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Carrying Humble Dollar Forward

Andrew Clements  |  Apr 7, 2026

"Andrew, What a wonderful piece, beautifully written."
- Andy Morrison
Read more »

Financial Tension

William Housley  |  Apr 17, 2026

"It is a different kind of investment. 🙂"
- William Housley
Read more »

The condo, HOA, senior citizen conundrum

R Quinn  |  Apr 19, 2026

"I can see why people might be getting a little upset over the increase in the HOA monthly fee. It's approaching, in some instances I imagine, what they pay in property tax. The difference is that the HOA fee is directly re-invested in the place they live, while the property tax is not. I don't like paying $100 for an oil change, but it preserves the value of my car. I am less fond of paying $6000 for a new engine. Sometimes you need to pay a little (relatively) now to avoid paying a lot later. But some people are more about limiting the monthly budget than protecting/enhancing the long-term value of their assets."
- John Katz
Read more »

Staying Rational

ArticleAdam M. Grossman  |  Apr 18, 2026

IT'S BEEN MORE than six years since Covid first entered our vocabulary. It goes without saying that investors have experienced a lot, and for better or worse, recent market events provide some useful lessons. The first has to do with the nature of the stock market. What drives stock prices? Open a finance textbook, and the answer will be clear: The value of a stock should equal the sum of the company’s future profits. This idea is known as intrinsic value, and it’s the textbook explanation of how stock prices work. But there’s clearly a disconnect, since stock prices bounce around far more than the math suggests they should.  How can we square this circle? Over the long term, the data tell us that intrinsic value is a valid idea. Chart the price of any given stock, then overlay the company’s profits, and there will often be a reasonably close relationship. But only if you’re Rip Van Winkle. Over shorter periods of time, anything can happen. Stocks often move far above or far below their intrinsic values in response to the news of the day.  Especially during times of economic uncertainty, intrinsic value analysis is typically cast aside and replaced by some combination of emotion, conjecture, speculation and storytelling. That’s what we saw in the early months of 2020. Stores were closed, employees had been sent home and the economy went into recession. And since no one had a crystal ball, that’s when storytellers were able to step in with their extreme predictions, causing the stock market to drop more than 30% in the space of six weeks. The lesson for investors: No one can predict when the next crisis will roll around or what form it will take. But there is one very reasonable way to be able to keep it in perspective: by remembering that, at the end of the day, intrinsic value is what matters, and ultimately that’s what drives stock prices. Basic arithmetic illustrates how this can help us manage through the next crisis. Consider that the price-to-earnings ratio of the U.S. stock market has historically averaged around 16. The average company’s total stock market value, in other words, has been equal to about 16 times its annual profits.  Now let’s imagine that the next crisis results in every company in America losing an entire year of earnings. That’s extreme and hasn’t happened since the Depression, but it’s useful as a thought experiment. In that scenario, what would be the impact to those companies’ intrinsic value? In simple terms, it would be just one-sixteenth, or a modest 6%. What if a crisis were so severe that a company lost two years of earnings? Using this simple model, the impact would be about 12%. This is meaningful, I believe, because crises typically result in stock price declines that are far more severe than just 6% or 12%. In 2000 and in 2008, the market dropped more than 50%. While every crisis is different, I think it’s useful to keep these numbers in mind whenever the next geopolitical event causes stocks to drop. When that occurs, storytellers will inevitably take over, and the news will be downbeat. But if stocks drop to an extreme degree, as they have in the past, we can probably view it as an overreaction. That won’t help anyone’s portfolio recover any faster, but it should help us tune out the worst of the forecasters and maintain our equanimity. How else can you maintain an even keel during a market crisis? It’s important to understand the impact of recency bias. This bias is the tendency to extrapolate from current conditions, to assume that the future will look like the present, and to downplay the possibility that things might change. That tendency is what contributed to the cycle of negative news during the depths of 2020, and this is why I think it’s so important for investors to be aware of market history.  Again, extensive analysis isn’t required. We need only look back across some of the crises the country has weathered, from the Civil War to the Depression to World War II. In each case, the economy recovered and went on to become larger and stronger than before. The lesson for investors: In the depths of a crisis, it’s very difficult to know when or how it will end. But a sense of history can help carry us through. Those are ways to manage through a crisis. Covid also provided a lesson on how to prepare—specifically, how to prepare our portfolios—for a future downturn. In 2022, investors were caught flat-footed when popular total-bond market funds delivered surprising losses. These funds are one pillar of the well-known three-fund portfolio and have traditionally been viewed as the default choice for a set-it-and-forget-it bond allocation. But in 2022, when the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates, these funds dropped a surprising 13%. That was during the same year that the U.S. stock market dropped nearly 20%, creating a very difficult situation for those in retirement and needing to withdraw from their portfolios. The lesson for investors: Total-bond market funds may be well diversified, but they carry risk along another very important dimension known as duration. This is a bond metric that measures, in simple terms, how long it will take for bondholders to be repaid, and it’s a key determinant of risk. The longer the duration, the greater the risk of loss when rates rise. While total-bond market funds have holdings across a broad range of durations, they average out to nearly six years. That’s why they lost so much value in 2022. What’s the alternative? Short-term bond funds tend to have a duration in the neighborhood of just two years. As a result, in 2022, short-term government bond funds like Vanguard’s Short-Term Treasury ETF (ticker: VGSH) lost a far more manageable 4% of their value. To be sure, every crisis is different, and it’s easy to rationalize about the past once it’s in the past. But these lessons, I think, can help us better prepare both our emotions and our portfolios for whatever comes next.   Adam M. Grossman is the founder of Mayport, a fixed-fee wealth management firm. Sign up for Adam's Daily Ideas email, follow him on X @AdamMGrossman and check out his earlier articles.
Read more »

