Perhaps what we should be debating is which is the most important line on the tax return. I can tell you that most would say line 34, “this is the amount you overpaid, or line 37, “this is the amount you owe. I contend line 24 matters most, “this is your total tax”. Rarely, and I mean well under 1% of the time, did a client ask me how much tax they paid. As a matter of fact,

Key Medicare benefits are being stripped away, and patient care is being handed over to profit-driven corporations.

On June 25, 2025, in an unprecedented move, Dr. Mehmet Oz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), announced that Original Medicare will now require prior authorization for a list of 17 services.
This marks a major shift—and a serious rollback of a key protection retirees have relied on for decades.
What’s Changing?

There is something of a tradition when family is at our place on Cape Cod and it puzzles me. Actually it is picture puzzles. 
A card table is set up and the puzzle pieces laid out. The puzzle is assembled on the three foot square coffee table. The puzzles are 1,000 pieces or more and are photographs of houses, woods, streams with many of the pieces looking very much alike. I guess that why it’s a puzzle.

I belong to a club I never wanted to join: women who have outlived their husbands. Like me, millions of baby boomer women, and now Gen Xers too, will face life without their long-term partner.
Thankfully, today’s widows have more choices than our great-grandmothers did. Some of us embrace living solo. Others are surprised to find companionship again, sometimes even love. That next chapter can be sweet, but it’s also financially complex.
I know this firsthand.

A recent article by Michael Finke in Think Advisor discusses some anecdotal evidence he has been hearing about recent trends in SS claiming. Worry about a reduction in benefits apparently is leading some retirees to claim their benefits earlier than might be expected given their wealth.  I have to admit that this year’s discussions around SS funding and administration have given me pause.
Two things about the article. It was published in a professional journal targeting financial  advisors.

Sometimes, the big picture that frames your life can just happen without much thought, mostly by luck. I guess not everyone who has good fortune like this will admit anything other than hard work and true grit got them to where they are now. Take myself; I claim some credit for what I’ve achieved, but I had a lot of good tailwinds that certainly helped immensely.
I was part of the last UK generation eligible for free higher education.

The recent tax legislation triggered a thought. Do taxpayers understand the difference between their marginal tax rate and effective tax rate?
I see the focus on the tax on the next dollar earned – marginal tax rate as opposed to what I view as actually mattering – the effective tax rate. 
There is a big difference between their two. Are seniors overestimating the net impact on the new $6,000 deduction? 
My associate Gemini explains it like this:

Marginal rate is the speed limit on each segment of a road.

ON DEC. 31, 1759, Arthur Guinness signed a lease to take over a defunct brewery in Dublin. What was unusual was the lease’s term: 9,000 years.
It didn’t take long before Guinness and his landlord both realized they’d made a mistake and agreed to end the lease. Guinness needed more space, and the landlord realized he’d neglected to account for inflation. The rent was fixed at £45 annually for the entire 9,000 years.
The Guinness case is notable because it’s so extreme,

I have been following the passage of the new bill signed today. I thought the deduction was 6K for couples, but it is per person. Here is information on the specifics from an AI source:
The (bill) includes a significant tax break for older Americans, specifically a new $6,000 “bonus” deduction for those 65 and older. This deduction is targeted at those with modified adjusted gross incomes up to $75,000 for individual filers and $150,000 for joint filers.

So, we have signed the contracts. We have advised all our staff. We are talking to our customers every day about the sale, about the new owners and how it will be “business as usual”, how they can expect the same service that they have been used to.
We have already received lots of really positive and quite humbling feedback from our customers. Even those that could be challenging at times have been really generous in their praise and thanks.

We hear a lot of doom and gloom about inflation these days.  Soaring prices,  the sigh every time we fill up the tank. On my side of the pond inflation seems to be receding as a major problem. Fingers crossed it stays in its box and doesn’t jack in the box back out. But what if I told you that inflation is actually a benevolent force?
I don’t want to belittle the genuine hardship that the recent bout of inflation has caused to many families around the world but I was just thinking….

I observe the national state of taxes, deficit spending, debt and related interest payments and wonder, is the American view of this fiscal management a reflection of the personal finance habits of too many of us? 
As a nation we don’t live within our means for sure, largely ignore interest payments, and apparently don’t think about our financial future or who will pay the bills some day.
As individuals, that scenario seems to reflect the lifestyle of too many Americans.

Most of the arguments against investing in individual stocks boil down to investors not being able to beat the market, therefore shouldn’t even try, and instead buy low-cost index funds. The fact that “you (or any money manager) can’t consistently beat the market” was even confirmed by the world’s greatest money manager, Ken Fisher, in a recent article of mine.
At this point, it will usually be mentioned that buying and selling individual stocks results in increased (and earlier) taxes due to having to pay tax on your capital gains when you sell the stock.

As I’ve talked about recently I’m currently at my holiday home but strangely I’m thinking about my other house. I wanted to share something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, a kind of internal debate, I’m good at them! My wife, Suzie and I are in our late 50s, and we’ve reached a point where we feel it’s starting to feel important to get ahead of the curve and plan for our future living situation,

This may sound crazy to most readers here, but as a 45 year-old, until 2022 I had never lived in, let along invested in, a rising interest rate environment.
This is, of course, owing to the enduring bond bull market from 1981-2022 (RIP).  Obviously, we all know rates rose in 2022 and have held steady for a bit.  They are now mostly in the 4% range depending on duration.
As a young investor in the 2010s and early 20s,