Financial Commute

Morton Wealth
  • 5.0 (11)
  • Business News
  • Updated Weekly

Hosted by Chris Galeski and Meghan Pinchuk, Financial Commute is a weekly podcast that gives the rundown on what's going on in the current market, how it affects you, and what you can do about it – all designed to fit into your commute. Each week Chris and Meghan welcome an expert guest, including Morton Wealth advisors, fund managers, and investment analysts, to break down complex financial topics. Our goal for this podcast is to provide you with the tools to help you navigate this challenging environment, leading to a path of more confident investing. 

  1. 13h ago

    The Investor Symposium Is Back: Here’s Why You Should Be There

    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 is a particularly important moment to get the answers right. Questions This Episode Answers What is Morton Wealth's Investor Symposium? What sessions will be covered at this year's symposium? Why should I attend the Investor Symposium this year specifically? What does "Designed for Life" mean as a financial planning philosophy? What makes this event different from a standard financial education seminar?

  2. Aug 20

    The Power of Pro Bono Financial Planning

    Financial Commute

  3. Aug 13

    The Most Common Money "What-Ifs" Answered: Job Loss, Inflation, & Running Out of Cash

    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 are different. The underlying framework that answers all of them turns out to be the same. Questions This Episode Answers What should I do if I lose my job?What if inflation stays high for a long time?What if I run out of money in retirement?What should I do with a raise or a larger bonus?What if I have a large unexpected expense like a medical bill or helping a parent?How do the three buckets work in financial planning?

  4. Aug 6

    Money Guilt: How to Move Past It

    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 down the difference between guilt and shame around money, why shame in particular tends to keep people stuck, and what the practical path forward looks like regardless of where you are starting from. *Questions This Episode Answers* • What is money guilt? • What is the difference between money guilt and financial shame? • Is it normal to feel guilty about spending money? • How do I stop feeling guilty about spending money? • What should I do if I feel behind on saving? • Does money shame only affect people who are struggling financially?

  5. Jul 28

    The Difference Between a Financial Advisor and Doing it Yourself

    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 a market that stayed underwater for ten years, or if you think you will just buy the dip when things go wrong, this conversation is going to challenge some assumptions worth examining. Key Takeaways Buying index funds is not the same as having a financial plan. If your only goal is broad market exposure, you may not need an advisor. But the moment you need to know how much to save, when you can retire, how to sequence withdrawals, or how to manage risk across different life stages, the complexity compounds quickly. An advisor is not just an investment picker.Most DIY investors only hear the highlight reel. When investors talk about their returns at the bar or over coffee, they share the wins. The losses stay private. Advisors, by contrast, see the full picture across many clients over many market cycles, including the war stories. That breadth of experience is what shapes the caution around outsized risk.You have to be right twice. Picking a stock that goes up is only half the job. Knowing when to sell is the harder part. Eric puts it plainly: most people who say they are good at picking stocks acknowledge they are not good at knowing when to get out.The market has gone sideways for ten-year stretches before. Between 2000 and 2013, and between 1968 and 1982, investors who held diversified stock portfolios effectively lost purchasing power for a decade or more after accounting for inflation. Younger investors who started after the 2009 recovery have no experiential memory of this, and Beau describes that as a form of blind faith rather than informed conviction.Thou shalt preserve capital. Morton Wealth founder Lon Morton's guiding principle rhymes with Warren Buffett's: rule one is do not lose money, rule two is do not forget rule one. The math is unforgiving on the downside. A 20 percent loss requires a 25 percent gain just to get back to even. Downside protection is not a conservative choice. It is a mathematical one.

