I’m a long-time lurker/reader and a first-time forum poster. I wanted to share something interesting that I recently discovered with Mike Piper’s very helpful Open Social Security (OSS) tool that seems worth sharing.
As discussed numerous times in Humble Dollar articles and posts, the typical optimal timing for a couple filing for Social Security is to have the higher earning spouse wait until 70 and the lower earning spouse to file at 62. While there are definitely exceptions to this,

$244,750 or $87,572 take your pick.
The Vanguard 2024 How America Saves report, says those number are the average and median 401k balances among their 401k participants aged 55 to 64. 
For those folks time is running out.
Is there a valid excuse for that level of savings? Rarely. 
What are people thinking? Consider that many, perhaps most, of these folks have an employer match as well. 
I maintain that we humans have a serious flaw in our ability to plan and act with the future in mind.

I was recently informed that I will be a non-spousal beneficiary of an Inherited Roth IRA.  My understanding is that I will have no required RMDs, but will be required to empty the account by the end of a ten-year period. I will have no need for these funds for that period so I will let them remain untouched until I’m required to take a total withdrawal.  But how should they best be invested over that ten-year certain period?

I retired from my 38-year career as an electrical engineer with the country’s largest operator of nuclear power plants on September 5, 2023. I’d often dreamed about having an enjoyable encore career, and a week after retirement I began working part-time as a Chief Engineer in a consulting firm with a few hundred employees. The job has largely been true to my dream. In the roughly 16 months since I retired from full-time work, my wife Lisa and I have undergone many changes related to our financial lives.

MICHAEL BURRY IS a hedge fund manager who gained fame betting against the housing market in 2008. When that market collapsed, Burry made a fortune, and that cemented his reputation as a market seer. Burry was later portrayed as the central character in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short.
But in the years since, Burry’s predictions haven’t turned out as well. Five years ago, he spooked index-fund investors when he argued that they might have trouble accessing their funds.

This is a thought exercise.
Suppose that you owned a home in Pacific Palisades, or Altadena that was destroyed by one of the wildfires. You have been through a very tough time. The fires are out, and after reporting your loss, you are waiting to hear from the company adjuster. You have a big decision to make……Will you rebuild?
Our little housing area here in the PNW has about 2000 single family homes. The first ones were built in 1976,

I am not an economist and even they often don’t agree, but shouldn’t we be concerned about the Country’s deficit and debt?  
Nobody I know likes taxes, but does debt and growing interest payments present a greater risk? Federal interest payments are over one trillion dollars a year – that is a million, million by the way. 
I sometimes think, can we get to the point where nobody, not even another country wants to invest in the US?

RETIREES ENDLESSLY debate how best to draw down their retirement savings, and yet it all comes down to two simple rules: Don’t spend too much each year, and don’t sell stocks during down markets.
How do we put these two rules into action? Retirees can pick from a host of withdrawal strategies, including the five popular choices listed below. You’d likely fare just fine with any of the five strategies—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pick carefully.

I had read recently in the WSJ about an upcoming change in how brokerage cash is managed by Fidelity.
Once this change is effective, the cash balances held in your core transaction account option will be redeemed, and the proceeds of that redemption will be reinvested in FCASH. Any interest paid in your core transaction account on or after this change is effective will be paid in cash and reinvested in FCASH. Further, any other cash in your account will also be invested in FCASH.

I am sure that we have all been following the current tragedy going on in Los Angeles with the large fires burning there.  One of my friends in the insurance industry told me that he had heard from someone in the reinsurance business that the total insured losses from these fires will be more than Twenty Billion Dollars.  
So, I have been thinking about how a catastrophe of this magnitude could be financed.  In insurance,

Regular HD readers know how old I am, but just for fun how about a trip down memory lane to a very different time. 

When I was a child an ice cream cone was a dime, a slice of pizza was $0.15. There were no malls. Where there are malls today, there were dairy and cattle farms.
When I was really young our milk was delivered by horse and wagon kept cool by blocks of ice. 

STOCKS, BONDS, CASH—and a house owned free and clear. For many, that’s the recipe for a financially successful retirement. Our homes represent a central pillar of middle-class status. With a paid-off mortgage, we have an affordable place to spend our old age.
Yet signing up for decades of house payments has become controversial for its high opportunity cost—what you give up to pay the mortgage. Has a home mortgage, with its long, slow road to payoff,

Given the quality of the articles and the comments on Humble Dollar, I get the sense that people here are (A) much more financially literate than the average person, and (B) consequently, probably more financially secure. Yes – I’m painting with a broad brush regarding those assumptions, but I’ll bet they apply to the vast majority of regular content contributors /consumers on this site.
Given that, and given that I try to keep things simple, my question is this: Which are you more likely to run out of first: Money or time?

MY SON IS A FRESHMAN in high school, and I’m beginning to be more purposeful about his baseball aspirations. But after dropping $85 on a one-hour pitching lesson, I was wondering, was my money well spent?
My search for an answer began with the Netflix series Receiver. I tuned in to see football player George Kittle, a former University of Iowa Hawkeye and bigtime professional wrestling fan. Kittle was kind enough to send autographed memorabilia for a softball fundraiser we had a few years ago.

THERE ARE TWO TYPES of mistake I make: those that are unintentional and those where I should have known what would happen.
After an unintentional mistake, I’m perplexed by what went wrong. I might say to myself “I’ll never do that again” or perhaps “what the heck just happened?” These are genuine mistakes, and I try to learn from them.
By contrast, stupid mistakes are those that I should have known would occur. No matter how many college degrees we have or how many years on the job,