Education Center

There aren’t many free lunches in healthcare, tax planning or investing. The Health Savings Account (HSA) comes pretty close. Designed to help you save and pay for medical expenses, HSAs are an example of a major investment and tax benefit hiding in plain sight. Less than 15 percent of those eligible use them. Do you?

Research shows that only 1/3 of investors are currently comfortable with their investment portfolios. That’s a very low satisfaction rate, given how long and hard people work for their money. If you’re one of the many people not happy with their portfolio, we want you to know we are expanding our investor client base at Osbon Capital to include people who don’t yet meet our usual $5M threshold for investable assets.

I spent the weekend at an invite-only financial regulation round table hosted by Jo Ann Barefoot, senior fellow at Harvard and a veteran of the financial regulation world. Jo Ann founded the Barefoot Innovation Group. Over the course of the weekend we discussed the symbiosis (interaction) of the old guard and the new in banking, lending, asset management and regtech (regulation technology). Here is what we learned.

Given that the first official day of Summer was yesterday, June 21st, we thought it would be appropriate to suggest a handful of financial and investment goals for your family to explore over the next thirteen weeks. We’re all busy, so I selected these because they’re short, sweet and effective. See if you can manage to tackle all five before September 22nd.

It’s not surprising that financial literacy is a top concern parents have for their kids. Whether it’s watching children struggle with money decisions, or worrying about them responsibly handling their eventual inheritance, parents have good reason for concern. Kids don’t learn much about personal finances in school, and in many families it’s not a typical dinnertime topic. Here are some steps you can take to build strong family habits around shared financial literacy:

If you are uncertain, optimistic or nervous about investments right now, it may be a good time to do a little reading. Knowledge is really the best way to counterbalance emotions, which we know may be running high for some right now. Our advice: Check out what the masters have said. They’ve devoted their lives to understanding investing and captured it all in print. It turns out there is truly nothing new under the sun; their insights apply year in and year out.

For several weeks we’ve been discussing what Charlie Collier found when he studied what made wealthy families truly successful over the long term. While panning for nuggets from our previous posts, we see seven indispensable practices that maximize family wealth, and here they are…

Where do you keep your house rules? Are they hanging on the fridge, framed in your study or simply preserved through an unspoken mutual understanding? The fourth installment of our True Family Wealth series is about intellectual capital, which includes the framework for making decisions in wealthy families. The intellectual capital topic often sits untouched and unarticulated. Here’s how it can help you.

This is the third in our series on true family wealth. We previously discussed the most obvious form of wealth — financial capital — and the most important form – human capital. Today we move on to social capital. Your family’s social capital is used to care for others beyond your family.