E. H. Howard Wealth Management

E. H. Howard Wealth Management Faith - Family - Finance

Wealth Management Company.

Specializing in all things regarding comprehensive financial planning including investments, insurance, estate planning, and tax planning.

Here's where things landed for the week of August 17 through August 21.Equities snapped a three-week winning streak. The...
08/24/2026

Here's where things landed for the week of August 17 through August 21.

Equities snapped a three-week winning streak. The bond market did most of the driving, with long-dated Treasury yields reaching their highest levels since 2007. Commodities and crypto moved the other direction, and oil gained on renewed Middle East tensions.

The week ahead brings the July PCE inflation report and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's first Jackson Hole address, both of which tend to matter more for retirees than a single week of index moves does.

Numbers reflect Friday's close. Cryptocurrency values are as of Monday morning.

Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

Full story: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/samsung-shareholder-return-package-sk-hynix-buyback-ai-chip-boom.html

One of the most common questions we hear from people inside ten years of retirement: pay the mortgage off early, or keep...
08/22/2026

One of the most common questions we hear from people inside ten years of retirement: pay the mortgage off early, or keep the money invested?

There isn't a universal answer, and the interest rate is only part of it.

Paying it off removes a fixed monthly obligation. That lowers the amount you need to pull from retirement accounts each year, which can ripple into your taxable income, and in some cases into things like Medicare premium tiers and how much of your Social Security gets taxed. For some households that ripple matters more than the rate on the loan.

Staying invested keeps the money liquid. Home equity is real, but you can't spend it without selling the house or borrowing against it.

The tax piece surprises people. Since the standard deduction roughly doubled in 2018, about 10 percent of taxpayers itemize, down from about 31 percent in 2017 (Source: Tax Policy Center). If you're taking the standard deduction, the mortgage interest deduction isn't doing anything for you, so "I keep the mortgage for the tax break" may not hold up under a closer look.

Rate, timeline, tax picture, liquidity needs, and how you actually sleep at night all belong in the decision. Worth running it with someone before you commit either direction.

Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

Of all the things that can go wrong in a retirement plan, the easiest one to fix is the one most people never think abou...
08/19/2026

Of all the things that can go wrong in a retirement plan, the easiest one to fix is the one most people never think about.

Your beneficiary form.

It takes a few minutes, costs nothing, and it quietly determines where your retirement accounts actually go. Not your will. Not your trust. For employer retirement plans, the form on file with the plan administrator is what governs.

There's a Supreme Court case that made this painfully clear. In Kennedy v. Plan Administrator for DuPont Savings and Investment Plan, decided in 2009, a man divorced in 1994 and his ex-spouse gave up her claim to his retirement plan in the divorce decree. He intended the money to go to his daughter. He never updated the form. When he died, the plan paid the ex-spouse, and the Court held the administrator was right to follow the document on file.

Most people have more of these forms than they realize. An old 401(k) from two employers ago. An IRA opened in your thirties. A life insurance policy through a job you left. Each one has a name on it, and that name may be a decade out of date.

Worth an afternoon. Pull up every retirement account and policy you own, check both the primary and the contingent beneficiary, and confirm the names still reflect what you actually want.

We cover this in more detail in our educational book, The Intelligent Retirement. Download here: https://ehhowardwealth.com/

Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

π—¦π˜π—Όπ—Ώπ˜† 𝗼𝗳 π˜π—΅π—² π—ͺ𝗲𝗲𝗸Uber announced Friday it is expanding its robotaxi partnership with Chinese operator Pony.ai, with plan...
08/17/2026

π—¦π˜π—Όπ—Ώπ˜† 𝗼𝗳 π˜π—΅π—² π—ͺ𝗲𝗲𝗸

Uber announced Friday it is expanding its robotaxi partnership with Chinese operator Pony.ai, with plans to deploy 2,000 self-driving taxis across Europe and extend the partnership into the Middle East. The rollout builds on the pair's March launch in Zagreb, Croatia, which they claim was Europe's first commercial robotaxi service, and adds four more unnamed European cities. Fleet scale matters here, because more vehicles generate the data needed to prove safety to regulators. Alphabet's Waymo currently leads globally with roughly 5,000 vehicles.

It is a genuinely interesting story about where a lot of capital is going. It is also not a reason to change anything about your retirement plan.

That is not us being dismissive of the news. It is that the things which actually move the needle for a retiree, when you claim Social Security, how you sequence withdrawals, where your assets sit for tax purposes, are almost never the things making headlines. A plan is built to hold through this kind of story, not to respond to it.

Full story: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/14/uber-partners-with-chinas-ponyai-for-2000-robotaxis-in-europe.html

Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

There's a stretch in a lot of retirement plans that doesn't get talked about much. You stop working at 62 or 63. Social ...
08/14/2026

There's a stretch in a lot of retirement plans that doesn't get talked about much. You stop working at 62 or 63. Social Security hasn't started yet. Medicare doesn't begin until 65. The pension, if there is one, kicks in on its own schedule.

For those few years, the money has to come from somewhere.

That somewhere is what planners call a bridge. It isn't a product and nobody sells it. It's just a portion of savings set aside in something stable, sized to cover the gap, kept separate from the money that stays invested for the long haul.

Why bother separating it? Because of what happens if you don't. If the market drops in your first year of retirement and your entire income is coming out of your portfolio, you're selling into that decline to pay the light bill. The money you sell at the bottom never gets to recover. That's the risk we've written about before as sequence-of-returns risk, and a bridge is one of the more direct ways to soften it.

It also buys you options. Delaying Social Security increases the monthly benefit for each year you wait past full retirement age, up to 70. That's only a choice you can make if something else is covering the bills in the meantime.

