This past weekend, my wife Lisa and I traveled to Middleburg, Virginia—a little over an hour west of Washington DC. My son’s father-in-law Matt, who also happened to be one of my college apartment-mates, is turning 60 soon and his family threw him a huge surprise party. Most of Matt’s immediate and extended family members were there, as well as key people from his career, church and other parts of life. I was part of the college friend contingent. The bash, replete with food trucks, lawn games for the kids, and a great band, was a smashing success. The location for the event was Welbourne Inn, a huge estate that dates from 1775 and sprawls over 500 acres. The main house, which has 10 large bedrooms, has been inhabited by the Dulany family since 1833. Guests there can be forgiven for thinking they are spending a night at the museum (or in our case, two nights). Our spirited hostess, friend of Matt’s wife, and Dulany family member Rebecca stated that the house contains over 9000 books, the accumulation of eight generations. I picked a volume out at random in one of the libraries. It had been published in 1840. The collection of furniture, paintings, and artifacts housed at Welbourne is astounding. A sizable portion of the estate’s land is dedicated to an equine retirement community. People pay to have their beloved horses live out the rest of their days being cared for in an idyllic setting. About 90 horses make Welbourne their home. My wife and I, along with college friends Bill and Catherine, journeyed into this wonderland our first evening there. As much as I love animals, I’ve never spent much time around horses. When six or eight of these giants came lumbering over to us, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Seems like they just wanted to satisfy their curiosity and maybe get a pat or scratch. On our last day at Welbourne, before breakfast, I went out alone to the pasture. Two majestic horses in particular took an interest in me and I spent a long time scratching and sweet-talking them. It was truly magical for me. I once wrote an article in which I mused about the difficulties of downsizing our personal library of about a thousand books. My issues seem insignificant compared to the challenges Rebecca has managing an ancient family library that’s almost 10 times as large. Somehow, she has managed to cull out about a thousand books during her tenure. We talk a lot about travel here at HumbleDollar. Great vacations don’t have to involve expensive cruises, overseas travel, pampering at five-star hotels, or even lengthy periods of time. For me, this three-day road trip pretty much had it all: quality time spent with family and some of my best lifelong friends, great food and drink, natural beauty, immersion in a bygone era, and connections with some special animals. The cost for our road trip was modest, maybe $500 total. We didn’t even buy a present for Matt. His wife Katie, in the invitation, implored, “No presents please, oh please! We have enough stuff!” As usual, she and Matt were the ones doing the giving.

I BEGAN MY FIRST JOB out of college 38 years ago. A newly minted electrical engineer, I was assigned by Philadelphia Electric Company to work at its Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Delta, Pennsylvania. As a young child, I had visited the Peach Bottom Unit 1 Visitor Center, never anticipating that I’d someday return to the site as an employee. My concentration in college was power engineering, so I fully expected to be working in the transmission and distribution side of the electric power business. I’d taken exactly one credit hour of nuclear engineering classes in my undergraduate studies. But due to what I attribute to God’s providence, I ended up at Peach Bottom in the generation side of the business. Less than a year after I started there, the Chernobyl accident occurred, casting a pall on the entire nuclear power industry. About a year after that, Peach Bottom was shut down by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and it wasn’t clear that the station would ever produce another megawatt. Here I was two years into my new career, employed at the worst U.S. nuclear power plant and in a dying industry. I felt I’d made a boneheaded career move and my future would involve either extended unemployment or an entirely new field of work. If folks had told me back then that I’d still be at Peach Bottom in 2023, I would have laughed at them. At the time, even in the best-case scenario, the plant’s operating license only extended to 2008. What happened? After two and a half years of turmoil, determination, hard work and necessary paradigm shifts, Peach Bottom was granted its license again and started making power. Fast forward through the next few decades, and the plant had been through several power uprates and two life-extension efforts, extending the plant’s operating life until at least 2053. For many years now, Peach Bottom has been recognized as one of the best-run nuclear power plants in the country, if not the world. During my career, I’ve seen several up-and-down cycles in the nuclear power industry. In the 1990s, deregulation came to the electric power industry. The financial pressure on the affected utilities was acute. My company went through at least three major downsizings during that decade. Over a