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Edmund Marsh | Sep 29, 2023
TWO YEARS AGO, at age 59½, I thought I was on the verge of taking a major step toward retirement. At the time, my usual zest for my work as a physical therapist was waning. Though I don’t think the quality of my patient care suffered, I found it took more effort to maintain the energy needed to complete a day at the clinic, and concentrating on work became tougher. In addition to the tension building on the inside, I was also feeling external pressures. One concern was the care my wife and I were providing to our families. Over the past decade, we’ve become intricately involved in the lives of several family members who need our help because of age or illness. We love them dearly, and don’t consciously begrudge the time we give them. Still, anything that stretches time thin can fray nerves and shorten tempers. Further stress came from the pandemic. We were all affected by COVID-19 in some way, from the annoyance of the toilet paper shortage to the heart-rending loss of a loved one. The social narrative about the disease took on a surrealistic life of its own. I finally stopped discussing it with nearly all except my wife, and I won’t comment on it here. I can’t deny, however, that the pandemic profoundly affected how I felt about my job. My experience is hardly an anomaly. Howard, a coworker, notes that the pandemic magnified the stress inherent in a health care career. His opinion is supported by a study led by researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. It discovered some 50% of workers from all areas of health care reported an increase in stress during the pandemic. The highest levels of job-related stress, which can cause an occupational phenomenon termed burnout, were reported…
Read more » In Different Places
Edmund Marsh | Aug 16, 2023
MY WIFE HAS PLANS for retirement. Travel plans. For too many years, she’s lived a mostly travel-free life. We’ve logged just a few short excursions to hither and yon. Yes, there have been reasons for this dearth of travel that were largely beyond our control. But her biggest obstacle has been—and continues to be—me. I’m mostly a homebody, and I’ve been reluctant to change my ways. My wife didn’t choose to love traveling. Rather, she was born into a family of travelers. When she was a child, her family spent summers and holidays camping all over California and other western states. Later, one of her brothers roamed Europe and elsewhere during 20 summer breaks from teaching school. I’ve written about another brother and a cousin who live abroad. In that article, there wasn’t enough space to list all my wife’s kin who live or have lived overseas. I suspect this familial wanderlust began when an ancestor decided to hitch up his wagon and head west. By contrast, my family genetics incline us to move once and stay put. There are exceptions, but a majority of my family members hew to this trait. It was certainly true of my parents. My mother still lives in the house they bought in 1952, and she can list her traveling vacations on two hands—with fingers to spare. My genes tell me to be still. Despite that, I’m not completely opposed to traveling. I’d like our retirement to have an ample amount. That’s where our differences start, however. My idea of ample falls short of what my wife considers barely adequate. While she’s dreaming of destinations and thinking of the itinerary details, I’m fine-tuning the latest iteration of my home project list. We’re both searching for happiness, but looking in different locales. My wife, it…
Read more » Getting Old
Edmund Marsh | Apr 19, 2023
I COULD BE KIND TO my home and say it has rustic charm, but that would be pretentious. The truth is, it’s an old house, built in 1930 by my maternal grandparents. It sits on a remnant of the farm my family once owned. It’s a place I love, and where I’d like to grow old, and therein lies the challenge. More than 20 years ago, my father and I extensively renovated the house inside and out. Within the house, every surface was replaced or refinished. My wife gets credit for a share of the painting. We gave it air conditioning to tame the hot, Georgia summers and a furnace to take some of the chill out of winter. The house is still old and drafty, however. Warmth from the wood heater in the fireplace, fed by trees that I cut on the property, draws the family near when nights are frigid. Though the inside of the house is mostly neat, I can’t say the same for the surrounding property. The rambling yard is decidedly weedy, divided by haphazard beds of old-fashioned bulbs and flowering shrubs lovingly planted by my grandmother, supplemented by annual additions from my wife and me. On three sides, it’s difficult to tell where the yard ends and the surrounding small woodland begins. Out back, the old smokehouse, which once held hams and bacon, is now home to a clutter of tools and is in obvious need of repair. The dilapidated barn is beyond repair, and is waiting to be put out of its misery. Wildlife wanders about when Lottie the Labrador retriever is asleep on the porch. This year, on St. Patrick’s Day morning, after letting Lottie out of her kennel, a familiar sound rang out from near the vegetable garden. From our porch, my wife…
Read more » Money Memories
Edmund Marsh | Sep 6, 2024
Six years ago, Jonathan Clements published an article in HumbleDollar recounting some of the anecdotal influences on his financial thinking. Rather than research and facts, he explained, it’s often the exploits we experience, the tales we’re told or the comments that come our way that shape how we view money matters. I know that holds true for me. Years later, I can still hear the voices and see the faces attached to these events: 1. In the summer of 1973, the gasoline shortage had our nation waiting in line at the pumps. I was age 11, and excited about spending the first of several summers with my grandfather. Meanwhile, he was unhappy about President Nixon asking gasoline sellers to restrict sales, and remembering wage and price controls from two years earlier. He was also intent on giving me an economics lecture. “Supply and demand” was his incessant mantra, meaning the markets should be allowed to freely operate. At the time, I was too young to grasp the significance of his words, but they apparently sunk into my psyche. Today, even public policy decisions that appear sound or necessary make me wonder what possible unintended consequences time will reveal. 2. During most of the last two decades, with savings account interest rates bumping along the bottom, I often thought wistfully of a conversation I had in the early 1980s with my great-uncle Jake. He was elated with the 9% interest he was collecting on his certificates of deposit. What would it take to return to those heydays, I mused, with cash actually paying its keep? During the last couple of years, I found out. It’s true that everything comes with a price. 3. In my early 20s, at one of my sales jobs, I worked for Gene, who owned a small…
Read more » On My Own Time
Edmund Marsh | Feb 5, 2025
WHO OWNS TIME? WE speak of “my time” and “your time” as if it were a possession we hold in our hands. But we can’t stash it away for future use, nor can we trade or transfer our allotment to another person. Is it truly ours? For the moment, let’s say that it is. Appraising time. How much do we value our time? Some days, we treat it as a precious commodity. On those days, if we’re in a generous mood, we’ll share minutes with a friend or donate them to a cause that stirs our passions. Alternatively, we might be time-stingy. We value our seconds more than people. We zealously hoard our hours, begrudging the moments others manage to wheedle away from us. Either way, it’s obvious that time is a treasure. But we can also be careless with time. We may mindlessly go about our workday, going through the motions until quitting time arrives. Once home, we aimlessly click on internet articles or flip through television channels, lingering until the clock or exhaustion announces our bedtime. Instead of managing time well, we just manage to make it to the ends of the weeks that become months that accumulate into years. What does it matter? If I’m indeed master of my time, who’s to say I can’t treat it as I please? Maybe no one. But consider a couple of other perspectives. Some religions, including my own Christianity, believe time is part of creation. God is eternal, and therefore outside of time, but all else is subject to the ravages of time’s relentless passage. It’s a gift to be used wisely, like all resources entrusted to us. Though I may fall short of that mark, my failure doesn’t relieve me of my responsibility. Even if we don’t hold this view,…
Read more » Why Wait?
