Friends, On Friday I told you I’d use this week to reflect and make new plans. This week looks very different. Two hours after our RTMG call, my dear friend Holger died in a car accident. So instead of thinking about my impossible goal, I’m grieving a friendship that ended far too suddenly. I hesitated to post this here, but I want to share it with you anyway. Just a week and a half ago, Holger and I talked about how much our children mean to us, and how we had both learned to give ambition and the chase for money a different place in our lives. Above all of that stands our love for God our Father. We’ve said it many times in this group: our goals only matter when they fit into what we truly value. You’ve become more than my rapid transformation partners. You’ve become friends, and that’s why I’m sharing this with you. Would you pray for me and my family, and for Holger’s children? Thank you, Marcel

For more than two decades, I've prepared tax returns and managed investments for many of the same families. The people who had done everything right kept describing the same feeling: "I know I should feel okay. I don't." The gap was almost always structural. Their investments and their taxes were being treated as two separate problems instead of one. That observation became my book, The Tax-Smart Retirement Paycheck. It lays out a three-stage income framework that separates near-term income from market swings and accounts for taxes from the first dollar. For two days only, the Kindle edition is 99¢. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HNHF33FL

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These are the slides for today. Have a great meeting I can't join tonight, I'll be playing at a worship evening with my children.

Brief update: I've been away from the group because my partner, Claire's mother, passed away suddenly, and the days since have been harder than either of us expected. I wanted to check in rather than stay silent, though I'm not fully back yet, our France cooking vacation starts in about 10 days.