2025 Charting the Course

Insights on the Economy and Market 2025 Percent of U.S. Individual Charitable Giving Going to Private Foundations and DAFs January 2025   There has been a shifting narrative as to where individuals have been directing their gifting. In 2008, donor- advised funds (DAFs) accounted for 4% of individual charitable gifting versus 13% going toward [...]

By |2025-01-27T10:51:33-05:00January 27, 2025|

Donor Advised Funds vs Private Foundations

Choosing a Philanthropic Vehicle January 2025 In recent years, there has been a proliferation of assets in and contributions to donor-advised funds (DAFs). Grants from DAFs have grown an impressive 14% per year from 2019 through 2023, and total assets have grown by over $100 billion in that same time period.1 Some estimates point to these [...]

By |2025-01-22T14:07:44-05:00January 22, 2025|

2024 Charting the Course

Insights on the Economy and Market 2024 Small Business Employment by State December 2024 This chart shows the percentage of workers in each state employed by small business, defined as companies with fewer than 500 employees.     Small businesses are a significant part of the U.S. economy, providing jobs and driving innovation. Understanding their distribution [...]

By |2025-01-28T12:56:06-05:00December 23, 2024|

Worries

"I know worrying works, because none of the stuff I worried about ever happened." - Will Rogers If you reside in a swing state or have a cell phone number that is from a swing state, you may be hoping that election season soon ends to put a stop to the text and robocall onslaught. Regardless of where [...]

By |2024-12-30T14:15:37-05:00November 5, 2024|

The Importance of Transition Management

A Note From our CEO March 2024 This month marks the 4th anniversary of COVID impacting our lives. Fortunately, in many ways it seems like ancient history, as most of the societal restrictions have been lifted, we are free to gather with family and friends wherever we want, and many of the economic repercussions of COVID policies are [...]

By |2025-01-14T11:00:45-05:00April 1, 2024|

Target Date Funds

"If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca Companies hope that their employees can retire with dignity, but many of them can no longer afford to offer defined benefit plans. As a retirement plan sponsor, believing that Social Security can provide anything more than supplemental income in [...]

By |2024-12-30T14:15:37-05:00April 1, 2024|

The Perfect Benchmark

Purpose   Benchmarking is a way of life. Babies are benchmarked to national averages and assigned percentiles for height and weight. Children are graded and sorted based on the academic standards they meet relative to peers. Teenagers compete to exceed an overly complex and mostly unknown admission benchmark of a coveted university. And for many adults, annual job reviews [...]

By |2024-12-30T14:15:37-05:00April 1, 2024|

Risky Business

"If you don’t invest in risk management, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, it’s a risky business." - Gary Cohn We have written before about the risks to passive investors when indexes become overly concentrated. Investors may think that they are well diversified when their index fund holds 500 or even 1,000 different stocks, but there are [...]

By |2024-12-30T14:15:37-05:00March 26, 2024|
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