Note: I'm still cleaning out my old 'never submitted' article file. Here's #4. And yes, my OCD compels me to keep track of the numbers.   FRUGALITY IS WORN like a badge of honor among many of us in the HumbleDollar tribe. I am happy to include myself in that club. Even if we no longer have a pressing need to be so frugal, we get a kick out of it. I’ve written several articles on the theme. What about the other side of the coin? How about those times where, instead of going for the low-cost option, I’ve stepped out and splurged a bit? Here are examples of what I consider some of my most satisfying indulgences: All-wheel drive vehicles. I wrecked my first car, a Honda Accord that I had bought right out of college, while driving to work in the snow early in my career. In retrospect, the problem was caused my inexperience and cheapness. I had let the tires wear down to unsafe levels. After that experience, I developed a phobia about driving in the snow. Even with good tires—I had learned my lesson—those unavoidable drives in bad weather caused me considerable stress. Near the end of my career, I bought my first AWD vehicle, an older Subaru Outback. I found driving an AWD to be a cure for my decades-long snow phobia. I got rid of the Outback, which was always a money pit, and both our vehicles are relatively new (at least for us) AWDs now. Landscaping services For many years, a spring ritual at our house would be mulching. A large pile of mulch would be deposited on our driveway and I would chip away at it, wheelbarrow load by wheelbarrow load. I never liked doing it. Lisa used to help a bit, but her back issues made it hard for her to continue. A few years ago, we hired a landscaping service to do our mulching and edging for about a grand. Needless to say, the yard looks much better after being worked on by professionals. Pets At one time, we had three cats and a Shetland Sheepdog. Living with so many animals was like having a four-ring circus at times. It also cost a good bit of money, especially as our precious furballs aged. Still, it was money well spent. We have fond memories of all those pets. The enjoyment we received over their lifetimes was priceless. We’re down to my daughter’s cat, Blossom. She’s responsible for all of Blossom’s costs, so last year we had no pet expenses. I’m itching to get another pup, but a bit hesitant to make such a large commitment this early in retirement. Restaurants No doubt about it, it’s much cheaper to cook and eat at home these days. My wife Lisa is a great cook and I can manage some dishes that aren’t bad. Chicken pot pie is my specialty. I don’t have an office to go to any more, so I am more proactive about getting together with my friends. Often, we meet for a meal. Lisa also eats out often with her friends. I expect our restaurant budget to rise during retirement, and that’s okay. The experience is well worth the expense. I rarely pick up food for a solitary meal any more. I’d rather just eat at home unless a social aspect is involved. Electric Yard Tools In the spring, I would often have a miserable time trying to get my gas-powered yard trimmer to run. I purchased a low-cost electric trimmer hoping to get some relief. Unfortunately, that trimmer had little power and the internal battery did not last long. A few years ago, I bought an EGO brand trimmer, which was expensive but has lots of power. The batteries are easily replaced, but in any case, they are still working well. We also bought a hedge trimmer of the same brand. When my gas-powered Toro mower finally conks out, I expect to replace it with an electric model. There aren’t many material things left that I need or want. Like many HumbleDollar readers at my stage of life, experiences give me the most bang for the buck. How about you, fellow member of the frugal fraternity (or sorority)? What are some of your most satisfying splurges?

