Straight talk on retirement, markets, and your money — from someone who's required to put your interests first.
The financial media is full of noise. Talking heads arguing about indexes. Clickbait about market crashes. Headlines designed to scare you into action — or freeze you into inaction.
This page is different. I write about what actually matters to people planning for retirement: understanding risk, building a plan that fits your life, and knowing when the headlines are worth paying attention to (and when they aren't).
If your advisor's main talking point is how your portfolio did relative to the S&P 500 last quarter, you might be keeping score the wrong way.
The purpose of a retirement strategy isn't to beat an index. It's to get where you want, when you want to be there. Whether an investment underperforms or outperforms is fun to look at — but what really matters is whether the investment helped your where and when.
Think about it this way: if your plan needed 6% annual growth to fund your retirement at 63, and your portfolio returned 7% while the S&P did 12% — are you losing? Or are you ahead of schedule?
The scoreboard that matters is your personal plan. Not someone else's index.
"When headlines talk about tariffs, index funds, and economic uncertainty — I think they're missing the point. We don't chase benchmarks. We build plans around the life you actually want to live."— John Mulheron Jr., RICP®
Most people have never put a number on their comfort with risk. They use vague words like "moderate" or "aggressive" — but those mean different things to different people. Your Risk Number gives you and your advisor a shared language to build around.
The word gets thrown around a lot in financial marketing. But the legal and practical difference between a fiduciary advisor and a suitability-standard broker is significant — and it directly affects the advice you receive.