MFAC BLOG

You’ve spent the better part of your career building retirement accounts, growing investments, and accumulating the assets that are supposed to fund the next chapter. But as retirement gets closer, the focus can naturally shift from building wealth to protecting it, coordinating it, and making sure the right people and the right instructions are in place if something happens to you, and that’s what estate planning is really about. According to Caring.com’s 2025 Wills and Esta

What the Evidence Says About Market Timing and the Power of Staying the Course On any given day, the financial world is buzzing with activity. Between morning newsletters, app notifications, and casual conversations about the latest market movements, investors are constantly fed a stream of updates. The implicit message behind all this noise is almost always the same: you need to take action. But when faced with this daily influx of information, a quiet question often arises:

Turning embedded gains into charitable impact—without handing the IRS a windfall With major stock market indices sitting near historic highs, many investors find themselves with substantial unrealized capital gains in their taxable brokerage accounts. That’s a great position to be in—but it also creates a tax problem. Sell those shares for any reason, and you’ll likely owe capital gains taxes that can eat 15% to 23.8% of the appreciation, depending on your income (not includi

A blog post template displayed on a laptop screen Retiring early is the ultimate financial milestone for many. But before you hand in your resignation, there is one massive hurdle you must clear: health insurance. If you are leaving the workforce before age 65, you are stepping into the “coverage gap”—the period between losing your employer-sponsored health plan and becoming eligible for Medicare. Without an employer subsidizing your premiums, the true cost of healthcare can

A practical framework for tackling the biggest fear in retirement planning If there’s one question that keeps pre-retirees up at night, it’s this: will my money last? It’s not an irrational fear. People are living longer, healthcare costs are rising, and markets don’t move in a straight line. The good news is that outliving your assets isn’t an inevitability — it’s a risk that can be managed, measured, and in many cases, significantly reduced. The key is knowing which questio

The questions you need to answer before you walk out the door Retirement feels like a single moment — the last day of work, the first Monday morning with nowhere to be. But the financial reality is that retirement is a series of interconnected decisions, and most of them need to be made before you leave your employer. Miss one, and it can cost you real money for years. This guide walks through the major issues to consider before you retire, organized into six categories: cash

Building a Social Security Strategy That Adapts to Life We’ve arrived at the final post in this series. Over the last three posts, we’ve explored the mechanics of Social Security, the portfolio implications of claiming early versus late, and the coordination strategies that can protect married couples for decades. Through this series a theme has emerged: every dimension of this decision connects to something else in your financial life. But even the most rigorous analysis bum

How Married Couples Can Turn Social Security Into a Household Strategy In the first two posts of this series, we looked at Social Security through the lens of individual claiming decisions—how timing affects your taxes, your portfolio, and your long-term financial security. But if you’re married, the picture becomes considerably more complex. For couples, Social Security isn’t two separate decisions—it’s a household strategy. The choices you and your spouse make about when

Sequence-of-Returns Risk, Opportunity Cost, and the Case for Portfolio Preservation In the first post of this series, we established a foundational idea: Social Security should never be viewed in isolation. Maximizing your monthly benefit doesn’t always mean maximizing your total financial picture. In this post, I want to dig deeper into one of the reasons why—and it has everything to do with what’s happening inside your investment portfolio. The conventional advice to delay

Understanding the Mechanics—and Why the Claiming Decision Deserves Real Attention For most Americans, Social Security is the cornerstone of retirement income. It’s the one thing nearly everyone counts on—a monthly deposit that arrives once you stop working. And because it feels automatic, it’s easy to assume the decision around it is simple, too: pick an age, file the paperwork, and move on. But the reality is far more nuanced than that. When you choose to claim Social Securi