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If you bequeath your stamp collection, your kids will remember you. If you bequeath your Roth IRA, they’ll remember you fondly.

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Subconscious Frugality

"Mark, wow, I resemble your remarks, as well as elements in both Dana and BB’s posts below. So I’m just going to add my thoughts regarding expensive restaurants. I avoid them as often as I possibly can. Sure, I rather dislike a tab that runs into the hundreds of dollars, but what I really hate is when I’m lying in bed afterwards, with acid reflux brought on by multiple courses of delicious food and several glasses of pricey wine, overpowering my Omeprazole, causing me to question why anyone would spend so much to feel so lousy."
- DAN SMITH
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Go While You Still Can

"W were in Chicago for four days last week, too. My husband had a conference, and I tagged along and then we stayed two extra days to have some fun. Weather was fantastic. We ate a couple of excellent meals and went to exhibits at the science and industry museum. We also love the Art Institue and went on the architectural river boat tour a couple of years ago."
- DrLefty
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2025 and Medicare Rx

"The $2,000 out of pocket max is $2,100 this year, so I guess it will continue to be indexed. I am not complaining as the Zanubrutinib I take costs $14,750 monthly which is up $1,000 monthly over last year."
- Howard Schwartz
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Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) are a Generational Bargain Right Now

"Thank you! Yes, the TIPS would be held in my IRA, and the plan would be to hold them until maturity. I haven't found any inflation-adjusted annuities, but it looks like I could buy an SPIA with a 2 or 3 percent annual increase. Helpful but not an impregnable defense against 3.5 percent inflation."
- Emily Croy Barker
Read more »

Taking a Loss?

"Randy, I agree you don't buy bonds for price appreciation, though I don't hold them for the dividends either. For me, they’re more of a portfolio ballast to smooth out the ride. Nice lock-in on the 10-year TIPS, by the way."
- Mark Crothers
Read more »

What I Retired To

"I am the same way, I too have this thing about seeing net worth decline no matter how illogical it is. These past few weeks have not helped has investments have tumbled and taken me from my happy place. My son in law is a managing direct at a Wall Street firm and warned me about this summer, but it doesn’t make me feel any better."
- R Quinn
Read more »

Today in Financial History

"Notice that I said I may hire an advisor someday if or when needed? This assumes that I will recognize that time is approaching and have time to interview and hire someone. Life often does not work that way. And you answered my unasked question, that is "why pay someone now to do what I may need someday, but just not yet?" By working with your advisor now, you can reasonably expect that your advisor will continue to follow your preferred strategy in the future, with or without your oversight. Smart move."
- Jack Hannam
Read more »

