Greg Spears

I WAS HAPPY to read in The Wall Street Journal that 401(k) plans are “minting a generation of moderate millionaires.” I spent the last two decades of my professional life promoting 401(k) plans to workers, so the news felt like validation.
Moderate millionaires were loosely defined as coupon-clippers with seven figures. Sound familiar? It should to many HD readers. At Fidelity, a record 654,000 investors had a million or more in the 401(k) in the third quarter of 2025.

THE WAVES AND WEATHER are always changing on the coast of Maine. Last summer, I paddled my canoe to a nearby island in the sun, and two hours later had to feel my way back through a fog that hid the mainland.
There are longer-term forces at play here, too. The black mussel beds I steered around as a child are all gone now. So is the sea grass that made a good hiding place for crabs.

I’VE TAUGHT BEHAVIORAL economics, which holds that even our most important decisions are influenced by unrecognized biases. For my students, there’s no better example than the choice of where they went to college.
Although the cost is enormous, the decision of where to go hinges on the smallest things. A teenager who says, “I want to be close to my boyfriend,” will zero in on a nearby college, even if her high school romance is fading.

I NEVER PURCHASED long-term-care insurance, even though the personal finance magazine I wrote for in the 1990s often recommended it. To the magazine’s editors, it seemed like another logical step in retirement preparation. I had two reasons to decide against it, however.
First, it seemed a huge expense. We were advised to buy it around age 60, long before any presumed decline. I was younger than that and unprepared to pay hundreds a month for decades when I didn’t know if I’d ever use the coverage.

I WAS INTRIGUED WHEN an old Dutch painting attributed to a “follower of Rembrandt” came up for auction near me in Maine late last month. It was a portrait of a young woman wearing an elaborately starched ruff collar, the type of clothing depicted in Golden Age paintings from the 1600s.
The country auction house estimated the painting would fetch $10,000 to $15,000. I couldn’t shake the thought—however fleeting—that this might be the real thing.

I MAY BE WRONG, but I’m pretty sure Vanguard Group doesn’t have a secret plan to control the U.S. banking system. Not everyone is so confident, however.
There’s a federal regulation that no investor can buy more than 10% of the shares of a U.S. bank without regulatory approval if it’s seeking to “control” the bank. Thanks to the popularity of its index funds, Vanguard funds collectively owned 12.5% of State Street’s shares as of June 30.

IF YOU WORKED AT Vanguard Group, you felt like a kid in a candy store when it came to picking investments. There were so many well-run, low-cost funds to try. Yet my favorite fund wasn’t offered as an investment option in the Vanguard 401(k) plan. Ironically, it’s the fund that made Vanguard’s reputation.
Vanguard opened its S&P 500 index fund (symbol: VFIAX) in 1976. This first commercially offered index fund was designed to earn the U.S.

MY TAX RETURN IS too complicated by far, and yours probably is, too. I lose hours looking up figures online, then toggling over to TurboTax to enter them in different boxes. It doesn’t help that I tend to pile, rather than file, important financial papers.
I take the job in stages because it’s so boring. I’ve also learned not to file early because late-arriving mail can upset my math. It happened again this year,

YOU COULD CALL ME a 529 superfan. The college savings plans helped me put my two kids through college. Their state and federal tax advantages cut the exorbitant cost of college just enough so we didn’t have to borrow for our two kids’ education.
Which makes it surprising that I knew the man who created the 529 plan—but I didn’t realize he’d fathered them.
I covered Senator Bob Graham of Florida as a newspaper reporter in Washington in the 1990s,

I BOUGHT AN EXPENSIVE new water heater last year for my house in Maine. The old heater had a ring of rust at the bottom, and I was spurred to act by an $800 rebate offered by the state of Maine, which was contingent on buying a heat pump water heater. The new water heater draws its heat from the surrounding air, and is two-to-three times more efficient than my earlier model.
I filled out a rebate form at the appliance store counter.

I WAS HAVING DINNER in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a new friend, Joseph. He told me of his frustration with his financial advisor. The two might meet for an hour, but afterward Joseph still didn’t know what to do.
“Explain it to me like I’m five,” he said to me. So I did.
Joseph has a PhD from an Ivy League university, so he doesn’t need a kindergarten story. Yet I understand his frustration.

