You know the season. Envelopes in the mailbox, messages in your inbox, and a cashier asking if you'd like to round up for a good cause. And somewhere between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve, a lot of generous people make many of their charitable decisions in a hurry. In 2025, nonprofits received 37% of their annual online donations in December, with the final days of the year carrying much of that weight. 1 That's a...

Many people picture a scam as something obviously off: a strange email, a robotic voice, a too-good-to-be-true offer. The more dangerous version sounds like rescue. A calm, professional voice tells you your bank account has been compromised, and they’re calling to help you fix it before it’s too late. That’s what makes it work. Impersonation scams, where criminals pose as banks, financial institutions and other trusted businesses, have become one of the more common ways...

It's easy to set estate planning aside once you've done a version of it. You sign the paperwork. You name a beneficiary. You mentally close the file. The only thing is, the file keeps changing. Accounts get opened. Families grow. Laws shift. And in the space between signing and revisiting, a handful of reasonable-sounding assumptions can start to stand in for an up-to-date plan. Here are six of those assumptions, along with what tends to...