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9 Ways to Make Sure You Accomplish Your New Year’s Resolutions

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The new year is finally upon us. It’s the perfect time to reflect on what’s happened in your life over the past 365 days, and create your New Year’s Resolutions. What are you most thankful for? What did you accomplish? What boxes were left unchecked?

One of the best parts about starting a new year is the ability to essentially start over – you’re walking into 2017 with a clean slate. This is why you make New Year’s resolutions, so that you can start doing all of those new things you’ve talked about or accomplish your most important goals.

So, why do so many of us never do what we say we’re going to do? Why do we never accomplish our New Year’s resolutions? It’s not because there’s a lack of “how to” information – in fact, there’s almost an overload. Everywhere you look has tips on how to better yourself, from the extra dollar a week savings challenge to how to get killer abs in just 15 minutes a day. What we lack are tactics to help us successfully do the “how to.”

The “how,” your New Year’s resolution, is only information. It isn’t applying those resolutions to help you accomplish your goals. How you do the how to – how you go about doing your resolutions – is more important than your resolutions themselves.

9 Ways to Make Sure You Accomplish Your New Year’s Resolutions

Here are 9 ways to go about doing your New Year’s resolutions to make sure you accomplish them:

1. Set realistic goals. This is the number one reason why you won’t accomplish your New Year’s resolutions – you don’t set realistic goals for yourself. And you will fail because of that. Why do you think gyms start clearing out around February? When you don’t see your dream body staring back at you after the first month, it’s easy to get discouraged. But, life doesn’t come with an instant button –  achieving a goal takes time, patience, and dedication. Not only do you need to be realistic about the goals you’re setting, but break them down into smaller goals. That way you can see yourself making progress regularly.

2. Track your progress. Sometimes, your progress can be small enough that you don’t notice it. This is why using something to track your progress weekly, even daily, is helpful. For example, our digital wealth management platform, JB Wealth Builder, monitors your financial health daily. It gives you the ability to produce a picture of your complete, current financial position in real time so that you can continuously monitor your progress toward your goals.

3. Form good habits. Successful people have good habits. Unsuccessful people have bad habits. It’s just that simple. Think about the actions you take every day – are they helping you inch closer toward success, or are they keeping you stagnant, even pushing you closer to failure? The simple, mundane choices you make every day will determine where you end up. Making sure that you have good habits, that you are making choices that inch you closer to success every day is essential. At first, a new habit will feel forced. But eventually, it will become second nature and part of your daily routine.

4. Surround yourself with positive people. You’re the average of your five closest friends – physically, mentally, professionally and personally. You really do become who you associate with. This is why surrounding yourself with people who are motivated, goal oriented and have an overall positive outlook on life is important. But it doesn’t just stop with your inner circle. Think about the people you look up to, the people you idolize. Are they putting positivity out into the world? Are they motivating you to be a better person, to be successful? If not, they shouldn’t be on your list of heroes.

5. Find an accountability partner. It’s easy to hit the snooze button and miss your morning workout when you’re the only one showing up. But what if you had a trainer counting on you to be there? A friend who attended your workout classes with you? You have much more motivation to show up and work out in these instances, because you have someone besides yourself depending on you – you have someone else holding you accountable. In a recent study, 70% of participants who sent weekly goal updates to a friend reported accomplishing them. This is just one example of the positive affect from an accountability partner.

6. Hold yourself accountable. Yes, we just told you to find an accountability partner. But, what is most important is that you hold yourself accountable. A lot of people struggle with the concept of responsibility. Maybe that’s because we say it in ways that can sound negative – you know, “ grow up and take responsibility for your actions.” But it isn’t a form of blame, it’s not something to avoid. Rather, responsibility means that you are the cause of everything that happens in your life. It means that no one is responsible for your success or failure but yourself.

7. Stop, think, plan and write it down. As simple as it sounds, people will routinely say they don’t have time to stop and think. But taking the time to stop and think about where you are and where you’re trying to go is important. Then, make a plan for how you’re going to get there and write it down. Remember in school when you thought writing down all of those notes was a waste of time? Well in case it hasn’t hit you by now, it certainly wasn’t. It’s scientifically proven that you are more likely to retain information and accomplish goals when you write them down.

8. Read. Reading is one of the best ways to better yourself. Ask any successful person, and you will find that they learned much of what they practice from reading. And I’m not just talking about reading for entertainment – that’s fun, but it won’t help you grow. Mix in books focused on personal development as well. Spending just 15 minutes a day reading these kinds of books can do wonders for your mind. Check out these recommendations from the Jarred Bunch bookshelf to get you started.

9. Give yourself something to look forward to. Your resolutions should produce things for you to look forward to. These should be rewards for the effort you’re putting in. Maybe it’s a vacation since you’ve exceeded your savings goal or a shopping spree for new clothes since you’ve lost weight. When you have things to look forward to – rewards for your hard work – you’re more likely to act in a way that ensures you will accomplish what you’re working toward. Plus, doing things for yourself is essential for happy human functioning.

How to Stop Surviving and Maintain Success in 4 Easy Steps

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Here’s a dirty little life secret – the formula for success is simple. In fact, it’s so simple that everyone is capable of succeeding, of accomplishing their most important goals. Even you. It boils down to this – success takes what it takes.

So, if it’s that simple, why isn’t everyone uber-successful and wealthy? Why will the majority of us fail? Jeff Olson discusses this in his book The Slight Edge. I would highly recommend reading this – it’s lifechanging, and is where much of the following ideology comes from. It’s because of the little, seemingly insignificant choices that you make every day.

Failure, Survival and Success

In life, you can either fail, survive or succeed. For most people, success is fleeting – they will spend the majority of their life fluctuating between failure and survival.

If you’re failing, it means you’re not living the life you want, you’re not accomplishing your most important goals. Finding yourself in this state or near it will prompt you to spring into action. This is how you get back to surviving. This is the pivotal moment in your life.

If you’re surviving, you’re already on your way to success. In fact, you may have accomplished one or more of your most important goals. The reason that pure, raw success is so rare is because when you find yourself on the upward trend, something triggers you to stop – whether you’re aware of it or not. Think of it as going on auto-pilot. Instead of continuing the climb toward sustained success, you can find yourself slipping back toward failure. And the never-ending roller coaster ensues.

