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

When I wrote Nest Egg Care (NEC), I used data for stock and bond returns starting from 1926. I displayed FIRECalc results for 72 23-year sequences in Graph 2-4. I highlighted the most harmful sequence – a blue line on that graph – as

Did you summarize your 2021 tax return in a format that is understandable to you? I find the 1040 form confusing. You can spend a bit of time to reorganize it so it’s much easier to understand. The purpose of this post is to provide

This is something last I thought about in detail when I first went on Medicare, but the purpose of this post is to pass on some of my thinking on supplemental insurance coverage to Medicare. The key criterion was to be able to go to

Bonds have declined steeply since last September, by roughly -13% real return. Our brokerage statement shows that Patti and I are barely above water on our total bond holdings: the current market value for our bonds is only a shade better than the cost basis