I work with a number of Garmin employees in Olathe and the Kansas City area, and one thing comes up again and again: Garmin offers one of the strongest benefit packages I have seen, and a lot of people are not capturing everything available to them. The good news is that fixing this rarely requires earning more or saving dramatically more. It usually just requires understanding how the pieces fit together. Here is where I focus when a Garmin employee sits down with me for the first time.

If you own a target date fund in your 401k or an S&P 500 index fund in a brokerage account, you probably feel pretty diversified. You own 500 companies. That's the entire point of indexing.

But the S&P 500 of 2026 is not the S&P 500 most investors picture in their heads. A handful of names are doing most of the work, and the gap between what people think they own and what they actually own has rarely been wider.

Here is what is going on, why it matters, and how to think about your own portfolio in light of it.

If you have been watching gas prices climb over the past few weeks, you are not alone. Conflict in the Middle East has disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between Iran and Oman that carries roughly one-fifth of the world's oil supply. That disruption is filtering through to prices at the pump, grocery store shelves, and investment portfolios. Understanding why oil prices react so sharply to these events, and how this situation differs from tariffs or sanctions, can help you make sense of what you are seeing in the headlines.

With April approaching, taxes are top of mind for most people. But here is an uncomfortable truth: if the first time you think about your tax situation each year is when your CPA sends you a questionnaire, you are almost certainly paying more than you need to.

In our previous article, we touched on the idea that tax planning should be proactive, not reactive. Today, we are going to unpack that idea in detail and walk through several strategies that can meaningfully reduce your tax burden over time. Some of these are straightforward. Others are more advanced. All of them require planning well before April 15.

If you have ever sat down with a financial advisor and walked away with little more than a pie chart of your investment allocation, you are not alone. That experience is incredibly common, and it leaves a lot of people wondering whether financial planning is really worth the time and cost.

A real financial plan is a living, breathing strategy that connects every major financial decision in your life to a set of clearly defined goals. It is not a product someone sells you. It is a process you work through with a trusted advisor, and it evolves as your life changes.

Here is what that actually looks like in practice.