Persistence of Memory
Ken Cutler | Sep 15, 2024
In May of 1974, I took a trip to Israel, Greece and London with my parents and one of my sisters. I was in sixth grade at the time. Prior to our departure, I gave my parents a hard time about making me go on a trip during the school year. I was unhappy about missing two weeks of school and having to make up all that homework. I’d collected my assignments for the upcoming two weeks from all my teachers with the exception of my social studies teacher, Mr. Reiss. At the end of my last day of school before the trip, I stood in line to see him at his desk. As his conference with the student in front of me dragged on and on, I got concerned that I would miss my bus. I eventually left just in time to catch the bus for the 45-minute ride home. When I returned to school two weeks later, some kids on the bus told me that Mr. Reiss had gone ballistic when he realized I hadn’t picked up my assignments. He angrily told the class he was going to make me copy the entire textbook by hand. When I did meet with him, my consequences were only slightly less severe. He told me that I had to memorize the textbook glossary, which consisted of 104 items. I would then stand up before the class and the students could ask me to define any word they selected from the glossary. My grade would be the percentage I got correct. It was clear to me that his goal was to embarrass me in front of my classmates. As you might imagine, public humiliation was a huge fear for that somewhat timid middle-school boy. Armed with a high level of motivation and…
Read more » Retirement Pets
Ken Cutler | Oct 21, 2024
I have a decision to make over the next year or two. Money is certainly involved, but it’s not primarily a financial decision. Currently, our daughter is living with us while she saves up money to buy her own townhouse or condo. She’s a huge lover of cats (understatement of the year). A few years ago, I noticed the jet-black feral cat that hung out across the street at our neighbors’ home was carrying a kitten around by the neck. I told my daughter; she was able to hold the kitten and of course, she fell in love. Several days later, we separated the tiny tuxedo kitten from her mom and made a trip to the vet. Poor kitty had a nasty cough, had been covered with fertilizer, and was sporting some serious discharge in one of her eyes. Following the vet visit, none of us could bear to again expose the kitten to the perils of living outside with her mom (there were no other kittens in the litter). My daughter adopted the kitten and named her Blossom Theodosia. It turns out she was probably no more than four weeks old, a little young to be separated from her mom. Fortunately, we had an older tuxedo cat named Sam at home. At one time, we had three cats, and of the three, Sam could be a bit of a bully. Still, the kitten seemed to arouse Sam’s paternal instincts. He was patient with Blossom even though her kittenish badgering was relentless. Sam was never nasty with Blossom but did teach her the limits of acceptable behavior. When she came into the same room as Sam, he would often greet her with a happy chirp. Sam was protective of Blossom when our overly curious Sheltie, Cleo, got a little too…
Read more » 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…
Read more » Working for Free
Ken Cutler | Aug 26, 2024
Despite what you might expect from the title, this is not an article about volunteer work. Rather, it’s a perspective on my current situation as a so-called paid employee. You see, tomorrow I turn 62. My Social Security benefits, which until now have been only a theoretical future payout, are now fully accessible to me with a few clicks of a mouse. Once I elect to take my Social Security benefit, my wife will be eligible to begin receiving hers as well. Because much of her career was spent working for the federal government in a position exempt from Social Security, she's only eligible to receive a spousal benefit. As I’ve mentioned before, when I input our specific personal information to Mike Piper’s Open Social Security calculator, the results point me to taking my benefit early, well before I turn 63. For us, waiting until I turn 70 or even 67 would be somewhat foolish, based solely on that model. There seems to be little downside risk to me starting Social Security early. The total benefit my wife and I could be receiving is roughly equivalent to what I expect to earn this year from my part-time job. Essentially, rather than working 15-20 hours a week, I could be working zero hours a week and bringing home the same amount of money. I might as well be working for free. What should I do? For now, I’m not changing anything. I really receive satisfaction from my job, as I’ve written about previously. It feels more like a well-paid hobby. As long as I have that sense, it will be hard to give it up completely. Another option would be to take Social Security but reduce my hours so I could stay under the Social Security earnings limit, currently $22,320. That…
Read more » Longtime Worry
Ken Cutler | Dec 26, 2023
IS A STORM COMING? Long before I discovered HumbleDollar, I regularly read articles by Scott Burns. Now in his 80s, Burns was a popular financial columnist who wrote for the Boston Herald and later The Dallas Morning News. He’s a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so he’s comfortable presenting quantitative arguments. Burns is an advocate of low-cost index funds, and he helped popularize couch potato investing, using a low-maintenance 50-50 mix of stock and bond index funds. One of the books in my financial library is his work The Coming Generational Storm, coauthored with Laurence Kotlikoff. It came out in 2004, so its 20th anniversary is approaching. It was on Forbes’s 2004 list of the top 10 business books. Here’s a sample from the back cover: “In 2030, as 77 million baby boomers hobble into old age, walkers will outnumber strollers; there will be twice as many retirees as there are today but only 18 percent more workers. How will Social Security and Medicare function with fewer working taxpayers to support these programs? According to Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns, if our government continues on the course it has set, we’ll see skyrocketing tax rates, drastically lower retirement and health benefits, high inflation, a rapidly depreciating dollar, unemployment, and political instability.” As you might imagine, the book was an uncomfortable read. The twin threats of unfavorable demographic shifts and unsustainable government debt are laid out in stark terms. The generational storm thesis can be summed up by these two sentences from the epilogue: “The American dream is becoming prohibitively expensive. And unless we act soon, the Greatest Generation will be the last to leave its children and grandchildren a better country.” The biggest reason we’re facing this generational storm, according to the authors, is an implicit asset problem. “The…
Read more » The Price of Advice
Ken Cutler | Oct 19, 2023
WHEN I TOOK OVER responsibility for my developmentally disabled uncle's finances, following my father’s death in 2001, I inherited the stock broker that my dad was using. The broker was associated with a well-known financial company. I’d never used a broker before. Any investments I personally owned were held in my employer’s 401(k) plan. The first time I met the broker, whose name was Jim, I took notice of the large and finely appointed office he had. I figured that, since his title was senior vice president, this was to be expected. He was pleasant enough, although occasionally hard to follow when he started throwing financial jargon around. Jim and his staff were helpful to me, especially since I was new to the game. They took care of retitling the accounts based on the appropriate legal documents. I found that one of the trusts benefiting my uncle included a physical stock certificate for some bank shares. They converted the certificate into electronic shares and deposited them into the appropriate account without much effort required on my part. After a few months, everything seemed in order. Initially, I didn’t make any drastic changes to the portfolio. Jim would periodically give me recommendations on moves to make. When a bond matured, he’d present another option, which I’d usually accept. I didn’t have any particular strategy for managing the trust accounts and generally relied on the broker’s recommendations. After all, he knew a lot more than I did. After I’d worked with Jim for a few years, I decided to open a Roth IRA for myself with his brokerage firm. I felt secure dealing with a brick-and-mortar company that had familiar staff I could contact or meet with as necessary. Opening a completely online account with a different company seemed vaguely risky to…
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