Mark Gardner

Comments

• Sorry to hear this and hope your daughter-in-law gets well soon. As a suggestion, directly pay the medical provider. The IRS provides an unlimited medical exclusion for gift taxes.

  Post: What would you do if you received this text from your child as I did this morning? 

  Link to comment from September 16, 2026

• Today, with traditional Strategic Asset Allocation (SAA), I might decide on 60% stocks, 30% bonds and 10% real estate, and periodically rebalance back to those allocations. I can break down stocks into US, international, emerging markets and so on. This is what we are used to. Total Portfolio Approach (TPA) turns the question around: the process is to ask what job each invested dollar needs to do. Maybe 60% of my money needs to provide growth, 30% needs to provide stability and 10% needs to protect against inflation. I then look for the best investments to do those jobs. Growth might come from U.S. stocks, international stocks or private equity. Maybe even debt with interest rates at 5%! Stability might come from bonds, cash, gold or managed futures. Inflation protection might come from TIPS, commodities or real estate. So SAA starts with "what asset classes should I own and in what percentages?" TPA starts with "what does my portfolio need to accomplish, and what investments can best accomplish it?" From what I read, the distinction is more important to large financial institutions like pension funds where departments are organized around SAA today.

  Post: Total portfolio approach?

  Link to comment from September 16, 2026

• I had no problems switching to ID.me.

  Post: What to do about the new ID.me login requirement at TreasuryDirect

  Link to comment from September 14, 2026

• For those of us lucky enough to have sufficient assets, isn’t Social Security longevity insurance? Taking it early because you may not live long enough to “get your money back,” or because your heirs can inherit your investments but not your Social Security, seems to miss that point? The value of delaying is the larger inflation-adjusted income if you happen to live a very long time. We don’t normally judge other insurance by whether we got our money back, do we?

  Post: Americans are rushing to collect Social Security. The reason is disturbing

  Link to comment from September 13, 2026

• I grew up in a 650-square-foot, two-bedroom condo, surrounded by a loving family, a beautiful garden and close neighbors. I’m not nostalgic for the small home—we were four people, often with visiting relatives, in a very tight space. What I am nostalgic for is the closeness. When I could afford it, I bought a 2,100-square-foot home and was quite happy to have the extra room. But I tried to carry forward the family life I grew up with. That, to me, is what’s worth remembering about those smaller homes—not their size, but the families that filled them. Decades later, we remain close across generations.

  Post: Growing Up In A Big House

  Link to comment from September 13, 2026

• I do wonder when Americans actually had a “secure” retirement. It’s largely a myth, propagated by politicians and those who profit from the complexity. In reality, the typical retiree is more like a wildebeest crossing the Serengeti. Good luck getting to the other side! There was probably a sweet spot in the 1980s and 90s for people with good pensions, Social Security and Medicare, but that was hardly everyone. What has clearly changed is who bears the risk. Today it’s basically: “Here’s your 401(k). Now save enough, invest it for 40 years, survive a few crashes, and figure out how long you’re going to live!”

  Post: A bleak picture for retirement in the future?

  Link to comment from September 2, 2026

• While “tax rate today equals tax rate at withdrawal” is certainly correct for an individual dollar, the eventual withdrawal rate depends partly on how large the traditional balance becomes. Larger RMDs can push dollars into higher brackets and across IRMAA thresholds. When I tried to optimize all of this, it got complicated very quickly. I eventually settled on a “good enough” approach: convert up to a chosen marginal-rate ceiling each year, provided I have funds outside the traditional account to pay the taxes. Another approach I toyed with was a simple “rule of thirds”: roughly a third of the risk portfolio each in brokerage, traditional and Roth/HSA. Roth conversions then become partly a rebalancing exercise rather than a tax-optimization problem. This assumes the brokerage account is primarily for legacy or paying conversion taxes, with heirs benefiting from the step-up in basis.

  Post: Traditional or Roth

  Link to comment from August 29, 2026

• The 2009 CARD act requires the CFPB to send this data to Congress every two years. With the gutting of expertise in this department, let's see if the 2027 report will still be useful. From the 2025 report, we can estimate nearly half (49%) of active general-purpose credit card accounts carried a revolving balance in 2024, meaning interest was being charged on balances carried from prior billing cycles. More strikingly, 13% of general-purpose accounts were in what the CFPB calls “persistent debt”—where interest and fees during the year exceeded half of all payments made on the account.

  Post: Americans and their credit cards

  Link to comment from August 25, 2026

• Our Treasury Department is paying its 30-year mortgage with its credit card via the bond buyback program. The NY Times has an Op-Ed where the author argues for Sumerian-style debt cancellation. Strange times indeed.

  Post: Americans and their credit cards

  Link to comment from August 25, 2026

• One way to appreciate the number: a million seconds is about 11 days, a billion seconds is 32 years, and 40 trillion seconds is about 1.2 million years! But $40 trillion by itself is probably the wrong way to frame the debt problem. The US is a very large and very wealthy country. GDP is about $32 trillion a year and household wealth is around $180 trillion. The more relevant number is debt held by the public, which is roughly 100% of GDP. I don’t think the goal needs to be paying off the debt. We need to stop it from growing faster than the economy. Our government currently spends about 23% of GDP and collects about 17-18%. Close that gap by 2-3% of GDP and, with economic growth, the debt becomes much more manageable. Of course finding that 2-3% is where it gets hard. It probably requires some combination of Social Security and Medicare changes, more taxes, spending cuts, and economic growth. We can do it if we get past our divisive politics.

  Post: Federal debt

  Link to comment from August 20, 2026