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A Letter 40 Years Later: What Mrs. Dolezal Remembered

Andrew Clements | Jul 1, 2026

"Jeff, thank you so much. I’m glad the story resonated with you. It’s often the little things, the quiet acts of kindness and simply being there for someone, that leave the most lasting memories. I appreciate you taking the time to read it."

- Andrew Clements

Independence Day

D.J. | Jun 29, 2026

"Congratulations. I’d at least like to be able to count my individual stocks on one hand; currently I can’t count them on two. "

- Michael1

Exercising true frugality

R Quinn | Jul 1, 2026

"Seriously, Dick? Looks like you love your seven bucks more than you love your grandkids! JUST KIDDING! Expensive greeting cards are at or near the top of my list of rip-offs; it’s emotional blackmail. Funeral homes are in the same category; put me in a pine box for gods sake, I won’t care, I’ll be dead⚰️"

- Dan Smith

Lessons Learned Along the Way

Dan Smith | Jun 25, 2026

"Olin, yeah, I was kind of an anomaly when I took the tests to become securities licensed at age 50. Many of my coworkers from the beer business expressed a desire to try something different, but lacked whatever motivation it took to get outside their comfort zone. "

- Dan Smith

Mr Market visits Art Basel

ricardodiaque | Jun 29, 2026

"Ricardo, a few questions, if you don't mind my asking. Have you been trading like this for a while? You mentioned the necessity of capturing an upswing and "getting out on time" — to my mind, that would require near-flawless execution. In a market moving at the algorithmic speed you describe, have you actually managed to escape the volatility unscathed so far, or have you already had to stomach the kind of paper losses that usually come with riding these waves? And is the end goal here an early exit from the workforce altogether?"

- Mark Crothers

Luck, Stupidity, Automation and Inertia

Mark Crothers | Jun 27, 2026

"And I also was referred to listen to a radio show where Burton malkiel was the guest. I bought his book and learned index investing; how has that worked over the last 50 yrs. NO ONE BEATS IT!!!! no one"

- Kenneth Tobin

Reminded of Jonathan’s Grace

rkhamilton920 | Jun 29, 2026

"I’m reading “Money and Me” too but I’m trying to read just a few chapters at a sitting to savor the wisdom and voice of Jonathan. I guess I will have to step up my pace as my borrowing from my local library (where I requested the book and they ordered it for me) has the book due back soon. This is a must read for so many family of friends who I will recommend it for but few will take the time to pick it up to read it. Very worthwhile to put on your reading list (or ask your library to order it as I did)."

- Brian Frisch

Automatic Income stream? How important to you?

R Quinn | Jun 26, 2026

"I would expect, to protect themselves at least, prudent plan sponsors would be very careful when selecting the annuity option to include in their plan and to communicate the full picture to plan participants. In addition, offering in the group market allows insurers to be more flexible than in the individual market."

- R Quinn

The cost of foreign taxes on returns

Matt Halperin | Jun 25, 2026

"I appreciate the info on the cost of having foreign investments in non-taxable accounts. There may be a better place to mention my observation, but here goes: I've been thinking about reasons why I (or anyone) would have foreign investments in a non-taxable account. The main one is that I can rebalance without running into capital gain tax effects. If all my foreign investments were in taxable accounts, the selling of such that I've done for the last year or so would have been tax-costly. With Matt's analysis, I can see the cost of the "insurance" I have against these taxes when I hold foreign investments in a Roth (or IRA) acct."

- F William Matthewson

Why can’t more people plan for their retirement future?

R Quinn | Jun 27, 2026

"The only kale in our house goes into Portuguese kale soup where the taste is lost among the chorizo."

- R Quinn

The Price of a Cool Pillow

Mark Crothers | Jun 25, 2026

"That's spooky — would you believe we're actually in the middle of packing up to do exactly that right now! We head to the coastal house this Wednesday and we're planning to stay through to the end of September."

- Mark Crothers

Quiet Failure: The Stories We Tell about Money

Javier | Jun 28, 2026

"My approach to/attitude toward money is partly built from family origins and partly by faith convictions. My husband and I both grew up in very modest conditions—I’d say barely lower middle-class on both sides. I always had to work for what I wanted, and that gave me a strong work ethic that I have to this day. I have a strong need for security and have never wanted to take risks with our finances. I also wanted my kids to have enough and never feel like the “poorest kid in the neighborhood,” which is how I grew up. At the same time, because of our religious faith, we feel strongly about giving to charity and have always done that even in our young married years when finances were very tight."

