From a different type of work environment - I was production editor for medical journals at a Philadelphia publisher in the late 90s. (A bit of trivia - at that time the world center of medical and legal publishing was Philadelphia, although most publishers were owned by Dutch companies. I don't know if that is still true.) At any rate, editors who had worked there a bit longer than I recalled fondly earlier years when the custom was to devote Fridays to citation checking - editing lists of credits at the end of each article. It is tedious work. To make the work more palatable, the publisher would bring in kegs of beer. Editors began drinking at lunchtime and continued until the end of the workday, when many of them went together to local bars to continue drinking. One restriction was that all citation-checking for anesthesiology journals had to be completed during morning hours, before drinking began. Those journals were notoriously tougher to edit than others, although it may just have been that their editors-in-chief were stricter than others. I don't think I could edit a medical citation list after a couple of beers, but it seems the older editors were made of much sterner stuff!
Thank you - enjoyed the article and the accumulated wisdom of generations of wise money management. Also, I was happy to see a mention of YNAB. This simple budgeting tool enabled my husband and myself to get out of debt in the nineties. We gifted a subscription to my son, who used it to accumulate enough $$ to pay off his student loans and then to buy a home mortgage-free in another country, where he and his wife now live. We are big fans of YNAB - I'm sure there are plenty of equally useful budgeting tools, but that is the one we know and love.
Three years in and still loving retirement. I worked full time until the age of 71, though, so I have waited a long time for this. Two of the things that are keeping me busy:
Teaching English conversation to immigrants one day a week, with an organization called Welcoming the Stranger.
I knew that I wanted to do more learning in retirement. Checked out things such as OLLI and The Great Courses, which look wonderful. However, I ended up trying something on my own. I never really knew much about classical music, though I probably know more than I should about classic rock. Decided to remedy this defect by reading biographies of composers and listening to their music in the order it was composed. Almost everything you could ask to hear is on YouTube, for free. I started with Beethoven (this took more than a year - I was in no hurry), then moved on to Rachmaninoff. Currently doing a side excursion on the life and music of Cole Porter. Very content to be doing a little reading and a little listening every day - no rush, no schedule, and no tests or quizzes. A bonus is learning not only about the composers and their music but about the history of their eras as well.
The funny thing is, as light a commitment as teaching one class 1.5 hours one day a week is, I still look forward to and appreciate my holiday and summer breaks! Just like when I was in school or working full time!
Looking at this from the other side, I enjoy clicking the up arrow on posts or comments I find helpful, insightful, or funny. To me it seems like a free way to "leave a tip" for good service. I always hope that an up arrow might provide just the tiniest bit of encouragement to someone. And I suppose you can't have up arrows without down arrows.
My thinking on this may not be correct, but it has always seemed to me extremely risky to make all reliance for income for an entire family based upon the income of only one person. If that person becomes disabled, how do the others manage? I realize that disability insurance covers some of the need, but does this insurance have a COLA? What if the one and only breadwinner is disabled for 10-30 years? In addition to inflation eating away at the disability benefits, wouldn't that person's social security benefits also be frozen at the moment of disability, and therefore quite low? Perhaps there is something here that I am not seeing. But I would always opt for both parents having enough experience in the workforce to bring in a decent income unless it is absolutely not possible.
My mother was widowed at the age of 47 with two young children (my brother and me) to raise and no work experience except as a farm wife. Fortunately, she had Social Security survivor benefits. She also took in laundry and cleaned houses. I remember the three of us sitting at the kitchen table on hot summer evenings sorting and rolling pennies. We sorted by year and mint (San Francisco, Philadelphia, Denver), and my mother marked each completed roll with that information plus our names. The goal was to acquire a roll of each type of penny for each of us. Her thought was that in the future, when she was gone, we would each have a complete collection of 50 pennies from every year from every mint, and this would become quite valuable. We never did complete this collection, of course. I have eight rolls of coins in faded pink wrappers. Although they have not increased in monetary value, every year the increase in memory value is quite dramatic.
