Marc Ruiz

When I filed my taxes last year, I had a slight over-payment. Because as a business owner I pay quarterly taxes, I simply instructed the IRS to apply the over-payment credit to next year’s taxes. A few weeks later, I got a letter from the IRS in...

Writing a weekly column is not an easy task. The biggest challenge is coming up with relevant topics, the second biggest challenge is delivering the article to my editor by Wednesday each week. This week I thought I had it in the bag, I had targeted...

It's likely the stock market was due for a breather, and sometimes stocks go down just to go down, but there is no doubt the Chinese coronavirus provided the perfect backdrop for market sell-off over the past week. This is, of course, a financial...

A dear friend and longtime client enjoys educating me on his world view, which varies in many ways from mine. He is clearly an avid reader and forwards material from lots of different publications into my email. His emails provide me some nice mental...

There’s an issue affecting my retiree clients more and more nowadays, and it’s an issue that really chaps the hide of many. The issue is Medicare premiums and more specifically the income adjusted related monthly adjustment amount, otherwise...

I’ve been investing on behalf of other people for 25 years now. While, after keeping up with my daughter home from Purdue on the ski slopes for a couple days, I’m a little creaky this morning, it's sometimes hard for me to fathom that I’ve been...

In 2009 my youngest child, Ethan, was born with Down Syndrome. As any family of a loved one with special needs will tell you, at the moment of awareness a whole new dimension of parenting opens and the learning curve is immediate and steep. A whole...

I need to take my own advice. It seems I am constantly encouraging others to turn off their propaganda channel of choice, the leading two being CNN and Fox News, and focus on their version of the real world and just enjoy what it means to be an...

Last week my family began the college visit process for the next teenager on deck. As all parents know, each child is unique, and for us, so has been each college due diligence process. When we went through this process for the older girls, they both...

It was 1989. As a young college kid, I was walking through the Chauncey Hill mall area at Purdue. Two pretty girls standing behind a folding table asked me if I wanted to sign up for a Visa card to get a free two-liter of Coke and a t-shirt. I was...