AFTER YOU’VE BECOME successful and accumulated wealth, what comes next? Americans are facing this question more often than ever before. CNBC notes that the number of millionaire U.S. households grew by more than 700,000 in 2017. This affluence can create a disconnect between parent and child: One generation created the wealth, while the other grows up surrounded by it.
As a financial planner, I’ve learned the younger generation has two options: They can either destroy the wealth or they can add to the family’s legacy.

WHEN I WAS AGE SIX or seven, an older man came to our house. My mother answered the door. I couldn’t hear what the man was saying, but my mother mentioned the word “garage.” I then followed her to the kitchen and watched her make a sandwich with white bread, sliced bananas and mayonnaise. She then poured a glass of milk and went to the garage.
There, sitting in a lawn chair in our tiny garage,

WITH INCREASING frequency over the past month, I’ve been hearing the question, “Why does the stock market keep going down? I understand why the market dipped when the Fed raised interest rates, but why does it keep going down day after day?”
If you’ve been feeling unnerved by recent headlines, you aren’t alone. After gaining 10% in 2018 through late-September, the U.S. stock market reversed course and gave up that entire 10% over the course of just two months,

IF THE STOCK MARKET decline resumes, we’ll soon be reading articles about remorseful everyday investors bemoaning their earlier foolishness.
No doubt some folks have been foolish. Perhaps they’ve belatedly discovered that Amazon and Apple aren’t one-way tickets to wealth, that they aren’t the investment geniuses they imagined, or that they misjudged their courageousness and shouldn’t be 100% in stocks.
But mostly, I view these articles as patronizing garbage that propagate the myth that all amateur investors are clueless and all professionals are super-savvy.

WHEN IT CAME to money, I long had a slight degree of magical thinking—that there would always be enough, that some higher power would ensure that my checkbook was balanced and that I could be that super-generous person, even if I really couldn’t afford to be.
This sometimes landed me in trouble when, for some inexplicable reason, a check would bounce or I discovered I had less in my checking account than expected. To a great extent,

WHAT DOES FINANCIAL success look like? To some, it might mean owning a mansion, vacation home and luxury cars. But to most Americans, it’s far different: Being able to pay their bills in full, save for retirement and spend time with family is enough.
Unfortunately, even this level of financial success doesn’t come easily. Look at the current state of our financial affairs. Credit card debt is on the rise. We don’t spend enough time with family.

WANT TO SEE THE VERY worst of human nature? Look no further than financial salespeople—and the way they exploit their clients.
Incentives drive their behavior. High commissions make brokers and insurance agents do unconscionable things. The worst products contain the highest payouts. Result? Consider seven real-life examples. Names are withheld to protect the innocent and, unfortunately, also the guilty.

A widowed nurse inherited her husband’s $1 million IRA. An unscrupulous insurance salesperson convinced her to put the funds into a high-cost variable annuity.

IT’S THAT TIME OF the year. We seasoned citizens must take our required minimum distributions (RMDs) from our retirement accounts, like it or not, needed or not. Uncle Sam forces us to take these taxable withdrawals, so he can get his share.
It’s a fairly simple process to figure out how much needs to be withdrawn. Determine the total value of your qualified retirement accounts, such as your 401(k) and traditional IRA, as of the previous Dec.

IT’S FIVE WEEKS UNTIL the end of the year—which is five weeks during which you can do some valuable financial housekeeping. Here are seven recommendations:
1. Give tax efficiently. In the past, charitable contributions were a direct and easy way to lower your tax bill. But with the recent tax law changes, which include a big hike in the standard deduction and limits on some itemized deductions, this strategy doesn’t work as well.

HOW THINGS LOOK depend on where you stand. Trying to figure out how to respond to the market drop? After the initial slump, a brief rally and then another decline, the S&P 500 is down 10% from its September all-time closing high of 2930.75.
History suggests that, five years from now, share prices will be no lower than they are today, and 10 years from now they’ll be handsomely higher. But at times like this,

THERE’S A RETAIL CHAIN called The Container Store. As the name implies, it sells all types of containers, storage units and custom closets to help people organize their stuff, much of which they likely don’t need.
Let’s say you want a separate plastic box for each pair of shoes. You can have it. Did you know men own an average 12 pairs of shoes and women an average 27 pairs? Amazingly, 85% of women own shoes they purchased but have never worn.

SAY “1040” AND MOST of us think of the income tax returns we file each year on April 15. But it’s only because of chance that we fill out 1040s, instead of 1039s or 1041s: That number was up next in the sequential numbering of forms developed by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, the predecessor of today’s IRS.
It all began on Jan. 5, 1914, when the Department of the Treasury unveiled the new Form 1040 for tax year 1913.

TODAY WAS PAINFUL. How painful? Think of the financial losses:

Homeowners who closed on their house sale might have lost as much as 6% of the proceeds to real-estate commissions.
Car buyers who picked up their new vehicle probably gave up more than 10% of the purchase price just by driving off the dealership lot.
Those who signed separation agreements with their soon-to-be-ex spouse likely surrendered 50%.
Investors who bought load funds might have been nicked for 5.75%.

IN AN EFFORT TO understand each other’s financial background, my fiancée and I began holding a money date night. These finance-focused conversations started out slowly. But they’ve become our way to talk about money and our future together.
As a financial planner, I don’t want to dominate the financial side of our lives. I believe household finances should be managed together and not individually. We view this date night as an opportunity to learn about our individual feelings toward money and what our goals are.

DURING THE FIRST three weeks of house hunting, I looked at a dozen different properties. None met all the criteria I’d set for my “ideal” home, but a couple came close. My price point of $380,000 limited me to looking at smaller, starter-type homes. The competition for those houses was often fierce. On at least three occasions, a home I wanted to view would appear as a “new listing” one day and be marked as “pending sale” the next.