quarter of the company’s employees left during the first reduction, which involved generous voluntary retirement incentives to all employees age 50 and over. These incentives included a nine-month salary lump-sum payment and a pension sweetener that added five years of age and five years of service to the defined benefit pension formula. By the time the third downsizing was complete, there were very few employees left over age 50. [xyz-ihs snippet="Mobile-Subscribe"] In 2001, when I was 39, employees were offered the opportunity to convert their traditional pension to a cash-balance pension. The industry wasn’t exactly thriving financially, even though nuclear plants were running extremely well throughout the country. My informal assessment was that, if I was more than 90% confident of staying with the company until age 50, selecting the traditional plan would be the best choice. Lacking that confidence, I opted in to the cash-balance plan. A few years ago, my employer—now called Exelon—again faced financial dilemmas related to its nuclear plants. The industry was in a down cycle, primarily due to the extraordinarily low price of natural gas at the time. Natural gas-fired plants were at that point much more economical at producing electricity. Some of the company’s nuclear plants, including Peach Bottom, were profitable. Other plants, particularly in Illinois, were hemorrhaging money, even though they were well-run and had high-capacity factors. Absent a political solution, Exelon stated its intent to permanently shut down several of the financially struggling units. Hundreds of employees exited the affected plants to find other jobs. Once again, the future looked bleak for the company and industry. In September 2021, while some of the plants were in the process of shutting down for the final time, the Illinois legislature passed a bill that provided the necessary financial support to keep them running. It was a stunning turnaround, particularly noteworthy in an era of political dysfunction. It seems that today, with the sustained focus on climate change and increased support for clean energy, nuclear power is again in an up cycle. Next generation small modular reactors are in various stages of development. Grace Stanke, 2023’s Miss America, is an outspoken advocate for nuclear power. Filmmaker Oliver Stone has put out a movie called Nuclear Now that’s strongly pro-nuclear. Even California is looking to extend operations at its last remaining nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. Plants that had been scheduled to shut down are now furiously hiring new workers. Such is the environment today, as I look ahead to retirement in September. One result: I’ve found that I’m not quite ready to give up my connection to the industry or the specialized knowledge I’ve acquired over the past 38 years. But that may be a story for a future article. 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’ve made the trip from Pennsylvania to California six times. The first time I went, I didn’t have to pay for my plane tickets. Each of the next five times, the entire trip was completely free. I was asked to be the best man in a college friend’s wedding a couple of years after we graduated. He lived near Los Angeles. I planned my trip out there with another college friend, Robert. Like me, he was an engineer and single. He’d recently been bumped from a flight to Alaska and had been given a large voucher in return. Generously, he used part of that voucher to purchase my plane tickets. Robert and I rented a yellow Nissan Sentra and put over 1800 miles on it during the week before the wedding. Robert was a great travel companion. He was a brilliant guy who seemed to have a wry observation or witty remark for any situation with the slightest potential for humor. He was laid back and easy to get along with. We had a map but didn’t have a detailed plan for the trip. After a long day taking in Yosemite National Park, we rolled into Modesto late at night and had some trouble finding a place to stay. Finally, we found a motel in a seedy part of town with a vacancy. We checked into our room and turned on the TV to wind down. Out of the corner of my eye, I sensed movement, but didn’t think too much of it at first. A short time later, the source of the motion became apparent: the room was infested with the biggest roaches I’d ever seen. I wasn’t happy about the situation, but Robert was traumatized. He wrapped himself up in his sheets to try to form a hermetic seal against the bugs. I don’t think he slept much. Robert and I both had excess cash flow and saving for retirement was not yet on our radar. We were quite loose about money on the trip: we’d alternate paying for meals and hotels, not bothering to keep track to make sure we were sharing equally in the expenses. When we got to Morro Bay a couple days after the Modesto fiasco, we found a hotel with two rooms available. One was on the ground floor. The other was on the second floor but was the expensive honeymoon suite. Without batting an eye, Robert said we’d take the suite. He paid for it, explaining to me that he thought there would be less chance of roaches. The suite had a fireplace. Though it wasn’t cold outside, Robert was determined to get his money’s worth. He got a rip-roaring fire going. Eventually we started