I perhaps have a contrarian view of the utility of some higher education courses. This opinion has developed over the last 20 years or so, talking and interacting with younger staff I employed within my past business. Degree courses seem to have somewhat transformed into a business model, more influenced by volume over suitability of the course and proper weight being given to the future earning and retirement outcome expectations the course will achieve.
To use a fishing analogy,

There are an ever increasing number of ETFs available to investors.  There is also the “tokenization” of stocks, but that is for another post.
Jason Zweig addresses the proliferation of ETFs over at the Wall Street Journal:
“deworsification: cluttering a portfolio with too many investments.
I think many investors should worry instead about deversification…..That’s the opposite of diversification. Rather than spreading your bets, you concentrate them—and that can be dangerous.”
Over at another forum there has been a running debate about how many stocks to own to achieve diversification.

I have a grievance this morning. Strange as it may seem this involves a chicken and bacon burger, one of my favourite restaurants, the global market economy and golf. At first glance they seem odd bedfellows don’t you think?
Yesterday afternoon I was feeling peckish and decided to indulge myself with a chicken burger. Whilst about to order the offending item I was alarmed to discover the price had increased by 125% in a matter of a week.

Before I say what it is, let’s consider all the things Americans don’t like about health care – cost, availability, insurance companies, third-party involvement, high deductibles, premiums, etc.
🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 
NOW, the challenge.
Tell us why you will or will not support a form of Medicare for All replacing all the payment systems currently in place, public, employer and private plans to be funded by a combination of employer and individual taxes, income based premiums and cost sharing at the point of service. 

Today Morningstar released a very interesting article exploring how a 60/40 portfolio diversification limits losses during market declines. Of note is the fact that due to the 2022 bond market swoon this portfolio has still not fully recovered.
You can read the article here:
150 Years of Stock and Bond Market Crashes: How the 60/40 Portfolio Held Up | Morningstar
Here are some highlights:
There have been 19 bear markets for stocks and three bear markets for bonds over the past 150 years—that is,

Credit cards certainly help drive our economy and drive some people into financial ruin. 
As I stated more than once, my philosophy of personal finance is simply save first, spend the rest but never carry a credit card balance. 
My American Express card was recently cancelled by Amx. It was a business card and they said since I no longer ran a business I couldn’t keep it. Even though I had the card since 1986, I had to apply for a new one which I did and was approved virtually instantly.

I’ve always had a bit of a dark side, one I never really tried to control and certainly didn’t think of as a problem. This was especially true when I ran my own business. Through sheer effort and hard work, that business threw off a lot of free cash flow. With all that cash sloshing around, I christened my peculiar habit: Random Spontaneous Generosity (RSG).
RSG would manifest in unpredictable ways, at random times. For instance,

We welcomed guests to stay over at our holiday home yesterday. It was a lovely sunny day in the low 80’s and we spent our time at the beach. They’re a young couple we’re very close to who are getting married next week. We are looking forward to attending their wedding. They are a very sensible duo in their late twenties with good jobs, they also managed to get on the property ladder through their own hard work.

A couple weeks ago, the team I was part of was eliminated.  My boss- and his boss-were also laid off, along with about 10 of us.  The industry is facing significant headwinds, and our organization was no exception.
This is the first time in my life I’ve been laid off, and I never imagined finding myself in this situation. I’ve always believed in strong work ethic in creating and delivering value to both the organization and the customer.

I bumped into a friend a few months ago. I knew he’d retired about two years prior, and since I was just on the cusp of doing so, I steered the conversation toward how he was enjoying himself.
As we talked, he revealed he was pretty stressed out and far too busy to enjoy himself. Surprised by this confession, I pressed him for the reason.
It turns out, being good with his hands, he had always fancied having a go at picture framing and purchased some equipment for this endeavor.

OVER THE JULY FOURTH weekend, a friend asked me what I thought about the new financial instrument known as a “stock token.” Developed by the online broker Robinhood, a stock token is designed for investors to buy stakes in private companies such as OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT. It’s a novel concept because private company investments are typically inaccessible to individual investors.
Despite the appeal, I urged caution. Why? These tokens may not perform as expected because they aren’t the same as actual equity in a company.

I noticed that in the post by Dick Quinn – beyond-fees-is-using-a-financial-advisor-advisable , couple of folks had mentioned having flat-fee advisors. I see that it is lot easier to find advisors that charge a % of the assets under management but one that I am not fond of.
Have read mixed reviews about FACET, have found two sites that have flat-fee FAs

https://www.flatfeeadvisors.org/
https://saragrillo.com/2022/03/14/flat-fee-financial-advisors/

Are there other resources that one can look up?
Part of the “holistic”

This has nothing to do with finance, but I thought it was highly fascinating and that you would find it interesting.
Thinking about AI and LLMs after authoring one of the articles and reading the other, I copied four of my Humble Dollar posts into Google Gemini and asked for a profile of the author. It was unbelievably accurate about my education, lifestyle, age, lifestyle choices, financial standing and general personality type and outlook on life… really spooky and slightly alarming.

LAST YEAR, I fouled up my Pennsylvania EZ Pass account. I bought a used car in Maine and forgot to add it to my EZ Pass account. Much later, when I got back up to Maine this Memorial Day, my post office box was bulging with dunning notices from Pennsylvania, New York, Maine and Delaware.
For most of a year, I had driven from Washington D.C. to Maine blissfully unaware that my EZ Pass transponder wasn’t paying a cent.

On July 4th, the president signed a significant new tax and spending bill into law. The text of the bill runs to almost 900 pages and affects nearly every corner of the tax code, including personal, business and estate tax rules.
Below I summarize the provisions I see as most relevant to financial planning. It’s important to note that many of the provisions are retroactive to the beginning of 2025.
The formal name of the law is the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and it is,