Minimum wage is a touchy, often political, subject and it is often misunderstood. I suspect not many HD readers are concerned with the minimum wage. On the other hand, I see implications of changing and not changing it. 
Few workers actually earn the federal minimum wage. The percentage of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less was 1.1 percent in 2023. Minimum wage workers tend to be young, single, work part-time, and have an high school or less education.

If you were going to recommend one place for your fellow HumbleDollar readers to visit—a city, a town, a park, a museum, a church, you name it—what would it be and why? No, the place doesn’t have to be outside the U.S. and, no, there are no points for picking something nobody’s ever heard of.
I’ll go first. But contrary to what I just wrote, it is a place outside the U.S. and it’s not well known.

Engineering Economics was a required course for my college major. Being introduced to concepts such as present worth, future value, continuous cash flow, compounding, rate of return, time values of sums, and how to factor in taxes and depreciation among other economic principles have been most useful in managing my own finances. When MS Excel was introduced a few years later, I found it useful to create economic models to evaluate various financial decisions. I also use Quicken to track our investment portfolio,

Pre-Covid, when I wasn’t traveling, a friend and I delivered lunches for Meals on Wheels. We worked twice a month, for over ten years. Sometimes the list of recipients stayed the same for months, at other times we’d see two or three replacements in quick succession.
A couple of guys each had a room in a shared house. A couple of women lived in apartment buildings. Some people lived in what was obviously low income/subsidized housing.

Sequels are made by film studios trying to capitalize on the success of the original release. Rocky II became another blockbuster for MGM Studios. J.P. Morgan’s Nasdaq Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPQ) is an audience-pleaser right in our own backyard. It’s the glitzy younger sister of the star of the active ETF world, J.P. Morgan’s Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPI).
Like most sequels, the new technology-oriented fund borrows a good bit from its predecessor. It’s on a pace to be just as big a moneymaker,

WE MAKE CONSTANT tradeoffs as we allocate our time and money across our life’s many competing demands. What if we feel like all is not right in our world? We may be confronting the seven choices below—and favoring one option at the expense of the other, leaving us with what feels like an unbalanced life.
1. Between doing what we should and doing what we want. Here, I’m thinking about taking care of ourselves physically.

Bob Brinker’s idea of financial asset critical mass was reaching a level of financial security where your money is working for you. Included in the tribute is a list of recommended investment books that Mr. Brinker had included in his newsletter and radio show over the years. Those recommended books, including those that I have already read, mirror humble wisdom that I find here every day.
I have a lot of reading to do.
 

I turned 73 this summer and received a modest buyout of my share of a group practice earlier this year. Should I take my required RMD now or take two prior to next April fifteenth?

I HAVE LONG HELD a grudge against Los Angeles, and not just because they stole the Dodgers from Brooklyn when I was a kid. It’s a city where too much value is placed on how you look, a metric where I don’t score particularly high. By contrast, New York City—my old stomping ground—is principled more on what you know, and on that score I feel I deserve at least a gentleman’s C.
That said,

While driving on the highway recently I noticed the vehicle in front of us was a Bentley – an SUV no less. My immediate thought was that this SUV would never be part of an off road adventure – neither are most SUVs for that matter.
I had another thought too. Why would you spend that kind of money on a depreciating asset that costs a fortune to maintain? The price tag is about $279,000. That’s a lot of cash to get from A to B even in comfort.

I’m on the cusp of turning 67. Since I’ll be spending my birthday in Slovenia, we went to NYC yesterday to have a picnic celebration with our older son and family on the Hudson in lower Manhattan. It was wonderful, with food, wine, and a delicious lemon meringue pie. We tossed the football and enjoyed the beautiful weather and setting.  Later that evening we had dinner with our younger son and family at a marina-side restaurant,

FORMER NEW YORK CITY Mayor Ed Koch used to frequently ask the city’s residents, “How am I doing?”
When I was younger, I’d ask myself that same question. I was always trying to keep up with others, whether it was socially, academically, athletically or financially. My big fear was that I wasn’t going to make it. I could never let down my guard, relax and take it easy. I was always having to compensate for whatever I was deficient in.

I am looking to get on to Medicare early next year and while reading up on this topic, I see this line, “All plans with the same letter have the same coverage, but prices can vary based on the insurance company” repeated often regarding the Medigap policies.
For example, when I look up Plan G for my state (SC), I see that there are “47 plans” and the premiums range from a low of $90 all the way up to (gulp) $493.

When I was a freshman in high school, my earth science teacher once started out a class by playing Pink Floyd’s song Time, from their album The Dark Side of the Moon. He played the uncut version, which runs almost seven minutes. His reasoning for having us listen to the song was that musicians probably know more about time than the typical person. Two years after that science class, a song called Time Passages by Al Stewart became popular.

On August 31, 2024 Jonathan wrote What We Believed which included the following. How right he is. I experienced it first hand over my near fifty years working for the same employer.
“Employers care. My parents worked for a paternalistic employer, and I certainly thought of my initial employers in those terms. But how many folks today believe that, if they work hard, their employer will return that loyalty and that their job is truly safe?