I talked about my first paying job, at the local public library, in Learned From Less. I discussed experiences from my second job in Not Long Remembered. My third job, as a temporary factory worker, also made a big impression on me. During the second part of the summer after my college freshman year, I signed up with a temporary employment agency. They would call me most weekday mornings to offer work assignments at pay slightly above minimum wage. There was no penalty for turning down a job. Many of my assignments were at an industrial flooring factory in the town next to mine. It’s still in business, so let’s give it a fictitious name: Rockstrong. Most of my assignments were on the 3 to 11:30 p.m. backshift. On my first day there, I got a clue that it was going to be a bit different from my other jobs. A tall, muscular worker in his late 20s named Stan came up to me and asked how old I was, where I lived, and other standard questions. Then, in the same friendly tone, he asked, “Do you smoke pot?” I answered in the negative and the conversation was over. A little while later, he came over to me and said that it was okay if I didn’t toke. I was still cool, he assured me. My job responsibilities varied depending on the needs for the shift. Some nights I worked on the assembly line. I would package several cans of epoxy, a bag of sand, and a mixing paddle into a box. I would then push the box through a taping machine. The nights went fast when I worked that position. Early on, though, I was warned by a worker named Tom not to work so hard. “You temps come in and make us union guys look bad. You’re only here for a little while, but we’re stuck here all the time.” His argument actually made sense to me. I took the hint and, in any case, I wasn’t looking for trouble at $3.45 an hour. At 8 p.m. sharp each night, Doug, a man built like an NFL linebacker, would stop the assembly line and announce that he needed a bathroom break. I found it curious that rather than head to the bathroom, he would walk through the rollup door into the factory parking lot. I later found out he was buying quaaludes from a local drug dealer. No wonder he was always so mellow for the last few hours of the shift. Sometimes they wouldn’t need me on the assembly line, but the temporary agency still had an assignment for me at Rockstrong, a five-hour janitorial shift. The task was to clean the bathrooms and break area, as well as vacuum the offices. At most, there were two hours of work. Even cleaning at my most leisurely pace, I still had lots of down time. Often, I would fill the time just resting in a comfortable office chair, and other times I’d chat with coworkers. In the office area, there was an honor system snack box, apparently provided by an outside vendor. It included a generous assortment of candy and salty snacks, all nicely arranged in a cardboard display box that included a slot for payment. I was amused to see a note on it: “The last time we collected, this box was $21 short. We’re sure this was just an oversight. Please remember to put in what you owe.” The amount on the note increased as the summer went on. I learned from other workers that Stan had been a high school state wrestling champion in his glory days. One evening I came into work and noticed that he wasn’t around. I found out Stan had been fired for smoking pot on the job. Mark, a new supervisor who worked the backshift, had apparently been the one to catch him. A couple weeks later, I clocked in and was surprised to see Stan was back. The union had gotten him reinstated. This was not good news for Mark, a short, pudgy guy in his early 30s who was studying computers. Every time Mark walked by, Stan would either give him the evil eye or make a loud comment to a coworker about how Mark had ratted him out. My friend Dan also worked at Rockstrong sometimes. Near the end of the summer, he saw Stan confront Mark in the dark, lonely parking lot after the evening shift. “Hey man, why’d you rat me out?  That wasn’t cool. If it’s something personal, we can settle it right now.” To emphasize his last point, Stan slammed his hand on a car hood. Meanwhile, his friend Doug—the linebacker—was shadow boxing under a nearby streetlight. Mark was understandably scared out of his wits. His car keys were rattling in his shaking hands as he stammered out, “no...no...nothing personal.…” All at once Stan and Doug broke out laughing and went on their way. A couple times I was given jobs that I absolutely loathed. The worst one consisted of standing at a wall with a hole in it, scooping sand out and putting it into small plastic bags. Eight hours of solitary, mindless work. I didn’t even have music to distract me. Another time I was paired with a Rockstrong employee at a machine that filled hundred-pound bags with some kind of powder. The regular employee’s job was to push the start button on the machine. My job, as the temp, was to load the hundred-pound bags on pallets. It took a while for my back to recover from that one. Still, it was preferable to the mental torture of sand bagging. None of the workers at Rockstrong wanted to be there. Many of them had plans for moving on, such as training to be an HVAC technician. Few of the regular workers had been there for more than a couple of years. Here are some life lessons I learned that summer: Education is important. I grew up in a family where education was highly valued. Hearing firsthand about the limited options available to the Rockstrong employees complemented that message nicely. Activity is preferrable to boredom. I liked the fast pace of the assembly line. I detested the solitary drudgery of sand bagging. Just because a job is easy doesn’t mean it’s not stressful. Learn to play in the sandbox. I had little in common with the Rockstrong employees. They were the roughest characters I’d ever rubbed shoulders with. Although we’d never be buddies, I was able to get along fine with them. As a temp employee, I was below them in the company hierarchy, which I think helped them accept me. Had I acted superior because I was a “college boy,” things undoubtedly would have gone differently. Find a mission. Some folks, like my Rockstrong coworkers, simply have jobs, many others have careers, and a few fortunate people approach their work as a calling. I’ve always aspired to be in that last category. Having that mindset helps to overcome the times of drudgery that inevitably arise, whatever you do for a living. It’s a good way to approach retirement, as well. Quality can be a fragile thing. At the factory, there were lots of opportunities for product quality to be compromised, not the least by the untrained temporary workers that were hired. For example, there were wide variations in the amounts of sand contained in the bags included in the boxes I assembled. I often wondered how that would play out on the customer end. I’m glad I enrolled in Real Life 101 at Rockstrong when I was 18. The education I received on the factory floor was like nothing I would ever learn from a textbook or college class.

LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, I’ve made both bad and good decisions during my financial journey, and those have affected the financial well-being of my now-older self. Here’s what I consider my five worst financial decisions, followed by my five best: 1. Contributing too little to my 401(k) early on. I’ve confessed to this in a prior article. I missed out on a lot of potential growth by making only token contributions to my 401(k) during my 20s. If I’d saved an extra $2,000 in each of my first five years of 401(k) eligibility and invested that money in an S&P 500-index fund, my balance would have been more than $250,000 higher when I retired in September. 2. Playing it safe with my asset allocation. Throughout almost my entire investing life, stocks have appeared to be priced too high. Remember Greenspan’s "irrational exuberance" proclamation in 1996? My younger self took this kind of statement to heart, and I was far too conservative for decades. Stocks were rarely more than 50% of my portfolio, even in my 20s and 30s. 3. Timing the market. Here’s just one example: I was convinced that, regardless of whether Clinton or Trump won the 2016 election, stocks were headed lower in 2017. I sold some stock holdings in October 2016, and moved the money into cash investments and short-term bonds. Result: Less of my capital benefited from the subsequent high-growth years. After that humbling mistake, I adopted a practice of benign neglect with my 401(k), and that’s turned out far better. 4. Managing my Roth IRA poorly. I opened my Roth in 2004 and invested it aggressively from the outset. In 2008, my portfolio lost almost half its value. Rather than waiting out the decline, as I should have, I sold low and moved all my money into certificates of deposit and money market funds. It was several years before I got around to moving the money back to a brokerage account, where I could invest in stocks. Meanwhile, I again lost out on a lot of investment growth. 5. Keeping too much in low-interest bank accounts. I probably still have too much cash in bank accounts, but sometimes I get lazy about moving it out. Still, these days, I have a large percentage of my cash holdings in a higher-yielding brokerage cash account. Meanwhile, what did I get right financially? Here’s my top five: 1. Purchasing inexpensive vehicles for almost 40 years. I talked about this at length in a previous article. I’ve always prioritized reliability and value when purchasing a car. Status, which doesn’t have a quantifiable financial benefit, has never been a consideration. 2. Staying put in an appropriately sized house. We’ve only owned two houses, so our lifetime losses to transfer taxes, realtor fees and the like are pretty low. We could have afforded—with the help of a mortgage—a much larger first home, but decided to buy only what we needed at the time. Our current home, where we’ve lived for 23 years, still feels perfect to us. By purchasing only what we needed, we’ve never had to take out a mortgage, which means we’ve not only avoided mortgage interest, but also we’ve never had to pay mortgage-application fees or mortgage insurance. 3. Getting serious about saving after age 30. Although I didn’t make funding my 401(k) a priority before I was married, I got aggressive about contributing thereafter. Not having a mortgage freed up cash flow, and that allowed us to shovel hefty sums into my 401(k). Even during the years when we were pulling from savings to fund our children’s college educations, we were able to save a significant percentage of my salary. We also maxed out our Roth IRAs in each of the past 12 years. 4. Working 38 years at a company with a pension plan. The name of my company and the terms of my pension changed several times over my career. Still, I continued to be covered by a pension throughout all 38 years. I never had one of the top-paying positions at the company, but I did stick around longer than most. The monthly pension payouts will be the cornerstone of our finances for the rest of our lives. 5. Marrying my wife. This was my best financial decision. It’s not because I married someone who was rich or was a high earner. Indeed, Lisa has been a homemaker for most of our married life. Rather, having a stable marriage is correlated with wealth accumulation. Marrying and having children increased my sense of purpose during my career. Compared to when I was single, I found I was more content at work. I suspect that led to improved job performance. Lisa and I have a good friendship and a high level of trust in each other. Divorce is so far from being a possibility as to be laughable. I’ve never had any qualms about maintaining joint accounts or funding her Roth IRA from my income. Although we might disagree on spending priorities, we always manage to come up with a plan that works for both of us. Have the outcomes of the good decisions sufficiently outweighed the effects of the bad ones? I think so. We aren’t particularly wealthy. But financially, our retirement should be just fine. Ken Cutler lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and has worked as an electrical engineer in the nuclear power industry for more than 38 years. There, he has become an informal financial advisor for many of his coworkers. Ken is involved in his church, enjoys traveling and hiking with his wife Lisa, is a shortwave radio hobbyist, and has a soft spot for cats and dogs. Check out Ken's earlier articles. [xyz-ihs snippet="Donate"]

