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John Yeigh

John Yeigh

John is an author, speaker, coach, youth sports advocate and businessman with more than 30 years of publishing experience in the sports, finance and scientific fields. His book "Win the Youth Sports Game" was published in 2021. John retired in 2017 from the oil industry, where he negotiated financial details for multi-billion-dollar international projects.

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Hole Truth

John Yeigh  |  Feb 25, 2025

SOON AFTER GRADUATING college and starting work, I visited a dentist I found in the Yellow Pages for a long overdue teeth cleaning and exam. Although I had never had a cavity, the dentist informed me that I had multiple cavities that urgently needed to be filled. Naïve me allowed this dentist to fill the two supposed cavities of most concern.
Somewhat traumatized, I avoided dentists for a time. Finally, I queried several older coworkers,

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Trouble Ahead

John Yeigh  |  Feb 6, 2025

TED BENNA IS OFTEN called the “father of the 401(k).” In 1980, he implemented the first 401(k) plan based on his somewhat bold interpretation of the Revenue Act of 1978. He certainly couldn’t have envisioned the $11.4 trillion in “defined contribution” 401(k) and 403(b) accounts that we have today.
Individual retirement accounts also took off in the early 1980s, and traditional IRAs now hold an additional $11.3 trillion. Combined, that’s an impressive $23 trillion in tax-deferred retirement assets.

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Getting Going

John Yeigh  |  Jan 30, 2025

WITH THE ADVANTAGE of advanced age and flawless hindsight, I now believe the three most important contributors to retirement prosperity are a robust savings rate, an aggressive allocation to stocks and funding tax-free accounts, both Roth and health savings accounts (HSAs).
What about other financial factors, such as the investments we pick, whether we buy income annuities, when we claim Social Security and what Medicare choices we make? These matter on the margin, but I don’t think they’re as crucial to a successful retirement. 

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Getting Roasted

John Yeigh  |  Nov 27, 2024

“YOU WILL ROTH!”
“But Dad, I’m only 10.”
“Evan, it is never too early to start saving. Besides, this gives you 70-plus years of compounding.”
“Yes, Dad, but didn’t you tell me last week that I need a job and earned income to contribute to a Roth?”
“We can arrange to get you a paycheck. I’ll get a friend or neighbor to hire you. What would you like to do?”
“I like to play soccer.”
“Evan,

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Driven by Taxes

John Yeigh  |  Jul 17, 2024

EXPERTS OFTEN ARGUE that tax-avoidance strategies shouldn’t drive our financial plans, especially as Congress is forever fiddling with the tax rules. And yet many of us end up making decisions based on federal tax policy, which is loaded with incentives designed to change behavior and advance social goals.
That’s certainly true for my wife and me. Despite the tax code’s many provisions—and its 75,000 pages of complexity—four big-picture tax considerations have largely shaped how our financial lives have turned out,

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Youth May Triumph

John Yeigh  |  May 17, 2024

LET ME PLAY THE contrarian. A dominant narrative today is that—compared to earlier generations—younger workers are both economically disadvantaged and less inclined to do anything about it.
Such notions have been bandied about for at least 2,000 years. Horace wrote that “the beardless youth… does not foresee what is useful, squandering his money.” For a more modern take, check out these comments from HumbleDollar contributors and readers lamenting the financial plight of today’s younger generation:

Company “loyalty to employees in large measure no longer exists.”
“Young people are forced to contend with the twin challenges of relatively low salaries and high student loan burdens.”
Baby boomers are “fortunate in a way that’s nearly impossible for Americans today.”
“Many workers are strapped today,

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The Retiree’s Dilemma

John Yeigh  |  Apr 22, 2024

I’VE FOUND RETIREMENT to be a conundrum. We finally have the time to pursue any activity we want in a leisurely manner—spend time with family and friends, exercise, sleep, travel, read, binge watch TV, knock items off our bucket list. On the other hand, I now hear the constant ticking of life’s clock.
Tick tock, tick tock.
For the decades before retiring, life for my wife and me was pedal-to-the-metal with work, children, commuting and chores,