Edmund Marsh | Jul 4, 2024
Several months ago, I wrote of my wife's and my decision to simplify our financial lives by reducing our investments to the bare minimum. Our thinking is in the same vein as our editor's, and a number of others in the HumbleDollar community, judging from my recollection of reader comments. Now, I know that many others have a different opinion of where to place their money, and that's okay. I'm not implying they're wrong. Indeed, I freely admit that I don't know the future, and time may show that their decision is justified. But, given the uncertainties of life, of our health and mental capacity as we age, is the chance of a little more gain worth the risk of greater loss from the gradual erosion of our ability to nimbly manage a complex portfolio? And what of the present? An interest in investing is, perhaps, the thickest common thread that brings us together here. It's an intensely interesting hobby for many of us. But with time ticking progressively faster, is it a habit that keeps us from other pursuits that may bring more happiness? We each have our own answer to that question, but aside from taxes and similar good reasons for keeping the complexities in place, why wait to embrace simplicity?
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Jeffrey K. Actor, PhD, was a professor at a major medical school in Houston for more than 25 years, serving as an academic researcher with interests in how immune responses function to fight pathogenic diseases. Jeff’s retirement goals are to write short science fiction stories, volunteer in the community and spend time in his garden. Check out his earlier articles.
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.
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- Secure the login to your bank account by setting up two-factor authentication. And if your bank supports it, use an authenticator app, rather than text messages, for the authentication codes. Ideally, if your bank supports it, switch to a passkey. This is a newer technology that represents a significant advance over traditional passwords. Most importantly, they aren’t vulnerable to phishing attacks. They’re also easier to use, providing one-click logins, and you can store passkeys in a password manager. For those reasons, more websites are beginning to support passkeys. I’d make the switch as soon as your bank makes them available.
- Set up alerts through your bank to monitor activity in your checking account. Every bank is different, but most allow you to set up email- or text-based alerts to let you know when transactions above a specified threshold are processed, or when other types of activity occur.
- Monitor your transactions. These days, it can be hard to keep an eye on every account. Households often have one or more bank accounts plus credit cards and electronic payment services like Venmo or Zelle. Most people realistically don’t have the time to review every account in real time. That’s why I recommend a service like Monarch or YNAB, which are web-based versions of traditional budgeting tools like Quicken. These services can pull in transactions from all your accounts and present them in a consolidated list, making review much easier. If you kept Monarch or YNAB open in a browser window on your home computer, you could scroll through recent transactions whenever you have a spare minute.
- To narrow the circle of people who have access to your account information, try limiting the number of paper checks you write. Especially with Zelle and Venmo as alternatives for making payments, this is getting easier. If you do write paper checks, be sure to use a gel pen and to avoid freestanding mailboxes. Those steps can help prevent a related type of fraud, as Jonathan Clements explained a few years back.
- Pay attention to notifications of data breaches. Unfortunately, breach announcements seem to occur so frequently that we’ve become immune to them. It’s worth paying attention, though, to understand which particular pieces of information have been stolen. If it looks like your banking information is included in a breach, it might be worth opening a new account, inconvenient as that would be.
- Have your guard up against unsolicited phone calls, emails or text messages. If someone is contacting you about an “account security issue,” or claims to be calling from your bank or from the IRS, be especially wary. Those are common tactics for creating a sense of urgency that can cause people to let their guard down.
What if, like Tom and Jane, you spot a fraudulent transaction in your account? Then it’s important to report it as quickly as possible. Regulation E can limit your liability, but the faster you report a suspicious transaction, the more protection it provides. Liability is limited to just $50 if a theft is reported within two business days, but that exposure increases to $500 if it’s reported later. And after 60 days, there are no guarantees. Thieves, unfortunately, don’t seem to sleep, which means that we need to be more vigilant than in the past, and need to be continuously vigilant. As personal finance author Mike Piper wrote recently, “Cybersecurity should be considered another core area of personal finance—no different from insurance planning, for instance.”A bleak picture for retirement in the future?
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