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,

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.