sweating, so we turned the air conditioning on full-blast to compensate. I ordered a pizza to be delivered to our room for dinner. Inspired by Robert’s indulgences, I gave the young lady who dropped off the pizza a tip of nearly 200%. I can still remember the startled look on her face as she thanked me. The trip to California with Robert was hands down the best vacation I ever took as a single guy. I would not return to the Golden State for over a decade. When I did, it wasn’t for a vacation. Between 1998 and 2001, I made five trips to San Jose on business. Some of those trips lasted two weeks, which gave me a free weekend to explore. My company put me up in a four-star hotel that had a favorable corporate rate. I had my own rental car and an expense account. As the trips were typically during the summer, there was a lot of daylight left for exploring after the workday was over. It felt wonderful driving around the San Jose area after work. It was even more magical to venture out further on weekends, cruising in my rental car and listening to CDs I’d purchased for a buck a piece at a record store near my hotel. I spent time in San Francisco, Monterrey, and Santa Cruz. I hiked in some amazing parks, saw redwood trees and visited wine country. I absolutely loved driving around California and taking in its diverse terrains. To add to my heightened dopamine state during those trips, the lead engineer from the company we were working with made client entertainment his top priority. Sujit had a company credit card with a $30,000 monthly limit. His greatest pleasure in life seemed to be making sure his customers had a good time. For the most part, this consisted in treating them to lavish meals. The highest amount I ever witnessed him lay down was an inflation-adjusted $7,500 at The Plumed Horse in Saratoga, a nationally ranked French restaurant where he hosted our group of 18. I recently wrote a Forum article that discussed the special thrill humans experience when receiving something for free. I can’t help but think that one of the reasons I enjoyed my California business trips so much was that I didn’t have to pay a penny for any of them.

I retired from my 38-year career as an electrical engineer with the country’s largest operator of nuclear power plants on September 5, 2023. I’d often dreamed about having an enjoyable encore career, and a week after retirement I began working part-time as a Chief Engineer in a consulting firm with a few hundred employees. The job has largely been true to my dream. In the roughly 16 months since I retired from full-time work, my wife Lisa and I have undergone many changes related to our financial lives. Here are 10: Emptied our TreasuryDirect accounts. Given the current mediocre returns on savings bonds, along with a desire to simplify our finances, we cashed in all our on-line savings bond holdings, zeroing out our TreasuryDirect accounts. Cashed in paper U.S. Savings Bonds. The process of dealing with the Federal Government bureaucracy to redeem savings bonds seems clunky and slow. Many banks are no longer redeeming bonds, even for longtime customers. My bank still provides that service, so I’ve been cashing them in there. I’ve worked through all the highest denomination bonds. This has had tax implications as our interest/dividend income has been much higher than normal. I’ve adjusted my pension and earnings withholdings accordingly. Went on Medicare. Well, at least Lisa did. It was a very smooth process, all successfully completed online. I didn’t even feel the need to purchase ‘Medicare for Dummies’ to help navigate through the decision making. Plenty of good information was available here on HumbleDollar. And no, she is not enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan. Spent 50% more on eating out. My son Dan and I meet almost every Thursday for lunch. Dan is a software engineer who works from home and lives about a half hour away from me. My wife, daughter and daughter-in-law get together monthly for a Cutler girls’ meal. Having lots of flexibility in my schedule, I regularly meet for meals with a variety of friends. So does Lisa. And there are date nights, of course. Replaced our gas heating system. When a major part in our 23-year-old gas heater broke, I didn’t hesitate to replace the entire unit rather than getting it repaired. Furthermore, I didn’t spend any time agonizing before selecting the more expensive but higher efficiency replacement option. Cut the cord on cable TV. The addition of basic TV to our cable internet package was costing us about an extra $70 a month. Most of our TV viewing involves YouTube or Amazon Prime. Occasionally we watch our local TV channel, which comes in very clearly with an antenna. In fact, we can pick up about 11 channels over the air. Given our viewing habits, there was absolutely no reason to continue paying for cable TV. Funded Roth IRAs in retirement. Since I still have a modest earned income, we can fully fund Roth IRAs for both me and Lisa. I look at the Roth IRAs as our last line of financial defense. They are in essence our long-term care insurance policies, to be used only when all other resources have been exhausted. We hope to be able to transfer these policies intact to our heirs. Began modest withdrawals from my 401(k). About two-thirds of our financial wealth is in