Widow Tax

THE WIDOW TAX is sold to the wrong households. It gets pitched to affluent couples as the reason to convert to a Roth or buy life insurance. The pitch says that when one spouse dies, the survivor files single, lands in a higher bracket, and gets clobbered. I ran the numbers for three couples at three incomes, and at the comfortable end the widow tax often costs nothing, or even less than nothing. The real cost lands lower down, on households nobody is selling anything to. What follows uses 2026 federal figures to show what the widow tax actually does in dollars, not in scary percentage points. The pattern runs opposite to the marketing. The higher your income, the smaller the hit, and the lower you go, the more it bites. Three Things Move When the first spouse dies, three things change, and they get bundled under one frightening label. One Social Security check stops, and a pension may shrink or end. That is lost income, and it is usually the largest of the three. It is not a tax. Spending shifts as well. The survivor pays one Medicare premium instead of two, but the mortgage still comes out of the same account. The third change is the only one the tax code causes: narrower single brackets, a smaller standard deduction and lower thresholds for the Medicare surcharge. The widow tax is that third piece alone, and the three households below measure how big it really is. The Affluent Couple Both spouses are over 65. Their income is about $360,000: $80,000 from Social Security, $210,000 from a pension and required minimum distributions, plus $30,000 in qualified dividends and $40,000 in long-term gains. They sit in the 24% bracket, and both already pay the Medicare surcharge. One spouse dies. The survivor keeps the larger Social Security check and most of the other income, landing at roughly $308,000. As a couple, they paid about $53,900 in federal income tax and a Medicare surcharge of about $9,240. As a single filer, the survivor pays about $55,000 in federal tax and a surcharge of about $6,355. The effective rate rises from 15.7% to 18.7%, which is the headline people remember. But the federal tax barely moves, up only about $1,100, because the survivor has less income to tax. The Medicare surcharge actually falls about $2,900, because two enrollees in the couple's joint tier cost more than one survivor a tier above. Net it all out, and the survivor pays about $1,800 a year less than the couple did. The rate went up, and the dollars went down. At the high end, the widow tax measured in money hands back a small refund. This is why the Roth conversion pitch aimed at comfortable couples misfires. If converting to Roth would cut the survivor's future taxable income without cutting the couple's lifestyle, the converted money was surplus. Surplus is money the survivor never needed to replace. Edward McQuarrie, a finance professor emeritus at Santa Clara University, made a version of this argument in a 2023 paper. He found the dollar hit inconsequential for affluent couples, and located any real cost lower down, where the Social Security torpedo bites. Where It Actually Bites Drop down to a couple with $180,000 of income: $60,000 from Social Security and $120,000 from a pension and required minimum distributions, all ordinary income. Both are over 65. The couple files jointly at $180,000; the survivor files single at about $150,000. As a couple, they paid about $17,148 in federal tax and no Medicare surcharge. The survivor pays about $22,737 in federal tax and a new surcharge of about $2,885. The federal tax rises about $5,600, and a surprising chunk of that comes from the collapse of the new $6,000 senior deduction, which phases out against a lower income threshold for singles. Then the survivor crosses into a Medicare surcharge tier the couple never paid. The total cost of widowhood here is roughly $8,500 a year, set against a $30,000 income loss. This is the one band where both the dollars and the rate move the wrong way. Now take a couple with $90,000 of income: $38,500 from Social Security, about the national average for two retired spouses, plus $51,500 from a pension and distributions. The survivor keeps the larger Social Security check and the full pension, landing at $73,500. As a couple, they paid about $3,433 in federal tax, at an effective rate of 3.8%. The survivor pays about $5,278, at an effective rate of 7.2%. There's no Medicare surcharge at this income, and there never will be. But the survivor's effective rate nearly doubles, because more of the Social Security benefit becomes taxable, up to the 85% ceiling, when the single thresholds replace the joint ones. The added tax is about $1,845, and the lost income is $16,500. Real money for a household least able to absorb it. It doubles the effective rate, and it hurts.  Read the three together and the widow tax points the wrong way from the marketing. At $360,000 it costs less than nothing, roughly a $1,800 annual saving. At $180,000 it costs about $8,500. At $90,000 it costs about $1,850, but the effective rate doubles. The affluent couples being sold protection don't need it. The middle couples who feel the sting are not being sold anything, and they're the ones for whom a few thousand dollars a year actually constrains a life. The tax code has three different mechanisms, and which one finds you depends almost entirely on your income. At the top, the Medicare surcharge does the work, and it falls. In the middle, the surcharge appears from zero. At the bottom, the Social Security torpedo raises the taxability of the benefit from 75% to 85%. The mechanism changes with the income, and so does the household's ability to absorb the hit. Plan Ahead This is where the widow tax conversation usually stops, and where I think it should start. The moves most likely to leave a survivor better off are the ones you make years before, and they help whether or not the widow tax ever bites. Converting traditional IRA money to Roth over several years before retirement smooths your taxable income. It lowers the required minimum distributions that will later push a single filer into higher brackets. It can also keep a survivor under a Medicare surcharge tier the couple never worried about. Drawing accounts in a sensible order, spending down the right buckets first, reduces the future tax base that a single bracket structure will tax more steeply. Managing required distributions as they grow, rather than letting them balloon off a rising balance, limits the single bracket exposure that builds across a long widowhood. A more tax-efficient bequest helps the people who inherit what is left. None of that is widow rescue. It is good multi-year planning that happens to compound in the survivor's favor. The widow tax is one input to that planning, not the reason for it. The reason is that the year your spouse dies is the worst possible year to be making financial decisions, and the more of those decisions you have already made, the fewer you hand to someone who is grieving. You can do a rough version of this at your own kitchen table, and you should, ideally long before you need to. Estimate the survivor's income after the smaller Social Security check and any pension change, then estimate the survivor's spending from your actual budget, not a generic rule of thumb. Subtract. If reliable after-tax income still supports the life the survivor wants, with margin, the tax rate was never the thing to worry about. Then project the survivor's federal tax, the net investment income tax where it applies and the Medicare surcharge as a single filer, and compare it to the couple. Keep the tax separate from the lost income, so you can see what the tax code actually did. Sometimes, as the affluent couple shows, it does you a small favor. Only then does a planning move earn a look, and only if you can answer what it costs today, what it might save later, who benefits and what has to come true for it to work. The widow tax is real, but it isn't the catastrophe it's sold as. At higher incomes it's not a cost at all. Lower down it is a real cost, and the lower you go, the more it's worth measuring, because the households it constrains have the least margin to spare. The planning that matters most is the kind you do years ahead, smoothing income, holding down future distributions, managing the surcharge tiers and putting the estate in order. Do that, and you've done right by your survivor, for reasons that have little to do with fear and a great deal to do with care. You'll have done it in the years when you still had the time, and the clarity, to do it well. ________________________________________________________________________________ John Urban is the founder of RetireSmartIRA, a retirement tax-planning app. Earlier, he founded GT Nexus, a supply-chain software company acquired by Infor in 2015. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Kathy, and enjoys time with family, travel, reading, Bay Area sports, and the occasional deep dive into the fine print of the tax code.
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Credit Card Debt.