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

DAN SMITH  |  Apr 12, 2026

"West Bend Poppery II off Ebay, and a bag of beans is all you need. I use a wooden spoon to agitate the beans to help move the chaff off. Roast outside. It gets smokey."
- Bob Steele
Read more »

A Life You Build

Jeff Peck  |  Apr 19, 2026

"Thank you for sharing your life story. We would do well to reflect on the lessons you have learned along the way. I particularly liked the bit about having flexibility with discipline, and the need for compassion."
- ram bala
Read more »

Navigating a Turbulent Career

ArticleRichard Connor  |  Apr 18, 2026

A RECENT article by Adam Grossman relayed an interesting story of the 2015 merger of Kraft and Heinz.  One of the aspects that made this merger unique was the involvement of Warren Buffet. Adam’s story is a cautionary tale for investors – research shows that, more often than not, the hoped-for corporate synergies and growth are elusive. The story provides more evidence for the benefits of indexing to investors. There is, however, another side to this story that is very important to an individual’s personal financial life. In addition to being investors, most of us are, or were, employees of a corporation.  What if you are an employee of a company that is acquiring another company, being acquired by another company, or part of a merger?  How do you navigate the challenges of this significant career event? In late November 1985, I interviewed with RCA’s Astro Space division in East Windsor, NJ.  Several weeks later I interviewed with GE Aerospace in King of Prussia, PA.  In between those 2 interviews it was announced that GE was acquiring RCA. I received an offer for a position in the thermal engineering group of both companies. The GE offer was for $32,000, $4,000 more than the RCA offer.  The GE plant was about 8 miles from our home; the RCA plant was 62 miles from our home.   I accepted the GE offer.  When I called the RCA manager to tell him my decision, he was professional and understanding.  He remarked that “who knows, we may end up working together and you got a better deal out of it”. Four months later that RCA manager became the senior manager of the merged thermal engineering organization – my new boss’s boss. Seven years later my division was sold to Martin Marietta, whose space operations were based in Denver, CO. Two years later Martin Marietta merged with Lockheed, in Sunnyvale, CA, to form Lockheed Martin.  Later that year it was announced that the company was closing its 2 east coast plants and moving the work to Sunnyvale and Denver.   Over the 31 years starting in 1986, I was part of numerous acquisitions, mergers, two plant shut-downs, and being sold to a private equity company. Somehow, I managed to stay employed, and grow my career. I wasn’t special – hundreds of colleagues trod the same path. When I look back I can identify some of the attributes that helped me navigate a turbulent career. Build your Reputation: Be someone that people want to hire. If you move up, be someone that people want to work for. My first senior manager position came about because the hiring team remembered me from 4 years previous  Maintain Flexibility: Are you willing to travel or relocate? Would you take a lateral position, or even a step down, if it meant keeping a job?  During my career I traveled extensively, commuted 62 miles for four years, and took new positions that challenged me and my family.  Focus on your Skills: What are the skills and behaviors that are valued by your company, and differentiate successful employees? These include technical, leadership, managerial, and interpersonal skills. My first GE manager provided a sound technical base, but also taught me just as much about work ethic, and professionalism. Focus on the Culture:  Combing organizations means combining cultures, just as much as products or processes.  This may require you to be open to a different way of doing things. It requires a willingness to learn and grow.  It will also likely require some diplomacy skills.  Change is hard for employees, and nobody enjoys being told their processes or products are inferior.  When we merged with RCA, we found there was a significant difference in the way that managers and senior technical leaders challenged their employees in public forums, in front of customers.  GE preferred to work out technical differences and approaches in-house, and present a united front to customers. This took some time to resolve into a shared approach. Focus on the People:  When my first GE manager retired, we held a group luncheon. He was universally liked and respected.  Someone described him as the best “BTU chaser” he’d ever seen, which was high praise. He gave a short speech at his retirement, where he discussed the exciting space programs he had supported. He ended that the thing that made his career special wasn’t the projects and technology, it was the people.   I was also fortunate to work on some exciting, ground-breaking projects.  It wasn’t always easy, and the path certainly wasn’t straight.  Looking back, it is the people I think of most, and I miss the most.    Richard Connor is a semi-retired aerospace engineer with a keen interest in finance. He enjoys a wide variety of other interests, including chasing grandkids, space, sports, travel, winemaking and reading. Follow Rick on Twitter @RConnor609 and check out his earlier articles.
Read more »

