Obviously, this is a stressful time. We’ve had two years of COVID that could have ruined our economy; inflation has not been this high for 40 years; and we have a war in Europe. I can’t make sense out of what it means for our

Last week I compared historical return data for stocks and bonds from three sources. I had not looked in detail at the Shiller data for stock and bond returns which date back to 1871. I plotted the data and find four sequences of return that

I spent time this week trying to understand the historical record of stock and bond returns. I mentioned last week that FIRECalc uses one source for stock and bond returns (Shiller) while I’ve used another for my spreadsheet calculations (Ibbotson). I looked at the detail

I spent time this past week reviewing my calculations of the age-appropriate Safe Spending Rates (SSR%s) that I display in Graph 2-7 and in Appendix D in Nest Egg Care (NEC). This post concludes the SSR%s that I first calculated in 2014 are

I imagine on the morning of each January 1 that Patti and I open a gift envelope from the much younger Tom to the older Tom and Patti. I imagine we open the gift envelope that held the $2,000 that I contributed to my Traditional