I thought I had overcome it when I retired and the numbers in the spreadsheet said it was practically a sure thing – financial security for life for my wife and me, and something meaningful left over for the children. It was a wonderfully liberating feeling when, freshly retired, we bought a home for our retirement near our families, a new car and joined the golf club, for the first time without a second thought.
So why have I spent the last three days waiting to change the battery in my mouse when it’s clearly ready to give up the ghost?

In a previous post I recounted how luck and stupidity kickstarted my retirement savings journey, but I glossed over one important detail: the cost.
In the mid-eighties, high-fee front-loading was standard practice, and these products were typically sold by people whose entire compensation depended on shifting them. The pressure to sell was enormous, and the salespeople were good at their jobs.
My twenty-year-old self walked straight into one of them. He was slick, he was persuasive,

These are not the four pillars you’ll find in most personal finance books. Nobody’s selling a course called “How Stupidity Made Me Rich”. But they’re the answer to how I retired at 58 with a pension portfolio that’s pretty decent. I think that honesty is worth more than another article about discipline and vision.
Let me start with the luck, because it’s important to be clear about what I mean. I don’t mean timing the market or backing the right stock.

I read daily about seniors who can’t pay their bills in retirement, who say it’s unfair for them to pay property taxes for schools, who say they deserve higher SS COLAs etc.
Some people, through no fault of their own, because of uncontrollable misfortune, did not have the ability to save and build retirement income at whatever level they were throughout life. But those folks are far from the majority. 
So what happened that after forty years of working so many seniors seem poorly positioned to live in retirement?

THE INVESTMENT WORLD is full of storytellers. And while these folks might be entertaining, they generally aren’t very helpful. There’s one category of stories, however, that I do think is useful: They’re what I might call investment fables. They’re apocryphal stories that likely aren’t real. But they’re helpful nonetheless because each carries a useful lesson. Here are some of the more popular ones.
Consumer choice. In 1999, Richard Mille and a partner launched a company to make wristwatches.

I recently received an email from Vanguard informing me they’re updating the prospectus on a developed world fund I hold with them. The change relates to concentration limits. Under existing European regulation, no single company can normally represent more than 10% of a fund. However, there is a pre-existing exemption available to index-tracking funds that allows this ceiling to be raised to 20%. Vanguard are now choosing to apply that exemption.
Here’s what caught my attention: no company has actually hit that 10% threshold yet.

There is a slowing growing movement to offer annuities within 401k plans, mostly through target date funds. They purchase the annuity gradual starting around age 50 or so or in a lump sum.  401k Plan provisions determine other options. I think it’s a good and much needed option for the great majority of workers.
But my question is, how important to you is a regular income stream, at least to cover all basic living expenses. I know many HD folks like the flexibility of DIY withdrawals,

I used AI as an editorial assistant to help organize and refine my thoughts; the underlying ideas and personal experiences remain my own.
Rebalancing sounds simple. Pick your target allocation and, whenever a holding drifts too far, trade back to target.
That’s how I thought about it as I started managing my risk portfolio. The problem was that I never stopped to ask what “too far” meant. I found myself reacting to routine market movements that had little effect on my long-term plan.

At every stage of my life, I picked up at least a tidbit of knowledge that helped me when I moved on to the next step. Here is some of the curriculum from my school of life. 
 

Don’t Drive Like My Brother, 101. Dave is three years my senior. We used to go out driving around after he got his license. He drove like a mad-man. Tickets, accidents, street racing, you name it. He was a one man wrecking crew.

In February, Guindy Sam wrote about taxes on foreign dividends and taxes, and I decided to quantify the issue using data from the index provider MSCI.
Quick reminder: some countries tax dividends at the source when they’re paid, similar to payroll withholding tax. US taxpayers can claim credit for these foreign taxes paid on their returns (the Foreign Tax Credit). But investors who do not itemize this benefit — those holding the stocks in IRAs, 401(k)s,

If you don’t already know, I live in Ireland, not exactly a country you’d associate with scorching heat. Because of this, Irish homes have never needed air conditioning, and mine is no different. Air conditioning in an Irish home is still something of a novelty.
The problem is, mother nature is slowly changing the rules. It’s still cloudy and mild more often than sunny and warm, but heat is creeping into our summers, and not the pleasant kind.

My great aunt survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 with nothing. We know this because she wrote a letter to my grandmother in Kansas asking her to sell the property they had inherited together. She and Billy had nothing left. Nothing at all. A Union soldier — that is how she described him in the letter — handed her a pair of long johns. That was what she had to wear.
She and her husband William F.

This morning I was at a high school graduation and one of the speakers-head of the BOE-started her speech by relating a local news story about an elderly lady photographed in the rain pushing a shopping cart to where it belonged. The lady was questioned why do that in this terrible weather.
Her quoted reply was, “I was taught to put things back where they belong, besides it’s the right thing to do.”
The curmudgeon feels vindicated 👍 Maybe it’s an age thing. 

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,

Here’s something that will either comfort or disturb you: the mathematical technique underpinning your retirement strategy was invented by an unwell mathematician playing solitaire in his sick bed.
In 1946, Stanislaw Ulam found himself laid up recovering from encephalitis with nothing to do but shuffle cards. Being the sort of guy who couldn’t boil an egg without pondering the thermodynamics involved, he started wondering about the mathematical probability of winning at solitaire.
He tried working it out properly with equations and formulae,