From a total life perspective, it took me a long time to truly appreciate how much easier it is to be kind and thoughtful to fellow humans, and how much more satisfying it is. I wouldn't go so far as to say I ever did cruel things (other than to my younger siblings, and that ended 55 years ago), but I certainly did thoughtless and hurtful things. I'd like a mulligan on that. From a financial perspective, I am pretty sure that I had to make every stupid financial mistake in the book in order to knock it into my head that the only way to get wealthy is slowly, by saving, investing, and spending less than you have. Fortunately, I did figure it out in time.
Dennis, I so get this. I am a very fit 70-year-old, but a longtime diabetic with increasingly bad neuropathy in my feet. If you put me on a level, clean, smooth surface, I can still walk 3 miles in 50 minutes, but if you put me on a uneven surface, I am immediately in peril. I cannot feel my feet well enough to climb a ladder safely; I have to walk with my eyes rather than my feet now, so stepping on a stray pine cone that I didn't see can make me wobble and, occasionally, fall. This past year, I had to give up using the chain saw (a vital tool on a heavily wooded 1.5 acre lot) because I fell over backwards while I was cutting down a small tree and the saw was running. The idea of going up onto our very steep roof to blow the leaves off after autumn season is something that died a few years ago. Like you, I worry about the little things now, and I'm trying to lose that habit as well. When you start worrying about the little things, it is because you have tied up most of the loose ends on the big things. We had three other couples over for dinner last night, ages 58-80. The question came up from one of the youngest, "Would you be willing to go back in time, to any point in your life, with no guarantee that you could change the path you followed?" The three oldest of us (69, 70, and 80) said "No way!" Three of the five youngest were willing to go back, but none further back than their late forties. Nobody wanted to 21 again, My best advice for all of us aging is to celebrate what you can still do, and try to let go of what you can no longer do. But fight every step of the way. My second best advice, if you are coupled and have a partner who has been traditionally been passive regarding the finances, is force them to get involved. After never having done so, my wife has been reviewing and paying all the bills for the past three years (I know she is doing a good job because she asks me about the occasional unnecessary purchase I have made on a credit card). We have identified and met with both someone who will do her taxes and someone who will assist her with the investment plan after I am gone. My third best advice is to find a good handyman. We have a guy who can do anything I used to be able to do and more, and charges thirty bucks an hour. Chas. E.
I finally went to all cash and equivalents. I NEVER thought I would do this. At age 70 (with wife 69), we have been through plenty of harrowing markets and just kept investing vigorously. But I am mindful of something Bill Bernstein said, or I am at least paraphrasing: "When you have won the game, stop playing." If you trust Social Security to pay people my age what they have promised to pay (or even if benefits are cut 20% or so), between that and a pension and a ten-year annuity that expires in 2033, and two QLACS that kick in the year after that, and LTC insurance, what we had invested in stocks was basically "leave our daughters well off beyond their wildest dreams" (we have not exactly ignored them, even if you don't count paying pretty much every cent of three college degrees and funding 529 plans for grandkids https://humbledollar.com/2025/05/do-it-for-the-kids/#comment-2066667) or "rent a 10 bedroom villa on the Mediterranean and fly twenty people over for a week". That would all be lovely, but not really necessary. We're pretty happy as it is. The Geometry of Wealth by Brian Portnoy was very influential in getting us to this point. I checked our combined investment accounts for the first time yesterday since selling all. This is the weekly ledger: -$9.24 (0.00%). OK, fine.
Done and done, Jonathan! What a great idea! When my daughters (now 35 and 40) started having earned income, I had them open Roth IRAs and have since gifted them the amount of their earned income up to the Roth limit (with the proviso, of course, that they actually put it into the Roth). It has not only put them in a better financial situation than they would otherwise be in, but it has connected them to me and led to an avenue to financial education and discussion that I doubt we would otherwise have engaged in.
