I can’t take credit for the headline here. Actually Jonathan wrote it for my section of My Money Journey.  I like it so much I use it on my blog too.
It articulates one word to me – responsibility, in this case financial and related matters.
We talk a lot about financial literacy and the lack thereof, but I don’t see even that as preventing basic prudent decisions about, saving, spending.
My grandson came home from high school yesterday and told his father the teacher in his financial management class told them to always spend on themselves first.

My preference is to book everything far ahead of time—flights, restaurants, hotels, cruises, you name it. I like having stuff to look forward to. For me, anticipating fun events is a big contributor to happiness.
But is this the smartest financial strategy? I’ve taken plenty of trips both internationally and within the U.S. over my lifetime, but I don’t consider myself an expert on money-saving travel. Still, here are some pointers I’ve picked up along the way and by digging around online.

I NEVER PURCHASED long-term-care insurance, even though the personal finance magazine I wrote for in the 1990s often recommended it. To the magazine’s editors, it seemed like another logical step in retirement preparation. I had two reasons to decide against it, however.
First, it seemed a huge expense. We were advised to buy it around age 60, long before any presumed decline. I was younger than that and unprepared to pay hundreds a month for decades when I didn’t know if I’d ever use the coverage.

The new kid’s back in town and he’s a bully. Remember active mutual funds, those dinosaurs of yesteryear? Get ready, because here come actively managed ETFs. In 2019, there were only 350 of those guys but now that number has swelled to over 1,600. More than 400 active ETFs were launched in 2023 and another 200 through June of this year. Remarkably, actively managed ETFs gobbled up over 20% of the asset flow into ETFs by midyear.

THE BEST WAY TO WIN a contest for the largest tomato is to paint a cantaloupe red and hope the judges don’t notice, or so says an old adage.
What does that have to do with managing money? Newspapers and magazines frequently interview mutual fund managers who have beaten their competitors, and perhaps the S&P 500 as well. Fund-management firms will even run ads touting the performance of these funds.
These interviews sometimes prompt me to do my own research.

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.