Are you concerned by signs of social disintegration of the past month? Is there injustice, inequity, racism, hatred and other evidence of sin in our world? Absolutely. Does it help anyone of any group to allow, much less encourage willful rioting and looting? Absolutely not. Neither does it help for [...]
Has the whole world gone crazy? Are you and I the only sane people left? It’s hard to turn on the news without either wanting to curl up in the fetal position or smashing it with the nearest heavy object. We find ourselves in an argumentative world that shows no [...]
President John Adams once said, a problem is just an opportunity in disguise. Generally speaking, it is often during a crises that innovation comes. We need not look back too far in time to find primary examples of this. In 2003, during the height of the SARS epidemic, it was [...]
Several months ago, when Covid-19 was first starting to spread domestically, I wrote a column about the importance of having a plan in place should the virus get really bad here in the area. In all of my planning, the one thing I didn’t think to do was get a [...]
There are some events that have a generational impact on our nation. Some, like the 9/11 attack or Pearl Harbor, brought our nation together. Others, like the Vietnam War or the election of Donald Trump, pulled us apart. Clearly, the coronavirus is one of these events. While it’s easy to [...]
I’m a planner, I always have been. Perhaps it’s my pessimistic nature, but generally speaking, I assume things left to chance will turn out badly. For that reason I live by the credo “hope for the best, but plan for the worst.” As you might imagine, threats like the coronavirus [...]
Coronavirus is spreading around the globe and the world stock market has pulled back from the recent strong rally that started in the second half of 2019. It’s natural to be concerned from a health and wealth perspective. We have seen similar experiences in the past with SARS, bird flu, [...]
What a difference a year and a decade make! Last year at this time the market had quickly dropped 20% lower over recession and trade war fears. Fast forward a year and we are at all-time highs with record holiday spending, signed a newer version of NAFTA, and about to [...]
According to the Senate Special Committee on Aging, financial exploitation cost seniors nearly 3 billion annually. Although it is hard to obtain exact numbers because according to Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt only 1 in 24 cases gets reported. Since scammers are constantly changing their tactics, a comprehensive list of [...]
You might have noticed in recent years that the prevalence of payday loan storefronts has started to wane. According to the most recent information from the Missouri Division of Finance, since 2015 approximately one-third of active payday loan businesses in the state have closed. Even better, over the past decade [...]
