Retirement

There is a world of reality beyond the HD community.
The Census Bureau reports that poverty among adults at least 65 years old rose in 2024 from the prior year. The poverty rate rose from 14.2% to 15%, the highest level among all age groups.
The 2026  COLA is projected between 2.7 and 2.9% (even though there is no inflation🙄) while the Medicare Part B premium is projected to increase $21.50 plus higher Part D premiums and higher supplemental coverage premiums.

Has anyone heard about this Network?
With my wife dealing with the financial aspects of her mother’s recent passing she has been dealing with the final hospital bill. When she received the final EOB from the insurance company at the bottom there was the following:
“(Her hospital) participates in the USA senior Care Network program. The part A deductible of $1,676 will be waived by the hospital. No benefits are due.”
From what I have been able to glean from the website many insurance companies participate in this program in which participating hospitals will waive all or part of many deductibles.

One of the biggest surprises in retirement is how the tax rules around charitable giving shift. During your working years, you might have claimed a deduction for every gift you made. But now, with the standard deduction so high—$32,300 for couples 65 and older in 2025—many retirees no longer itemize. That means the tax benefit from donations often disappears.
Still, there are strategies that can help you get more impact—for yourself and for the causes you care about.

After reading Richard Quinn’s recent post about Medicare, I thought this would be a good place to solicit thoughts.
I have a 64 year old brother who is single, has no other immediate family, and is currently on Medicare disability due to mobility issues.  He has a medicare advantage plan which has coverage for his prescriptions (Part D), vision and dental.  As he is now within 3 months of his 65th birthday, he has the opportunity to switch to original medicare without underwriting,

I came across the following Kiplinger article recently:
https://www.kiplinger.com/retirement/social-security/minimum-savings-to-retire-by-state
It postulates that you would need to save a minimum of 1.6 M to retire comfortably in California, the third most expensive state in which to retire. There are a lot of unknowns in how they calculate this, but alarmingly the median savings of people 65-74 in $200,000 the average is $609,230. On social media sites, people ask if they can retire on social security alone. I know this is preaching to the choir,

I realize this is an anomaly, but my wife Suzie is in a much better financial position today because she cashed out her Defined Benefit pension for a lump sum payment.
Neither Suzie nor I understood the reasons why the offer was so generous. The financial advisor we consulted about the proposed surrender value also didn’t get the logic but strongly suggested we take the deal.
I don’t like little mysteries that defy normal thinking, so over the last while,

Regular readers of HumbleDollar may recall some of this as it has been mentioned by me in various articles over the years.  In essence it is a summery of my adult life. 
There were no moments of financial brilliance. It was mostly just plugging along with an absence of misfortune while trying to avoid doing anything exceptionally stupid. 
I don’t recommend any similar actions for anyone. In fact, if I had to do it over, I suspect I would not recommend all of it for me either. 

That question just popped into my head. The answer is part of a long journey that always included some form of saving albeit quite modest for many years.
When I was a kid, raising money for important stuff like miniature plastic soldiers, caps for my six guns, beans for the pea shooter and ice cream cones was a necessity. No allowance in my home. 
We acquired our wealth by selling Kool-Aid, collected empty soda bottles for the two cent deposit,

Warning: this post is more of a rant and a plea for sympathy than it is thoughtful or informative!
So as you know, I retired on July 1. Or did I? I retired from two university systems and was supposed to get one pension check from each starting August 1. On August 1, I got…nothing. And it was my birthday, too!
I already knew I wouldn’t be getting one of the checks that day; my retirement application had been in limbo for a while (not my fault) and is allegedly being processed.

In an earlier article, I described my unexpected decision to use fixed-term immediate annuities (FTIA) to form a floor for my expenses over the next ten years. I thought you might find it of interest if I expand on this, relating to the balance of our income needs and how this might play out over the longer term. To be clear and upfront this strategy is “Prioritizing Income Generation Over Capital Preservation” but not in a reckless way and could change over each 10 year block.

Well, I tried to stay up until midnight to pop a cork, but it just wasn’t happening. So today I woke up as a retired person!  If you’ve read my articles from 2024 on the topic, you know this didn’t sneak up on me.
My road through the logistics of retiring from two university systems and applying for Medicare went…somewhat smoothly. I was pretty meticulous in my preparation. I attended webinars for both systems last year and put the application dates on my calendar.

Retirement sounded so great to me a few years ago. Now as I face the reality of it, I find myself having panic attacks. “No more income? I will end up a homeless bag lady on Main Street….” I find myself thinking.
All irrational thoughts since I will have a COLA pension supplemented by my savings and will receive social security in 18 months.  These revenues will come close to matching my current net pay when I start social security.

Well, mostly FI, but some RE. (FIRE standing for Financial Independence, Retire Early). Christine Benz from Morningstar recently attended a CampFI event in Spain, and wrote about her experience here.
She comments that “A lot of people have a caricatured perception of the FI community. They assume that everyone is trying to live on $10 a day in order to hang it up at age 35.” While she met some young people, she met older people as well.

Dear HD readers:  We had so much fun with the original version of this post, that I thought it might be fun to add a 3rd possible route to funding retirement at $138,000/yr.   Of course, there is no reality in this, no real personal info, it is just a scenario.  And, most important, any legal route that get you to your desired retirement income is the right one for you.
 
One of my friends is hitting 73 in August and we were discussing his need to do an RMD this year. 

I’m 58 and my wife is 56. We’ve been planning our retirement with care and intention for years—no debt, solid retirement savings, a well-diversified portfolio, and a liability-matching plan (LMP) that covers us until Medicare kicks in. We’ve talked through our priorities, run the numbers, and built our plan together. The core approach to our plan was heavily influenced by Bill Bernstein and Wade Pfau’s writing and we are content with a good funded ratio.
One thing we agreed on early: when one of us loses or leaves work,