My wife and I met for brunch on Saturday with the couple we are going to Hawaii with later this month. As we reviewed our upcoming plans, we coincidentally (before I had read Jonathan's post) got around to discussing our money foibles. Perhaps my most bizarre: Every morning I wash down my morning meds with a glass of Low Sodium V8 juice, and after discovering that I could subscribe to a six-bottle shipment from Amazon for $0.80/bottle less than I can get it at the cheapest grocery store in my area, I jumped at it! Given that I go through a bottle a week, this saves me around $42/year, about half of what I spent on brunch yesterday when I picked up the tab. In all, as of the market close on Friday, the amount I "save" on V8 annually is less than 0.0025% of our liquid net worth.
When I take my SS at age 70 next year, my wife's and my combined SS plus an immediate annuity will pay all of our "necessary" (very liberally interpreted) expenses. I am keeping five years of budgeted optional expenses in CDs, but am otherwise 100% in stock index funds (so let's call it 95% stocks). We are effectively insured against healthcare shocks, so there really isn't a hell of a lot that can go wrong other than my untimely demise (even then, we have QLACs that will kick in in 2033 with an inflation rider). When we made that commitment, I thought of that as basically replacing the bond portion of our portfolio. Before we both retired, we were making so much more than we needed to live on that we were unapologetically 100% all in. It is worth noting that we were notoriously lucky - we only started making real money from our professions in around 1997, and invested increasingly more in stock index funds every year until 2017. There is no getting around the fact that accelerating our investing during the Great Recession period (driven solely by our increasing income and our lack of fear) ended up being a great boon for us (the nominal return of the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested from January 2009 to December 2017 was 15.8%). You can certainly find periods during which it could have worked out much worse, but we retired at age 63 from jobs we could easily have continued, with increasing salaries, until the moment I am typing this. So that was another firewall. We are well aware that we were very lucky, in addition to just being good savers who understand how much it would cost us to afford what seems to us to be a very pleasant life. If we have any wisdom at all, it is the wisdom of understanding what is enough.
We have a set percentage of our annual budget that we contribute to charity (which will increase soon when I am able to make tax-free contributions from my IRA). Regarding our daughters, ages 35 and 39, my wife and I have gone back and forth, and finally settled on this approach: We have informed them that for as long as my wife and I are both alive, they will each receive no less than $X/year, which will be adjusted each year by the Social Security COLA. In this case, $X is presently enough to make annual payments on a sensible not-too-old used car even at the current daunting interest rates. X was determined using a Monte Carlo analysis where even horrible rates of return showed that an expenditure of $2X/year would not really matter in terms of our quality of life. In addition to that, though, we have told them that the older we get, the more likely they are to get more than X - it will just depend on how our investments do, and how long the old man hangs on (I will take SS next year at 70, and the difference between my dying at 75 and dying at 85 is pretty significant in terms of how much money we will have to take from our investments, not least because my SS will be almost twice my wife's, and will replace hers when I die). One of the things that most of the people who read this forum understand has been one of the hardest to explain to my daughters - the difference between a 1% and 2% real return over 20 years is impressive; the difference between 1% and 3% over the same period is astonishing. In our case, it is the difference between cutting things close and having more money than we could ever spend.
John- Enjoyed the story. Like you, I am also celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first date this year, on May 24th. Ours has a bit of a twist - we actually went to high school together, but didn't particularly care for each other. As fate would have it, though, we ended up attending the same large state university which was overwhelming to both of us. We ended up in the same geology class freshman year, and started sitting next to each other just because it was a bit of a comfort. When I finally asked her out, it was more to hang out with someone I knew than because I was smitten. But I figured out in about 4 months that I couldn't live without her. It took her about 5 years to figure out that she couldn't live without me, including a lot of time apart with not even a hint that we would have celebrated our 44th wedding anniversary last Friday, but indeed we did. Chuck McLean
Comments
From a total life perspective, it took me a long time to truly appreciate how much easier it is to be kind and thoughtful to fellow humans, and how much more satisfying it is. I wouldn't go so far as to say I ever did cruel things (other than to my younger siblings, and that ended 55 years ago), but I certainly did thoughtless and hurtful things. I'd like a mulligan on that. From a financial perspective, I am pretty sure that I had to make every stupid financial mistake in the book in order to knock it into my head that the only way to get wealthy is slowly, by saving, investing, and spending less than you have. Fortunately, I did figure it out in time.
