Creating a comprehensive financial plan for clients is just part of what differentiates us. Investable assets are not just numbers on a page. They represent hopes and dreams. The best financial advice is that which is tailored for the individual, advice that creates a better life for you and those you love. So when we meet with you we take into account all of these issues all the while looking at the big picture and the tax consequences of your decisions. This is what custom comprehensive planning is all about. And we will be here when you need us. There will be no automated response to any of your questions or calls. We are here to serve you. Call or stop by our office to set up an appointment or to learn more about how we can help.
Team Intro
Creating a comprehensive financial plan for clients is just part of what differentiates us. Investable assets are not just numbers on a page. They represent hopes and dreams. The best financial advice is that which is tailored for the individual, advice that creates a better life for you and those you love. So when we meet with you we take into account all of these issues all the while looking at the big picture and the tax consequences of your decisions. This is what custom comprehensive planning is all about. And we will be here when you need us. There will be no automated response to any of your questions or calls. We are here to serve you. Call or stop by our office to set up an appointment or to learn more about how we can help.
Our solutions
About Thrivent
A different kind of financial company
Thrivent is a member-owned financial services organization offering advice, investments, insurance, banking and generosity programs to help clients make an impact on the people, causes and communities they love.
Where Money Means More™
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Community impact
Thrivent membership benefits
When you join Thrivent, you become part of something bigger. You share in the collective ownership of our company and you’re part of a community of people looking out for others. In addition to Thrivent’s financial expertise and solutions, membership provides eligible clients with tools and resources to make it easy to give of yourself and live a more meaningful life.
Events
2026-07-09T16:00:00
Back to School Supply Drive for Boys and Girls Club of Northwest Indiana
Help us with our Back-to-School Supply drive!
Bring any items listed below to the Summer Concerts in Valparaiso at Central Park Plaza on July 9 or August 20, 2026 to the Maar Financial Group tent. Or drop off our Valparaiso office location, M-F, 9am-3pm at 331 W 806 N, Valparaiso.
With your support we can give the kids at the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Northwest Indiana a great start to the new school year!
Book bags
Folders
Crayons
Colored markers
Pencils and erasers
Colored pencils
Scissors
Glue sticks
Pencil sharpeners
Construction paper
2026-07-10T00:00:00
Summer Concert Series 2026
Gather your family and friends and join Maar Financial Group for a fun evening in the park with live music from Cosmic Velocity, a high-energy, classic rock band!
Kick off the Valparaiso Events Summer Concert Series and our Back-to-School supplies donation drive to benefit the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Northwest Indiana with a night of great music, lively atmosphere, and community. Be sure to visit our tent between 5:30 and 6:45 p.m. for some summertime goodies and drop off your donations.
Help us with our Back-to-School Supply drive
Bring any items listed below to the concert and with your support we can give the kids at the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Northwest Indiana a great start to the new school year!
Book bags
Folders
Crayons
Colored markers
Pencils and erasers
Colored pencils
Scissors
Glue sticks
Pencil sharpeners
Construction paper
No registration required — just bring your lawn chairs or blankets and enjoy a great night of summer entertainment!
Questions? Call 219-763-2244.
Cosmic Velocity is not endorsed or affiliated with Thrivent.
Strong and stable
We are proud to be part of Thrivent, a company with a long heritage of financial strength and fiscal stability. For more than 120 years, Thrivent has helped people build their financial futures and live more generous lives. Today, Thrivent is a Fortune 500 company, offering a full range of expert financial solutions, serving more than 2.4 million clients, as well as the communities in which they live and work.
News and insights
Commentary April 2026
Looking out my open window while I write, I hear the birds chirping as a warm breeze moves across my desk. All looks serene right now, but within a couple hours, severe storms are predicted to travel across the area bringing hail and high winds followed by a thirty degree drop in temperature from yesterday’s high. Welcome to spring in the Midwest.
When I sat down to draft this commentary, I knew the theme was going to be about spring. As I contemplated what spring meant to me, I researched what others had to say about the topic. I found it all came down to one word: “rebirth”. It seems such an obvious answer that it was a bit anticlimactic. It almost goes without saying; of course, spring is the season of Easter and plants emerging from their winter soil while trees bud and leaf-out in all their glory. We are surrounded by reminders and images of rebirth throughout this wonderful season that owes its success in part to these sometimes-challenging spring storms and rains.
