Our eldest daughter just recently moved out to begin her adventures as a young adult. My wife and I are suddenly discovering how quiet a house can be, and how much free time seems comes with “empty nesting”.
Given my fidgety nature, I’ve started looking for all the little jobs that have escaped my attention for a while, but can now be attended to. One of the most mundane was replacing the screen protector on my cheap Android phone.

IT’S BEEN AN UNUSUAL week in the bond market, and not necessarily in a good way. This has many investors questioning the value of bonds, which is understandable. Bonds are supposed to be the “safe” side of a portfolio, but they’ve struggled in recent years.
Arguably, the drama we’re seeing in the bond market today began more than 50 years ago. To put today’s situation in perspective, I’ll briefly summarize that long history. Then we can look at what steps you might take to better protect your portfolio from here.

WHEN MY YOUNGER brother Jonathan died, I thought I knew who he was.
After all, we had shared a childhood in England, years together at boarding school, family adventures in Bangladesh, and more than six decades as brothers. I knew the journalist the world admired, the devoted husband and father, and the man whose words quietly helped millions of readers live richer lives, not simply financially, but personally as well.
I was wrong.
Over the past several months,

I’ve never cared much for bond funds. They never mature. Their NAV is at the mercy of Federal Reserve policy. 
I like how individual bonds mature and return my investment, but I don’t want the risk of owning individual issues. 
I nearly brought this question up in Mark Corothers ‘Flipin’ post, but didn’t want to send his discussion about real bond returns down the wrong rabbit hole.
So here goes. I have a CD ladder to protect me from a lost decade.

With the current fixed income environment, have you given any thought to your portfolio asset allocation?
For most of the last 15 years bonds paid next to nothing, a big fat zero actual return. For a stretch in 2021 they actually paid less than nothing: 10-year TIPS traded at negative real yields, meaning you were paying the government for the privilege of protecting your own purchasing power. In that world, equities weren’t one part of the growth engine.

Chrissy and I have had a fun year. A road trip across the country to visit Chris’s niece in California, we have re-discovered the joy of live concerts, and have had some nice day and overnight trips so far this year. We are looking forward to a couple concerts, a Broadway play or two, and a trip to tour the Frank Lloyd Wright Falling Water House in PA.  Still, we can’t be on the road all the time,

“Hi. Could I borrow $5000? Only if you have it available from a cash source (don’t want to cause taxes for you). We depleted our HSA with all the medical expenses in the last year and still have bills to pay. I would need to start selling off stock and mutual funds at this point and pay the taxes on the earnings.”
I told him I would not loan him the money, but I would send the $5,000 immediately which I did.

There’s an old saying that time is money. There’s also the view that, on occasion, getting money owed to you is more bother than it’s worth. My wife Suzie and I have reached that stage over a $2000 cell phone bill.
In the lead-up to retirement, we made a concerted effort to streamline our finances. That’s when it came to light that we’d been billed for a third cell plan going back several years. Suzie had assumed my plan was coming out of her checking account as well as her own,

EVERY THREE MONTHS, a small committee meets in Manhattan to make decisions that dictate where billions of retirement dollars flow. You won’t see them on financial television. They belong to the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices.
Nearly all readers here likely know the S&P 500 isn’t a mindless tally of America’s 500 largest businesses. Yet in an era dominated by mega-cap hype, it is worth remembering just how ruthlessly disciplined that curated roster really is.

Harry Sit has written an article on his website, The Finance Buff, this morning 9/14/2026, describing the new requirement for using ID.me to log into a TreasuryDirect account. I found the article particularity informative as, like him, I had previously obtained a ID.me account.
His closing comment, “You have two bad choices. Either give sensitive information to a private company picked by the government agency or sell everything and pay taxes. I really don’t like this,

I have been reading in some of the comments on the Forum recently that some of you use a total portfolio approach for your investments.  I tried to look it up in Jonathan’s guide but couldn’t find it. I don’t know what this is and was hoping some of you might be able to explain it in a way I could understand. I am not sure if this is something I need to research more?  I tried to look it up on Mother Google but didn’t understand what the AI said it was.  

As retirees, we spend a lot of time thinking about risks that may never happen. We diversify our investments, buy insurance and keep emergency reserves. We don’t need to know that something bad will happen before protecting ourselves against it.
I’ve been wondering whether we should think about AI the same way?
Some of the people building the world’s most powerful AI systems are loudly warning about the risks, even as their companies spend billions racing to make them more capable.

My wife and I are 73 and 75 and in RMD territory. With pension, SS and RMD our marginal tax bracket is 24%.
80% of our assets are in tax sheltered IRAs. Other than QCDs to reduce tax liability are there any other strategies? We recognize that one of us will be facing the widow/widower’s tax situation. Also IRMAA will take a bigger chunk of our Medicare bill.
My feeling is that we continue with our current situation and pay the effective tax rate of maybe 18 –

I am incensed when I read nonsense posted on social media about social security – “Congress stole the SS funds and never paid it back,” “there would be plenty of money if we didn’t give it to people not eligible” and worse. All nonsense.
Is it worth me getting upset over? It is, because uninformed people believe it and now it appears people are acting on the lies and misinformation they read and hear. They don’t understand that SS can’t go bankrupt or run out of money and that there is a different between SS’s ongoing revenue and the reserve trust.

An e-mail I received from Retirement Researchers by Wade Pfau contains this:
“If a retiree owns 1,000 shares before receiving a dividend and still owns 1,000 shares afterward, it can seem as though nothing has been spent. Selling 20 shares feels different because the account now holds fewer shares. That visual difference can reinforce the idea that dividends allow you to spend income while preserving principal.
For example, suppose a company is trading at $100 per share,