Richard Connor

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.

I HATE TO BE WRONG. I’ve written before about the technique I’ve developed for evaluating health insurance. My wife and I have used it over the years to decide which plan to select. I’ve shared it with friends and colleagues, and many have found it useful in gaining insight into their own health insurance options. I still think it’s a valid and valuable method.
But our recent experience, after switching health insurance mid-year, made me realize it was missing one important variable—the length of time you’ll be in the plan.

I STARTED MY CAREER with a little-known engineering company called SAI. It’s now called SAIC, short for Science Applications International Corp., a publicly traded and internationally renowned technology firm. But when I started in 1980, there were only a few thousand employees and several small, independently run offices scattered across the country.
SAI was started in 1969 by Dr. J. Robert Beyster, a nationally recognized expert in nuclear physics and national security. He started the company with the dual tenets of technical excellence and employee ownership.

SENIORS RECEIVING Social Security celebrated the recent announcement that their benefits will increase 5.9% this January. It’s the largest cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in 40 years, and it’s based on a measure of inflation called the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W).
As the name implies, CPI-W is a “monthly measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban wage earners and clerical workers for a market basket of consumer goods and services.” The index jumped 5.9% between the third quarters of 2020 and 2021.

WE ALL SUFFER, in ways large and small, from COVID-driven shortages. The global supply chain has been disrupted, affecting automobiles, furniture, building supplies and much more.
But the impact really hit home last month when my brother-in-law called and told me he couldn’t find his favorite bourbon. He lives in central North Carolina, where liquor sales are limited to state-owned stores. He had to go to three stores to find his backup brand, Maker’s Mark.

THE PREDOMINANT WAY financial planners get paid is by charging a fee based on the amount of money they’re managing. The typical industry fee I’ve seen is 1%, and it’s been that way for years. Under this model, a financial planner managing a client’s $1 million portfolio would charge $10,000 a year.
Charley Ellis’s recent article explained how this approach came into being. His article also demonstrated how a seemingly innocuous 1% fee can actually consume a large portion of a portfolio’s return.

I RECENTLY SPOKE with a colleague. I’d expected him to be retired by now. He told me that he’d planned to retire last spring, but his employer offered him a three-day-a-week part-time schedule with full benefits. He discussed it with his financial planner.
The planner told him that, if he retired, he had an 85% chance of meeting his retirement goals. By working part-time for two more years, his chances of meeting his goals went up to 95%.

I RECENTLY WOKE UP early to try and catch the peak of the Leonid meteor shower. Because the celestial event coincided with a full moon, the best time to view the meteors was at 5 a.m., just after moonset.
The estimates I read indicated that there were typically 11 to 17 meteors per hour during the peak. But there was no guarantee.
At 5 a.m., I got up and went to the front porch,

ONE OF MY FAVORITE tenets espoused on HumbleDollar is the emphasis on using our hard-earned money to buy experiences rather than possessions. As you get older, you feel like you have enough things. Indeed, my wife and I spent much of the past year getting rid of excess stuff when we downsized.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has put on hold some of the experiences we look forward to. Prior to 2020, in 24 of the previous 25 years,

OPEN ENROLLMENT begins in early November for many employees. This is a great time to see if you’re making the most of your workplace benefits, especially flexible spending accounts, or FSAs.
FSAs allow you to deduct pretax dollars from your paycheck for medical, adoption, commuting and dependent-care expenses. There are some new rules for the accounts this year in response to the pandemic.
First, the basics: During open enrollment, you tell your employer how many dollars you want deducted for these accounts over the next year.