The Financial Metric I Refuse to Calculate
Mark Crothers | Sep 14, 2025
I guess I'm going to be hounded out of the forum with pitchforks and flaming torches for confiding this dirty little secret. Apparently, confession is a catalyst for redemption, so here's the truth: I never have and probably never will produce a statement of net worth. I really don't see the point. My two homes and cars aren't for sale, and their personal contents are just that—personal and not for sale. Since I don't view any of these possessions as liquid, they hold no practical monetary value for me. I only care about knowing the position and value of my actual liquidity: cash, stocks, and bonds. My financial foundation is built on zero debt. Given this principle, I can't chip a brick from my home's wall or remove a wing mirror from my car to use either as payment at the grocery store. These items are irrelevant to my financial planning, as are the assets they belong to. To me, the only reason to include illiquid assets in financial calculations is if you plan on leveraging those assets to take on debt—which I don't. My illiquid assets, along with remaining liquid assets, will simply be passed on to my children and grandchildren to do with as they choose. It won't be a difficult task for my heirs to sell any illiquid assets and valuable personal possessions to distribute the money as per the will. They'll just have to accept any impediment as a fee to access my illiquid assets. However, it won't be difficult because a detailed account of my liquid assets will be available, and all deeds, titles, and policies will be deposited with the will. My wife Suzie is fully on board with this philosophy and is fully aware of all our financial positions should I shuffle off…
Read more » Financial Trauma
Mark Crothers | Feb 14, 2026
SOMETIMES WORLD events beyond your control create a hard reset point in your financial life. A before and after. For me, that point was the 2007 Great Financial Crisis (GFC). The psychological scars still reverberate into my current life. Looking back, I was aware of something rumbling about in the financial landscape but didn't take much notice due to being deeply involved in running my business. Little did I realize the impact heading my way. At that point, we had finally reached a good place in life. It was ten years since founding my company and the memory of the first five tough, lean years were a fading thought in my mind. Meaningful cash was flowing into our personal accounts, and business was very profitable with dreams of life-changing expansion on my mind. Nothing seemed impossible. We were young and proud of our achievements. Mid-2008 saw banks in my country going under and the government stepping in to prop them up. My wife Suzie worked for a large UK-based international bank. I distinctly remember one Saturday morning chatting together about the crash in Suzie's employer's share price and whether we should take a big personal position. We both thought the company was fundamentally strong and a massive bargain. Any thoughts about investing went out the window by that Monday afternoon. My bankers called me to an urgent afternoon meeting. With little in the way of diplomacy, immediate repayment of loans and overdrafts was demanded within seven days. The final insult was informing me that a small, unused $100 overdraft on my personal account was withdrawn with immediate effect. Shell-shocked understates how I felt as I left the meeting. It’s a bit of a blur, and so were the next 18 months of fighting for survival. All of mine and…
Read more » The Illusion of Wealth
Mark Crothers | Jun 27, 2025
I was sitting on the deck of my holiday home, enjoying the morning sunshine and breakfast, when a deep rumble announced the arrival of an expensive, sporty car. It was my neighbour. He's a very nice man in his 40s who always dresses impeccably, with two well-turned-out kids and an immaculate wife – to all intents and purposes, a family living the dream. Contrast that with me: I drive a seven-year-old SUV with 70,000 miles on the clock, habitually run around in shorts and T-shirts, own three pairs of trainers, one pair of dress shoes, and exactly one suit. It's obvious there's no comparison in who's "winning the game of life"... or is there? About 18 months ago, a conversation started when I mentioned I'd just paid off the mortgage because my wife was retiring. My neighbour then spoke with pride about his ability to juggle credit cards, expertly transferring balances with 0% transfer rates. However, he also revealed a concern about his own mortgage. As is common in the UK, his rate was fixed for five years, and with two years left on his 1.25% rate, he couldn't see how he'd afford the jump to around 5%. That nice car, the designer clothes, the immaculate facade – they all come with a hefty, often hidden, price tag. While my neighbour projected an image of success, his confession about juggling credit cards and his anxiety over the impending mortgage hike painted a different picture. This isn't just about the obvious payments for the car or the latest fashion; it's the relentless pressure to maintain a certain lifestyle. The "keeping up with the Joneses" trap is real, amplified by social media. People feel immense pressure to project prosperity, even if it means accumulating significant debt. This pursuit often takes a quiet…
Read more » Enriching Our Collective Wisdom
