I’M FASCINATED BY frugality. Being frugal is not the same as being cheap, though—based on what I read about some people who claim frugality—it sounds to me like they are indeed being cheap.

We’re told frugality adds to the quality of life, that it creates a less stressful, less materialistic existence. Being frugal is fine, but living frugally because it’s a necessity—especially in retirement—not so much. Is a minimalist lifestyle all that satisfying?

I think being frugal is a misnomer.

THE LATE JOHN BOGLE, in his book Enough, tells a wonderful story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. At a dinner party, Vonnegut asks Heller what it was like knowing that another guest made more in a day than Heller had ever made from his bestselling book Catch-22. Heller replied that he had something that the other guest would never have—enough.
I had forgotten my own story of enough,

WILL YOU BE WORKING with a CPA to file your tax return? For eight years, I was one of the folks on the other side of this annual ordeal. Want to make life easier both for yourself and for us green-shade types? Here are 22 insights:

1. Time is money. CPAs sell expertise by the hour. They track everything they do, all day long, in six-minute increments—or perhaps 15. For the business to survive,

THERE’S A SCENE in Three Days of the Condor, that very ’70s, America-in-decline movie, where the CIA is the bad guy and Robert Redford’s character is in danger of imminent extinction.
Max von Sydow’s character Joubert—the Alsatian assassin—warns him that he has “not much future.” Then he calmly describes how the CIA will come for him.
“It will happen this way,” Joubert says. “You may be walking. Maybe the first sunny day of the spring.

OVER THE PAST FEW months, we’ve been inundated with articles touting Series I savings bonds and their 7.12% yield. More than a few HumbleDollarers have written about them, including here, here, here and here. It’s gotten so bad that, if I hear one more mention of Series I bonds, I’m going to scream.
Sure, at first glance, 7% sounds enticing. But after a detailed review, it all sounds like a marketing pitch worthy of Uncle Ron Popeil rather than Uncle Sam.

NEW YEAR, NEW TRENDS. That theme continues to play out. So far in 2022, the U.S. stock market, as measured by Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (symbol: VTI), is down 9.1%. Brighter conditions are found overseas, despite today’s geopolitical risks. Vanguard FTSE Developed Markets ETF (VEA) is down just 4.3% year-to-date, while Vanguard FTSE Emerging Markets ETF (VWO) is up 0.5%.
A sore spot for international investors has been small-cap stocks. Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-U.S.

THERE’S A GROUP of high-income earners who sit just below the billionaire business founders, the C-level suite set and the heiress crowd. Matthew Stewart, in his new book The 9.9 Percent, labels them the “new aristocracy.” Author Richard V. Reeves famously called them “dream hoarders” in his book of the same name.
By all objective criteria, this high-income crowd should be thrilled with their financial gains over the past three years.

VIEW ANY NUMBER of YouTube videos on retirement planning, and you’ll find advice on how much you need to save each month, how to invest, how much to accumulate and how to generate retirement income. The same is true for the experts who write blogs.
All this information relates to the retiree. Rarely—actually never—have I seen a discussion about survivor benefits. Even the 4% rule uses an assumed 30-year retirement period, apparently ignoring the possibility that retirement income needs to last over two lifetimes that may extend beyond 30 years,

SOMEONE ASKED ME last week about a popular and frequently cited market statistic. It goes like this: The U.S. stock market has historically delivered an average annual return of 10%. But if an investor had missed just the five best days over the past 30 years, that return would have been cut to 8.6%. If the investor had missed the 15 best days, the return would have been reduced even further, to 6.5%. Missing the best 25 days out of that 30-year period would have chopped an investor’s return in half—to just 4.9%.

WHAT IF WE MADE IT easier to delay Social Security, so more retirees ended up with a larger monthly check?
Last year, I wrote about a study from Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research (CRR) that detailed the value in claiming Social Security later. A new CRR paper examines the topic further.
The paper describes a survey of those nearing retirement. The goal: to gauge interest in using a 401(k) “bridge” to generate income while folks delayed claiming Social Security.

CATHIE WOOD’S ARK Innovation ETF was the toast of the investing town in 2020 and early 2021. The star portfolio manager picked one winning stock after another—stocks that benefited as much of the world shifted to work-from-anywhere.
Like so many other hot funds, her time in the sun didn’t last. After Wood’s flagship ARK fund returned more than 150% in 2020, plus another 25% to start 2021, the bubble finally popped last February. The peak-to-trough decline was 57.6% through Jan.

EVERY FALL AT LAW schools across America, a process occurs called on-campus interviewing, or OCI, as it’s commonly known. The more elite the law school, the more prestigious the crop of law firms that visit, each offering the promise of large salaries to brilliant, mostly young minds. Only students with excellent grades or editorial positions on the school’s law review are selected to interview for summer internships.
Like nearly all graduate schools, law school comes with an expensive price tag,

TAX SEASON IS HERE. You’ve probably received your W-2 and, if they haven’t arrived already, your investment tax forms may be just days away. If you’re like me, your email inbox has been inundated with tax-filing services pitching their latest deal. I’m no expert on which tax-prep provider is best, but each year I check this page for reviews of the major sites.
I have two other tips that might save you a few bucks.

WHEN I WAS IN THE Navy, the checklist was a way of life. Everything from a radiation leak to starting an air compressor required one. In emergency situations like flooding, you were expected to take memorized “immediate actions,” and then use a checklist to ensure all the actions were accomplished. For more routine procedures, you would follow the checklist line by line—deviations were not allowed.
While this wasn’t conducive to a creative working environment,

IT SEEMS LIKE EVERY month or so, one of our kids—and, for the married ones, that includes spouse and little ones—is on vacation. A week or two in Cabo or Cozumel, a road trip out west, or a jaunt to some other interesting destination is commonplace. How is this possible? One of the reasons, I believe, is because they don’t work for themselves.
Instead, they work for big institutions, such as corporations, universities, school districts and large nonprofits.