On Adventure: Lessons from the Edge

Two recent conversations from the On Adventure Podcast — and what they have to say about the lives the rest of us are building.

Every so often we like to step back from the episode list and look for the thread running through it. This time the thread found us. One guest has spent decades on the world’s high mountains and keeps discovering how little that protects him. The other didn’t start camping until her thirties and didn’t pick up a trail-maintenance section until she was fifty-nine. Different altitudes, opposite directions — and the same quiet conclusion. What you’ve already done is not the thing that carries you. Staying honest about where you actually are is.

Episode 79: Why Altitude Humbles Even Experienced Climbers

Karl Frank is a Colorado native, a mountaineer working his way through the Seven Summits, and the president of A&I Wealth Management in Denver — a man who grew up hiking out the back door of his family’s home at 7,000 feet and has been climbing ever since.

What stayed with us wasn’t the summit list. It was how candid Karl is about the mistakes that came from being sure of himself. On Kilimanjaro, a chest cold turned him around at the Barranco Wall — and the descent route that opened up as a result is one he counts among the best hikes of his life. Two physicians in his group were carrying a full medical kit and he never asked them for help, because he was the guy from the big mountains. On Aconcagua, in a bad weather year, his heaviest gloves stayed in his pack so he could move faster. He lost the skin on the tips of all ten fingers and all ten toes.

His line about impaired judgment is the one we keep repeating: you spot it in your climbing partners long before you spot it in yourself. He also says something quieter — that getting up is optional and getting down is not, and that most of the trouble starts after the summit. Anyone who has watched a family reach a long-planned financial milestone and then lose the plot afterward will recognize the shape of that.

Listen to Episode 79 →

Episode 78: Adventure Has No Expiration Date with Beverly MacDowell

Beverly MacDowell is a retired educator, hiking guide, trail maintainer, and search-and-rescue trainee based in Asheville, North Carolina — and the great majority of that list, as she puts it, happened after fifty.

She didn’t begin camping until her thirties. She joined the Carolina Mountain Club in her fifties, started maintaining a section of the Appalachian Trail at fifty-nine, and began search-and-rescue training at sixty-five. Along the way she has made a practice of taking women over sixty backpacking for the first time — supplying the equipment, the knowledge, and the company, so that something that looked impossible from a distance turns out to be a matter of one foot in front of the other.

What we keep coming back to is her insistence that a little challenge is good for us, and that it matters more, not less, with age. Hiking asks the body and the brain to keep adapting — rocks, roots, balance, weather — and that adaptation is the point. She and Josh also talked about Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, and about Max Patch recovering from being loved too hard, which is its own lesson about the places that give us a great deal and need something back.

Listen to Episode 78 →

What We Took From Both

Put the two conversations side by side and you get a useful pair of correctives.

Karl’s is a warning against confidence that has outrun the conditions. Experience is real, but it doesn’t transfer cleanly to a new mountain, a new market, or a new decade of life — and the person least likely to notice the drift is the one experiencing it. That’s most of the argument for a plan written in advance, and for having someone in the party who is allowed to say the uncomfortable thing.

Beverly’s is a warning against the opposite error — assuming the interesting part is behind you. A financial plan is not a monument to what you’ve already accumulated. It’s a set of decisions about what you still intend to do, and for most of the people we work with, the second half of that list is the better half: the trip, the gift, the business handed on well, the grandchildren taught by being taken along.

Neither one is really about mountains. Stay honest about where you are. Keep a little challenge in the plan. And don’t assume your best adventures are behind you.

Ridgeline Wealth Advisors

When One Spouse Handles the Money

Division of labor is sensible. It’s the gap it quietly creates that’s worth closing — while both of you are around to close it.

In most of the households we work with, one person handles the money. Not by decree, usually. It just happened — one of you found it interesting, or had the time, or was better at it at twenty-six, and thirty years later that’s simply how it works. The other person has been busy with a career, or the children, or the parts of the household that are every bit as demanding and far less spreadsheet-shaped.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Specialization is how households get anything done. Nobody suggests both spouses should learn to repair the dishwasher.