What I’m about to tell you next is critical – if you only take away one thing from here, this should be it. If you can survive, you can succeed. Heck, even if you fail, you can succeed. Many people never understand this.

How to Maintain Success in 4 Easy Steps

Surviving means doing just enough to get by – just enough to reach a milestone, but never pushing yourself to break through the glass ceiling above and reach a higher level of success, a better version of yourself that takes you closer to the life you want to live.

The ability to accomplish this comes from maintaining success. Here’s how you can stop surviving and maintain success in four easy steps:

1. Audit your philosophy. There are more how-to books, seminars, programs, and speakers that teach people the paths to success than you can fathom. But it’s not the how-to that matters when it comes maintaining success. It’s your philosophy. You have to understand your “why,” for money, for life, for all of it. Until you clearly understand what it is you want, you have nothing to fight for. You have nothing guiding your daily choices. Your “why” is what is important to you, the values you hold close and how what you do builds the life you want. It isn’t until you uncover your “why” that you’ll be able to change the way you think about the simple choices you make every day.

2. Focus on what seems insignificant. Little things can produce big results. So, go ahead, save that extra $50 a month into your savings account. Do that 20 minutes of cardio every day if that’s all you have time for. When you force yourself to take action – even if it seems too insignificant to matter – you’re training yourself to cultivate good habits. Eventually, those insignificant actions are going to build, they’re going to become more substantial. And when that happens, bettering yourself won’t be a question of “if,” but instead will be a priority. It will have become second nature.

3. Stop searching for the instant button. Success isn’t instant. This is exactly why people fail over and over again – they expect instant results. If you go to the gym for a month, you can be easily discouraged when your dream body isn’t staring back at you in the mirror. So, you give up. But remember, those seemingly insignificant actions build over time. You can’t see the results from these actions in five days, five weeks or even five months. It’s not until the summation of all of those small actions over time – all of those work outs over the course of a year – produce an end result that the drastic difference is realized.

4. Keep doing what you’re doing. The very same actions that carry you from failure to survival are the exact same actions that will carry you from survival to success. But only if you keep doing them. Once you start to taste success, it’s common for you to stop doing the things that you got there. You stop practicing good habits, making those seemingly insignificant choices that are pushing you forward every day. The only way to break through to success – and to maintain that success – is to keep doing what you got there in the first place. Yes, that’s the big secret.

Why Does it Matter to You?

Success takes what it takes – it takes repeating seemingly insignificant actions over time. Without your “why” you have nothing to fight for – it’s more than an attitude adjustment, it’s defining the philosophy that creates your attitude, which then dictates your actions.

This is why success starts with your mindset. It’s your “why” that helps you see that the small, mundane choices you make every day are playing an essential role in your journey toward success. It helps you understand these choices are what dictate whether you fail, survive, or succeed. It also helps you understand that success is incredibly simple, because you realize that you already know how to do what it takes to maintain success – those things that helped you survive, and got you to where you are today. You’ll also understand that success is incredibly difficult, because it’s just as easy to not be successful, to stop practicing the good habits that started you on your upward trend.

You have the potential to live the life you want, and you have the potential to be a flat-out failure. Which person you’ll be is under no one’s control but your own.

3 Ways That Complaining Can Make You a More Negative Person

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Research suggests that most people complain once a minute during a typical conversation. In fact, the same research suggests that we complain so much, most people don’t even know they’re doing it. Our brains don’t register it as complaining, but the negative side effects compound with every complaint.

Feelings Aside…

Complaining is tempting because it causes a feel-good effect for you, the complainer. Not only does it allow you to openly express your feelings, it helps you gain justification for the way you feel from others. It also helps you establish conversations and rapport with people who may just be meeting for the first time. Don’t believe me? Think about every time you ride in an elevator with another person. How do you start conversations with them? Maybe it’s something like, “Thankfully it’s Friday, huh?”, or what about “It sure is cold out there this morning isn’t it?”. While these are typical conversation starters that make you likable, they’re also complaints. You may complain a few times before you even get off the elevator, before you even truly start your day.

While complaining may feel good, it’s just like every other thing that may feel good but not actually be good for you. It isn’t good for your overall well-being, and is actually proven to make even the peppiest of people more negative.

Three Ways Complaining Makes You More of a Negative Person

1. It actually wires your brain for negativity. Even though it’s an incredibly powerful machine, our brains don’t like to work any harder than they have to – they favor efficiency. When you complain regularly, or engage in any activity on a regular basis, your neurons branch out and connect to each other so that information can flow easier. This is a gateway for easy repetition of that behavior in the future. In this case, it means that future complaining will come easy to you. In essence, you’re literally re-wiring your brain for negativity. But it’s not just a network of negative-infused neurons that can cause problems. A study from Stanford University showed that complaining can also affect other areas of your brain, like shrinking your hippocampus. This part of the brain is important for problem solving and intelligent thought.

2. It’s bad for your health. Aside from the mental implications, complaining can also affect your health. When you complain, your body releases cortisol. This is a stress hormone that can raise your blood pressure or blood sugar. As with any type of stress, increased cortisol can cause you to feel anxious regularly, cause difficulty falling and stay asleep, regular headaches, weight gain, and impaired immune system and more. It can also make you more susceptible to high cholesterol, diabetes, heart disease and obesity. It can even make you make more vulnerable to strokes.

3. It prompts you to surround yourself with other complainers. As humans, we like to surround ourselves with those who confirm our biases or beliefs. We like to hang out with people who think like we do. When comradery is formed through complaining, it can make you seek out more people who enjoy partaking in the activity with you, or who have the same complaints that you do. But the old saying you become who you associate with has merit here. Our brains naturally and unconsciously mimic the moods of those around us. Therefore, the more complainers you associate with, the more complaining you will participate in and the more negative you can ultimately become.

Why Does it Matter to You?

Cutting down on complaining preserves positivity and your well-being. There are two simple ways you can do that.

First, reflect on everything that you are grateful for in your life. It’s easy to just focus on the negative things happening around us. But when you stop and think about all of the good happening around you, all of the things you have to be thankful for, you’ll probably find that they far outweigh the bad. Research from the University of California, Davis found that people who take the time to focus on what they’re grateful for every day are healthier and happier than those who don’t.