Whenever someone mentions frugality I always remember an article I read many years ago on raising children as frugally as possible. One of the tips was to stick used popsicle sticks into the ice cube tray and then offer your children "clear popsicles" on a hot summer day - just as refreshing as the ones you pay for! I don't imagine that one fooled very many kids. :)
Many of us are familiar with the marshmallow test. Walter Mischel and others demonstrated that children who were able to delay gratification had more impressive achievements later in life than those who could not wait to eat their marshmallows. These studies have often been analogized to saving habits – individuals who are able to save money regularly from an early age usually demonstrate impressive financial achievements later in life. Some people have theorized that this shows that some people have innate abilities to delay gratification – they are born savers. I was interested to read of a follow-up study conducted at the University of Rochester, in which the children taking the marshmallow test were divided into two groups. One group of children (the reliable group) were given a set of inferior art supplies and asked to complete an art project. They were told that researchers would be back soon with better supplies, and indeed this is what happened. The researchers gave them better supplies, and they completed the project. So far so good. The other group of children (the unreliable group) were subjected to the same situation, with the difference that the researchers returned in two and half minutes and said that they had made a mistake – there were no better art supplies. The researchers then repeated this pattern with stickers (I can get you some better stickers – sorry, we don’t actually have better stickers). Then both groups were subjected to the marshmallow test. (It is amusing to note that one little boy who was very tempted to eat his marshmallow immediately instead sat on it, to remove the temptation.) There was a huge difference between the reliable group and the unreliable group. Children who had experienced unreliable adults ate their marshmallows as soon as they were left alone with them. Children who had experienced reliable adults were able to wait. The researchers’ conclusion: Children's wait times reflect rational decision making about the probability of reward. This might partially explain the difference between savers and non-savers: one’s experience of the reliability of the world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain why two people from the same family differ radically in their ability to save. The researchers’ final caveat: "Don't do the marshmallow test on your kitchen table and conclude something about your child. It especially would not work with a parent, because your child has all sorts of strong expectations about what a person who loves them very much is likely to do."
I never thought much about SS for retirement because my father died when my brother and I were six and eight years old. He had no life insurance. My mother picked up jobs cleaning houses and taking in laundry. SS supported all three of us until my brother and I were through college. (Both of us also had scholarship money and he had ROTC benefits for college - not saying that SS covered everything.) The idea of saving and investing in the stock market during those years is laughable. I have two relatives who receive SS disability benefits. The fact that SS is now an important part of my retirement income seems like a nice and unexpected bonus.
I have a good friend who never wanted to go to college while she was in high school. No one in her family had attended college, and she didn't like studying or classes. Nevertheless, she signed up for a bus trip to visit a nearby college simply because it was free and meant a day away from school. During the tour, she was unimpressed by everything the group learned about classes, professors, dorms, cultural events, etc. It all seemed irrelevant to someone who assumed she would immediately begin working 9-5 in a shop or factory after graduation, just like everyone else she knew. Then the group walked through the student center/cafeteria. My friend was astounded to see people about her own age laughing, eating, smoking, and having fun in the middle of the afternoon. She instantly decided that she would go to college after all. Though she freely admits that she went to college mainly to have fun (and she pursued that path diligently), she ended up with a career in social work and helped hundreds of people before she retired. But she always maintained that she went to college in order to be able to sit around with friends and smoke cigarettes every afternoon without being forced to hurry back to a job.
Comments
From a different type of work environment - I was production editor for medical journals at a Philadelphia publisher in the late 90s. (A bit of trivia - at that time the world center of medical and legal publishing was Philadelphia, although most publishers were owned by Dutch companies. I don't know if that is still true.) At any rate, editors who had worked there a bit longer than I recalled fondly earlier years when the custom was to devote Fridays to citation checking - editing lists of credits at the end of each article. It is tedious work. To make the work more palatable, the publisher would bring in kegs of beer. Editors began drinking at lunchtime and continued until the end of the workday, when many of them went together to local bars to continue drinking. One restriction was that all citation-checking for anesthesiology journals had to be completed during morning hours, before drinking began. Those journals were notoriously tougher to edit than others, although it may just have been that their editors-in-chief were stricter than others. I don't think I could edit a medical citation list after a couple of beers, but it seems the older editors were made of much sterner stuff!
