Boz & Company LLC

09/07/2026

"The best trips don’t just change our scenery. They change us."

"No doctor is writing prescriptions for a week in Portugal (yet!), but the case is building. A review of recent travel studies found that the psychological benefits of a vacation, like improved mood and sleep, don’t vanish the moment you’re back at your desk. Even the anticipation of a trip leads to feeling happier about your family, your health and your finances than when you have no travel planned."

"Similarly, a meta-analysis of 55 controlled clinical trials involving more than 4,400 participants over three decades found that the same ingredients that comprise a good vacation—passive, peaceful activities, like time in nature, or active pastimes, such as hiking—are good for our mental health."

"Awe functions as 'a primary driver of feelings of happiness, meaning, purpose and social connection in one’s life,' partly because it puts a person’s big problems into perspective, making them seem smaller, says Piff. 'Feelings of awe connect people to the larger things they are part of, the natural world, the universe, all living things,' he says."

- WSJ.com via MSN.com

Forget the staycation. Research reveals that travel can build stress resilience, sharpen cognitive health and ward off depression far better than staying home.

09/07/2026

"College-educated workers ages 22 to 34 years old have only seen worse unemployment in the past two decades during the pandemic and the economy’s slow rebound from the 2007-09 recession."

"The more physical and in-person the work is, the lower the unemployment tends to be by that occupation’s own historical standards."

"Especially among younger workers, those with less education are more likely to be missing from the labor force. That includes nearly a quarter of those with a high-school diploma, compared with about one in seven for those with a college or advanced degree."

- WSJ.com via MSN.com

Unemployment among younger workers who didn’t go to college has rarely been lower in recent decades. It is the opposite story for college graduates.

09/04/2026

For individuals in states with low taxable estate thresholds and/or high estate tax rates, such as Oregon and Washington, making use of generous Federal lifetime and annual gifting limits may be advisable to avoid or limit estate taxes.

"My understanding is that there is a $19,000 limit on annual giving per recipient. Is that right?

That is a common misunderstanding. That figure is the limit on how much you can give without submitting paperwork to the Internal Revenue Service. As of this year, you can give up to $19,000 to each of your children, each of their spouses, and each of your grandchildren, every year generally without filing any paperwork to the IRS in the form of a gift-tax return.

And you can give considerably more than that. Gifts above the annual exclusion generally require you to file Form 709 with the IRS, but that doesn’t mean you owe tax. Instead, the excess counts against your lifetime gift-and-estate-tax exemption, which in 2026 is $15 million per person, or potentially $30 million for a married couple."

- WSJ.com via MSN.com

There are ways to go beyond the $19,000 annual limit without being subject to the gift tax.

08/30/2026

On the career and retirement journey, not losing sight of the object - a growing semblance of freedom not to be taken for granted:

"I’d come to Spain hoping several hundred miles of walking might tell me where my life was headed. A month before I arrived, I’d been a business reporter. Then, my job vanished. The night I got the news, TikTok served up a video of someone walking the Camino. My Washington, D.C., apartment lease was ending the same day as my job, so this seemed like a better plan than refreshing LinkedIn until my soul left my body."

- WSJ.com via MSN.com

After losing my job to AI-era job cutting, I walked 500 miles across Spain and found singing nuns, ruined feet and a road full of people between lives.

07/16/2026

"So many women feel intimidated with understanding and managing their finances. Including yours truly." - Maria Bartiromo

07/04/2026

The state of higher education in America and the statistical fallacy of the value of a college education.

06/26/2026

The U.S.'s secret sauce to economic prosperity evidently not shared with the Europeans.

06/17/2026

Europeans are falling behind economically and increasingly so.

Political Economics: Europe trails far behind U.S. economic output. Politics is bound to catch up sooner or later.

05/31/2026

"The legendary investor [Warren Buffett] had been one of the foundation’s biggest supporters and had pledged to make annual gifts throughout his lifetime. But he stepped down as a trustee in 2021 after the announcement of the Gateses’ divorce, and in 2024 he told the Journal that the Gates Foundation had no money coming from him after he dies.

In early May, Gates didn’t attend the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway, the company Buffett led for decades where Gates had been a board member until 2020. While he wasn’t barred from attending, some people advised Gates not to go. It was the first time he didn’t attend in many years.

Just a few weeks later, Gates welcomed members of the Giving Pledge, the organization he co-founded with Buffett and French Gates, at an annual gathering in Ojai, Calif. Notably absent at the retreat: the other two co-founders."

🥶🌬️🥶



- WSJ.com via MSN.com

The billionaire philanthropist was once ranked the world’s most admired man—but the revelations of his Jeffrey Epstein ties are eroding efforts to burnish his reputation.

05/27/2026

“The most important thing to do is to save money,” he said. “How you save it isn’t typically going to be as impactful.”

- WSJ.com via MSN.com

Some parents are hesitant to lock money into college-savings accounts, preferring financial flexibility in an uncertain world.