Rick is a semi-retired aerospace engineer with a keen interest in finance. He retired from Lockheed Martin Space Systems after a 38-year career designing satellites. Rick is a lifelong Philadelphian with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Villanova University. He completed the Certified Financial Planner® and Retirement Income Certified Professional® programs at the American College of Financial Services. Rick and his wife Vicky have two sons and three grandsons. They recently retired to the Jersey Shore. Rick is an amateur winemaker and enjoys a wide variety of other interests, including chasing grandkids, sports, travel and reading. He's written more than 100 articles and blog posts for HumbleDollar.
IT’S OFTEN SAID THAT beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The same could be said of fairness in taxation.
A recent article by Kelly Phillips Erb addresses this contentious topic. Erb, who tweets as @TaxGirl, is the team lead for insights and commentary at Bloomberg Tax and Accounting. Her article was titled, “Did you pay your ‘fair share’ of federal income tax this year?”
The piece discusses the history and current state of U.S.
MY BROTHER AND I recently reminisced about the investment club we helped found in the late 1980s. The club’s benefits were threefold: financial education, the pooling of money and camaraderie.
Our club was composed of family and friends. We met monthly. When we started, investing was largely a manual process. There were few discount brokers and even they charged relatively high fees. You bought and sold with a phone call, and mailed checks for payment.
IS IT JUST ME OR HAS dealing with health insurance companies become more confusing and frustrating? Trying to figure out who to speak to feels like that classic Abbott and Costello comedy routine, “Who’s on first?”
My wife retired last July. For the previous four years, we’d used her employer-provided medical benefits and now we needed to shop for coverage. Under my old employer’s pension plan, pension-eligible employees like me—who retired prior to beginning Medicare—were eligible to sign up for one of the company’s medical plans.
I HATE LOOKING at life through the lens of taxation. But at this time of year, it’s hard to avoid.
I’ve been doing my own taxes for more than four decades. But this year represents a new milestone in my tax return preparation career. We moved from Pennsylvania to New Jersey at the end of March 2021, so I’ve had to prepare 2021 tax returns for both states. Although I’d researched New Jersey’s tax code and made an estimate of what the differences would cost,
I RECENTLY HAD a chance to go back in time. An alumnus from my high school is spending his retirement documenting the school’s football program. He’s done an amazing job. He created a YouTube channel populated with an extensive library of game films dating back to the 1950s.
I recently stumbled across the channel, and scrolled to my senior year, which was 1974-75. I played tight end on arguably the worst team in my high school’s long and storied history.
AS A YOUNG ENGINEER at General Electric, I took a three-day class on career development. That class strongly influenced my thinking about my career—and my life. The class made use of a great little book by David P. Campbell called If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, You’ll Probably Wind Up Somewhere Else.
The premise of the book is that life is a journey, not a destination. We should set some basic goals that help guide our journey,
LOTS OF RESEARCH has been done on the best way to generate retirement income. It’s one of the most popular topics on HumbleDollar. I think this popularity is driven by two things: its obvious importance—and the fact that there’s no one right answer.
By contrast, figuring out how much we need to save for retirement is relatively easy. It isn’t hard to pick a future retirement date, or at least a range of years during which we’ll likely retire,
WHAT IF WE MADE IT easier to delay Social Security, so more retirees ended up with a larger monthly check?
Last year, I wrote about a study from Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research (CRR) that detailed the value in claiming Social Security later. A new CRR paper examines the topic further.
The paper describes a survey of those nearing retirement. The goal: to gauge interest in using a 401(k) “bridge” to generate income while folks delayed claiming Social Security.
THE SOCIAL SECURITY claiming decision is one of the most complex—and contentious—choices that retirees have to make.
I was reminded of that in December, while at a Christmas party. Two former colleagues were discussing their Social Security decision. Both are male, single, childless, retired engineers. Each has a traditional pension, a paid-off home and significant retirement savings. Ted is age 77. Fred is 66.
Ted took his Social Security at 62. His reason was longevity or,
MY WIFE AND I recently re-watched a video made by one of our nephews. In the video, he interviewed his grandparents—my wife’s parents—about their lives. He wanted to understand what they’d done or taught that built such strong family bonds that lasted over such a long time.
My wife is one of five children: three boys and two girls. Each of her four siblings is married with at least two children—11 kids in total.
PREPARING FOR infirmity is one of the most important—and least popular—parts of financial planning. A neighbor’s recent stroke provides a stark example of this challenge. He’s in his mid-80s and has some underlying health problems.
Our neighbor lives in a second-story condominium, with external stairs as access. The stairs end at a narrow deck, with a right-hand turn into the home. An overhang blocks the screen door from opening fully.
When he had a stroke,
LIVING A HEALTHY lifestyle is one of the most important aspects of a happy retirement. It is, alas, also one of the most difficult goals for many of us to achieve. A 2005 Boston College Center for Retirement Research study concluded that health was the second most important factor in determining the happiness of retirees—and those with poor health “experience dramatically lower levels of well-being.”
I stopped working fulltime on March 31, 2017. My health,
MARKET STRATEGIST and economist Ed Yardeni says the current bull market is “the most hated and feared bull market that any of us have experienced, maybe in history.” This quote came from an interesting interview published in ThinkAdvisor, a magazine for financial professionals.
Worried about today’s lofty stock prices? You may find Yardeni’s views comforting. When asked about his market outlook, he commented on the strength of the current bull market, which started in 2009.
IF YOU’RE A NUMBERS geek who’s also interested in Social Security, the recently released OASDI Beneficiaries by State and County 2020 report is for you. Put out by the Social Security Administration (SSA), the report provides a wealth of interesting statistics.
Here are some basic numbers for context. As of December 2020, the U.S. population was 329,484,123. The population age 65 or older was 55,659,365, or 16.9% of the total. The SSA provides benefits to retirees,
I HAVE A SECRET to share. I’m a Fire God, and quite proud of it. My first engineering job was with General Electric’s Aerospace Division in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. I started in the thermal engineering group. The group was responsible for the design, fabrication, integration, testing and operation of spacecraft temperature control systems.
An important part of the design was managing the heat input from the sun. Since the group “controlled the sun,” someone gave the group the moniker “Fire Gods.” I knew none of this when I joined as a young graduate.
