Somehow the word budget has gotten a bad name.  An innocent financial tool has been equated with penury, and excessive frugality.  Some people think budgeting is synonymous with obsessively tracking every penny spent. But it doesn’t have to be. 
In Personal Financial Planning, budgeting is a tool to help us manage our finances, make better decisions, and achieve our financial goals. It can be tailored to fit your situation. If you find there is “too much month at the end of your money”,

I DON’T LIKE SPENDING, though the older I get, the more I loosen the purse strings. Still, I rarely enjoy spending money. I think I got this from my mother and grandparents.

My grandparents reused Christmas tree tinsel year after year. My grandfather removed every strand—made of metal back then—and placed it in a box for the following year. My grandparents also had two sets of rugs, one for winter and the other—made of woven rattan—for summer.

There are alternatives to the 4% rule that are not complicated. Here are three ways to calculate your first-year spending rate. All the calculations show the percentage of your investment assets so you can compare them against each other and the 4% rule.
The first one is from the Society of Actuaries:
Retirement age / 20 / 100
At 65 the calculation would be 65 / 20 / 100 = 3.25% and if you retire at 75,

Seeking to conserve my driving time, energy and long term parking rates, I decided to drive to my regional PA airport, Scranton/Wilkes Barre, an easy one-hour highway drive, rather than 2 1/2 tense, traffic – ridden hours to LaGuardia or Newark for a direct flight to St. Louis. It’s a tiny, empty airport with honor system self checkout at the souvenir and snack shop. As I’m sitting at the gate, I hear an announcement that our “landline flight” to Philly (where I’ll be transferring for the St.

I’ve made the trip from Pennsylvania to California six times. The first time I went, I didn’t have to pay for my plane tickets. Each of the next five times, the entire trip was completely free.
I was asked to be the best man in a college friend’s wedding a couple of years after we graduated. He lived near Los Angeles. I planned my trip out there with another college friend, Robert. Like me, he was an engineer and single.

I never meant that a consumer buying cases of water at the grocery was wasting money, my point was that at so many venues, water costs well over a hundred bucks a gallon. Why is my tap water only worth .003 cents per gallon, at the store maybe a buck a gallon, and at a concert 120.00 per gallon?
Which price is “correct”? Even at a store, if water is more than a nickel a gallon,

I just received my annual water bill, a tiny 158 dollars. It informed me that I will pay .00375 cents per gallon.
When bottled water is even 5 a pint or 40 per gallon, that is roughly 10,000 times higher. It is often at 30,000 times higher.as many venues charge 15 a pint.
Even at a buck a pint  , that is still thousands of times more , for exactly the same stuff that falls, every time it rains.

I LOVE TO TRAVEL—and it runs in the family. My parents were avid travelers, with my father receiving a generous travel allowance from his work every four years.
In addition, my father always managed his time and budget for numerous other trips. After his passing, my brother and I took turns maintaining the travel tradition with our mom, until plans were disrupted by the pandemic.
After retiring this year, I eagerly anticipated visiting my mother in India and taking her on a grand tour.

I was a bit of a surprise to my parents. My father was 44 and my mother was 40 when I was born. My youngest sister was over seven years older than me. Because of the age differences between my three sisters and me, after about age 10 I rarely had any siblings at home. I was essentially an only child from that point on.
Besides having my parents to myself, my experience growing up in southern New Jersey was a bit different than my sisters’ in another 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?

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.

My preference is to book everything far ahead of time—flights, restaurants, hotels, cruises, you name it. I like having stuff to look forward to. For me, anticipating fun events is a big contributor to happiness.
But is this the smartest financial strategy? I’ve taken plenty of trips both internationally and within the U.S. over my lifetime, but I don’t consider myself an expert on money-saving travel. Still, here are some pointers I’ve picked up along the way and by digging around online.

ON TELEVISION, I WATCH the Barrett-Jackson auctions of expensive cars. When two bidders want the same car, they drive up the price until one decides enough is enough and drops out.
Why is this car so important to the bidders? In many cases, it’s a well-known car that’s highly valued by car collectors, so it’s treated like an investment with lasting value. Other times, it could be a model that the bidders had admired as teenagers,

I WAS INTRIGUED WHEN an old Dutch painting attributed to a “follower of Rembrandt” came up for auction near me in Maine late last month. It was a portrait of a young woman wearing an elaborately starched ruff collar, the type of clothing depicted in Golden Age paintings from the 1600s.
The country auction house estimated the painting would fetch $10,000 to $15,000. I couldn’t shake the thought—however fleeting—that this might be the real thing.

If you were going to recommend one place for your fellow HumbleDollar readers to visit—a city, a town, a park, a museum, a church, you name it—what would it be and why? No, the place doesn’t have to be outside the U.S. and, no, there are no points for picking something nobody’s ever heard of.
I’ll go first. But contrary to what I just wrote, it is a place outside the U.S. and it’s not well known.