Post: Drinking on the Job
Link to comment from October 19, 2025
Thank you - enjoyed the article and the accumulated wisdom of generations of wise money management. Also, I was happy to see a mention of YNAB. This simple budgeting tool enabled my husband and myself to get out of debt in the nineties. We gifted a subscription to my son, who used it to accumulate enough $$ to pay off his student loans and then to buy a home mortgage-free in another country, where he and his wife now live. We are big fans of YNAB - I'm sure there are plenty of equally useful budgeting tools, but that is the one we know and love.
Post: Perspective from a grateful recipient of outpatient economic care
Link to comment from October 17, 2025
Three years in and still loving retirement. I worked full time until the age of 71, though, so I have waited a long time for this. Two of the things that are keeping me busy:
- Teaching English conversation to immigrants one day a week, with an organization called Welcoming the Stranger.
- I knew that I wanted to do more learning in retirement. Checked out things such as OLLI and The Great Courses, which look wonderful. However, I ended up trying something on my own. I never really knew much about classical music, though I probably know more than I should about classic rock. Decided to remedy this defect by reading biographies of composers and listening to their music in the order it was composed. Almost everything you could ask to hear is on YouTube, for free. I started with Beethoven (this took more than a year - I was in no hurry), then moved on to Rachmaninoff. Currently doing a side excursion on the life and music of Cole Porter. Very content to be doing a little reading and a little listening every day - no rush, no schedule, and no tests or quizzes. A bonus is learning not only about the composers and their music but about the history of their eras as well.
The funny thing is, as light a commitment as teaching one class 1.5 hours one day a week is, I still look forward to and appreciate my holiday and summer breaks! Just like when I was in school or working full time!Post: Wade Pfau has put me in a funk. Are you dealing with the stages of retirement?
Link to comment from October 11, 2025
Looking at this from the other side, I enjoy clicking the up arrow on posts or comments I find helpful, insightful, or funny. To me it seems like a free way to "leave a tip" for good service. I always hope that an up arrow might provide just the tiniest bit of encouragement to someone. And I suppose you can't have up arrows without down arrows.
Post: re RDQ’s “down arrows” —> My 1 cent :
Link to comment from August 30, 2025
My thinking on this may not be correct, but it has always seemed to me extremely risky to make all reliance for income for an entire family based upon the income of only one person. If that person becomes disabled, how do the others manage? I realize that disability insurance covers some of the need, but does this insurance have a COLA? What if the one and only breadwinner is disabled for 10-30 years? In addition to inflation eating away at the disability benefits, wouldn't that person's social security benefits also be frozen at the moment of disability, and therefore quite low? Perhaps there is something here that I am not seeing. But I would always opt for both parents having enough experience in the workforce to bring in a decent income unless it is absolutely not possible.
Post: In retirement a pension is a advantage. Are two family incomes during working years an advantage as well?
Link to comment from August 7, 2025
My mother was widowed at the age of 47 with two young children (my brother and me) to raise and no work experience except as a farm wife. Fortunately, she had Social Security survivor benefits. She also took in laundry and cleaned houses. I remember the three of us sitting at the kitchen table on hot summer evenings sorting and rolling pennies. We sorted by year and mint (San Francisco, Philadelphia, Denver), and my mother marked each completed roll with that information plus our names. The goal was to acquire a roll of each type of penny for each of us. Her thought was that in the future, when she was gone, we would each have a complete collection of 50 pennies from every year from every mint, and this would become quite valuable. We never did complete this collection, of course. I have eight rolls of coins in faded pink wrappers. Although they have not increased in monetary value, every year the increase in memory value is quite dramatic.