- DrLefty

A Letter 40 Years Later: What Mrs. Dolezal Remembered

Andrew Clements | Jul 1, 2026

- Andrew Clements

Independence Day

D.J. | Jun 29, 2026

"Congratulations. I’d at least like to be able to count my individual stocks on one hand; currently I can’t count them on two. "

- Michael1

Exercising true frugality

R Quinn | Jul 1, 2026

- Dan Smith

Lessons Learned Along the Way

Dan Smith | Jun 25, 2026

- Dan Smith

Mr Market visits Art Basel

ricardodiaque | Jun 29, 2026

- Mark Crothers

Luck, Stupidity, Automation and Inertia

Mark Crothers | Jun 27, 2026

- Kenneth Tobin

Reminded of Jonathan’s Grace

rkhamilton920 | Jun 29, 2026

- Brian Frisch

Automatic Income stream? How important to you?

R Quinn | Jun 26, 2026

- R Quinn

The cost of foreign taxes on returns

Matt Halperin | Jun 25, 2026

- F William Matthewson

Manifesto

Jul 1, 2026

NO. 19: WE SHOULD make future spending as exciting as possible, so we’re less tempted to spend today. That means visualizing our goals and imagining how great it’ll be to achieve them.

act

Jul 1, 2026

TRIM YOUR CHECKING account. If there were a guaranteed way to earn a few extra percentage points a year on your investments, you’d jump at the opportunity. So why would you leave excess cash in your checking account, where it likely isn’t garnering any interest, when that money could be in a high-yield savings account earning a decent sum each year?

Truths

Jun 30, 2026

NO. 101: THE TIME horizon for your portfolio may extend beyond your lifetime. Suppose you’re age 75. If you have more than enough set aside for your own retirement and plan to bequeath assets to your children or grandchildren, you might be dealing with a time horizon of a half-century or more. That’s plenty of time to make good money in stocks.

think

Jun 29, 2026

OVERCONFIDENCE. Most of us believe we’re above-average drivers, smarter than most and better looking. This overconfidence is often a good thing—it can boost happiness and help our careers—but it’s terrible for investment results. As they try to beat the market, the overconfident trade too much, take unnecessary risk and buy costly investments.

Money Guide

Manifesto

Jul 1, 2026

NO. 19: WE SHOULD make future spending as exciting as possible, so we’re less tempted to spend today. That means visualizing our goals and imagining how great it’ll be to achieve them.

Spotlight: Charity

From Mali With Love

Larry Sayler | Sep 4, 2023

FELLOW HUMBLEDOLLAR contributor Marjorie Kondrack concluded a recent article by saying she’d “never been to Paris or Prague, Timbuktu or Tokyo.” I had always thought of Timbuktu as an imaginary, faraway place. Only recently did I discover that it actually exists.
Timbuktu is a town in Mali with a population just north of 50,000 people. But according to Wikipedia, thanks to gold and salt that could be found in the area, it was once a “world-renowned trading powerhouse” with a population of 250,000.

Share What You Know

Jim Wasserman | Sep 27, 2021

MOST EVERYONE AGREES financial literacy should be taught to some degree in schools. Even the basics, like how to set up a bank or credit card account, or how to make a budget and avoid debt, should be explained to those soon to enter the workforce.
Another group of newcomers to the U.S. financial system who could use guidance are immigrants, particularly refugees. Jiab and I have been volunteering for a number of years to help refugees get acclimated to American life.

Magic Number

Don Southworth | Jun 28, 2021

MY MOM AND DAD split up when I was seven years old. Money was an issue for the rest of my childhood. Mom was rarely able to work fulltime and, according to her, child support and alimony were never enough.

When I started working a newspaper stand at age 12, I was expected to give 25% of my daily take for rent. Mom also demanded that I save at least 10%. Depending on the headlines,

A Year for Generosity

Julian Block | Oct 31, 2017

MANY OF MY CLIENTS make donations to their favorite philanthropies in the final months of each year. With lower tax rates in the offing, this could be a good year to make such gifts—especially for those who have appreciated property to donate.
Many clients reflexively write checks, as that’s the easiest way to qualify their gifts for charitable deductions. But before they reach for their checkbooks, donors who want to make major gifts—and also lose less to the IRS—will do themselves a favor if they first familiarize themselves with other often-overlooked ways to contribute.

Wall Street Journal Article about Jonathan’s New Initiative

Mark Wyncoll | May 8, 2025

Today’s WSJ has a Jason Zweig article about the the Jonathan Clements Initiative.
This will be paywalled. https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/the-wsjs-jonathan-clements-wants-to-leave-a-living-legacy-19f1738d
Intrepid readers can also find a link or two about how to donate if you are not buying the excellent new book.

Giving Advice

Adam M. Grossman | Dec 12, 2021

GOT CHARITABLE giving on your mind? Join the crowd. Many folks donate at this time of year, with their charitable giving driven by the charities themselves.

