Morningstar posted an article by Allan Roth (an investment writer just in the past year) this morning.
He writes the delaying Social Security until 70 and buying a US Treasury TIPS ladder are risk free inflation adjusted alternatives to purchasing an annuity through an insurance company who’s payments generally are not..
https://www.morningstar.com/funds/hidden-risks-income-life-target-date-funds?utm_source=eloqua&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=MorningDigest&utm_content=None_75089&MorningDigestUS&utm_id=39201
Enjoy

“Family. Readers. Words.”
At Jonathan’s memorial service, one of the songs he selected was the Bee Gees’ Words. At the time, I simply thought it was a beautiful melody, a favorite of ours from the Bangladesh days. Only later did I realize how perfectly it captured his life.
A few months before his death, Jonathan wrote the final chapter of his book Money and Me. Knowing his time was limited, he reflected on how he hoped to be remembered.

If you’re inclined to create a spreadsheet — and I know that some of you are and some of you aren’t — you can put that spreadsheet directly into an AI program and ask it to analyze what you own. What happens next might surprise you.
Setting Up Your Spreadsheet
Your spreadsheet doesn’t need to be complicated. At minimum, include these columns:

Ticker — the symbol for each holding
Shares — how many you own
Cost per share — your purchase price,

Jonathan’s thought of the day is, If the stock market’s performance over the next five years was miserable, would you be? I thought it might be fun to kick this one around a bit. 
Though I am positioned just fine to survive five or even ten years of misery from the market, I still wouldn’t like it. I guess I’m just too used to seeing things go up. So while the nuts and bolts of our life would be fine,

A week ago I posted “The Quiet Failure of Good Advice.” More than two dozen of you replied with experience, candor, and care. Thank you, sincerely. I’ve been thinking about what you wrote, and I wanted to come back and share what I took from it.
A few patterns kept surfacing.
The first is structural. Several of you named the same diagnosis: financial planning as a profession is calibrated to serve the wealthy. Mike Lynch, a retired CFP and longtime industry educator,

A few weeks ago my 27-year-old daughter mentioned she’d been hearing a lot about memecoins. That conversation sparked this text, which I wrote for her first and then revised for HD. I hesitated over the slight political connotation, but on reflection the underlying lesson feels too useful not to share.
Do you remember inauguration week? January 2025 didn’t just mark a political transition, it also launched a brand new cryptocurrency: the $MELANIA memecoin. It arrived with fanfare,

To try to keep up with the 21st century, I recently started to use ChatGPT.
I have an excellent financial advisor, who is a Certified Financial Planner, and for over 40 years, I have also made a lot of investment decisions on a “do-it-yourself” basis. I have read the Humble Dollar for years as well.
An early request to ChatGPT was to develop a training plan for me to help me revive a long-neglected hobby. I was very pleased with the analysis and the specific suggestions that ChatGPT provided to me.

Our children know we are not your typical retirees when it comes to finances. I’m sure they figured that out from our funding eleven 529 plans, gifts and more often than not, picking up the check when families go out to eat, but that’s all they know. 
They have no idea of our income, no knowledge of our investments-what kind, or how much. They, of course, know we own two homes, but not our net worth. 

I don’t use Instagram. I drive a 21 year old car. Many of my clothes are from the charity shop. I really do spend most of life completely oblivious as to how I compare to others.
But my guilty pleasures are the “See the average net worth for Australians….” articles. It’s reassuring to think that you’re going better than average. That the hard work and moderate spending have actually led you to a healthy financial position.

I WAS RECENTLY asked about strategies that high earners can use to reduce their tax bill.
Most people know the usual options. They contribute to a 401(k), fund a health savings account or make a Roth IRA contribution through the backdoor method. Business owners may have additional opportunities through retirement plans and business structures.
But there’s another strategy worth knowing about: the Mega Backdoor Roth (MBDR).
The MBDR allows some workers to put far more money into Roth accounts than the usual contribution limits permit.

A WHILE BACK, I was speaking with a fellow who had recently retired. He shared this observation, only half-jokingly: “Working was easy,” he said. What he meant was that financial management during our working years is more straightforward than it is in retirement. We earn and save and hope that our savings grow. But when we get to retirement, it becomes more complicated to know exactly how to manage those savings.
In the 1950s,

In April 2025, I watched the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral for the umpteenth time. I found tears rolling down my cheeks as one of the characters read the poem “Funeral Blues,” written by W.H. Auden, at the memorial service for his partner. What sparked the tears? The poem tells of the emotional devastation of losing a loved one. But for me, it highlighted my distress at knowing that all that brings me happiness—Elaine,

Judging by all the buzz on social media—and the emails from the youngsters in my family—the SpaceX IPO appears to be the first investment in history with no downside.
The case seems straightforward:

Near-monopoly space launch provider.
Starlink.
Defense contracts in a tense world where every military is arming itself to the hilt.
AI somehow.
Mars.

Like flag pins and patriotic hats, accepting SpaceX’s invitation to participate in the IPO appears to be an American civic duty.

Over the years, Suzie and I have approached clothing from fundamentally different financial philosophies. The clearest indicator lives in our walk-in dressing room: 36 feet of hanging rails for her, approximately four feet for me. We also share two 12-drawer dressers. Four of those drawers are mine. I’m told this is generous.
Then there is one of three spare bedrooms, currently serving less as a guest room and more as a textile archive, complete with vacuum-packed clothing.

There are people who pass through our lives briefly, yet leave marks that time never erases. I briefly mentioned him in last week’s article, but his story deserves its own telling.
He was a teacher named Richard Hunter, though to nearly everyone at Bryanston School in Dorset, England, he was simply known as “Bunty.”
I arrived at boarding school at the age of ten. To some boys it may have been an adventure, but for others,