For many years I fiddled annually with my stock portfolio. Decades ago, I would spend hours and hours trying to pick winning stocks. Years ago, I would spend hours trying to pick winning, actively managed stock mutual funds. I stopped all fiddling for the last

I have no idea if you like to spend on travel. Patti and I really look forward to traveling, and it’s our biggest category of discretionary spending by far. It’s been 22 months since we traveled abroad, and we just got back from our trip

You DO NOT want to buy an annuity to substitute for bonds in your portfolio! I read this article about a month ago, “Using Annuities During Retirement: When to consider annuities rather than bonds.” The article suggests that one should seriously consider buying an annuity

When Patti and I officially started our Nest Egg Care retirement plan in December 2014, I had no Roth IRA. All our retirement accounts were Traditional IRA, and most of our money was in retirement accounts. I posted here and here about the importance of

What changes in your financial retirement plan and, most importantly, how is the surviving spouse’s financial well-being affected when one spouse dies? This purpose of this post is to describe the key changes as I see them. The key point is that the surviving spouse’s

This post doesn’t have anything to do with financial retirement planning, but I thought I would describe the current COVID-19 requirements to travel to the UK and to return to the US – as best as I understand them. That’s because this was the all-consuming

My tickler file tells me that this is the week to take my first draft cut on my tax plan for 2021. This post is to describes my steps. I get three things from this process: 1) a rough guess of our Safe Spending Amount

Patti and I traveled this week to Denver (Patti’s sister and family) and to St. Louis (my brother and his wife and family of Patti’s brother who died last spring). So, this post is far lighter than normal. The good news this week for Patti

How do you set your mix of stocks and bonds before the start date of your retirement? Patti and I officially started our retirement plan in December 2014. That was the first year we took a full withdrawal from our nest egg for our spending

Every January, I complete the Morningstar nine-box display of returns for segments of the market: the box is a matrix of annual returns by company size category (Large, Mid or Small Cap) and investment style (Value, Blend, or Growth). I did not realize that Fidelity