On July 21 I held my first meeting at the new Scottsdale location of Foothills Financial Planning.  Although our primary office remains in Ahwatukee, a significant percentage of our clients in the Phoenix area reside or work in Scottsdale, North Phoenix, or the West Valley.  It became clear that a more centrally located office was important to accommodate those needs, so we are now conducting meetings by appointment at 3337 N. Miller Road, on the Southeast corner of Miller and Osborn.

Come visit us!

Scott Adams advises us to buy companies we hate.  They'll perform better:  http://tinyurl.com/dilbertinvest.

This past week has been pretty busy for me, as I attended the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting last weekend, and the Wesco annual meeting on Wednesday.  Wesco is run by Warren Buffett's partner Charlie Munger.  Whereas the Berkshire meeting has the atmosphere of a very popular circus, the Wesco meeting features about 1% of the attendees of the Berkshire meeting, and it allows for more unfiltered Mungerisms, which makes it well worth the effort.

Last year I took voluminous notes at the Berkshire meeting, and barely shared any of them.  The process felt daunting and I was very busy.  That's no different this year, but I think there is a lot of value in what was communicated, and that value is definitely worth sharing.  Nonetheless, I plan to do this in digestible pieces, which should make it more readable and more feasible for me.

One point about the logistics of the meeting:  beginning last year, the Q&A process alternated between those being asked by three journalists, and those being asked by members of the audience.  The journalists were Carol Loomis, Becky Quick and Andrew Ross Sorkin.  They each receive thousands of questions from the investing public, and whittle them down into broad themes and form specific questions accordingly.  I took notes on most questions asked by the journalists, but not on all questions asked by the audience.  Some just didn't hold much interest for me.  Other questions didn't strike me as worthy of particulary insightful responses.  Consequently, my sharing will be selective.

First up (next post):  Warren Buffet's view of the recent troubles at Goldman Sachs.

Intuit has decided to leverage its considerable data to provide an anonymous, aggregate view of employment trends for small business in the United States.  The index focuses on small businesses that employ fewer than 20 people, which they say make up more than 87% of all American employers.  It pulls data from approximately 50,000 US businesses.  Intuit views small businesses as a sort of bellwether for overall employment, as they see small businesses hiring earlier than larger employers.

So what can we learn from the data this month?  In short, small business is on the comeback trail.  Employment in this space has been gradually trending upward since June, 2009 and accelerated a bit in February.  Although I have no reason to discount the statistical validity of 50,000 businesses, any representative index like this will have a margin of error.  The "acceleration" indicated in February still translates to a .2% rise in employment; in other words, we're not experiencing a surge in employment at this point.  Nonetheless, the upward curve seems to be steepening slightly, and I think the stats are positive, if muted.

Full Disclosure:  Foothills Financial Planning uses Intuit’s payroll service.  Although we’re perfectly happy with it, the point of this article is not to offer an opinion for or against the service.

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About The Motley Fool

Founded in 1993 in Alexandria, VA., by brothers David and Tom Gardner, The Motley Fool is a multimedia financial-services company dedicated to building the world's greatest investment community. Reaching millions of people each month through its website, books, newspaper column, television appearances, and subscription newsletter services, The Motley Fool champions shareholder values and advocates tirelessly for the individual investor. The company's name was taken from Shakespeare, whose wise fools both instructed and amused, and could speak the truth to the king—without getting their heads lopped off.  For more information please visit Fool.com.
 
About the Garrett Planning Network

The Garrett Planning Network is an international organization of like-minded fee-only financial advisors whose mission is to help make competent, objective financial advice accessible to all people. For more information please visit GarrettPlanningNetwork.com.

As part of "Jump-Start Your Retirement Planning Days", Kevin O'Reilly is teaming up with Kiplinger Personal Finance and The National Association of Personal Financial Advisors to provide free advice to consumers. See the press release and learn more here:http://tinyurl.com/FFP-Napfa.

More about Kiplinger:http://kiplinger.com
More about NAPFA:http://www.napfa.org

Some financial planning humor, courtesy of Saturday Night Live.

Foothills Financial Planning was featured in the Ahwatukee Foothills News this past Friday in a Q&A session. Check it out!

It has been a few weeks since the last post, primarily because we have shifted blog platforms along with changing the software underlying our website.  However, we're back and will return to a regular schedule of posting this week.

For those who are interested, we have moved our website from Linux to .Net on Windows (yes, .Net can run on Linux).  We were using Joomla to manage the content on the Linux site, but I am very experienced with development on Microsoft platforms, with .Net and otherwise, and this gives me more flexibility and opportunity to create functionality.  I decided to shift the blog as well, and chose BlogEngine.Net as the tool to maintain blog content.  WordPress would have worked fine on Windows, and I wasn't unhappy with it, but once again I have a bit more flexibility with the new setup.

You'll note that the look and feel has not changed - we're still happy with the results we achieved in that department working with Glendale Designs.