Something to Think About

David Lancaster  |  Mar 24, 2026

"This is an issue for an optimizer but not a satisficer. I'm more concerned with the total amount I convert each year than the timing. But I do have optimizer tendencies: I tend to leave maybe half or more of my Roth conversions for December so I can guess better and make my income near the top of the tax bracket and keep my capital gains in the 0% bracket."
- Randy Dobkin
Read more »

Fixing Social Security once and for all

R Quinn  |  Apr 15, 2026

"I’ve read that is so! 😂"
- David Lancaster
Read more »

The IRA Decision That Affects Your Kids

David Lancaster  |  Apr 17, 2026

"Children yes"
- R Quinn
Read more »

One Good Call?

Mark Crothers  |  Apr 14, 2026

"Jeremy. A very sharp observation, and it brings to mind that old saying: invert, always invert. To answer your question directly: no, I haven't analysed my wife's portfolio to that extent — and if I'm honest, I probably won't. She's determined to stay with the adviser, and I'm content with what we've achieved: a fee reduction and a new commitment to advise based on our total combined holdings rather than hers in isolation. Sometimes you have to know which hill to die on — and when to retreat with a partial victory."
- Mark Crothers
Read more »

What happens to Medicare Supplement coverage when moving to a different state?

Carl C Trovall  |  Mar 15, 2026

"Triple check but I believe that the Medigap insurer you originally picked stays with you if you move to another county or state (and don't change plans or companies). A few states even allow you to change companies and/or plans without underwriting or higher premiums (community pricing). Each state has an 800 SHIP (State Health Insurance. Assistance Program)  hotline to connect you with knowledgeable folks."
- R Mancuso
Read more »

Carrying Humble Dollar Forward

Andrew Clements  |  Apr 7, 2026

"Andrew, What a wonderful piece, beautifully written."
- Andy Morrison
Read more »

Financial Tension

William Housley  |  Apr 17, 2026

"It is a different kind of investment. 🙂"
- William Housley
Read more »

The condo, HOA, senior citizen conundrum

R Quinn  |  Apr 19, 2026

"I can see why people might be getting a little upset over the increase in the HOA monthly fee. It's approaching, in some instances I imagine, what they pay in property tax. The difference is that the HOA fee is directly re-invested in the place they live, while the property tax is not. I don't like paying $100 for an oil change, but it preserves the value of my car. I am less fond of paying $6000 for a new engine. Sometimes you need to pay a little (relatively) now to avoid paying a lot later. But some people are more about limiting the monthly budget than protecting/enhancing the long-term value of their assets."
- John Katz
Read more »

