So what - no more candy?
I took our daughter to the dentist this week, and it kind of put everything in perspective.
We've used a few things as a positive reward like gummy candy and lollipops recently and the dentist wasn’t exactly pleased. Over the long term, this is going to lead to some pretty terrible results. It sure is fun to see her light up over it, though.
It just reinforces what I’ve learned about shortcuts. People ask about them all the time. Could a shortcut work in the short term? Sure. She wakes up wanting more candy and is in a great mood, until the sugar crash. The problem with that is, it requires more candy.
Hitting Curve Balls
The All-Star Game is coming up. As a kid, I never missed it. These days I'll catch a few minutes and move on. I played baseball growing up, and it taught me more about life than I expected. One of those lessons was learning to hit a curveball.
When is the Right Time?
It's summer in Texas. If you're outside for any length of time, you either want to be in a pool or you're planning your next trip to one. Otherwise the other option is to stay inside, which is rarely the better option.
Here's the thing about the pool, it's cold when you get in. Every time. You hesitate, you ease in, maybe someone pushes you in because they have no patience for your indecision. Usually though, when you get in it only takes a few minutes to get acclimated. Then, you pretty much don't want to get out.
I think about investing the same way.
Lessons from Beckett Monthly Magazine
I was lucky enough to have a pretty cool childhood. My parents opened a sporting goods store when I was around 8 years old. I witnessed what owning a business looks like at an early age. One thing I did was build a trading card business. This was a glass case underneath the cash register. Yes, we had a cash register back then. We even had the journals showing money in and money out. I just came across them again, and it is an interesting story.
The Whole Picture
I believe good financial planning looks at the whole picture. When it comes to managing investments, I want everything working together, including the tax bill.
Here are some strategies I use with clients.
Rhymes
I've heard history doesn't always repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.
There are some significant companies going public right now. They may prove to be revolutionary, and if you have a position in them either by working there or owning shares, you may be sitting on a life-changing amount of wealth.
Are You Using Every Tool Available to You?
Most business owners know about the 401(k). Fewer know there are strategies that can be stacked on top of it.
For high-income business owners, there are often three retirement planning tools that can work together: employee 401(k) contributions, profit-sharing contributions, and a defined benefit cash balance plan.
That third piece is where many business owners leave opportunities unexplored. A cash balance plan is a type of defined benefit plan, similar to a traditional pension, but designed in a way that can provide more flexibility for today's business owners.
Cash balance plans aren't for everyone, but for the right business owner they can create substantial tax deductions while accelerating retirement savings. In some cases, they can allow six figures of income to be moved out of the current year's taxable income while building a meaningful future benefit.
The Stock of the Century
Do you ever watch a TV series and they go back in time to build a story? Let me build one for you.
The year is 1964 and there is a lot of talk about a space stock. It's called COMSAT. COMSAT builds satellites. In June 1964, they go public.
The IPO raised nearly $200 million. It is the largest offering since Ford went public in 1956. Investors scrambled for shares. Brokers had to set strict limits on how many any one person could buy. Some people were buying it just for the stock certificate. The stock opened at $20, jumped to $27 on day one, and would eventually reach $87.
It was called "the stock of the century."
The excitement made sense at first. President Kennedy had signed the Communications Satellite Act two years earlier. The space race was real. COMSAT had already launched the first commercial communications satellite, Early Bird, into orbit. This was the future actually happening.
COMSAT is a case study in what happens when a great story meets investor enthusiasm. The company was real. The technology was real. But the price reflected something beyond the business — a narrative that outran realistic expectations. It reflected the feeling people had about space, about progress, about not wanting to miss out on something historic.
Does this sound familiar?
The Biggest IPO Season I've Seen in a While
I think this might be the biggest IPO season I’ve seen in my career. Actually, let’s just say it is. The numbers are staggering, and I graduated college in May of 2000, so that’s saying something.
An Initial Public Offer, or IPO, is the moment a private company opens its doors to public investors for the first time. When I was finishing college, the hot IPOs were companies like Pets.com, remember the sock puppet mascot, and Webvan, an online grocery delivery service that was going to change everything. Anything with a .com took off. The story was compelling, and the prices reflected all of that enthusiasm. Then reality set in. Pets.com went bankrupt within a year of going public. Webvan burned through over a billion dollars before collapsing. The narrative was great, but the business wasn't.
Amazon and Google also went public around that same era, and we all know how those turned out. It’s not that IPOs are bad. It’s that the hype cycle has a way of making it very hard to tell the difference between the next Amazon and the next Pets.com while you’re living inside it.
Fast forward to 2026. This year's class includes SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. These are names that carry a lot of excitement and even bigger valuations. SpaceX alone is targeting a valuation between $1.75 and $2 trillion. I'll be honest, I've had a lot of clients ask me about SpaceX specifically, and I get it. I'm genuinely excited to see what the company can do. I think Elon Musk is our generation's once-in-a-generation mind. That's not something I say lightly.
What is a Fee Only Advisor?
When starting Vonera Wealth, I had certain values that I wanted to make sure I adhered to. The biggest one was being a fee-only advisor. It’s a straightforward word, but it can lead to some confusion.
The basic premise is that the client pays the advisor a fee. I want my pay to be transparent to the client and I don’t want an incentive to recommend one product or style over another. I want to be able to sit with the client and truly partner with them on their decisions.
Embracing the Curves
We recently relocated from Dallas, Texas to just outside of Austin in a place called Dripping Springs, aka the gateway to the Hill Country. One thing I noticed is straight roads don’t really exist here. Even the main highway from Austin to our place winds through elevated terrain where you can’t always see very far ahead.
What’s amazing is every so often you come around a curve and think, Wait, I didn’t know this was in Texas. There are so many fun surprises tucked into the landscape, and if you come through on a weekend, you’ll probably see a few pretty cool cars built specifically to take the curves.
The Decision Point
Life is uncertain.
On March 3rd, 2026, I took a phone call that would directly impact my life in a way I could not imagine.