Second, if you must complain, engage in solution-oriented complaining. This kind of complaint has a clear purpose behind it, and is focused on addressing a specific issue. It also starts and ends with a positive. For example, if you’re having trouble with a co-worker, try complaining to your boss in this way – “I’ve really enjoyed working with Joe over the last five years, but lately he’s missed several important deadlines without much regard for how it impacts the other members of our department. How can we address this with him so that he and I can still have a good working relationship, but we ensure that our work is done efficiently and to the highest standard?

It’s foolish to say that you can completely eliminate complaining from your life. But rather than falling victim to it on a regular basis, employ one or both of the above strategies to stifle the negativity.

The Best Way to Guide Your Investment Decisions

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Whether you’re just beginning to invest or are a seasoned investor, there’s one question that we all have. It’s a question that I guarantee you’ve asked yourself at one point or another – why do some people succeed at investing while others fail, and how can I be one of the successful people?

When it comes to investing, you can be your own worst enemy. This is because money is emotional, and when volatility strikes, it causes you to react emotionally – even irrationally or dangerously. Emotionally driven investor behavior often hurts you more than it helps you. And there are numerous emotional triggers and traps that will plague you almost daily as an investor.

Before you put that first dollar into your investment account, you have to understand this – you have to know what can deter your success. You also need to determine the best way to invest based on your personal values, wants and most important goals.

So, how can you avoid bad investor behavior? How do you know that you’re making the right investment decision? What is the overarching philosophy that’s guiding your decision making process? Easy, refer to your Investment Policy Statement (IPS).

Crafting Your Investment Policy Statement 

An IPS is one of the best ways to guide your investment decision making process. It’s one of the best ways to make sure that your personal values and most important goals are at the heart of your strategy. It’s one of the best ways to avoid bad investor behavior and maintain a disciplined approach. It’s also a great way to set expectations between yourself and your wealth manager, and to make sure all fees are completely transparent.

Drafting a basic IPS is relatively easy, and should be done in conjunction with your wealth manager. Here are the main components that should comprise your IPS:

Purpose. What is the purpose of your IPS? This should be easy, because we’ve already given you the answer. Your IPS is meant to foster a disciplined approach to investing by guiding your decision making process based on your most important goals and personal values.

Statement of Values. If can’t name your top five most important values, do that now. These are things that money enables you to do, the things that fuel your “why.” They should be defined and clearly laid out in this section of your IPS.  All of your investment decisions/actions should support these values, so this is a good way to remind yourself of what’s motivating you.

Statement of Objectives. These are defined based on your values. For example, if family is your number one value, one objective of your investment account(s) may be to send your children to college. Other elements such as time horizon, risk tolerance and performance expectations should be detailed here as well.

Duties/Responsibilities. It’s important to know what role everyone on your investing team will play. Who is on your team and what role do they play? How involved will you be? Do you want a partnership with your advisor, or do you want them to take everything off your plate? What is the duty of the actual investment manager? These are important things to stipulate. This sets expectations upfront, and enacts accountability for each team member.

Portfolio Selection. What are the actual investments that will comprise your portfolio? This should be based on previous elements, such as your risk tolerance and time horizon. Here is where you put your portfolio on paper, so that you can clearly see each individual investment and what the complete picture looks like.

Performance Monitoring. It’s important to know what dictates the selection of investments in a portfolio, and what determines their hiring and firing. This is an important question to ask and understand. This is where that criteria should be explicitly stated. Again, base decisions on facts, not opinions.

Costs. Any fees associated with your portfolio should be accurately communicated, and your advisor should be nothing less than 100% transparent with you. Period.

Review. Don’t overlook this last part. You need to stipulate how often your IPS should be reviewed. You should review your IPS annually at the least. Some people will need to review theirs quarterly. This ensures that as life changes, your investment strategies change with it.

Why Does it Matter to You?

While this is a simple template to help get you started, your IPS should be unique to you. After all, investing isn’t about a “number.” It’s about maximizing your financial potential with good habits, control, and value (what you value personally and what money enables you to accomplish). This is why you have to protect yourself against those bad decisions that can deter your success. When you have an IPS, the choice is simple – if the investment doesn’t align with what’s stated in your IPS, you shouldn’t invest in it. Period.

12 Tricks for Being More Productive During the Work Day

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It seems like everyone is always wishing for more hours in their day. Think about how often you’ve said something along the lines of, “If only there were 26 hours in the day, then I could get everything done.” Well, we can’t control how many hours are in a day or wish the day longer. Why is it then that some people seem to accomplish more than you do?

We all have the same 24 hours in the day to accomplish our goals. The difference is how you utilize your time. Successful, productive people understand the importance of using every minute of their day efficiently. This is key to getting more done during the day.

12 Tricks to be More Productive During the Work Day

These 12 simple tricks will help you become a more productive you

1. Exercise in the morning. Exercising is one of the things that seems to get pushed to the wayside as you get older. This is why setting aside time to work out in the morning, before the kids are awake or your work day starts, is the perfect solution. Not only is regular exercise good for your health, but it’s also be shown to increase focus, productivity and is linked to a better mood. Try it one morning and see how much better you feel throughout the day.

2. Write down your to-do list daily. Planning out your daily tasks gives your mind a map of what it needs to focus on for the day. Prioritizing your tasks is important as well, so pull out your priority actions for the day from your list of tasks. These are the things that must get done. At the end of the day, you can gauge what you’ve accomplished. Also consider the value that you added to your workplace from accomplishing your tasks. Not only does this make you feel more productive, but helps you feel like you are working with a purpose.

3 Set up a system. Find how you work best and make it a system. Organizing your time during the day is a great way to do this. Layout your day by devoting certain blocks of time to certain things. Something that I’ve found helpful is creating focus days and buffer days. Focus days are for concentrating on your priority tasks, your big goals for the week. Buffer days can still include daily tasks, but can be used for other things aren’t necessarily daily tasks. For example, I meet with my leadership team on buffer days and focus on aspects of running the business, as opposed to meeting with clients.

4. Close your door. Don’t be afraid to schedule blocks of uninterrupted time for yourself. Make others aware of this also. A study by Microsoft researchers found that it can take the brain up to 15 minutes to refocus on the task at hand after your attention has been turned elsewhere. This is why making sure you have time where you can focus solely on the task at hand, without threat of interruption, is key to increasing productivity.