Staying Rational

ArticleAdam M. Grossman  |  Apr 18, 2026

IT'S BEEN MORE than six years since Covid first entered our vocabulary. It goes without saying that investors have experienced a lot, and for better or worse, recent market events provide some useful lessons. The first has to do with the nature of the stock market. What drives stock prices? Open a finance textbook, and the answer will be clear: The value of a stock should equal the sum of the company’s future profits. This idea is known as intrinsic value, and it’s the textbook explanation of how stock prices work. But there’s clearly a disconnect, since stock prices bounce around far more than the math suggests they should.  How can we square this circle? Over the long term, the data tell us that intrinsic value is a valid idea. Chart the price of any given stock, then overlay the company’s profits, and there will often be a reasonably close relationship. But only if you’re Rip Van Winkle. Over shorter periods of time, anything can happen. Stocks often move far above or far below their intrinsic values in response to the news of the day.  Especially during times of economic uncertainty, intrinsic value analysis is typically cast aside and replaced by some combination of emotion, conjecture, speculation and storytelling. That’s what we saw in the early months of 2020. Stores were closed, employees had been sent home and the economy went into recession. And since no one had a crystal ball, that’s when storytellers were able to step in with their extreme predictions, causing the stock market to drop more than 30% in the space of six weeks. The lesson for investors: No one can predict when the next crisis will roll around or what form it will take. But there is one very reasonable way to be able to keep it in perspective: by remembering that, at the end of the day, intrinsic value is what matters, and ultimately that’s what drives stock prices. Basic arithmetic illustrates how this can help us manage through the next crisis. Consider that the price-to-earnings ratio of the U.S. stock market has historically averaged around 16. The average company’s total stock market value, in other words, has been equal to about 16 times its annual profits.  Now let’s imagine that the next crisis results in every company in America losing an entire year of earnings. That’s extreme and hasn’t happened since the Depression, but it’s useful as a thought experiment. In that scenario, what would be the impact to those companies’ intrinsic value? In simple terms, it would be just one-sixteenth, or a modest 6%. What if a crisis were so severe that a company lost two years of earnings? Using this simple model, the impact would be about 12%. This is meaningful, I believe, because crises typically result in stock price declines that are far more severe than just 6% or 12%. In 2000 and in 2008, the market dropped more than 50%. While every crisis is different, I think it’s useful to keep these numbers in mind whenever the next geopolitical event causes stocks to drop. When that occurs, storytellers will inevitably take over, and the news will be downbeat. But if stocks drop to an extreme degree, as they have in the past, we can probably view it as an overreaction. That won’t help anyone’s portfolio recover any faster, but it should help us tune out the worst of the forecasters and maintain our equanimity. How else can you maintain an even keel during a market crisis? It’s important to understand the impact of recency bias. This bias is the tendency to extrapolate from current conditions, to assume that the future will look like the present, and to downplay the possibility that things might change. That tendency is what contributed to the cycle of negative news during the depths of 2020, and this is why I think it’s so important for investors to be aware of market history.  Again, extensive analysis isn’t required. We need only look back across some of the crises the country has weathered, from the Civil War to the Depression to World War II. In each case, the economy recovered and went on to become larger and stronger than before. The lesson for investors: In the depths of a crisis, it’s very difficult to know when or how it will end. But a sense of history can help carry us through. Those are ways to manage through a crisis. Covid also provided a lesson on how to prepare—specifically, how to prepare our portfolios—for a future downturn. In 2022, investors were caught flat-footed when popular total-bond market funds delivered surprising losses. These funds are one pillar of the well-known three-fund portfolio and have traditionally been viewed as the default choice for a set-it-and-forget-it bond allocation. But in 2022, when the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates, these funds dropped a surprising 13%. That was during the same year that the U.S. stock market dropped nearly 20%, creating a very difficult situation for those in retirement and needing to withdraw from their portfolios. The lesson for investors: Total-bond market funds may be well diversified, but they carry risk along another very important dimension known as duration. This is a bond metric that measures, in simple terms, how long it will take for bondholders to be repaid, and it’s a key determinant of risk. The longer the duration, the greater the risk of loss when rates rise. While total-bond market funds have holdings across a broad range of durations, they average out to nearly six years. That’s why they lost so much value in 2022. What’s the alternative? Short-term bond funds tend to have a duration in the neighborhood of just two years. As a result, in 2022, short-term government bond funds like Vanguard’s Short-Term Treasury ETF (ticker: VGSH) lost a far more manageable 4% of their value. To be sure, every crisis is different, and it’s easy to rationalize about the past once it’s in the past. But these lessons, I think, can help us better prepare both our emotions and our portfolios for whatever comes next.   Adam M. Grossman is the founder of Mayport, a fixed-fee wealth management firm. Sign up for Adam's Daily Ideas email, follow him on X @AdamMGrossman and check out his earlier articles.
Read more »