"I pay off credit debt monthly, but I don’t limit myself to one card because part of your credit score is based on the percentage of credit utilization. Your utilization rate will be lower (and credit score higher) if you have multiple credit card accounts."
- corrupt
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Can we be completely safe?

"My BIL was a victim of ID theft… They took control of his phone, and resetting all his password's was impossible since he no longer had a phone to use as the second factor. It took months to straighten out."
- corrupt
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Degrees of Doubt: When Higher Education Misses the Mark

"The widely cast net is catching students that require remedial classes in math, English and reading. Is it any surprise that today’s students are unable to think critically?"
- corrupt
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Inflation, prices, COLAs, retirement and the last 16 years

"Not early, but when I claimed I was still working and collecting a pension. Otherwise it would be unlikely we could have saved it all, but that stopped several years ago. My point was if a person can delay until age 70 presumably they don’t need SS until then so collect sooner and invest it until you do need it. Of course the tradeoff is a lower SS benefit for life vs accumulated assets that may or may not provide income to offset the lower SS benefit. The gamble also depends on how long the person lives past age 70. On the other hand, the invested funds are always available to someone. I’m not selling the idea, just something I am happy with the result."
- R Quinn
Read more »

Subconscious Frugality

"Mark, wow, I resemble your remarks, as well as elements in both Dana and BB’s posts below. So I’m just going to add my thoughts regarding expensive restaurants. I avoid them as often as I possibly can. Sure, I rather dislike a tab that runs into the hundreds of dollars, but what I really hate is when I’m lying in bed afterwards, with acid reflux brought on by multiple courses of delicious food and several glasses of pricey wine, overpowering my Omeprazole, causing me to question why anyone would spend so much to feel so lousy."
- DAN SMITH
Read more »

Go While You Still Can

"W were in Chicago for four days last week, too. My husband had a conference, and I tagged along and then we stayed two extra days to have some fun. Weather was fantastic. We ate a couple of excellent meals and went to exhibits at the science and industry museum. We also love the Art Institue and went on the architectural river boat tour a couple of years ago."
- DrLefty
Read more »

2025 and Medicare Rx

"The $2,000 out of pocket max is $2,100 this year, so I guess it will continue to be indexed. I am not complaining as the Zanubrutinib I take costs $14,750 monthly which is up $1,000 monthly over last year."
- Howard Schwartz
Read more »

Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) are a Generational Bargain Right Now

"Thank you! Yes, the TIPS would be held in my IRA, and the plan would be to hold them until maturity. I haven't found any inflation-adjusted annuities, but it looks like I could buy an SPIA with a 2 or 3 percent annual increase. Helpful but not an impregnable defense against 3.5 percent inflation."
- Emily Croy Barker
Read more »

Taking a Loss?