IN THE CENTER OF the Maine village where I spend my summer, a few residents live in a makeshift encampment. It consists of four popup trailers—the kind towed by cars—plus some cars, dilapidated lobster boats and a couple of pup tents, one containing children’s toys.
The residents live without running water, so they bring it to the site in gallon jugs. Their laundry hangs on clotheslines strung between trees and a lobster boat. The site looks forlorn and temporary,

WHEN I WAS YOUNG and unschooled about money, I borrowed thousands of dollars to attend Northwestern University. As I recall, tuition was around $12,000 a year in 1980, and I had only $3,000 to my name. How could I pay?
The dean sent me a letter explaining that the college would lend me the money for my master’s degree in journalism. It would also extend me a work-study job, which would help pay for my spartan off-campus room.

LESS THAN HALF of Americans—46%—have tried to calculate how much they need to save to live comfortably in retirement, according to a 2022 survey by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. I often meet extremely bright people—doctors, residents, PhD students and professors—who say with a sheepish smile that they don’t understand the intricacies of their retirement plans.
For some, this lack of understanding is a choice. People who sense they haven’t saved enough, or any money at all,

AROUND THE TURN of the year, investment experts issue their forecasts for the next 12 months. Bloomberg says it has gathered more than 500 market predictions for 2023, with many forecasting a rough year for the financial markets.
I’ve done my research as well, and I’m now prepared to offer my forecast: There’s an 80% chance that the S&P 500 will return between -10% and 30% in 2023.
I can’t claim this as original work.

JUST IN TIME FOR Christmas, a sweeping new retirement law has passed both houses of Congress, and should be signed into law this weekend. Dubbed the SECURE Act 2.0, it makes dozens of significant changes to the employer-based savings systems that millions of workers depend on for retirement.
Under the new law, some workers will be able to save far larger catch-up contributions during the home stretch of their working years. Meanwhile, retirees can delay taking required minimum distributions until age 73 starting in 2023.

WHEN JANET YELLEN was nominated to be secretary of the treasury, the Senate Finance Committee staff went over her tax returns with a magnifying glass. Yellen, an economics PhD who taught at Harvard, always prepared the returns for herself and her husband, economics Nobel laureate George A. Akerlof.
“She discovered to her surprise that she had been doing the family taxes wrong for years,” reports Owen Ullmann in his excellent new biography of Yellen,

YOU KNOW IT’S BEEN a rotten year for investors when it’s time to brush up on the rules for tax-loss harvesting. It’s one way to turn negative returns to your advantage, provided you act before year-end.
If you have taxable investments that have lost value this year—and who doesn’t? —the basic idea is to sell them in 2022 to lower the taxes you owe. Realized losses can be used to offset any investment gains you’ve realized this year.

I LOOKED UP OUR investment account balance recently. It’s something I’d avoided doing for months. My wife, the voice of reason, said we might bounce a check if we didn’t know how much was in the money market fund. Confession: I don’t balance our checkbook manually.
I waited to log on until after the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 14% in October, its best month since 1976. I don’t know why the bear lost its grip on the Dow last month,

BONDS ARE ON PACE to have their worst year on record. To be sure, once interest rates stop rising—perhaps early next year—they may win back their place as a worthwhile investment for retired investors. But right now, that feels like wishful thinking.
As the Federal Reserve has hastily raised short-term interest rates in big steps to fight inflation, bond prices have fallen down the cellar stairs. Bloomberg’s broad U.S. aggregate bond index is down 16% in 2022.

ONLY CASH IS SHOWING a positive return this year, while most parts of the stock and bond market have suffered double-digit losses. And with inflation spiking, even cash investments have been a losing proposition in 2022. With nowhere to hide, perhaps it’s time to renounce active management and consider the three-fund portfolio.
Long championed on the Bogleheads forum, the three-fund portfolio is an indexing approach that drives down costs, feasts on diversification and ends investment selection errors by sticking with just three funds:

Total U.S.

A VANGUARD FINANCIAL planner once told me his clients’ biggest problem was that they didn’t want to withdraw money from their accounts during retirement. They lived beneath their means because they just couldn’t overcome their desire to continue seeing their assets grow.
If this describes you, too, you might be pleased to learn that required minimum distributions (RMDs) would be delayed a year or more if legislation, which currently sits before Congress, can slip through the crowded legislative calendar and pass before year-end.

