My dad characterized his family as poor. My mom’s dad was an engineer on the railroad, and likely an alcoholic. Neither of my parents hit the inheritance lottery, so when they married in 1940, they started out with a blank financial slate.
They met while working at the Hostess Bakery, then owned a small restaurant for a while, with my dad finally getting a job at The Overland, AKA Jeep. After owning a duplex for several years,

In economics, they say there are no free lunches. How about a free breakfast?
Some hotels are quite happy to serve up a continental breakfast or much more. Now that summer vacation is in the rear-view mirror, here’s how I came to find those breakfasts rather satisfying even if they aren’t truly free of cost.
Before we head out on the road, I tend to research hotels and their prices for what I think is the best overall value.

With the anniversary of Jonathan’s death approaching, I’m sharing the remembrance I delivered at his memorial service.
As I speak, I hold both Jonathan and my sister Tory, who passed away this past August, close to my heart. They shared a deep bond, one that distance and time could never weaken. I take comfort in imagining them together again, side by side, watching over us with love.
Jonathan was born at home, as was tradition in 1960s England,

I’ve known since I was a young woman that my siblings and I did not win the genetic lottery when it comes to health, particularly regarding heart disease. My grandfathers and my father all died of heart attacks in their 60s. My dad was the youngest, only 61 when he passed. My brother, now 54, had a quadruple bypass when he was just 47.
Only recently did I become aware that a “bad family history” actually had a specific indicator,

 
Marks recent post on the cost of his daughter’s upcoming wedding made me think about and remember fondly the 2 weddings we “hosted” (sponsored, bankrolled… not sure what the right term is) now 17 and 12 years in our rear view mirror.
Yes, the costs and add ons were outrageous then but we paid for them, survived and even retired since.
Mark, if you think the wedding is expensive wait until the costs of family social gatherings (including your new in-laws),

I’m slightly obsessed with wedding costs at the moment. You might recall I’ve mentioned before that my daughter’s getting married next February. As anyone who’s ever sat on the sharp, pointy, “paying” end of a wedding will tell you, this is not a cheap hobby. But lately I’ve started to wonder if the wedding supplies industry has lost its mind.
My daughter lives in London, marrying at home in Ireland. That means all the long-distance logistics funnel straight through us,

Unlike many of the HD community, I still pack my lunch each weekday and head off to work. There’s a range of reasons for this, but most importantly it keeps my wife sane!
During my 9 to 5, people will buy ride-on mowers somewhere in the range of $10,000 to $25,000. My relatively frugal brain thinks …. “Wow, $15,000 just to cut your grass”. And it got me thinking about how some folks are completely comfortable to spend like that,

There was a time when we compared ourselves to the Joneses.
The Joneses lived across the street.
Maybe they had a newer car, a nicer house or a better vacation. We could see what they had because they were right there. Our world of comparison was relatively small.
Today, the Joneses live everywhere. Facebook. YouTube. Instagram. TikTok.
We see their houses, cars, vacations, restaurants, clothes and lifestyles. And among all those people are some of the wealthiest people on earth.

DEEP DOWN INSIDE, I want to be the richest person in the graveyard. 
I retired at age 62, confident in our financial plan to survive market fluctuations. We saved over 25% of our income for nearly three decades. Perhaps a bit too much, but we lived well and always had sufficient funds to raise a family, maintain our household, and put our children through postgraduate education.
If anything, our retirement spending level is conservative,

RECENTLY, A FELLOW—let’s call him Tom—contacted me with a distressing story of financial fraud. I’ll describe what happened then review steps you might take to prevent this same sort of thing.
Tom first noticed there might be a problem when he spotted a larger-than-average withdrawal from his checking account. The payee was a 529 college savings plan. But because Tom and his wife—let’s call her Jane—have 529 accounts for their children, the transaction almost went unnoticed.

I recently came across another piece of Jonathan’s early writing that I thought his readers might enjoy.
He wrote “The Fear” when he was just 14 years old. It has nothing to do with money or personal finance, but it offers another glimpse of Jonathan long before he became the writer so many of us came to know.
Here it is, exactly as he wrote it.
THE FEAR
He crouched, his shoulders hunched, waiting for the order.

Financial success is driven by good savings habits—and for that we need low fixed living costs.
I spent 20 years in a house that was far less expensive than I could afford. This isn’t a strategy I recommend, because I never much liked the house. Still, it came with a huge silver lining: The modest monthly house payments allowed me to save great gobs of money.
My sense is that most folks aren’t naturally inclined to save.

My wife Suzie has been organising a hen party for our daughter, nothing spectacular, just a group of girls heading into the big smoke for a candle-making course, followed by dinner and a cocktail bar. Because there were quite a few people attending, all three venues required small deposits, which my wife happily paid. All told, the combined deposit came to around $100 per person.
Most of the group are around our daughter’s age: very late twenties through to mid-thirties.

Geoffrey Schmidt is a CPA and retirement planning expert with a YouTube channel called HolySchmidt. 
In a recent video “The Map is Wrong” he analyzed the five best and worst states to retire and challenged the idea that the best choice was states with no income tax. He based his analysis on median home values and retiree incomes. 
He used the estimated combined spending on property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes and property insurance.  When added together the results showed no income tax is sometimes a misleading criteria,

Yesterday, I got an email from State Farm asking me to choose a payment method for my dividend. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was a scam, but it’s legit.
Apparently, State Farm is issuing a one-time $5 billion cashback dividend to customers who had a qualifying auto policy in 2025, with percentages ranging from 4% to 10%.
If you received an email with a Dividend ID and PIN, you can easily check how much you can get.