ON JUNE 15, THE NEWS was broken by The Oregonian of a massive hack at Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles, apparently leading to the theft of sensitive details about most of Oregon’s 3.5 million holders of a driver’s license or ID card. Incidents like this, along with the huge 2017 Equifax hack, give criminals cheap and easy access to key personal information that many organizations routinely use to verify our identities and screen our credit applications.

I HAVE WRITTEN THIS article about bourbon because, when HumbleDollar’s editor previously asked me to write about my travels, I thought, “Hey, if someone wants to pay me $60 to write about travel, I’m in. I’m hoping he’ll next suggest I write an article about drinking bourbon.”
Sadly, this site’s editor didn’t ask me to write about bourbon. But I went ahead anyway.
I “spiritually” came of age when I was 19 years old.

WOULDA, COULDA, SHOULDA are part of every retiree’s investment vocabulary. I’ve certainly had my share of bloopers.
Too often, we writers stand up here and pontificate about our exploits, leaving readers feeling they couldn’t possibly do the same. With an eye toward leveling the playing field, I thought I’d divulge two of my biggest blunders.
Error of commission. Using the royalties from her husband’s high school Spanish textbooks, my mother-in-law Rose began to accumulate municipal bonds in the late 1970s.

ONE RECENT TREND among newly minted retirees: unretirement. According to an AARP study, some 3% of retirees are back in the workforce one year later, taking on either fulltime or part-time jobs. Often, unretiring wasn’t part of the retiree’s original plan—but we shouldn’t assume it’s necessarily about needing money.
Starbucks’s Howard Schultz, quarterback Tom Brady and Disney’s Bob Iger are poster children for unretiring. Even our HumbleDollar world includes many examples of those who have reinvented,

MOST OF US HAVE TOO much stuff, and we’re apt to joke about it. But clutter, if allowed to spiral out of control, can turn into hoarding.

Hoarders are people who acquire an excessive number of items, some with little or no value, and yet they continue to add to their chaotic overflow. Unable to manage the clutter but unwilling to let any of it go, they become upset and anxious when others offer to help clear it up.

I FOUND OUT A YEAR ago that my Aunt Ina Lou, then aged 95, had designated me as her agent in her financial and medical powers of attorney. She also named me as executor of her estate and the trustee for her trust.
She wasn’t well and needed more help than her thoughtful neighbors could provide. Within months, my brother, my wife and I had our aunt settled in an assisted living facility near her townhome in Burke,

OUR FIVE KIDS SPENT a collective 24 years in college. All five have bachelor’s degrees, and three also have master’s degrees. The youngest graduated May 2023. Only one child qualified for non-merit aid—a $300 Pell grant.
My wife and I didn’t give them money for college. We don’t live near a major public university, so four of the five had to live on campus. Here’s what prepared them for college and how to pay for it.

JOY DOESN’T COME easily to me. I tend to default toward melancholy, so I try to ensure my discretionary purchases bring as much happiness as possible.
Like many readers, I’m a firm believer that buying experiences sparks more joy than buying stuff. The dollars we’ve spent on family vacations, sporting events, church mission trips and, more recently, escape rooms—worth trying sometime—have created memories that’ll last a lifetime. Yet obviously not all of our discretionary money is spent on experiences.

I GOT CAUGHT UP IN some weird investment fads during the recent era of 0% interest rates. With cash investments and bonds yielding almost nothing, I instead sought to pad my investment returns by opening new brokerage accounts to snag promotion cash, and by dabbling in digital currencies and newfangled alternative investments.
Result? I ended up with far too many financial accounts—and it became a burden to keep track of everything. Just a year ago,

WHAT DO WALL STREET analysts, magazine editors, economists and academics have in common? They’ve all found it virtually impossible to make accurate market forecasts. That’s why Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle gave this advice to investors: When markets go haywire, “Don’t do something. Just stand there.”
Warren Buffett has given the same advice. In 2008, here’s how he explained it: “In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts;

AS FOLKS HURTLE toward retirement, they often wonder whether they’ve saved enough, debate when to claim Social Security and fret about how they’d pay for long-term care. Make no mistake: Such issues are hugely important.
But amid these financial musings, we should also spare a thought for four other questions:
How can I transform myself from a diligent saver to a happy spender? This sounds so easy, and yet many struggle with it,

WHEN I WAS ASSIGNED a high school essay on business morals, I asked my dad if he knew of any books on the topic.
“No, Stevie, I don’t. From what I’ve seen in New York real estate, it would be a very thin book.”
For more than 40 years, that cynical quip has haunted me, coloring my view of rental real estate. I’m not emotionally suited to being a landlord. But I wanted real estate as a stock market diversifier—and I was drawn to the benefits of combining rental income with stock market dividends.

IN MY LAST ARTICLE, I wrote about how Harvard and other colleges are offering programs to help growth-oriented retirees find new meaning and purpose. Having a sense of purpose improves our quality of life and provides a sense of well-being.
But most of us, including this writer, can’t afford Harvard’s program. That’s why I’m going to show you how to find your main reason for being within the comfort of your own home—using the ikigai method.

FINANCIAL FRAUD against Americans age 60 and older costs $3 billion a year, and the average loss per incident is $120,000, according to a 2020 study by the AARP Public Policy Institute. And scams against older Americans are increasing. The FBI reports that losses more than doubled from 2019 to 2021 and internet swindles against elderly victims rose 84% in 2022.
My wife was the target of a fraud and you may have been,

I RECENTLY LISTENED to an interesting Hidden Brain podcast discussing different ways of bringing about behavior change. The guest on the podcast was Loran Nordgren, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and coauthor of a book entitled The Human Element. The discussion centered on two related concepts: fuel and friction.
Fuel is the stuff we use to motivate ourselves and the people in our lives. It can be positive or negative.