Spending

I came across a term I’d not heard before in an article from my local newspaper. S.K.I.ing: the act of spending down your retirement portfolio and assets without regard for familiar inheritance. To my mind it’s basically blowing the budget on travel and other indulgent consumption. Apparently it’s a growing “thing” now.
The article in question came with glowing endorsements from practitioners and testimonials from the potentially inheritanceless children, telling their parents not to feel guilty and they never expected an inheritance anyway.

Our eldest daughter just recently moved out to begin her adventures as a young adult. My wife and I are suddenly discovering how quiet a house can be, and how much free time seems comes with “empty nesting”.
Given my fidgety nature, I’ve started looking for all the little jobs that have escaped my attention for a while, but can now be attended to. One of the most mundane was replacing the screen protector on my cheap Android phone.

There’s an old saying that time is money. There’s also the view that, on occasion, getting money owed to you is more bother than it’s worth. My wife Suzie and I have reached that stage over a $2000 cell phone bill.
In the lead-up to retirement, we made a concerted effort to streamline our finances. That’s when it came to light that we’d been billed for a third cell plan going back several years. Suzie had assumed my plan was coming out of her checking account as well as her own,

In economics, they say there are no free lunches. How about a free breakfast?
Some hotels are quite happy to serve up a continental breakfast or much more. Now that summer vacation is in the rear-view mirror, here’s how I came to find those breakfasts rather satisfying even if they aren’t truly free of cost.
Before we head out on the road, I tend to research hotels and their prices for what I think is the best overall value.

I’m slightly obsessed with wedding costs at the moment. You might recall I’ve mentioned before that my daughter’s getting married next February. As anyone who’s ever sat on the sharp, pointy, “paying” end of a wedding will tell you, this is not a cheap hobby. But lately I’ve started to wonder if the wedding supplies industry has lost its mind.
My daughter lives in London, marrying at home in Ireland. That means all the long-distance logistics funnel straight through us,

My wife Suzie has been organising a hen party for our daughter, nothing spectacular, just a group of girls heading into the big smoke for a candle-making course, followed by dinner and a cocktail bar. Because there were quite a few people attending, all three venues required small deposits, which my wife happily paid. All told, the combined deposit came to around $100 per person.
Most of the group are around our daughter’s age: very late twenties through to mid-thirties.

I left my unhappy home in 1999 with my clothing, my hi-fi, the Omega watch given to my dad when he retired in 1980 and little else. Storage space in my new life was not an issue I had to concern myself with. 
I was still in pretty good shape three years later when I met Chris. If there’s a polar opposite word for a person who hoards, that word would describe Chris, at least in 2002.

THE OPEN KITCHEN restaurant has been a fixture in Charlotte, North Carolina for 75 years. The restaurant has an old-time feel, with memorabilia, including menus from years gone by, lining its walls. Those old menus provided David Enna, a financial journalist, with a laboratory for examining the effects of inflation.
What did Enna find? The oldest menu on display is from 1963. To state the obvious, today’s prices make those from the 1960s look quaint.

It’s 72 degrees and sunny as I write this, but September is nearly upon us, and I’ve been making inquiries for the supply and delivery of one cord of kiln-dried hardwood for our two log burner stoves. This year, the price is coming in around $1,000, and yes, firewood runs at a steep premium here in Ireland. As with everything, the price keeps rising every year. Inflation in action.
But here’s the thing: I don’t need to buy the wood.

The first time I sat down for dinner with Joey’s family in the Philippines, I did what I had always done at a restaurant: I picked up the menu and started deciding what I wanted to eat. I soon realized I had it all wrong. Nobody was ordering their dinner. Dishes were being chosen for the table, passed around and shared by everyone.
It was a small moment, but I didn’t forget it. In the years since,

In response to a recent rant of mine that “The Rent is too Damn High” a commenter responded that “Many customers have no idea what makes up [contractor] prices.” I had to respect this guy, as not too many civilians side with the contractor.
After a recent interaction with a cobbler, who humbly calls himself “The Shoe Master,” I’ve now realize that most business owners don’t provide pricing details as they have no idea how they came up with the price in the first place.

SOME MILESTONES are auspicious. Others are not.
This week, the Treasury announced that the federal government’s debt had topped $40 trillion for the first time.
Government debt is nothing new, but the problem is now of more concern, for two reasons. First, the scale has grown. An apples-to-apples way to look at the government’s debt load is to compare it to GDP—the economy’s total annual output. On this basis, outstanding debt now exceeds 100% of GDP,

My wife Suzie and I have been travelling around the Iberian peninsula for three weeks now, moving between hotels as we go. Last night, over a brandy nightcap, she asked whether the one in my hand was cheaper or pricier than the ones we’d had at our previous two stops. I had no idea. Worse, I couldn’t even tell her what this one cost.
That’s not like me. I’m normally frugal to a fault, so not knowing the price of a drink I’m actively holding is close to a personality violation.

Within a ten-minute walk of my vacation home there’s a lovely nine-hole golf course, its main lateral hazard being the river made famous as the source of water for Bushmills Irish whiskey. I haven’t lost a ball to the River Bush since I retired. That isn’t because I’ve gotten any better at golf. It’s because I’ve recently realized I haven’t played the course since losing my regular wage after retirement.
Instead, I’ve subconsciously started playing a nine-hole links course twenty minutes’

She was a beautiful young girl, going through some hard times, living on the street and surviving by the good will of others. A middle aged man and his wife, well, he considered himself to be middle aged but was actually well beyond the half way point, offered to take her in. She was a little creeped out by the offer. 
Always on guard, she wondered what was the catch, what was expected in return. But they seemed to want nothing in return,