When we think about the idea of “rebirth,” it may seem as if it doesn’t apply to the work we do at the Maar Financial Group. The plans we create with our clients are designed to be long-term; they certainly aren’t altered with the seasons. It is true we must handle financial storms as they arise. Often the storms are temporary, caused by events such as a company posting lower than expected earnings or a jobless report that is higher than expected. Sometimes the turbulence is more challenging. Many of us remember the spring and summer of 2008 when credit markets were overwhelmed by the collapse of first Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers. This set off a widespread financial panic, but we always make sure our clients are prepared for volatile markets, and this was ultimately another storm we saw our way through. We adjusted to new conditions, but even that didn’t seem to constitute anything like a “rebirth.”
But as I thought about our clients, especially those who have been with us for decades, I came to realize I actually had witnessed rebirth on a regular basis. What I have seen over time is a rebirth of purpose. Often when we begin working with clients, their primary purpose is to save and invest for retirement security which is a significant goal. Meeting it can take years but after clients accomplish this goal, the question of “what to do now” emerges.
The answer to this question can give rise to much greater complexity than that of planning for retirement. Then the focus was on one thing: saving. This new question requires two different processes which might appear to be at cross-purposes.
On the one hand, the retirement account must continue to remain strong, it is the fortress that offers protection from the shifting winds of circumstances beyond our control. But on the other hand, it is also a time of life when people want to “do” things they have put off when they were busy raising families and building careers. For some this involves travel, moving to a new place to live, and/or establishing a legacy of charitable giving. Any of these plans will require an expenditure of precious resources and part of our challenge at the Maar Financial Group is finding a way to balance these two very different processes so that our clients can both fulfill their dreams and maintain their financial strength.
I have come to think of this rebirth of process as really a process of alignment. Our goal is to help our clients align money with purpose. This often involves identifying their core values and aligning them with their goals. Then when they direct their saving or spending towards these goals, they find themselves moving towards that which provides them with a feeling of fulfillment.
Money represents different things to us, depending very much on the stage of life in which you find yourself. It is usually when you have achieved the basic, and important, goals of financial security that you are now free to think about money in a new way. It can become a tool for helping you toward a more meaningful life.
And that is truly a rebirth. Thrivent is a diversified financial services organization that helps people achieve financial clarity, enabling lives full of meaning and gratitude. Thrivent and its subsidiary and affiliate companies serve more than 2.3 million clients, offering advice, insurance, investments, banking and generosity products and programs over the phone, online as well as through financial professionals and independent agents nationwide.
Thrivent is the marketing name for Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. Insurance products issued by Thrivent. Not available in all states. Securities and investment advisory services offered through Thrivent Investment Management Inc., a registered investment adviser, member FINRA and SIPC, and a subsidiary of Thrivent. Licensed agent/producer of Thrivent. Registered representative of Thrivent Investment Management, Inc. Advisory services available through investment adviser representatives only. Thrivent.com/disclosures.
The concepts presented are intended for educational purposes only. This information should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, strategy, or product.
MFG Winter 2026 Commentary
February is often referred to as “the dead of winter,” and I can understand how it may seem that way. On bitter cold mornings when I take the dogs out, everything can seem deathly quiet. There is no sound: no birds singing, no leaves rustling — just the sound the dogs and I make in the frozen stillness as my boots crunch a path through the snow. Yet, in reality, our snow-covered landscape is far from “dead.” It only appears that way to us humans who are limited by our sense of sight and sound. If we had the hearing of the Grey Owl we would hear the heartbeat of animals even if they were under a foot of snow. If we had the eyesight of the American Eagle we could detect a bird on a branch from over a mile away. After a snowfall, we may see the tracks of rabbits, squirrels, deer, and all sorts of animals. Ones we never heard or saw. Even on these bitter cold mornings there is much life going on all around us. Trees and plants are already preparing for the spring that will soon arrive.
Nonetheless, a sense of peace exists in the quiet stillness. Then the dogs and I go inside where I check the morning news and suddenly, I’m bombarded by many, sometimes alarming, headlines. The mornings’ peace dissipates quickly, replaced with the effort it takes to sift through the events from the previous day. Being constantly connected via the internet and the 24-hour news cycle can leave us feeling overwhelmed and anxious. I have first-hand experience with this, because as the day goes on, clients will be asking how these news stories will affect the markets. I will often have to answer in absolute honesty, “I have no idea.” The truth is once again our human nature can mislead us. Humans look for patterns and find comfort in believing they can detect cause and effect. That is usually just as much an illusion as standing in a still winter landscape in the dead of winter.
