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When to Spend

When to Spend

by | Saturday, April 15, 2023 | , ,

IF YOU HAVE READ enough HumbleDollar articles, you’ve probably noticed that frugality has played a major role in the financial success of many of the site’s writers. Peruse the article comments and the site’s “Voices” section, and you’ll find that readers often share the same thriftiness. Frugality is also a key theme running through many of the 30 financial life stories in the forthcoming book, My Money Journey. Sure enough, I highlighted frugality in the essay I contributed to the book, as well as in my most popular HumbleDollar article to-date. But while we might be good at saving, we...

Going Our Own Way

Going Our Own Way

by | Friday, February 3, 2023 | , ,

HOW WE THINK ABOUT money affects almost every aspect of our lives. All the landmark decisions we make have a thread of money influence running through them. I’m talking about college, career, marriage, kids, the people and places we associate with—even how we spend our time. If we don’t make these decisions intentionally, we’ll drift downstream, carried by the current of the most popular money management ideas. That brings me to a study recently published by the Journal of Retirement and entitled, “The Life-Cycle Model Implies that Most Young People Should Not Save for Retirement.” The...

Wiser in 21 Ways

Wiser in 21 Ways

by | Saturday, December 3, 2022 | ,

WHEN I MET ARON for dinner, the occasion marked a milestone for both of us. Aron had earned his bachelor’s degree in audio production in 2020—during the thick of the pandemic—and finding his place in the industry had been more difficult than he’d hoped. Now that things were finally falling into place, Aron approached me for help with his finances. In particular, he wanted to understand his tax situation, which had grown into a mixture of self-employed contract work and part-time employment. I’ve known Aron since my wife Sarah began babysitting for the family when she and I were dating in...

Read That Statement

Read That Statement

by | Thursday, November 3, 2022 | ,

HAVE YOU HEARD that you shouldn’t check your 401(k) at times like this? Market volatility can wreak havoc not only with our account balances, but also with our decision-making. Ignoring our 401(k) statements might help us stick with our long-term investment plan. True as that may be, there’s a good reason to peek at your second-quarter statement: to see if you can find a new feature—the lifetime income illustration. It was mandated by Congress as part of the 2019 SECURE Act, but it’s only now showing up on many 401(k) statements. Here are three points to help you make sense of...

A Home Run

A Home Run

by | Thursday, November 3, 2022 | , ,

MY WIFE SARAH AND I recently dusted off our old Scrabble board. We reviewed the rules and were reminded of the Scrabble Bingo—the 50-point bonus awarded to a player who figures out how to play every letter tile from the tray on a single turn. Neither of us could remember ever achieving the Scrabble Bingo. That wasn’t surprising, we reasoned, because it’s rare for all the stars to align. You’d need the right combination of seven letters, the vision to see the word they can form, and the perfectly accommodating space on the board to play the long word. On top of all that, you’d need to...

Making It

Making It

by | Friday, August 12, 2022 | , ,

FLETCHER WHITE, my great-grandfather, was one of the young American doughboys drafted to fight in World War I. He also helped set the financial direction for our family for generations to come. Fletcher may have lacked military acumen, but he compensated with ingenuity and resilience learned growing up in rural Appalachia. In fall 1918, he and a million fellow American soldiers pulled off in a few months what the French had been unable to accomplish in four years. At a cost of more than 26,000 U.S. lives, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive dislodged the German soldiers from their trenches,...

No Help

No Help

by | Friday, July 8, 2022 | , , ,

OUR LAST SUMMER road trip didn’t exactly go as planned. That ordeal changed my mind about an annual expense I’d been paying without much thought. I gained a new perspective—even if I did learn my lesson the hard way. On a Saturday morning last summer, Sarah and I woke our kids at 4 a.m. for a predawn drive through the mountains of East Tennessee and across the Carolinas. We were on our way to enjoy the beaches of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. For the first eight hours of our planned nine-hour trek, we all watched the trees go by in peace—a significant feat, as any parent will tell...

Insuring Infirmity

Insuring Infirmity

by | Friday, July 8, 2022 | ,

LONG-TERM-CARE insurance and disability insurance can both be part of a comprehensive financial plan. But is it a good idea to have both coverages at the same time, or could one substitute for the other? After all, both policies are designed to help those who are, in some way, infirm. To answer this question, let’s start with another one: What’s the purpose of insurance? The best use of any type of insurance is to guard against financial disaster. It isn’t there to provide a discount on expenditures you could otherwise afford or to play a wealth-building role in your portfolio. There...