You are planning to get another tattoo, it costs $200.
You are going to take your best friend out for fine dining, it will cost $175.
You promised your children to take them to a local theme park, $200.
You receive a bill from your doctor because you hadn’t met your deductible, $200.
Which expense is unaffordable?
Okay, a bit of a trick question, but there is no doubt the answer is nearly always the medical expense is unaffordable.

I’M NOT PARTICULARLY well traveled. I’ll turn age 65 at the end of this year and I’ve never been to a Caribbean island. I’ve never been to Hawaii or Bermuda. Heck, I’ve never even been on a cruise.

I’ve never been to Canada or Alaska. I’ve been to a couple of the U.S. National Parks, but have yet to visit the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite. 

I’ve been to Europe quite a few times,

WHEN I REACHED AGE 70, I felt a sense of accomplishment, a bit of weird pride. At 75, I had a similar feeling. But when I turned 80 last year, things felt different. It was like I was an overachiever. Suddenly, the future wasn’t as long.

For many years, I’d searched for a high school friend who’d been my navigator at sports car rallies, but with no luck. Then, recently, I stumbled across his obituary.

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;