Welcome to 2023! I hope your holiday season and new year celebration was cathartic. I’ve come into the new year feeling extremely refreshed and excited! On a personal note, 2022 ended with me getting engaged to my lovely fiance, so I couldn’t be more excited to see where this year takes us.
You’ll notice this newsletter is in a very different format from our recent Patch Notes editions. That’s intentional. I wanted to try out a new format for the newsletter and I also have a lot of updates from the financial world for you this time of year. As a result, I figured something more informational and less firm-centric would be a huge benefit to you as clients (or other readers.)
If you’re disinterested in the reading, feel free to bring up the topics in our future conversations. But, for those of you interested in reading, I hope you enjoy the articles I summarized and linked below.
Inflation was big over the last two years, and the IRS is adjusting for that. This year we see changes to the contribution limits on all of the major retirement account types as well as HSAs. So that means you can now save more to your IRA, 401(k), or other equivalent savings vehicle. Make sure to update your contributions if your goal is to maximize these accounts.
Secure Act 2.0 passed during the last week of the year. It’s a monstrous bill and has a lot of material within it across financial subjects. The major changes are to 529 plans, Required Minimum Distributions, Roth Plans and Matching, Student Loan Payments and Matching, and Catch-Up Contributions for those over the age of 50. While I will not cover all the changes here, feel free to ask me for specific information if you want to know more about how these changes may apply to you.
Lastly, we’ll wrap up this quarterly newsletter with a reminder that investing in individual stocks can be a huge gamble. This study argues that since 1926 over 50% of U.S. common stocks have less return than 1-month treasury bills! This basically means that owning just a smaller slice of the market is a big risk, as those stocks may not be in the 43% of the stock market that will generate a large percentage of the next decade’s return. For those who wonder why diversification is important, here is at least part of the reason.
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If you are a client of the firm, thank you! You have my deepest gratitude. I have had an extremely fulfilling and financially rewarding last few years. I owe that to you. The greatest compliment you can give me is to spread the word about my services. Every single referral client I have worked with has been awesome.
Cheers to a great 2023!
