Recent events have the potential to reverse the longtime gap between men and women in the office. If things change in the direction I suggest in my imagined news alert below, it'll have big implications for financial planners.

I was prompted to write this largely fictitious story by a study undertaken by Catalyst (a New York-based nonprofit focused on women in the workplace) about women and their lower pay. The Wall Street Journal covered the study in  "Women M.B.A.s Continue to Lag in Pay, Promotions." 

News Alert--April  1, 2020
According to study released today by Catapult, a San Francisco-based nonprofit focusing on men in the workplace, since 2009 men in corporate managerial positions are not getting the same pay and promotions as their female colleagues.    More 

For the fifth straight year, I attended the Technology Tools for Today Conference, now known as the T3 conference. From its humble beginnings in "bed bug" hotels in South Florida, it has risen to be a "must attend" conference; this year held at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines. The conference set records for attendance--for exhibitors as well as advisors.

What were some of the main messages heard in the hallways of the conference? One, technology can make your firm more efficient. Yet your firm has to make the commitment to training, and even further, to establishing "workflows" so each client has a consistent experience allowing your firm to be highly compliance oriented. More important is the bottom line. Technology vastly improves your firm's bottom line. It is clear to remain competitive in our industry; technology must be embraced to survive long term.   More 

I apologize in advance if this post seems like a lot of excuses and whining, but some of the data problems that I've worried about for months have come home to roost. As expected, recent economic data were seriously messed up with weather, seasonal adjustments, and data that just don't seem to match up with what our analysts were hearing from their companies.

There are times in an economic cycle when it's just better to listen to the government's numbers, as companies seem too shell-shocked to see improvement under their own noses (as was the case last spring). Then, there are times when it is better to listen to companies and analysts because the changes in government data become smaller later in a recovery, and the noise levels (weather, for example) become larger than the changes in the raw data. Now is one of those times.   More 

You've heard the Stephen Covey saying that so many of us spend years climbing the corporate ladder only to find that it was leaning against the wrong wall. I think this concept is particularly important when it comes to money.

So much of our lives are spent on thinking about the "how" of money and so little about the "why."

What good does it do to have saved your entire life for retirement then find yourself bored out of your mind three weeks into it? What good is financial success if your kids consider you a failure as a parent because you were never home? Having enough money is preferable to going without, but if the pursuit costs you the things that money can't buy, what was the point?

The important thing to keep in mind it that real wealth comes when we take the time to align our values with our use of capital. I am not really sure how you can make "good" investment decisions until you are clear about where you want to go and why you want to be there.