Post: My Money Memories
Link to comment from August 7, 2025
Whenever someone mentions frugality I always remember an article I read many years ago on raising children as frugally as possible. One of the tips was to stick used popsicle sticks into the ice cube tray and then offer your children "clear popsicles" on a hot summer day - just as refreshing as the ones you pay for! I don't imagine that one fooled very many kids. :)
Post: Extreme Frugality: It Better be Fun
Link to comment from June 25, 2025
Many of us are familiar with the marshmallow test. Walter Mischel and others demonstrated that children who were able to delay gratification had more impressive achievements later in life than those who could not wait to eat their marshmallows. These studies have often been analogized to saving habits – individuals who are able to save money regularly from an early age usually demonstrate impressive financial achievements later in life. Some people have theorized that this shows that some people have innate abilities to delay gratification – they are born savers. I was interested to read of a follow-up study conducted at the University of Rochester, in which the children taking the marshmallow test were divided into two groups. One group of children (the reliable group) were given a set of inferior art supplies and asked to complete an art project. They were told that researchers would be back soon with better supplies, and indeed this is what happened. The researchers gave them better supplies, and they completed the project. So far so good. The other group of children (the unreliable group) were subjected to the same situation, with the difference that the researchers returned in two and half minutes and said that they had made a mistake – there were no better art supplies. The researchers then repeated this pattern with stickers (I can get you some better stickers – sorry, we don’t actually have better stickers). Then both groups were subjected to the marshmallow test. (It is amusing to note that one little boy who was very tempted to eat his marshmallow immediately instead sat on it, to remove the temptation.) There was a huge difference between the reliable group and the unreliable group. Children who had experienced unreliable adults ate their marshmallows as soon as they were left alone with them. Children who had experienced reliable adults were able to wait. The researchers’ conclusion: Children's wait times reflect rational decision making about the probability of reward. This might partially explain the difference between savers and non-savers: one’s experience of the reliability of the world. Unfortunately, it doesn’t explain why two people from the same family differ radically in their ability to save. The researchers’ final caveat: "Don't do the marshmallow test on your kitchen table and conclude something about your child. It especially would not work with a parent, because your child has all sorts of strong expectations about what a person who loves them very much is likely to do."
Post: Why Don’t Folks Save?
Link to comment from February 19, 2025
I never thought much about SS for retirement because my father died when my brother and I were six and eight years old. He had no life insurance. My mother picked up jobs cleaning houses and taking in laundry. SS supported all three of us until my brother and I were through college. (Both of us also had scholarship money and he had ROTC benefits for college - not saying that SS covered everything.) The idea of saving and investing in the stock market during those years is laughable. I have two relatives who receive SS disability benefits. The fact that SS is now an important part of my retirement income seems like a nice and unexpected bonus.
Post: They’re Right, I’m Wrong, Sort Of
Link to comment from February 3, 2025
I have a good friend who never wanted to go to college while she was in high school. No one in her family had attended college, and she didn't like studying or classes. Nevertheless, she signed up for a bus trip to visit a nearby college simply because it was free and meant a day away from school. During the tour, she was unimpressed by everything the group learned about classes, professors, dorms, cultural events, etc. It all seemed irrelevant to someone who assumed she would immediately begin working 9-5 in a shop or factory after graduation, just like everyone else she knew. Then the group walked through the student center/cafeteria. My friend was astounded to see people about her own age laughing, eating, smoking, and having fun in the middle of the afternoon. She instantly decided that she would go to college after all. Though she freely admits that she went to college mainly to have fun (and she pursued that path diligently), she ended up with a career in social work and helped hundreds of people before she retired. But she always maintained that she went to college in order to be able to sit around with friends and smoke cigarettes every afternoon without being forced to hurry back to a job.
Post: Ranking Colleges
Link to comment from October 1, 2024