Don't Get Hooked: A Guide to Recognizing and Avoiding Phishing As financial professionals, we understand how vital it is to safeguard your personal and financial information. Unfortunately, in our increasingly digital world, cybersecurity risks, such as phishing attacks, have become a prevalent issue that can compromise your financial health and personal identity. Phishing is a deceptive practice employed by hackers to trick you into divulging sensitive personal or account data, often via...

Sheri’s take: Recently, we shared two guest posts on this fall’s insurance open enrollment period, authored by Mark Maurer, CFP®, MBA, president and CEO of LLIS. Mark’s posts were well-received, so we were delighted when he agreed to share one more interesting idea with us on how to use “layering” to save costs on your life insurance while still ensuring adequate coverage for your loved ones. Good coverage at less...

Sheri’s take: As this year’s open enrollment period goes into full swing, you and your family can use the opportunity to not only review your healthcare coverage, but also to take a fresh look at life and disability insurance coverage available to you. Last week, we were pleased to share an insightful guest post on group and individual life insurance considerations, compliments of Mark Maurer, CFP®, MBA, president and CEO...

Sheri’s take: There’s strength in numbers, especially in having a number of well-informed alliances to supplement our own financial know-how. Mark Maurer, CFP®, MBA, president and CEO of LLIS is one such alliance we’ve long maintained – because protecting the wealth you’ve already got against life’s many risks is essential to your total wealth interests. Thanks to Mark and his LLIS team for sharing this guest commentary on insurance coverage worth...

  As a follow up to our recent blog post, “Five Warning Signs That It’s NOT the IRS Calling,” a handful of SAGEbroadview clients and others have let us know that they have experienced another form of fraud. Some have received mailings from the IRS (the real IRS), alerting them that they may have fallen victim to identity fraud in the form of a bogus tax return being filed in their name....

While the Internal Revenue Service may not be your favorite Federal agency, criminals falsely posing as IRS representatives are unquestionably the much greater enemy. As time and technology march on, scammers have been setting increasingly treacherous traps for swindling taxpayers’ assets, identities or both. To make matters worse, their favorite targets are those most likely to succumb to the trickery and least able to afford the assault – such as...

Employer-sponsored group life insurance can be a nice perk to help ensure that your loved ones are well cared for in the event of your untimely death. Most plans offer basic coverage at no cost to employees, along with supplemental coverage you can purchase at group rates. What are the factors to consider in deciding whether supplemental group coverage makes sense for you? To address this question, we are pleased to...

My son Dominic is 18 and a high school graduate, as of this week! Knock on wood, he’s had only one near-miss since he began to drive. Only days after receiving his permit, he and his dad were driving to school when a kamikaze deer leaped in front of the car. Devon, his younger brother, was waiting at the school bus stop and witnessed the event. Unfortunately, the deer had...

In our last post, “The Ins and Outs of Insurance Coverage,” we described some of the ways an objective advisor can help you select from the wide range of good, bad and occasionally ugly insurance possibilities available. In this post, we share a case study, revised with permission from an original, advisor-oriented piece by Low Load Insurance Services, Inc. "I'm Covered with Group Disability at Work." Really? Look again...

Taking a Second Look at Your Current Liability Coverage By Guest Author Rocco Esposito, Esposito Insurance Group Most current standard home, condominium and renters’ insurance policies include liability coverage to protect you against some of life’s usual suspects at home and afield. For example, if a pedestrian slips and falls on your damaged sidewalk, your diseased tree collapses on a neighbor’s garage or your daughter slides into a pedestrian while riding her...