The headlines are representative of just a tiny fraction of “events” that have happened in a narrow band of time. Over a 24-hour period how many events take place that have the potential to cause people to buy or sell in what we call the market? Dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of events? Whatever the number actually is (and no one knows) very few of these events will actually make the news.
It is all too easy to be alarmed by news stories that cause uncertainty and it’s only natural to worry that these events may affect our financial security. But the impact of any event will be altered by countless other events happening at the same time. This is what is known as “market dynamics,” which is a technical term for “the unknown.” And there are different types of unknowns. When he was Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld was criticized for saying there were “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” This may have sounded strange, but he was making a valid point, one that very much influences market dynamics.
There are things that we know will happen at some point; we just don’t know when. Those are the “known unknowns.” At some point the Fed will adjust the prime lending rate, either up or down. At some point a major company will announce record profits or losses. We know these things will happen, but it is foolish to try and peer into the future and attempt to predict. The “unknown unknowns” are when events we couldn’t possibly foresee take place. These could be natural disasters or something caused by human behavior such as the attacks on September 11, 2001. Events, predicted or not, can have the power to move markets. But acknowledging that to be true is a far cry from claiming one can discern cause and effect. And what of unintended consequences?
One striking example is what happened when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 reduced the thriving city of Chicago to a smoldering ash heap. Experts predicted this would be the end of Chicago as a major American city. Instead, it became a tremendous opportunity for the city to be made new, and within a decade Chicago was rivaling New York as the most important American city. Any event can have effects that even the most informed experts cannot imagine.
Even though the cause and effect of market dynamics can be murky, at Maar Financial Group we take all of this into account as we fashion your financial plan. This is why it is important for you to work with professionals. While there is no crystal ball that tells us what the effects of an event will be, we know that over the course of time there will be changes, even sudden changes, in markets. We don’t pretend we can predict specific events, but we can predict that markets evolve and that is built into the planning we do. Of course, we monitor the ever-changing financial landscape, but we don’t react to every shifting trend. A trend is defined as a “preference that many people follow, a shift to something new.”
We don’t chase or follow trends. Trends can be as illusory as “the dead of winter.” Our thinking is long-term, because over the long-term events achieve a clarity lacking in the short-term. A term for this is “purposeful investing.” This approach frees you from worrying about every headline and allows you to focus on things like meaningful friendships, helping others, and enjoying family. These are the sorts of things that don’t make headlines. But in life they are the things that actually matter. It can be easy to lose sight of that when caught up in the endless news cycle. We can help make sure this doesn’t happen to you. Thrivent is a diversified financial services organization that helps people achieve financial clarity, enabling lives full of meaning and gratitude. Thrivent and its subsidiary and affiliate companies serve more than 2.3 million clients, offering advice, insurance, investments, banking and generosity products and programs over the phone, online as well as through financial professionals and independent agents nationwide.
Thrivent is the marketing name for Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. Insurance products issued by Thrivent. Not available in all states. Securities and investment advisory services offered through Thrivent Investment Management Inc., a registered investment adviser, member FINRA and SIPC, and a subsidiary of Thrivent. Licensed agent/producer of Thrivent. Registered representative of Thrivent Investment Management, Inc. Advisory services available through investment adviser representatives only. Thrivent.com/disclosures.
The concepts presented are intended for educational purposes only. This information should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, strategy, or product.
MFG Winter 2026 Commentary
February is often referred to as “the dead of winter,” and I can understand how it may seem that way. On bitter cold mornings when I take the dogs out, everything can seem deathly quiet. There is no sound: no birds singing, no leaves rustling — just the sound the dogs and I make in the frozen stillness as my boots crunch a path through the snow. Yet, in reality, our snow-covered landscape is far from “dead.” It only appears that way to us humans who are limited by our sense of sight and sound. If we had the hearing of the Grey Owl we would hear the heartbeat of animals even if they were under a foot of snow. If we had the eyesight of the American Eagle we could detect a bird on a branch from over a mile away. After a snowfall, we may see the tracks of rabbits, squirrels, deer, and all sorts of animals. Ones we never heard or saw. Even on these bitter cold mornings there is much life going on all around us. Trees and plants are already preparing for the spring that will soon arrive.
