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,

I’ve been dabbling in AI.  Began using precursor “Expert Systems” about 20 years ago, but the new apps are more generalized and interesting. I’m aware of the limitations and anyone who wants to use something like Gemini or ChatGPT should also be aware. They can (and do) generate false information with apparent confidence. This can deceive users. Such disinformation has been given the name “hallucination” or “confabulation” by AI experts. Interesting names for inaccuracy.
However, using precise prompts seems to improve the response.

Suzie and I had a delicious meal last night – slow-roasted chicken, stacked on a bed of buttery Irish champ with a Bailey’s Cream-infused peppercorn sauce, very tasty! Top-quality restaurant fare. But the thing was, I made it from scratch.
I’ve always, for as long as I can remember, had a passion for cooking. It’s one of my favourite activities and brings me immense personal satisfaction seeing people enjoy the food I’ve created. Now that I am retired,

The Washington Post has an article on yet another effort to cut taxes for the wealthy. This time it is stepping up the cost basis for capital gains to account for inflation. You’d think they’d at least wait for the dust to settle from the recent give away.
I don’t know whether the article is behind the pay wall, it’s not giving me an option to share it so I did a straight copy.

I’ve been thinking about family dynamics and how they affect financial decisions, and this will be the first of several posts on various applications of this topic.
This first one is a hard one to talk about: It’s family estrangement, specifically a family member(s) going “no contact” with or otherwise walking away from other family member(s). It’s not as unusual as you might think–there is growing research on the topic, and some estimate that more than 30% of American families have an estranged family member.

There was a discussion recently on HD about the costs/benefit of a financial advisor.
I have more questions. Who needs a financial advisor and why? I have looked up the pros and cons and certainly a case can be made for using an advisor, but not always. 
I have never used an advisor, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be better off if I did.  I asked at Fidelity, but the fee percentage – I think it was 1% a few years ago –