Dear friends,

Chip and I escaped for a bit this month. We headed northeast to Door County, the peninsula that extends above Green Bay, Wisconsin. Like the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, Door County represents “my happy place.” For folks unfamiliar with it, imagine a less commercialized version of Cape Cod: water on both sides, farms in between, cherries everywhere, no chain restaurants at all, and a series of small lakeside or bayside towns whose permanent populations number in the hundreds.

Here was the plan: disconnect from the outside world, Continue reading →

There are days when the world seems unnecessarily out of whack. Runways in London are melting, doctors and pharmacies are denying basic legal reproductive care to women because of fear of prosecution, and corporations are hiding more and more dark money contributions.   It doesn’t matter where you stand politically; both parties are rollicking in the dark. Many people are working to make the world a better place, and many more seem stunned and appalled. One of the strategies that was very much in vogue last year was Continue reading →

I am now in my fourth week of retirement. This article is the third of a three-part series describing my experiences as I retire. It builds upon “Certainty of Death and Taxes,” where I describe how taxes, social security, and Medicare may impact retirement financial plans. The topics covered in this article are:

1. Investment Environment: A recession is becoming more likely in 2023
2. Sequence of Return Risk: How a recession early in retirement can damage retirement plans
3. Tax Efficiency: Optimizing lifetime after-tax retirement income
4. Withdrawal Strategy: Using a basket of accounts to reduce taxes
5. Investment Strategy: The extended Bucket Strategy

Continue reading →

I’m not sure that I can. If I were to offer any tip, it might be to avoid TIPS.

The Problem: Inflation, TIPS, and Investment Frustration

Some investors (me included) bought Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS) to protect against rising inflation. Inflation has been raging in 2021-2022. Are you frustrated that shorter dated TIPS have made no money, while anyone who bought longer TIPS lost a bundle? All bonds lost money this year but TIPS were supposed to make money. And they didn’t. This very frustrating outcome is counterintuitive. In this article I take a look at Continue reading →

By Don Glickstein, the author of this article, which we’ve posted for him.

(Editor’s note: Glickstein worked for a decade as a reporter and editor on daily newspapers, and he won a National Press Club award for consumer journalism. He dipped his toes into politics as a campaign press secretary for the late Washington Gov. Booth Gardner. He later worked for nearly three decades in communications for what was then the nation’s largest consumer healthcare cooperative, now part of Kaiser Permanente. While there, he served as an intranet webmaster reaching 10,000 employees. His book, After Yorktown, was named one of the 100 best books ever written about the Revolution by the Journal of the American Revolution.) Continue reading →