5. Put your phone away. Thanks to technology, we’re now constantly connected to our social groups, whether it be through social media, text or phone call. But these are also large distractions during the work day. That’s not to say that you can’t answer a text or take a phone call, but specify blocks of times where you put your phone away and don’t answer it. Remember that saying “out of sight, out of mind?” If your phone is out of site, you won’t be thinking about what your friend is posting on Facebook or itching to answer incoming text messages.

6. Focus on one thing at a time. You have to accomplish more than one thing in a day to be productive, but trying to focus on more than one thing at a time can actually hurt your productivity, as was found in a study by the American Psychological Association. How many times have you been talking to a co-worker while trying to type an email, and realized that you actually didn’t hear anything they said to you? Now magnify that effect for larger projects. As the study points out, we’re not designed for heavy-duty multitasking.

7. Say no when you have to. Helping your co-workers boosts a healthy workplace morale. However, taking on work from others to help them detracts from the priority tasks that you have to accomplish for the day. It can be hard to do, but saying no is critical for preserving your level of productivity. Also, if you can’t give something extra your best work and full attention, your help could actually be less helpful than you planned.

8. Eat lunch away from your desk. Even though interruptions can affect productivity, it’s also been shown that stepping away from your work for a short amount of time can be helpful for rejuvenating your mind. Rather than always working through your lunch and eating at your desk, use it as an opportunity to step away from your work and clear your mind, even if it’s only for 30 minutes. It’s hard to be constantly firing on all cylinders for eight or more hours at a time.

9. Sleep. Getting enough sleep at night is key to high levels of productivity. A lack of sleep can cause your mind to feel cloudy, and can even affect your general well-being. According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average adult needs seven to nine hours of sleep a night. Are you getting enough? Try to find a routine at night, like going into your room at the same time every night or reading before bed.

10. Keep a clean inbox. When you open your email and see 100 messages sitting in your inbox, it can immediately induce anxiety. It can also cause important messages to get lost in the clutter. Delete emails that you don’t need. Make folders and file emails accordingly once you’ve responded to them. A clutter-free inbox is the first step to a clutter-free mind.

11. Make your time valuable. Don’t fill your day with unnecessary meetings. Make sure that any meeting on your schedule is truly necessary, that you’re prepared for it and that the objective of why you’re meeting is clear. While there are times when you have to meet in person with people, decide if what you’re discussing can be done through email or on the phone.

12. Leave work at work. There’s always going to be something that didn’t get done. But making work your life isn’t necessarily the healthiest, or most productive, strategy. Be content knowing that you used your time as efficiently as possible during the day, and accomplished your priority tasks. Then go home and enjoy time with your friends, family or doing things that you enjoy. Don’t check your email, don’t answer calls – unless you absolutely have to – and unplug.

Secrets from the Rockefellers: How They’ve Protected Their Wealth for Generations

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The Rockefeller name has been a prestigious image of wealth, power and business in American history. Other names that would rival it include Walton, Ford, Mars and S.C. Johnson. And they’ve all managed to keep their billion dollar clans intact for generations.

Wealth Eroding Factors: Gift and Estate Taxes

One of the biggest wealth eroding factors can be estate and gift taxes that you will incur at the time of your death. Luckily, as of 2016, the Estate, Gift and Generation Skipping Transfer (GST) tax exemptions are $5.45 million per individual and $10.9 million for married couples. This means you can leave a minimum of $5.45 million and a maximum of $10.9 million (if married) to your heirs and pay no federal estate or gift tax.

What’s that? You’re in the clear because this won’t affect you? Well, great. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to protect your wealth now and at the time of your death. Even fortunes worth far less than $5.45 million are still substantial sums of money.

How do you know that your assets will be distributed according to your wishes? How do you ensure that your estate will avoid the costs of probate? How do you protect your wealth from divorce, creditors and the like now and when it’s passed to your beneficiaries? How do you pass your wealth to your beneficiaries without them incurring large income taxes? These are all important factors to consider.

Protecting Your Legacy

Regardless of where you fall on the wealth-o-meter, the wealthy have three important estate planning goals:

1. Maintain satisfactory streams of income.

2. Protect their wealth from creditors forever.

3.Keep their money outside of the wealth transfer system.

Dynasty Trusts

For the ultra-wealthy (i.e. Rockefeller status) a fourth goal may be preserving their wealth for generations, far beyond their death. This is the core function of a Dynasty Trust.

Dynasty Trusts allow you to fund up to the amount of the exemption ($5.45 or $10.9 million) into the trust. These types of trusts allow the assets to be gifted to heirs who are more than one generation younger than the Grantor (creator of the trust), free of tax. This is a key function of Dynasty Trusts, because they protect your wealth against the GST tax. Leaving part of your legacy to those more than one generation younger than you is effectively “skipping” a generation in the government’s eyes. Because of this, there are special regulations that can cause you to get hit the hardest with taxes in these instances if your wealth isn’t properly protected.

Initially, the Rule of Perpetuities limited Dynasty Trusts to a maximum period of 21 years after the death of the last identifiable beneficiary living at the time the trust was created. So, if you set up a Dynasty Trust today and have a 2-year old grandchild, the trust would remain in effect until 21 years after their death. So, even with the rule in effect, this trust could easily remain in-force for 100 years. However, if done properly, Dynasty Trusts can last indefinitely. Many states have done away with the rule, allowing these trusts to essentially go on auto-pilot. The Grantor can also opt to extend the time period with verbiage in the trust that amends the rule. Either way, the value of your trust, and its appreciation, will pass to your descendants over multiple generations free from estate, gift and income taxes.

Revocable Living Trusts

A Revocable Living Trust is very ideal for the rest of us mortals who may not reach or exceed the $5.45 million exemption, but still want to protect our wealth and accomplish those three important goals.

First, “Revocable” means that you retain the right during your lifetime to amend, change, revoke or terminate the trust at your discretion. Second, “Living Trust” means that the trust is created while you’re alive, and goes into effect at the time of your death.

There are many benefits associated with a Revocable Living Trust, the first being its ability to avoid probate. Probate can get costly rather quickly, and are extra costs that exist in addition to any gift or estate taxes. If Uncle Sam can’t get you there, he can get you here. It can also become a drawn out, time consuming process. Rather than putting your loved ones through the time, stress and expense of probate, this trust can keep your estate out of probate. Also, many probate records are open to the public, so a trust ensures maximum privacy for your family. The amount of your estate and your beneficiaries are not public knowledge.