"Randy, I agree you don't buy bonds for price appreciation, though I don't hold them for the dividends either. For me, they’re more of a portfolio ballast to smooth out the ride. Nice lock-in on the 10-year TIPS, by the way."
- Mark Crothers
Read more »

What I Retired To

"I am the same way, I too have this thing about seeing net worth decline no matter how illogical it is. These past few weeks have not helped has investments have tumbled and taken me from my happy place. My son in law is a managing direct at a Wall Street firm and warned me about this summer, but it doesn’t make me feel any better."
- R Quinn
Read more »

Today in Financial History

"Notice that I said I may hire an advisor someday if or when needed? This assumes that I will recognize that time is approaching and have time to interview and hire someone. Life often does not work that way. And you answered my unasked question, that is "why pay someone now to do what I may need someday, but just not yet?" By working with your advisor now, you can reasonably expect that your advisor will continue to follow your preferred strategy in the future, with or without your oversight. Smart move."
- Jack Hannam
Read more »

Widow Tax

THE WIDOW TAX is sold to the wrong households. It gets pitched to affluent couples as the reason to convert to a Roth or buy life insurance. The pitch says that when one spouse dies, the survivor files single, lands in a higher bracket, and gets clobbered. I ran the numbers for three couples at three incomes, and at the comfortable end the widow tax often costs nothing, or even less than nothing. The real cost lands lower down, on households nobody is selling anything to. What follows uses 2026 federal figures to show what the widow tax actually does in dollars, not in scary percentage points. The pattern runs opposite to the marketing. The higher your income, the smaller the hit, and the lower you go, the more it bites. Three Things Move When the first spouse dies, three things change, and they get bundled under one frightening label. One Social Security check stops, and a pension may shrink or end. That is lost income, and it is usually the largest of the three. It is not a tax. Spending shifts as well. The survivor pays one Medicare premium instead of two, but the mortgage still comes out of the same account. The third change is the only one the tax code causes: narrower single brackets, a smaller standard deduction and lower thresholds for the Medicare surcharge. The widow tax is that third piece alone, and the three households below measure how big it really is. The Affluent Couple Both spouses are over 65. Their income is about $360,000: $80,000 from Social Security, $210,000 from a pension and required minimum distributions, plus $30,000 in qualified dividends and $40,000 in long-term gains. They sit in the 24% bracket, and both already pay the Medicare surcharge. One spouse dies. The survivor keeps the larger Social Security check and most of the other income, landing at roughly $308,000. As a couple, they paid about $53,900 in federal income tax and a Medicare surcharge of about $9,240. As a single filer, the survivor pays about $55,000 in federal tax and a surcharge of about $6,355. The effective rate rises from 15.7% to 18.7%, which is the headline people remember. But the federal tax barely moves, up only about $1,100, because the survivor has less income to tax. The Medicare surcharge actually falls about $2,900, because two enrollees in the couple's joint tier cost more than one survivor a tier above. Net it all out, and the survivor pays about $1,800 a year less than the couple did. The rate went up, and the dollars went down. At the high end, the widow tax measured in money hands back a small refund. This is why the Roth conversion pitch aimed at comfortable couples misfires. If converting to Roth would cut the survivor's future taxable income without cutting the couple's lifestyle, the converted money was surplus. Surplus is money the survivor never needed to replace. Edward McQuarrie, a finance professor emeritus at Santa Clara University, made a version of this argument in a 2023 paper. He found the dollar hit inconsequential for affluent couples, and located any real cost lower down, where the Social Security torpedo bites. Where It Actually Bites Drop down to a couple with $180,000 of income: $60,000 from Social Security and $120,000 from a pension and required minimum distributions, all ordinary income. Both are over 65. The couple files jointly at $180,000; the survivor files single at about $150,000. As a couple, they paid about $17,148 in federal tax and no Medicare surcharge. The survivor pays about $22,737 in federal tax and a new surcharge of about $2,885. The federal tax rises about $5,600, and a surprising chunk of that comes from the collapse of the new $6,000 senior deduction, which phases out against a lower income threshold for singles. Then the survivor crosses into a Medicare surcharge tier the couple never paid. The total cost of widowhood here is roughly $8,500 a year, set against a $30,000 income loss. This is the one band where both