What is your “worry free” spending limit? A cup of coffee? A bouquet of flowers? A restaurant steak? A new golf driver? When we got to a certain net worth, I recall thinking that anything under $20 or so was basically “free”. That is, even if spent every day, $20 wasn’t enough to materially impact our financial trajectory over the longer term. It was … Continue reading Worry Free Splurges
The 2025 stock market has been a case study in “follow the bouncing ball”. We were up (inauguration), down (“liberation day”), way up (tariff pause & lower interest rates), and now not up as much (China issues). The volatility with Trump isn’t unexpected given his history, but it has been quite a financial ride in 2025. When we returned for the first time in 6 … Continue reading Follow The Bouncing Ball
I’m on a flight from FL to MN right now and ran across this interesting survey from Empower, an investment company. I thought it did a good job showing how people are thinking about their financial lives & retirement. Link: Empower Study Overall, I’m generally pleased when I see how people are thinking about retirement, even if their actual behavior falls quite short. Like nutrition, … Continue reading Empowerment Retirement Survey …
An online group recently discussed the question “what are some ways that you SPLURGE or treat yourself in retirement?” Over 740 people responded to the question with many saying that a lifetime habit of pinching your pennies for the future is a difficult habit to break. Far and away the top comment was “More Travel” – especially upgraded with first class seats, 5 star hotels, … Continue reading 80 Ways People Splurge
The website, Ooma, recently published this interesting infographic comparing the states for the cost of living for retirees. They used 9 different dimensions for their ranking It’s a looooong infographic, so I broke it into key components so you can see the comparisons more easily. How does your state compare? I wasn’t surprised to see that our primary home state of Minnesota ranked in … Continue reading Retirement Cost of Living
Just a quick post this morning. I wanted to share this data I just came across in the Wall Street Journal. If you want to feel good about how your retirement savings are going, just compare your savings with these mean & median figures from across the USA. I’m guessing if you found your way to this site, you are running well ahead of the … Continue reading Mean & Median Net Worth
Everyone hates the idea that Congresspeople are using their positions to gain secret information to make investments. Political insider trading has been made illegal several times (usually after a damning CBS 60 Minutes broadcast), but later Congresses have either changed the laws or eliminated the penalties. You may have heard that some plucky entrepreneurs have decided to create ETFs that attempt to mirror the Congresspeople’s … Continue reading Insider Investment
Northwestern Mutual does a nice annual study on the ‘state of retirement’ in the USA. It’s a pretty exhaustive analysis that looks at all aspects of life and our involvement and satisfaction with each dimension. Link: Northwestern Mutual 2025 ‘Planning & Progress’ Study I was surprised by a few of the numbers from this year’s study and thought I’d share them. First, Americans are pretty … Continue reading Retirement Confidence
About once a year, some dusty old post from this site will “pop” and go viral. My post on private label grocery products from May of 2017 is the latest. Link: National vs Store Brands For some reason, it’s the top read post of 2025, after sitting mostly ignored for the last 8 years. After its 2017 debut (with a few hundred views), it fell … Continue reading Store Brands Revisited
I recently saw an interesting thread that discussed “How Can You Tell Someone Is Rich?” That is, what are the signs that someone has money, even if you just met them? It caught my attention because high on the list was “they retired from work in their 40s”. Here are some of the responses that people said suggest someone is rich … In general, these … Continue reading Signs Someone is Rich …
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