Another key element is that all your assets are coordinated according to one set of instructions – your wishes for how you want your legacy to be distributed. The inheritance also passes to your beneficiaries free from estate, gift and even federal income taxes. Assets that are owned by the trust protect both you and beneficiaries from creditors, spouses, divorce and future death taxes.

Why Does It Matter to You?

To fully appreciate the core benefit of any trust, understand this – estate and gift taxes hit every generational level. If your wealth isn’t properly protected, your legacy may only last a generation or two, simply because of tax erosion and nothing else. Whether through a Dynasty Trust or Revocable Living Trust, you can avoid these losses by keeping your wealth outside of the wealth transfer system. It also maintains substantial income for your heirs, whether it be for education, business opportunities, healthcare or general living purposes. Limiting the control of your beneficiaries means that their inheritance from the trust remains protected from a multitude of threats, including creditors and divorce, because it remains outside of their estate.

Both Dynasty and Revocable Living Trusts are excellent strategies for creating a structure around a family legacy, depending what your most important goals are along with your net worth.

3 Dangers of Ignoring Your True Cost of Living

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Understanding your true cost of living is one of the most commonly overlooked concepts. That’s because traditional planning does little to examine lost opportunity costs, much less offset them. But how can you reach your full financial potential when you don’t attempt to overcome one of the biggest wealth eroding factors you’ll encounter?

Lost Opportunity Cost

First, you have to understand just what I mean when I say “lost opportunity cost.” In relation to finance, it represents the actual amount of money you lose when making a financial decision. A great way to illustrate this is by using David Bach’s Latte Factor®.

Let’s say that every week-day morning you stop and buy a Venti Vanilla Latte from Starbucks on your way to work. This specific beverage will cost you $4.85. We’ll round that to $5 just for simplicity. This means that you are spending roughly $960 a year on coffee. Say you usually buy lunch three days a week as well, and spend about $10 every time. That’s $1,440 a year on lunches. Add this to the $960 you’re spending on coffee and you have a combined total of $2,400 a year.

So, what are coffee and lunches costing you? The answer isn’t $2,400.

What if you had invested that money instead?

Investing $2,400 annually earning 5% growth produces a gross value in 10 years of $30,351. In 30 years, it produces a gross value of $162,671.

THAT’S your true cost of living. THAT’S lost opportunity cost. See why you need to understand it, account for it and offset it?

3 Dangers of Ignoring Your True Cost of Living

There are three dangers that arise from ignoring your true cost of living:

1. Widespread wealth erosion. What we just examined is only one small area of your life. What about new technologies, goods and services that are created almost daily? I can barely keep up with having the latest and greatest in computers, smart phones and iPads. And now my kids are demanding the best when it comes to these gadgets. What about the planned obsolescence of everyday items, like appliances and cars? These products are made to break down so that you will have to buy them again. What about insurance premiums, investment fees, commissions and taxes? Add all of this lost opportunity cost to the previous totals and you can see your true cost of living.

2. The inability to recapture lost dollars. Two of the most common forms of lost opportunity cost are insurance premiums and financial fees/taxes. People have high insurance premiums because they want low deductibles. But if you were saving the ideal rate of 15%-20% of your income, you would have enough liquidity to cover expenses. Then you could raise you deductible and possible lower your premium costs. All fees associated with any investment account should be completely transparent, and justifiable based on the return and size of the account. Taxes can drastically reduce your net return as well; make sure that your investment accounts are tax managed to help control this erosion. Once you discover the areas where you may be spending money inefficiently, you can then recapture those dollars and put your money back to work for you.

3. Not reaching your full financial potential. Almost every decision you make can result in lost opportunity cost. This makes it one of the largest wealth eroding factors you will encounter and one of the biggest threats to your financial success, now and in the future. If you saw someone casually throw a $100 bill in the trash can, wouldn’t you think they may be a little crazy? Well, if you do nothing to mitigate this risk, you might as well join them. Doing nothing to mitigate this risk can result in you forfeiting millions of dollar over your lifetime.

How a Financial Model Can Help

This doesn’t mean you have to restrict yourself from your favorite coffee, dining out, taking that dream vacation or purchasing things you want. But it does mean that you need to understand your true cost of living, which can be hard to do in traditional financial planning.

A financial model can pick up where tradition falls short. For example, our digital financial model, JB Wealth Builder, can allow you to see where your money is actually going. It can diagnose problem areas where you may be spending money inefficiently. You can then evaluate your degree of lost opportunity cost, and implement strategies to recapture that money and put it back to work.

This can help you remain in the proper financial position where you are able to enjoy the sweet indulgences of life, but also have a financial backbone capable of helping you reach your full financial potential.

How to Lose Your Money in 5 Different Ways

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It’s easier to lose money than it is to accumulate it. This is because accumulating wealth requires you to make a conscious effort. Losing your wealth doesn’t require much thought at all.

You don’t build wealth without some form of discipline, good habits that you practice religiously and that inch you closer toward your goals. This is the conscious effort. Often, the conscious effort tends to disappear once you’ve achieved success. This is the part where you want to enjoy all the hard work you’ve put into building the life you’ve dreamt of. Your conscious effort can even disappear while you’re still working toward your goals. Reaching new milestones of financial success can enable you to do things you couldn’t do previously; it’s easy to get swept up in your newfound freedom. This is why it can feel like you’re constantly taking one step forward and two steps back.

5 Ways to Lose Your Money

The things that can prevent you from reaching your full financial potential are the same things that can wipe out your wealth once you’ve accumulated it. Here are five ways to lose your money in both instances:

1. Not protecting yourself for your full economic value. People want to pay as little insurance costs as possible for the minimum amount of coverage. Most think that leaving enough behind to cover the mortgage or a few years of their salary is sufficient. But your full economic value is worth much more than this. It’s worth the money you will now and in the future, your net worth now and in the future and your legacy now and in the future. Protecting yourself means protecting against premature death or disability, accounting for excess liability coverage and properly structuring your estate. Failing to do any of these things can leave your wealth exposed to a handful of threats.

2. Failing to offset taxes and inflation. These are two of the biggest wealth eroding factors that are out of your control. First, your money needs to outpace inflation, which is the natural erosion of your money’s purchasing power. For example, if inflation is 3%, then your $10,000 this year will only be worth $9,700 next year. Investing your money is a way to offset inflation. While the goal of most investors is to achieve the most efficient after-tax returns, many of them forget to evaluate the tax implications of their portfolio as a whole. Your return doesn’t mean much if you lose most of it to taxes.