The size of a bridge depends entirely on the gap you're crossing and what your expenses actually look like, so there's no universal number. But if you're within about five years of stopping work, it's a good time to figure out what your gap is.

Source: Social Security Administration, ssa.gov.

Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

It comes up in different forms, but the shape is always the same. Someone reads a headline about federal spending, sees ...
08/12/2026

It comes up in different forms, but the shape is always the same. Someone reads a headline about federal spending, sees a number too big to picture, and wants to know what it means for the money they've spent thirty years building.

The honest answer is that nobody knows. Not us, not the people on television, not anyone forecasting a decade out. We'd be careful with any advisor who tells you otherwise.

But the question underneath it is a good one, and it does have an answer. What people are really asking is whether they're exposed to something they can't see coming. That's worth taking seriously, and there's a more productive place to look for it.

Your plan has variables you control and variables you don't. The headlines are in the second group. The first group is where the work actually happens. In what order do you draw from your accounts, and what does that do to your tax bill? How much of your savings sits in accounts taxed later versus accounts that aren't? What happens if the first few years of your retirement look nothing like the average? When do you claim Social Security, and how does that ripple through everything else?

None of those depend on a headline. All of them can be modeled and revisited. And in our experience, the people who sleep well through rough stretches are usually the ones who did that work in advance, not the ones who guessed right about the big picture.

If the news has you unsettled, that's a reasonable prompt to look at your plan. It's rarely a good reason to change your portfolio.

Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

Berkshire Hathaway's operating earnings rose 16% in the second quarter to $12.98 billion, as strength in manufacturing, ...
08/10/2026

Berkshire Hathaway's operating earnings rose 16% in the second quarter to $12.98 billion, as strength in manufacturing, energy and its BNSF railroad more than offset weaker insurance results. The bigger story was CEO Greg Abel starting to deploy the company's record cash: Berkshire repurchased roughly $4.5 billion of its own shares, up sharply from just $235 million in Q1, and turned a net buyer of equities for the first time in 14 quarters, with nearly $20 billion in net purchases. The cash pile fell to $365.5 billion from a record $397.4 billion, reflecting the buybacks, stock buying and the closing of the Taylor Morrison acquisition. The filing also revealed Alphabet is now among Berkshire's five largest holdings, following a $10 billion AI-focused investment Buffett said he initiated after consulting Abel. Berkshire shares are up just 3% this year, trailing the S&P 500's 13% gain, though they've risen 9% over the past three months.

Full Story: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/08/berkshire-hathaway-earnings-q2-2026.html

Past performance is not indicative of future results. Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

A man divorced in 1994. The decree said his ex-wife gave up any claim to his retirement plan. He intended the money to g...
08/07/2026

A man divorced in 1994. The decree said his ex-wife gave up any claim to his retirement plan. He intended the money to go to his daughter. He never updated one form.

When he died, his ex-wife received the entire account. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 2009 the Court sided with her. The plan administrator was legally required to pay whoever was named on the beneficiary form on file, and the form still had her name on it.

That is the part most people never hear. Your beneficiary form outranks your will. It outranks your trust. It outranks your divorce decree. It takes about five minutes to update, and it quietly determines where some of the largest accounts you own end up.

That's one chapter of eight in our educational book, The Intelligent Retirement. The rest covers the laws that shaped your accounts, how RMDs collide with your tax bracket and your Medicare premiums, when rolling over an old 401(k) makes sense and when it does not, how the Roth conversion window works, and why the order your investment returns arrive in can matter more than the average.

It's free to download here: https://ehhowardwealth.com/

Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

You have probably seen the phrase in a headline or heard it from a neighbor: "Dividend Aristocrat." It sounds like a sea...
08/05/2026

You have probably seen the phrase in a headline or heard it from a neighbor: "Dividend Aristocrat." It sounds like a seal of approval. It is actually a rulebook.

To qualify for the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index, a company has to be in the S&P 500, have raised its dividend every single year for at least 25 consecutive years, and clear minimum thresholds for size and trading volume. S&P Dow Jones Indices reviews the roster every January. As of the 2026 review, 69 companies made the cut.

Here is the part worth understanding. The label describes what a company has already done. It is not a commitment about what comes next. A company comes off the list if it cuts its dividend, and it also comes off if it simply holds the dividend flat for a year. That has happened to household names.

Something else that surprises people: a long streak of increases does not mean a large dividend today. The screen measures consistency, not size. A company can raise its payout by a penny for 25 years and still qualify.

None of this makes the list a bad thing to pay attention to. It just means the word "Aristocrat" is doing a lot of work in a headline, and it helps to know exactly what it is measuring before you decide what it means for your own situation.

Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices, S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats Index methodology and January 2026 rebalance.

Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

U.S. equities closed a volatile week higher. The pivotal event was Wednesday's Fed meeting, where the central bank held ...
08/03/2026

U.S. equities closed a volatile week higher. The pivotal event was Wednesday's Fed meeting, where the central bank held rates steady but delivered a hawkish surprise, with three policymakers dissenting in favor of a hike, sending the Dow down more than 1,100 points in its worst day since April 2025. Markets rebounded later in the week as Big Tech earnings revived AI optimism, though the moves were uneven across megacap names. Treasury yields climbed on the hawkish tone, with the 10-year topping 4.7% and the 30-year spiking near 5.25%, its highest since 2007. Even with the strong finish, the Nasdaq-100 lost nearly 7% in July, its steepest monthly decline since March 2025, as investors kept weighing lofty valuations against the payoff on surging AI spending.

Full article: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/31/clear-street-pre-ipo-platform-databricks.html

Educational content only. Not personalized financial advice. Consult your own advisor about your specific situation.

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