Financial Commute

The US national debt recently crossed $40 trillion. Everyone’s starting to ask: does that math eventually lead to higher taxes?

In this episode of Financial Commute, Chris Galeski sits down with Beau Wirick, Director of Financial Planning at Morton Wealth, to work through the actual mechanics of the debt problem, what history suggests about how governments resolve it, why inflation may be doing more of the work than explicit tax increases, and what investors can do right now to build tax diversification into their retirement strategy before the environment shifts.

Timestamps

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About 40 percent of couples do not share the same vision for retirement. And 53 percent disagree on how much they actually need to have saved to get there. Those are not small gaps. They are the kind of gaps that surface at the worst possible moment, when one person is ready to stop working, and the other is not, or when the money runs out before the plan does.

In this episode of Financial Commute, financial advisors Chris Galeski and Kristin Dillon walk through the questions most couples never quite get around to asking each other before retirement...

Municipal bond yields are at their highest levels in 20 to 25 years, and the phrase “tax-free income” is getting a lot of attention from investors looking for safety and yield in a challenging rate environment. The case is easy to understand: if you live in California and own a California Muni bond, the interest you earn could be both federal and state tax-free.

But before you move into Munis based on that headline, there are a few things worth understanding first. In this episode of Financial Commute, Chris Galeski and Ian Rennick walk through the interest rate risk most...

Grocery bills are roughly 25 percent higher than they were a few years ago, and they are not coming back down. That is not a prediction. It is how inflation works. The spike you felt in 2022 and 2023 set a new floor. From here, prices continue rising, just hopefully more slowly.

In this episode of Financial Commute, Chief Investment Officer Meghan Pinchuk and Wealth Advisor Chris Galeski answer the questions everyone is asking: why prices are not going back down, what a K-shaped economy means for households at different income levels, and what investors can do to make sure...

For most of the past four decades, buying real estate in California was as close to a guaranteed win as investing gets. Prices rose. Interest rates fell. Demographics supported demand. People refinanced, pulled cash out, bought more, and built substantial wealth. That environment no longer exists.

In this episode of Financial Commute, CEO Jeff Sarti and Wealth Advisor Kevin Rex break down what drove real estate returns for 40 years, why those tailwinds have largely reversed, and what it takes to find genuine value in real estate today when the old playbook of closing your eyes and picking...

Lifestyle creep is not a dramatic financial event. It is a food delivery subscription you barely use, a rent upgrade that felt reasonable at the time, a closet full of things you barely remember buying. It happens when income rises, and spending rises automatically to meet it, and sometimes exceed it, without anyone consciously choosing that outcome.

In this episode of Financial Commute, Priscilla Brehm and Kristin Dillon, a baby boomer and an elder millennial who have each spent decades watching this pattern play out from both sides, talk about what lifestyle creep looks like today, why...

Seven years ago, roughly $7 trillion was invested in alternative assets globally. Today that number is $18 trillion. By 2030, Fidelity projects it will exceed $30 trillion. The average institutional investor already allocates 25 percent of their capital to alternatives. The average retail investor allocates about 5 percent. That gap is not an accident. 

In this episode of Financial Commute, Chris Galeski sits down with Jeff Sarti to break down what alternative investments actually are, why the industry's standard answer does not go far enough, and what the next 40 years of investing may look like for people who are still relying solely on s...

Every election cycle, clients ask the same question: should I be doing something different with my portfolio right now? The short answer, according to the data, is probably not. 

But the longer answer is more interesting. In this episode of Financial Commute, Chief Investment Officer Meghan Pinchuk and Chris Galeski walk through what historical market data actually shows about midterm election years, why the bigger risk to the current market has less to do with which party wins and more to do with what both parties agree on, and how to think about sizing your stock exposure w...

You saved into your 401 (k) for decades, reduced your taxes every year you could, and watched the balance grow. But the IRS doesn’t retire when you do. 

Every dollar you pull from that account in retirement is ordinary income, and if it is your only account, you could end up in the same tax bracket you were in when you were working, or higher. 

In this episode of Financial Commute, Wealth Advisors Ian Rennick and Mike Rudow break down the four types of retirement accounts, why the conventional withdrawal order most people follow might be a...

Stocks are at all-time highs. Consumer sentiment just hit its lowest point since the Vietnam War. AI is going to transform everything. AI is going to eliminate your job. Gold is the only safe asset. Sell your gold immediately. If any of this sounds familiar, you have been inside the noise.

In this episode of Financial Commute, Chris Galeski sits down with CEO Jeff Sarti to walk through the twelfth edition of the Healthy Skeptic investment letter, "When Headlines Get Loud, Principles Matter More," and the core principles behind the way Morton Wealth builds portfolios when headlines...

