OVER EIGHT MILLION Americans have said “so long” to the U.S., heading overseas to work or retire. These expats—short for expatriates—most likely have eight million different reasons to leave our shores for life in another country. My wife’s cousin Chuck and her brother John are among them.
John had his eye on living abroad when he took his first engineering job with Litton Aero Products, where he helped support aviation customers in the Middle East.

“I WOULD SAY TO the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering…. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory. Victory at all costs—victory in spite of all terror—victory, however long and hard the road may be,

I ENJOY WRITING for HumbleDollar—but I often feel I get more from the thoughtful reader comments than whatever insights I provided. For instance, in a recent article, I discussed some year-end financial decisions I was considering. Two readers made comments that caused me to review my decisions, while also delivering a few dollars’ worth of humility.
The first comment identified an error in my spreadsheet analysis. I noted that my marginal New Jersey state income-tax rate was 8.97%.

MY MONEY JOURNEY began as a young girl when a confluence of events created tragedy and financial ruin for my family. I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s. After the death of my father at age 40, we lost our home and had only the barest of necessities.

At that time, there was little help for people in our situation. The meager government benefits that existed were highly regulated and came with a lot of intrusion into your personal life.

ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 2022, to shed some holiday weight and make the most of one of the world’s great strolling cities, I resolved to walk several miles each day around the streets of New York.
I’ve always had a happy knack for finding money as I wander. Ideally, I’d love to have been blessed with a more glamorous superpower. But alas, my lot in life seems to be a preternatural ability to locate lost coins at a hundred paces—the result of a thrifty Scots heritage,

INCOME SHOULD BE ONE of the simplest concepts in financial planning—and yet it turns out to be one of the most confusing, thanks to the multiple ways it’s calculated depending upon whether it applies to income taxes, Social Security and so on. My goal today: Help you sort out income’s shifting definition across the U.S. tax code.
Gross income. This is the granddaddy—income from all sources, before almost any taxes or deductions.

I GREW UP IN a blue-collar family. When money was tight, one strategy my dad used to improve the situation was simple but effective. Overtime, time-and-a-half and double-time were all terms I heard frequently throughout my childhood.

In this Iowa factory town, those words can still be regularly heard at the taverns, bowling alley and family get-togethers. Overtime is the gift that can make a low-paying factory job worthwhile. Time-and-a-half turns that $12 job into a far more palatable $18 an hour,

HIGHLY INTELLIGENT people sometimes don’t know much about investing. Still, they can have a misplaced confidence in their own abilities and feel certain they require no help. In the end, it’s often their adult children who sort things out—which, in this particular case, meant me.
Five years ago, my 84-year-old mother and 85-year-old stepfather moved from the mountains of Colorado to Georgia to live closer to my wife and me. For more than 20 years,

THERE’S TRADITIONAL career advice, such as clarify your goals, master essential skills, promote yourself, network and work smarter, not harder—whatever that means.
While this general advice is great, it’s no sure-fire formula. There’s no guarantee that if you work hard and smart, you’ll get a promotion and a pay raise. Traditional career advice tends to assume that you, your boss and the company are all behaving logically, and that the system reflects that logic.

I STEP INTO THE OLD farmhouse where I grew up and am momentarily confused.

Where’s the blue sofa under the living room bay window with its plump pillows and cozy blankets that my mother likes to throw over her as she reads the morning paper? Where’s the coffee table with the covered pewter candy dish filled with M&Ms and Hershey Kisses? Where’s the rickety table where our family of eight crowded around for countless meals in the tiny but somehow adequate kitchen?

ON DEC. 14, MY WIFE and I celebrated 54 years of marriage—not bad for a curmudgeon and the person who’s had to live with him.
Considering that the average marriage in the U.S. lasts seven to eight years and the divorce rate is near 50%, we’ve done pretty well. On top of that, we got married just 10 months after our first date—and I was in the Army for eight of them. I remember receiving a letter from my dad while I was in the Army in which he basically asked,

THIS PAST SPRING, my brother Phil made the six-hour trip from our hometown in North Carolina to northern Virginia to visit our 95-year-old aunt, whom we know as Aunt Ina Lou. We hadn’t heard from her in a while, which was unusual.
Since we were children, she’d always sent us Christmas and birthday cards, and she’d missed some recently. Phil tried calling several times, but she hadn’t been answering her phone. This wasn’t particularly surprising since our aunt is almost deaf.

THE BEST FINANCIAL advice I could give to a Gen Z or millennial is this: Join a credit union. But they probably wouldn’t listen.
A GOBankingRates survey earlier this year found that fewer adults under age 40 are banking with credit unions, instead preferring national or online banks by as much as a two-to-one margin. I’ve done all my banking with a local credit union for almost 18 years, and it’s provided me with a degree of personal customer service that’s likely less common with banks.

WHEN JANET YELLEN was nominated to be secretary of the treasury, the Senate Finance Committee staff went over her tax returns with a magnifying glass. Yellen, an economics PhD who taught at Harvard, always prepared the returns for herself and her husband, economics Nobel laureate George A. Akerlof.
“She discovered to her surprise that she had been doing the family taxes wrong for years,” reports Owen Ullmann in his excellent new biography of Yellen,

IN BEHAVIORAL FINANCE, there’s an important concept that doesn’t get a lot of attention: It’s called temporal discounting. The idea is that we view our current and future selves, to some degree, as different people—and there’s a tendency to discount the needs of the “other” person. It’s an interesting idea because, even for the most diligent planners and savers, there’s an inherent tension between the financial needs of today and those of tomorrow.

Take the “latte factor,” which argues that a young person could accumulate nearly $1 million in savings simply by forgoing a daily coffee and muffin.