I did my initial plan for our Safe Spending Amount for calendar 2024 the first week of August. I finalize the plan this month, and I can do that now. I have the two items of new information since August: 1) the 3.2% COLA

A final data point for inflation in September was issued this morning. That was for the important chart below for Personal Consumption Expenditures less Food and Energy components. This is the measure of inflation that the Federal Reserve favors. The last six months point to

Since 1982 the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has tracked what they call an experimental index for Americans age 62 and older, CPI-E. This index weights components of inflation differently than the index that Social Security (SS) uses to calculate its annual Cost of Living

I’m sure you saw this news this week: SS benefits will increase by 3.2% for 2024. At the same time, the news was that 12-month inflation was 3.7%. Why the difference? This post is a refresher: SS uses a different measure of inflation than

A SPIVA report that I summarize in this post shows that nearly 90% of institutional fund managers return less to the owners of their fund than their benchmark index over 10 years. I recently summarized a prior SPIVA report on active mutual fund managers:

We now know the tripwires of income that trigger surcharges we retirees could pay to Medicare in 2024.  About 15% of those on Medicare have high enough income to result in surcharges. If you are in that category now or might be in the future,

My post two weeks ago addressed US funds. This post looks how closely four international stock index funds match the benchmark they are attempting to match. Two Vanguard funds very closely track their benchmark index. Two other funds don’t do as well. The return rates

I was a member of AAII a number of years ago, but dropped my subscription. This week I got a slick packet enticing me to join that says, “AAII Members Make Nearly 3 Times More Profit than Most in the Stock Market.” “Join 150,000+ AAII

Ideally, before costs, index funds exactly match the index they attempt to mimic. Returns for shareholders of the fund should be the returns for the index less the fund’s expense ratio. This doesn’t always hold true because of tracking errors – the funds inability to

A final data point for inflation in July was issued Thursday morning. The important chart below is the one for Personal Consumption Expenditures, a measure the Fed favors. The rate for both June and July were about half that of the average of the prior