Supplementing Private Foundations With a DAF January 2025 It feels good to have a rainy-day fund – a little something in the coffers to dip into when times are tough. These funds can be safely stashed away, left untouched until needed. Most individuals and institutions have some ability to choose how much to spend versus [...]

"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 [...]

Insights on the Economy & Markets 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 helps gauge economic [...]

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 [...]

"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 [...]

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 [...]

"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 [...]

"No one has ever become poor by giving" - Anne Frank At Cornerstone, we are blessed to work for many not-for-profit organizations performing extraordinary acts every day to make the world a better place. We are equally thankful to serve the families and corporations that provide support for those institutions. One of the ways we seek to add [...]