“I’m giving you a love that’s true
And gonna make you love me, too
So get ready, get ready
‘Cause here I come.”
adapted from “Get Ready”
The Temptations, 1966
 
The Motown rhythm and blues quartet may well have divined the arrival of actively managed exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Can’t stop them now, ladies and gentlemen—they’re already here.
Leave it to the frantic asset managers who brought you the load fund and then repackaged it as no load with hidden excessive fees to invent a product to compete with the fabulously successful passive (or index) ETF.

As I do my daily social media surfing I am finding a disturbing trend- anti tax sentiment and one group or another thinking they should be exempt from taxes. We Americans are not among the highest taxed countries and despite the rhetoric, the wealthy do pay the great bulk of taxes.
Seniors seem to be the most vocal looking for tax exemption. Many feel they should be exempt from property taxes and of course, paying taxes on Social Security benefits.

I recently viewed an interview by Christine Benz on YouTube with the finance writer for the Washington Post.
The topic was the difficulty transitioning from saving to using money for retirement income, a topic frequently discussed on HD. The writer said she was getting ready to retire and her husband was already retired. She went on about her own thinking regarding the difficulty of transitioning from saving to spending. 
After a few minutes of the discussion about withdrawal strategies,

IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, before the invention of the printing press, a strategy for remembering information was to build a so-called memory palace. The idea was to associate words with images. Even today, this is how participants in memory competitions can achieve feats like reciting a thousand digits of pi.
Similarly, when it comes to personal finance, I’ve found that certain images can help illustrate important concepts. These are the ones I rely on the most:
1.

As you ponder the years ahead, what’s at the top of your list of concerns? Here are 10 possibilities:

A stock market crash
Deteriorating health
Running out of money
Cuts to Social Security
Being alone
Family financial demands
Falling behind inflation
Long-term-care costs
What’ll happen after your death
Being compelled to move

Or does something else top your list of worries? Let’s hear what’s keeping you up night and what you’re doing to address your concerns.

In 2020, the Silverado fire broke out near our city. At the time, I couldn’t imagine that fire would threaten our home because it would have to burn a large part of our town to get to us. Surely, the firefighters would have it under control before there was mass destruction. Then, the Palisades and Eaton fires this year destroyed thousands of structures fueled by low humidity and strong winds. I now realize we might not have been as safe as I thought we were.

Portfolio Back Test: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/analysis
Calculators: Retirement, How long will my money last, Etc. https://www.saving.org
Compound calculator: https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator
Sector Performance: https://www.barchart.com/stocks/market-performance
https://novelinvestor.com/sector-performance/
Fund overlap: https://www.etfrc.com/index.php
Can you add to my list?

To follow up on a recent post by Steve Abramowitz:
A Morningstar article published 3/11/25 addressed this subject looking at performance over the past 10 years.
It found that less than one out of every four active funds topped the average of their passive rivals over the 10-year period ended December 2024.
Long-term success rates were highest among bond and real estate funds.
The prospective payoff for choosing a winning fund versus the penalty for picking a loser.

IN THE 1990s, Mark Cuban started one of the first internet companies, a video streaming service called Broadcast.com, and later sold it to Yahoo for several billion dollars. With some of the proceeds, he bought the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise and sold that as well, taking home another several billion dollars.
And for 16 seasons, Cuban appeared on the reality TV show Shark Tank, in which entrepreneurs present ideas to a panel of prospective investors.

Some people are enamored with the word tariffs. My new favorite word is assumptions.
I was listening to a podcast today and they told a story of a person who went to two financial planners seeking to determine if his retirement plan was sufficient. The first planner told him he had a 95% chance of success. The second said 75%. Naturally, he went with the first planner, but failed to ask the key question. What assumptions were used in the calculation?

March 10 market sell-off was a good example of two kinds of investing risks: overall market and stock-specific risks.
When you invest in a single stock, you are not only subject to overall market risk, but also risks that are unique to that company.
When you invest in a broad-based index fund, you can minimize both risks by diversifying.
March 10, 2025 Stock Market sell-off:
Dow Jones  –
Dow Jones Industrial Average       -2.08%
S&P 500
Standard &

Need a vacation from our turbulent market? Go first-class with Vanguard’s Total International Stock Index Fund. Why do I need foreign stocks? After all, they’ve drastically underperformed the S&P in the last few years—and let’s face it folks—the world is in turmoil.
The whole idea of plunking some money down on foreign stocks gives many investors the heebie-jeebies. You’re not a victim of home country bias, you’re just being prudent, right? Aren’t almost all foreign economies—especially government-heavy and 

The risk of sensitive personal data leaks is higher than ever, fueling identity theft, phishing attacks, financial account hijacks, and scams. It’s also a time when nation-backed hackers skillfully target critical infrastructure like mobile networks. A major hack revealed last year led the FBI to advise trusting only end-to-end encrypted communications.
No security is foolproof against a determined attacker, but you can make yourself a harder target. Nancy and I have so far avoided major cybercrimes but have faced fraud attempts.

One of the biggest financial questions I wrestle with is when to spend. Saving has never been an issue for me—my thrifty habits make that easy. What I struggle with is knowing when (if ever) to splurge.
For example, I love rock climbing with my kids. It’s a weekly ritual, and I have no hesitation spending money on those experiences because I know I’m investing in memories before they grow up and move on.

It’s now been 18 months since I retired from my primary career as an electrical engineer. In a previous post, I talked about financial moves I’ve made since retiring. What other changes in my life have occurred since retiring from full-time work? Here are a few:
Parks and Recreation.  For over three decades, my opportunity to enjoy the beautiful Pennsylvania autumn season was limited. As an engineer at a nuclear power plant, I was required to support refueling outages every two years for each reactor.