Post: My favorite question.
Link to comment from August 9, 2025
Dennis, I so get this. I am a very fit 70-year-old, but a longtime diabetic with increasingly bad neuropathy in my feet. If you put me on a level, clean, smooth surface, I can still walk 3 miles in 50 minutes, but if you put me on a uneven surface, I am immediately in peril. I cannot feel my feet well enough to climb a ladder safely; I have to walk with my eyes rather than my feet now, so stepping on a stray pine cone that I didn't see can make me wobble and, occasionally, fall. This past year, I had to give up using the chain saw (a vital tool on a heavily wooded 1.5 acre lot) because I fell over backwards while I was cutting down a small tree and the saw was running. The idea of going up onto our very steep roof to blow the leaves off after autumn season is something that died a few years ago. Like you, I worry about the little things now, and I'm trying to lose that habit as well. When you start worrying about the little things, it is because you have tied up most of the loose ends on the big things. We had three other couples over for dinner last night, ages 58-80. The question came up from one of the youngest, "Would you be willing to go back in time, to any point in your life, with no guarantee that you could change the path you followed?" The three oldest of us (69, 70, and 80) said "No way!" Three of the five youngest were willing to go back, but none further back than their late forties. Nobody wanted to 21 again, My best advice for all of us aging is to celebrate what you can still do, and try to let go of what you can no longer do. But fight every step of the way. My second best advice, if you are coupled and have a partner who has been traditionally been passive regarding the finances, is force them to get involved. After never having done so, my wife has been reviewing and paying all the bills for the past three years (I know she is doing a good job because she asks me about the occasional unnecessary purchase I have made on a credit card). We have identified and met with both someone who will do her taxes and someone who will assist her with the investment plan after I am gone. My third best advice is to find a good handyman. We have a guy who can do anything I used to be able to do and more, and charges thirty bucks an hour. Chas. E.
Post: It’s The Little Things That Scare Me Now
Link to comment from May 17, 2025
I finally went to all cash and equivalents. I NEVER thought I would do this. At age 70 (with wife 69), we have been through plenty of harrowing markets and just kept investing vigorously. But I am mindful of something Bill Bernstein said, or I am at least paraphrasing: "When you have won the game, stop playing." If you trust Social Security to pay people my age what they have promised to pay (or even if benefits are cut 20% or so), between that and a pension and a ten-year annuity that expires in 2033, and two QLACS that kick in the year after that, and LTC insurance, what we had invested in stocks was basically "leave our daughters well off beyond their wildest dreams" (we have not exactly ignored them, even if you don't count paying pretty much every cent of three college degrees and funding 529 plans for grandkids https://humbledollar.com/2025/05/do-it-for-the-kids/#comment-2066667) or "rent a 10 bedroom villa on the Mediterranean and fly twenty people over for a week". That would all be lovely, but not really necessary. We're pretty happy as it is. The Geometry of Wealth by Brian Portnoy was very influential in getting us to this point. I checked our combined investment accounts for the first time yesterday since selling all. This is the weekly ledger: -$9.24 (0.00%). OK, fine.
Post: Ch-Ch-Changes?
Link to comment from May 10, 2025
Done and done, Jonathan! What a great idea! When my daughters (now 35 and 40) started having earned income, I had them open Roth IRAs and have since gifted them the amount of their earned income up to the Roth limit (with the proviso, of course, that they actually put it into the Roth). It has not only put them in a better financial situation than they would otherwise be in, but it has connected them to me and led to an avenue to financial education and discussion that I doubt we would otherwise have engaged in.