the dollars and the rate move the wrong way. Now take a couple with $90,000 of income: $38,500 from Social Security, about the national average for two retired spouses, plus $51,500 from a pension and distributions. The survivor keeps the larger Social Security check and the full pension, landing at $73,500. As a couple, they paid about $3,433 in federal tax, at an effective rate of 3.8%. The survivor pays about $5,278, at an effective rate of 7.2%. There's no Medicare surcharge at this income, and there never will be. But the survivor's effective rate nearly doubles, because more of the Social Security benefit becomes taxable, up to the 85% ceiling, when the single thresholds replace the joint ones. The added tax is about $1,845, and the lost income is $16,500. Real money for a household least able to absorb it. It doubles the effective rate, and it hurts.  Read the three together and the widow tax points the wrong way from the marketing. At $360,000 it costs less than nothing, roughly a $1,800 annual saving. At $180,000 it costs about $8,500. At $90,000 it costs about $1,850, but the effective rate doubles. The affluent couples being sold protection don't need it. The middle couples who feel the sting are not being sold anything, and they're the ones for whom a few thousand dollars a year actually constrains a life. The tax code has three different mechanisms, and which one finds you depends almost entirely on your income. At the top, the Medicare surcharge does the work, and it falls. In the middle, the surcharge appears from zero. At the bottom, the Social Security torpedo raises the taxability of the benefit from 75% to 85%. The mechanism changes with the income, and so does the household's ability to absorb the hit. Plan Ahead This is where the widow tax conversation usually stops, and where I think it should start. The moves most likely to leave a survivor better off are the ones you make years before, and they help whether or not the widow tax ever bites. Converting traditional IRA money to Roth over several years before retirement smooths your taxable income. It lowers the required minimum distributions that will later push a single filer into higher brackets. It can also keep a survivor under a Medicare surcharge tier the couple never worried about. Drawing accounts in a sensible order, spending down the right buckets first, reduces the future tax base that a single bracket structure will tax more steeply. Managing required distributions as they grow, rather than letting them balloon off a rising balance, limits the single bracket exposure that builds across a long widowhood. A more tax-efficient bequest helps the people who inherit what is left. None of that is widow rescue. It is good multi-year planning that happens to compound in the survivor's favor. The widow tax is one input to that planning, not the reason for it. The reason is that the year your spouse dies is the worst possible year to be making financial decisions, and the more of those decisions you have already made, the fewer you hand to someone who is grieving. You can do a rough version of this at your own kitchen table, and you should, ideally long before you need to. Estimate the survivor's income after the smaller Social Security check and any pension change, then estimate the survivor's spending from your actual budget, not a generic rule of thumb. Subtract. If reliable after-tax income still supports the life the survivor wants, with margin, the tax rate was never the thing to worry about. Then project the survivor's federal tax, the net investment income tax where it applies and the Medicare surcharge as a single filer, and compare it to the couple. Keep the tax separate from the lost income, so you can see what the tax code actually did. Sometimes, as the affluent couple shows, it does you a small favor. Only then does a planning move earn a look, and only if you can answer what it costs today, what it might save later, who benefits and what has to come true for it to work. The widow tax is real, but it isn't the catastrophe it's sold as. At higher incomes it's not a cost at all. Lower down it is a real cost, and the lower you go, the more it's worth measuring, because the households it constrains have the least margin to spare. The planning that matters most is the kind you do years ahead, smoothing income, holding down future distributions, managing the surcharge tiers and putting the estate in order. Do that, and you've done right by your survivor, for reasons that have little to do with fear and a great deal to do with care. You'll have done it in the years when you still had the time, and the clarity, to do it well. ________________________________________________________________________________ John Urban is the founder of RetireSmartIRA, a retirement tax-planning app. Earlier, he founded GT Nexus, a supply-chain software company acquired by Infor in 2015. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Kathy, and enjoys time with family, travel, reading, Bay Area sports, and the occasional deep dive into the fine print of the tax code.
Read more »

Credit Card Debt.

