Just wrapped a client meeting. Female. 73 and healthy. 2 adult kids (age 42 and 47). 13 year old grandson. Plenty of money for her comfortable retirement. The conversation was mostly focused on estate planning and encouraging her to feel okay giving money to her adult kids. Here's what I said to her: "Think about life 20 years from now. You're 93... Your kids are in their 60s and your grandson is 33. Then they'll inherit your money. However, at that time everyone is fairly settled into who they are and what they'll become. Now compare that with a gift today. Your kids are at a place in their lives where a financial gift can have a trajectory-altering impact. Consider the ripple effects of removing a bit of financial stress from the parents of a 13 year old. I'll help ensure your needs are met for the rest of your life, but if you see an opportunity to help the people who matter to you, seize it."

This will be a fun one.

Just wrapped a client email exchange. Couple in their early 60s. Still working. $1.8m across Pretax and Roth IRAs. $100k (with regular additions) in a Trust account earmarked for a downpayment on a second home (FL) His initial email: "Hey Adam, Hope alls well. Quick question: We’re considering buying an RV (about $80k) until we decide if/when we sell our house and move to FL full time.   Would it be wiser to take a loan at 9-12% interest, or use the money market we’re holding in the Schwab account as our safety net and future FL house down payment and pay cash for the RV?" Without getting into whether or not purchasing an RV makes sense and all the tradeoffs present in this, here's what I said: "I will almost never encourage you to take a 9-12% loan. Here's what I want you to do: 1) If you're set on getting the RV, pay cash for it. 2) Pretend you adopted a 10% loan at 5 years. This would have been about a $1,700 monthly payment. 3) Make this monthly "payment" back into your portfolio. Even if you think you're not going to get the RV for a couple months, start this synthetic debt payment/portfolio contribution strategy right away. Maybe even run the math on insurance, fuel, etc. and add that to the $1,700. Ideally, I want you to feel how this choice would impact your cash flow prior to being locked into it." After some back and forth, that's what we're going to do. Homes and RVs and Flying Roadsters are fun. If you plan to finance them, adopt those expenses in a savings strategy before you're married to them as debt service. Then when you do adopt them, you'll not only have adapted your cash flow to match, but you'll have built some savings in advance.

The year is 1998. I want to chat with a girl I have a crush on. I call her family’s house phone. Her dad answers. “Hi Mr. ______, this is Adam. Is ________ available?” …. And this (probably) was the foundation for my excellent warm calling skills when prospecting for Harding Wealth.

“The gym is where men are made. Don’t let anyone outwork you. No excuses.” - Social media post made at 10:28am on a Tuesday by Cody, 28, Fitness Influencer

The 49ers are good but these two offensive PI calls are absolutely insane.

My daughter has a new hobby at preschool: Gathering the kids in a circle and talking about how their parents and grandparents are going to die someday. It’s not going over too well.

What good is having Fuck You Money if you never say “fuck you”? And what better situation to say “fuck you” than when some billionaire tells you your opening act and friend for a decade can’t call out a genocide.

Stop normalizing saying "congrats" when people buy a new car. All that means is they have less money in their bank accounts or portfolio, or they've committed a portion of their future earnings to monthly payments.

“I’ll really cut back spending and save aggressively for retirement when I hit 50.”

A prospect turned new client called me “borderline apathetic” in my approach to pursuing him as a client. I agreed with a slight correction. It’s not apathy. It’s confidence that the right people will hire us, we’ll love working with them, and turnover will remain comically low.

Just wrapped a conversation with the receptionist at my office building. 31. Married. Solid two incomes. No kids for another couple years. The reason for the conversation: Her mom told her to make sure she's maxing out her Roth IRA and Roth 401k and she wanted to know what I thought about that. My response: Look, your mom cares deeply about you but this is a classic example of her projecting her own concerns about her money onto you. She sees the impact of pulling out $25,000 of a retirement account to be able to only spend $20,000. But you have other priorities. Kids. Real estate. Economic resilience. ...And, yes, retirement. My advice? Fund the hell out of her taxable brokerage account. Form the base of the pyramid. Then build up. Sacrifice the tax optimization for optionality. Then use that optionality to reclaim the tax optimization in later years. ... There's no single right answer for what to do. But there is this: Be careful taking advice from people whose priorities may be wildly different than yours.

