BASIC ECONOMICS teaches us that scarce commodities are more precious. This holds true for metals, rocks, food—and time. Which brings me to today’s topic: Time spent with my daughter and only child has reached the rare and precious stage.
In summer 2023, scarcity was far from my mind. My daughter and I traveled to visit Grandmama—my mother—five hours’ drive south of our home. The visit itself was short and mundane, with just the usual catching up with my mother and tending to her business.

Five non community property states – Alaska, Florida, Kentucky, South Dakota and Tennessee, currently allow married couples to create community property trusts (CPT).
The benefit of a CPT is the potential income tax savings to a surviving spouse via the full ‘step-up’ in basis of a home or other trust assets that occurs when the first spouse dies when assets held in the CPT are later sold.
There are likely a lot of negatives to establishing a CPT including complexity,

Bob’s a little out of place in the 21st century. He does not own a computer. He does possess a recent iPhone, but not the depth of understanding to take full advantage of its capabilities. I have to admit that my iPhone skills aren’t all that deep either.
Bob just found out that his SS number is on the dark web. The notices suggested freezing his credit along with some other ideas to protect himself. He tried doing the work on his smart phone,

801 US billionaires control a record $6.2 trillion in wealth.The bottom 50% of Americans control $3.7 trillion in wealth.
When 801 people control more wealth than half a country’s population, we have a very serious problem. So says a long ago Secretary of Labor on social media post. 
I assume, but can’t verify, these numbers are correct, but in any case I have to ask, what exactly is the problem? Sour grapes?
I attempted to learn the answer using AI,

BY THE 1990s, New York City had been in decline for decades. What brought about the city’s recovery? It was, in part, the broken windows theory.
Picture a vacant building with one window broken. Most people wouldn’t think much of it. But this one broken window sends a signal—and, soon enough, others get broken. How do you reverse this decline? It’s easy: You get rid of the broken windows, and make sure things stay that way.

According to one of my new AI friends, “Anchoring is a cognitive bias in behavioral finance that describes how people use a first piece of information, or ‘anchor’ as a reference point for making decisions. This bias can affect many areas of financial decision-making, including investing, budgeting, and spending.”
In Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely makes the following statement: “…what consumers are willing to pay can easily be manipulated, and this means that consumers don’t in fact have a good handle on their own preferences and the prices they are willing to pay for different goods and experiences.”
What can this trickery look like?

The actual formula for how benefits are determined is somewhat cloaked in mystery (at least to me).  Before I retired in mid 2001 at age 55, I tried to at least take a look at this topic.  The SS website at the time had a calculator which you could use to estimate future benefits.  I think it began with an estimate  based on you continuing  to work at your current annual income level until FRA.  So I already  had an approximation of what might get if I continued to work.

SOME YEARS AGO, an elderly neighbor came to our door, asking for a favor. She was looking for packing tape because she’d sold her television and needed to ship it. She went on to say that the buyer, who she’d found on eBay, was in Nigeria. It was, of course, an obvious scam. But for whatever reason, she couldn’t see it.
Today, scams like this are better known and easier to recognize. But what makes online fraud such a problem is that the crooks are always developing new tricks.

Clearly the answer is maybe. It is a personal decision and I certainly am in no position to advise others or to push one decision or another.
I am more of the “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” philosophy. We took ours at FRA and invested it for several years and we now have a pile of cash in bonds and monthly income (tax-free) to access when necessary.  After over fifteen years reinvesting that income exceeds Connie’s monthly SS benefit. 

It was a halting and sleepless night. The latest Covid vaccine just became available. I got my jab yesterday. I felt great when I turned off the WNBA game at 10:30. I awoke at midnight with aching bones and a fever, and what sleep I managed to get was hit and miss.
Oh I know there are vaccine deniers out there that think that I’m stupid to get the shot, I respect that, but I’ve lost a half dozen friends and clients to the sickness,

WE ALL HATE LOSING—and life, alas, is full of it.
I’m not just talking about investment losses. There are the career successes we never had, the relationships that didn’t pan out and the purchases that fell short of our expectations. Almost all of us, I suspect, can recall countless situations that turned out less gloriously than we’d initially hoped.
Yet, even though my failures pain me, they don’t stop me from getting up each day and trying again.

When I get an article to edit that includes a quote from a famous person, I almost always put the quote into a search engine to make sure the person in question really said it. Often, it was somebody completely different—or, alternatively, it’s not clear who said it.
Consider five examples:

“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” This one is frequently attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes. But it was probably said by the financial analyst A.

HUGE AMOUNTS OF TIME and money are spent planning for retirement. The focus is almost entirely financial—running the numbers, so to speak. How much do I need to save to retire by age 65? Can I retire with my current nest egg? What are the chances I’ll run out of money?
No doubt these are the sorts of questions that keep HumbleDollar readers up at night. And, yes, the numbers are important.

It’s not a political question, but a practical one, especially for us retirees. Let’s see.
We survived a pandemic.
My wife and I have both had expensive health issues in the last four years for which we received excellent care and that were paid in full by Medicare and our Medigap insurance.
Inflation has been up and now going down – but at its highest a lot less troubling than in the 70s and 80s. Social Security was adjusted upward accordingly.

We needed a roll of packing tape, so my first instinct was to order from Amazon. But I didn’t want a three- or six-pack, and I didn’t feel great about the environmental impact of an Amazon truck driving to my house to deliver an overly large cardboard box containing a single roll, even if it was a bargain at less than $4.
Instead, during my afternoon walk, I stopped by the local drugstore to pick up a roll—which was priced at $5.99.