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

DAN SMITH  |  Apr 12, 2026

"West Bend Poppery II off Ebay, and a bag of beans is all you need. I use a wooden spoon to agitate the beans to help move the chaff off. Roast outside. It gets smokey."
- Bob Steele
Read more »

A Life You Build

Jeff Peck  |  Apr 19, 2026

"Thank you for sharing your life story. We would do well to reflect on the lessons you have learned along the way. I particularly liked the bit about having flexibility with discipline, and the need for compassion."
- ram bala
Read more »

Navigating a Turbulent Career

ArticleRichard Connor  |  Apr 18, 2026

A RECENT article by Adam Grossman relayed an interesting story of the 2015 merger of Kraft and Heinz.  One of the aspects that made this merger unique was the involvement of Warren Buffet. Adam’s story is a cautionary tale for investors – research shows that, more often than not, the hoped-for corporate synergies and growth are elusive. The story provides more evidence for the benefits of indexing to investors. There is, however, another side to this story that is very important to an individual’s personal financial life. In addition to being investors, most of us are, or were, employees of a corporation.  What if you are an employee of a company that is acquiring another company, being acquired by another company, or part of a merger?  How do you navigate the challenges of this significant career event? In late November 1985, I interviewed with RCA’s Astro Space division in East Windsor, NJ.  Several weeks later I interviewed with GE Aerospace in King of Prussia, PA.  In between those 2 interviews it was announced that GE was acquiring RCA. I received an offer for a position in the thermal engineering group of both companies. The GE offer was for $32,000, $4,000 more than the RCA offer.  The GE plant was about 8 miles from our home; the RCA plant was 62 miles from our home.   I accepted the GE offer.  When I called the RCA manager to tell him my decision, he was professional and understanding.  He remarked that “who knows, we may end up working together and you got a better deal out of it”. Four months later that RCA manager became the senior manager of the merged thermal engineering organization – my new boss’s boss. Seven years later my division was sold to Martin Marietta, whose space operations were based in Denver, CO. Two years later Martin Marietta merged with Lockheed, in Sunnyvale, CA, to form Lockheed Martin.  Later that year it was announced that the company was closing its 2 east coast plants and moving the work to Sunnyvale and Denver.   Over the 31 years starting in 1986, I was part of numerous acquisitions, mergers, two plant shut-downs, and being sold to a private equity company. Somehow, I managed to stay employed, and grow my career. I wasn’t special – hundreds of colleagues trod the same path. When I look back I can identify some of the attributes that helped me navigate a turbulent career. Build your Reputation: Be someone that people want to hire. If you move up, be someone that people want to work for. My first senior manager position came about because the hiring team remembered me from 4 years previous  Maintain Flexibility: Are you willing to travel or relocate? Would you take a lateral position, or even a step down, if it meant keeping a job?  During my career I traveled extensively, commuted 62 miles for four years, and took new positions that challenged me and my family.  Focus on your Skills: What are the skills and behaviors that are valued by your company, and differentiate successful employees? These include technical, leadership, managerial, and interpersonal skills. My first GE manager provided a sound technical base, but also taught me just as much about work ethic, and professionalism. Focus on the Culture:  Combing organizations means combining cultures, just as much as products or processes.  This may require you to be open to a different way of doing things. It requires a willingness to learn and grow.  It will also likely require some diplomacy skills.  Change is hard for employees, and nobody enjoys being told their processes or products are inferior.  When we merged with RCA, we found there was a significant difference in the way that managers and senior technical leaders challenged their employees in public forums, in front of customers.  GE preferred to work out technical differences and approaches in-house, and present a united front to customers. This took some time to resolve into a shared approach. Focus on the People:  When my first GE manager retired, we held a group luncheon. He was universally liked and respected.  Someone described him as the best “BTU chaser” he’d ever seen, which was high praise. He gave a short speech at his retirement, where he discussed the exciting space programs he had supported. He ended that the thing that made his career special wasn’t the projects and technology, it was the people.   I was also fortunate to work on some exciting, ground-breaking projects.  It wasn’t always easy, and the path certainly wasn’t straight.  Looking back, it is the people I think of most, and I miss the most.    Richard Connor is a semi-retired aerospace engineer with a keen interest in finance. He enjoys a wide variety of other interests, including chasing grandkids, space, sports, travel, winemaking and reading. Follow Rick on Twitter @RConnor609 and check out his earlier articles.
Read more »

