IT’S CHALLENGING TO GO from saving during our working years to spending in retirement. Our solution: Use a modified version of the 4% rule.
Financial planner William Bengen was the first person to articulate the 4% rule. He wanted to know how much people could withdraw from their investments each year and still not run out of money. Through extensive back-testing, he found that if folks withdrew 4% in the first year, and thereafter increased this amount each year for inflation,

I HAVE TROUBLE accepting things at face value. I like to validate information, checking it against several sources. This is especially true when it comes to all things money- and retirement-related. But it’s not always easy to do.

Do Americans tell the truth about how they spend their money? Do they actually know? Does it really take extreme frugality to save for the future, a talent many folks lack or refuse to embrace?

I look around and,

MOST PEOPLE ON Medicare report that they’re very satisfied with their health care coverage—but the program is undoubtedly complicated. There’s an alphabet soup of plans, coverage choices, premium levels and enrollment rules.

While it’s easy to be flummoxed by the ins and outs of Medicare, think of it as “eating an elephant.” The only way to start is one bite at a time. Learn the basics first—by deciding whether you want original Medicare or Medicare Advantage.

HARRY MARKOWITZ, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who passed away recently, invented a new approach to investing. Known as modern portfolio theory, it offered investors, for the first time, a logical approach to building portfolios. How much should you hold in stocks vs. bonds? Markowitz could tell you precisely.
But Markowitz also knew math wasn’t the only driver of investment decisions. In a frequently cited interview, Markowitz recalled how he decided what to hold in his own retirement plan early in his career.

THE STOCK MARKET offers limited downside and unlimited upside. That might not seem like a big deal. But this asymmetry has huge implications for how we manage our money—and, for prudent investors, it should be a great comfort. How so? Consider five key implications.
No. 1: The most a stock can lose is 100% of its value. Sound grim? There’s a silver lining. Assuming you own your stocks outright, your potential loss is limited to the sum you invested.

WE BOUGHT A FARM earlier this year. We already have a greenhouse business, where we grow flowers, as well as several small tracts of land. The purchase was part of our farming plan, which involves expanding our crop business as opportunities arise.
But buying a farm is also part of our estate plan—and our fishing hopes. We now have two ponds with fish. True, they’re very small fish, as far as we can tell from three afternoons of fishing,

WHAT’S THE COST BASIS of the stocks you own? It’s hardly surprising that this information occasionally gets lost, especially if we’re talking about shares acquired years or even decades ago. In fact, you may never have known the cost basis if you received the shares as a gift and, to make things even more confusing, the IRS has quirky rules for gifted shares.
Whatever the reason, many people are missing cost basis information—a significant problem because cost basis directly affects the taxes you may have to pay when selling investments held in a regular taxable account.

ONE REASON I WAITED so long to sell my house was my extreme reluctance to move all my belongings. I didn’t want to deal with the hassles involved—because I’d gone through that less than a decade earlier.

In 2013, I had the house renovated. I replaced almost all the flooring, with hardwood downstairs, carpet upstairs and tile in the bathrooms. I also updated the kitchen cabinets. That meant, of course, that every single thing in the house had to be moved.

IF YOU WANT ADVICE on investing, don’t ask me. My investment knowledge is, shall we say, limited.

I don’t pay much attention to expense ratios, individual stocks, international markets, the VIX, interest rates or much else. I know nothing about evaluating stocks or the overall market, though I have learned the hard way that rising interest rates aren’t friendly to utility stocks.

In other words, I’m more like your typical saver who’s playing at investing.

WHEN I WAS BORN 80-plus years ago in Madathumpady, it was one of the remotest villages in India. The country was ruled by the British and the freedom struggle was underway, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.
My parents hadn’t attended school because there were no schools in the village when they grew up. But they weren’t illiterate. Both learned to read and write. In fact, my mother taught me how to read and write before I attended school.

WHEN I RETIRED, I thought about creating a website and writing about my retirement. I looked into what it would take to build a site and have someone edit my work. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the only ones who would probably visit my site would be my sister, brother-in-law and maybe a few curious friends. It wouldn’t be worth the time, effort and money—especially when HumbleDollar offers all the benefits an unknown and inexperienced writer needs.

THIS IS MY SIXTH STORY for HumbleDollar. You don’t know how happy you’ve made this old hick from Kentucky feel by taking the time to read my stuff, let alone comment on it.
I’ve done and continue to do a lot of dumb things in my walk down life’s path. I hope to share most of them to give you something to think about and maybe avoid on your own. Today,

PERHAPS YOU’RE TOYING with seeing a therapist to help you cope with, say, the transition to retirement or the loss of a loved one. How can you get the best return for the time and money you’ll invest? Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer.
Early in my career, I was an academic psychologist whose area of specialty was the effectiveness of psychotherapy. I published many papers on the topic, and also presented several at the proceedings of the Society for Psychotherapy Research.

NEW YORK ATTORNEY Steven Schwartz recently found himself in hot water. Schwartz was representing a passenger injured on board an Avianca Airlines flight. In a filing with the court, Schwartz cited several precedents that appeared to support his case, including Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines. The only problem? These cases are all fictional—made up not by Schwartz, but by ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) “chatbot.”
The judge was not pleased,

WE LIVE IN A WORLD rife with intolerance—and that intolerance, alas, has infected the once-civilized world of index-fund investors.
Back in the 1990s, we indexers were such a small minority that simply owning index funds was a common bond. But now that more than half the fund market is given over to index funds, internecine skirmishes regularly erupt, with folks debating what’s the right way to index and belittling those who take a different approach.