Our Insights

Stay in-the-know about the latest.

Financial Planning
How the Illinois State Estate Tax Works

In the world of financial planning, the federal estate tax tends to get a lot of press, but what often surprises some clients (and will impact more of them) is that states themselves also have their own estate or inheritance taxes. For clarity, an estate tax is levied and paid by the estate of the deceased, while an inheritance tax is paid by the heirs receiving the inherited property (with spouses generally exempt).

Read More
Investments
Ignoring the Noise and Staying the Course:  A Recipe for Success

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s easy to get caught up in the noise of predictions, forecasts, and market speculation. It’s tempting to listen and react to predictions, but successful investing and sound financial planning involve tuning out the noise and taking a more disciplined, strategic approach.

Read More
Financial Planning
Nurturing Wealth Across Generations: A Guide to Multi-Generational Wealth Planning

Often referred to as the “Great Wealth Transfer,” studies show that roughly $84 trillion in assets amassed by baby boomers will change hands over the next 20 years. When examined more closely, a third of today’s high-net-worth individuals inherited their wealth.  According to the UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report, in 2023, more new billionaires were created by inherited wealth rather than entrepreneurship. This trend looks to continue in the years to come for many wealthy families (not just billionaires).

Read More
Financial Planning
The Benefits of Being a Co-Trustee on Your Parents or Loved Ones Accounts

As we watch our parents (or any other loved one) make that gradual shift from being totally independent to needing help, there are some steps that can be taken to facilitate family involvement.  Even for those of us who have parents who are 100% capable of managing their affairs, it doesn’t hurt to be prepared for an unexpected circumstance.

The most common solution for being able to manage our parent’s accounts on their behalf is to have an attorney draft a Power of Attorney (“POA”).  A POA is a legal document that authorizes a person to act on another person’s behalf.  We highly recommend them for everyone 18 years and over, so they can have someone act on their behalf when they are no longer able to make financial or health care decisions.   It creates a fiduciary relationship between the Principal (person who created the document) and the Agent (person named to carry out the instructions).  This is my non-attorney understanding of how it works. 

Read More
Investments
Investing During an Election Year

Investing takes nerve. There’s always a reason to “let things calm down,” “hold off for now,” “take profits,” or any other common quip we’ve all heard. We do know that long-term, diversified investing leads to positive outcomes in almost every circumstance.  Despite that, human nature leads us to make emotional choices affected by outside influences.  There are times when these emotions seem especially heightened.  This year promises to be one of those years. 

Read More
Current Events
What We Have Been Reading – Market Commentary & Beyond for January 2024

Our team regularly reads articles from industry peers and trusted resources to stay up to date on financial markets.  We enjoy reading about topics related to economics, investments, current events, and financial planning.

In addition to circulating some of the best pieces internally, we thought our clients, partners, and friends might enjoy reading some of the same articles as us.

Here are 9 recent pieces that our team members have read, along with some commentary on why we found the respective articles interesting.

Read More
News
What Can Your Family Achieve with a Boutique Family Office?

For the past few years, we’ve been using the tagline “Managing Complexity, Delivering Simplicity.”  Sounds nice, maybe even pithy.  But what does it really mean, and why would anyone care?

Speaking from my own experience, both in servicing clients for over thirty years and in handling my own financial affairs, I can tell you that the answer is pretty simple; when you accumulate wealth, you accumulate complexity too. Fighting through that complexity, making sense of and managing the details, and simplifying what we can, when we can, is among the things that our team at Strategic Wealth Partners does best.

Read More
News
Celebrating 2023

The whole team at Strategic Wealth Partners wants you to know how appreciative we are of our partnership with you. We greatly value the opportunity to serve as your trusted partner.

We look forward to continuing our relationship in 2024 and wish you and your family a very happy new year!

We hope you enjoy our video Celebrating 2023 as we highlight this past year.

Read More
Investments
The “So What?” of Higher Interest Rates

Background: How We Got Here

In late 2008, the Federal Reserve (the Fed) cut the Fed funds rate – the target interest rate at which commercial banks borrow and lend their excess reserves to each other overnight – to 0% for the first time in history in response to the Global Financial Crisis.
Since cutting the Fed funds rate to 0% didn’t cause inflation to surpass the Fed’s 2% target (one of their dual mandates is price stability), the Fed maintained this accommodative policy (along with quantitative easing) for the next decade-plus as shown in the chart below.
Ultra-low interest rates from 2009 to 2021 paved the way for one of the longest economic recoveries in history; during this period, borrowing was cheap and therefore prevalent, and because credit investments offered meager returns, investors were encouraged to pursue higher-return (and higher-risk) investments such as stocks.

Read More

Have a question for our team?