I GET A THRILL FROM saving money on groceries. We have customer loyalty cards for the two local grocery stores where we do most of our shopping. The sales receipts list total savings for that shopping trip. I love to see big numbers on that line. I’m a prodigious cereal eater, and my favorite is Cheerios. The regular price for the smallest box is $4.99. Of course, I never pay that. Fairly frequently, one of the local stores runs specials on General Mills brands, and the price for small boxes of Cheerios is often two for $6. Occasionally, they’re two for $5 or even two for $4. I have on rare occasions even purchased two for $3. At $1.50 a box, that’s a savings of 70% over the regular price. If a cereal I eat regularly is discounted significantly, I’m likely to buy it even if we have some in stock already. I’ve also sampled the various store brands of cereal, which are priced much more favorably. I’ve found that I like some as much as the name brands, while others I’d never buy again. None of the generic substitutes for Cheerios tastes good to me. On the other hand, I can’t tell the difference between generic and name-brand frosted mini-wheats. What about other grocery store items? I generally don’t buy things like pouches of tuna, pasta sauce, certain frozen dinners and name-brand orange juice unless they’re discounted. Similarly, I usually won’t try out a new product unless it’s offered on sale. I have an online account for one of our local stores where I can redeem points accrued on past purchases to get a discount on a future bill. Each month, I typically get a $3 or $4 reward for my efforts. Hey, every little bit helps. I’m not a coupon clipper, but I recently downloaded a grocery store’s app to my phone, and I’ve used it a few times to get some good deals. This is a potential growth area for me. With the help of digital coupons on a recent trip, I saved $14.38 on a $50.57 bill. That’s a savings of more than 28%. On one of my many spreadsheets, I keep track of our spending on groceries and related items. I track total spending by store, not by individual purchase. For example, everything we spend at Costco goes into the tally, even though we occasionally purchase non-food items there. Despite all the concern about food inflation, my spreadsheet indicates these expenses have remained steady over the past few years. My efforts as the family’s secondary grocery shopper result in admittedly small overall savings, but it gives me some sense of control in the face of spiraling price increases. I have to give my wife Lisa credit for becoming an increasingly discriminating shopper. Funny thing is, she’s managed to do this without even bothering with spreadsheets. Go figure. Now that I’m semi-retired, I can accompany Lisa to Costco more frequently. The last time I went, we purchased two extra-large boxes of Cheerios for $3.99. That’s the equivalent of less than 87 cents for a small box, a discount of more than 80% over the regular price. That’s far better than the best price I’ve ever gotten at a grocery store. I may need to update my strategy.

When I was a freshman in high school, my earth science teacher once started out a class by playing Pink Floyd’s song Time, from their album The Dark Side of the Moon. He played the uncut version, which runs almost seven minutes. His reasoning for having us listen to the song was that musicians probably know more about time than the typical person. Two years after that science class, a song called Time Passages by Al Stewart became popular. I’m sure readers can think of many other popular songs that include time as a theme. Time is a fascinating and fundamental concept, but as a whole we don’t comprehend it well. One of my high school math teachers presented a mathematical argument as to why time seems to speed up as we age. The year between birthdays four and five represents a full fifth of your life experience. The year between your 49th and 50th birthdays constitutes just two percent of the years you’ve lived. Our perception of time is not static. Over 20 years ago, I went through a difficult period. For the previous several years, I had been in charge of a stressful project at work. My father was dying. We were building a house. And I probably had a form of PTSD lingering from the recent experience of my young daughter’s cancer ordeal. At some point, something snapped and I experienced a long season of serious insomnia. No treatment seemed to help; in fact, the various medications that were prescribed for me made the problem worse. Unable to sleep more than an hour or so at night for months on end, I slipped into an abyss. A single day seemed agonizingly long in the face of unrelenting misery. I’ve wrestled with the concept of time throughout my life. As a young man, I memorized this verse from the Psalms: “Show me, O Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting is my life.” It’s a verse I still meditate on, and it takes on different layers of meaning as I age. Still, I don’t know the number of days I have left. As we know all too well here at HumbleDollar, our lifespan expectations can be shattered in a moment. My father lived to be almost 84, and my mother 91. Based on that, I seem to have a default mental model that tells me to figure on living until about 80. Yet, when I think about it, my parents’ lifespans provide little basis for that assumption. When my dad reached 60, for a brief while he talked as if it were likely he wouldn’t be around much longer. I didn’t understand Dad’s attitude until much later, when I found out his own father had dropped dead at 61. That age must have become a benchmark for him. Fortunately, it was off by 23 years. I find I have little interest in agonizing over the minutiae of how long of a retirement to plan for. No matter how long one’s life lasts, in the end it will be “fleeting” in comparison to time already passed. And there is also a concept called eternity to consider, which is both mind-blowing and sobering.