But money isn’t the dishwasher. The arrangement works beautifully right up until the day it has to be carried by the person who wasn’t carrying it — and that day tends to arrive unannounced, often at the worst possible moment, and usually alongside grief or a health crisis that leaves very little capacity for learning something new.

We’ve sat across from people on that day. We’d rather have the conversation years earlier.

What the Gap Actually Looks Like

It’s rarely that the non-managing spouse doesn’t understand investing. More often it’s simpler and more practical than that. Where are the accounts. Who is the attorney. Is there a trust, and what does it actually do. Where does the money come from each month — which account, on what date, and does it arrive by itself or does somebody push a button. What happens to the pension. What happens to Social Security. Who gets called first.

These aren’t sophisticated questions. They’re logistics. But logistics are exactly what disappears when the person who held them in their head is gone, and they’re very hard to reconstruct from a filing cabinet.

The second kind of gap is subtler and matters more. It’s confidence. A spouse who has never made a financial decision alone doesn’t just lack information — they lack the experience of having made a call and watched it turn out fine. That’s the thing that can’t be handed over in a document, and it’s the reason the fix has to start well before it’s needed.

It’s also, frankly, what makes someone a target. The schemes we’ve been writing about this fall find their way to people who are newly alone, uncertain about their own judgment, and reluctant to ask. Shared fluency is a security measure as much as a planning one.

The Case for Starting Small

The instinct, when a couple decides to fix this, is to schedule a four-hour download. One spouse explains everything; the other takes notes; both of them end the afternoon exhausted and no better off, because this isn’t information that transfers in a single sitting.

What works better is smaller and more repetitive. A few ideas:

Both of you come to the meetings. Not as an observer in the corner — as a participant with questions. If one of you has been attending alone for a decade, changing that is the single highest-return thing on this list. The questions the quieter spouse asks are usually the best ones in the room, because they’re the ones nobody has stopped bothering to ask.

Put it on one page. Institutions, account types, roughly what each one is for, who to call. Not balances — those change and go stale. Structure. Then tell each other where that page lives, and write the date on it.

Let the other person drive something. A small real decision, start to finish, while the experienced spouse sits on their hands. Rebalance something. Handle the annual charitable gift. Make the call to the insurance company. One completed task builds more confidence than any amount of explanation.

Name the professionals out loud. The attorney, the CPA, the advisor, the person at the bank. A name and a relationship, not a business card in a drawer. We’d much rather a surviving spouse call us because they know us than because they found us on a statement.

Talk about the “what happens when” scenarios while they’re hypothetical. What changes if one of us needs care. What the income looks like for whoever is left. These conversations are enormously easier when they’re abstract, and nearly impossible when they’re not.

On Being the Spouse Who Handles It

A word for the one who’s been carrying this, because it deserves saying plainly: handing some of it over can feel like a loss. You’re good at it. It’s been your contribution. Teaching is slower than doing, and watching someone else do it less efficiently is its own small test of patience.

But the most generous version of managing your family’s money is managing it so that it doesn’t require you. That’s not a diminishment of the work — it’s the completion of it. The same way the best business owners build something that runs without them, and the best parents raise children who don’t need calling every week.

And there’s a quieter benefit. Couples who talk about money regularly tend to argue about it less, not more. The conversations that go badly are almost always the ones that got postponed.

Where to Start This Month

If you read all of that and want one thing to do, make it this: both of you come to the next meeting, and let the spouse who usually doesn’t ask the questions ask them. We’ll take it from there, at whatever pace suits you. There’s no quiz, and there’s no wrong question — we’ve heard all of them, and the ones people apologize for asking are usually the ones most worth asking.

If you’d like help putting the one-page summary together, that’s something we do all the time. Just say the word.