"I pay off credit debt monthly, but I don’t limit myself to one card because part of your credit score is based on the percentage of credit utilization. Your utilization rate will be lower (and credit score higher) if you have multiple credit card accounts."
- corrupt
Read more »

Free Newsletter

Get Educated

Manifesto

NO. 28: WE SHOULD nurture investment compounding—by buying stocks for the long run, minimizing costs and taxes, and avoiding risky investments where we could lose big.

Truths

NO. 105: IN INEFFICIENT markets—such as those for microcap stocks and emerging market companies—skilled investors have a better shot at earning market-beating returns. But after investment costs, most investors will still lag behind the market averages and the shortfall will often be large, because the cost of active management is so high.

think

ASSET ALLOCATION. This is a portfolio’s split among the four asset classes: stocks, bonds, cash like savings accounts and money market funds, and alternatives such as gold and real estate. It’s arguably the most important decision an investor makes. The more a portfolio has in stocks, the higher its expected return, but the greater the volatility.

act

CALCULATE YOUR monthly nonmortgage debt payments as a percentage of your pretax monthly income. We’re talking here about car payments, student loans and minimum credit card payments. Aim to keep these payments to less than 10% of monthly income, though that can be a tough target to hit if you’re a new college graduate with student loans.

Final Book

Manifesto

NO. 28: WE SHOULD nurture investment compounding—by buying stocks for the long run, minimizing costs and taxes, and avoiding risky investments where we could lose big.

Spotlight: Health

Building Connections

I’m  not so good in the genre of Rapper or hip hop singers, but I don’t let that deter me when my mind is in tune with a good word puzzle.  Yes, I’m hooked on the NYT word game Connections.
Chances are you played or, at least heard of the New York Times “cult”puzzles.  Over the past few years, Wordle became a staple  as part of millions of peoples daily routine, and I highly recommend the addictive Connections as a new challenge for word puzzle aficionados and word mavens.

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Medicare Open Enrollment and Medigap

The Medicare Annual Enrollment period runs from October 15th to December 7th. I initially believed this was the only time I could switch my Plan G Medigap supplement. However, these dates specifically apply to those changing Part D or Medicare Advantage plans.
In contrast, Medigap plans can be changed at any time during the year, although underwriting may be required. I turned 65 in June and enrolled in Medicare Plan G, already changing plans once during my initial 6-month sign-up period.

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Do you commit Medicare fraud? Hopefully not intentionally.

Seniors may be susceptible to participating in grey area fraud – my term.
Many seniors routinely have their toenails trimmed under Medicare. It’s a covered expense but only under certain medical conditions like a diabetes complication, but it’s convenient, less costly than a pedicure and many podiatrists are willing to oblige. 
Physical therapy is unlimited under Medicare as long as it is necessary for existing conditions and there is progress treating a condition. But hey it feels good.

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Paradox of choice. What to do, what to do?

I used to be a big fan of choice when it came to employee benefit plans including life insurance, health insurance and, of courses 401k investment options. 
When working I crafted a plan with lots of choices. Employees said they wanted choice, it was all the rage at the time. Our unions were not so thrilled, but went along. 
The unions were right and I was wrong. 
People may say they want choice, but when faced with it for very important decisions,

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Husband will still be working at 65, delay taking Medicare?

In my analysis it will be less expensive for him to stay on employer sponsored coverage than going on Medicare. My understanding is that he could sign up for Part A but if he does he cannot contribute to his HSA.
Anyone have any insight on this, in general?

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Keep Moving

Physical strength is essential to making our way in this world. While we may not have to rally our muscles to subdue wild beasts or unruly neighbors, we do need them to accomplish our daily objectives. At a minimum, we have to muster the energy to get from bed to bathroom to breakfast table. Even if we make money with our minds, rather than our bodies, chances are we’ll need the stamina to sit up and manipulate a keyboard.