In honor of my late father's birthday today, I've decided to post an article I wrote many months ago but never released to Jonathan for publication.  MY FATHER’S FINANCES has some parallels to my own. Like me, he saved his end of year paystubs. Using an inflation calculator, I was able to compare his earnings to mine. He was an accountant who rose to the highest level of his company, while I was an engineer who topped off at senior staff level, at a pay scale roughly equivalent to that of an engineering manager. Both of us had jobs that paid decently from the outset. Engineering is known for having good starting salaries for new college graduates. As a graduate of the Wharton School of Pennsylvania, Dad was well compensated early in his career also. Neither of us made gobs of money, but our incomes were comfortably above average throughout our working lives. Dad’s income history, adjusted for inflation, tracks closely with mine. One exception: His inflation-adjusted salary pulled away from mine in the last phase of his career, after he was elected president of his company. My father stopped working full-time at 61. So did I. He was careful with money, but certainly no miser. My spending habits are similar to his. Neither of us ever carried a bank home mortgage. He funded three college educations, at a time when tuition was not so expensive. I paid for two. Both of our wives were primarily homemakers. Despite all of the parallels and similar incomes, I find myself seemingly better situated financially for retirement than he was at my age. Why is that? I can think of three major factors: Pension. We were both fortunate to be covered by a pension, but mine replaces a higher percentage of my working income than his did. Additionally, I chose a 100% survivor option on my pension. Dad’s pension had no survivor benefits. Tax-advantaged accounts. Dad worked in an era before 401(k) plans and Roth IRAs were available. He never owned an IRA of any kind. In contrast, I’ve reaped years of tax-free growth from these plans. I also received employer matching contributions in my 401(k) account. Low fee index funds. Dad’s investments were completely in individual stocks and bonds. He had to pay broker fees whenever he purchased or sold a stock or bond. For much of his life, index funds were not readily available. Those that were available had higher fees relative to today’s funds. Financially, Dad’s retirement was a success. He had enough resources to fund both his and my mom’s remaining years after he stopped working full-time. My three sisters and I even received modest inheritances after Mom passed away, 34 years after Dad retired. Although my wife and I seem to be in even better financial shape at the outset of retirement, I see one big area where we are probably at a disadvantage. Our medical and long-term care expenses are currently unknowns as my wife and I look ahead to the next 20 to 30 years—Lord willing. My father was treated for cancer and my mom had dementia, an amputation and other major health issues for over a decade before she passed. Still, medical expenses did not make an appreciable dent in my parents’ savings. They had Medicare and Medigap policies that covered almost everything. On the other hand, Mom’s savings did get eroded by several years spent in nursing homes. There’s a good chance that things won’t go as well for us on the medical expenses front. We don’t have long-term care insurance, so any expenses incurred in that regard would be totally our responsibility. Health care costs have risen faster than inflation in the years since my father passed away. Availability of providers has also become a concern. The medical practice my wife and I have gone to for years has become woefully understaffed. My dermatologist wouldn’t accept my wife as a new patient. Last winter, my wife had to reschedule her routine dentist appointment due to a snowstorm that closed the dentist’s office. Her rescheduled appointment was six months out. When she contacted a different dental practice near us, she found she would only have to wait a month. The catch: the cost for a cleaning was $611, and they were not part of our insurance company’s network.