Something to Think About

David Lancaster  |  Mar 24, 2026

"This is an issue for an optimizer but not a satisficer. I'm more concerned with the total amount I convert each year than the timing. But I do have optimizer tendencies: I tend to leave maybe half or more of my Roth conversions for December so I can guess better and make my income near the top of the tax bracket and keep my capital gains in the 0% bracket."
- Randy Dobkin
Read more »

Fixing Social Security once and for all

R Quinn  |  Apr 15, 2026

"I’ve read that is so! 😂"
- David Lancaster
Read more »

Free Newsletter

Get Educated

Manifesto

Apr 19, 2026

NO. 59: MOST FOLKS should avoid alternative investments. Yes, they promise returns uncorrelated with the stock market and gains when shares are tumbling. But isn’t that why we own bonds?

Truths

Apr 21, 2026

NO. 20: DOLLAR-COST averaging isn’t magical—but it is worthwhile. Investing the same sum every month in stocks supposedly improves the odds of making money. But in truth, dollar-cost averaging is about investor psychology: It helps us to overcome our reluctance to invest in stocks, instills discipline and makes stock market declines more palatable.

act

Apr 20, 2026

ALERT U.S. EMBASSIES to your travel plans. Before leaving on a foreign trip, sign up for the State Department's free Smart Traveler Enrollment Program and detail where you’re going. The local U.S. embassy or consulate will then contact you if, say, there’s a natural disaster or terrorist incident while you’re traveling abroad—and it may be able to offer advice or help.

think

Apr 20, 2026

INFLATION RISK. Suppose inflation runs at 2.5% a year. If you were living off a traditional employer pension or interest from long-term bonds, your income would lose more than half its spending power over a 30-year retirement. What to do? You might keep more in stocks, while also delaying Social Security so you have more inflation-indexed income.

Money Guide

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Manifesto

Apr 19, 2026

NO. 59: MOST FOLKS should avoid alternative investments. Yes, they promise returns uncorrelated with the stock market and gains when shares are tumbling. But isn’t that why we own bonds?

Spotlight: Family

Pass the mashed potatoes by Quinn

R Quinn   |  Dec 30, 2024

In a previous article I wrote about food waste in America even as 7 million Americans are reported as food insecure. 
I occasionally feel food insecure, but not in the real sense. My experience comes from fugal relatives and friends. Have you ever had dinner with family or friends and been afraid to take a reasonable portion of the food? I can’t imagine what some hosts are thinking. 
I was at a holiday dinner and when the turkey being passed around got to me only a wing was left.

Read more »

How was your Mother’s Day?

luvtoride44afe9eb1e   |  May 12, 2025

This holiday can be a stressful one for many families.  Who plans it? Who hosts it? Do you go out for a meal or cook or cater in?  Who is invited?  Who can actually come (geographically and other commitments)?  How does everyone get along?
After an exhausting but great Mother’s Day at our Jersey shore home on a beautiful day here my wife and I collapsed as I reflected on how lucky we are compared to many families including many of our friends.

Read more »

Estrangement & Estates

DrLefty   |  Jul 10, 2025

I’ve been thinking about family dynamics and how they affect financial decisions, and this will be the first of several posts on various applications of this topic.
This first one is a hard one to talk about: It’s family estrangement, specifically a family member(s) going “no contact” with or otherwise walking away from other family member(s). It’s not as unusual as you might think–there is growing research on the topic, and some estimate that more than 30% of American families have an estranged family member.