WHEN I WAS A KID, I remember being puzzled by all the newspaper stories devoted to a recession. First, the articles said that one might be ahead. Then they said it had arrived. Immediately afterward, the stories shifted to, “Is the recession lifting?”
The same loop is starting in my newsfeed now, with daily stories asking if a recession is ahead. It’s a definite maybe, according to the experts, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

BEN FRANKLIN WROTE the most popular personal finance text of the 18th century. Originally published in 1758 as an essay in his Poor Richard’s Almanack, it became a perennial bestseller when printed separately under the title The Way to Wealth.
You can read the 1810 version printed in London at no charge, thanks to Project Gutenberg. I assign it to students in my behavioral economics class, and it sparks a discussion about whether thrift and hard work are still the routes to financial security.

STEVE MARTIN HAD a joke on “how to become a millionaire” during his 1970s stand-up routine. “First,” he would say with a mock-serious glare at the audience, “get a million dollars.”
There are piles of books written about how to invest your money. Far fewer explain how to make money in the first place. To balance the scales, I’ll offer this suggestion: If you’re still working, this would be a great time to interview for a new job.

WHEN I WORKED FOR a personal finance magazine in the mid-1990s, I wrote a story about conmen who met their marks in internet chat rooms devoted to stock investing. One of the slickest tricksters went by the name of Josef von Habsburg. He told people he was descended from Austrian royalty.
In researching the story, I called the police in von Habsburg’s hometown of Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The local police knew him as Josef Meyers and said he was about as royal as you or me.

WE BUY LOBSTERS from the backdoor of a fisherman who we know here in Maine. On Tuesday, my wife texted him to say she’d left $35 in cash for the four lobsters he’d set aside for us in a cooler. He texted back to say $25 was more than enough.
In a year of spiking inflation, I have a morsel of good news. The wholesale price of lobster has crashed since March, down 45% according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St.

I RECENTLY LEFT A BID for a set of old, dusty chairs at a country auction. The next morning when I called the auctioneer, he told me I was the high bidder and the chairs’ new owner. As an economist, I immediately thought, “Wait—am I the winner or the loser here?”
The auction was held at the Elks Lodge in Rockland, Maine, where old furniture tends to go for a song. I had been drawn there by a picture of six Chippendale dining chairs supposedly made in Philadelphia in the 18th century.

WHEN OUR KIDS applied to colleges, the smallest detail of each campus visit mattered a lot. If our daughter admired the student leading our tour, the school skyrocketed in her estimation. If the class our son attended to “get a feel for the place” turned out to be a test period, Grandpa’s alma mater was forever struck from consideration.
In economic terms, the college decision features asymmetric information. Colleges know a lot about us from our detailed personal and financial applications.

BORROWING FROM MY 401(k) helped my wife and me buy our home in 1997. I’m grateful I was able to reach inside my retirement plan for the money we needed for the house down payment.
Experts often warn against 401(k) loans because, even if the loan is repaid, the money borrowed can miss out on investment gains. That’s certainly a risk. Still, there’s a second way of taking money out of a 401(k)—and it’s far more harmful to retirement savings.

WHEN WE MOVED to Pennsylvania in 1996, I wanted to buy an old house. After months of looking, we found a stone farmhouse close to my new job and in a good school district. There was just one problem: We didn’t know if we could afford it.
We hadn’t been able to sell our home in Maryland, so we didn’t have any home equity to bring to the table. When our real estate agent saw the asking price,

WE PUT OUR TWO KIDS through college using 529 plans—and I estimate the accounts easily added 10% to the value of our college savings, compared to what we would have accumulated if we’d invested through a regular taxable account. Yet only 37% of families use 529s to help pay for college, according to a 2021 survey by Sallie Mae.
Like an IRA, a 529 plan gives you a tax break for saving for a specific goal—but,

I JUST REACHED my full Social Security retirement age of 66 and four months. Funny, I don’t feel a bit older. Still, I am now entitled to 100% of the benefit that I’ve earned since I started working.
Conventional wisdom says to delay filing. Each month that I wait will add 2/3rds of 1% to my eventual benefit. That adds up to a risk-free 8% a year. If I were to wait until I turn 70,

I CAN’T CALL THE BOOKS I buy “beach reads” because, honestly, they can get dense. Still, if—like me—you enjoy learning about investing, economics or even the religious overtones of capitalism, here are five books that might make for insightful summer reading or, perhaps, induce napping in the hammock.
The Physics of Wall Street by James Owen Weatherall. This book begins with the assertion that “Warren Buffett isn’t the best money manager in the world” and then spends the next 224 pages introducing us to genius PhDs who’ve whipped the S&P 500 by anticipating the prices of securities.

