My hat’s off to the couples that got hitched right out of school and stayed that way, happily. That was not my reality. Young love, often ignited by intense physical attraction, often doesn’t ask the hard questions, or require clear answers even if the right questions are asked. And while achieving the age of 73 doesn’t make me an expert, I think everyone is entitled to my opinion, so here goes😉.
That intense physical energy is going to change over time,

A question for discussion. Is an eighteen year old an adult? Do you expect an 18 year old to pay their bills, to be on their own for college?
Several years ago on HD someone wrote in a comment that when their child reach age 18, they were done. They expected them out of the house and they were on their own.  Another wrote that when their youngest child graduated high school, the were relocating south and leaving the child behind. 

I drink the odd can of Coke Zero — sugar free, caffeine free. Unfortunately the caffeine free version is rarely on offer, but on those odd occasions when I discover it at a good discount I buy multiple cases. I enjoy a good bargain.
My instinct for a bargain extends to my retirement portfolio. I scratch that itch by having a policy statement around rebalancing during market volatility. Normally I only rebalance once a year, but my policy statement has a clause to enact a threshold rebalance if the equity portion of my portfolio drops more than 15% — a once and done strategy.

“What, me worry?” — Alfred E. Neuman
What should worry me more—inflation or market declines? Both reduce the value of our savings, but they behave very differently. Inflation tends to work slowly and quietly. Market declines, by contrast, often happen quickly and visibly.
Consider several bear markets—defined as declines of 20% or more in the S&P 500.

Bear Market
Market Decline
Time to Bottom
Time to Recover

1973–74 Oil Crisis
-48%
21 months
~7 years

1987 Crash
-34%
3 months
~2 years

2000–02 Dot-com Bust
-49%
30 months
~7 years

2008 Financial Crisis
-57%
17 months
~4 years

2020 COVID Crash
-34%
1 month
~5 months

2022 Inflation Bear Market
-25%
9 months
~2 years

Market declines are dramatic.

A recent forum post on keeping gold bars as financial crisis insurance got me thinking about alternative stores of value. I’ll admit there’s an element of tongue-in-cheek to what follows — but I also think it might prove rather more useful than stuffing a gold bar in each pocket and heading out to barter for your Sunday lunch. It would certainly be kinder to the structural integrity of said pockets.
I have to point out my perspective on this comes from an unusual place.

TL:DR – I explain my approach to financial disaster protection including holding physical cash and gold
I’ve had a long career in Software development, and as a result I understand how fragile software systems can be.  As more of our financial infrastructure comes to rely on software as its underpinnings, the more likely it is that we will experience an outage that will last some period of time.
This naturally brings up the question:  how do I protect myself if such an outage occurs? 

I was feeling sorry for myself recently. Connie’s health issues prevent us from traveling, even going to our Cape house for the time being. I said to myself, time really is running out. 
We seem to be surrounded by illness. Two of our neighbors now in Florida have been taken seriously ill and can’t get home. My brother in law fell on ice and broke his wrist and arm. Connie, my cousin and a close friend are all undergoing cancer treatments.

When I’m turning a tricky problem over in my mind, my normal port of call is my wife Suzie…she’s much more sensible than me. But I have an issue I can’t ask her thoughts on. The reason is simple — it’s a secret that she knows nothing about. So I thought I’d canvass opinions from the Humble Dollar community.
Right now I’m thinking of offering four separate loans to extended family members, and the backstory is straightforward.

I was reading a 3/6/2026 article on Advisor Perspectives about the most-read articles of February 2026. That article had noted that Allan Roth’s article titled ” Money, Investing & Happiness” as the blog’s most-read article of last month.
In that article Mr. Roth wrote “Johnathan Clements did more research on the subject of money and happiness than anyone I’m aware of. He asserted that we should use our money to purchase experiences,

The title sounds like a contradiction. How can something be wrong and right simultaneously? Step back and look at the famous utterance from the Sage of Omaha, and it makes complete sense — to me, anyway.
Some background. In his 2013 shareholder letter, Warren Buffett laid out a simple inheritance plan for his wife: put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. On the surface,

A witty, honest and poignant short film:
Retirement Plan
With a lesson:
“Time is the one asset you can’t compound; spend it while the market is still open.”
 

Should You Use a ‘Safe’ Withdrawal Rate?

A very interesting blog post from this morning, on the White Coat Investor site.
Upshot:  its REALLY hard to deplete all of your assets if you spend 4% or more……many things need to go wrong
As an aside: the chart showing the “famous” spending smile from David Blanchett is likely incorrect, in a good way – new data shows that the rise in spending at the right side of the curve,

IF YOU OWN a home or are planning to buy one, there are a few things you need to know from the tax standpoint that could save you money:
1. Mortgage Interest
If you have a mortgage, you can typically deduct the interest you pay on the loan up to $750,000 ($1,000,000 if taken before December 16, 2017) but only if you itemize your deductions (schedule A)
You can also deduct points you paid if you itemize.

I’VE RECENTLY MADE the most significant change to my own portfolio in thirty five years. For the first time I’ve moved away from pure market-cap investing, tilting meaningfully toward Europe and Southeast Asia and bringing my US technology concentration down to around fifteen percent.
I’m retired. I don’t need to chase the outperformance that concentration might deliver, and I don’t need the potential volatility that comes with it. This is a personal position rather than any kind of recommendation;

A POPULAR JOKE about retirement is that it can be hard work. That’s because financial planning is like a jigsaw puzzle, and retirement often means rearranging the pieces.
In the past, I’ve discussed two key pieces of that puzzle: how to determine a sustainable portfolio withdrawal rate and how to decide on an effective asset allocation. But there’s one more piece of the puzzle to contend with: taxes. Especially if you’re planning to retire on the earlier side,