Life Events

WHEN MY YOUNGER brother Jonathan died, I thought I knew who he was.
After all, we had shared a childhood in England, years together at boarding school, family adventures in Bangladesh, and more than six decades as brothers. I knew the journalist the world admired, the devoted husband and father, and the man whose words quietly helped millions of readers live richer lives, not simply financially, but personally as well.
I was wrong.
Over the past several months,

WHEN A HUSBAND dies, his widow inherits his IRA. Somewhere in the paperwork of the months that follow there is a decision to make, and nobody presents it to her as one. She can take the account as her own, or she can leave it titled as inherited.
Taking it as her own means filling something in. Leaving it means doing nothing, and the IRS tells custodians they may assume that is what she wants.

With the anniversary of Jonathan’s death approaching, I’m sharing the remembrance I delivered at his memorial service.
As I speak, I hold both Jonathan and my sister Tory, who passed away this past August, close to my heart. They shared a deep bond, one that distance and time could never weaken. I take comfort in imagining them together again, side by side, watching over us with love.
Jonathan was born at home, as was tradition in 1960s England,

RECENTLY, A FELLOW—let’s call him Tom—contacted me with a distressing story of financial fraud. I’ll describe what happened then review steps you might take to prevent this same sort of thing.
Tom first noticed there might be a problem when he spotted a larger-than-average withdrawal from his checking account. The payee was a 529 college savings plan. But because Tom and his wife—let’s call her Jane—have 529 accounts for their children, the transaction almost went unnoticed.

I recently came across another piece of Jonathan’s early writing that I thought his readers might enjoy.
He wrote “The Fear” when he was just 14 years old. It has nothing to do with money or personal finance, but it offers another glimpse of Jonathan long before he became the writer so many of us came to know.
Here it is, exactly as he wrote it.
THE FEAR
He crouched, his shoulders hunched, waiting for the order.

As I reflect on the past year, I realize grief doesn’t follow a straight path. It comes in waves. Some days bring sadness, others gratitude, and often the two arrive together.
When my sister Tory died suddenly, there was no opportunity for one last conversation, no chance to say goodbye or tell her one final time that I loved her. Instead, I faced one of the hardest moments of my life, telling my mother that the daughter she adored was gone.

Looking back in the archives, I came across Jonathan’s No Regrets article. In it, he wrote “I’ve known enough bad times to have perspective”. I think there are both good and bad perspectives to be gleaned from such times. The important thing is to grab the good ones in order to move forward. For example, many HumbleDollar contributors write that they came from poor families, and from that experience, came the desire and drive to get more out of life.

BOB MADE A very expensive tax mistake. Doctors told Bob that he only has a year to live… What did Bob do?
He decided to gift a house to his only son before passing away. The house is worth $2,000,000 that he bought back in 1970 for $50,000 in an expensive suburb of California.
The son decided to sell the house and paid about $430,000 in federal taxes.
$430,000 that could have been $0 instead…
How?

While researching Jonathan’s early years, I came across this article he wrote as a teenager for Saga, the magazine at Bryanston School in England. Years later, Jonathan would say this was his “entrée to becoming a journalist.”
Reading it today, I was struck by something unexpected. Although he was still a teenager, I could already hear the voice that millions of readers would later come to know. He wasn’t simply writing about a school pipe organ.

AS WE CELEBRATE 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, I’m reminded of an expression that’s popular in the investment world: “This time is different.”
The phrase dates to a 1993 publication titled “16 Rules for Investment Success,” authored by the veteran investment manager Sir John Templeton. Rule number 11 included the following admonition: “The investor who says, ‘This time is different,’ when in fact it’s virtually a repeat of an earlier situation, has uttered among the four most costly words in the annals of investing.”
Templeton’s message,

My dad’s brother passed away two years ago. I liked him, but I didn’t really know him well; the last time I’d seen him was at my mum’s funeral, about a year before his own. I’d kept my distance from that side of the family; ours was really just a wedding-and-funeral relationship. My uncle was a character. A dodgy character.
Here’s one example of his pedigree. Unbelievable as it sounds, back in the 60s and early 70s,

More than forty years after we first met, Mrs. Dolezal sent me a letter shortly before she passed away.
By then I had long since finished school, built a business with my twin brother, retired, and settled into a comfortable life. The years between us had quietly slipped away.
As I read her letter, one passage stopped me in my tracks.
“You are like a son for me. I shall never forget the kindness and strength you showed me after the devastating shock of my husband’s death… You were a young man at the time but you took on a heroic task… I shall never forget what you did for me and my children.”

Yesterday I spent the day reading “Money and Me” in basically one sitting. I kept thinking I should do something else beside read,  I found myself saying  – “just a few more chapters” –  and before I knew it I had finished the book. That is definitely not to brag, but to shine a light once more on what a special, insightful person Jonathan was. I felt like he was talking to me in ways I wish someone had when I was starting out and navigating adulthood,

Several years ago I listened to Requiem: The Story of One Sky by Dimash Qudaibergen, an internationally acclaimed singer from Kazakhstan whose music often explores themes of peace, compassion, and our shared humanity. The song is a plea for peace in a world too often divided by conflict. (I encourage you to listen to it on YouTube.) At the conclusion of the song appeared a quote from Pope Francis:
“Dialogue, understanding and the widespread promotion of a culture of tolerance,

I DON’T HAVE MANY regrets in life. But there is one conversation with my mother that I wish I had never had. It was about moving her into an assisted living facility. She was in her 90s, and I thought it would be best for both of us.
My mother would receive better care, and I could take much-needed breaks. She could even keep her house and spend time there when I was with her.
It seemed like a middle-of-the-road approach to providing care.