Tenured Wealth Management of Raymond James

There's something bittersweet about watching your kids grow up.

On the one hand, you get to see who they're becoming as they make more of their own decisions. And clearly, I couldn't be prouder of these two girls as they start the new school year.

On the other hand, you start to notice a shift taking place, which I've come to think of as the hidden cost of independence. It's what all your parenting is designed to do: give your kids the tools to be themselves and make the most informed decisions possible.

But that doesn't make it any easier once they actually start to do it. After all, it wasn't that long ago they were still asking you to check whether there were any monsters in the closet or under the bed.

To go from there to middle and high school seems like the blink of an eye. And I know Bridget and I aren't too far away from our first college drop-off, which a lot of you just experienced (and I'm not sure anyone is entirely prepared for).

Sure, there are a bunch of financial planning tie-ins I could make here, which I'll get to in the coming weeks. But for now, I just want to check in with all the other parents out there: How are these first couple of weeks of the school year going?

I hope it's an exceptional year, and that your kids enjoy all the hard-won success independence brings.

August brought renewed volatility, shifting market trends and uncertainty in the bond market. Despite these pressures, the underlying backdrop reinforced that the US economy continues to expand. Get the details in the August market recap:

August review: Markets advance despite familiar tensions raymondjames.com

The daycare invoice comes the same week every month, and you know the amount before you even open it.

When a study came out this summer putting a number on what it takes to raise a child in 48 U.S. metro areas, what caught my eye wasn't where Detroit fell on the list (37th, at $23,682 a year, against chart-topper San Francisco at $43,171).

It was what the number is made of.

Just under half of it, $10,985, is childcare, and the study prices childcare at what a center charges for a toddler. Up and down the list, daycare is 40 to 61 cents of every dollar.

So, a ranking of what it costs to raise a child is mostly a ranking of what it costs to have your child cared for while you're at work. Housing, food, healthcare, and the rest keep going until your child leaves home.

Daycare is different, though.

It stops as soon as your youngest starts kindergarten.

Yes, some of that turns into before-school and after-school care, but the rest goes back into what you keep from your take-home pay.

That doesn't make this month's invoice any smaller, I know. But it does mean you won't be surprised when daycare ends. What might catch you off guard is how little fanfare there is about it.

There's no letter when the last invoice clears, and no line on a pay stub. It's just that one month there's about $900 more in your account than there was the month before.

And instead of just imagining what you could do with that extra money, why not start planning for it now?

Kintsugi Village is a community gathering place in Corktown where people of all ages come together to learn, create and grow — home to an artist incubator, school for curious young learners, a working kitchen, gardens and event spaces built around one idea: we're better together.

On October 15th, Kintsugi Village celebrates one year with A Night at the Village — an evening of great food, live music, art and community, marking a first year in the books and raising a glass to what's next. Guests can wander the gardens, explore the campus and connect with the people who make this place what it is.

Every ticket helps fuel the next chapter: supporting artists, nurturing young learners and creating spaces where people can gather, grow and belong.

Come celebrate what's been built — and help shape what's next!

Night at the Village qgiv.com

Does financial help for adult children end after college?

For a lot of families, it does not.

I recently saw data that puts real numbers behind something many parents already feel in their day-to-day lives: the support often keeps going long after graduation, and it can quietly take a bigger bite out of the household budget than expected.

What looks like helping here and there can turn into a meaningful ongoing commitment.

The figures shared from a 2025 AARP survey were striking.

1. Half of parents with adult children still give regular financial support, and they are spending $1,474 per month to do it. That is more than twice what they are contributing toward their own retirement.

2. Among parents age 45 and older, 75 percent are supporting at least one adult child financially, even though more than half of those children are able to cover their own basic needs.

3. Forty-two percent of those parents say the arrangement is creating financial stress, and 9 percent say it led them to retire earlier than planned.

4. Forty-seven percent say they have put their own finances at a disadvantage in order to help their children.

5. Eighteen percent believe the support may go on indefinitely, with no clear stopping point.

I do not read that and think parents should stop being generous.

I read it and think many families need a clearer plan.

For professors, physicians, and business owners especially, this matters. You may already be balancing retirement plan contributions, college funding, mortgage decisions, tax planning, and in some cases pension elections or business cash flow.

Ongoing support for adult children can easily become one more financial obligation that never gets fully named.

That is when good intentions start competing with long-term security.

I think the better question is not whether you should help.

It is whether that help is being done thoughtfully, with boundaries, timing, and tradeoffs you actually understand.

If your child is just out of school, a few years into working life, or still relying on you more than expected, this is worth talking through before it becomes the default setting in your financial life.

