Fall Items to Check Off Your List
With fall fast approaching, it’s time to take care of a few things before year end that can also set you up for the start of next year.
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- Retirement contributions and withdrawals – Just as it’s important to make the necessary contributions to your retirement plan based on your financial plan, you must also take your required minimum distribution (RMD) by December 31 to avoid any penalties if above age 72 or own an inherited IRA. The Merriman Client Services team is hard at work making sure these are all completed for clients. Contributions: The deadline for 2021 Roth IRA and Traditional IRA contributions is April 15, 2022.
I recently heard a TED Radio Hour story on NPR about Lux Narayan, an entrepreneur and data analyst. His organization spent two years analyzing the obituaries in The New York Times, looking for threads of commonality between the people who were featured. Then, his team created a word cloud of the text to show which words turned up most often.
As football season is fully underway, many of us get swept up in the weekly excitement of watching our favorite teams take on their rivals. Maybe you’re closely watching the ups and downs of your Fantasy Football team and strategizing about who to start each week and what the most beneficial trades may be. It’s an exciting time of year for many fans. Let’s take this opportunity to highlight the work one football player is doing off the field. 
In 2006, during the first football game played in New Orleans’ Superdome since Hurricane Katrina tore through the city the previous year, Steve Gleason, a safety for the Saints, blocked a punt against the Atlanta Falcons. The blocked punt resulted in a Saints touchdown and marked the beginning of the winningest season for the Saints up to that point. More than that, though, the blocked punt turned into a symbol for the resiliency of New Orleans. Looking at challenges Gleason has faced in his own life, it’s easy to view the blocked punt as a symbol of his own resiliency as well. 