my 401(k). I realized that although our asset allocation is satisfactory to me, our asset location profile is not. It’s time to start slowly chipping away at the ticking tax bomb before the RMD grenade explodes in 13 years. I’m taking a baby step by starting withdrawals at an amount roughly equivalent to what a financial planner might charge me in fees. Increased focus on estate planning. Lisa and I are not getting any younger. At our ages, things can change quickly. My current focus on asset location is partly a nod to estate planning. We plan to update our wills this year. I continue to add more details to my ‘sudden death’ instructions letter for Lisa. Fixed a date to begin taking Social Security. Based on results from Michael Piper’s Open Social Security calculator, Lisa and I should both start taking our benefits at her full retirement age. That’s what we’re planning to do. As you can see, a lot can happen financially in a little over a year. I doubt that things will settle down in 2025. I may have a part-time job, but retirement is a full-time endeavor.

Note: This is the second Forum piece from my ‘shelved articles’ archive. It was written months ago but never submitted to Jonathan. These days, people often debate the value of a college education, but what about the value of a good high school education? I was fortunate to attend high school in Moorestown, New Jersey, a community that has always valued having an excellent school system. With the perspective shaped by over 40 years of life post-graduation, I find that my respect for my high school teachers has only increased. Out of 25 or so different teachers I had over my four high school years, I can think of only a few that I would consider to be mediocre. I have many examples of teachers that were superior or even, in my humble opinion, world class. Prior to high school, I’d always excelled at math, science, and reading. What about writing? When I look at samples of writing I did prior to high school, I’m not impressed. I did well enough in my freshman English class to be put into an advanced class for my sophomore year, but not well enough to be put into the top honors English section. Competition for the honors section was fierce as it came with a grade point average sweetener. I was very fortunate to be upgraded to the honors section for my junior year. That’s when the fun began. Mrs. Fine was the teacher. She was elegant, dignified, erudite, and perhaps a tad unusual. I was a competitive student who always got straight A’s and really wanted an A in this class to boost my class rank. The workload in Mrs. Fine’s honors class was crushing. It seemed we would have to read and analyze an entire novel or play every week. She would think nothing of assigning us to read 250 pages of Moby Dick in one night. Or maybe we would have to read an entire play by Henrik Ibsen and be ready to discuss it the next day. Even though I was a good reader, it was very hard to keep up with the work, given my other classes. I got a B in the first marking period, the only stain on my otherwise perfect report card. I lacked confidence that I could get an A in this class. Many of my classmates seemed much more insightful than me during the discussion times. Still, I was determined to push on. We generally were required to submit a typewritten paper once a week for the class. As I recall, the specified topics were quite sophisticated. They were a far cry from ‘what I did for my summer vacation’ stuff. Mrs. Fine would go over our papers with her red pen. Any grammar or spelling errors were quickly flushed out. But she also would give extensive feedback on matters of style or content. If she really liked something you wrote, she would let you know that as well. Somehow, my writing and class contributions improved enough that I received an ‘A’ for the second of four marking periods. Since only the final grade counted toward class rank, I still had a chance. Over the course of the year, I was required to read an astonishing number of diverse pieces of literature and write dozens of papers, including a large term paper. To say I learned a lot from Mrs. Fine’s teaching and detailed feedback would be a great understatement. When I emerged from her class with the coveted ‘A’ as my final grade, I was changed. I had a new confidence in my upgraded writing skills, thanks to the arduous course Mrs. Fine had directed me through. In college, I took one term of honors English. It was so easy compared to what I had experienced in high school it seemed almost laughable. One of my high school classmates, a respected attorney who graduated from a prestigious college, has stated that Mrs. Fine was a better teacher than any professor he had both as an undergraduate and as a law student. Throughout my career, I have been confident in my writing skills. It has been part of my “brand” as an engineer since the beginning and I’ve always felt comfortable highlighting those skills on my resume. I’ve gravitated to assignments that required considerable writing. Lots of engineers prefer to avoid that kind of work. I trace my confidence and interest back to Mrs. Fine and what I learned in her intense English class. The skills I learned in high school from her class served me more in my career than anything I picked up in any of my college engineering classes.