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Give Early and Often

John Yeigh  |  Feb 22, 2024

KEY PROVISIONS IN 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) will expire in 2026 unless Congress steps in. That means folks have a two-year window to prepare.
What’s at stake? Income-tax rates will increase for many taxpayers. This creates an incentive to boost income over the next few years by, say, undertaking Roth conversions to shrink traditional retirement accounts and thereby lowering future required minimum distributions.
The sunsetting of key TCJA provisions would also cut the threshold for federal estate taxes in half,

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Dance With Destiny

John Yeigh  |  Feb 16, 2024

TODAY IS THE 50th anniversary of the most important day of my life. On Feb. 16, 1974, I met my wife. Choosing a life partner is arguably the most crucial decision we make. No other choice likely matters as much, including education, career, finances, where we live or even having children.
We’ve all heard the statistic that half of marriages end in divorce. In addition, marriage rates are declining, marriages are happening at later ages,

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Our Estate Plan B

John Yeigh  |  Jan 22, 2024

WHEN WE UPDATED our wills last year, my wife and I attempted to cover every imaginable scenario, including the future state of our children’s marriages, grandchildren, step-grandchildren and the like. Still, we and our lawyer missed one outlier scenario: What if our whole family was wiped out simultaneously? Think airplane or car crash.
This risk crossed my mind when our small family took a flight together for a recent vacation. Our core family is just six people: us and our two children,

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Live to 100

John Yeigh  |  Sep 26, 2023

MY WIFE AND I JUST finished watching the Netflix documentary Live to 100, which I highly recommend. The four-part series focuses on Dan Buettner’s study of pockets of people around the world who achieve amazing longevity, including many residents who live to age 100 and beyond.
The seven longevity locations include Okinawa, Japan; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; Nicoya, Costa Rica; and Loma Linda, California. These locations of long-lived people have been labeled “blue zones” based on the seminal demographic work on Sardinia by Giovanni Mario Pes,

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How We Unretired

John Yeigh  |  Jun 22, 2023

ONE RECENT TREND among newly minted retirees: unretirement. According to an AARP study, some 3% of retirees are back in the workforce one year later, taking on either fulltime or part-time jobs. Often, unretiring wasn’t part of the retiree’s original plan—but we shouldn’t assume it’s necessarily about needing money.
Starbucks’s Howard Schultz, quarterback Tom Brady and Disney’s Bob Iger are poster children for unretiring. Even our HumbleDollar world includes many examples of those who have reinvented,

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Slicing the Apple

John Yeigh  |  Jun 11, 2023

THE DOUBLE-DIGIT recovery by the S&P 500-stock index this year has been driven almost entirely by seven mega-cap stocks: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Tesla and Nvidia. In fact, these seven stocks now comprise more than 25% of the index.
Since our family is heavily invested in a mix of the S&P 500, U.S. technology and growth funds, plus some individual tech stocks, I began to worry about our portfolio’s investment concentration. I tallied our positions in these seven stocks across all our accounts.

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Searching for Answers

John Yeigh  |  May 16, 2023

MY DAYS WRITING for HumbleDollar may be numbered. I recently started playing with Google’s Bard, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s version of the ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) platform, and was curious to see how they might perform in providing basic financial guidance. Their answers were generally sensible and aligned with HumbleDollar’s approach—though also occasionally flawed.
You might think that AI can’t possibly replace articles penned by contributors, since the charm of HumbleDollar is the contributors’ personal stories.

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That 28,000,000% Tax

John Yeigh  |  Apr 17, 2023

IF YOU’RE IN YOUR 60s or older and making sizable Roth conversions, it isn’t just income taxes that you need to worry about. You may also trigger much higher Medicare Part B and Part D premiums.
We’re talking here about those Medicare surcharges known as IRMAA, short for income-related monthly adjustment amount. These surcharges are over and above 2023’s standard $1,979 per person Medicare premium, and they’re based on income from two years earlier.

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