As our community starts to open back up, if you are looking for ways to volunteer your time, below are a few local opportunities that may interest you.

Red Cross (redcrossblood.org) Blood donation appointments can be scheduled by visiting their website.

Baby Fold (thebabyfold.org) The Baby Fold embodies Christian principles to help families and children develop the hope, courage, and love they need to become whole and healthy.

Faith in Action (bnfia.org) Volunteers provide free rides to medical appointments and grocery shopping, friendly visits, reassuring phone calls & light home maintenance.

Often, when we meet clients that have entered the “growing family/expanding household” stage, they articulate that it feels as if life is speeding up (and passing by quicker!). Because attention is on the day-to-day and energy is often at a premium, it is harder to focus on long-term planning. Hopefully, if building blocks have been put into place during the “early adult” phase, we can put some things on auto pilot.

For example, we encourage clients at this stage to take advantage, when possible, of automatic 401k sign up or automatic yearly increases (allowing them to increase their saving without even thinking) and to consider setting up some sort of automatic re-balancing on their investment accounts.

Of course, this is also a time when attention needs to be paid to budgeting on some level, as often expenses are going up and sometimes adjustments are being made to work/family life balance. We encourage people to think of budgeting as a way of understanding where their money is going, not something that is just meant to restrict or punish. Developing a healthy relationship to spending tracking and spending goals is vital at this stage to ensure plans stay on track long-term.

This is also often when near- and mid-term goals become more real, such a buying a first or bigger home or beginning to save for children’s educational expenses. Because the time horizon for these goals is shorter, it is important to spend time thinking through what exactly it is you are shooting for: what size and type of home will fit your family both for the near- and longer-term and how much do you feel comfortable tying up in real estate; or how much of your children’s educational costs do you want to contribute to and how much will you ask them to participate; or do you want to tag educational savings as just that—solely for education—or do you want to build in some flexibility (e.g. using a 529 plan vs using a UTMA acct)?

And another focus should be on making sure we are protecting our ability to work towards those things, by looking at how to integrate life and disability insurance into our planning. The hope is that clients see this as time to begin to dream a bit and then put in place the plans to make those dreams come true.

With mortgage rates near rock bottom, a couple of clients have asked me if this is a good time to refinance a mortgage. These questions also prompted me to consider refinancing for my own mortgage and I ended up contacting my lender and pulling the trigger.

To determine if refinancing makes financial sense for you, there are several factors to consider but generally it makes sense if you can pay for the refinance closing costs with the monthly mortgage cost savings within a time frame of no longer than two years.

For example, the closing costs for my own recent refinance were $1250. I was able to lower my rate by .75 which represented a $77 decrease in my monthly payment. Dividing the total closing costs $1250 by $77 translates into roughly 16 months to recoup my costs. My lender also determined that I would save roughly $11,000 in interest payments over the remaining term of my mortgage. Now, my closing costs were only about .5 percent of my mortgage and this is because I was able do what my lender called a mortgage modification. I did not have do a full refinance with appraisal and title costs, so my refinance decision was a rather easy one to make.

Your situation might be more complicated, so I would suggest contacting your financial advisor and clicking on one of the below links for more information to assist you as you make your decision.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/mortgages/refinance-calculator

https://www.investopedia.com/mortgage/refinance/when-and-when-not-to-refinance-mortgage/

Hopefully you have started to envision your life without restrictions. What are you yearning to do? Perhaps it is taking a special trip that was delayed or getting back to volunteering or gathering with family as much as possible.

Personally, I (Dave) am looking forward to hopefully being able to go on an Alaskan Cruise this summer with my family that was cancelled last year. We are also looking forward to spending time with family at several weddings this summer as well as being able to go see movies in an actual theatre. We would love to hear what you all are looking forward to the most so please go to our DFS Facebook page and let us know!

As we turn the page on 2020, the word that comes to mind is “hopeful.” Hopeful that the vaccines will allow businesses to open fully again and that people will feel more and more comfortable socializing and traveling again. Hopeful that we won’t forget the lessons learned through this COVID crisis: that we need each other; that the simple things in life are vital; that we need to learn to slow down so we can rejuvenate and stay healthy; that no matter how hard we try we can’t always control things and the best we can sometimes do is make the “best next choice.”

The investment markets continue to be hopeful as well it seems. A recent article indicated that strength in the equity markets is fairly broad, which is a good sign. Of course, there are still concerns about overconcentration in the mega cap stocks within indices, about the rich valuations created by increasingly optimistic economic growth projections (that may or may not play out based on how virus containment goes), about how fast policies will be enacted by the new administration that may either boost near-term growth or start to constrict longer-term growth, and about what might happen with inflation and long-term interest rates in light of the growing national debt.

So, we stay vigilant—not reactionary, but vigilant. Focusing on the long-term and keeping the short-term obstacles in perspective and sometimes even using them to our advantage.