I’m typing this early in the morning from my cousin’s lovely little courtyard garden in London. Everyone is still sleeping, and it’s a beautiful, sunny start to the day, perfect for contemplating and drinking coffee. The thought is playing through my mind: although my life is now different, I don’t feel “retired.”
My days are certainly different and definitely more enjoyable than when I was working, but I still have that sense of agency and direction that filled my time prior to retirement.

Warning: this post is more of a rant and a plea for sympathy than it is thoughtful or informative!
So as you know, I retired on July 1. Or did I? I retired from two university systems and was supposed to get one pension check from each starting August 1. On August 1, I got…nothing. And it was my birthday, too!
I already knew I wouldn’t be getting one of the checks that day; my retirement application had been in limbo for a while (not my fault) and is allegedly being processed.

When you sit down with an annuity salesperson, they’ll probably start with a question that cuts straight to your fears:
“What if you live to 100? Wouldn’t you rather have a guaranteed check every month?”
It sounds comforting — but the truth is, most annuity checks are just your own money coming back to you, with a little interest, minus their cut.
Let’s run some numbers.
Imagine you’re 65 years old with $500,000 in retirement savings.

We often hear that we are a consumer driven economy, with estimates that consumer spending provides as much as 70% of GDP. I read a recent article by Ben Carlson that indicated that, at least for this year, Big Tech’s capital expenditure spending on AI is approaching a similar level. The Bloomberg Magnificent 7 Total Return Index (I had no idea this existed) is up about 39% over the past year, compared to about 19% for the S&P 500.

I’m turning into my mother more and more every day. Back when I was taking care of her, she’d hand me her credit card whenever we went shopping. She’d say, “I’m not qualified to carry this anymore.” She was afraid she’d lose it.
Now I catch myself doing the same thing. When Rachel and I go out, I sometimes give her my wallet to toss in her purse. I’m scared I’ll lose it. Since I’ve retired,

I just realized the only time I see my money is when I withdraw from an ATM. Ye gads, my wealth accumulated over 70 years is all in cyberspace.
I am at the mercy of computer systems and the folks who run them – and maybe someone in a tiny village in Mongolia. Everything hinges on a programing language which are all Greek to me. 
Even my last ATM attempt didn’t go well. There is only one branch of my bank on the Cape.

Since Trump’s return as POTUS everyone is inundated with the news about Trump’s tariffs on just about every country in the world. His reasoning is that other counties have always taken advantage of the USA, and it is time that the USA rights the imbalance of trade.  He has said that he has always believed in tariffs, harking back to before 1913 when income tax was implemented. Of course, any thinking person would know that these tariffs are paid by the importers,

Can you even begin to imagine the confusion and chaos that follows a major disaster, and the difficulty of communicating and coordinating a response? This is a situation where data management, especially with a simple but powerful tool like a spreadsheet, shows its magic.
One very well-known situation that comes to mind is the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Facing a complex amount of data, engineer Richard Feynman and his team had a hunch about the cause.

The first movie I ever saw in a theater was 2001: A Space Odyssey. My sister Carol took me to it when I was six years old. She wasn’t sure I’d like it, but I really loved it—except for a bit of primitive violence in the opening scene that was too intense for my young eyes (and stomach). In particular, the future technology depicted in the film fired my imagination. People in 2001 casually used video telephone calling and iPad-like tablet computers.

On the Fidelity account page that displays my holdings online, I noticed banners saying I could make extra money by lending my securities. I ignored this on the premise of “too good to be true.”  Then I got an email from Fidelity advertising their Fully Paid Lending Program and read what they had to say. By following a link, I was able to get an assessment of each of my accounts telling me which holdings might be eligible and how much they might yield.

The Congressional Budget Office (OMB), the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) all use quite sophisticated forms of a spreadsheet and they all come up with different projections for debt, deficits, GDP and inflation, etc. … because they use different assumptions. 
See, I told you so, those darn spreadsheets will find any answer you like.😱😁

I’ve always had a deep fascination with maths, and recently, thanks to my retirement and the freedom of time it’s given me, I’ve been conducting a bit of “self-educating” on the topic of actuarial science. During this process, I discovered a little-known but fascinating historical character named John Graunt.
He was a 17th-century cloth seller from London who had a very strange hobby. Before starting his workday, he liked to study the Bills of Mortality, which were weekly records compiled by parish clerks,

EARLIER THIS SUMMER, Congress passed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act—GENIUS, for short. This sounds obscure, but it’s a story worth following. The GENIUS Act’s purpose is to promote the growth of—and to regulate—a new type of financial instrument known as a stablecoin.
What’s a stablecoin? It’s similar to a cryptocurrency but differs in one important way: Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have exhibited wide price swings. That makes them interesting to investors but less-than-useful as currencies for everyday transactions.

In a recent Morningstar article, the author pointed out a few things.
“It feels like the economy has gone through three cycles in the past six years. The future looks very messy and uncertain, yet there’s no shortage of pundits that claim to know what will happen tomorrow.
But predicting the short-term direction of the economy has always been that way. ….
The media and investors alike are subject to recency bias: the tendency to place more emphasis on recent news and events than on older circumstances.

President Trump signed an executive order Thursday 8/7 to allow 401(k) participants to invest in private  assets.
The directive instructs the Department of Labor and the Securities and Exchange Commission to draft guidance for defined-contribution plans to incorporate private-market investments, including private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, real estate, and possibly gold and crypto.
Plan sponsors are not required to offer these investments-and I hope they don’t. This is a bad, short-sighted idea.

That’s all we need in 401k plans,