3. Living beyond your means. One of the simplest, cardinal get rich rules is to spend less than you earn. Sure, you may have the huge dream home or the exotic foreign car, but if you can’t truly afford it, this doesn’t make you rich. It makes you house poor and car poor, two of the best ways to lose your money faster than you can earn it. It also probably means that you’re building up a substantial amount of wealth. Here’s another cardinal get rich rule: If you have to finance it, you probably can’t afford it. Debt detracts from your net worth, from your ability to save and achieve your goals.

4. Not saving enough money. If you’re not consistently saving a substantial portion of your income every month, then you’re violating another cardinal get rich rule: Pay yourself first. With American savings rates teetering around 5%, it may seem drastic that I’m telling you to aim for a savings rate of 15% – 20%. But this is what funds your core liquidity, your ability to save for and achieve short-term goals. It also funds your future, and includes saving into different unqualified and qualified investment accounts for retirement, your child’s college tuition, and more.

5. Lacking a defined investment philosophy. One of the best things you can do for yourself before you start investing is to create an Investment Policy Statement. This is a guiding statement of how you will invest according to your values and desires, your most important financial goals. Otherwise, you can find yourself making emotionally charged decisions and engaging in bad investor behavior. This includes stock picking, market timing and forecasting, following investment trends and more. Investors who engage in these behaviors often get burned big time.

Why Does it Matter to You?

If you want to reach your full financial potential, you must understand how each of these five things can deter your success. For instance, protection isn’t just about insurance. It’s about protecting your life’s work from the numerous threats that can destroy it. Inflation alone is enough to erode your wealth. You have to put fear of the market to the wayside, and let your money work for you. Taxes will have a direct effect on the real returns your money produces and can significantly erode them. Include low-turnover and tax-managed investments in your portfolio. We can also offer our clients Separately Managed Accounts, which offer the greatest level of tax control.

Acting rich doesn’t count for much of anything. Most of the truly wealthy people would more than likely tell you that they would rather defy society’s image of being rich than being deceptively poor. Neglecting to pay yourself first means that you may lack the funds to achieve your most important goals or living a reduced lifestyle in retirement. Engaging in bad investor behavior can also guarantee these things. But how can you avoid it? How do you know if you’re making the right investment decision? Easy, refer to your Investment Policy Statement. If an investment doesn’t meet its criteria, then you shouldn’t invest. Period.

Building wealth is no small task, but the work doesn’t end there. If you can’t sustain your wealth, then all your hard work means nothing. Sustaining your wealth is where the real work happens.

10 Picks from the Jarred Bunch Bookshelf

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“If you want to be successful, you have to stay teachable.”

This is one of the most important sayings you might ever hear. It’s simple and true. I’ve long believed that if you’re always the smartest person in the room, there’s a big problem. You’re not challenging yourself to grow into a better person.

Success doesn’t just happen, it’s learned. Who better to learn success from than those who have already achieved it and then some? That’s how you grow into a better version of yourself. I’ve spent the last 13 years learning how to be successful from others. And I have no intention to stop learning, or to stop being successful. Neither should you.

Ask any uber-successful person, and you will probably find that they are voracious readers in their spare time. Reading the experiences, thoughts and work of others is one of the best ways to learn. Former President George W. Bush used to engage colleagues in reading challenges; he read almost 100 books a year during his time in office. Warren Buffet is far from shy when it comes to acknowledging his ever-growing reading list. Taking the time to read is a key ingredient in becoming a more successful person in life and business.

These 10 picks from the Jarred Bunch bookshelf helped us inch closer to success and can do the same for you:

Rich Dad Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki. This real-life tale compares the author’s biological father (the poor dad) against the father of his childhood best friend (the rich dad). It will open your eyes to the divide among those who live in scarcity mode, as opposed to those who live with an abundance mindset. Two fundamental concepts will come to you from this book: An abundance mindset and an attitude cultivated in fearless entrepreneurship.

L.E.A.P: Lifetime Economic Acceleration Process, by Robert Castiglione. A big influencer in the financial industry for almost 30 years, Castiglione created a blueprint for how to accelerate wealth building and sustain it for life. The cornerstone of this book lies in his quest to morph traditional financial planning into something better for the new age. You’ll uncover several foundation elements for reaching your full financial potential here.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder. At 10 years old, Buffett was already visiting Wall Street, engaging a senior partner at Goldman Sachs in a conversation that resulted in the partner asking Buffett which stock he liked. Even if you not an entrepreneur, Buffett’s biography has applicable insight. Appropriately titled “The Snowball,” Schroeder depicts how Buffett never quit striving for success; he worked tirelessly to make things for himself bigger and better. It winds between tales of lessons learned, goals crushed and immense respect earned.

Crush It, by Gary Vaynerchuk. Vaynerchuk is the CEO of VaynerMedia, entrepreneur, motivational speaker, author and up-and-coming digital marketing mogul. Crush It will teach you the three golden rules to success: 1) Love your family, 2) Work incredibly hard, 3) Live your passion. Instead of measuring success based on how big your business is or how much money you have, you’ll learn to measure it based on how happy you are, and how satisfied you feel with what you’re doing every day.

Start With Why, by Simon Sinek. As Sinek points out, there is a distinct difference between leaders and those who lead. Leaders have found their “why,” their way of thinking, acting and communicating that enables them to inspire those around them. He explores the effect of motivating people through inspiration rather than manipulating people into action. Try your hand at becoming an inspirational leader by starting with your “why,” not “how” or “what.”

The Random Walk Guide to Investing, by Burton G. Malkiel. Based on the previous literary hit, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, Malkiel introduces his ten-point plan for success. This concise guide aims to take the mystery out of personal finance, and cuts through the thick jargon to make for an easy to read and follow piece. Confidence and knowledge to make better investment decisions are both by-products you’ll experience thanks to this book.

The Slight Edge, by Jeff Olson. If you’re looking to gain the extra edge in life, Olson’s book is a great addition to your library. He centers the book on your own personal philosophy and how you think, exploring the difference between entitled and value-driven attitudes. You’ll find a greater appreciation for the three gifts in life: 1) Love, 2) Money, 3) Wisdom. And you’ll gain a deeper understanding of why wisdom is the hardest gift to earn.

