Catherine

I’M A HOUSEHOLD of one—in theory. True, one adult child lives rent-free in our family home in California. Her first full-time job’s wages are too low for her to afford an apartment in our expensive urban area.
I’m also paying college expenses for another daughter living on campus 80 miles away. She’s working part-time and will graduate this coming spring semester. With a STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) degree, I hope she’ll find gainful full-time employment soon after.

DRIVING CROSSTOWN, my brother and I stopped at an onramp, where a man held a cardboard sign.
“Does anyone give these people money?” my brother asked, then immediately answered his own question by mentioning a friend who hands out bottles of water instead. “Anything helps,” read the man’s sign.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve seen people pass $5 bills out the window.” A single dollar used to be enough for a panhandler to end his shift and shuffle off to the nearest mini-market.

STOCKS, BONDS, CASH—and a house owned free and clear. For many, that’s the recipe for a financially successful retirement. Our homes represent a central pillar of middle-class status. With a paid-off mortgage, we have an affordable place to spend our old age.
Yet signing up for decades of house payments has become controversial for its high opportunity cost—what you give up to pay the mortgage. Has a home mortgage, with its long, slow road to payoff,

SIPPING MORNING coffee on the porch of my 40-year-old aluminum box in the Sonoran Desert, I’m pondering the cost of housing.
My affordable unit sits on cement piers at the end of a street within an age-restricted park, at the sparsely populated edge of Tucson. Few jobs exist nearby. Civic amenities are modest. Summer weather is challenging, with heat, thunderstorms and seasonal rattlesnakes. Still, these conditions have created a financially comfortable place for a retiree to live.

IN JANUARY, I surrendered to passionate irrationality, buying a park unit in Arizona that has become my second home.
Now I understand why, at least in the movie cliché, a man might buy house slippers for his long-suffering wife’s birthday, while giving flashy, expensive baubles to his girlfriend for no reason at all.
My single-wide “girlfriend” is tiny and fragile, the bloom off her youth. Things that improve her are easily obtained. A phone call to a friendly fellow at a store,

WHEN I ASKED MY brother what to bring to my newly purchased winter home in Tucson, his response was succinct: “Money. Lots. And extra credit cards.”
The voice of experience, he bought a so-called park unit five years ago before home prices soared, up 47% since early 2020 . My expenses in buying my place—and making it into what I wanted—had me selling beaten-down shares in a total bond fund to refill my cash accounts.

I’M TYPICALLY FRUGAL and financially cautious. But this past January, I became reckless. No, it wasn’t love, at least not the ordinary kind. Rather, I saw a photograph and made an offer of $48,000 on a “park unit” located 1,000 miles from home.
Park unit, I learned, is a technical term for a variant of what I’d call a mobile home. My first task was to look up the term, so I’d know what I was offering to buy.

CAN IT REALLY BE TWO years since I wrote about sending my twins off to college? One is a chemistry major, midway through her junior year. Meanwhile, for her twin sister, the artist, there have been big changes in her college trajectory.
My initial criteria for college selections included published statistics on cost, likelihood of admission, timely graduation and low rates of loan default. I took this last stat as a reasonable proxy for post-college success.

ASSET ALLOCATION is usually a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. At least, that’s how I’ve handled it until now. I decided on my appetite for risk, then set my stock-bond ratio accordingly.
I tallied everything once or twice a year, and then rebalanced. I’d apply a portion of my winning positions to my less successful asset classes. Rebalancing this way forced me to buy low and sell high. Combined with dollar-cost averaging, it’s an investing approach that’s served me well for more than 20 years.

FINANCIAL FIRMS spend heavily on marketing to create a friendly, customer-first impression. But these firms aren’t your friends, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. They make their money, fairly and legally, by providing specific services to customers.
Friendliness at a retail level keeps your capital in place, where it works for the firm’s benefit. Every once in a while, I see language that clearly expresses what they want from our “relationship.” These communications help me review where I do business,

IT’S BEEN A MONTH since I dropped off my twins at college, one east, one west. Each has a debit card for an account with the credit union here in our hometown. One has downloaded the credit union’s mobile app. Both are already developing their own ideas and strategies for managing college life on a shoestring budget.
I got them their debit cards some time ago. I also opened a teen account for their brother,

MY TWINS ARE OFF to college. They’re on different paths. One is attending an institution less than 100 miles from home, while the other will be on the far side of the continent. One has a full-ride package of financial aid from her chosen college. The other isn’t getting as much.
Every morning this past week, I’ve intended to pay the first semester for the twin who didn’t get a full ride. I have the cash.

AS MY TWINS DEPART for college, they leave behind a home base where they find food in the refrigerator, get new clothes and shoes when needed, have bills paid and extra-curriculars funded, and receive a small weekly allowance to save or spend.
Now, they’re headed far from familiar security. They gain instead independence and the opportunity to explore other ways of living and spending, all part of their higher education. Cold cereal for supper?

