THE ABOVE HEADLINE doesn’t refer to Afghanistan. Even that 20-year struggle has finally come to an end. This is about an even more relentless campaign—against the cable company. In my case, that means Spectrum, part of Charter Communications.
The first question is, why haven’t I cut the cord? The short answer: My wife loves sports on TV and cable seems to be the only way to get all her favorites.
As cable victims know,

SOCIAL SECURITY benefits are fairly modest—the average retiree receives $1,555 per month or $18,660 a year—but they’re a vital source of retirement income for countless retirees. Today’s burning question: How can we shore up the program’s finances?
It’s estimated that Social Security provides some 30% of the income for the elderly and that nearly nine out of 10 people age 65 and older receive benefits. Social Security is even more important for women, 42% of whom rely on it for half or more of their income.

“DEAR OHIOAN: According to our records, you have applied for and/or received pandemic unemployment benefits.” As I haven’t been to Ohio in more than 20 years, I knew something was amiss. It was highly likely I was the victim of identify fraud. After some investigation, I found out someone had been receiving unemployment benefits in my name since March 2021.
I’m hardly the only person victimized by this fraud. In a recent report, Ohio Auditor Keith Faber estimated that $3.8 billion in fraudulent unemployment payments and overpayments had been made since March 2020.

WANT THE LAST WORD? Write your own obituary.
It’s the final opportunity to tell the world you were a great person and that others should regret never having known you. You can write what you want because, in most newspapers, the obituaries are essentially paid ads—and pricey, to boot. No one is going to challenge your obituary’s veracity, at least not publicly, unless it’s outrageous.
Was she really well liked by everyone she met?

IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE writing about gifts when the perfect essay on the topic already exists. I can’t improve on Emerson’s sentiment that expensive but impersonal presents are not gifts but “apologies for gifts” or that the true gift is “a portion of thyself.”
Still, I’m dismayed by the reaction to news that supply chain woes may negatively affect gift availability this holiday season. Naturally, retailers are worried. Some media outlets are reporting the lack of toys and other gifts in apocalyptic fashion,

OCTOBER’S EMPLOYMENT report was impressive: 531,000 jobs were created, beating economists’ expectations. The unemployment rate ticked down to 4.6%, while average hourly earnings increased a solid 0.4% from September.
Across the board, the data from the U.S. labor market show the economy is humming along, with no signs of stagflation. I like to dig into the wage numbers to see which segments of the workforce are enjoying the best pay increases. Leisure and hospitality pay rose the most,

INFLATION IS IN the news and at the gas pump. We see it in smaller product sizes and empty store shelves. According to Google Trends, a record number of people have searched the term “inflation” this year. Inflation has even made its way into Halloween spoofs.
While some have suggested that investors are overreacting, I’m not so sure. If higher inflation is here to stay, the implications for both Wall Street and Main Street are profound.

WALL STREET JOURNAL personal finance columnist Jason Zweig recently made this observation: Getting rich isn’t the hard part, he said. “Staying rich is the hard part.”

On the surface, staying rich might seem easy. After all, you simply need to build a balanced portfolio and then withdraw from it at a reasonable rate. Sure, there are stories about lottery winners and professional athletes going broke. But you might assume that phenomenon—having a hard time staying rich—is limited to such extreme cases.

HEALTH SAVINGS accounts are frequently praised on HumbleDollar—with good reason. A lesser-known benefit: Health savings accounts, or HSAs, can be a boon for new employees, thanks to the last-month rule.
What’s that? If you have a qualifying high deductible health plan (HDHP) as of Dec. 1, you’re eligible to make a full-year HSA contribution, even if you only just bought an HDHP. On top of that, if you continue HDHP coverage,

I’D ALWAYS THOUGHT that saints were long-ago martyrs, those people shown in paintings in the Louvre or the Prado.
That’s why I was surprised to find a plaque honoring a 20th century saint at the church I attend in Newcastle, Maine. The saint, Frances Perkins, had worshipped at that very church, St. Andrew’s Episcopal, until her death in 1965.
Who was Frances Perkins? My friends often draw a blank at the name, although she helped shape our lives.

YIELDS ON SAFE investments—namely Treasurys, certificates of deposit, savings accounts and money market funds—are in the basement. Yes, Series I savings bonds currently offer an annualized 7.12%. But that rate is only guaranteed for six months, plus regular purchases are limited to $10,000 a year.

“Where can I go for yield?” goes the cry heard throughout the land. Nowhere, of course. As put by money manager Raymond DeVoe Jr., “More money has been lost reaching for yield than at the point of a gun.”

Still,

IF YOU WANT PEOPLE to do something, make it easy. That’s the big idea behind a nudge, which helps people do the right thing for themselves. It turns out that nudge has an evil twin, called sludge. Sludge makes the right thing harder to do. If you look around, sludge is everywhere.
“If you cannot get financial aid without filling out a twenty-page form, then you have been subjected to sludge,” behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein write in the new “final” edition of their bestselling book Nudge.

WHAT SEEMS OBVIOUS isn’t always true. Here are seven examples from the financial world:

Just because an investment has performed well doesn’t mean that’s a good guide to the future. This is usually mentioned with regard to stocks. But today, my bigger concern is folks who are extrapolating past bond fund returns. Their strong past performance was driven by a huge drop in interest rates over the past four decades—something that can’t be repeated starting from 2021’s tiny yields.

DURING THE PANDEMIC, I’ve taken to reading the obituaries. I especially enjoy the stories about people who lived a long time. What I’ve found is that many of them volunteered in some fashion or continued to work until late in life. Most didn’t do it because of the money. They did it because it gave them a sense of purpose.
I’ve come to believe that doing work that we love and have a passion for—that’s meaningful to us—serves as our own personal “fountain of youth.”
Ask yourself: Why do rich people,

GOT SOMETHING THAT needs repairing? Faced with the increasing specialization of people’s knowledge, ever-growing technical complexity and our perennial lack of time, it’s often tempting to just call in an expert or even buy a replacement.
But repairs can be costly, which is why we’re told to get multiple bids. One of the “bid” options I always check out: fixing it myself with the guidance of that repository of collective step-by-step knowhow, YouTube. Perhaps not since the Great Library of Alexandria has so much expertise been collected in one spot—along,