I’m slightly obsessed with wedding costs at the moment. You might recall I’ve mentioned before that my daughter’s getting married next February. As anyone who’s ever sat on the sharp, pointy, “paying” end of a wedding will tell you, this is not a cheap hobby. But lately I’ve started to wonder if the wedding supplies industry has lost its mind.
My daughter lives in London, marrying at home in Ireland. That means all the long-distance logistics funnel straight through us,

Unlike many of the HD community, I still pack my lunch each weekday and head off to work. There’s a range of reasons for this, but most importantly it keeps my wife sane!
During my 9 to 5, people will buy ride-on mowers somewhere in the range of $10,000 to $25,000. My relatively frugal brain thinks …. “Wow, $15,000 just to cut your grass”. And it got me thinking about how some folks are completely comfortable to spend like that,

There was a time when we compared ourselves to the Joneses.
The Joneses lived across the street.
Maybe they had a newer car, a nicer house or a better vacation. We could see what they had because they were right there. Our world of comparison was relatively small.
Today, the Joneses live everywhere. Facebook. YouTube. Instagram. TikTok.
We see their houses, cars, vacations, restaurants, clothes and lifestyles. And among all those people are some of the wealthiest people on earth.

DEEP DOWN INSIDE, I want to be the richest person in the graveyard. 
I retired at age 62, confident in our financial plan to survive market fluctuations. We saved over 25% of our income for nearly three decades. Perhaps a bit too much, but we lived well and always had sufficient funds to raise a family, maintain our household, and put our children through postgraduate education.
If anything, our retirement spending level is conservative,

RECENTLY, A FELLOW—let’s call him Tom—contacted me with a distressing story of financial fraud. I’ll describe what happened then review steps you might take to prevent this same sort of thing.
Tom first noticed there might be a problem when he spotted a larger-than-average withdrawal from his checking account. The payee was a 529 college savings plan. But because Tom and his wife—let’s call her Jane—have 529 accounts for their children, the transaction almost went unnoticed.

I recently came across another piece of Jonathan’s early writing that I thought his readers might enjoy.
He wrote “The Fear” when he was just 14 years old. It has nothing to do with money or personal finance, but it offers another glimpse of Jonathan long before he became the writer so many of us came to know.
Here it is, exactly as he wrote it.
THE FEAR
He crouched, his shoulders hunched, waiting for the order.

Financial success is driven by good savings habits—and for that we need low fixed living costs.
I spent 20 years in a house that was far less expensive than I could afford. This isn’t a strategy I recommend, because I never much liked the house. Still, it came with a huge silver lining: The modest monthly house payments allowed me to save great gobs of money.
My sense is that most folks aren’t naturally inclined to save.

My wife Suzie has been organising a hen party for our daughter, nothing spectacular, just a group of girls heading into the big smoke for a candle-making course, followed by dinner and a cocktail bar. Because there were quite a few people attending, all three venues required small deposits, which my wife happily paid. All told, the combined deposit came to around $100 per person.
Most of the group are around our daughter’s age: very late twenties through to mid-thirties.

Geoffrey Schmidt is a CPA and retirement planning expert with a YouTube channel called HolySchmidt. 
In a recent video “The Map is Wrong” he analyzed the five best and worst states to retire and challenged the idea that the best choice was states with no income tax. He based his analysis on median home values and retiree incomes. 
He used the estimated combined spending on property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes and property insurance.  When added together the results showed no income tax is sometimes a misleading criteria,

Yesterday, I got an email from State Farm asking me to choose a payment method for my dividend. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was a scam, but it’s legit.
Apparently, State Farm is issuing a one-time $5 billion cashback dividend to customers who had a qualifying auto policy in 2025, with percentages ranging from 4% to 10%.
If you received an email with a Dividend ID and PIN, you can easily check how much you can get.

This is from a survey of only 240 people from WalletHub August 2026, but still, the results are not optimistic. 
For example, 43% of those surveyed believe it is not realistic for the average American to expect to retire comfortably. “Not realistic?” How do HD readers feel about that?

Pension preference: 7 in 10 people believe a pension is better than a 401(k).  Understandable, but for most workers this is not practical because you need to be a participant in a pension plan (generally one employer) for decades to generate a significant retirement income and the average tenure with one employer is only 4-6 years +-
Americans worry about retirement: More than 1 in 3 Americans are not confident that they will have enough money to retire.

I recently watched the music video for Dimash Qudaibergen’s Love’s Not Over Yet. It tells the story of a man who becomes so consumed by work and the pursuit of success that he gradually loses sight of the people he is supposedly working so hard for.
As I watched, I felt an uncomfortable sense of recognition.
Many years ago, while building a landscape business with my twin brother, Nick, I became that man. The business was successful,

I received a monthly newsletter from Andy Panko today, dated 9/1/2026, titled “How to move to a new state…tax compliantly”.
I think it is well written and a good read for anyone who commutes into another state to work, has multiple residences in different states or has adopted a RV or snowbird  lifestyle.
Andy’s article is focused on state level inheritance and estate taxes. The article references a 8/7/2026 WSJ article which summarizes a Connecticut estate tax case where the taxpayer’s estate and the State of Connecticut do not currently agree upon the taxpayer’s domicile at his 2015 death.

I left my unhappy home in 1999 with my clothing, my hi-fi, the Omega watch given to my dad when he retired in 1980 and little else. Storage space in my new life was not an issue I had to concern myself with. 
I was still in pretty good shape three years later when I met Chris. If there’s a polar opposite word for a person who hoards, that word would describe Chris, at least in 2002.

THE OPEN KITCHEN restaurant has been a fixture in Charlotte, North Carolina for 75 years. The restaurant has an old-time feel, with memorabilia, including menus from years gone by, lining its walls. Those old menus provided David Enna, a financial journalist, with a laboratory for examining the effects of inflation.
What did Enna find? The oldest menu on display is from 1963. To state the obvious, today’s prices make those from the 1960s look quaint.