Hello HD community.  I need to vent a bit and hope that one or more of you can relate to my situation and provide some insights.  As I posted on this site several weeks ago, I was terminated the day before my 59th birthday.  After close to 40 years, I suddenly found myself without a job that often required long hours including 3 hours of commuting time.  I was unhappy and unfulfilled in my role and considered quitting,

FOR MUCH OF THE seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European monarchs used a financial instrument known as a tontine to help finance their governments. 
Tontines were first developed in the 1650s by an Italian government worker named Lorenzo Tonti and were similar to annuities: In exchange for a single, lump-sum purchase, tontines offered guaranteed payments for life. But tontines also offered some unique features.
Unlike an annuity, where payments end with the death of the owner,

WHEN A HUSBAND dies, his widow inherits his IRA. Somewhere in the paperwork of the months that follow there is a decision to make, and nobody presents it to her as one. She can take the account as her own, or she can leave it titled as inherited.
Taking it as her own means filling something in. Leaving it means doing nothing, and the IRS tells custodians they may assume that is what she wants.

A $5,000 payment for every adult citizen. Talk about feeling jealous from the other side of the pond. So I thought I’d create a thought experiment to make myself feel better.
On a purely personal level, it’s easy to imagine how that cash might be useful. Perhaps to pay down high-interest debt, top up an emergency fund, or buy a low-cost index tracker. But what happens if we step back and think about the economy as a whole?

My dad characterized his family as poor. My mom’s dad was an engineer on the railroad, and likely an alcoholic. Neither of my parents hit the inheritance lottery, so when they married in 1940, they started out with a blank financial slate.
They met while working at the Hostess Bakery, then owned a small restaurant for a while, with my dad finally getting a job at The Overland, AKA Jeep. After owning a duplex for several years,

In economics, they say there are no free lunches. How about a free breakfast?
Some hotels are quite happy to serve up a continental breakfast or much more. Now that summer vacation is in the rear-view mirror, here’s how I came to find those breakfasts rather satisfying even if they aren’t truly free of cost.
Before we head out on the road, I tend to research hotels and their prices for what I think is the best overall value.

With the anniversary of Jonathan’s death approaching, I’m sharing the remembrance I delivered at his memorial service.
As I speak, I hold both Jonathan and my sister Tory, who passed away this past August, close to my heart. They shared a deep bond, one that distance and time could never weaken. I take comfort in imagining them together again, side by side, watching over us with love.
Jonathan was born at home, as was tradition in 1960s England,

I’ve known since I was a young woman that my siblings and I did not win the genetic lottery when it comes to health, particularly regarding heart disease. My grandfathers and my father all died of heart attacks in their 60s. My dad was the youngest, only 61 when he passed. My brother, now 54, had a quadruple bypass when he was just 47.
Only recently did I become aware that a “bad family history” actually had a specific indicator,

 
Marks recent post on the cost of his daughter’s upcoming wedding made me think about and remember fondly the 2 weddings we “hosted” (sponsored, bankrolled… not sure what the right term is) now 17 and 12 years in our rear view mirror.
Yes, the costs and add ons were outrageous then but we paid for them, survived and even retired since.
Mark, if you think the wedding is expensive wait until the costs of family social gatherings (including your new in-laws),

I’m slightly obsessed with wedding costs at the moment. You might recall I’ve mentioned before that my daughter’s getting married next February. As anyone who’s ever sat on the sharp, pointy, “paying” end of a wedding will tell you, this is not a cheap hobby. But lately I’ve started to wonder if the wedding supplies industry has lost its mind.
My daughter lives in London, marrying at home in Ireland. That means all the long-distance logistics funnel straight through us,

Unlike many of the HD community, I still pack my lunch each weekday and head off to work. There’s a range of reasons for this, but most importantly it keeps my wife sane!
During my 9 to 5, people will buy ride-on mowers somewhere in the range of $10,000 to $25,000. My relatively frugal brain thinks …. “Wow, $15,000 just to cut your grass”. And it got me thinking about how some folks are completely comfortable to spend like that,

There was a time when we compared ourselves to the Joneses.
The Joneses lived across the street.
Maybe they had a newer car, a nicer house or a better vacation. We could see what they had because they were right there. Our world of comparison was relatively small.
Today, the Joneses live everywhere. Facebook. YouTube. Instagram. TikTok.
We see their houses, cars, vacations, restaurants, clothes and lifestyles. And among all those people are some of the wealthiest people on earth.

DEEP DOWN INSIDE, I want to be the richest person in the graveyard. 
I retired at age 62, confident in our financial plan to survive market fluctuations. We saved over 25% of our income for nearly three decades. Perhaps a bit too much, but we lived well and always had sufficient funds to raise a family, maintain our household, and put our children through postgraduate education.
If anything, our retirement spending level is conservative,

RECENTLY, A FELLOW—let’s call him Tom—contacted me with a distressing story of financial fraud. I’ll describe what happened then review steps you might take to prevent this same sort of thing.
Tom first noticed there might be a problem when he spotted a larger-than-average withdrawal from his checking account. The payee was a 529 college savings plan. But because Tom and his wife—let’s call her Jane—have 529 accounts for their children, the transaction almost went unnoticed.

I recently came across another piece of Jonathan’s early writing that I thought his readers might enjoy.
He wrote “The Fear” when he was just 14 years old. It has nothing to do with money or personal finance, but it offers another glimpse of Jonathan long before he became the writer so many of us came to know.
Here it is, exactly as he wrote it.
THE FEAR
He crouched, his shoulders hunched, waiting for the order.