My wife and I were watching Sense & Sensibility on TV over the weekend and there is a scene where the Dashwood ladies are having their hearts broken, I kinda laughed and my wife turned to me and asked me if I ever had my heart broken and I turned to her, looked her in…
Month: February 2024
Financial Regrets: Accumulating Junk
When my wife and I got married we lived in a small one bedroom apartment. All of our possessions could fit comfortably in a space no bigger than 10ft x 10ft. When we were expecting our first child, we bought our first house which was a two story five bedroom house. When we moved in…
Municipal Bonds: Do You Know Good From Bad?
The greatest thing about investing in the United States are the endless choices. The worst thing about investing in the United States are the endless choices. From tens of thousands of stocks to even more bonds and seemingly endless real estate there are just too many choices and too many decisions to make so how…
Father To Son Financial Lessons, Often Ignored
When I became a teenager and received my first driver’s license my father gave me a few pieces of advice about safety and driving, etc. Of course, as a teenager that “knew” everything I rolled my eyes. One additional piece of advice my father gave, which also caused me to roll my eyes, was to…
Do You Have An I-Bond Time Bomb?
One of the blogs I love to read is www.tipswatch.com by David Enna. The blog covers, as you might imagine by the name, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities and a recent post had me thinking about my own bond portfolio. The crux of the matter is if you’ve been buying bonds for a long time and…
My 10 Year Anniversary With Kiva.org
One of the ways I like to give back to the community and help others is through Kiva.org. If you don’t know what Kiva is, here is a blurb from their About page: More than 1.7 billion people around the world are unbanked and can’t access the financial services they need. Kiva is an international…
Retirement Planning: Step 5 – Putting It All Together
Let’s review my five retirement planning steps in case you missed any…click on the Steps to go to the appropriate Step. Step 1 – Total all retirement accounts. Step 2 – Estimate how much social security might provide. Step 3 – Estimate what the IRS standard deduction might be during my retirement years. Step 4 – Estimate…
Retirement Planning: Step 4 – IRS Tax Brackets
It’s 2:00 a.m. on a cold February morning, do you know which tax bracket you’re in right now? If you don’t, you’re in luck because I put this table together from the IRS that shows the tax brackets for 2023. I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that tax brackets are…
Retirement Planning: Step 3 – IRS Standard Deduction
Do you know what the IRS standard deduction is and how it fits into retirement planning? First the definition of the standard deduction from the IRS: The standard deduction is a specific dollar amount that reduces the amount of income on which you’re taxed. Your standard deduction consists of the sum of the basic standard…
Retirement Planning: Step 2 – Social Security
In Step 1, I gathered all my retirement accounts and established what pool of money I will have to be able to retire and that will be my largest bucket of money to live off of for the rest of my life. Another bucket of money that may or may not exist when I retire…