The last few days have been hectic, attending a funeral for a friend as well as an information session by a local funeral home.
I learned a lot from the presentation on funeral services. Pre-planned funerals can ease the burden on survivors. They claim it is cost effective by locking in current prices. Services these days can be extensive and cover death even on a cruise ship or a foreign country.  They also offer incentives (discounts,

“I’m giving up on your cousin Bernie, Fay.”
“Bill, grow up already and stop acting like a wounded bird. Be a good husband and give him another year.“
“Another year?  It’s already been three years and he told me two. Good-bye to our $20,000. I told you it wouldn’t be so easy to go from men’s clothing to shoes. Your family’s in la la land.”
The business lesson. My father looked up from his lamb chop and poked his fork at me.

Not a day goes by that I don’t hear or read how inflation impacts seniors – not that it doesn’t impact everyone. Many seniors have a unique perspective on what they are entitled to as evidenced by these – not unusual – Facebook comments.
“2.3% for next year Social Security is a joke. They should take into consideration, food prices, and medication. We should be getting more like 8% or maybe 9% each year.”
“Food and medicine went way up for older people and increasing Social Security is not sufficient.

IN RICH DAD POOR DAD, author Robert Kiyosaki touts the virtues of owning real estate as a way to reach financial independence. He explains the difference between how his father handled money and invested in his education, versus his friend’s dad, who gained his wealth by investing in businesses.
There’s controversy over whether this is a true tale or just a literary device to explain how to invest in real estate.

My friend Guy who is 85 and lives Ohio was traveling to visit his son in Seattle. I drove Guy to the airport (DTW) which is an hour or so north of us in Detroit on 7/11. His return flight was on 7/18 with a quick stop in LA. He arrived at LAX just in time for some computer nerd at CrowdStrike to press the send key that paralyzed businesses all over the planet.
Stuck overnight,

In the month since HumbleDollar launched the Forum, the site’s web developer has made a number of improvements. Among them: By clicking on a commenter’s name, you can see all of the commenter’s Forum posts, as well as his or her comments on other folks’ articles and posts.
We’ve now taken this one step further. Want to tell readers a little more about yourself? You can now add biographical information to your Forum profile page.

I have written several times that I don’t use spreadsheets or budgets. However, once when buying our first home I spent endless hours with paper and pencil trying to determine if we could afford a house and for how much?
It was 1971. I had gotten out of the army 18 months before and we had one child. Connie stopped working in July 1970. Mortgage interest rates were about 7.5% and you needed a 20% down payment. 

SUPPOSE YOU WANTED to construct as simple an investment portfolio as possible. What would it look like?
Many argue that, for stock market exposure, you could go with a single fund, one that tracks the S&P 500 index. The S&P index offers broad diversification and tax efficiency, plus it includes the largest and most successful companies, making it a popular choice. But it’s not perfect.
The S&P 500, like many market indexes, holds stocks in proportion to their size,

I am a Baptist pastor.  Significant moment #1.  One day I was in a leadership meeting and a fellow pastor commented that he had just met with his financial advisor and was told he would have to work to age 81 to retire.  I didn’t laugh.  I was his age and had just lost 40% of my retirement from the economic downturn that began in October, 2007.  After that meeting I did some serious soul searching and decided I would become a student of understanding “money”

I BEGAN INVESTING in the stock market in 2007. Within a year, I’d lost 60%. My response was like that of almost any human: I stopped investing.
That’s what happens to most people who start investing at the height of a bubble. They invest in something when everybody else does. And when everything comes crashing down, the pain of loss is so bad they swear they’ll never invest again. 
While I missed out on huge returns in the years that followed the financial crisis,

 
This month’s AARP bulletin has an article titled “Make your Retirement savings last”.
 
 
This article points out that retirement investing is for the longer term and one should not sweat short term market movements. It also points out that there is one short term danger, however, that we should all be aware of.
 
 
Let us assume when you retire, the stock market is doing very well. You take a lump sum pension payment or consolidate accounts into an IRA and fully invest your nest egg.

The IRS on Thursday issued final regulations regarding Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) requirements for those who inherit retirement accounts which were published in the Federal Register today 7/19/2024. The final regulations requires Non-Eligible Designated Beneficiaries to take RMDs starting in 2025 if the decedent had already reached their required beginning date.
The full final regulations can be read here –
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/07/19/2024-14542/required-minimum-distributions
The summary of the rule as published in the Federal Register is effective 9/17/2024 follows-
This document sets forth final regulations relating to required minimum distributions from qualified plans;

Social Security is an important program. Millions of Americans rely on it and millions more will in the future. At the same time it is widely misunderstood. Rumors of its demise are exaggerated. Some people unfortunately act on such misinformation by starting benefits early. 
Making the program solvent for the foreseeable future is actually quite easy and relatively painless using a combination of changes For example, just making Section 125 employer cafeteria plans subject to the payroll tax would reduce the funding gap by 10% according the the Committee For a Responsible Federal budget calculator –

The new kid’s back in town and he’s a bully. Remember active mutual funds? Get ready because here come active ETFs. In 2019, there were only about 350 of those guys, but now that number has ballooned to almost 1,500. Remarkably, active ETFs gobbled up over 20% of the net asset flow into stock ETFs in the first half of this year.
According to one active ETF advocate, actively management has become more popular as heavyweight asset managers have entered the fray.

My family has been using HSAs as stealth Roth IRAs (with the added benefit of a tax deduction), in that after a couple of years in the beginning, we no longer make withdrawals for current medical expenses.
One neat trick we were able to pull off is that my son, while on our insurance before age 26, made the family contribution to his HSA (in addition to my wife’s family contribution and $1000 catch-up contributions for me &