Behavior

As retirees, we spend a lot of time thinking about risks that may never happen. We diversify our investments, buy insurance and keep emergency reserves. We don’t need to know that something bad will happen before protecting ourselves against it.
I’ve been wondering whether we should think about AI the same way?
Some of the people building the world’s most powerful AI systems are loudly warning about the risks, even as their companies spend billions racing to make them more capable.

Unlike many of the HD community, I still pack my lunch each weekday and head off to work. There’s a range of reasons for this, but most importantly it keeps my wife sane!
During my 9 to 5, people will buy ride-on mowers somewhere in the range of $10,000 to $25,000. My relatively frugal brain thinks …. “Wow, $15,000 just to cut your grass”. And it got me thinking about how some folks are completely comfortable to spend like that,

There was a time when we compared ourselves to the Joneses.
The Joneses lived across the street.
Maybe they had a newer car, a nicer house or a better vacation. We could see what they had because they were right there. Our world of comparison was relatively small.
Today, the Joneses live everywhere. Facebook. YouTube. Instagram. TikTok.
We see their houses, cars, vacations, restaurants, clothes and lifestyles. And among all those people are some of the wealthiest people on earth.

DEEP DOWN INSIDE, I want to be the richest person in the graveyard. 
I retired at age 62, confident in our financial plan to survive market fluctuations. We saved over 25% of our income for nearly three decades. Perhaps a bit too much, but we lived well and always had sufficient funds to raise a family, maintain our household, and put our children through postgraduate education.
If anything, our retirement spending level is conservative,

The title is a comment in response to my post on credit card use, including:
“I think it can be summarized, in most cases, as poor financial planning and irresponsible behavior.” 
Which I stand by 100%. 
As a reminder, Haughty describes an attitude of blatant superiority, arrogance, or disdain toward others, often characterized by a belief that one is inherently better, more refined, or of higher status.
I think that’s a bit unfair. 
After working from age 18 to 67 (mostly dealing with people) and reaching 83 years old one tends to become a tad cynical,

WALMART SELLS FOOD. They sell car tires. Board games too. You can stop at any Walmart in the world and buy the same plethora of consumer goods. One roof, dozens of product areas, thousands of individual items.
This “cross-vertical” strategy has many perks to consumers like us. But it’s not without flaws. From brand dilution to in-store clutter, down to a lack of item expertise when you ask questions of employees – there are issues with “selling everything to everyone.”

I’m not making this up. I once overheard a conversation in a bar by a couple guys who were planning something nefarious. They were discussing what was essentially the same kind of risk/reward conversation we think about when making allocation decisions; the major difference was that they were weighing time in prison should they be caught. 
I don’t know how things worked out for the pair, but at least they were considering the can-of-worms they were about to open. 

I like to be humble, but I also like to be honest. I can’t deny that I ran a successful business for twenty-five years, that I own two homes, or that I had the resources to retire at fifty-seven. In short, I’ve been fortunate. It would be farcical of me to pretend money isn’t an important enabler in life, but it’s worth remembering that it isn’t the most important thing.
I’ve spent most of the last month at my vacation home,

These are not the four pillars you’ll find in most personal finance books. Nobody’s selling a course called “How Stupidity Made Me Rich”. But they’re the answer to how I retired at 58 with a pension portfolio that’s pretty decent. I think that honesty is worth more than another article about discipline and vision.
Let me start with the luck, because it’s important to be clear about what I mean. I don’t mean timing the market or backing the right stock.

THE INVESTMENT WORLD is full of storytellers. And while these folks might be entertaining, they generally aren’t very helpful. There’s one category of stories, however, that I do think is useful: They’re what I might call investment fables. They’re apocryphal stories that likely aren’t real. But they’re helpful nonetheless because each carries a useful lesson. Here are some of the more popular ones.
Consumer choice. In 1999, Richard Mille and a partner launched a company to make wristwatches.

Here’s something that will either comfort or disturb you: the mathematical technique underpinning your retirement strategy was invented by an unwell mathematician playing solitaire in his sick bed.
In 1946, Stanislaw Ulam found himself laid up recovering from encephalitis with nothing to do but shuffle cards. Being the sort of guy who couldn’t boil an egg without pondering the thermodynamics involved, he started wondering about the mathematical probability of winning at solitaire.
He tried working it out properly with equations and formulae,

THE WAY INVESTORS think about the stock market may be entirely wrong.
Intuition tells us, and academic research confirms, that a company’s stock price should respond to important news and information. When a company announces a new product, for example, its stock should go up. And when results fall short of expectations, it should decline. 
But a new paper titled “The Inefficient Pricing of News” calls this idea into question. The authors found that investors respond much more slowly and inconsistently to market news than previously thought.

A article in the NYTs says “Many people are not aware IRAs exist.”  Can that be true? I bet it is.
One survey reports the median worker has only $955 saved for retirement. Another says 1 in 5 Americans over 50 has no retirement savings.Some people push for a national IRA with auto enrollment because people don’t have access at work. 
I find that curious because as you know there are individual IRAs, ROTH IRAs, SEP IRAs (Simplified Employee Pension),

Most investors understand risk-adjusted return. I’m guessing few apply it to the way they earn the money in the first place. That gap, between what you made and what it actually cost to make it, is where some of the most important financial decisions of a life get made without anyone really noticing.
Take my friend as an example. He’s lived a remarkably colourful life. He served in the UK equivalent of Force Recon: small teams,

When I took at look at the data I was a bit surprised. We hear a lot about the US being the richest country in the world, but the data was a shock.
Using a global measure, it’s not hard to be wealthy.
These figures come from global income distribution analyses and calculators using World Bank and UN data.
Net worth
Based on the latest global income and wealth distribution data, the approximate cutoffs for the 50th,