https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2025/04/23/us-bonds-never-risk-free-never-will
The above article, I believe provides interesting food for thought. It speaks to our latent recency bias, that people often make decisions based on how current things will get projected into the future.
I wonder if things get labeled “risk-free” as a selling point, so that we’ll pay more, own more, beyond it’s real value.
Well it’s got me thinking.

Throughout my working years, one thing that disturbed me greatly was the lack of concern even disregard shown by many workers for a spouse, especially a surviving spouse and nearly always a woman.
I remember the “good old days” when the husband’s earnings were his money, his pension was his pension. I remember when workers hid their overtime pay from the wife and when they elected a single life annuity pension because only they earned it,

ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO, Steve Edmundson, manager of the Nevada state pension, became a folk hero in the investment world when The Wall Street Journal profiled him in an article titled, “What Does Nevada’s $35 Billion Fund Manager Do All Day? Nothing.”
It was an exaggeration to say he did “nothing,” but Edmundson definitely did things differently. Since the 1980s, the trend among pension and endowment managers had been to follow in the footsteps of Yale University’s David Swensen.

I have bought books, including My Money Journey by Jonathan Clements, from Harriman House. I received a email today advising me that Harriman House will no longer be selling our books directly to customers from 9th May 2025.
My question is which of the book stores I decide to buy from pay the book authors the best book royalties.
 

Last year I wrote a couple of HD articles called “When and Where?” about my upcoming retirement decisions. The “when” is settled: I’m retiring on July 1 (checks countdown app: 1 month & 28 days!). The “where,” I thought was also settled: We’d stay in the college town (Davis, CA) where we’ve lived for over 30 years, raised our kids, and built a life.
We’re now rethinking the “where,” but in two different ways: (1) Do we stay in Davis,

A detour from personal finance to something more macro:
 
Isn’t it amazing (sarcasm intended) that the price of a barrel of oil has dropped from $ 72 to $ 59 over the past month, yet “shockingly” – sarcasm intended, again – the price of gasoline hasn’t budged in my area. It seems that the oil companies have no problem raising the price of gas IMMEDIATELY, whenever there is a hiccup in the Middle East, but they FORGET how to lower prices when the price of oil goes down !

On my blog today I have a piece on a radical and very disturbing proposal from the CBO to change Social Security. The story originally appeared on MarketWatch.
There is a tinge of politics, so I am not posting it directly, but if Social Security is a concern, you might want to take a look on Quinnscommentary.net
The link goes directly to the article
 

I love going to bed. There’s something comforting about lying in the darkness, wrapped in the sheets and blankets, knowing the wider world is unlikely to intrude. What bad could possibly happen? To me, there’s no safer place.
No doubt others feel differently, finding a sense of security elsewhere—in their SUV safely separated from other drivers, in the hefty balance in their checking account, in their large house fenced off from their neighbors, in their modest monthly financial obligations,

I recently posted a request for comment about the appropriate amount of umbrella insurance one should have. I was hoping to learn of some formula or rule-of-thumb stating that “if your net worth is $X, you should carry $Y of umbrella coverage.” As far as I can tell, there is no such formula or rule.
Many thanks to those who responded.
Mark Eckman wrote that most insurance companies offer a maximum umbrella of $5 million.
Patrick Brennan’s insurance representative regarded $500,000 of liability coverage on his auto policy and a $1 million umbrella as sufficient for his needs.

As I have mentioned, stock in my former employer (PEG)  is one of our largest holdings. I have owned it for 50 years or so. It’s recent financial reports were good, but it missed one estimate by one penny.
That range over the last 52 weeks was $68.29 to $96.52. Other than interest rate concerns I have no idea why. Today the price is $78.79.
Then I read this:
News

Evercore ISI Adjusts Price Target on Public Service Enterprise Group to $92 From $99
MT NEWSWIRES
May-01-2025 11:36 a.m.

On April 30, Kitces posted an comprehensive article regarding the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) describing in detail where the congress is currently at and what steps are necessary to extend and/or change the the TCJA before the current tax law sunsets at the end of 2025.
https://www.kitces.com/blog/tax-cuts-and-jobs-act-tcja-sunset-budget-resolution-reconciliation-salt-cap-qbi-deduction-congress-republication-house-senate-bill/
I agree with the conclusion of the article to currently “wait and see” before taking action until I have a concrete expectation of what the individual income tax rules will look like in 2026.

After several years of RMDs from my rollover IRA, I’ve run out of cash to cover the withdrawal. In 2025 there is enough cash to cover about half the required RMD.
So, where does the rest come from? Which fund(s) do I sell? Here are the funds and their percentage of the account balance. 
NOTE about these funds. There is no rhyme or reason. A logical strategy does not exist. Some resulted from the transfer of the account.

If there is an antonym to HumbleDollar it surely must be in the form of a gift my wife just received from her niece. The gift is a bag. It’s a designer thing. From Paris. I googled the bag, and if you are interested you can buy one of your very own for about $4000.
My wife’s bag is actually a knock off, a counterfeit. The niece only paid 50 bucks. I couldn’t figure out how to post a picture,

This week marks the 50th Anniversary of Vanguard, and through that time, John Bogle’s company has saved investors on the order of One Trillion dollars – yes the total savings approach a huge T, not just B’s!!!
Vanguard serves over 50 million investors, has over $9 Trillion assets under management, and has fund expenses that average a meager $0.07%. We have about half our assets invested through Vanguard, and particularly appreciate that Mr. Bogle’s fee savings have been adapted across large segments of the brokerage industry.

HumbleDollar has hosted a lot of interesting and useful discussion recently about the benefits of buying an annuity to provide guaranteed income to a retiree. Once you have decided to purchase an annuity, you are faced with the complicated choice of what annuity to buy. In 2012, Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research published a paper that posited that delaying your Social Security benefits and using other resources to fund your lifestyle was akin to purchasing an annuity from the Social Security Administration (SSA).