Q4 Letter to Clients

The Economic Landscape

Here’s the short version. The S&P 500 gained about 2.7% for the quarter and the Nasdaq added about 2.5%, while the Dow slipped about 2.7% and the Russell 2000 of smaller companies fell about 7.5%. Technology did most of the heavy lifting. After a first quarter down 4.6% and a second quarter up almost 15%, the market seemed to be catching its breath.

The bigger news for your wallet came from the Federal Reserve, which raised rates a quarter point on September 16 to a range of 3.75% to 4%. That’s the first increase since 2023, and they’re signaling roughly one more before year end. The reason is inflation. Consumer prices in August were up 3.4% from a year ago, with gasoline up more than 27%.

Making Sense of the Headlines

Two stories dominated the news, and they’re connected. The first is the conflict with Iran. With the Strait of Hormuz still effectively closed, oil has bounced around quite a bit, dropping about 10% in early August on hopes of a deal and then climbing back toward $107 a barrel for Brent by late September.

The second is the bond market. The 10-year Treasury yield moved above 5.3% as the quarter ended, the highest in roughly two decades. Picture a savings account that suddenly pays more than it did last year. Stocks have to work a little harder to earn a place in your money, which is part of why smaller companies struggled. Consumers are feeling it too, with sentiment at a record low in September.

Staying the Course in a Noisy World

The number I keep coming back to this quarter is that ten point gap between the Nasdaq and the Russell 2000. Someone who owned only big technology names had a pretty good summer, and someone who owned only smaller companies did not. A diversified portfolio owns both, so it rarely has the best quarter or the worst one. I know that doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s why I don’t lose sleep when one corner of the market has a bad stretch. It’s like a garden where something is always blooming while something else rests.

And anyone who stepped aside after that rough first quarter missed the best quarter the S&P 500 has had in six years. Nobody rings a bell at the bottom, so I’d rather we stay invested and let the plan do its work.

Year-End Tax Planning: Protecting What You’ve Built

A volatile year can actually be a good one for tax planning, because the same swings that make the headlines uncomfortable can create real opportunities. Nothing here is specific to you, so please treat it as a starting point for a conversation with us and your tax professional.

Start with losses. Smaller companies had a rough quarter, so some taxable accounts may be holding positions worth less than we paid. Selling those can offset gains elsewhere, which is called tax-loss harvesting, as long as we stay clear of the 30-day wash-sale rule. Rebalancing after the run in technology can create gains, so we try to pair those sales with losses or charitable gifts.

If you give to charity, think about how. The standard deduction is high enough now that many people never itemize, so bunching a couple of years of giving into one year, often through a donor-advised fund, can help the total clear that bar. If you’re 70½ or older, a qualified charitable distribution sends money straight from your IRA to charity, counts toward your required minimum distribution, and doesn’t show up as income. Those distributions generally need to happen by December 31.

Roth conversions are worth a look in a lower-income year. You pay tax now in exchange for taxfree growth later, and you can’t undo it. And don’t overlook the simple stuff. For 2026 you can defer up to $24,500 into a 401(k), plus an extra $8,000 if you’re 50 or older, or an extra $11,250 if you’re 60 to 63. The IRA limit is $7,500, with an extra $1,100 if you’re 50 or older. Payroll deferrals have to be done by year end, so check where you stand, and give your health savings account the same look. For gifts to family, the annual exclusion is $19,000 per person.

Every dollar we keep out of taxes stays in your plan, working toward the things you actually want from life. Whatever the market does next, I hope you spend some of this fall with the people and plans your money is supposed to serve. Take the long weekend. Call the friend you keep meaning to call. If you’d like to talk any of this through, call our office at (919) 782-0494 and we’ll find a time.

The Call That Sounds Right

The most effective fraud attempts right now don’t look like fraud. They look like us.

