Are you considering hiring a planner to help navigate your financial future? If so, do you know what financial planning entails? Financial planning revolves around taking a holistic view of a client's financial situation and advising them on how to achieve realistic economic goals.

While it seems simple enough, there are several myths surrounding financial planning that might prevent you from enlisting a planner. Let's examine four of these in detail to help you reach a better understanding of how a financial planner can meet your needs.

We continue our series profiling different financial advisors at Carnegie Investment Counsel with our Portfolio Manager Linda Fousek. Linda is a Chartered Financial Analyst® and her expertise areas are investment strategy and asset allocation, including portfolio construction and implementation.

As a portfolio managerat Carnegie Investment Counsel, I am involved with creating portfolios designed to help clients meet their goals. For individuals, corporations or nonprofits, investment policy statements (IPS) are a way to outline goals and objectives. Outside of work, I serve as an investment committee member for my church's endowment. As such, I am sharing my IPS experience as a portfolio manager and as a community member in my church. Let's start with some basics.

Brittany Blazey loves to think of ways to make her clients feel valued. Her role as the Relationship Manager at our Toledo Office is a perfect fit for a person with a heart for taking care of clients.

Thinking about another marriage as you approach retirement? What are the financial considerations?

Getting married at any point in life is an exciting step toward personal and shared fulfillment. But getting married later in life can be both exciting and potentially challenging, at least from a financial standpoint. Compared to those who are marrying for the first time, people who remarry likely have to solve a much more complicated financial equation in order to be prosperous.

Before you tie the knot a second or third time, you and your future spouse should have an open and sincere discussion regarding your respective finances. Some points in this conversation will probably be uncomfortable, but you can avoid future arguments by laying all your financial cards on the table today. Consider the following discussion points:

On a monitor across from my desk, two screens share constantly updating market news from earnings reports to headlines. On my phone, Twitter flashes the latest evaluations and thoughts from, well, thought leaders. Bloomberg provides analytics, data and even more financial news. The flow of information is good and valuable. Everyone can access this information. It’s a far cry from years ago when we had to wait to receive faxes of earnings reports. Now financial information is certainly becoming more “democratized”. But these volumes of information are a challenge for individuals to process, even if those individuals are professionals.

At Carnegie, the word “counsel” in our name speaks to the expertise we bring to investment management. But how does the Carnegie approach work in practice? How do we synthesize information together as a team to help portfolio managers digest it and make decisions for our clients’ portfolios?

Suddenly find yourself winning the lottery or with an unexpected inheritance? Or maybe you sold your company for a surprising amount. Managing sudden wealth includes both mental and financial considerations. So while it may seem like a dream come true for some, it can be detrimental to those who don’t know how to manage the sudden event.. Here are 12 steps to help you survive and thrive:

With the upcoming holiday season, we reached out to our Carnegie Investment Counsel team to share gift book recommendations. No two answers were alike and the recommendations were rich and unexpected.

The Thanksgiving holidays provide a time for gathering with family and friends, whatever that looks like for you this year.

We asked our team members about games they played with family around the holidays that helped them learn money management. Below our financial advisors share their holiday favorites. 

Do you have a personal bucket list or a roster of things to do before you die (or “kick the bucket”)? What’s the value of such a list? Why do many people create an inventory of things to accomplish during their lifetimes? How do you conceive a bucket list for yourself or with your loved ones?

Today, some people begin creating their bucket list earlier in life, possibly merging their list or revising it with a spouse in later years. Others do not even begin considering their lifetime goals until middle age or as retirement beckons. In recent months, the pandemic has made exotic travel even more of an aspirational future dream but still bucket-list worthy. 

Your bucket list can take many different forms, but the underlying design will always revolve around your aspirations and subsequent achievements. Here we also provide advice on how to plan for your bucket list items financially.