On October 29th, we are hosting our fifth annual Investor Symposium, and this year’s theme is “Designed for Life.”

It is a phrase that captures what financial planning is actually for: not hitting a number for its own sake, but using your resources to build the experiences, relationships, and life you want. In this episode, Chris and Beau (who will be returning as our MC!) highlight three sessions that are going to be featured at the event, explain why the questions being covered matter more than most people realize, and make the case for why this year i...

What if I lose my job? What if inflation stays high? What if I run out of money? What if I get a raise and do not know what to do with it? These are the questions people type into Google and AI tools at two in the morning, and they rarely get a straight answer. 

In this episode of Financial Commute, Chris Galeski and Mike Rudow pull the most common financial what-if questions and work through each one with the kind of honest, practical perspective that does not show up in a search result. The scenarios a...

If you have ever felt embarrassed about how much you have saved, avoided opening a credit card statement, or justified a purchase to your financial advisor before they even asked, you have experienced money guilt or financial shame. Most people have. What most people do not know is that these two feelings are actually different, that one of them is more useful than the other, and that both of them are far more common in financial planning conversations than anyone talks about openly. 

In this episode of Financial Commute, Chris Galeski and Modearn® Advisor Kristin Dillon break do...

Questioning whether you really need a financial advisor is fair, especially right now. Index funds are easy to access, fees are low, and the last decade has rewarded the people who simply bought the market and held on. So what does an advisor actually do that you cannot?

Wealth Advisors Beau Wirick and Eric Selter have both heard this question for years, and in this episode of Financial Commute, they give an honest answer. Not every investor needs an advisor. But if your plan depends on making the right call twice, if you have never lived through...

U.S. stocks were down almost 5% in the first quarter. Then up 15% in the second. On paper, the first half of 2026 looks fine. But underneath those numbers, there is a concentration in semiconductor stocks that just had their best quarter in history, an AI spending wave that is running well ahead of the revenue it is producing, margin borrowing at all-time highs, and a consumer savings rate approaching low 2007 levels. 

In this episode of Financial Commute, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Sarti and Chief Investment Officer Meghan Pinchuk walk through what happened in Q2 2026, what the signals in t...

It is a simple question. And for most investors holding concentrated stock positions, the honest answer is no.

On this week's Financial Commute, Chris Galeski and Chief Investment Officer Meghan Pinchuk walk through why the answer is almost always taxes, why letting the tax decision drive the investment decision is a risk in itself, and what the after-tax value of a highly appreciated position actually looks like when you do the math.

They also cover the middle path most investors do not consider: trimming gradually, staying in favorable long term capital gains treatment, and using...

Most of the conversations clients have had about long-term care insurance are based on products that no longer exist.

On this week's Financial Commute, Chris Galeski sits down with Russell Boring, Founder of Elevated Strategies Insurance Services, to walk through what has actually changed. The carriers that mispriced their policies are mostly gone. What replaced them are hybrid and annuity-based structures that solve the biggest objection people have always had: what happens to the money if you never need care?

The short answer: it comes back.

They also cover why people in their 70...

Everyone has been waiting for rates to come down.

It has not happened. And on this week's Financial Commute, Chris Galeski and Chief Investment Officer Meghan Pinchuk explain why the Fed's new chair is holding firm, what energy prices and the war in Iran have to do with your portfolio, and why the national debt makes this moment more complicated than the headlines suggest.

They also get into the practical side: how to think about inflation as a slow tax on cash, why gold has held its value for over a century, and the one...

If you have been watching housing prices and wondering whether the new executive order restricting institutional investors is the fix everyone is hoping for, you are not alone. The frustration is real, and the concern for affordability is legitimate. 

In this episode of Financial Commute, Chris Galeski sits down with Mikey Taylor, Mayor of Thousand Oaks and CEO of Commune Capital, to examine what the data actually says about who owns single-family homes, why the ban on institutions is unlikely to move the needle on prices, and what the real barrier to housing affordability in California looks l...

Most people come to a wealth manager for one reason: their finances. But what if focusing exclusively on financial wealth is actually making it harder to achieve? Nurturing the various types of wealth (social, physical, mental, time, and financial) is the central idea behind Sahil Bloom's book, The 5 Types of Wealth. 
 

In this episode, host Chris Galeski sits down with Wealth Advisor Bruce Tyson to reflect on Bloom's framework. The conversation weaves together philosophy, personal experience, and practical wisdom, including Bruce's own story of losing his home in the Palisades Fire an...