I like to think of myself as a decent planner, and when I spend money I like to make sure I’m getting value. Both qualities were very much on display last August when I booked a trip to Valencia, Spain, to witness a total solar eclipse.
The planning had started years earlier. Solar eclipses are predictable to the minute centuries in advance, and I’d known about the Spanish eclipse long before it was on anyone else’s radar.

Do you know Peter Cancro? Peter is 69 years old and someone to be admired, someone who started out very ordinary and in one transaction became a new US billionaire, around $4.9 billion netted from selling his business. 
I greatly admire such people, I wish I was as ambitious, a risk taker and committed to success. Sure he had help along the way, notably his high school football coach who was also a banker, but he started this journey at age 14 and took the big risk at age 17. 

JONATHAN CLEMENTS’S final book was released this week. Titled Money and Me, it traces the arc of Jonathan’s nearly four-decade career as a personal finance columnist.
Money and Me starts with the story of a man named George Cope, who was a nineteenth century tobacco baron. At the time of his death in 1888, Cope was one of Britain’s richest men. But within just two generations, his fortune was gone.

WHEN I STARTED writing for HumbleDollar, Jonathan gave me some simple but important advice: “Don’t brag about your financial situation. You want readers to like you.” Perhaps that’s one of the reasons he named his financial site HumbleDollar.
I try to follow this advice not only regarding money, but in other aspects of my life. I know how fleeting things can be—especially when it comes to health. Life can change on a dime. It can humble you.

We have now emerged from the hellish phase of moving and are settling into our new home. Our condo sale closed on Tuesday, all the money went where it was supposed to go, and our first new mortgage payment is due on Monday.
I have found it quite amazing/shocking how many expenses there have been over the last few weeks for both ends of the transaction. I’m not talking about the obvious (buying the house and paying sales commissions).

A couple of year after retiring from a career in translation and the organization of international conferences, I enrolled in a graduate program for Financial Planners at Rice University and subsequently passed the CFP exam. I didn’t intend to go back to work, and I haven’t. What motivated me was an interest in learning how to manage my own finances better. In the process, I gained an appreciation for financial planning as a profession and would consider it seriously if I were starting out again.

Back in mid-January I decided I owned too much of too few things. The big American tech names had crept up to take an uncomfortable slice of everything I held, and with being recently retired, that started to feel less like a strong portfolio and more like a bit of a risk. So I trimmed some of it back.
A portion of what came off went into an Asia Pacific fund, ex-Japan. The valuations looked decent,

The 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession were unsettling. People lost jobs, homes, and a good chunk of their nest eggs. The S&P 500 saw an almost 40% drop in 2008 alone.
The 24-hour news cycle and social media offered up plenty of data, advice, and stories of sheer panic. And the messengers we listened to likely affected our reaction to the market’s decline—as well as our longer-term financial prospects.
I started thinking about how the likes of John Bogle and Jonathan Clements helped me develop a thick skin for market gyrations and the things we can’t control.

At ten years old, my twin brother and I stood in a dark hallway trying not to cry.
The suitcases had already been taken from the car. Around us stood other families saying goodbye to children far too young to understand why they were being left behind. Then suddenly it was our turn.
Two frightened boys clinging to their mother, tears streaming down our faces as we watched home disappear behind us.
“An ominous dark hallway,


I’ll be honest — I’m a little worried.
A few months ago, in a moment of weakness, I agreed to run a 10k road race. That’s 6.25 miles, for those of you who’ve never had cause to think in kilometres. The problem? Although I’m retired and theoretically swimming in free time, I’ve somehow managed to be too busy to train properly. I’ve done a few 5k fun runs, my comfort zone distance, and told myself that was close enough.

Our own long-time contributor Adam Grossman was this week’s guest on one of my favorite podcasts Morningstar’s The Long View.  You can listen anywhere you hear podcasts or at this link:
Adam Grossman: Asset Allocation Is an Investor’s Best Defense | Morningstar
Congratulations, Adam!

The U.S. tax system only taxes realized income—meaning money from a paycheck, a dividend payment, or the actual sale of an asset. If a billionaire owns $100 billion in stock and that stock grows by $10 billion in a year, they do not owe a single dime of income tax on that $10 billion increase until they sell the shares.
And neither does anyone else. I don’t pay on the growth in my IRA or any investment.

The Kindle version of Jonathan’s Money & Me has appeared in my Kindle Online Amazon library a few minutes into the early hours of 5/26/2026. I am looking forward to reading it.

My wife asked me yesterday “did you know that 93% of seniors age in place?”. Really? That didn’t sound right. Where we live on Mercer Island (next to Seattle) there are many retirement communities, including a large one on the lake called Covenant Shores that was converted from Shorewood Apartments where I delivered newspapers more than 50 years ago. Folks in my yacht club live there, I see constant advertising for the Aegis Living, a higher end one from Era called Aljoya,

You or your parents may think a will is enough — until probate creates costly delays and stress. One simple document could help your family avoid a financial nightmare.
I recently helped a friend go through probate after her father passed away. Although he had a will, he did not have a Revocable Living trust — the document that can help families avoid lengthy and costly probate.
What many people do not realize is that a will alone does not avoid probate.