No custodian is perfect. Altruist has some excellent things regardless of Vanguard involvement or not. But we're also multicustodial to help make sure we have the ability to move our clients between Fidelity, Schwab and Altruist in the event that any one of them has a more competitive offering.

You could have $300k in debt or $0 and I’d still have you follow this formula: 1) open the accounts you need. Brokerage, 529, Roth, workplace 401k, etc… Whatever your situation needs. 2) establish a recurring deposit and auto investment to those accounts. If you have a mountain of debt these amounts are going to be like $5/wk…that’s okay, it’s just about building infrastructure. 3) as you witness the power of auto deposits and investments, it will become energizing. You’ll find extra money — a subscription to cancel or side gig or a promotion. You’ll start to understand why eliminating debt payments is the key to unlocking massive accumulation. No more $600/car payment? $600 goes to your portfolio. And when you’ve unlocked more investable dollars you aren’t tasked with opening accounts and deciding what to do…. You already decided and it was just $5/wk or whatever. Now you just bump up the numbers.

Just wrapped a client email exchange. Married. Late 50s. Recent inheritance. Still needs to work, save, and invest for another 10 years or so to be able to retire comfortably. The initial email: "I wanted to get your thoughts on a potential purchase I’m considering before I make any decisions. I’ve been thinking of purchasing a boat for a while and seriously considering a particular one in the $65k - $70k range.  Given our previous conversations about my financial situation and overall plan, I’d like your opinion on if this is something I can comfortably afford without affecting my longer-term financial goals." My Response: "I'm gonna have to be the No Fun Police on this one. Do this: 1) Try to estimate how many Boat Days you’d have in a given year. Go with the highest possible number: like 4x per month for 4 months a year or so. 2) Find how much per day it would cost you to rent a boat. I just looked at your area and it seems to be about $400/day. 3) Multiply 1 and 2 above. If it’s $400/day and you go 16 times a year, you have $6,400 a year in boating costs. Think of your $70k boat purchase like pre-purchasing 11 years worth of boat use up front along with the headaches and cleaning and licensing and storage costs not included. Not to mention, the $70k remaining invested should hopefully produce some return to help pay for your boat rental costs." He replied with gratitude for the reminder. ----- We often jump straight to thinking we need to own things. Our ego wants it to be 'ours' but the math often supports renting. I do this same analysis with second homes, private planes or boats or anything like that. Sometimes people have enough money to make the suboptimal financial choice, or sometimes the ownership isn't suboptimal. It's all circumstantial, but the main takeaway is this: You can rent the dream.

Men, If you're feeling behind financially -- maybe even feeling like a failure -- the very last thing you should be doing is taking huge risks with your financial capital in an attempt to make up ground. If you do that there's a >90% chance you're going to make things worse.

The worst part is the Situational Awareness guy is going to be around forever just like Cathie Wood and her terrible performance. His catastrophe will be the reason he gets airtime.

Just wrapped a messaging chat with a client. 38. Married. Just welcomed their first child. Here’s the message I received: “Hi! We had our baby girl 7/18/26. Happy and healthy. When you get a chance, I’d like to discuss 529, Brokerage and Roth IRA options. I have $10k for her and more on the way. The 529 will largely be funded by the grandparents and the brokerage funded through us to give her opportunity and learn as she gets older. That’s my goal at least.” My response: “Congrats, my dude. 1) Roth IRA isn’t in play until she has earned income. 2) Sign her up for the Trump account and get the free $1k but no more. 3) open the Ideal Idaho 529 account for her. Aggressive allocation. 4) We’ll open an UTMA brokerage account for her at @altruist. And look, I know you want to hit the ground running on this stuff, but the best thing by far is for you guys to just ‘be rich’ in your own accounts. Earmarking funds for them by making UTMA deposits feels good — but it’s restrictive without much benefit when compared to just gifting larger sums when she’s older and can see it as an educational tool. Just continue working to be rich yourselves and your kids will benefit. Don’t over focus on funding accounts specifically in their name unless you have generational wealth.”

I love spending the summer visiting places that are absolutely awful for 8-9 months a year. The sense of making every ‘good weather day’ count amongst the locals is such a great vibe to be around.

There's a 99.93% chance you care more about the gift tax limit than you should.