As solicitations arrive, people decide on a case-by-case basis whether to pull out their checkbooks. But some folks follow a more structured process, and that’s the approach I favor. It includes asking these three questions:

1. How much ideally would you like to give? As a starting point,

Why I Retired

Ken Begley | Jun 30, 2023

IT TOOK FIVE FALSE starts to write this column. Each time, I’d inundate readers with information. So, here’s a sixth try. Have you ever seen those questions to financial advisors on the internet that say, “I have [insert dollar amount]. Can I retire?” How the heck could the advisor give a reasonable response? To answer the question, it takes more than simply knowing how much you have in the bank. You need a lot of personal and financial information to make the decision to retire. Much of it has to do with personality and family situation. Let me tell you how I decided to retire at 60. Retiring at that age wasn’t my plan. But I came to the decision that it was for the best. Here’s why. I’ve generally had at least two or three jobs for most of my working life. I’m not a workaholic. But you do what you have to do when you have a good wife and five kids. My wife Cindy and I have contributed to 401(k)s and IRAs for decades. She stayed at home to raise our kids for 12 years and she’s nine years younger than me. She works at a local bank as a teller. Cindy plans to work until age 59. Our ace in the hole for retirement has been my pension from 43 years of active and primarily reserve military duty. The pension started at age 60, increases each year with inflation, is larger than my future Social Security check and includes a family medical insurance plan through Tricare. We have no debt and we had two children in college at the time I retired. Both were covered by scholarships then and both are now employed. [xyz-ihs snippet="Mobile-Subscribe"] My last civilian job was working as an accountant for a…

Friend Request

Ken Begley | Sep 29, 2023

HOW’S YOUR FRIENDSHIP account balance looking? I spent my life watching my bank account, and taking great pleasure as it grew and grew. I never cared much for what I could buy with the money, but I loved the feeling of security it offered. Friendships, meanwhile, took a back seat. That was pretty much normal for my family, and maybe it’s more normal for most folks than we like to admit. We have a tight little circle that includes family, but not many others. It’s not that I was socially awkward or unfriendly. But my interactions with people were a quick hello, how are you doing and goodbye. There was nobody other than family that I would go out of my way to socialize with. But that changed—thanks to my determined effort. What did I do? For starters, there was the part-time job I picked up some 20 years ago, writing a column for a weekly local paper in our small town. My columns were principally comedy, religion and human-interest pieces focusing on readers and events. Soon, people would walk up to me and comment on what I wrote. I enjoyed those interactions more than the notoriety of my work or what little money I earned. Some 1,000 columns later, I still get a kick out of talking to readers. My retirement led to doing volunteer work with an organization called the Marion County Veterans Honor Guard, which performs at military funerals. My old sergeant major called, said they were always short of vets and asked me to help out. Among those in the honor guard, I was the kid at age 60. At that time, the ages of the folks ranged up to 93. One uses a walker. I came to enjoy my time with a bunch of old…

Broken Trust

Ken Begley | Jan 9, 2024

MORE THAN 40 YEARS ago, I was an agent for the Internal Revenue Service. During training, we learned about auditing individuals, corporations, subchapter S corporations, Schedule C businesses, partnerships and probably a few other areas that I’ve since forgotten. But there was one area we didn’t touch: trusts. That puzzled me, so I asked the trainer why. His response: “You aren’t smart enough to audit trusts.” He told me that how trusts operate might change drastically based on slight differences in wording. Auditing trusts was left to lawyers who worked for the IRS. Four decades later, I came to understand the trainer’s wisdom. I sat between my mother’s accountant and her lawyer, who were fighting over how a trust worked for tax purposes. The irrevocable trust set up by my father’s lawyer not only didn’t save money, but also it endlessly complicated the finances of both my father’s estate and the rest of our family. The reason: all the tax law changes between when the trust was set up and when my father actually died. To be fair, the lawyer’s actions in 1996 made sense at the time. At that juncture, anything over the $600,000 federal estate-tax exclusion was subject to tax rates ranging from 37% to 55%. But if you put the $600,000 in an irrevocable trust before you died and left it to grow, the $600,000 plus the subsequent growth would sidestep estate taxes when you died. There were other potential advantages to the trust, but this was the main selling point. My dad died 23 years later, by which time the federal estate-tax exclusion had jumped to $11.4 million. My father’s estate and the trust were worth nowhere near that amount, so the trust no longer made sense. But the trust was irrevocable, so that was that.…

