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You could get some really big outdoor fans and fox spray...

OP here. Thank all of you for your thoughts and suggestions. As Keim pointed out, her recovery process is a complicating factor over the "just say nothing ever", which is my usual policy for gifting money to friends and family when they think are taking a loan from me. I am going to tell her...

Last year, I loaned my ex-wife first and last month's rent so she could move out of our son's apartment, telling her she could start paying me back in August of 2023. She was 2 years sober and getting her act together at the time after decades of imprudence, financial and otherwise. I don't...

+1 for pants from Clothing arts. The zippered pockets are extremely comforting. The fabric is fairly wrinkle free and looks like regular khaki slacks (no cuffs). There used to be something called the Columbia sportswear adventure II that were darn near perfect but are of course thus made no...

1/2 of my living expenses are from 72(t) (aka SEPP) withdrawals from my IRAs. The other is from dividends and cash in taxable accounts. For health insurance, I'm paying $20/mn for a Bronze plan, and will pay < $1/mn next year. The 72(t) w/d are counted as income for the ACA subsidy which is...

Good news! Thanks :)

Where will I get parts for my 1990 washer / dryer? It broke back around 2000 and the $3 part was easy to find...

Yep. Most software developers I know have two or more screens. As for the video viewing, it's Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc. among the young folks that my daughter knows.

When they started charging a dollar a hair, I started doing it myself. Easy enough to do with my do.

I've been run down...

Look at the history of disease care costs. It started rising when "health insurance" started paying for more care and skyrocketing in the '60s when gov't became a payer. Plenty of links on the web for it. BTW, the only way I can see out of the current mess is complete government-provided...

That's good news because it's obviously insane for someone to spend nearly half their income making other people rich and not getting commensurate benefit from it. Maybe once it's gone beyond insane to obviously insane, we as a nation will do a right thing. [RANT]Government intervention caused...

HI--I suggest you use Crowdsourced Financial Independence and Early Retirement Simulator/Calculator or some other calculator to plot things out. You can put in your wife's pension, your social security, etc. and it will tell you how much you can spend. there's also firecalc.com as an...

If you have flexibility to spend less, you're set. From running a sim on another tool, it looks like you're pretty well set to retire now if you wanted (on $150K).

There were a good selection of bars for music on Frenchman St, just to the east of the French Quarter when I went last year (unlike decades ago:). They weren't quite as croweded as the French Quarter can get. Try Marigny Brasserie and stumble south. We stayed at the Hotel Roosevelt, very nice...

I've been paying my property taxes in the "even" years for a while now. I have no mortgage, and it reduces my taxable income by 3K (and growing :() every two years--like getting a bi-annual bonus. It helps not to have a mortgage, so I don't have to convince them to escrow it for me and pay at...

seems ok for me now.

From talking with old doctors, medical care wasn't insanely expensive until we started having more health insurance. As one writer put it "we didn't need health insurance until we had health insurance." [From what I heard, health care costs took off big time when the fed'l govt became the...

Two cars probably, no driver supplied. And gas costs more. Does your wife remember how to drive?

Agreed. if financial independence can't buy you the ability to be genuine, i'm not sure it's all it's cracked up to be. this is the other side of "FU money".

I believe: Most of us live our life feeling we're immortal. Sure, we know we could die any second, that the likelihood grows as we get older, but that knowledge hardly ever informs our feelings or affects our life. What you went through is that knowledge becoming something you feel. Many of...

+1

Taking the money out of a 401k or IRA causes taxable income and affects your AGI. If the tax burden (including ACA subsidy loss) of doing that is low, maybe you could do that instead.

That's a good thought, though you're not exactly selling low. It's more like you're deciding to buy low (since you get the dividend and then it gets reinvested or not, even if that's hidden from you). Of course, that's a form of market timing that can bite us; however, the studies I've seen on...

That's a self-serving observation on Fidelity's behalf: all the studies I've heard on active managers say that most of them woefully under-perform the market. You'll be taking the chance that you're going to pay 1% / year to someone that's the next Peter Lynch or Warren Buffet. I'm not sure...