Mark Crothers | Oct 1, 2025
I'm truly a bit of a techno refusenik when it comes to social media and much of the current online content. For example, I'm honestly not 100% sure how you'd find or listen to a podcast. Vlogs are a total mystery to me. I don't know what they are, and I simply don't have the curiosity to find out. Obviously, I'm not a total dinosaur. After all, I'm writing this post for Humble Dollar, a most decidedly online retirement and personal finance forum. In my opinion, it provides its visitors with intelligent and thoughtful reading by a small group of amateur writers as they articulate their thoughts and feelings on various retirement topics. I've been contributing since the site moved to the forum model, trying to share my journey through revelations and experiences about my recent retirement, along with anything else I think would be of interest. My unconscious style seems to be mostly conversational and light-hearted. I guess that comes from not taking myself or life too seriously. I was a long-time lurker, reading and enjoying the content. Over time, I realised that most articles were penned by a small portion of the readership. Seeing an opportunity to add to the material's diversity and originality, I wanted to try my hand at contributing—to give back something in appreciation for the site's efforts to educate and entertain. My motivation for writing this particular article is simple too. I've noticed in the comments section of the authors' articles a large wealth of articulate and intelligent individuals who obviously have the talent and life experience to compose interesting and unique writing to enhance the site—but fail to do so. I think it would be wonderful and very much appreciated if some of our commentators and the family of silent readers would share…
Read more » Gold and Diamonds
Mark Crothers | Jun 12, 2026
I was in my friend's workshop recently. He's a goldsmith, the proper kind, with a laser welder, a magnifying glass tucked above one eye, and old fashioned tools he uses to make expensive things even more expensive. We were there because Suzie had lost a claw from the setting of her diamond engagement ring. One of those four tiny prongs that holds the whole romantic enterprise in place had simply given up, which made Suzie anxious until he fixed it in about ten minutes flat. The argument about whether I should pay him lasted considerably longer than the repair. Once that was settled, badly from his perspective, we sat drinking coffee and he told me something I found genuinely fascinating. It doesn't fit neatly into a financial story. I'm sharing it anyway. Suzie's ring has a half-carat main stone. Half a carat was what we could stretch to at the time, and we could only manage that because the owner of the business I worked for happened to know someone in the wholesale jewellery trade who let us in through the back door of the pricing. Without that connection, we'd probably have been looking at a very nice cubic zirconia or a microscope diamond. But here's what my goldsmith friend explained, coffee in hand, in that particular tone of a man sharing trade knowledge he suspects you'll find more interesting than you have any right to. The cost relationship between the diamond and the gold in a ring like Suzie's has completely reversed since the day I bought it. Forty-odd years ago, the rough split was 80/20, eighty per cent of the ring's cost was the diamond, twenty per cent was the gold. Today, that ratio has essentially flipped. The gold now accounts for around eighty per cent of the…
Read more » Flexing the Retirement Spending Muscle
Mark Crothers | Jul 17, 2025
Suzie and I are packing a travel bag right now. Later this morning, we're off to the Fermanagh Lakelands, a two-hour drive from our holiday home. We're staying for three nights in a fancy hotel that's also the wedding venue for the daughter of a very close friend. We'll be attending the festivities there. I'm looking forward to the wedding, except, of course, for the suit I'll have to wear. I'm particularly interested in seeing the bride in her wedding dress because, unusually enough, I purchased it for her. Certainly not the traditional way with a wedding dress, but the bridal budget was having a cash flow crisis at the time. I was deep in the throes of sorting out my retirement finances when this not insignificant purchase happened, and I admit, very unusually for me, I dallied slightly before making the offer. But a realization hit me: I'm retiring soon. If this wasn't the perfect opportunity to give myself permission to spend in retirement, when would be? I reasoned this would be a perfect test of flexing my retirement spending, putting the generosity line on the spreadsheet into real-world practice. Thinking about this, I considered the other outcome that people might have chosen in the same situation. After years of carefully saving for retirement and being careful with their budgeting, it's not a given that this spending muscle would be ready for its task, and the offer of bridal help may never have happened. I've read and seen a few real examples of people never fully embracing this phase when they enter retirement, living a life far below their means. They let their spending muscle atrophy through fear of running out of funds in their later years, or from simply being unable to shed the psychological shackles of frugality…
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