The Elements of Investing, by Charles D. Ellis & Burton G. Malkiel. Despite what the title may indicate, you won’t find much in the way of specific investment advice in this book. That’s one of the reasons why I like it. What you will find are the foundational elements you need to have in place in order to make good investment choices, along with a few general principles on how to invest. The book is simple and concise, but powerful in helping you understand the importance of building a sound foundation before you start investing.

The Compound Effect, by Darren Hardy. There are two key lessons you’ll learn from Hardy: You can reap huge rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions and always take 100% responsibility for everything that happens to you. He also demonstrates the importance of aligning your values with your actions and goals, and why you need to design the life you want first, and the business you want second.

Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. If you’re a fast thinker, Kahneman would say that the “automatic” part of your brain is winning the fight for control against its “conscious” counterpart. Kahneman explores this struggle, and teaches the many ways in which this can lead to errors in memory, judgement and decisions. While you may always think fast, this book can help you learn how to successfully balance the art of thinking slow for improved cognitive functioning.

Younger Next Year, by Henry Lodge, M.D. and Chris Crowley. This co-authored book by doctor and patient creates a framework that explains why the things we all know we should do (eat right, exercise, etc.) are mandated by the laws of biology. You should make it point to live a healthy lifestyle as part of a successful lifestyle, according to Lodge and Crowley. The co-authors demonstrate why regular activity – now and especially when you’re older – is a demand of human evolution, not the fitness industry.

Do Your Financial Actions Support Your Most Important Values?

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This is probably one of the most important questions you should be asking yourself when it comes to your finances. When your most important values and your financial actions aren’t correlated, you can easily lose focus of your “why.” Your strategies may not truly be working toward your goals. And many times you won’t realize it until life happens.

Discovering Your “Why” Behind Money

One of the first things you have to discover is your “why” behind money. Yes, we both know that you need money to live. But dig deeper than that.

Think about money in relation to the things that matter most to you, like sending your kids to college, starting a business or taking family vacations. Based on this, what purpose would you say money serves in your life? What does it enable you to do? If these desires are important to you, then money enables you to do a number of things: To give your children an education that puts them ahead in life, to take advantage of an opportunity to better yourself and to foster quality time with your family making memories. See how money serves a greater purpose than just “living?”

Your Most Important Values

Your values are what you believe are important in the way you go about your daily life. They should be used to guide your priorities and your daily actions. People whose values are aligned with their behavior tend to be much more satisfied and content with their lives. If you’re behaving in a way that doesn’t match your values, life can feel out-of-whack, unsatisfying and stressful. Life in general is more enjoyable when you make a conscious effort to honor your values. The same is true for your financial life: Consciously honoring your values can make for a much smoother, fulfilling ride.

After you determine what purpose money serves in your life, you can identify the corresponding values it helps you fulfill. Let’s go back to our previous example. In this instance, some of the values that money helps you fulfill would be education, hard work, ambition, fun and family. Organize your values in terms of their importance, so that you can clearly see your top five values.

Do Your Financial Actions Support Your Most Important Values?

This brings us to the ultimate discovery question: Are your values aligned with your financial actions?

If family is your number one value, but you’ve failed to adequately protect yourself against death or loss of income, these actions – or inactions – don’t support your number one value. What if you’re only saving 5% of your income and funneling the rest into qualified retirement accounts? You can find yourself without the necessary liquidity to pay tuition, take advantage of opportunities or to pay for vacations. These actions clearly don’t support your values of education, ambition or fun.

See why this is an important question to ask yourself?

Why Does it Matter to You?

Without taking the time to consciously acknowledge your most important values, you can find yourself suffering the consequences when life happens. Values should play the same role in your financial life that they play in your daily life: They should guide your financial actions and priorities.

Not only should this be the first stop on your financial journey, but it’s one that you should revisit regularly. Aligning your values and financial actions can first help you see what strategies would be most prudent for you to implement. Reviewing your values as you reach different milestones helps ensure those strategies are always working to your benefit.

This worksheet is a great place to start. This step-by-step guide will walk you through everything we just discussed here, from discovering your “why” behind money, to identifying your most important values and gauging whether or not your financial actions support them, to creating an action plan to better align the two.

Investing Lessons from Market Bubbles

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We all know that money plays on emotions, and that emotions drive behavior. And it says a lot about this very fact when the scientist responsible for the law of gravity can be swept up in an investment that for a time, defied the laws of science. Sir Isaac Newton may have been one of the most gifted minds in the scientific community, but in his day to day life, he wasn’t much more than a gullible participant in one of the biggest market bubbles of the early 1700s.

Even Smarties Can be Suckers

No matter how advanced your intellectual capabilities may be, there is a sobering fact that unites investors everywhere: We’re suckers for a good get rich quick strategy. Throughout history, financial bubbles have tugged at the cords of greed, seducing investors with their promises of instant gratification.

The bubble that got Newton was the South Sea Bubble of 1720. It was centered on a company that was promised a trade monopoly by the British government for taking over the debt that was the result of the war against France. The investment grapevines blazed and the press continued to fuel the fire. The South Sea Company shares grew almost eight-fold between January and mid-July 1720. But just as all good things come to an end, the bubble burst in September of that year. By October, share prices had dwindled to their January price.

So what does Newton and other investors from the South Sea Bubble have in common with investing victims of modern day bubbles? Quite a bit according to Richard Dale, a London-based economist, author and historian.

Investing Lessons to be Learned from Market Bubbles

Dale recently gave an interview to MarketWatch where he points out investing lessons from the South Sea bubble that can still apply to the modern investor/market bubble. Here are a few of them:

MarketWatch: How did Isaac Newton get lured into such a disastrous investment?

Dale: Newton invested around £3,500 in early 1720 and sold out in late April of that year having doubled his money. However, like so many others, he was induced to get back into the market in the summer of 1720 at the height of the bubble and ended up losing £20,000, around £3 million in today’s money.

MarketWatch: What modern-day financial bubble is most similar to the South Sea Bubble?