We spent a good part of September on this one — a client webinar on safeguarding your family and your wealth from current cybercrime tactics, and then a follow-up note a few days later when our custodian flagged a scheme that was picking up steam. It’s the most engagement we’ve had on a topic in a while, which tells us something. People are feeling it.

So here’s the short version, written down in one place.

What’s Actually Happening

The tactic making the rounds is impersonation. Someone calls, texts, or emails claiming to be from your custodian or from an advisory firm — sometimes ours by name. There’s usually a story attached: a suspicious charge, a login from an unfamiliar place, an account that’s been compromised. The story is designed to do one thing, which is to get you moving quickly.

The part that unsettles most people is that caller ID can be made to display a real number. The number on your screen can say Schwab. It can say Ridgeline. That’s spoofing, it’s not difficult to do, and it means the one verification step most of us rely on by reflex is no longer worth anything.

Add to that what artificial intelligence has done to the texture of these attempts. The clumsy email with the odd grammar is mostly gone. What’s replaced it is clean, specific, and personalized — and in the more aggressive cases, a voice on the phone that sounds like someone you know. The tools that make a scam convincing got cheap and easy at the same time.

The Four Things That Never Happen

This is the part worth committing to memory, because it turns a judgment call into a simple test. Your custodian and your advisor will never contact you out of the blue to:

  • Ask for your password, a one-time code, or a verbal password
  • Ask you to confirm fraud by clicking a link
  • Request remote access to your computer or your phone
  • Tell you to move money into a “safe” account

That last one deserves its own sentence. There is no safe account. It is not a thing that exists. Anyone who uses that phrase is trying to take your money, full stop.

What to Do When Something Feels Off

Hang up. Don’t reply. You are allowed to be rude to someone who called you — you owe an unexpected caller exactly nothing, including politeness.

Then call back on a number you already trust. Not the number that called you, not the number in the email, not the number the caller gives you when you say you’d like to verify. The number on your statement, or in your client portal, or in your own phone’s contacts. This single habit defeats nearly every version of this scam, because the whole scheme depends on keeping you on their line.

Never give your Social Security number, date of birth, account numbers, or login credentials to someone who contacted you. The direction of the call matters more than anything that’s said during it.

And treat urgency itself as the warning sign. Real institutions are slow. They send letters. They are fine with you calling back tomorrow. Pressure to act in the next ten minutes is not a sign that the situation is serious — it’s a sign that someone needs you to stop thinking.

A Few Structural Protections

Beyond the habits, there are a handful of settings worth putting in place once so they can work in the background.

View-only access for family. Most custodians offer an online permission that lets another person see account activity without being able to transact or change anything. It works well for an adult child helping with oversight, or for a spouse who isn’t the one in the accounts day to day. If you’d like that set up, tell us and we’ll take care of it.

A verbal password with your advisor. Not one we’ll ever call and ask you for — one you can use to confirm it’s really us, in the direction that matters.

Multi-factor authentication everywhere it’s offered, with an authenticator app rather than text messages where you have the choice. Text codes can be intercepted by someone who takes over your mobile number.

A family code word. Low-tech, and increasingly useful. If a voice that sounds like your grandchild calls in distress asking for money, the code word ends the conversation in four seconds.

A freeze on your credit at all three bureaus. It’s free, it’s reversible, and there’s very little reason not to.

The Posture We’d Recommend

We’d rather field a hundred unnecessary calls than miss the one that mattered. That’s not a figure of speech — please use the phone. Nobody here is going to be annoyed that you checked, and nobody is going to think less of you for having almost fallen for something clever. These attempts are convincing by design, built by people who do this full-time, and getting fooled is not a referendum on your intelligence.

If something seems off, call us at (919) 782-0494. If it turns out to be nothing, we’ll have had a nice conversation.

A few places worth bookmarking, if you want to read further:

If you missed the webinar, the recording, the slides, and a supplementary resource from a digital privacy firm went out to clients by email in late September — reply to that note, or call us, and we’ll resend the links.