Post: Do It for the Kids
Link to comment from May 10, 2025
My wife and I met for brunch on Saturday with the couple we are going to Hawaii with later this month. As we reviewed our upcoming plans, we coincidentally (before I had read Jonathan's post) got around to discussing our money foibles. Perhaps my most bizarre: Every morning I wash down my morning meds with a glass of Low Sodium V8 juice, and after discovering that I could subscribe to a six-bottle shipment from Amazon for $0.80/bottle less than I can get it at the cheapest grocery store in my area, I jumped at it! Given that I go through a bottle a week, this saves me around $42/year, about half of what I spent on brunch yesterday when I picked up the tab. In all, as of the market close on Friday, the amount I "save" on V8 annually is less than 0.0025% of our liquid net worth.
Post: Mind Over Money
Link to comment from February 2, 2025
When I take my SS at age 70 next year, my wife's and my combined SS plus an immediate annuity will pay all of our "necessary" (very liberally interpreted) expenses. I am keeping five years of budgeted optional expenses in CDs, but am otherwise 100% in stock index funds (so let's call it 95% stocks). We are effectively insured against healthcare shocks, so there really isn't a hell of a lot that can go wrong other than my untimely demise (even then, we have QLACs that will kick in in 2033 with an inflation rider). When we made that commitment, I thought of that as basically replacing the bond portion of our portfolio. Before we both retired, we were making so much more than we needed to live on that we were unapologetically 100% all in. It is worth noting that we were notoriously lucky - we only started making real money from our professions in around 1997, and invested increasingly more in stock index funds every year until 2017. There is no getting around the fact that accelerating our investing during the Great Recession period (driven solely by our increasing income and our lack of fear) ended up being a great boon for us (the nominal return of the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested from January 2009 to December 2017 was 15.8%). You can certainly find periods during which it could have worked out much worse, but we retired at age 63 from jobs we could easily have continued, with increasing salaries, until the moment I am typing this. So that was another firewall. We are well aware that we were very lucky, in addition to just being good savers who understand how much it would cost us to afford what seems to us to be a very pleasant life. If we have any wisdom at all, it is the wisdom of understanding what is enough.
Post: Is a 100% stock portfolio reckless?
Link to comment from June 22, 2024
We have a set percentage of our annual budget that we contribute to charity (which will increase soon when I am able to make tax-free contributions from my IRA). Regarding our daughters, ages 35 and 39, my wife and I have gone back and forth, and finally settled on this approach: We have informed them that for as long as my wife and I are both alive, they will each receive no less than $X/year, which will be adjusted each year by the Social Security COLA. In this case, $X is presently enough to make annual payments on a sensible not-too-old used car even at the current daunting interest rates. X was determined using a Monte Carlo analysis where even horrible rates of return showed that an expenditure of $2X/year would not really matter in terms of our quality of life. In addition to that, though, we have told them that the older we get, the more likely they are to get more than X - it will just depend on how our investments do, and how long the old man hangs on (I will take SS next year at 70, and the difference between my dying at 75 and dying at 85 is pretty significant in terms of how much money we will have to take from our investments, not least because my SS will be almost twice my wife's, and will replace hers when I die). One of the things that most of the people who read this forum understand has been one of the hardest to explain to my daughters - the difference between a 1% and 2% real return over 20 years is impressive; the difference between 1% and 3% over the same period is astonishing. In our case, it is the difference between cutting things close and having more money than we could ever spend.
Post: Is it better to give away money now or upon death?
Link to comment from June 22, 2024
John- Enjoyed the story. Like you, I am also celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first date this year, on May 24th. Ours has a bit of a twist - we actually went to high school together, but didn't particularly care for each other. As fate would have it, though, we ended up attending the same large state university which was overwhelming to both of us. We ended up in the same geology class freshman year, and started sitting next to each other just because it was a bit of a comfort. When I finally asked her out, it was more to hang out with someone I knew than because I was smitten. But I figured out in about 4 months that I couldn't live without her. It took her about 5 years to figure out that she couldn't live without me, including a lot of time apart with not even a hint that we would have celebrated our 44th wedding anniversary last Friday, but indeed we did. Chuck McLean
Post: Dance With Destiny
Link to comment from February 17, 2024