Marc Ruiz

The payoff for “holding down the fort” for my teammates over the holidays was a long-ago scheduled ski trip the first week of January. The location — Whistler, British Columbia — was on the Marc “bucket list,” and this vacation had been scheduled …

The $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill passed late last year during the final weeks of the prior Congress included some important changes to the rules and laws pertaining to retirement planning. This legislation, termed the Secure Act 2.0, enhances and …

Summer is winding down. I can feel it in the air and see it in the daylight shadows. In many ways, this summer has been the nicest I’ve had in years. The weather in the upper Midwest was nearly perfect, my college kids were both working jobs that were …

One of my favorite Warren Buffet quotes is, “the light on Wall Street can at any time go from green to red without pausing at yellow.” With this in mind, I always enjoy hearing the end of day “market minute” reports on any given media outlet which …

I was driving north in my super thirsty pickup truck, mountain bike in the bed, when my heart jumped. A Speedway billboard showed gas for $4.57 a gallon, and I needed almost a full tank! What a deal. Coming back to my senses, reality reasserted itself. “I …

This week our beloved Spanish exchange daughter Ane returned from Spain to our home to spend most of the remaining summer. Ane spent the 2017-2018 school year with us, and visited again in 2019. My wife and I were supposed to travel to her region in northern …

If you’ve been reading my column for a while, then you probably know that I spent considerable time in my younger years traveling through wilderness areas in North America. My favorite regions are the upper Midwest (Boundary Waters, Isle Royale, Northern …

My wife, Tracy, and I took a short vacation, celebrating our anniversary, to Utah last week. The trip was planned around an invitation we received to the Ford Performance Driving School in Park City. The invite was included when we purchased her new Ford …

Here we go again. The warning sirens are growing louder and louder, the winds of change seem to be blowing, and it looks like a storm is moving in. In order to defend its credibility and attempt to fulfill the price stability (inflation control) component of …

We had a rare weekend free of obligations last week. With nothing holding us down, my wife Tracy, 12-year-old Ethan and I headed up to Southwest Michigan to enjoy the day bumming around and searching out some locally made snacks to have on hand for the coming …