Michael1

Comments:

• Like many here, I’ve had some pretty great work trips. I think the best are memorable not because of the fancy hotels or meals, but for what I got to see and do. Travels when I was still in uniform or in government probably top such a list more than my later corporate trips. What makes me comment is the reference to that trip to Cali with Robert being the best trip Ken had as a single person. That got me thinking, what was my best trip while young and single?  A trip that rises to the top in my memory was with a good friend with whom I was serving in Italy in my early twenties and with whom I used to hike a lot. His parents had come over, and the four of us took a trip to hike in the northern mountains of what was then Yugoslavia. Good people, trout fresh from the river outside our spartan hotel, super hiking to the source of the same river where it emerged from a cave in a mountainside. Perhaps one of my cheapest trips in an addition to one I remember well and fondly. 

  Post: California Free by Ken Cutler

  Link to comment from October 8, 2024

• Thanks for sharing that. I did some other looking and it does indeed look like the beneficiary has to be 70 1/2. I’m going to edit my original note above so people who don’t read all the way down don’t leave with bad info.

  Post: Our annual give it away meeting 🤑

  Link to comment from October 5, 2024

• I know what you mean. We never encountered much trash on the footpaths in England.

  Post: Free to Roam

  Link to comment from October 5, 2024

• Mike, I’m sorry for your loss. Editing my comment to point out Willam Perry’s below, citing a IRS pub saying you have to be 70 1/2 to take the RMD as a QCD. Btw, you may not know there are other options besides rolling your wife’s IRA into yours. Besides looking at what the IRS says, I’d ask the custodian of your current IRA about your options for how to treat the account. https://www.irs.gov/publications/p590b

  Post: Our annual give it away meeting 🤑

  Link to comment from October 5, 2024

• Yes, Mike does have to take the RMD. Enjoyed the article btw. .

  Post: Our annual give it away meeting 🤑

  Link to comment from October 5, 2024

• This is a good list but I think the nest egg point misses that if the point is to resist inflation, at least part of the nest egg needs to be in stocks. Just saving isn’t going to cut it unless it’s a whole lot of savings.

  Post: Hedging your bet in retirement-dealing with inflation. What’s your strategy? R Quinn

  Link to comment from September 30, 2024

• Agree. Especially lower essential expenses and even more especially reduced food costs.

  Post: Hedging your bet in retirement-dealing with inflation. What’s your strategy? R Quinn

  Link to comment from September 30, 2024

• This is a great question. I don’t know the answer but there are some thoughts.  One is it’s different for everyone.  For someone whose needs are covered by social security or some combination of COLA adjusted pensions, the question is largely irrelevant. Their ability to spend isn’t dependent on market returns or the sequence in which they happen. For someone who has no pension or annuity of any kind and expects to live totally from their portfolio, then this risk is very important.  Now to your question. For that second person or those in between, where’s the end of the danger zone? I might think about it being when my portfolio is large enough that I could accept either of (1) a 30% drop in the market that takes five years to get back to where it was, or (2) no big drop, but 0% return for the first five years of retirement, before returning the historical average.  Some people might want to be able to handle a 50% drop that takes ten years to recover, or 0% return for ten years. The above are just examples of how I might try to quantify the danger zone. 

  Post: Sequence of Return Risk

  Link to comment from September 28, 2024

• Looking back I see my first article was mid 2021, so I probably found the site a year or two before that. I had just read How to Think About Money, and went on the web to look for more by Jonathan. Thankfully HD was in the search results.

  Post: How and when did you find out about HumbleDollar?

  Link to comment from September 26, 2024

• I also sometimes think about having an advisor or even manager. Partially because my wife is less interested in managing investments than I am, and partially for the reason you cite. And beyond increasingly sophisticated fraud, there’s plain old cognitive decline. I think at some point it will become desirable, and it would be preferable to have established the relationship well in advance of needing it, even if that comes with paying for it before we really need it.

  Post: Stay Safe Out There

  Link to comment from September 24, 2024