Nonetheless, a sense of peace exists in the quiet stillness. Then the dogs and I go inside where I check the morning news and suddenly, I’m bombarded by many, sometimes alarming, headlines. The mornings’ peace dissipates quickly, replaced with the effort it takes to sift through the events from the previous day. Being constantly connected via the internet and the 24-hour news cycle can leave us feeling overwhelmed and anxious. I have first-hand experience with this, because as the day goes on, clients will be asking how these news stories will affect the markets. I will often have to answer in absolute honesty, “I have no idea.” The truth is once again our human nature can mislead us. Humans look for patterns and find comfort in believing they can detect cause and effect. That is usually just as much an illusion as standing in a still winter landscape in the dead of winter.
The headlines are representative of just a tiny fraction of “events” that have happened in a narrow band of time. Over a 24-hour period how many events take place that have the potential to cause people to buy or sell in what we call the market? Dozens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of events? Whatever the number actually is (and no one knows) very few of these events will actually make the news.
It is all too easy to be alarmed by news stories that cause uncertainty and it’s only natural to worry that these events may affect our financial security. But the impact of any event will be altered by countless other events happening at the same time. This is what is known as “market dynamics,” which is a technical term for “the unknown.” And there are different types of unknowns. When he was Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld was criticized for saying there were “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns.” This may have sounded strange, but he was making a valid point, one that very much influences market dynamics.
There are things that we know will happen at some point; we just don’t know when. Those are the “known unknowns.” At some point the Fed will adjust the prime lending rate, either up or down. At some point a major company will announce record profits or losses. We know these things will happen, but it is foolish to try and peer into the future and attempt to predict.
The “unknown unknowns” are when events we couldn’t possibly foresee take place. These could be natural disasters or something caused by human behavior such as the attacks on September 11, 2001. Events, predicted or not, can have the power to move markets. But acknowledging that to be true is a far cry from claiming one can discern cause and effect. And what of unintended consequences?
One striking example is what happened when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 reduced the thriving city of Chicago to a smoldering ash heap. Experts predicted this would be the end of Chicago as a major American city. Instead, it became a tremendous opportunity for the city to be made new, and within a decade Chicago was rivaling New York as the most important American city. Any event can have effects that even the most informed experts cannot imagine.
Even though the cause and effect of market dynamics can be murky, at Maar Financial Group we take all of this into account as we fashion your financial plan. This is why it is important for you to work with professionals. While there is no crystal ball that tells us what the effects of an event will be, we know that over the course of time there will be changes, even sudden changes, in markets. We don’t pretend we can predict specific events, but we can predict that markets evolve and that is built into the planning we do. Of course, we monitor the ever-changing financial landscape, but we don’t react to every shifting trend.
A trend is defined as a “preference that many people follow, a shift to something new.” We don’t chase or follow trends. Trends can be as illusory as “the dead of winter.” Our thinking is long-term, because over the long-term events achieve a clarity lacking in the short-term. A term for this is “purposeful investing.” This approach frees you from worrying about every headline and allows you to focus on things like meaningful friendships, helping others, and enjoying family. These are the sorts of things that don’t make headlines. But in life they are the things that actually matter. It can be easy to lose sight of that when caught up in the endless news cycle. We can help make sure this doesn’t happen to you.
Thrivent is the marketing name for Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. Insurance products issued by Thrivent. Not available in all states. Securities and investment advisory services offered through Thrivent Investment Management Inc., a registered investment adviser, member FINRA and SIPC, and a subsidiary of Thrivent. Licensed agent/producer of Thrivent. Registered representative of Thrivent Investment Management Inc. Advisory services available through investment adviser representatives only.Thrivent.com/disclosures.
Insurance products, securities and investment advisory services are provided by appropriately appointed and licensed financial advisors and professionals. Only individuals who are financial advisors are credentialed to provide investment advisory services. Visit Thrivent.com or FINRA's Broker Check for more information about our financial advisors.
Thrivent provides advice and guidance through its Financial Planning Framework that generally includes a review and analysis of a client’s financial situation. A client may choose to further their planning engagement with Thrivent through its Dedicated Planning Services (an investment advisory service) that results in written recommendations for a fee.
Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. The mutual fund prospectus contains more information on investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses, which investors should read carefully and consider before investing. Available at Thrivent.com.
Office information
Address:
331W 806 NValparaiso, IN 46385
Phone:
219-763-2244Operating Hours:
M – Th 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.; F 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Phone:
708-672-0571Operating Hours:
M-Th 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.; F 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.
Phone:
219-763-2244Operating Hours:
By appointment