  6. Jul 22

    Q2 2026 Market Update

    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 the data are telling them, and how they are thinking about portfolio positioning when the market is this disconnected from the fundamentals. Key Takeaways Semiconductor stocks had their best quarter ever, up over 80% in three months. Intel and Micron were up almost 200% for the quarter. That kind of move comes with a warning: this is also one of the most cyclical industries in the market, with a history of 45 to 80 percent drawdowns when the cycle turns. Semiconductors now make up roughly 20 percent of the S&P 500.The four hyperscalers are spending close to $1 trillion a year on AI data centers. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta have shifted from cash-flow-generating machines to heavily capital-intensive spenders, now issuing significant debt to fund the buildout. The key question investors should be wondering: when does the spending translate into revenue?The AI spending boom has a structural problem the railroad and internet booms did not. Railway lines and fiber cables are durable assets still in use today. Computer chips depreciate rapidly. A data center built today may need its chips replaced in three to five years, raising real questions about the long-term economics of this build-out.Margin borrowing and leveraged ETFs are flashing speculative excess. Retail margin borrowing is at an all-time high. Leveraged single-stock ETFs, a product that barely existed five years ago, now represent over 400 of the 600-plus leveraged ETFs on the market with nearly $200 billion in the category. Increased borrowing is a sign of escalating speculation and previous peaks in margin borrowing (e.g., 2000 and 2007, and 2022) preceded market corrections.Gold pulled back about 7% in the first half after a massive multi-year run, but the thesis is unchanged. Rising interest rates created an opportunity cost for holding gold. But the underlying reasons to own it, a federal interest expense now approaching $1.3 trillion annually, ongoing dollar debasement, and structural deficits running nearly $2 trillion per year, have not changed.

  7. Jul 15

    Should You Own a Stock You Wouldn't Buy Today?

    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 the rebalancing process to reduce concentration without triggering a single large tax event. If you are holding something you would not buy at today's price, this one is worth eight minutes. Key Takeaways Most people who hold concentrated stock positions would not repurchase them at today's price. Chris has asked this question to senior executives holding company stock for years. More than 90 percent say they would do something different with the money. The reason they have not is almost always taxes.Letting the tax decision drive the investment decision is a known risk. Known in the industry as the tax tail wagging the dog, this pattern leads investors to hold positions longer than their actual conviction warrants, increasing concentration risk in the process. Portfolio allocation, Meghan argues, should be the first question, with tax efficiency as the second.Tax loss harvesting and direct indexing strategies are useful but often misunderstood. Some of these products are genuinely valuable. Others are more marketing than math. Even the best of them are typically deferral strategies, not permanent solutions. The tax liability moves, it does not disappear.The real after-tax value of a position is lower than the account balance suggests. A $2 million stock position with a low cost basis is not worth $2 million in spendable terms. Factoring in the embedded tax liability, it is closer to $1.4 or $1.5 million. That reframe changes how clients think about concentration risk.Trimming gradually is a viable middle path between holding and selling everything. Chris and Meghan both point to a practical guideline: realizing roughly 5 percent of a taxable account's value in long term capital gains per year is a reasonable pace for managing down a concentrated position while staying in a favorable tax treatment relative to ordinary income rates.

  8. Jul 7

    Is Long-Term Care Insurance Worth It?

    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 70s who assumed they had aged out of the conversation now have options they did not before, and why the clients who can afford to self-fund are sometimes the ones who need this conversation most. Key Takeaways 70 percent of people over 65 will likely need some form of long-term care before they pass away. Roughly 1 in 5 of those people will need care for more than five years. At six figures per year, a multi-year long-term care event is a real and meaningful risk to a retirement plan, not a remote possibility.The traditional long-term care model has largely disappeared. Carriers mispriced their products for years, which drove most of them out of the market. In California today there are fewer than five traditional carriers remaining. The products that replaced them are structured differently and carry different trade-offs.Hybrid and annuity-based structures solve the "money gone" problem. With newer products, money placed into a long term care policy either gets used for care or comes back as a death benefit to your heirs. A $100,000 contribution on a leveraged structure might provide $300,000 in long term care coverage day one, with the original contribution returned if care is never needed.Age is no longer the barrier it once was. Older product structures tied to life insurance became expensive and harder to qualify for as clients aged. Annuity-based long term care options have changed that. Someone in their 70s who previously would have been priced out can now access meaningful leverage on their safe-bucket assets without taking on additional market risk.Existing life insurance or annuity cash value can be repositioned. If you are holding a policy you no longer need for its original purpose, it may be possible to exchange that into a long term care structure in a tax-advantaged way, removing gain exposure and creating a leveraged, tax-free benefit pool for care.

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About

Hosted by Chris Galeski and Meghan Pinchuk, Financial Commute is a weekly podcast that gives the rundown on what's going on in the current market, how it affects you, and what you can do about it – all designed to fit into your commute. Each week Chris and Meghan welcome an expert guest, including Morton Wealth advisors, fund managers, and investment analysts, to break down complex financial topics. Our goal for this podcast is to provide you with the tools to help you navigate this challenging environment, leading to a path of more confident investing. 

Information

  • Creator
    Morton Wealth
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    201
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Financial Commute
  • Show Website
    Financial Commute

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