Last week I described that Patti and I fall in the category of having More Than Enough that I describe in Chapter 10 of Nest Egg Care (NEC). Our current portfolio value supports a Safe Spending Amount (SSA; Chapter 2) that means our

I looked in detail at our spending in this blog about 18 months ago as a way to help me understand how much we needed to pay ourselves from our nest egg. I did the same exercise this week, but in a much simpler way.

I have no idea of when this bear market will end. I have no crystal ball. But I was not remembering what has to happen for it to officially end. The purpose of this post is to describe that event.

We can only have

FIRECalc builds many historical sequences of stock and bond returns in history and displays how a portfolio will fare over time for all the sequences. Nest Egg Care uses THE Most Harmful sequence as the baseline assumption for determining a Safe Spending Rate in retirement

Dammit. It got me. I have no idea how. I’d put myself in the super cautious category. I wear a mask when others don’t. I avoid crowds. I hope you have not gotten it and won’t, but an article I read said roughly 50% of

In a way this is a silly question. $500 is worth $500, but in my case $500 isn’t worth much. Last week I locked up $10,000 of what I have in money market or interest-bearing checking to buy an I-Bond that I cannot redeem for

Oops. This is getting serious. My stocks are down more than 17% from the start of the year. My bonds are down more than 9%. (And the real declines are greater when I adjust for inflation.) Those are steep declines. Not nearly as steep for

The purpose of this post is to provide information on recent trends in inflation. We’ve all been hit with inflation: it hurts our spending power; both stocks and bonds react negatively to increasing inflation. The last time it was this high was about 40 years

My fun project for this week was to spend time planning our next big walking vacation in England in August. It was a good distraction from thinking about the stock market! The purpose of this post is to simply tell you what was fun for

Returns for stocks and bonds are down sharply this month and year to date. In the last week or so, I’ve read a number of articles implying that we retirees should be nervous: we should be lowering our spending; we should be taking special cautions