I am not sure if you’ve followed the stock market this year, but it has been a wild ride. In January and early February, we were approaching record highs in the major indexes. Then COVID-19 happened, and everything plummeted in March and April before an incredible recovery since the middle of 2020 (with some minor corrections along the way). I have a huge interest in technology trends, startups, IPOs, and ...
The week between Christmas and New Year’s is…weird. Everything builds up to a zenith on December 25th – which is a great day – but then it ends. And we find ourselves suspended in mid-air until after the calendar actually turns, listless and a bit out of sorts, wondering what even happened during the past year and feeling hesitant about jumping into the new year with two feet. Maybe there ...
I was reading a paper recently entitled “Spending in Retirement: Determining the Consumption Gap” that talked about how retirees are dying with more money than they had when they actually retired. Specifically, the researchers studied 704 retirees between 2000 and 2010 and found that across five quintiles of wealth, each group had more financial assets than when they initially retired. What's also interesting is that in the top three quintiles, ...
We’re up in Southwest Virginia for the holidays, and God gave us snow on the night of Christmas Eve! The miraculous part of it was that it had barely snowed here in many years. But somehow, everything lined up perfectly and we got almost six inches to create one of the most picturesque winter wonderlands I had ever seen. We ate icicles, went sledding, threw snow at each other, and ...
Merry Christmas everyone! This special day allows me to reflect on Jesus, his celebrated birth, and all that He means to me and my family. And the day itself has become even more fun since Rachel and I had kids, because we get to remember what it was like as a child, and see everything afresh from their eyes. Finally, we do love that the holiday brings family members together ...
When I was in elementary school, I used to entertain myself in the oddest of ways. I remember taking a a ruler and a fine sharpie marker and drawing a compass (like, the kind you would see in the corner of a map) on a 4x6 index card. And I would carry this around whenever my mom or dad would take us somewhere by car. It would be so much ...
You may know that I’ve been hoping and praying for a older, wiser mentor in my life for decades. Someone who has walked the road I am on, who sees something unique in me and feels led to invest in me, and who regularly demonstrates they care through intentional actions and words – reactively (when I ask for help) and even proactively (because they love me and want the best ...
As you know, I have been thinking about how I’ll never be satisfied. And that all of the beautiful things I've gone after – romantic love, success, pleasure, adventure, money, clout – won’t ever fully do for me what I hoped they would do. Rather, they are meant to point me (and you) to God, who is the only One who can complete us. Well, I’ve had another breakthrough in ...
With Christmas fast approaching, I was thinking about the relationship between the parents of Jesus. We don’t know much at all about Joseph from historical texts, but English translations convey that he was a carpenter pledged to be married to Mary, a Jewish girl in her teens. However, under Jewish law and according to Old Testament scholars, a betrothed woman was considered to be married. When Mary got pregnant, Joseph ...
Every fall, it’s hurricane season down here in Southeast Florida - which serves as an annual reminder that disaster could be headed my way. I’ve had to deal with four major hurricanes while I’ve lived down here, and it has not been fun. Typically, what happens is that the news channels let us know a new one is moving in our direction, and everyone monitors the updates to see where ...