MY WIFE AND I TOOK a two-week trip to Ireland. We flew to Dublin and stayed at the Hotel Riu Plaza. If you’re ever on the run and need a hiding place, just ask for a room on floor 2C. They’ll never find you because of the strange floor plan. All things considered, the Riu Plaza is a fine hotel at a reasonable price, with a good buffet breakfast to start your day.
After touring Dublin for four days,

IT’S CHALLENGING TO GO from saving during our working years to spending in retirement. Our solution: Use a modified version of the 4% rule.
Financial planner William Bengen was the first person to articulate the 4% rule. He wanted to know how much people could withdraw from their investments each year and still not run out of money. Through extensive back-testing, he found that if folks withdrew 4% in the first year, and thereafter increased this amount each year for inflation,

WHEN I RETIRED, I thought about creating a website and writing about my retirement. I looked into what it would take to build a site and have someone edit my work. The more I thought about it, the more I realized the only ones who would probably visit my site would be my sister, brother-in-law and maybe a few curious friends. It wouldn’t be worth the time, effort and money—especially when HumbleDollar offers all the benefits an unknown and inexperienced writer needs.

GOOGLE THE QUESTION, “How many Americans live on a fixed income?” You won’t find an answer. But we all know “fixed income” is used endlessly to describe the plight of us seniors.

For example, there’s this from the National Council on Aging: “Living on a fixed income generally applies to older adults who are no longer working and collecting a regular paycheck. Instead, they depend mostly or entirely on fixed payments from sources such as Social Security,

LIKE MANY IMMIGRANTS living in the U.S., I regularly return to my hometown to visit family and friends. My trips to Kolkata are usually short and jam-packed, seeing not just contemporaries, but also the older generation, including aunts and uncles, my parents’ friends and my friends’ parents.
My two recent visits—one last fall and the other this spring—were no exception, but I had mixed feelings this time. Most of the older generation are now in their 70s and early 80s,

RECENT HUMBLEDOLLAR articles have addressed issues of aging, including defrauding the elderly, end-of-life considerations and preparing our homes to age in place. It must be the season for worrying about the elderly because I’ve also had their welfare on my mind, thanks to several recent events.
First, a friend’s 93-year-old mother fell down a flight of steps in her home. A faulty handle came loose from a door at the top of a staircase,

AS A RETIREE FOR WHOM Social Security payments are my financial foundation, it’s worrying to hear about a potential cut in benefits 11 years from now—because I’ve seen this movie before.
If Congress does nothing, benefits would drop 23% in 2034. It’s an unfathomable situation, but one that most pundits believe is unlikely. Let’s hope. Thankfully, I feel secure that my state pension—one third of my monthly income—will stay solvent.
More than 40 years ago,

AH, RETIREMENT. You’re blissfully free of the daily grind. If you’ve made plans for this long-awaited milestone, great. What if you haven’t? You may feel out of sync and out of sorts.

I’ve heard it said that, “The capacity to take a fresh look at all things makes a young person out of an old person.” It’s never too late to look anew at the challenges of retirement, while you still have time to resolve them.

GETTING TO RETIREMENT is lazy work for an indexing aficionado. What could be easier than stuffing money every paycheck into an all-in-one target-date index fund? Even building a two- or three-index-fund portfolio takes minimal effort.
Actually retiring, on the other hand, feels like a fulltime job. Who knew that spending money takes more thought than earning, saving and investing it? At age 61, I’m faced with important decisions that I want to get right,

I WROTE MY FIRST article for HumbleDollar in 2017. I’d been retired for nine years and I had plenty of material. I’d made a lot of mistakes with my money over the years.
I was truly a humble writer then, and I still am. My early articles weren’t my best. It was a learning experience. I wrote them using the notes app on my old iPhone 5—an app that was designed for jotting down quick thoughts,

WHEN I WAS FORCED out of my banking job of 36 years, I was age 59 and had enough money to retire comfortably. But I still felt the need to work—because that’s how I’m wired. Working gives me a sense of purpose and makes me happy, but it has to be the right kind of work.
I need work that’s fulfilling and which allows me to help others. I knew myself well enough to realize that,

“HOW MUCH CAN I withdraw from my portfolio each year?” It’s one of the most common questions that retirees ask.
In the past, I’ve talked about the 4% rule, a popular tool for addressing this question. Among the reasons it’s so popular is its simplicity: In the first year of retirement, a retiree withdraws 4% of his or her portfolio, and then that amount increases each year with inflation. If you have a $1 million portfolio,

NOW THAT I’M RETIRED, I have more time to reflect on the larger shape of my life—a tendency that’s lately been strengthened by the fairly common impulse to ponder what to accomplish in the new year.
The disturbing truth: An objective assessment of my life suggests I’m pretty boring. Of course, I’d long known that most other people were boring. But until recently, I hadn’t realized I was one of them.
I also didn’t realize that my capacity to enjoy what looked from the outside like a boring life is,

I EXPECTED TO SPEND early 2017 blogging about my fourth round-the-world trip, which I’d just completed, and planning my next journey. Instead, I spent much of the year on the couch with a heating pad, in between assorted medical appointments, everything from acupuncture to meeting with an infectious disease specialist.

Eventually, I got a definitive diagnosis—I had a form of rheumatoid arthritis—and, in early 2018, an effective medication. But I had been forcibly reminded of something I’d first learned 10 years earlier,

I RECENTLY DISCUSSED Social Security with a friend. After trying to explain the program’s funding, I gave up when his reply was, “The facts are that the Social Security money was misappropriated and there’s no way it can be tracked after all these years. People die before they collect one Social Security check, and others get very few checks. You will never convince me otherwise.”

Yes, that’s the one thing we do agree on: I will indeed never change his mind.