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PRIVATE PRACTICE: CLIENT@KENDALLHOUGHTON.COM
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NEWSLETTER: KENDALLHOUGHTON.SUBSTACK.COM
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RESEARCH: GOOGLE SCHOLAR
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The art and math of money.
Money is inextricably linked with every part of life. The global economy is a collaborative effort that governs the world. Our individual financial choices and fortune shape our life. When we understand money, and we know what we want, we can navigate this reality in alignment with our values. We can make the most of our life -- whatever that means to us.
Individual
Guidance
As important as money is, we are typically left on our own to figure it out. We inherit some habits from our community of origin. If we are lucky, these are good habits. We might learn a few things during the course of education. What none of this provides, is support as we navigate our choices.
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Each moment of life comes with financial decisions. A wished-for moment like marriage may contain the question of a prenuptial agreement. A life-changing medical diagnosis could change how essential a will feels. I have yet to meet a new parent who has not ruminated on the appropriate college fund while rocking their baby at 3am.
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We can navigate your situation. Through as many or as few one-on-one sessions as needed, you will understand the financial landscape relevant to you, know clearly what you want, and have an action plan. For more complex circumstances, I am available for ongoing and transitional support. I provide referrals to CPAs, lawyers, and wealth managers as relevant.
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Many times what feels overwhelming in the whirl of our mind becomes obvious in a couple confidential, guided conversations. Sessions are a flat fee, and I receive no commissions for referrals. This ensures your ability to feel safe providing unguarded honesty about your situation and preferences.
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This neutrality can be especially helpful if you are navigating the inflow of new wealth as in the context of company sales, inheritance, trust management, marriage, or first-time artistic and athletic contracts. Primary earners are supported by a confidential space to address concerns and potential weaknesses in their financial decision-making.
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Your path might include a prenuptial agreement, charitable giving, impact investing, self-imposed allowances, creation of a trust, bequeathment to your children. Or none of these things.​​ When you understand the system, you can choose for yourself.
Education
Subscribe to my newsletter to receive spontaneously-dispatched explanations of the economy and our role in it.
Academic Research
We could each work as an isolated, independent farmer relying entirely on our own efforts and luck. Most of us do not choose this. Instead, we give and receive effort, ideas, and resources with others — this is known as participating in the economy. The ideal economy makes good use of each person’s talents, honors our innate motivation systems, puts our collective power toward the problems we care about, and splits the rewards of the joint labor in an equitable manner. This is a very hard problem and we have not solved it yet.
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My research concentrates on evaluating how workers participate in the economy. I am particularly interested in understanding how the economy can be structured such that the lived experience of workers is valued alongside the creation of consumer surplus. Most people are both consumers and workers, after all. In recent decades, the economy has been oriented toward the efficiency gains that result from specialization. Individuals have sorted into being almost entirely child-rearing oriented, or almost entirely labor-market oriented, and labor-market individuals sort into narrowly defined areas of expertise. This is in tension with what we know from the preference data. Individuals, in general, enjoy mixed consumption bundles. A person is more-likely to enjoy a life in which they are involved in both child-rearing and labor-market activities, and a career that includes variety both within and over time. They might enjoy a career that includes gaps in working distributed across the life-cycle rather than concentrated in an end-of-life retirement phase. Education that occurs throughout life, and responds to changes in preferences and the world, might be preferable to education that is condensed to the initial phase of life.
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I am guided by the wisdom that the appropriate strategy changes as the problem evolves. The necessary efficiency required to solve the problem of scarce food, health, and shelter may no longer serve the problem of maximizing human utility in developed economies. The appropriate planner's problem incorporates the value of human production with the experience of that production. ​​
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DR. KENDALL HOUGHTON
Kendall Houghton holds a PhD in Economics. She is an educator, researcher, and consultant. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals.
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She works for an economy of expansive collaboration and joyful creation.
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Her experience carding wool with her grandmother, holding space for stories as the morning cashier at a convenience store, and teaching students how to spin up virtual machines informs her belief that we are all essential and we are all makers. May we go farther together than we could alone. May we all live the good life.