Spending

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.

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,

FOR DECADES, RESEARCHERS have been looking at the link between money and happiness. The findings? In short, it’s a mixed bag.
To be sure, there are ways that money can boost happiness, and below are some ideas to consider. But there are also obstacles to contend with. We’ll look first at the obstacles before turning to the recommendations. 
The most significant challenge is the fact that—to a great extent—our happiness level is hard-wired into us.

MILESTONES MARK the growth of a child as she moves from infancy through school age. In similar fashion, we adults tend to measure our life’s progress with “firsts” or other significant events. Perhaps we remember the feeling of maturity that came with our first kiss or our first job. Milestones help us attach meaning to the course of a life that sometimes seems beyond our control.
Financial milestones often command special significance, like my first “real” job at age 15.

I LIKE TO THINK I’M rational in the way I spend my dollars, and I suspect most readers do, too.
We are, of course, deluding ourselves.
Spending is never simply about buying what we want or need. Instead, behind every dollar that leaves—or doesn’t leave—our wallet is a complex mental dance that reflects how we feel that day, the influence of others, how we want to be perceived, and our own financial history. We might declare that we’re using our money to buy happiness.

WHEN I WAS 24 YEARS old, I took a weekend trip to Reno, Nevada. My hostess for the visit wanted to go to a casino. I had no interest in gambling. But not wanting to be impolite, I agreed to go with her.
I was making $16,000 a year back then. I decided I could afford to lose $20. I got two rolls of quarters and sat down at a slot machine. As I was getting close to losing the last of my coins,

THIS HAS BEEN A YEAR of living large in the Kerr household.
I just finished adding up the numbers for 2024, and between my son’s wedding in Colorado in June, my own wedding in October, our honeymoon afterward, a vacation to Key West, a new car for my new wife, and various long-overdue repairs to Rachael’s townhouse, I spent upwards of $60,000 on items I hadn’t budgeted for in 2024.
The tally doesn’t include the $9,000 I spent on a hot tub for the mountain house.

IT’S THAT TIME OF year when people think about giving. For my wife, this is what she lives for. She loves buying presents. She’s a very giving person and puts a great deal of thought into the gifts she buys.
She’ll buy gifts all year round, even when the event—such as Christmas—is months away. Problem is, she frequently forgets where she’s stored the presents she’s bought. They’ll eventually be found, but in many cases long past the date when she wanted to give them.

I FEEL GRATITUDE for the life I’ve had. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a few regrets: Friendships that turned sour or simply faded away. People who died before I got to see them one last time. Professional endeavors where I felt I could have done better. Purchases I made that didn’t live up to my expectations.
But my list of regrets has three glaring omissions.
First, it doesn’t include any of the investments I’ve made.

FOUR 20-SOMETHINGS named Ben, Duncan, Jonnie and Dave came up with a great idea for a reality show in 2010. It involved a purple bus named Penelope, a cross-country road trip and a list of 100 things to do before you die. For every item they crossed off their list, they’d help a stranger achieve something on his or her own list. 
Some of their to-dos were ambitious, with a low probability of success: host Saturday Night Live,

I DON’T LIKE SPENDING, though the older I get, the more I loosen the purse strings. Still, I rarely enjoy spending money. I think I got this from my mother and grandparents.

My grandparents reused Christmas tree tinsel year after year. My grandfather removed every strand—made of metal back then—and placed it in a box for the following year. My grandparents also had two sets of rugs, one for winter and the other—made of woven rattan—for summer.

I LOVE TO TRAVEL—and it runs in the family. My parents were avid travelers, with my father receiving a generous travel allowance from his work every four years.
In addition, my father always managed his time and budget for numerous other trips. After his passing, my brother and I took turns maintaining the travel tradition with our mom, until plans were disrupted by the pandemic.
After retiring this year, I eagerly anticipated visiting my mother in India and taking her on a grand tour.

ON TELEVISION, I WATCH the Barrett-Jackson auctions of expensive cars. When two bidders want the same car, they drive up the price until one decides enough is enough and drops out.
Why is this car so important to the bidders? In many cases, it’s a well-known car that’s highly valued by car collectors, so it’s treated like an investment with lasting value. Other times, it could be a model that the bidders had admired as teenagers,

I WAS INTRIGUED WHEN an old Dutch painting attributed to a “follower of Rembrandt” came up for auction near me in Maine late last month. It was a portrait of a young woman wearing an elaborately starched ruff collar, the type of clothing depicted in Golden Age paintings from the 1600s.
The country auction house estimated the painting would fetch $10,000 to $15,000. I couldn’t shake the thought—however fleeting—that this might be the real thing.

THESE DAYS, IT SEEMS every other article on retirement talks about a neat division between the go-go, slow-go and no-go years, with retirees moving seamlessly from one to the next.

I don’t remember seeing anything about these stages back in the late 1990s when I was contemplating early retirement. Instead, when I quit full-time work in 2000 at age 53, I just wanted to travel before I got too decrepit.

I did travel—extensively—right up until 2017,