Articles and Videos

Lucia Capital Group Weekly

Qualified Charitable Contributions

October 12, 2017

Here’s a little known piece of advice: Qualified Charitable Contributions allow you to make charitable contributions directly from your IRA to qualified public charities, where the amount is excluded from your income. They can also satisfy an upcoming RMD.

Lucia Capital Group Weekly

A Little-Known Secret of RMDs

October 5, 2017

As the end of the year slowly approaches, remember you still have time to make sure that your 2017 Required Minimum Distribution is satisfied. If you don’t take out the required minimum on time, you’ll pay an extra penalty tax of 50 percent of the amount that you missed. If you don’t need the money from your IRA or other retirement accounts, there’s nothing you can do about having to take your minimum distributions. But if your concern is that you don’t want to sell the securities in those accounts to meet the RMDs because you believe it’s a bad time to sell them, I’m going to let you in on a little-known secret: you can take what’s called an “in-kind distribution” from your retirement plan.

Lucia Capital Group Weekly

The Two Five-Year Roth Rules

September 28, 2017

Roth IRAs have certain stipulations associated with them to make sure their tax-favored status isn’t abused. In particular, there are two different five-year rules that are attached to Roth accounts that you need to be aware of.

Life Planning

The Five Intangibles of a Financial Advisor

September 21, 2017

Good financial planning decisions go far beyond how and where you invest – they can potentially enhance your lifetime standard of living. It’s important to understand that, because success may not always equal a higher portfolio return in the short term. Here are five intangible ways that a financial advisor can potentially add value to you.

Digital Risk

7 Steps to Protect Yourself from the Equifax Security Breach

September 14, 2017

If you have a credit report, the chances are pretty good that you’re one of the 143 million American consumers whose personal information was exposed by the data breach at Equifax, one of the three major credit reporting agencies in America. As it happens, I found out I may have been one of the victims myself.

Lucia Capital Group Weekly

From Bucket Strategy to Bucket List

September 7, 2017

Retirement can be the perfect opportunity to take a look at your bucket list and possibly make some of those wishes come true. Maybe even invent some new ones that you’d never thought of before. It seems like there’s never been a better chance than now, at your retirement, to make it all happen.

Investing and Personal Finance

Stock Market Disasters Happen – What’s Your Plan?

August 31, 2017

With Hurricane Harvey, we saw a real-world example of how things can change in an instant. One moment everything’s fine, the next, there’s total devastation in some areas. With natural disasters like these, Mother Nature will often have the final word, regardless of how you’re prepared.  But with investing, you may find that the better you’re prepared for market swings, the less of a negative impact there might be.

Investing and Personal Finance

How Technology is Changing the Advice Landscape

July 13, 2017

The old days, where people needed brokers to access investment offerings and when clients may have had little information and little choice, are pretty much gone. We went from an age of brokers and investments, then through an era of strictly financial planning and asset allocation models, and now we’ve entered an age of collaborative guidance.

Lucia Capital Group Weekly

Top 3 Unexpected Retirement Expenses

June 28, 2017

You want your money to out-live you, not the other way around, so how do you plan for the unexpected? It may help to know what you’re up against.

Lucia Capital Group Weekly

Unexpected Tax Issues at Retirement

June 14, 2017

If there’s one thing that’s ignored all too often at retirement, it’s the impact that taxes will have on your life. Your tax return can change a LOT once you’ve gone from working mode to retirement mode. Here are a few tax issues you need to be aware of.

Lucia Capital Group Weekly

4 Helpful Tips When Inheriting an IRA

June 7, 2017

IRAs can be wonderful tools for saving for retirement. As it happens, though, many IRAs are not depleted of funds before the account owner passes away, and they wind up in the hands of a beneficiary. If you’ve inherited an IRA, here are four things you should be aware of.

Investing and Personal Finance

The Risk of Rising Interest Rates

May 31, 2017

If you’re a bond holder, a change in interest rates means that the value of those bonds you’re holding could also change. And right now, though interest rates are still at historically low levels, we could be seeing higher rates in the near future. Which scenario makes more sense for you: keeping your bonds, or potentially improve your risk-adjusted performance with some fixed-income alternatives?