Read more »

Lessons for Life

Adam M. Grossman   |  May 17, 2025

WHEN HUMBLEDOLLAR’S editor was The Wall Street Journal’s longtime personal-finance columnist and his children were little, he often joked that he had a special incentive to see them succeed financially.
“It would be a tad embarrassing,” Jonathan wrote, if his children “grew up to be financial ne’er-do-wells.” For that reason, he used his own home as a laboratory of sorts, testing strategies to help set his children on the right financial path.

Read more »

Special Care Needed

David Gartland   |  Nov 5, 2024

FATHERHOOD WASN’T one of my life goals. I didn’t feel like I had a wonderful childhood, so I didn’t think I had much to offer my offspring that would help them to lead a wonderful life. If children happened, okay, but it was never a goal.
My first marriage ended because I placed money over fatherhood. I thought not having kids would speed my path to wealth. My wife disagreed—and walked out.
When I met my current wife,

Read more »

One family, two very different life experiences

R Quinn   |  Dec 10, 2024

An eighteen year old girl married her high school sweetheart who had dropped out of high school to join the army. They lived on an army base. Shortly they had a baby. They were transferred to another post.
Not many months after settling in at the new base he receives orders for the first of three tours in Vietnam. The young lady and child move in with her parents while he is in Vietnam. 
Upon his final tour,

Read more »

Spotlight: Cutler

Learned From Less

Ken Cutler   |  Dec 4, 2023

HOW MANY OF OUR adult financial habits are shaped by childhood experiences? My parents, who grew up during the Great Depression, weren’t fans of providing allowances for my sisters and me. My oldest sister, Gail, got no pocket money but remembers being offered a quarter to fill a grocery bag with dandelions pulled from the yard. Lynn, 10 years older than me, received a quarter a week for a short period. My first allowance was also a quarter a week, which I started receiving around age 10. That may not sound like much, but I felt fortunate. At the right store—Grants—I could buy three full-size candy bars for that quarter. Baseball cards, my other big extravagance, were a dime a pack. It seemed that all my friends had more money than me. One friend’s dad gave him $5 a month, paid out all at once. I suspect it was doled out that way in an attempt to teach him to budget his allowance for the whole month. The lesson was lost on my friend. Shortly after receiving his monthly $5, he tended to blow the entire wad on candy, soda, baseball cards, comic books and whatever else caught his fancy. It was fun to hang out with him right after he got paid. Some of my friends had newspaper routes. These guys were flush with cash. They could afford many more packs of baseball cards than me. Since I couldn’t buy my way to a superior baseball card collection, I had to learn to be a shrewd trader. If I came into possession of a card coveted by one of my richer friends, I’d negotiate getting a large number of their unwanted duplicate cards in return. Then I’d use one or more of those duplicates to execute a similar trade…
Read more »

Requiem for a CEO

Ken Cutler   |  Aug 23, 2024

A former CEO of my old company passed away this week at age 89. Of the half-dozen or so company CEOs that passed through during my tenure, Joe had made the biggest impression on me. Of course, I was way down the food chain so my interactions with him were limited. My first encounter with him was as a newly hired engineer for the Philadelphia Electric Company. The company had a program in which engineers were exposed to different divisions of the company during their first year. The program involved travel to a different company location each month. We would typically get a tour of a facility and then would be treated to a lavish lunch. One time, they herded us into a bus and we went to Chinatown. At the posh restaurant we ended up at, we were served egg rolls, followed by soup, and then fried rice. Finally (so I thought) the main course was brought out. Everything was delicious and I was filling up. Next thing I knew, another main course was brought out. Eventually, we were served about seven or eight dishes, one after the other. I wished I’d known they were going to do that, because I had no room left to even sample the last few courses. But I digress. Another feature of these gatherings was a keynote speech, usually during or after lunch, by the vice president of the company division we were learning about. To be honest, these speeches were snoozers, given by aged executives who seemed to ramble on. This pattern held until we rotated to the finance division. Joe was the relatively young finance VP, and his speech was unlike all the others. With amazing clarity, he regaled us with stories of clever financial maneuvers and other financial topics that…
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An Ordinary Life