Dale: From the standpoint of the South Sea directors, the bubble represented a giant Ponzi scheme (e.g. Bernie Madoff) in that it proposed to pay dividends not from profits but from sales of new shares for cash. From the point of view of investment behavior, the bubble resembles the dot.com boom/bust when the valuations of dot.com companies lost any connection with underlying value or realistic profit projections. (The Bank for International Settlements pointed this out at the time). I don’t think much has changed. Bubbles are inherently instances of how crowds can go crazy.

It’s exactly the same mentality. ‘You gotta play the game while the game is going on.’ The fear of losing out and losing market share, that mentality of knowingly taking some pretty big risks because everyone else seems to be doing the same, seems to be a feature of markets from time to time.

MarketWatch: So it is pretty easy to get sucked into a bubble?

Dale: I think even way back in 1720, the people that got sucked in, in many cases, were very ordinary people. You didn’t have to be rich. Mini bubbles were developing. It was the poor man’s bubble. For a penny you could buy a share subscription. Everyone was being sucked in at that time…I think one of the features today is one of the ordinary returns from conventional safe investments is now so low that people are inclined to look for riskier alternatives.

MarketWatch: What are signs that an investor is involved in a venture that could end badly?

Dale: There are different things…It’s painful to watch when people are offered higher-than-normal returns, and higher returns than you could reasonably expect. They tend to fall for it time and again. That happens and people lose their money. You only offer supernormal returns if you’re offering supernormal risks.

What we’re seeing all the time with these is that …investors are offered good returns when good returns are hard to come by. That’s not going to change…Madoff was a slightly more sophisticated one because returns were not that out of the ordinary. That kind of thing is just going to go on and on. People are greedy and will jump at the prospects of better-than-normal rates of return.

MarketWatch: What else drives people to get involved in risky financial ventures?

Dale: In some cases, it is the desire to be brave and do something different, the excitement. Or it is a retired person wanting to do something interesting, make their lives rather exciting…high risk, high return. There are plenty of savvy investors who are prepared to take a high risk, but once you get to a certain stage you don’t need to do that. Some people just don’t know they’re taking the risk…a lot of people are very financially naive. It is unfortunate, but that is the case.

Why Does it Matter to You?

At their core, market bubbles from all time periods have the same effect on investors: They convince them they’re onto something groundbreaking only to have it blow up in their face. A good way to avoid being swept up in the market mania is to create an Investment Policy Statement.

This statement will guide how you invest by aligning your money with your values and goal for reaching your full financial potential. If an investment doesn’t match the criteria of your IPS – which many found in market bubbles won’t – then you shouldn’t invest in it. Period.

5 Goal Hacks to Help You Achieve More

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Sometimes, life can become hectic. The path you’re traveling down that was so crystal clear when you began your journey can suddenly seem cloudy and uncertain. I’ve found that it’s in times like these where revisiting my most important goals is crucial. It’s easy to dream, in fact I would encourage you to never stop dreaming. But if we don’t stop and break those dreams down into an action plan on a regular basis, that’s when your vision becomes unclear.

Cautiously vs. Courageously

I believe that there are two ways to live life: Cautiously and courageously. Living cautiously isn’t necessarily a bad thing; you can still live a very happy, enjoyable life. For me, the disconnect happens when causation stops us from challenging ourselves, from becoming a better, more successful version of ourselves.

Living courageously includes striving toward lofty – perhaps even what seem would deem crazy – dreams. In dreams lie an inherent abundance mindset, we can see the potential in ourselves of where we are today and the unlimited growth we’re capable of. But just to dream isn’t enough. We have to put together an action plan of how our dreams will come to fruition.

For me, the turning point in dreaming big was our recent decision to free ourselves from the chains of our broker dealer, from the Wall Street powerhouses. Now that we can be a true representative of our clients, the opportunities to better serve people are unfolding daily. The potential of our team to make a positive impact in people’s lives is greater than I could’ve imagined.

However, I’ve realized that in dreaming big and capitalizing on big opportunities, breaking these down into attainable goals is crucial for our success.

5 Goal Hacks to Help You Achieve More

Here are five goal hacks that have greatly helped me over the years, and even more so recently, in not only setting goals but actually achieving them:

1. Make time to reflect and think. As simple as it sounds, people will routinely say they don’t have time to stop and think. But taking the time to stop and think about where you are and where you’re trying to go is important. It doesn’t have to happen daily; it can be a monthly, quarterly or even yearly exercise. Allocate this time to yourself and your thoughts. Shut off your phone, leave your normal routine, travel somewhere or simply shut the office door. Tune out the noise and get back in touch with your dreams.

2. Hold yourself accountable and write it down. Again, simple but extremely essential. Remember in school when you thought writing down all of those notes was a waste of time? Well in case it hasn’t hit you by now, it certainly wasn’t. It’s scientifically proven that we are more likely to retain information when we write it down. The same is true when it comes to your goals. Not only does this evoke a certain level of personal accountability, but I would even encourage you to take it one step further and find an accountability partner. In a recent study, 70% of participants who wrote down their goals and sent weekly updates to their selected peers reported getting them done, compared to only 35% who didn’t write them down.

3. Organize and categorize. Sometimes our own goals can seem overwhelming or disjointed, like they’re scattered all over the place. I know that this has been true with our team lately, with all of the changes we’ve encountered and opportunities we want to take advantage of. First, we needed to categorize our different goals, and give them a home. Then we needed to organize them in order of importance. You wouldn’t believe the impact this had, and how much it simplified things. What initially seemed daunting became a simplified process for each individual goal.

4. Assign deadlines. One of the most important steps in goal setting is applying a timeline. This is the backbone of your action plan, and is what keeps your goals in-tact. When you set hard deadlines, it keeps you motivated to stay focused and disciplined as you work toward your goal. Set up checkpoints along the way as well. These demonstrate whether or not progress is being made and if there are any obstacles that need to be addressed. Don’t forget, a goal without a plan is simply a wish. A comprehensive timeline gives your goals a tangible framework for achieving them.

5. Go backwards. It might sound weird, but I’ve found that working backwards can be highly beneficial. When I write down a goal, I then write down the ultimate end result that I am aiming for. Then I back into the starting point. It’s always easy to dream, but sometimes it’s not as easy to recognize all of the steps it will take to get there or what could go wrong. This is where working backwards helps me the most. Not only does it help me visualize an action plan, but it helps me identify obstacles that could deter our success early on. This is helpful for proactive planning, because I already have an idea of what can hinder the process and how to overcome it.