Category

Investment Management

Keeping the Long View Amid Change and Chaos

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The last few weeks have felt like total chaos—at home, our routine schedule has been upended with weather-related school cancellations, kids with the flu, and late nights of basketball games. At Meridian, we’ve been working hard on the usual year end reporting and tax preparation tasks, as well as rebalancing

Understanding Your December 2024 Statement

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Happy 2025 y’all! This is my first official blog of the year, and I am starting to prefer the 1-minute video format (the Meridian Market Minute)! There will be one that accompanies this post. Nonetheless, I will write about a topic that has been on some of our clients’ minds recently: December 2024 statements!

Tax Loss Harvesting – Not as Fancy as It Sounds

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Capital gains taxes are a consideration when buying and ultimately selling assets. For this post, we will focus on stocks, but capital gains taxes apply to real estate and other assets as well. Put simply: you buy a stock, it increases in price, and you sell it at a higher price. The difference between your […]

Flipping the Script: Pay Off a Mortgage or Invest

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We’ve been receiving a lot of questions about paying off mortgages or using cash to buy real estate…Nathan covered the question of whether to purchase a home with cash (or use cash for a larger down payment) in his Meridian Market Minute, so this blog post is about using cash or investments to pay off […]

Luck vs. Skill

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In the spirit of the recent St. Patrick’s Day holiday, luck has been on my mind as to how it affects our financial journey both through financial planning and investment management. Luck is defined as success or failure brought by chance rather than through one’s actions with a reasonable expectation that a

Like a ROTH to a Flame

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I apologize for the lame title to this post, but it seemed a little more attention grabbing than ‘help your kid open a ROTH IRA.’ If you have a child who is earning income, he is eligible to open a ROTH IRA (in Virginia, the minimum working age is 14), and you should probably help […]

The “Cash Trap”

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With the Federal Reserve’s campaign to tame inflation pushing short term interest rates higher, cash yields have become more and more enticing.  Frankly, we’ve never bought more CDs and Treasury bonds for our clients than over the past year.  It’s been a welcome sight to see Treasury and cash yields in the 5%

Learning New Things @ Exchange

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Gaining Industry Insights at the Exchange Conference Yes, finding an excuse to go to a conference in Miami in February is generally a good idea. As is the case with most events like these, we are still spending the lion’s share of our time inside conference rooms, but it’s still a great location for this […]

Net Unrealized Appreciation (NUA) – Worth It?

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Happy New Year to you and your families! That is, if it is still appropriate to wish people a Happy New Year this far into January. I always enjoy the debate around how far into the year you can still say that. I tend to land on through the end of January. I think Seinfeld […]