Ken Cutler   |  Apr 11, 2024

MY GRANDFATHER FALLS into the category of folks who are “not long remembered.” He died more than 75 years ago. None of his children or their spouses is alive. The one grandchild alive at the time of his death was only a few months old. It’s safe to say his memory has been all but erased, and yet his story offers a glimpse into what working life was like in the first half of the 1900s. Emil Cutler was born in 1887, the second son of farmers who lived in rural Maryland. His older brother, Willitts, had been born two years before. A sister, Lorena, was born in 1889, but died from dysentery—attributed to eating a green apple—just before her first birthday. In 1891, another sister, Beatrice, was born to complete the family. In the family letters I have, there isn’t a lot of information about my grandfather’s early years. For high school, he went to the Tome School for Boys, a prestigious boarding school in nearby Port Deposit, Maryland. There, he took the “commercial course,” graduating in 1907. After graduation, he wasn’t sure what career to pursue. He made an inquiry with the U.S. Marines, seeking information about how to join as an officer. Another career he considered was forestry—he looked into enrolling in the Biltmore Forest School. Eventually, he landed a sales job and moved to Philadelphia. From there, he relocated to Camden, New Jersey, and helped his parents start a fruit jelly company, Cutler and Cutler. His parents took care of production at their Maryland farm, while he was instrumental in procuring supplies, such as jars and labels. In 1912 and 1913, while living in Camden, he received a lot of letters and invitations from a mysterious Aunt Lucy, who lived in nearby Philadelphia. Lucy, a young…
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They Made the Lists

Ken Cutler   |  Dec 12, 2023

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…
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That Dumb Stock Market

Ken Cutler   |  Oct 11, 2025

The proposition of an article I recently read was “this is the dumbest stock market in history.” Why is it dumb? In part because of an increasingly popular approach to investing—one that most in the HumbleDollar community, including myself, subscribe to.  According to the article, passive index investing is “the very definition of dumb money, because indexers buy stocks without any regard to valuation.” Here are some other points that caught my attention in the article, which I will link to in the comments: -Fewer and fewer people are actually making a market in stocks using their brains. Most index fund investors are just blindly buying, assuming that someone else is minding the store. -The dumb stock market, built entirely on blind faith, wouldn’t matter so much if the numbers passed a sanity test. The problem is, they don’t. -Due to bets on AI, a single company, Nvidia, is worth substantially more than all of the 2000 companies in the Russell 2000 index combined. -Metrics such as price per earnings and the ratio of total stock market to GDP indicate that stocks are priced at historically high levels, close to valuations during the 1999/2000 bubble. The conclusion of the article is that investors need to stress test our so-called risk-tolerance sooner rather than later. We may be taking on far more risk than we realize. After a conversation with my son in which he pointed out I am quite conservatively invested if my pension is included as part of my retirement portfolio, I wondered if he had a point and if I should increase my stock allocation (currently around 63% for my retirement funds). I decided to stick to my “kiss rebalancing goodbye” approach. Still, I have moved a good bit of money from U.S. to international stocks as valuations…
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Taste Those Savings

Ken Cutler   |  Dec 18, 2023

I GET A THRILL FROM saving money on groceries. We have customer loyalty cards for the two local grocery stores where we do most of our shopping. The sales receipts list total savings for that shopping trip. I love to see big numbers on that line. I’m a prodigious cereal eater, and my favorite is Cheerios. The regular price for the smallest box is $4.99. Of course, I never pay that. Fairly frequently, one of the local stores runs specials on General Mills brands, and the price for small boxes of Cheerios is often two for $6. Occasionally, they’re two for $5 or even two for $4. I have on rare occasions even purchased two for $3. At $1.50 a box, that’s a savings of 70% over the regular price. If a cereal I eat regularly is discounted significantly, I’m likely to buy it even if we have some in stock already. I’ve also sampled the various store brands of cereal, which are priced much more favorably. I’ve found that I like some as much as the name brands, while others I’d never buy again. None of the generic substitutes for Cheerios tastes good to me. On the other hand, I can’t tell the difference between generic and name-brand frosted mini-wheats. What about other grocery store items? I generally don’t buy things like pouches of tuna, pasta sauce, certain frozen dinners and name-brand orange juice unless they’re discounted. Similarly, I usually won’t try out a new product unless it’s offered on sale. I have an online account for one of our local stores where I can redeem points accrued on past purchases to get a discount on a future bill. Each month, I typically get a $3 or $4 reward for my efforts. Hey, every little bit helps. I’m not…
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