Earlier today Dick Quinn published a useful reminder that the time to think about doing qualified charitable deductions (QCD) is now.  We’ve also been looking at our annual charitable contributions.  We are not quite old enough to use QCDs, but there are a few changes in the 2026 tax code that will impact our charitable donations.
Starting in the 2026 tax year, non-itemizers (those who take the standard deduction) will be able to deduct some of their charitable donations made to eligible charitable organizations. 

As you may know, months before Jonathan’s death the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy launched the Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative.  
Over the past year, I’ve received numerous inquiries as to the status of the program. I’m pleased to say that a formal update is now available here.
Thank you to everyone who supported this one of a kind initiative.

Last night Connie and I spent time giving away money, it was like being on Amazon (we did that too) only no waiting for packages. It was our annual session of who receives a qualified charitable distribution (QCD). We have a list that goes from the church to food pantry’s, soup kitchens, St Jude’s hospital, the Williamsburg Foundation and a few others. I like to direct most to organizations that focus on individuals. 
It’s a fun process and financially painless.

YEARS AGO, while practicing law, I was a frequent contributor to Humble Dollar. I loved Jonathan Clements’s vision for the site – a corner of the financial universe built on clarity, frugality, and the quiet dignity of living within one’s means.
Then my life took a sharp pivot. I left legal practice to teach gifted-and-talented students and coach varsity athletics at a public magnet high school. Almost immediately, my submissions here dried up.

YOU MAY BE familiar with a concept known as Pascal’s wager. Named for Blaise Pascal, a devout seventeenth-century French mathematician, it was a thought experiment in which he tried to weigh, in logical terms, the costs and benefits of believing in God. His conclusion: The cost of not believing—a potential eternity of damnation—was so extreme that it far outweighed any other consideration.
I mention Pascal’s wager because a common question is whether similar logic might apply to financial decision-making.

A friend from London phoned me on Monday for a catch-up. He’s a typical Londoner and likes to talk, which is my polite way of saying the conversation was rather one-sided. He’s been a self-employed IT consultant for the last few years and was buzzing about his imminent move back into paid employment.
He spent our chat describing his plans for the role, his impressions of the business and its key staff, and how he intends to use the regular paycheck as a springboard into retirement in five years.

The biggest mistake an investor can make is not reading a few great books on Personal Finance to learn the proper way to invest for the long term. Those authors that come to mind are Bogle, Malkiel, Swede, and Wm Bernstein

Joey and I just returned from Naples, Florida, where we stayed in a small, cozy Airbnb with the water right in front of us. Smaller homes surrounded us, though larger houses were beginning to change the neighborhood.
One morning at Starbucks, the woman ahead of me was telling the cashier about her oncology appointment later that day. The cashier shared that she was a cancer survivor. I mentioned my brother Jonathan, whom we lost to cancer.

Here at HumbleDollar, we spend most of our time on growing wealth. That focus leaves a blind spot: we’ve neglected readers who want to shrink their wealth through their investment choices. In the interest of balance, I’d like to address that gap systematically.
Let’s start with the easiest set-it-and-forget-it approach, a classic one-two combo. First, find a high-fee advisor who champions high-fee funds. Give it a few years and, if all goes to plan, you should see a healthy dent in your potential net worth.

Does it matter? Probably not if we are happy and reasonably financially secure. Benchmarks can be informative, if not helpful, though. For one thing they remind us when discussing money, affordability, frugality and such how relative, how different things can be and how normal at the same time.
An interesting (?) information exercise follows without conclusions or recommendations to move to Mississippi😎
Through extensive research (four AI apps) I have learned that “rich” is determined by income and “wealthy” by value of assets,

I see a lot discussed about using cash and bonds in retirement.  I’ve wondered why using portfolio income (interest and dividends) isn’t discussed to supplement or as an alternate to withdrawals.
I’ve thought about using income temporarily during market downturns to reduce cash and bond allocations.
What do you think and who has experience with this strategy?

FINANCIAL EMERGENCIES have a way of compounding when least expected. This is often coined as a correlated risk. I call it running out of clean underwear. 
My father used to profess, in emergencies, that turning pairs inside out was a legitimate way to extend undergarment use under duress. Financially, this is merely extending the life of a depreciating asset.  I am sure my mother would have refuted this concept. Nevertheless, before you judge me too harshly,

RECENTLY, A READER—let’s call him Tom—posed this question: If stocks historically have delivered far better returns than bonds, then why should an investor own any bonds at all? Even with the stock market’s unpredictable ups and downs, wouldn’t you end up way ahead by betting only on stocks over the long term?
It’s a fair question. Over the past 100 years, stocks have delivered returns of roughly 10% per year, while bonds have returned just 5%.

On 9/29/2026 the US Senate passed the Claiming Age Clarity Act that the US House passed in December 2025 and the the legislation is now on the way to the President for his signature to become law.
In a nutshell the law changes the terminology about how the claiming ages are referred to by the Social Security Agency.
H. R. 5284 Section 2 of the pending bill as adopted by the Senate without amendment reads as follows –

Over the past year, we received many comments expressing difficulty in logging in to HD from third-party sites such as Facebook, Disqus, etc.   And we listened.
A new feature on upper right-hand corner of the homepage navigation bar is an account/profile button from which you can register or convert a third-party login into a direct HumbleDollar login. Under FAQs there’s a new explainer animation that shows exactly how to do this: https://humbledollar.com/direct-login/ 
And if