For anybody considering hiring an advisor, it’s important to know exactly what you want. That is, it’s best if you go shopping for an advisor who meets requirements that you have selected, rather than letting somebody come to you to sell you their services.

One way in which advisors can be categorized is by what services they provide. At a very high level, the options would be:

1. Advice-only (i.e., they provide advice but do not manage the portfolio),
2. Portfolio management with very limited advice, or
3. Comprehensive financial planning, together with portfolio management.

Financial planners/advisors can also be grouped by designation (CFP, CPA, PFS, CFA, EA, etc.) or by areas of expertise.

Finally, it’s important to have a good idea of what fee model(s) you’d be willing to accept. Allan Roth recently wrote a piece discussing the pros and cons (from the client perspective) of the various fee-only (i.e., non-commission) models:

• Strengths & Weaknesses of Advisor Fee–Only Models from the Client Perspective from Allan Roth

Other Recommended Reading

• Educating Clients About Common Scams is No Longer Sufficient (guest article by me, for NAPFA Magazine)
• 5 Investments You Don’t Really Need from Christine Benz and Margaret Giles
• Caring for My Father Put My Life on Pause for 7 Years. Here’s What I Learned (The Long View episode with Elliott Appel as guest)
• Why Are Valuations Falling in a Bull Market? from Ben Carlson
• What Was the Best Portfolio Over the Last 50 Years? from Nick Maggiulli
• The New QCD Reporting Rule Raises a Big Question for IRA Owners from Denise Appleby
• Meta’s Muse AI Assistant Has a Vulnerability That Can Turn it into a Mac Backdoor from Pieter Arntz
• IRS Cyber Weaknesses Put Taxpayer Data at Risk Again, TIGTA Says from Martha Waggoner

Thanks for reading!

Earlier this month, news broke that somebody was selling scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses. It appears that it’s the result of a breach at a company (IDscan.net) that provides ID scanning services for other businesses, such as Hertz car rental, Target, and FedEx.

This is up there with the 2017 Equifax breach in terms of total number of people affected (i.e., almost half the U.S. population). It’s depressing/infuriating that we have so little control of where our information ends up. And this event definitely reinforces the lesson that any account secured exclusively with “private” information is no longer sufficiently secured, as the bad guys increasingly have access to our private information.

• FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses from Brian Krebs

Other Recommended Reading

• Jean Chatzky: How to Create a Forever Paycheck for Retirement (The Long View podcast episode with Christine Benz and Amy Arnott)
• Americans Deserve Better Oversight of Their Annuities from Bloomberg News
• How You Can Lose Your Entire Investment When Investing with Leverage (Borrowed Money) from Jim Dahle
• White House Mandates Agencies (Eventually) Use Login.gov for Public-Facing Websites from Christian Robles
• Vanguard’s Acquisition of Altruist is More About ETF Cost Than About Tech from Ben Henry-Moreland and Michael Kitces
• Here’s How Much Americans Rely on Social Security – at All Income Levels from Alicia Munnell
• Explaining the Rise in Alternative Investments in Public Pension Plans from Juliane Begenau, Pauline Liang, and Emil Siriwardane

Thanks for reading!

Fifty years ago today (August 31, 1976), Jack Bogle and Vanguard launched the first index mutual fund: First Index Investment Trust, which tracked the S&P 500 index (and which is now known as the Vanguard 500 Index Fund).

It’s hard to overstate the significance of that event, in terms of its impact on individual investors. Today, using low-cost, index-tracking funds is largely the default way to invest. The success of Vanguard’s index-tracking funds — and the fact that they operated the funds at-cost — revolutionized the entire industry.

• The Index Fund Turns 50: How Jack Bogle Changed Investing Forever from Allan Roth

Other Recommended Reading

• Why I Object to ‘Hitting a Number’ for Retirement from Christine Benz
• Do AIs Make Good Traders, and Do They Make Good Traders Better? from Jerry Bell, Victor Haghani and James White
• Vanguard to Acquire Altruist Advisor Custody Platform (Vanguard press release)
• Now THIS is a Bull Market from Ben Carlson
• Getting Ahead Has Never Been Easy from Ben Carlson
• The Value of Naming a Trusted Contact (And How They Differ from POAs) from William Anderson
• Roth Employer Contributions Come With a 1099-R Surprise from Denise Appleby

Thanks for reading!

TIPS maturing in 2046 or later are yielding slightly above 3% as of last Friday. (And TIPS maturing 2042-2045 aren’t far below 3%.)

It’s important to understand that interest rates are quite hard to predict. And there’s no rule that says that TIPS yields can’t go meaningfully above 3%. So there’s no way to say, “today is the very best time to buy.” But it is fair to say that “inflation + 3%” is a better expected return from the bond side of a portfolio than has been available for quite some time, without using lower-quality bonds.