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Spotlight: Horiuchi

My House Divided

I'M A HOUSEHOLD of one—in theory. True, one adult child lives rent-free in our family home in California. Her first full-time job’s wages are too low for her to afford an apartment in our expensive urban area. I’m also paying college expenses for another daughter living on campus 80 miles away. She’s working part-time and will graduate this coming spring semester. With a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) degree, I hope she’ll find gainful full-time employment soon after. My son is in Wyoming finishing up an alternative high school program. He just landed his first paid internship at an agricultural lab, the first step toward a career in environmental science. I provided the security deposits to get him into his first apartment. I also drop a bit of money into his bank account at random intervals. I do the same for his sisters, just to take the edge off early adulthood. Finally, wherever I reside, I share quarters with the family dog. So, I’m never entirely a household of one. Yet I wonder if my living situation will simplify as my children take flight. Due to my frugality and some luck, I have choices when answering these four key questions: Where do I want to be? What do I want to do? Who will accompany me? How much will all this cost? This last financial question causes me more angst than the existential where-what-who kind because there’s less opportunity to recover from any significant money mistakes I may make in retirement. To ease my concerns, I’ve considered selling the family house in California, rather than continuing to spend energy and money tending to it. After half a lifetime there, however, I wonder how it would feel to lose my old neighborhood. A song from the scouting bonfires of my…
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From Two to One

FOLLOWING MY husband’s death, I went from feeling prosperous to precarious in the space of a few short months. For decades, I’d had something extra in hand, beyond the minimum sum necessary to keep going. That sense of prosperity was now gone. This wasn’t just my imagination. Studies have found that widows are significantly less wealthy than their married counterparts. One academic article notes, “The death of a spouse is an event that may precipitate a large decline in wealth.” Similarly, a National Bureau of Economic Research study found that, “The death of the husband very often induces the poverty of the surviving spouse, even though the married couple was not poor.” For me, a decline in wealth might have been fine if our life had been just the two of us. After all, my husband would no longer be spending the money that he would no longer receive. Problem is, I have three children who are not yet grown, and everything else that goes along with a family of four. Though we never expected nor precisely planned for an untimely end, it turns out that our work-life choices and hopes for retirement had created a financial buffer. We had saved a higher percentage of our earnings than many others and had done so for decades. Still, since my husband’s death, I have been anxious to avoid a steady decline in our family’s nest egg. To that end, I’ve adopted a strategy for ongoing spending that I borrowed from a health care manual: “To lose weight, eat half what you now eat.” We all know how hard it is to slim down by merely consuming a little less. Our brains and bodies outsmart our best intentions. It seems that, if we want to shed pounds, we have to set far more…
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College Crapshoot

A LIFE OF FRUGALITY might mean your children graduate college debt-free, which is a major accomplishment. But what about your happy-go-lucky neighbors, who spent every dime they earned and never saved for college? At issue here is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which is the basis for the all-important expected family contribution (EFC). The whole thing can seem like one big crapshoot, as I can now attest. The EFC may determine that your spendthrift neighbors’ kids also get to graduate debt-free. Alternatively, even though they have no assets to be assessed, the EFC may require a substantial contribution from their income each year. On top of that, even an EFC of zero is no guarantee that a university will offer your child a full ride, plus the aid package may include substantial loans rather than much-coveted grant money. Retirement accounts are ignored in the FAFSA calculation, as is home equity, though some colleges may look at both when doling out the financial aid they control. Still, prioritizing retirement accounts and building up home equity is crucial if you’d rather not be expected to spend a quarter of your net worth or more on college costs. Once the FAFSA is filled out, your EFC is instantly displayed onscreen, formulaically derived from investments, income and “prior prior year” tax returns. For a thrifty soul like myself, the EFC is trouble and, indeed, double trouble with twins. Worse, in another three years their younger brother could also start college, leaving me with a trifecta of savings-chomping scholars. Recently passed by Congress, the 2021 omnibus spending bill includes changes to simplify the FAFSA process and dumps the term EFC, with all its negative baggage, replacing it with a new “student aid index.” We’ll learn more when the index is implemented for…
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Household Affairs

