Thanks so much for the great comments and advice on my previous post about this topic. As I said in a reply, I’m making a list of all the ideas commenters shared to discuss with my husband. We may or may not move forward with this idea—there are some complicated family dynamics that I won’t get into in this particular post. But if we do, here are some of the numbers we’re considering.

I’ve been looking at small starter homes or condos in either our town or the one 10 miles north of us.

MY RETIREMENT IN July 2020 came at a stressful time. I was recovering from knee replacement surgery and we were in the midst of the pandemic. Luckily, I had physical therapy goals to meet, and I’d already purchased a huge supply of reading material. TV, music and my laptop were also there to distract me. In addition, my wife had retired eight months before, so we had each other for company.
As the pandemic stretched on,

It is reported that over  25% of those over 65 will need significant support and services for over 3 yrs during their life time. As population ages, this is going to get worse.
In-home care is very expensive. As per Genworth, the median cost of round-the clock in-home care is $290000/yr, which is 2X the median cost of nursing home or 4X the median cost of assisted living. Such costs can destroy retirement savings of  many,

I’m reading frequently these days about Roth conversions and Required Minimum Distribution tax bombs.  Since I couldn’t know my own future tax rates and situation in advance, I have attempted throughout my working years to balance tax-deferred and tax-exempt.  I find myself close to retirement with the following breakdown:
45% tax-deferred (Traditional IRA, 401k, etc)
12% taxable (brokerage, savings, etc)
43% tax-exempt (Roth IRA, Roth 401k, HSA)
I haven’t done any kind of analysis to see if Roth conversions will be advantageous to me at some point,

ON TELEVISION, I WATCH the Barrett-Jackson auctions of expensive cars. When two bidders want the same car, they drive up the price until one decides enough is enough and drops out.
Why is this car so important to the bidders? In many cases, it’s a well-known car that’s highly valued by car collectors, so it’s treated like an investment with lasting value. Other times, it could be a model that the bidders had admired as teenagers,

So we’re thinking about buying a rental home, either in our college town or the town 10 miles north of us. I’ve written here before that we were briefly landlords in the late 90s when we moved to a larger home and rented out our starter home. But we felt we didn’t have the bandwidth to be landlords, so we sold the place after a year. That was a major financial mistake.
Why are we considering this now?

You don’t need Eli Lilly’s Ozempic to slim down. If you want to lose some of that tech bloating in your S&P 500 or total market index fund, I’ve got just the medicine to reduce the overweight.
Several sponsors offer ETFs that cut your exposure to possibly overvalued large technology stocks by weighting each company in the sector equally rather than by size. This strategy greatly reduces the impact of the largest companies in the fund,

A 2021 Society of Actuaries study on retirement risk looked at retiree vulnerability to unexpected financial shocks. Forty percent of retirees reported experiencing some form of financial shock.
They reported that 11% of retirees reported financial shock that reduced their assets by more than 25%. Thirty-two percent of retirees said they could not spend $10,000 without it affecting their retirement security. 
I think about financial “what ifs” all the time. I try to anticipate where money might come from to handle even something major like long-term care.

To my best recollection, I first came across the book Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely while on vacation. While my wife was checking out clothing and jewelry stores—a mild form of torture for me—I found a local bookstore and flipped through some of the more interesting chapters in Ariely’s book. One chapter’s thesis is that getting free stuff can be “a source of irrational excitement.” While the chapter is mostly about how our penchant for free things can be manipulated by marketers,

I WAS INTRIGUED WHEN an old Dutch painting attributed to a “follower of Rembrandt” came up for auction near me in Maine late last month. It was a portrait of a young woman wearing an elaborately starched ruff collar, the type of clothing depicted in Golden Age paintings from the 1600s.
The country auction house estimated the painting would fetch $10,000 to $15,000. I couldn’t shake the thought—however fleeting—that this might be the real thing.

ABOUT ONCE A WEEK, someone will say to me, “I don’t understand bonds.” Sometimes, they’ll state it in stronger terms: “I don’t like bonds.”
Fundamentally, bonds are just IOUs. If you buy a $1,000 Treasury bond, you’re simply lending the government $1,000. The Treasury will then pay you interest twice a year and return your $1,000 when the bond matures. That part is straightforward. What’s more of a mystery is why we should own bonds and what we should expect from them.

I’ve always been a man of habits and routines, but it seems that these days, as a 72 year old retiree, I adhere to them even more. I’m not yet on the level of Dustin Hoffman’s Rainman with Judge Wapner, but I’m getting there.
Maybe it’s because I have more control over my schedule now and so can more faithfully indulge these habits. Or maybe the calcification of my brain and the well known tendency of old folks to dislike change have combined to make me ever more dedicated to them.

MY FIRST REACTION ON hearing my cancer diagnosis: I’m okay with this. My reaction a few hours later: I’m being self-centered.
My time is short, though how short remains an open question. Still, my truncated life expectancy makes something of a mockery of my pre-diagnosis comments about how we should view retirement not as the finish line, but rather as the beginning of a journey that might last two or three decades and perhaps account for almost half of our adult life.

Six years ago, Jonathan Clements published an article in HumbleDollar recounting some of the  anecdotal influences on his financial thinking. Rather than research and facts, he explained, it’s often the exploits we experience, the tales we’re told or the comments that come our way that shape how we view money matters.
I know that holds true for me. Years later, I can still hear the voices and see the faces attached to these events:
1.

Check out my interview with longtime friend and WealthTrack host Consuelo Mack. Over the years, I’ve done numerous interviews with Consuelo, whose PBS show is now in its 20th season, and first met her in 1990, when we were both at The Wall Street Journal.
This most recent interview was recorded in my living room here in Philly. All the necessary equipment arrived in a hard-sided suitcase delivered by FedEx, and I then set up the camera,