I have a few hundred pounds of out-of-circulation notes. The Bank of England moved from paper to polymer notes a few years ago, and I had forgotten about some paper notes at the bottom of our safe. By the time I rediscovered them, they were no longer legal tender, and the period to exchange them at normal banks had ended.
Knowing I was flying to London, I decided to bring them with me and present myself at the Bank of England headquarters to exchange them for crisp,

Almost half of working-age adults are not paying into a private or workplace pension, the government revealed this week. This headline caught my attention while browsing the BBC News website the other day, and it really made me think!
This is an awful lot of people imperiling their future lives, and with the UK’s pension auto-enrollment system, now in its tenth year of operation, seeming to be pretty successful, it would suggest people are actively going out of their way to opt out of the system.

The best financial advice I know is “live on less than you earn and save the difference.” But what if there’s no daylight between what you earn and what you spend?
Many of us confront this problem because of four scary expenses: housing, healthcare, student loans and child care. Take housing alone. By my calculations, it would take a six-figure income to buy a $435,300 home, which is the median cost of a U.S. home today according to the National Association of Realtors.* The median U.S.

Saving money is the greatest of the financial virtues—and, for much of my adult life, I could hardly have been more virtuous.
This frugality didn’t come naturally. I wasn’t a “born saver.” Rather, I had no choice. Within a few years of graduating university, I found myself married to a PhD student and raising a family in one of the world’s most expensive urban areas. On my junior reporter’s salary, scrimping and saving were the only options.

Just weeks into my retirement, while sitting on a beach beside the Giant’s Causeway on Ireland’s north coast, a profound sense of gratitude washed over me. It was for a person whose name I couldn’t recall and a face I’d forgotten.
Forty years prior, in my very first job, I served a customer who turned out to be a pension salesman. To make a long story short, he persuaded an 18-year-old me to open a personal pension,

Oh my, I’m beginning to think that some of the articles I find on the internet aren’t really news at all. Below is one I clicked on today. It reminds me of those free dinners that Mike Flack recently posted about. I also think it ties in well with Dave Lancaster’s post about calculating net worth. 
The article didn’t define how it calculated net worth. I assume it includes checking and savings, IRAs and similar accounts,

Here is an interesting article I just read on my weekly Boldin (previously New Retirement) newsletter.

For more years than I remember I have saved my pocket change. Every day I put it in a tray on my dresser. When it overflows, Connie bags it and eventually rolls it for deposit. That happens at around $80.00.
I never pass a penny on the ground. In fact, on occasion I dig one out of the soft tar. Some coins are so mangled it’s hard to tell what they are at first. Sometimes people stare at me,

When I was working, I saved the maximum to my 401(k) account. So, I always kept up with the plan’s savings limits. If you haven’t heard, there are higher savings limits for 401(k) plans in 2025, plus a new “super catch-up” category. And it’s still early enough in the year for salaried workers to take advantage of them.
Thanks to an inflation adjustment, the maximum regular contribution to a 401(k) plan has increased by $500 to $23,500 in 2025.

Early in my career, I was critical of those who failed to save, tut-tutting over their short-sightedness and lack of discipline. Today, I’m more willing to cut the world’s spendthrifts a little slack.
Why? Over the past four decades, I’ve often been asked for financial advice not just by readers, but also by those I’ve known well. Some of the advice was followed, some wasn’t. But in every case, there was no change in the person’s basic spending and savings habits.

$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.

When I was working full-time, I always saved the maximum to my 401(k). Before my employers had a 401(k) plan, in the early 1980s, I saved the maximum to an IRA—a princely $2,000. Pretty soon I felt rich. I had $40,000 saved.
For this reason, I always pay attention to changes in plan savings limits. And there are higher savings limits for 401(k) plans in 2025, plus a new “super catch-up” category. For those who are interested,

WHEN I WAS GROWING up, I’d receive Series E savings bonds as birthday gifts from my parents. It was the start of many to come. My parents had great respect for savings bonds and, as I got older, I came to hold them in high regard as well.
Savings bonds never offered the highest interest rate. At a defense plant where I worked, a guy in the accounting department questioned my bond buying. He noted that savings bonds paid less interest than the certificates of deposit then available.

I HAVE MY MOTHER to thank for my good savings habits. She opened a savings account in my name when I was a kid. She also made sure I had a Christmas Club savings account every year. I was required to make deposits regularly.
I didn’t mow my neighbor’s lawn, have a newspaper route or sell lemonade on my front lawn. Instead, the money I saved came from the allowance my mother paid me.

During my teen years, I loathed the feeling of pockets empty of money. I was happy to forgo most spending on food, entertainment or the other sundry treats that entice kids to part with their treasure. Instead, I liked to keep my pockets full–or nearly so.
Later, as my wife and I began our life together, we owned the adult equivalent of empty pockets—depleted savings and retirement accounts with a zero balance. On top of that,