IN JANUARY, I surrendered to passionate irrationality, buying a park unit in Arizona that has become my second home. Now I understand why, at least in the movie cliché, a man might buy house slippers for his long-suffering wife’s birthday, while giving flashy, expensive baubles to his girlfriend for no reason at all. My single-wide “girlfriend” is tiny and fragile, the bloom off her youth. Things that improve her are easily obtained. A phone call to a friendly fellow at a store, the provision of a credit card number, and—voila—my private world is transformed for the better. Rational me knows the value I derive from each expenditure might be marginal, perhaps an imaginary gain or even an actual loss. Meanwhile, our longtime family home in California could also benefit from a new refrigerator, as well as much, much more. Over three decades of living in that house, I’ve remodeled, bought new appliances, replaced a furnace, changed out windows, and completed countless other projects. I have clear memories of improvements that helped and ones that disappointed. As of today, my 2007 kitchen remodel refrigerator has yet to die, so I’m thinking it can wait another year. After all, even when I’m living in the old family house, I’m not staring at the refrigerator nonstop. I might be in the living room, or dining room, or upstairs or out in the yard, with no thoughts of refrigeration clouding my mind. Here in my immobile home, the living room is also the dining room and the kitchen. Its tiniest flaws, any neglected maintenance, sit in plain view. On top of that—though not always the case—improving my single wide can require minuscule amounts of time, effort and cost. Less than a single quart repainted the “kitchen” and, with under 20 square feet of visible…
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Leaving Early

LIKE OTHERS, I TOOK my first part-time job as a teenager and, once working fulltime, stayed at it steadily for decades. Being an adult meant being a worker, affiliated with some firm or another, one industry or another. My plans for ever exiting the labor force were vague: “Save for the future, so someday you will retire with honor and dignity to spend your waning days as you desire.” I saved steadily, putting me on track for future retirement. The past 15 years at work have been rewarding, challenging, and required every bit of skill and effort I could muster, and I loved my work. As friends and family retired before me, I began wondering if I’d be one of those people who never stop. But that changed in 2019. I spent most of the year dealing with my husband’s death and a spell of accident-induced temporary disability, before returning to campus last fall. But even before the first day of class, I notified my dean that I was considering early retirement at year’s end—assuming a suitable exit package could be structured. Due to my injury, my commute by car and train was difficult to manage. I was still grieving for my life’s partner and the future we had anticipated, with little clarity about the alternate future I was now creating on my own. Additional responsibilities as a single parent added to my worries. Whenever we discussed retirement, my husband—who was retired at the time of his death—encouraged me to continue working as long as I felt effective and engaged in my duties. Before he passed away, our plan had been for me to work another five years. By then, our youngest would be out of high school and we could unwind as empty nesters. But after my husband’s death…
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When It Rains

TWO WEEKS AFTER my husband’s death, we held a memorial service for local friends and family. Days later, after a reasonable amount of online research, I visited a car dealer. It’s my experience that bringing at least one youngster along speeds up dealmaking, plus a parent can get unvarnished opinions about life in the backseat. So I brought along my 13-year-old. The two of us test drove two used cars and bought one of them. The next day, I drove to work in the city, instead of taking a train from the park-and-ride lot, as I'd done for the prior decade. My goal was to shorten my commute and reduce my hours away from home. This ended badly when I slipped on wet pavement in a parking garage, resulting in an injury that required surgery and time off work. Having never endured such an injury before, it was a shock to realize that—for the first time in my adult life—I was neither earning nor saving money, especially during a period of such high expenditures. Further, we’d lost all my husband’s future cash flow and his sharing of family responsibilities. Would that I had a partner and decades of earnings to recover the lost cash. But instead, I was on my own, launching three young adults. I had read about the "widowhood effect." I was at elevated risk of illness, injury or death. I had been careful. But I’d already exceeded the three-to-five days off work allotted for a death in the immediate family. On top of that, we grieving people are often told to stay busy and try to get back to normal routines. While anyone can lose their footing on a rain-soaked walkway, possibly nothing bad would have happened if I’d kept to my familiar commute or, even better, stayed…
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