AS MY OLD NEWSPAPER company slid toward bankruptcy, it signed over the deeds to its newspaper buildings to the pension plan in an effort to meet its obligations. It was like burning the furniture to keep the house warm—and it worked about as well as you might expect.
When the company finally filed for bankruptcy in 2020, it laid the blame on its unfunded pension obligations. The pension fund was short by $1 billion,

PEOPLE TEND TO attribute their investment gains to skill and their losses to bad luck. To these two categories, I’d like to suggest a third: making a fortune—thanks to good luck. Let me give you an example.
I’m a member of the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. It’s a downtown club where reporters went for a drink and a bite to eat after they filed their stories. As you might expect, business was rocky during the pandemic.

FOR THE FIRST TIME, retail investors have more money in index funds than actively managed funds. This is based on March 31 figures compiled by Morningstar and reported by columnist Allan Sloan.
Twenty-five years ago, Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle published his remembrance of the 1970s launch of the first index fund geared to main street investors. As I page through the book again, I’m reminded of how close indexing came to failing.
Bogle recounts going on a 12-city roadshow,

WHEN I ASKED MY college class this spring how many had been taught personal finance before, just a single hand went up. That’s why I teach Franco Modigliani’s lifecycle hypothesis of savings to my behavioral economics class.
A brilliant student born to a Jewish family in Rome, Modigliani was awarded first prize in a national economics contest by Mussolini himself. Warned to flee Italy while he still could, Modigliani soon after booked a zig-zagging trip through Switzerland and France before landing in New York in 1939.

WHEN I GOT MY FIRST job in 1976, my employer didn’t offer a 401(k) for one simple reason—the plans didn’t exist. By 1985, a new employer did offer one, so I signed on.
Where had the 401(k) come from? Well, I met the man who put the K into the tax code, and he was beyond humble about it. In fact, he’d forgotten all about it.
Barber Conable Jr. graduated at age 19 from Cornell University to join the Marines Corps in World War II.

EVERY YEAR, I READ somewhere that it’s going to be a stock picker’s market. These stories suggest I need an active manager to nimbly skip down Wall Street, picking the daisies and avoiding the weeds.
Then the annual results roll in. That unmoving and unmanaged S&P 500 Index fund has somehow, unaccountably, beaten those deft active managers at their game.
The S&P 500’s return of 28.7% in 2021 beat 85% of actively managed large-cap U.S.

I RECEIVED A GREAT education at Northwestern University in the 1980s. But the school’s commitment to excellence seems to have fallen short when it comes to the 403(b) retirement savings plan for teachers and staff.
Northwestern’s plan offers a generous 5% match and more than 400 investment choices, according to court filings. The lengthy list contained some clunkers, though, such as retail-class mutual funds when the plan could have offered lower-cost institutional shares instead.

I ONCE JOINED a book club led by an amazingly smart guy. We were reading a challenging book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the philosopher, investor and probabilities expert. Our discussion leader was a Chartered Financial Analyst who had solved one of the most enduring riddles at Vanguard Group, where I worked at the time.
For many years—decades, really—Vanguard hadn’t offered an international bond fund. Our founder, Jack Bogle, wasn’t a fan of international investing in general.

I DID ACHIEVE financial independence and retire early—if you count age 64 as early. My friend Jose, a true believer in FIRE, or financial independence-retire early, celebrated his retirement at 44. That took a steely nerve that I lacked, plus I had big college bills to pay before retiring.
One big challenge of FIRE, of course, is that your savings might need to last 40 or even 50 years. Vanguard Group recently published a research paper to help FIRE followers go the distance.

OVER CHRISTMAS, I got the sort of question I love to answer. My daughter’s thoughtful boyfriend had set aside some money for his niece’s college education. What was the best way to invest it?
I said that we’d paid for much of our children’s education with money invested in 529 college savings plans. The investment gains went untaxed because we’d spent the money on tuition, room and board. On top of that, our 529 contributions were deductible against our state-income tax in Pennsylvania,

THE FOUNDERS OF economics were prodigious thinkers. They tended to believe that others shared their brainpower and so would do as they did—wrinkle their brow, think deeply and make the best choices with their scarce resources.
Problem is, this isn’t how most of us operate. Instead, we take mental shortcuts. This is understandable: We’d never rise from the breakfast table to begin our day if we rigorously analyzed the health effects of eggs, orange juice and coffee.

