Brian White

Comments:

• This past spring, to celebrate our 25th anniversary, my wife and I went to Italy for four weeks, with hiking tours at the beginning and end of the trip. The second tour ended on a Sunday, at the Florence airport. I compared prices of the return trip that Sunday with flights the following Wednesday, and I found that we could save $800 each by flying back Wednesday. The $1600 savings more than covered three nights in a nice hotel very near Ponte Vecchio, as well as meals and admission to various places. I was glad I checked.

  Post: Booking It by Jonathan Clements

  Link to comment from September 14, 2024

• 52% Roth 16% taxable 32 tax-deferred (IRAs and 457) I'm 70 and retired 10 years ago. I took advantage of some low income years in retirement to do a lot of Roth conversions, figuring I will never see 15% or 12% marginal tax rates once I start taking Social Security (as I just did). I might even do another conversion this year. Given the evenly divided Congress, it is within the realm of possibility that no one can pass any tax changes, in which case the current tax rates will sunset at the end of 2025. I don't see my taxes going down under any circumstances (and I am okay with that), so locking in at the current rate is not a bad idea.

  Post: What’s your asset breakdown by tax treatment?

  Link to comment from September 11, 2024

• Ever since Hurricane Fran ran through central NC in 1996 and knocked out power for about a week, I keep a stash of 1s, 5s, 10s, and 20s on hand in case we're reduced to cash-only transactions again, without any working ATMs. I'm hoping this week's hurricane won't be a problem here, but who knows.

  Post: Cash On Hand

  Link to comment from August 7, 2024

• My father died at 46, but his "younger" sister is now 97, and my wife's father lived to 97. We chose the 100% survivor benefit for my pension. My wife's older sister is now a widow, and her husband had a 0% survivor benefit. I don't know if he had other options, but he died at 85, and she could have used some additional income.

  Post: Unasked Questions

  Link to comment from August 3, 2024

• I have been lucky most of my life. As others have said, I was born American. My father was a Naval Intelligence officer who did a great deal of writing, and my mother was a professional librarian, and both had taught school. I never had to think about how to use correct grammar, because perfect grammar was what I always heard from my parents, so that came naturally. I did not apply myself in high school, being more interested in peace, love, and rock and roll. Despite that, I got into college based on SAT scores. I was very fortunate to be living with my beautiful girlfriend in my freshman year. Her father was a professor at UNC, and she had great study habits, which I quickly assimilated just by spending all my time with her. I became a perennial dean’s list student, even after she left me behind. I tried various directions in college, finally ending up with a Masters in Computer Science. Not having any interests in specific research areas entering the graduate program, I was given a graduate assistantship in the department’s computer support group, where I excelled. Just as I was about to graduate, the person for whom I worked moved to another department. I applied for and got her job, and eight years later I was the IT Director. As Jeff Bond said, I was lucky when my first wife left me. Less than a year later, I answered one personal ad in a local entertainment guide. That was how I met my second wife, and we celebrated our 25th anniversary this year. Batting 1000 on personal ads has to be one of the luckier things in my life. In addition, I was lucky in another way: My wife was a clinical social worker, and they don’t get paid a lot. Because of her limited income, she was (and still is) quite thrifty and a good saver. As with my college girlfriend, I assimilated her thriftiness, or at least some of it. As my career progressed, I got raises, and we just plowed the additional money into savings. Around 2000, I started reading the Work and Money section of the Raleigh News and Observer’s Sunday paper, which included several pages from the Sunday Wall Street Journal. It was there that I found Jonathan Clements’ articles on all the subjects that are dear to Humble Dollar readers:  establishing goals, asset allocation based on risk tolerance, diversification, rebalancing, regular saving, using low-cost index funds, and “ignoring the noise”. Jonathan’s articles were certainly a lucky find, and they have served me well. I was also lucky when I decided to rebalance on the second lowest day of the COVID market crash. I think I might have just read one of Adam Grossman’s articles where he suggested having a plan to rebalance when the market dips by a certain percentage. Previously I had just rebalanced quarterly. I got lucky with my timing that day.

  Post: Feeling Lucky by Jonathan Clements

  Link to comment from July 26, 2024

• I started investing through the 457 plan offered by UNC (Go Tarheels!) shortly after getting my first job after graduate school. I had no idea what I was doing until I started reading Jonathan's columns from the WSJ, which were printed in the Raleigh News and Observer's Sunday paper. I think he mentioned various books in some of his columns, including Jack Bogle's Little Book of Common Sense Investing, which made a lot of sense then and now. In any case, I checked out Bogle's books from the library and became a diehard index fund investor. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, Jonathan and Jack.

  Post: What got you interested in investing?

  Link to comment from July 15, 2024

• This year my wife and I celebrated our 25th anniversary. Since we had skipped traveling much since the start of COVID, we decided to blow it out this year with a Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise in January, a four-week vacation in Italy (including two hiking tours), and a trip to Philadelphia last month to see the Rolling Stones and some American history. No regrets.

  Post: Satisfying Splurges by Ken Cutler

  Link to comment from July 15, 2024

• They have a good reason why they bought each of their many different mutual funds. I once helped a friend with his taxes. His Fidelity tax statement showed he had losses in 40 mutual funds. While it was a bad year (2018) for the S&P 500, I questioned why he had so many funds with overlapping holdings. I looked up the expense ratios of each of the funds and made a spreadsheet showing the expense ratios (averaging .72%) and suggested he dump them all and replace them with a few funds from either Fidelity or Vanguard with expense ratios averaging less than .2%. Given that he was also paying Fidelity twice what Vanguard charges for financial management, I also pointed out that he was not getting very good advice, since they were keeping him in a complicated set of conflicting, high expense funds, making it nearly impossible to tell what he had invested in any given market segment. However, he was unwilling to discuss this further or consider my suggestions. We're still good friends, but he just closes down when I bring up finances. I probably should have approached it differently. `I did not find a way to wake him up.

  Post: They’re Sunk by Jonathan Clements

  Link to comment from July 10, 2024

• Where I live, near Chapel Hill, NC, waiting lists for CCRCs can be as much as 15 years. Given our aging population, the waiting lists will likely continue to get longer. Our solution was to get on the priority lists of four different CCRCs, though there is one that we favor much more than the others. We got on the lists eight years ago, at ages 61 and 64, so we'll probably be 76 and 79 by the time we get in. I'm happy to live with stairs for a while longer, but yardwork is getting harder all the time.

  Post: Bracing for Evening

  Link to comment from November 8, 2023

• She already has dementia, but fortunately she should be able to stay where she is. It is not cheap, though, and it is sure to get more expensive. However, the cost increase this year was surprisingly small, given inflation.

  Post: Closing the Door

  Link to comment from June 21, 2023