The other evening I looked at the clock for the fifth time: 3:26am. I just couldn’t get to sleep. My mind was like a merry-go-round with different payment obligations occupying the funfair horses: wedding dress 1, wedding dress 2, vacation home property tax, a $10,000 down payment for a wedding reception here, an upcoming $6,000 payment for a summer trip there. They all revolved around my mind, and they all had one thing in common—an end of January payment date.

🤑

For the 2026 AFC Championship game between the Broncos and Patriots in Denver on January 25, 2026, tickets are available from approximately $307 to over $1,000+ depending on seating. What they call VIVID seats are $30,000.

WHO has that kind of money to spend on a football game? Apparently 76,000 people do. Oh yeah, parking is about $50.00

I wonder if this counts as a emergency fund expense😁

I’m sure there’s a few readers on Humble Dollar with a Scottish heritage and you might also be aware that tonight in Scotland, the air will be thick with the scent of haggis and the sound of bagpipes. It’s Burns Night, the annual celebration of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet. While he’s famous for “Auld Lang Syne,” Burns wasn’t just a romantic; he was known as a “Ploughman Poet” who knew the weight of debt and the grind of manual labor.

Every now and then I come across an idea that is immediately both interesting and “feels right”. I recently came across one such idea in a podcast from Tim Hartford, his “Cautionary Tales” episode about Tony Hsieh, the billionaire CEO of Zappos. The concept is “obluiqity”, that the best way to actually reach a goal is often to not focus directly upon that goal.
The term was coined by the economist Professor Sir John Kay, who noticed that often when companies had a focus purely on profit,

Root canal, kaput refrigerator, major car repairs, expensive prescription, 🤑shopping cart dents your car😎
What do the above have in common? They can legitimately be called a financial emergency, and they can happen to retirees as well as anyone else. 
New research from the Center for Retirement Research (How Much Are Emergency Expenses for Retirees and Are They Prepared?) shows that the typical retired household spends 10 percent of income on unexpected expenses in a normal year.

After church service, I said hello to a fellow parishioner. I asked him, how are you doing. He replied, I’m fine, but I wish my friends would stop dying. I said nothing. Upon reflection, I should have replied, well you need to make new friends.
I retired early three and a half years ago at age 57. I spent my days going to the gym (lifting weights) and swimming (getting my cardio). I would say hi to a few folks,

I’ve never seen this in any financial column anywhere:
I’ve told all my kids and anyone else who’ll listen to setup a HELOC on their home “just in case”. You never know when you’ll need cash, like when you’ve lost your job, and if you ARE jobless you won’t be ABLE to get a HELOC.
Notice I didn’t say Home Equity Loan. There is a difference between the two. I won’t go into that here, you can research that yourself.

ACCORDING TO THE World Happiness Report, Finland ranks as the happiest nation in the world, a title it’s held for eight years in a row.
Each time this report is updated, it makes the news for a day or two but then fades. That’s for good reason, I think. As much as Finland might be a nice place, it isn’t necessarily practical to suggest that anyone pick up and move.
The good news, though,

I get a lot of questions from W-2 employees asking, “How can I save money on taxes?”
Many people know that business owners have a lot of flexibility to lower their tax bill, but what about W-2 workers? I’ll skip some of the more “obvious” strategies, like:

401(k)
Backdoor Roth
HSA/FSA

Here are some other ones you might want to think about:
 
Commuter benefits
Some companies offer pre-tax commuter benefits that can be used for transportation expenses such as transit passes or parking.

If you read headlines saying Social Security isn’t going bankrupt or insolvent, they are right, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to be concerned about.
Social Security is headed toward depleting the retirement benefit trust, but as long has there is incoming tax revenue, reduced benefits will be paid.
However, many retirees with feel the impact of an immediate 19-20% reduction in benefits. That will put some into poverty.
According to the latest projections from the Social Security Trustees Report,

Around two years before I retired, I found myself giving a piece of advice to one of my most financially responsible younger employees that felt, quite frankly, absurd: “You need to go out and get a credit card that you don’t want, to charge things to, just to prove you can pay for them.”
She was a great employee, diligent, organized, and disciplined with her money. She lived entirely within her means, used a debit card for everything,

I received an alert from Fidelity today showing new tax issues to consider when planning a Roth conversion.
Essentially, the 2025 tax act added new benefits such as the senior tax deduction and higher limits on SALT deduction. Both have income limits based on MAGI income and thus both could affect the short-term value of a Roth conversion. The car loan interest deduction may also be a factor.
Could there be a short-term loss with a conversion? 

My son-in-law (sil) bought his folks smart watches for Christmas, and linked them to his own smart watch. Monday evening the kids had just finished grocery shopping when my sil’s watch pinged, alerting him to a ‘hard fall’ from his dad’s (Bill) watch. He immediately phoned his mom (Sue), who went into the basement to check on Bill. Bill had suffered a stroke and had been unable to call up to Sue for help. The kids were literally minutes from the house.

A few weeks ago, I saw an embroidered dishtowel that said, “This too will pass. It may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.” I thought to myself, this is how I feel about this month. Normally a festive time, much of our attention was focused on getting my father transitioned from independent to assisted living on short notice and making some other associated changes.
Dad went into the hospital in November. We were already planning to come for a visit in February but decided to get ourselves to the U.S earlier.

Five hours earlier, I’d been drinking coffee in my sunroom, the heat of a log fire lightly toasting my legs as I looked out at the snowy garden and thought about finding a good book and settling in for the day. At the current moment, I was struggling against a 50mph blustery wind with a wind chill of 13 degrees, hailstones beating against my face while I carefully made my way across a frozen landscape toward a 2,790-foot waypoint.