Learned in Uniform

Ken Begley | Aug 23, 2023

I SPENT ALMOST 43 years either on active duty or in the reserves for the Navy and Army. Yes, I’ve been around. The following is my list of the top 17 items—including some pertinent financial details—that might surprise those who have never served in the military. No. 1: Our primary mission is not to fight wars. Instead, it’s to be so big, so bad, so mean, so well equipped, so well trained and so well led that any potential enemy in its right mind wouldn’t want to fight us. Failing that, our secondary mission is to fight and win wars. No. 2: If we had a draft, we would be less likely to become involved in armed conflicts. We haven’t had a draft since 1973. If every family faced the prospect of their children serving in combat, there’d be less willingness to go to war unless it was absolutely necessary. As it happens, all males age 18 to 25 are still required to register with the Selective Service System in case a draft is ever reinstated. No. 3: The military doesn’t choose which wars to fight. You and your elected representatives choose wars. The treaties that our government signs generally determine which potential conflicts we become involved in. Political solutions should be a first resort, military action the last. No. 4: We fire a lot of bullets in combat. It was estimated that 50,000 rounds were fired to kill a single soldier in Vietnam. In fact, I was told that automatic weapons with large magazines were invented for the military because we’re notoriously bad shots when under the strain of combat. No. 5: Few people become members of the military. Today, about 0.5% of our population serve in the armed forces. That means that if, you have 1,000 people graduating…

For Richer or Broker

Ken Begley | Aug 14, 2023

I'VE SEEN FINANCIAL advisors do great work and I’ve seen them do poor work. Which brings me to my late father’s experience. Dad was a heck of a small businessman. Starting in 1956, he and his partner sold and serviced radios, televisions, appliances and furniture. Forty years later, he sold the business to four of my brothers. By the mid-1960s, Dad had accumulated what was for him a small fortune. This was the time of the stock market’s so-called go-go years. Dad said the market seemed to go crazy for any stock that had “tronic”—as in electronic—at the end of its name. He signed on with a young broker—today, the broker would no doubt call himself a financial advisor—and it was off to the races. Dad’s stocks just kept climbing and climbing. The broker was obviously a genius. Things seem to go up and up based on his wise recommendations. Dad told me that at that point, if his business had gone bust, he thought he’d just play the market for a living. All was right with the world. That is, until it wasn’t. The Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 995 in 1966. Then the bottom fell out. It was so bad that it wasn’t until 1982 that it finally broke permanently above that 995 mark and headed higher. That’s a “long haul,” as we say here in rural Kentucky. Years later, Dad would laugh at the optimistic notion that he could make a living playing the market. Dad told me, “I thought it hit the bottom several times. But it turned out to be a straw-bottom and everything just kept going down.” He took a beating like a bad boy and came to doubt his broker. He went looking for a new broker in the late 1960s. He…

Loosening My Grip

Ken Begley | Jun 12, 2023

AS I WROTE THIS STORY, the word count kept climbing and climbing because it has more twists and turns than a detective novel. It was so long I was afraid no one would read it, not even my mother. So, here is a condensed version of what I wanted to say. The hardest transition for some folks as they reach retirement is to go from a saver to a spender of what they’ve saved. You spend a lifetime saving up money for your golden years and then that period of saving money ends. You should now spend and enjoy some of your hoard. That was—and still is—difficult for me. After all, it’s rare for folks to flip a switch and suddenly change their whole personality. This is true if you’re going in either direction. My wife Cindy was age 22 and I was 31 when we married. I had always been a supersaver by nature, so I had a good-sized net worth at the time. I tell people that those years before Cindy were my single and “rich” years. I had a great job and low expenses because I was only responsible for myself. I could spend a fair amount but I was saving even more. I had a great life. What about Cindy? She really had nothing because, well, she was 22. But I wanted more and I wanted Cindy—badly. After we got married, I lost that great-paying job due to massive cutbacks at my employer. I never had another job as good as the one I lost. We both wanted to stay in our little town, where few jobs were available. I had to take whatever I could find, and that resulted in my pay dropping in half overnight. Over the years, our family grew to five kids.…

A Letter 40 Years Later: What Mrs. Dolezal Remembered

Independence Day

Exercising true frugality

Lessons Learned Along the Way

Mr Market visits Art Basel

Luck, Stupidity, Automation and Inertia

Reminded of Jonathan’s Grace

Automatic Income stream? How important to you?

The cost of foreign taxes on returns

Why can’t more people plan for their retirement future?

The Price of a Cool Pillow

Quiet Failure: The Stories We Tell about Money

A Letter 40 Years Later: What Mrs. Dolezal Remembered

Independence Day

Exercising true frugality

Lessons Learned Along the Way

Mr Market visits Art Basel

Luck, Stupidity, Automation and Inertia

Reminded of Jonathan’s Grace

Automatic Income stream? How important to you?

The cost of foreign taxes on returns

Free Newsletter

Get Educated

Manifesto

act

Truths

think

Money Guide

Manifesto

Spotlight: Charity

From Mali With Love

Share What You Know

Magic Number

A Year for Generosity

Wall Street Journal Article about Jonathan’s New Initiative

Giving Advice

Spotlight: Begley

Why I Retired

Friend Request

Broken Trust

Learned in Uniform

For Richer or Broker

Loosening My Grip