Bill Starnes was selected as one of five Delaware financial experts interviewed in the August edition of Delaware Today magazine.

Financial planning for clients during the income stage of life has generally involved strategies for accumulating and growing wealth. While growing wealth is absolutely essential for our retirement security, it is hard for people to know when enough is enough.

Most wealthy people were not born rich. In fact, 80% of wealthy people are first generation millionaires. In other words, never assume you are born into a standard of living that you can’t move out of. Your circumstances may not be ideal, or you may have been dealt a poor hand. However, even if your circumstances are not your fault, it remains your responsibility to manage your financial future. Don’t expect to be bailed out by family, the lottery, or the government. My goal is to empower you to take small steps towards wealth, even when you can’t see the immediate results.

You don’t have to be as wealthy as Bill & Melinda Gates in order to set up your own private charitable foundation. There is an alternative to a private foundation for those of us not as wealthy as the Gates called a Donor Advised Fund (DAF). What is a Donor Advised Fund (DAF)? Simply put, a DAF is your own private charity, funded in a lump sum or over time with cash or securities. You can then invest the dollars in your DAF and allow it to grow, or you can direct your DAF to donate some or all of the funds to the charities of your choosing whenever you decide.

I occasionally enjoy a good Looney Tunes cartoon with my boys, and recently saw one where Sylvester the pussycat was trying to gain some willpower over his desire to eat Tweety Bird.

Retired homeowners likely have some equity in their homes that is actually a large "asset" that they don't think about, or consider valuable in any way. However, for most clients, their home equity is a large asset that should be evaluated and considered as part of their overall "portfolio". The best way to do this is to think of your home’s equity the same way you would think about an IRA. They are both assets that are available for withdrawals. Spending down your IRA is easy to understand and to execute, but how do you spend down your home?

Financial independence does not result from a jackpot or inheritance. Instead, financial independence results from a lifetime of making prudent financial decisions. Over time, this incremental progress results in massive improvement in our financial lives.

Regardless of which decade of life you are in, financial responsibility usually comes down to managing a few basic goals: generating income, saving/investing money, controlling your living expenses, and protecting yourself from risks.

Sequence of return risk is a major factor in retirement security.

In my last blog post, I wrote about the use of Tax Bracket Smoothing as a technique to build wealth. In the video below, I expand on the concepts presented in the newsletter, and provide some demonstrations of how the strategy works, and how to confirm the value of such strategies.

What if I told you that you could build wealth by paying taxes—and paying them now instead of later? Most clients don’t want to pay taxes at all, let alone sooner rather than later. In fact it is common wisdom to defer income taxes as long as possible. How do you defer income and therefore taxes? The table to the right shows some typical income acceleration / deferral strategies.

It is easy to get lost in numbers, projections, and spreadsheets. Getting so deep into the weeds is an easy way to lose sight of where you are headed and what figures are really important to stay focused on.

I saw this quote, "Goodbye Tension, Hello Pension" hanging on an old sign in a restaurant. Of course, today with pension plans fading out of the retirement income portfolio, it should now read, Goodbye Pension, Hello Tension.

As a young man, I fell in love with a beautiful curvaceous automobile called a Mazda MX-6. I wanted to be the one behind that wheel and to live the life of someone who would drive that sexy sports car.

We all want to make the best financial decisions; and many of us have the financial knowledge to do so, but having this knowledge does not necessarily prevent us from making mistakes.