One key factor in a positive foster parenting experience is an empathic employer. I am grateful every day for mine. In the four plus years my husband and I have been full-time foster parents, we worked through a whole host of challenges among the young people living in our home, including logistical, behavioral, emotional, medical, educational and physical. Through it all (and a global pandemic!) my employer Winch Financial and my co-workers have been unfailingly supportive. At one point, a young person in our care was leaving school and showing up at my office. My co-workers gave us the space we needed to talk and my boss allowed me to leave in the middle of the day to walk him back each time it happened. Periodically, I need to drop everything and leave the office. I’ll be called to school for an emergency or need to take a child to an appointment that can’t be scheduled at any other time. No one has ever even questioned my absences in these situations. Our office supports the foster care system in other ways too. My co-worker Tanya is a music mentor to children in the Austin Texas foster care system, and Winch Financial donates funds and event tickets to various foster care programs as well. When the pandemic hit, our Winch Financial administrative staff made sure we were well equipped to work from home and, thanks to that logistical and financial effort, we are all able to work from home should the need arise. Our founder, Christina Winch supported many altruistic endeavors in her personal life. She and her husband Tim worked as house parents at a group home and volunteered as host parents for the ABC (A Better Chance) program. She has always encouraged her employees to support a wide range of charities as well. As a group we have walked for Down’s Syndrome, prepared and served meals at an emergency… | Read More »
General
Congratulations to Aaron Bauer, CFP®
Congratulations to Aaron Bauer, an investment analyst and financial advisor here at Winch Financial, who recently earned his CFP® designation. The CFP® designation requires some of the most rigorous standards in the industry. In fact, the Certified Financial Planning board bases its highly selective licensing on what it calls the four e’s – education, exam, experience and ethics. Regarding education, the board requires candidates to complete coursework on financial planning through a CFP Board Registered Program and hold at least a bachelor’s degree in any discipline from an accredited college or university. After completing the coursework, each applicant must pass a 170-question, multiple-choice exam that consists of two 3-hour sessions over one day. The exam includes stand-alone and scenario-based questions, as well as questions associated with case studies. Candidates also need to complete either 6,000 hours of professional experience related to the financial planning process, or 4,000 hours of apprenticeship experience that meets additional requirements. Lastly, and most importantly, each CFP® must maintain high ethical and professional standards for the practice of financial planning, and to act as a fiduciary when providing financial advice, always putting the clients’ best interests first. We’re very proud of Aaron and fortunate to have him on the Winch Financial team.
Just Joshing
Josh Tatum’s infamy straddles three centuries thanks to a financial scheme that apparently netted him $15,000 and inspired the U.S. Treasury Department to recall and then re-design the Liberty Nickel. If you’ve ever used the phrase “just joshing around”, you’ve referred to Mr. Tatum. Young, enterprising and, by some accounts, both deaf and mute, Josh Tatum took advantage of some similarities between the nickels minted in 1883 and gold pieces worth five dollars. Both coins were the same size and had remarkably comparable designs. At the time, the word “cents” did not appear on the nickel. So, as the story goes, Josh enlisted a friend of his to help him electroplate the nickels so he could pass them off as gold. He simply purchased low priced items, paid for them with the nickel that looked like a $5 gold piece and then collected the change. By some accounts, he wracked up more than $15,000 with this scheme, or more than $337,737.00 by today’s standards. Eventually, Josh was caught and charged but not convicted. His apparent defense was that the merchants were responsible for recognizing the value of the coins he handed over to them and, as a deaf mute, he never said anything to mislead them. He said he viewed the extra change he received as a gift. The opportunity to pass these nickels off as more valuable gold coins came and went very quickly. The U.S. Treasury first released the “Liberty Nickels” on Feb. 1, 1883 and, by March 11 of that same year, they began re-casting them with a design that included the word “cents” on them. If you’re planning to celebrate April Fool’s Day by “joshing around”, remember the origin of that phrase and always be sure to double check any financial transactions you make.
A promise kept
Hey Dad, they’re playing your song. “What song?”, my dad shot back quizzically. “This one. Here, turn it up.” Off our rockers, actin’ crazy And with the right medications we won’t be lazy Doin’ the Old Folks Boogie, down on the farm Wheelchairs, they were locked arm-in-arm. Paired off pacemakers with matching alarms Give us one more chance to spin one more yarn. And you know that you’re over-the-hill When your mind makes a promise that your body can’t fill. Old Folks Boogie, and boogie we will ‘cause to us, the thought’s as good as the thrill. “Ha! That’s a good one”, my dad says. “But I promised myself that I would jump off that bridge and I have every intention of keeping it.” We were traveling south on I-65 from Culver, Indiana to Lawrenceburg, Kentucky. In the car was my dad, two of my brothers and me, part of a caravan carrying 11 of us to our destination, and we were listening to the radio while we passed the time. It was the occasion of my dads’ 90th birthday and we were headed to Lawrenceburg because there, from an abandoned train trestle, my dad intended to jump 240 feet toward the Kentucky river with his ankles tied to a bungee cord. “He wants to do what?” was the reply of most people when they were told. But those of us who know him weren’t surprised at all. On his 80th birthday he jumped out of an airplane. Always an athlete, he played tennis well into his 80’s. Typical of stories he’s told over the years is one in which he climbed to the top of the state Capitol in Springfield, Illinois when he was a state Senator there. He and a colleague crawled out a service window in the dome and made their way up to the very top where the Illinois flag was anchored to the peak. I… | Read More »
We’re looking forward to 2022
We are looking forward with optimism to 2022 and we hope you are too. While each year brings with it both new challenges and residual struggles from the years before, it also offers opportunities for growth and understanding. We know now more than we ever did about so many things, and we’ll learn even more in the coming months. Our vocabularies have increased, like they do every year, as we’ve researched and discussed global events. We’ve all learned more about how things like supply chain issues and labor shortages can affect the economy; interest rates and the way the federal reserve can manipulate them; novel viruses and how they mutate; how resilient corporate profits can be. We know, because we’ve seen it before, that we should expect some level of volatility in the markets. We also know, because we’ve done so many times, how to combat that volatility with patience and diversification. We know that the U.S. stock market has been enjoying a historic run over the past three years. We also know that returns like that are not sustainable and that we should adjust our expectations moving forward. We have not seen double-digit inflation numbers since 1981 and we don’t expect to see them that high this coming year, but we do see consumer prices ticking up and anticipate factoring those inflated costs into our family budgets and investment plans. We know this now, so we can deal with it as it happens. Maya Angelou once said, “When you know better, you do better.” That’s the attitude we’re bringing into this fresh, new year. We’ll move forward armed with the knowledge we’ve acquired during these last challenging years, and with our resolve to put that knowledge to work for you. Happy New Year from all of us at Winch Financial. We wish you peace, good health, happiness and prosperity in the coming year.