By Erin Wood, Senior Vice President, Financial Planning and Advanced Solutions After my struggle with pregnancy issues, I was surprised by how quickly I found out I wasn’t alone. Friends, relatives, coworkers – people I’d known for years – were suddenly sharing with me a vital but private p …
By Mike Gertsema, CEO & Wealth Advisor This is going to be an unusual blog about estate planning because instead of discussing the dos and don’ts or going into a lot of legal documents and procedures, I want to discuss estate planning on how I’ve witnessed it with my clients over the la …
By Mike Gertsema, CEO & Wealth Advisor I’ve just finished the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek after it was recommended to me several times by friends and colleagues. It helps you think deeply about why you do the work you do.
By Jackie Heater, Director of Operations In my previous blog, “5 Tips I Wish I’d Known When the Unthinkable Happened,” I talked about the immediate things that need to be taken care of: funeral arrangements, bills, insurance, bank accounts, investment accounts and various other finan …
The so-called “Peanut Butter Manifesto” written by a Yahoo! Executive in 2006 gave us a term that hasn’t worn thin yet. The “Peanut Butter Approach” is a derisive term used in business to describe spreading anything – money, energy, time – too far and too thin to be effective or useful.
Return on Investment (ROI) is a term you learn about 5 minutes into your first class in business school. Maybe the business model is elegant and the organization is streamlined, but that all begs the question: what is the ROI? How much will we make?
By Jackie Heater At Gertsema Wealth Advisors, we often talk about retirement planning “what-ifs.” The death of a spouse is an especially difficult “what-if” scenario to discuss. Many people never plan for this, and while you’re never ready for it, there are a few preparations that can help …
