Creating Your Personal Pension Plan

Creating Your Personal Pension Plan

When you retire and begin to support yourself with portfolio withdrawals, life changes for your portfolio as well as for you. There are new risks, taxes, and other considerations for your investments; new questions about how best to raise the cash. Often there are unexpected emotions that arise as you draw down assets, causing cracks to appear between funding your retirement dreams and wanting to make the money last. A retirement cash-management plan can help bridge the gap.

The Carpenter Who Never Retired

The Carpenter Who Never Retired

A recent Wall Street Journal article, When Will I Retire? How About Never, asked the question, “What drives people to keep working long past the age when they could comfortably leave the workforce? What benefits are they gaining that those who retire might miss out on?”

The article highlighted examples of several people pursuing very different careers well past traditional retirement age and made me curious: what would the AI program Chat GPT-4 think about the idea of not retiring? This led to the conversation below, completely unabridged. The prompts are mine, everything else is Chat GPT-4.

Encore! – We May Need More Than Three Acts

Encore! – We May Need More Than Three Acts

The Center for Disease Control & Prevention lists developmental milestones for the first five years of life – “skills such as taking a first step, smiling for the first time, and waving “bye bye.”” After five years, evidently, all bets are off, and it’s up to us to figure out the appropriate next steps. Now that we’re living longer, with yet more longevity on the horizon, what should the developmental goals be for our lives?

Are You a Farmer or a DoorDasher?

Are You a Farmer or a DoorDasher?

“How many of you have dreamed of owning a sailboat?” a conference speaker asked the audience. Dozens of hands went up. “How many of you have dreamed of drydocking and painting that boat?” Hands fell back down. Few of us dream about the time, money, and vigilance required to prevent our possessions from falling apart, so we’re often surprised by what we’ve taken on.

How Worried Should Investors Be About Bonds?

How Worried Should Investors Be About Bonds?

The bargain that investors make with bonds is clear: in exchange for holding the most boring financial asset on the planet, they’ll receive slow, steady, but positive investment returns to cushion their far more exciting, but unreliable stocks. This year the agreement has been breached: bond prices have fallen alongside stocks as central banks raise interest rates to dampen inflation. How worried should investors be about this development and what, if anything, should they do about it?

What Are You Willing To Fail At?

What Are You Willing To Fail At?

When we commit to accomplishing a goal, we commit to the possibility of at least two kinds of failure - the possibility that we won’t get what we want, and the possibility that, if we do, we may discover that success wasn’t worth the costs. These costs include not just the time, money and effort we expended to reach our destination, but also the things we gave up in order to get there. The poet Robert Frost famously alluded to these things as “the road not taken”; economists call them “opportunity costs.”

The Most Important Questions To Ask Before Buying a Home

The Most Important Questions To Ask Before Buying a Home

Among the many surprises that the Covid pandemic brought into our lives was a split-second decision by thousands of U.S. households not only to uproot themselves and relocate to far flung areas of the country but to make the biggest purchase decision of their lives and buy a house. We’re still in the midst of the pandemic, but reports are already arriving of buyer’s remorse and people feeling “house poor” despite the historically low mortgage rates.

Your Commute is Calling — Will You Answer?

Your Commute is Calling — Will You Answer?

With vaccinations rolling out across the country, the factory whistle is sounding. Employers such as Uber, Google, Chase, and Goldman Sachs are beginning to call employees back to the office, saying it’s time to resume pre-pandemic work patterns. Employees aren’t so sure. They gave up a lot to reorganize their lives this past year and, like the inhabitants of Plato’s famous cave, had their eyes opened to new possibilities. What happens next in this developing standoff could transform not just the traditional office, but the broader contours of our lives.

Charitable Gifting - Start with Why

Charitable Gifting - Start with Why

When the industrialist Andrew Carnegie was giving away his fortune last century to help establish the modern public library system in the United States, the critics were quick to pounce. They questioned his motives for giving and derided the amounts as too small, given his enormous wealth. As it turns out, the critics were onto something: articulating one’s purpose for charitable giving and financial capacity to do so are an excellent starting place for anyone determining how much they want to donate.

How Much Should I Donate to Charity?

How Much Should I Donate to Charity?

Charitable giving is a two-step process: you decide whether to make a donation, then decide how much to give. The first step is usually easy, but the second step can be a doozy. The challenge of figuring out how much to donate often stops people in their tracks and can prevent them from giving anything at all. So, how do you figure out the right amount to give?