Meaningful decisions rarely feel perfect in real time. Whether it’s booking a trip, investing cash on the sidelines, or planning for retirement, waiting for absolute certainty often costs more than acting thoughtfully and moving forward.

With Christmas only a week away, it’s starting to come down to the wire on your holiday gift shopping. Ordering items online comes with unreliable shipping delivery dates and the malls are packed right now. If you still have a long list of people to buy Christmas presents for, it’s time to get creative.

The investing world has become more accessible than ever in the past decade. The examples are many: the rise of new trading apps built for mobile use (Robinhood and others). Slices of stock available to purchase with as little as a few dollars. Transaction-free stock trades. Private investments available to purchase that previously were reserved for the ultra-wealthy.

Recently I had a conversation with someone who was planning to retire this year. I asked them what they were looking forward to in retirement. Their response highlighted a shift in how retirees are approaching the next stage of their life: “Babysitting the grandkids. Surfing. Oh and I’m going to do consulting work for a handful of select clients.”

As the year draws to a close, we’re finalizing Roth conversions for many of our clients, taking their income and tax situation into account. We sent out a value-add piece in October to assist with the decision of whether to do a conversion and how much to convert.

Over the past few weeks, the media has attributed November’s financial markets volatility to an “overvalued stock market”. In other words, the current price of company stocks exceeds their intrinsic value when measured using metrics such as Price-to-Earnings ratio and investor sentiment. Layered on top of this discussion is the forewarning of an “AI bubble” given that so much of the market cap-weighted S&P 500 is concentrated in seven companies.