If you have federal student loans, you have undoubtedly enjoyed the past few years of zero interest + zero required payments on your loans. However, federal student loan payments and interest accrual are set to resume by mid-2023, and this could be a harsh awakening for many loan borrowers.

When it comes to financial goals, we’re often thinking about big, long-term objectives like saving for retirement, paying for college, or buying a home. Life is all about balance, though: you deserve to enjoy life now while planning for the future, so it’s important to consider what your shorter-term priorities might be.

We’ve shared how we help our clients prepare for the financial risk of a long life expectancy. But why does longevity planning really matter? In this Hilltop at Home video, David Wise provides 3 ways that longevity planning can help you live your best life in retirement.

Everyone hopes to live a long and healthy life, but a long life can also be a financial threat. This is called “longevity risk” and although it is a key financial planning concept, it can be difficult to quantify. In this Hilltop at Home video, Brittany Mollica shares a case study illustrating how we review each client’s longevity risk.

These days, everybody is talking about a post-COVID world and the “new normal,” but nobody knows exactly what it will look like. But we’re hoping we will all work together to make it better than the old normal. Continuing our “Foresight From 2020” series with a new Hilltop at Home video, Chris Hostetler discusses how you can seize this moment and renew your own priorities.

Unfortunately, the real world is unpredictable – many factors in the financial planning formula are random and uncontrollable. So how can you make wise decisions when you cannot control everything?

Although a steady investment return makes for a useful planning assumption, it’s not very realistic. The good news is we have a tool that supplements the usual model and gives us a more realistic picture of market uncertainty: the Monte Carlo simulation.

We’ve all heard the saying: “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” but what if using it wisely could bring you more satisfaction? That’s what Happy Money by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton (2014) explores.

It’s easy to understand why spring is a favorite season for many North Carolinians. Flowers are blooming, temperatures are temperate, and there’s no shortage of fun events to enjoy with friends and family. To help you fill your spring weekends, we’ve rounded up a few of our favorite events going on across the Triangle this season.

When you retire, you don’t have to travel the world to expand your horizons. You can grow wherever you live. In our October retirement panel event, we explored several ways to make the most of your retirement.

One of the great joys we experience as advisors is living vicariously through clients of ours who are traveling the world. Often, this is the payoff for years of hard work and careful planning. So we were excited to host an educational panel recently, “Envision the Retirement of Your Dreams”, with speakers discussing a range of ways to make the most of your time after the career phase of life.

As the leaves turn and college sports kick into gear, we love what the Triangle offers this time of year. If you’re looking for the best ways to celebrate the season with family and friends, here are some of the things we are looking forward to.

In this post, we’ll explore costs, advantages and disadvantages of some the options in senior living, as discussed by the panel of specialists hosted by Hilltop in May.

You probably hate uncertainty, and you probably don’t like to think about becoming physically dependent, dying, or aging in a nursing home. Put all of this together, and it can be hard to even think about where you’ll live as you age, who will take care of you, or how you’ll pay for it all.

When you truly trust the people you work with, you aren’t afraid to be locked up with them, at least for a little while. At Hilltop, we recently put our mutual trust to the test and went to an escape room for a little bit of team building.

In my spare time, I enjoy training for and running obstacle course races. These involve such challenges as crawling through mud, climbing over walls, and experiencing mild electric shocks. Fun, right?