While dumpster diving through the 2016 presidential campaign, I found something valuable. It wasn't what I was looking for, but if we have the courage to deal with it, it will make America greater. Check out A Plus from 2016 Presidential Campaign. 

Here's some wisdom from Jonathan Clements, an excellent financial author I started following this year. Here's a link to a recent MarketWatch article, and here's a link to an 18-minute podcast where the Wall Street Journal's "Money, Markets, & More" staff interview Clements. The article provides the list but with only limited comments. So don't stop with the article; please find the time to listen to the podcast.

To whet your interest, here is Clement's list of the ten most important Financial Decisions Ever:

1. How much you borrow for college.
2. What career you pursue.
3. How early in life you start saving.
4. How big a house you buy relative to your income.
5. Whether you marry the right person. (I'd rephrase this to "Who you marry.")
6. How often you replace your car.
7. Whether you make a lifetime commitment to stocks.
8. Whether you have children. (I'd add "... and how many.")
9. Whether you waste time and money on the foolish pursuit of market-beating gains.
10. When you claim Social Security.

Last week I stumbled into a Facebook stream that I thought was posted by an acquaintance of mine. After posting a reply to somebody's comment, and getting deluged with readers' responses, I realized I had entered a Mike Huckabee post that shared this link from the Conservative Tribune: SHOCK: 96% Of Hillary’s Charitable Donations Went To 1 “Charity.”

Over the course of about three days, I wrote quite a bit into that thread, generally to the dismay of many other participants. But this gave me an excuse to take a look at the Clintons' charitable contributions.

After finishing my interactions with the Huckabee post, I decided to pull together my posted comments and, with only light editing, post them on this webpage: Clinton foundations - ripoff or legit? If you want to do a little research on this topic, just click on the link. You'll find my perspective and several related factual links.

I trade many texts with an Asian-American friend regarding investment strategies and Christian spiritual formation. When texting about the impact of the United Kingdom's Brexit vote on investing, my friend asked several questions about U.S. politics and the upcoming election. He wanted to understand the landscape of American politics so he could factor it into his investment decisions. 

In the process of helping this and another international friend get up to speed in American politics, I realized that many new people are registering to vote in the November elections. Some of these are internationals who are now citizens; others are responding to the campaigns of Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. And some long-time voters may just want a refresher. If this is you, then I hope you will take a look at Political Primer 2016.

Recently, a soon-to-be new mother asked Robin and me to join in a time of blessing and offering of advice to her husband, the soon-to-be new father. 

I remembered, many years ago, teaching this skill using principles from The Blessing, a book by Gary Smalley and John Trent. The book, a little dusty, still sits on my shelves, and I also found my old teaching notes. Together these informed my contribution to the occasion, attended by a circle of friends. It was a blessed time, indeed.

Afterward, I decided to post Smalley and Trent's five elements of blessing others. To learn more about blessing people, click on Blessing Others.

Our financial capital is the total of our saved assets, beyond the value of the home where we intend to reside in retirement.

Human capital is the present value of all future earnings. It is our health, knowledge, skills and motivation. Anything we do to increase our ability to earn higher future income is an investment in human capital. It's at its peak around age 25 and mostly gone by age 65. 

At best, we have about 40 years to convert enough human capital into financial capital to last the rest of our lives.

For how this impacts your asset allocation strategy, click on Human v Financial Capital.

A few weeks ago I visited Ohio on family business and attended a Sunday worship. I quickly realized that Heather Kimura's message would head toward an invitation to follow Jesus. So I took notes, and am glad I did! 

A few weeks later, I decided to polish up the notes, add some personal content, and publish these in the Christian Teachings section of my site.

Maybe you're a follower of Jesus and, like me, always looking for another fresh way of packaging an invitation to follow Jesus. Or maybe God has already prepared you to receive his invite. Either way, I hope you'll check out The Invitation.

Blessings,

Tim

I meet individually with a few men who are working their way through Timothy Keller's book: Prayer - Experiencing Awe and Intimacy of God. 

Recently, two of us met for morning coffee at Panera Bread and talked about Keller's advice for meditative, or pondering, prayer. Keller unpacked a meditation framework from Martin Luther, which was intriguing enough that we decided to give it a try.