• Long TIPS Yield 3%. Time to Buy? from Edward McQuarrie and William Bernstein

Other Recommended Reading

• You May Not Get to Choose When You Retire from Christine Benz
• What Doubters Get Wrong About the 60/40 Portfolio from Jason Kephart
• PACE: A Better Model for Elder Care? from Harry Margolis
• The Mega-cap IPOs’ Impact on Index Funds from Allan Roth
• The Best Way to Sell a Concentrated Position from Nick Maggiulli
• Health Shocks and Annuity Choices from Johannes Hagen, Michal Hodor, and Abigail Hurwitz
• Find Your Fascination from Ben Carlson
• IRS Clarifies that $2,500 Trump Account Limit is Per Employee from Martha Waggoner
• IRS Warns Crypto Holders about Fake Compliance Portal Scam from Martha Waggoner
• Keeping Your Bitcoin Riches Safe Has Never Been Harder from Emily Nicolle

Thanks for reading!

In February of 2026, Morningstar bought CRSP (the Center for Research in Securities Prices), which until that point was owned by the University of Chicago. CRSP was the entity that operated a bunch of the indexes that Vanguard funds tracked.

Earlier this year, Vanguard announced that “Morningstar” would be added to the names of the various funds that track indexes now run by Morningstar (previously run by CRSP). For example, Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund would become the Vanguard Morningstar Total Stock Market Index Fund.

On Wednesday of last week, those new names took effect.

Just to be clear, it’s a name change only. Same funds, same indexes being tracked, slightly new name.

Other Recommended Reading

• Treasury Flags Concern Over ‘Potentially Abusive’ Tax Trades from Zachary Mider, Justina Lee, and Denitsa Tsekova
• Picking Stocks in a Bloodbath from Ben Carlson
• How the CFP Board Sold Out the Public & the Profession from Allan Roth
• Are Stocks Going Up or Is the Dollar Going Down? from Nick Maggiulli
• The Retirement Expense You May Be Missing from Christine Benz
• The Pope’s Official App Exposes 700,000+ User Emails from Jowi Morales

Thanks for reading!

I find myself coming back to the FBI’s cybercrime stats over and over, because they’re just mind-blowing. Over the last decade (2015-2025), annual losses to cybercrime for people age 60+ grew by an annualized rate of 39%.

For comparison, NVIDIA’s annual revenue also grew by 39% annualized from 2015-2025. And over that time NVIDIA went from being a company most people hadn’t heard of to being the largest or second largest company in the world. (It’s a tight race with Apple at the moment.)

So it’s safe to say that cybercrime is a growth industry in the US right now. (It has been growing rapidly with victims under age 60 as well, just not as rapidly.)

I’ve been writing about the topic here on the blog this year, corresponding with readers, and discussing the topic with clients. (I also picked up a few cybersecurity-related certifications along the way, so that I could speak and write about it more intelligently.)

And after learning more about it and discussing it with so many people, I’m pretty firmly convinced that cybersecurity should be considered another core area of personal finance — no different from insurance planning, for instance. To spend decades working, saving, and investing, only to then leave the proverbial doors wide open to would-be thieves makes no sense. (And, just like with dangerous gaps in insurance coverage, most people with dangerous cybersecurity gaps aren’t doing it intentionally.)

Within the personal finance realm though, most of what you’ll see written about cybersecurity and fraud prevention is essentially a) telling the reader to freeze their credit and b) descriptions of types of scams. To be clear, it is a good idea to freeze your credit. And it is valuable to be aware of the common types of scams. But the reality is that “don’t fall for scams” is not a sufficient cybersecurity policy. A policy that relies on always getting it right, every time, your whole life, is simply not good enough.

To that end, I’ve been working on a book (current working title: A CPA’s Guide to Cybersecurity: How to (Hopefully) Not Get Hacked or Lose Your Financial Accounts to Fraud).

It’s not finished yet, but it’s getting closer and closer. It’s at the stage where I could use the assistance of somebody who works in cybersecurity, who could serve as technical editor. If that’s something you’d be open to doing, please get in touch.

Update: thank you to everybody who got in touch! I have found multiple people to provide their expertise as technical editors.

Other Recommended Reading

• Go While You Still Can from Derek Hagen
• Retiree Spending Doesn’t Rise in Lockstep With Inflation, Blanchett Finds (Again) from Dinah Wisenberg Brin (Or here’s Blanchett’s article itself.)
• Should Retirees Fear another Lost Decade? from Amy Arnott
• Your Life Matters (Even If You’re Not Famous) from Darius Foroux
• The Quirky Roth IRA MAGI Rule and In-Plan Roth Conversions from Sean Mullaney
• The Cult of Equities from Ben Carlson
• Between Financial Independence and Retirement from Jim Dahle
• The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious from Will Oremus
• Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws from Brian Krebs
• The Seven Sins of Active Fund Management from Larry Swedroe

Thanks for reading!