Author: Amanda Bateman, CFP®
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Open Enrollment Is Coming. Don’t Pick Blind Again.
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Open enrollment windows start landing in inboxes this month, and most people treat them like paperwork. Log in, click through the same elections as last year, submit, move on. That approach is understandable. It’s also how a lot of quietly expensive decisions get made on autopilot, once a year, without anyone noticing. The pile shows…
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Five Years In. We Still Review the Budget Together.
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Five years ago last week, I married Chris. Today, our son turns three: a Spider-Man-obsessed, ridiculously charming little guy who brings the whole house joy. The two dates land three days apart every October, so this time of year I always end up taking stock of more than just the marriage. Not just of the…
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Cash Flow Finally Easing? Don’t Spend It Yet.
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Q4 starts Thursday. If your business has spent the back half of this year climbing out of a hard stretch and cash flow is finally starting to breathe, I want to name something before you get there: the moment relief arrives is exactly when the risk of a new mistake shows up. I see this…
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Three Years Can Decide Your Social Security Check Size
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in RetirementIf you’re picturing retirement at 65 because that’s when Medicare starts, I want to slow you down for a second. Sixty-five and Social Security’s full retirement age are not the same number, and the years in between, and sometimes the years before, are where some of the most consequential decisions in your entire retirement plan…
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Three Months of Expenses. One Less 3am Worry.
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September is Preparedness Month, which usually means flashlights and bottled water. I want to talk about a different kind of preparedness. The kind that shows up at 3am when you can’t sleep because you’re doing math in your head about what happens if the car breaks down and the AC dies in the same month.…
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Six Figures Doesn’t Mean You Have a Plan
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Labor Day gets framed as a day off. I’d rather use it to ask a different question: what is your income for? Not what it covers. Not what bracket it lands in. What it’s for. Because I sit across from a lot of high earners who can answer the first question in detail and go…
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4 Months Left in 2026. Time to Plan.
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The Stretch That Decides How the Year Ends Four months feels like a lot of time until it isn’t. Every year around this point, I watch business owners move from “we have plenty of runway left” to “where did the year go” almost overnight, usually somewhere between Labor Day and the first cold snap. The…
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Homeschool Starts Tuesday. My Budget Resets Too.
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The Week Everything Shifts Tomorrow our homeschool year starts back. Curriculum is organized, the school room (our dining room) is ready, for the first time my husband is teaching a class each week for our co-op, and I’m doing the thing I do every year around this time without fully realizing it until it’s already…
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Turning 65 Soon? 3 Medicare Mistakes to Avoid
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in RetirementThe Deadline Nobody Explains Clearly Somewhere between your last day of work and your 65th birthday, there’s a window that actually has a deadline, and it’s shorter than most people expect. Medicare’s Initial Enrollment Period is seven months long: the three months before the month you turn 65, your birthday month, and the three months…
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I’m in San Diego This Week, Learning for You
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Why I’m Not in the Office This Week By the time this publishes, I’m somewhere between a conference session and a Wi-Fi-dead hallway at the San Diego Convention Center. I’m at Focus, LPL’s flagship annual conference, spending four days in rooms full of financial professionals talking about what’s changing in our industry and how we…