In This Issue 

The Ground Beneath Her Feet — Ashley Cotler on starting over, survival, and why financial clarity became a lifeline

WEBINAR: The Gap Between Your Tax Return and Your Financial Plan — Ben Beck, CFP® and Garrett Murphy, Thursday April 23rd at 12pm ET

Our Own Augusta — Inside the second annual Beck Bode Masters at X-Golf

Planning Corner: 80-30-10 — Ben Beck, CFP® on compounding, told in three numbers

The Ground Beneath Her feet

There are some stories that are hard to tell, and harder to tell well.

Ashley Cotler's is one of them.

Ashley is Client Success Manager at Beck Bode. Before that, she and her husband Justin Cotler built CrossFit Dynamix in New York City for thirteen years, a business, a community, a life. Then the pandemic took sixty percent of their revenue in three days. Their son was born the same week. They moved across the country. They started over.

Somewhere in the middle of rebuilding, a mutual friend suggested they talk to Beck Bode. Ashley was skeptical. "It felt like the last thing we needed to think about," she remembers. They came in anyway.

Five years later, when Justin spent twenty-nine days in the hospital this winter, the plan they had built in the background became the thing that held everything together.

"The only thing that gave me a sense of strength was knowing that because of how we have our finances set up, I would be able to handle the emotional load. I wouldn't have to be in a scramble."

Ashley Cotler

For National Financial Literacy Month, Ashley sat down with us to share what she's learned, about rebuilding, about teaching her kids, about why financial clarity showed up exactly when she needed it most.

→ Read Ashley's Full Story

Webinar: The Gap Between Your Tax Return and Your Financial Plan

For most people, tax preparation and financial planning happen in two separate rooms.

Your tax return gets filed. Your plan keeps running. And the gap between them. The Roth conversion that didn't happen, the deduction that got missed, the capital gain that could have been harvested.

On Thursday, April 23rd at 12pm ET, Co-Managing Partner Ben Beck, CFP® and Director of Tax Services Garrett Murphy sit down for a conversation about what happens when tax strategy and financial planning are in the same room.

They'll cover the mistakes they see most often, the Roth opportunities that hide in plain sight, and what a year looks like when the two disciplines actually work together, rather than catching up to each other at the end.

Our hope is that you walk away from this one seeing your tax return a little differently. Not as a document you file once a year, but as a window into planning decisions you can make in the new year.

→ Register Here

Can't join live? Register anyway and we'll send you the replay when available.

Our own Augusta

A big thank-you to all the clients and friends who joined us earlier this month for the second annual Beck Bode Masters Tournament at X-Golf East Walpole.

Scramble format. Longest drive and closest-to-the-pin contests. The real Masters playing on the screens above us. It was a fantastic night of good competition and fun.

Congratulations to our 2026 Masters Champions: Travis, Dave, and Brendan. Green jackets earned, and a round at Oakley Country Club waiting for them.

Thank you to everyone who made the drive, the swing, and the night what it was. And a special thank-you to Jim, Vinny, and the team for making it happen, and to X-Golf East Walpole for hosting us again.

See you next year.

Planning Corner: 80-30-10

This month, Co-Managing Partner and CIO Ben Beck, CFP® shared a data point worth sitting with.

Imagine a 62-year-old entering retirement today. Born in 1964. Over the course of that lifetime:

• The S&P 500 is up 80 times (from ~85 to ~6,845)

• Dividends paid by the S&P 500 are up 30 times (from $2.58 to $78.50)

• The cost of living is up 10 times (CPI, the standard measure of inflation, from ~31 to ~310)

"It's about realizing how much of a miracle happens over that time. And it happens slowly. The dividend doesn't go up 30 times in one year. The market doesn't go up 80 times overnight."

Ben Beck, CFP®

For Financial Literacy Month, it's worth remembering: there are only a few variables that matter over the long term. The growth of the equity markets. The growth of dividends. And inflation. Most everything else is noise.

Slow is smooth. And smooth is fast.

A Final Thought

A financial plan isn't just a document. It's a living thing.

Tax returns get filed. Contribution deadlines close. The paperwork lands on desks across the country, and the decisions you made last year either held or they didn't.

Financial literacy, as Ashley reminded us, isn't really about charts or terminology. It's about whether the work you did is going to hold the weight of whatever comes next — the expected and the unexpected both. And the plans that hold aren't the ones built once and left alone. They're the ones that grew alongside the life they were built for. A new child. A new career. A business that ended. A diagnosis that arrived. A good year. A hard one.

Different stories, same theme. A plan worth having compounds because you keep tending it. It adapts because life requires it to. And when the ground shifts, it's the foundation you didn't know you were building all along.

That's the kind of work we're honored to do alongside you.

Thank you for the trust you place in us.

- The Beck Bode Team

P.S.

Last month's cover was Galway, Ireland. A few of you guessed it!

This month's cover is a little closer to home. Here's your hint: If you cross the bridge you can park your car in their yard. 

Share your best guess we'll share the answer in the next edition.