Lucia Capital Group Weekly

Lucia Capital Group Weekly

Is Now a Good Time to Convert Your Roth IRA?

July 19, 2018

The new tax law passed last year created some generally lower tax rates that are set to expire at the end of 2025. Now may be a good time to take advantage of this window to do Roth conversions before tax rates potentially go back up to 2017 levels or higher.

Investing and Personal Finance

What Does It Take to Be Wealthy?

July 11, 2018

If you were to ask people what their personal definition of “wealth” is, you’d probably get a different answer from just about everyone. You might think that “having lots of money” would be the standard definition, but according to a survey for the Modern Wealth Index from Charles Schwab, only 11% gave that answer.

Lucia Capital Group Weekly

Introducing Your Personal Financial Dashboard

May 24, 2018

Here at Lucia Capital Group, we continually strive to deliver enhanced services to you. We have been working diligently behind the scenes, setting up our client accounts on a new wealth management platform that will give our financial advisors more capabilities when illustrating our advice to you and your family.

Life Planning

Open Enrollment for the Affordable Care Act

October 26, 2017

Open Enrollment time for the health insurance marketplaces starts on November 1. This means that individuals and their families will have a short window of time to apply for new health insurance, or to switch to a different health care plan in the marketplace under the Affordable Care Act.

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.