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If our net worth were displayed on our foreheads for all to see, libraries would be mobbed and used cars would be status symbols.
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.
The table shows that the Traditional IRA would have been the better choice, producing about $3,500 more in available funds, or about 22% more. This demonstrates that the primary driver in choosing between a Roth and a traditional qualified account is a consideration of the tax rates at the time of contribution and at the time of distribution. There have been a number of changes to the tax code in the last decade that have contributed to the result, but I certainly didn’t predict any of them. If you guess wrong, you pay the price in a higher tax bill. In the example above, the extra $1,750 invested in the traditional account produced an additional $6,143.31 in earnings. The lower tax rate at the distribution of the traditional IRA results in the $3,500 in extra funds. Even though the Roth IRA had tax free earnings growth, the initial larger tax rate overcame that advantage, when compared to the traditional IRA. Because of my pension and my wife’s social security benefit, 85% of her social security benefit is taxable income, so that is not a consideration in our tax calculation. I used Dinkytown’s 1040 Calculator to run a series of estimates of our 2026 tax return to assess if we want to execute a Roth Conversion this year. We are still 4 years from taking RMDs, and I will start my Social Security in a year when I turn 70. My current thinking is a conversion of about $40,000 will keep us in the 12% bracket. There would also be a small NJ state tax impact. My simple analysis reinforces what I’ve been taught. Roth contributions make the most sense when you think your current tax bracket is lower than when you expect to withdrawal the funds. There are secondary considerations, like no tax diversification, no RMDs, and uncertainty about future tax rates. If you intend to pass the funds to heirs, it might make sense to perform Roth conversions today at the 22% tax bracket if you intend to pass these accounts to heirs who may be in their peak earnings years. Not sure? I believe I recall several HumbleDollar contributors write something about splitting the difference? 
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.
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.NO. 9: WE SPEND too much time fretting over our investments—where there’s limited room to add value—and too little on other financial issues, like taxes, insurance and estate planning.
HAVE A FAMILY talk about college. How much financial help can you give your children? If they’ll need to shoulder part of the cost, tell them long before they start eyeing colleges. What career do your teenagers plan to pursue? If they’ll likely end up with a modest income, counsel them against colleges that will require taking on hefty student loans.
END-OF-HISTORY illusion. This is the belief that we’ve changed significantly in the past—in terms of things like our values, our personality, and the food and music we like—but we won’t change much going forward. This belief can make us resistant to change. It also means our choices today may backfire, because our future self may have different likes and dislikes.
NO. 98: INSURANCE companies typically pay out less in claims than they receive in premiums. Result: For most buyers, insurance will be a money loser—which is what you want, because it's a sign that life is good. But because it’s a money loser, you should only insure against major financial risks, while committing to cover smaller losses out of your own pocket.
NO. 9: WE SPEND too much time fretting over our investments—where there’s limited room to add value—and too little on other financial issues, like taxes, insurance and estate planning.
COULD HUMBLEDOLLAR be replaced by a website chock-full of articles created using artificial intelligence? The short answer: It would be remarkably easy—and I fear readers wouldn’t object, especially if they didn’t know how the articles were generated.
To show what’s possible, I requested eight personal-finance articles from three freely available artificial intelligence (AI) tools, ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot. The first of those articles is published today, with the other seven appearing over the next four days.
Do you think we are moving toward a competency crisis in this country? I told this story in a comment on an article a few months back:
“Seven years ago, I bought a 2005 Outback. Despite the pink slip being clearly written by the dealer, the title came back with ‘Culter’ as my last name. I went to AAA for advice and they filled out a correction form for me. The title was revised to read ‘Renneth Culter’.
I retired from a 38-year engineering career with a large electric power generation company on September 5, 2023. On September 11, 2023, I began an encore career—part time, on-call—with a small engineering firm. In the winter, I worked very few hours. Some weeks I only logged a single hour. I felt like a retiree and started to self-identify as one. As we moved into spring, more contracts came in and I started working more hours. For the past several months,
I’ve read with interest posts such as Jonathan’s Taking Center Stage and Those Who Follow, both which touched on the pluses and minuses of taking on a part-time job in retirement. The conversation in the comments for both of those posts was great, too. Below, I share my own recent experience of re-entering the job world at age 64.
In my past HD posts I have written how, in our mid-60s, my husband and I appeared to be gliding into retirement.
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.
So, we have signed the contracts. We have advised all our staff. We are talking to our customers every day about the sale, about the new owners and how it will be “business as usual”, how they can expect the same service that they have been used to.
We have already received lots of really positive and quite humbling feedback from our customers. Even those that could be challenging at times have been really generous in their praise and thanks.
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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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The best state to retire? Take a close look.
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Percentage that “age in place”
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