MY TWIN DAUGHTERS just finished sorting through college offers and making their decision ahead of the May 1 acceptance deadline. With nearly 3,000 four-year colleges to choose from, how did they decide?
It wasn’t easy. The pandemic didn’t just close our local public schools. It also ended visits from universities and limited school-based college counseling. Counselors compensated with lunchtime workshops, links to webinars, and lots of robocalls and emails urging students to fill out and submit the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

MY FIRST JOB AFTER college was at a global engineering firm. A roommate also worked there. It was a tedious office job, but my bosses thought I had potential and encouraged me to study engineering, which I didn’t.
Instead, I quit and went to graduate school to study linguistics, a field where I observed the most professors having the most fun. My last paycheck at the engineering firm included an extra sum. It was a refund for a retirement account that had failed to vest because I hadn’t stayed long enough.

A LIFE OF FRUGALITY might mean your children graduate college debt-free, which is a major accomplishment. But what about your happy-go-lucky neighbors, who spent every dime they earned and never saved for college?
At issue here is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which is the basis for the all-important expected family contribution (EFC). The whole thing can seem like one big crapshoot, as I can now attest.
The EFC may determine that your spendthrift neighbors’ kids also get to graduate debt-free.

MY TWINS ARE SENIORS in high school. That means, pandemic or no pandemic, we spent the fall applying to colleges.
Here in California, the pandemic closed public schools in March and most did not reopen for in-person teaching with the start of the current academic year. That forced parents to stand in for college counselors. The preparations high school juniors usually engage in, such as visiting colleges and taking standardized tests, didn’t occur this past spring or summer.

LIKE OTHERS, I TOOK my first part-time job as a teenager and, once working fulltime, stayed at it steadily for decades. Being an adult meant being a worker, affiliated with some firm or another, one industry or another.
My plans for ever exiting the labor force were vague: “Save for the future, so someday you will retire with honor and dignity to spend your waning days as you desire.” I saved steadily,

AS MY PERSONAL and financial life gradually became more orderly in the months after my husband’s death, I found myself wrestling with one particular investment: My late husband had spent the bulk of his working life with Union Pacific and, like longtime employees at so many companies, he’d accumulated a significant number of shares. What should I do with those shares?
My husband and I occasionally discussed the dangers of overweighting company stock—something that often happens when shares are used for the employer’s 401(k) matching contribution or they’re granted as part of incentive pay packages.

FOLLOWING MY husband’s death, I went from feeling prosperous to precarious in the space of a few short months. For decades, I’d had something extra in hand, beyond the minimum sum necessary to keep going. That sense of prosperity was now gone.
This wasn’t just my imagination. Studies have found that widows are significantly less wealthy than their married counterparts. One academic article notes, “The death of a spouse is an event that may precipitate a large decline in wealth.” Similarly,

I LIKE TO THINK my husband and I were savvy and careful when planning our estate. Yet anybody can make an occasional dumb mistake. That brings me to my next surprise in settling my husband’s affairs—and it came with an unfortunate legal bill.
As a couple, we’d established a revocable living trust at a young age, when death was a strictly theoretical idea. The trust eliminated the need for our estate to go through probate,

SAVING FOR THE FUTURE entails a pinch in the present. Every so often, it makes sense to reconsider how much we save—and whether it’s time to take a break from saving. As a recent early retiree, I was pondering this, even before the latest stock market disruption.
Unfortunately, none of us has a reliable crystal ball that tells us when to buy low or sell high. We also don’t have complete knowledge of our future self.

DESPITE MY independent nature, I called family and friends after my injury. I thanked them for what they’d already done following my husband’s death—and requested additional, more intensive support.
One aunt, a government employee, arranged to work for a week at a nearby federal building. My sister-in-law also came for a week, and a cousin who is a nurse volunteered, too. A professional colleague parked her RV in the driveway and brought along her friendly pooch.

TWO WEEKS AFTER my husband’s death, we held a memorial service for local friends and family. Days later, after a reasonable amount of online research, I visited a car dealer.
It’s my experience that bringing at least one youngster along speeds up dealmaking, plus a parent can get unvarnished opinions about life in the backseat. So I brought along my 13-year-old. The two of us test drove two used cars and bought one of them.

AFTER LEAVING THE hospital, our family met up at a favorite neighborhood restaurant.
“What’s next?” the teenagers asked.
“Now begins the parade of covered dishes,” I answered.
For the month after my husband’s death, when preparing food hardly seemed possible, friends and neighbors made sure our refrigerator and freezer bulged. The kids experienced a variety of main meals, side dishes and desserts. There was enough for us and our many helpers, and we experimented with time and labor-saving meal shortcuts.

IT STARTED INNOCENTLY. A doctor’s visit. A blood test. Results. Admit to hospital for “a couple days of observation” that instead cascaded, over six days, into my husband’s death at age 71. His death certificate states “etiology unknown.” While doctors suspected prescribed medication, we will never know just what caused his liver to fail.
Throughout, the situation had been confusing. Clarity regarding treatment options—and the likely outcome from procedures—was in short supply. He and I and doctors made medical decisions in the face of this uncertainty and without regard to costs.