If you want help thinking through what that support means for your retirement, I am always glad to have that conversation.

When was the last time you resisted the urge to take a photo during a "perfect sunset"?

Yeah, us either.

But Bridget and I tried. We really did.

Because there's something undeniable about being in the moment and not feeling the need to get everything into the scrapbook.

That's about as far away from the advice I give every day as you can get.

Except it isn't really.

Yes, staying on top of the numbers is why people hire me. But they stick around, and often become friends, because the work we do together isn't just about setting a contribution rate or picking a retirement date.

It's about them getting to wrestle with that same sunset challenge on their next vacation.

And then comparing notes when they come in for their next meeting.

Your years in residency and fellowship are behind you now. And they were not wasted.

They asked a lot of you. Long hours, delayed milestones, and a decade when it could feel like everyone else was getting a financial head start while you were still training.

But that time built something real.

It built the expertise that made your career possible. It built the earning power that can now create room for meaningful retirement savings.

And it built the opportunity to think seriously about the life you want beyond medicine.

I think that matters more than many physicians give themselves credit for.

For faculty physicians especially, the benefits structure can be more helpful than it first appears.

- A decade of training delayed peak earnings, but it also created specialized expertise and earning power.
- Employees contributing to 403(b) and most 457 plans can expect a 2026 limit of $24,500 for each plan.
- Your attending paycheck is not merely delayed income: it is an opportunity to fund life beyond medicine.
- Nine years spent at TIAA administering higher education plans taught me that benefits structure can help late starters catch up.
- Healthcare includes many of the highest paying jobs in America, creating meaningful capacity for intentional retirement savings.

I have spent enough time around retirement plans to know that catching up does not always happen by accident.

It usually starts when someone recognizes that the season they are in now is different from the one that came before it.

Training was demanding. It was also formative.

And if you are finally earning at the level you worked so long to reach, I hope you give yourself permission to see that paycheck for what it can become:

Freedom, options, and a future that feels like your own.

Eighty years ago, the average life expectancy for a man was 64. Today, it's nearly 77. For women, it jumped from 69 to over 81.

Obviously, this has implications for your finances, including why it's so important to prepare for the five years women typically outlive men.

It also shows how things have improved over time, something that can get lost among the latest Yahoo Finance headlines and CNBC reports.

But lower infant mortality rates (down from 33.8 per 1,000 births in 1946 to 5.34 today) and a decrease in the percentage the typical household spends on food (down from almost 30% to just under 13% now) make it clear that there's been a lot of progress.

That's not to say we're living in a golden age of middle class prosperity. Those same news articles and economic reports show that more and more American households are struggling. And that's not something we can ignore.

But perspective matters.

I came to the U.S. from an Albania just emerging from communism, a country where, by 1997, the economy had completely collapsed. I know what "food insecurity" and "economic instability" look like when you strip away the gentler words.

That's why I choose to focus on the positives over the past 80 years. Over the past 80 days, for that matter. Because they're the real baseline.

Bad news isn't going away any time soon. I wish it were. But in the meantime, there's a lot to be said for keeping your sights set on the good news.

Putting parameters on a charitable gift can go a long way toward achieving your vision, but how strict is too strict?

Giving conditionally raymondjames.com

This wage gap map caught my attention, and I kept thinking about what it says beneath the rankings.

The Visual Capitalist piece lays out which U.S. states have the widest wage gaps, and the chart does more than highlight income at the top. It shows how unevenly opportunity can be distributed depending on where you live and what kind of work you do.

I spend my days talking to educators, physicians, and business owners about retirement, but retirement planning never starts at retirement.

It starts with earnings.
It starts with benefits.
It starts with whether your income has enough room to do more than cover the next bill.

That is why these state-by-state comparisons matter.

A wide wage gap can mean a lot of things in practice:

- Higher earners have more flexibility to save, invest, and recover from mistakes
- Middle-income households may be doing well on paper while still feeling squeezed in real life
- Lower earners can spend years without enough margin to build any long-term plan at all

I think about teachers in particular when I read data like this.

In many states, they are doing deeply important work inside systems that do not always reward them in proportion to the value they create.

Then later, they are asked to make careful decisions about pensions, 403(b) contributions, healthcare costs, and retirement timing, often without much room for error.

Business owners feel a different version of that pressure. Revenue can look strong from the outside while personal planning gets pushed aside because payroll, taxes, and growth keep taking priority.

That is why I never look at income data as just economics.

I see future tradeoffs. I see delayed savings. I see families trying to make smart decisions with limited breathing room.

Charts like this are useful because they force a harder conversation about what financial progress actually looks like across different communities.

I read pieces like this, then I go back to the work in front of me.

There is still a lot to solve.