LET’S NOT CALL THEM resolutions because that imposes a sense of obligation. Rather, think of these as adjustments that could give you—and maybe your kids—a smoother ride in 2022:

Check the beneficiaries on your employer’s retirement plan, IRAs and life insurance policies. Sometimes money winds up with an ex-spouse or maybe a younger child gets left off the list. This is an easy fix—while you’re alive. After that, it’s a mess.
How much do you pay for your investments—in dollars,

I WAS WRITING magazine stories back in 1996, recommending stocks and mutual funds. Privately, I worried that readers might think I had some genuine insight—and they might even invest in the ways I suggested.
Propelled by that fear, I favored safe stories, like the best electric utility stocks or the outlook for U.S. savings bonds. I ransacked the library, looking for sure-fire, can’t miss investments. Surprisingly, I found one—something called an index fund.
Twenty-five years ago,

IF YOU’RE LIKE ME, you almost dread looking at the morning newsfeed. This is why I’m happy to share some good news: The U.S. poverty rate has been cut nearly in half. What’s more, it was accomplished while the economy was practically flat on its back, with tens of millions out of work.
When I was a Washington, D.C., reporter in the mid-1990s, I reported from some of the poorest neighborhoods in Baltimore, Camden and Washington.

NEW RESEARCH suggests that target-date retirement funds—which currently receive a majority of contributions to 401(k) plans—are missing the mark.
Target funds’ returns, in aggregate, lagged those of replica portfolios built with exchange-traded funds (ETFs) by one percentage point a year, according to University of Arizona finance professor David C. Brown, one of the study’s authors.
The majority of the underperformance was due to higher fees, Brown said. Target-date funds are funds-of-funds. Most fund families charge investors layers of management fees—both on the target-date fund itself and on the underlying funds.

GREEN INVESTORS TRY to manage their portfolios in ways that are good for the Earth. But are they rewarded with good investment returns? Researchers believe the answer is a qualified “yes,” according to a new paper titled “Dissecting Green Returns.”
The paper found that, between 2012 and 2020, U.S. green stocks delivered higher returns than environmentally unfriendly “brown” companies. But the paper argues this outperformance—which averaged about 0.65% a month—is unlikely to persist.
“Past performance is not a guarantee of future performance,

I’D ALWAYS THOUGHT that saints were long-ago martyrs, those people shown in paintings in the Louvre or the Prado.
That’s why I was surprised to find a plaque honoring a 20th century saint at the church I attend in Newcastle, Maine. The saint, Frances Perkins, had worshipped at that very church, St. Andrew’s Episcopal, until her death in 1965.
Who was Frances Perkins? My friends often draw a blank at the name, although she helped shape our lives.

IF YOU WANT PEOPLE to do something, make it easy. That’s the big idea behind a nudge, which helps people do the right thing for themselves. It turns out that nudge has an evil twin, called sludge. Sludge makes the right thing harder to do. If you look around, sludge is everywhere.
“If you cannot get financial aid without filling out a twenty-page form, then you have been subjected to sludge,” behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein write in the new “final” edition of their bestselling book Nudge.

THE NEWSPAPERS ARE full of reports that a new tax on billionaires may be uncorked. The Washington Post even ran an article estimating what the 10 richest Americans would pay over the next five years should it pass.
I take no stand on the politics of the proposal. But I have seen enough trial balloons to be skeptical that Elon Musk will soon write a 10-digit check to the U.S. Treasury. As Chuck Collins has written in The Wealth Hoarders,

I’M A FAN OF SUSPENSE novels. But the latest mystery keeping me awake at night isn’t a work of fiction.
On Monday, Oct. 4, Vanguard Group announced it was cancelling a long-promised benefit, a health insurance subsidy for its retirees, which includes me. The very next day, the investment management company abruptly reversed course. The benefit was extended through 2022. Vanguard said it would “take a step back and recalibrate” its decision.
What prompted the reversal?

