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

I’ll complete my first draft of our tax plan for 2022 the first week of August, and I’ll finalize it by the end of November before I’ll sell securities to get cash for our spending in calendar 2023. I gather some information this time of

I used to be THE MOST DISORGANIZED, tardy person in gathering the information needed to complete our tax return. I procrastinated and was very late in filing returns. It eventually became an all-consuming, stressful task to file our returns. I’m probably over-organized and over-detailed now,

I like looking at Vanguard’s Style Box (I call it a Nine Box.) at the end of the year to get a snapshot of what outperformed and what underperformed the US stock market as a whole. This post shows 2021 results. It was obviously a

It’s a week or two past the time of year that most of us judge how well our portfolios performed for the past calendar year. This post shows the nominal and real returns Patti and I earned on our portfolio in 2021and over the past

You can find predictions for the stock market ranging from 2022 as the start of the Most Harmful Sequence of returns in history to it’s going to be a normal year. Morningstar and others predict we are very close to THE STEEPEST drop in stocks