THERE’S AN OLD SAYING: Good things come in threes. That’s certainly been true for one aspect of my life. I’ve lived in just three locations—and all of them have been featured in national “best places” lists. My early years were in Moorestown, New Jersey, a quiet town with a population of some 20,000. It’s an affluent suburb of Philadelphia that defies stereotypes about New Jersey. In 2005, Money magazine identified Moorestown as the best place to live in the country. This was well after I’d moved away. Still, the town was certainly a pleasant place to grow up during the 1960s and '70s. Moorestown has a strong school system, which I experienced first-hand. It also has a relatively low crime rate, a charming downtown and beautiful public spaces. It’s a little over an hour’s drive from the Jersey Shore. One downside: The town is so popular that homes have been richly priced for decades. After I graduated from Moorestown High School, I made my way to Blacksburg, Virginia, to attend Virginia Tech. Blacksburg regularly makes lists of desirable places to live. For instance, Forbes included the town in its 2016 list of the top 25 places to retire. In 2018, Blacksburg was named the 63rd best place to live in the country, according to Livability.com. I was only in Blacksburg for four years, back in the 1980s. It was an idyllic place to attend college. With the town located in the Blue Ridge Mountain range, it was easy to get away, even without a car. Within 10 minutes of leaving campus on a bicycle, you could feel like you were completely away from civilization. The college itself has a mix of academic sophistication and friendly country charm. In a survey a few years back, Virginia Tech’s student quality of life was reported to be the best of any U.S. college. It was also recently rated as having the third-best college food in America. Sadly, that was far from the case when I attended. All of my post-college life has been spent in either Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or an adjacent suburb. According to U.S. News & World Report, Lancaster is 2023’s top U.S. city for retirement. Lancaster County is probably most famous for its Amish population, but there’s much more than that. The food scene here has exploded—a good thing for my family of foodies. For instance, when I first came to Lancaster nearly 40 years ago, there were no Thai restaurants. Now, there's easily a dozen, most of them outstanding. Sushi is another family favorite. There’s a large number of great sushi places, Genki being our personal favorite. Want top-notch Vietnamese? There are several options, along with Burmese, Ethiopian, Moroccan, Indian and Peruvian restaurants. In fact, name just about any ethnic cuisine, and you can find it. Of course, the famous Lancaster County Pennsylvania Dutch buffets are still around, as well as many fine dining establishments that defy easy definition. In short, this small city of 60,000 has just about everything you could want, food-wise. What else is there in Lancaster County to attract retirees? A great health care system, parks galore, the Sight & Sound theater, top-rated farmers' markets and sprawling shopping outlets. The historic Strasburg Rail Road is popular with both tourists and local folks. Scenic drives through farmland abound. And, oh yes, you’ll see plenty of Amish folks with their horses and buggies. You may even get to know some of them when you buy their produce. There are several large, high-quality retirement communities in or near Lancaster. Willow Valley is the most prominent, with around 2,600 residents living on 210 acres just south of Lancaster. It’s convenient to already live in such a location. As I ease into retirement, we’re not planning to move any time soon. Most of our social network is here. We love the people in our church, where we’ve been members for nearly 30 years. I regularly get together with friends from work. We have great neighbors on either side of our house, in back of us, and across the street. We also have established relationships with a medical practice, a dental practice, auto mechanics, hairdressers and landscapers. A fully stocked hardware store is less than a mile away, and our well-managed fitness center is also close by. Since the criteria used in the various “best places” lists change regularly, I fully expect Lancaster to relinquish its crown as the “best place to retire” sometime soon. No matter. We’re staying put. 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"]