VANGUARD GROUP is renowned for its rock-bottom investment costs, including announcing last week that it was lowering expenses on its target-date retirement funds. As a former Vanguard employee, I just learned how the company is, in part, paying for such cuts. Yesterday, Vanguard emailed retired “crew members” like me to say it was shutting down its retiree medical account program.
When my old newspaper company’s pension plan collapsed last year—it was underfunded by $1 billion—my payments were picked up by the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

IF YOU’VE EVER wanted to own antique furniture, now is the time to buy. The cost of “brown furniture” has plummeted. That old-money mahogany is deeply out of fashion with today’s tastemakers, who prefer mid-century modern set out in spare, white rooms.

I won’t claim that 18th century goods are better aesthetically. That’s my personal preference, and probably an East Coast sensibility. Rather, I’d say that old furniture is better value. The fact that a table or desk has survived for two centuries is a testament to its durability—and it may cost less now than flat-pack furniture made of particle board.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT you pay for your 401(k)? Over time, even seemingly small charges can take a big bite out of your retirement savings.
That’s why a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report is so surprising. Fully 41% of people surveyed think their 401(k) is free. And I’ve got a unicorn tethered in my backyard. Not only are they incorrect, but also it suggests that those required fee disclosure documents from plan providers are written in ways investors just don’t understand.

FROM THE TIME I started covering Washington as a reporter in 1980, politicians have been condemning the federal budget deficit. Ronald Reagan was running for president that year. He excoriated his opponent, President Jimmy Carter, for increasing the federal debt by—brace yourself—$55 billion in 1979. These days, that wouldn’t pay a week’s bar tab for Uncle Sam.
With the sole exception of Bill Clinton, every president for 40 years has added to the federal debt,

THE GOVERNMENT will be able to pay full Social Security benefits only until 2033, according to the latest trustees’ report on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. After that, Social Security’s trust fund will be depleted—and it could only cover 76% of scheduled benefits with the money it collects in payroll taxes.
The timetable is even worse for Medicare Part A, which pays for inpatient hospital care. Its trust fund will be empty in 2026.

OUR NEPHEW JESSE, age 19, took a gap year after high school to explore meditation and work for UPS. He’s a great kid. But he had worn out his welcome with family friends in Florida, so he decided to sleep in his car.
That was in May—and that’s when we invited him to live with us in Pennsylvania.
Jesse hasn’t had an easy life. His mother died of cancer when he was four years old.

WE OWN AN OLD WHITE farmhouse in Mid-Coast Maine. When I have work done, I tell contractors to make it look exactly the same, as if the house were sealed in a snow globe.
Up here, the rural past seems close at hand. The artist Andrew Wyeth painted one peninsula over. His depiction of the Olson farm perfectly captured the rustic ideal. Christina Olson and her brother Alvaro sold vegetables out of their kitchen door.

MY 28-YEAR-OLD wanted to know how much to contribute to her retirement plan at work. As a father, this was a text that I loved to get.
In May 2020, we toasted Genevieve over Zoom when she graduated with a master’s degree in social work. Within a week, she’d landed a job helping children in foster care and their families. Now, nearly a year later, she was invited to join the retirement savings plan at work,

ONE FUN FACT I TELL my students about Daniel Kahneman: He won the Nobel Prize for economics without ever taking an economics course in college. Kahneman is a psychologist whose discoveries laid the foundation for the new science of behavioral economics.
One of his most important findings is that loss feels twice as painful to us as gain feels good, so the emotional scales aren’t balanced when we make economic decisions. For instance, workers will wait years to join a 401(k) because contributions can feel like a loss in spending power.

YOU CAN ADD ANOTHER item to the list of things in short supply: Up here in Maine, used boats are hard to find.
“You can’t buy a house, a car or a boat this summer,” said Sean, manager of the local lobster dock in Bremen, Maine. Luckily, you can still buy lobsters from Sean, though they’re mighty pricey.
Every afternoon, scuffed-up boats with names like Chomper and Sandollar glide up to the dock to winch their catch up to Sean’s lobster tanks.

A 156-YEAR-OLD newspaper company filed for reorganization in bankruptcy court last year. The company said it just couldn’t come up with the millions it owed to its pension plan. Some 24,000 current and future retirees were promised payments from that plan—and I’m one of them.
This is the story of what happened to our benefits after the pension plan failed.
For 10 years, I was lucky enough to cover Washington, DC, as a newspaper reporter.