In 2016 I registered as an investment advisor with the Commonwealth of MA and began offering comprehensive financial services as the only fee-only fiduciary in Franklin County.
I provide deeply integrated financial services for people combining my extensive experience as a tax accountant (I'm a CPA) as well as my knowledge of comprehensive financial planning (I'm a CFP® practitioner) and my investment advising expertise (I'm a registered investment advisor.)
I'm back in my home office at 3 Grinnell Street. The blog I update these days is the ProsperiTea Planning Blog page at my website. See you there!
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
Monday, November 24, 2014
Read this before you try to sign up for health insurance on the MA Health Connector for the first time!
A friend and I tried out the MA Health Connector this week. Here are my tips for you before you start. (Warning, this is LONG!)
Before you even try, I recommend you ask your doctor's office what insurance they do (or do not) accept. Not every physician takes every insurer.
They are going to want you to have some idea of your income in 2014. They are actually trying for your income in 2015 when they ask, though. But in either case, it's a good idea to rough in your 2014 tax return. (You can just take last year's and write in the margin if you want, no one is going to see this.)
The number they're going to use is your "combined modified adjusted gross income", that is, your Form 1040, line 37, plus any non-taxable interest or social security income that shows up on lines 8b or line 20a. You'll need this number for every member of your household who files a tax return and is covered under your insurance.
The other thing you'll want before you start is the address your employers use with the Department of Unemployment. It'll be whatever is on the W-2 you got from them in 2013. If you have a new employer in 2014 take a moment to find out the address they use for payroll before you start.
When you first get to https://www.mahealthconnector.org/ you may find that they redirect you to another site and then start asking very personal questions without ever mentioning that it's been hijacked on purpose and that it's not just an elaborate phishing scheme. MA is contracting with a company called Optum to run the exchange.
Optum will require you to create a login. Write down this login and password, you'll need it for the rest of your life (until age 65 anyway.) I recommend a password manager like "LastPass", too. Also note: they'll need your email address and you'll have to use a code they send you to verify the email address, so be someplace where you can check your email at the same time as you're doing the online application. (Because, don't we ALL have dual monitors and web-access to email? Sheesh, Boston!)
They are going to verify your identity by asking you some questions that they have gleaned off your Experien credit report. That means that it's a good idea for you to go to https://www.annualcreditreport.com/index.action and get a copy of your credit report to check for identity theft. (There are three agencies, but Experien is the one being used in MA.) You want the report, not the score: you're looking it over to make sure the things in it refer to things you've done. If you haven't opened up a Victoria's Secret store credit card EVER (even once to get 10% off!) and there's one on your report, then your identiy may have been hacked. Just look it over to see if anything jumps out at you as obviously wrong.
Okay, all set with a mock-up of 2014 income, addresses for your employers, web-access to your email, and you're pretty sure your credit report refers to things that happened in your own actual life? Sit down, this is going to take an hour.
You may be eligible for a special cost-sharing plan where copayments as well as the premiums are subsidized if your combined modified adjusted gross income (see above) is below 250% of the poverty level. Because they have no way to recapture this, they want to try to make sure you aren't faking having earnings less than $29,175 for a single and $59,625 for a family of four by checking your income against what your employers reported to the Department of Unemployment. (They can't check self-employed income as far as I can tell.) Here are the Federal poverty guidelines for 2014: http://familiesusa.org/product/federal-poverty-guidelines
You are eligible for an advance on your 2015 tax credits if you expect to earn less than 400% of the poverty level, $46,680 for a single and $95,400 for a family of four. Most people will want to get this premium credit sent straight to the insurance company, but if you earn more than you expected you will have to repay the excess tax credit you received in advance. (The opposite is also true: if you go to file your 2015 tax return and discover you earned less, you'll get the difference back in your refund.) Also note: everyone getting premium subsidies over and above MassHealth is going to have to file a tax return next year to prove you were really eligible once your 2015 income is known.
Watch out for a trick: there's a place in the questionaire where it asks if you've currently got health insurance. If you used to get it through the Connector and they threw you on MassHealth because they coudn't figure out how to implement ACA for the past year, you should answer "NO", you don't currently have insurance. You may be covered, but what you really have is a temporary stop-gap thing until they could sign you up under the Affordable Care Act. This is the first time anyone in MA could do this.
If you have adult children whose coverage you cover, you're going to need to put their information in this, too.
If it bombs - and it did with me - you don't have to start over, it auto saves each page. I had several times where there were long delays but if I retried it then I'd connect.
If you do not want to go through this by yourself, you can make an appointment with a free financial counselors like Heather or Aria at Baystate Franklin, or at the Community Health Center of Franklin County, They are free, and that makes them pretty popular.
Sunday, November 9, 2014
Book Review: "Save Your Retirement"
The hook for this book by Frank Armstrong III and Paul Brown is in the subtitle. Notice it's not "Save FOR your retirement". It's "Save Your Retirement: What do Do if You haven't Save Enough or If Your Investments Were Devastated" is a book of distilled wisdom compiled by a CFP® and professional financial journalist.
It's really mostly the gloss they put on it as an excuse to write yet another book on a tired subject. Basically, they suggest you not retire if you can't afford it. Sorry, spoiled it.
But I liked the book overall. I found the structure to be useful, segregated out into different chapters depending on how many years out you were. There were some useful nuggets. As I say, "rules of thumb work pretty well for people with thumbs."
Although I mostly liked it, I had two quibbles about this book. One was that they starkly say "don't buy annuities". Money managers have a HUGE thing against annuities. I really wish people would talk more about the risks and benefits of annuities, because I can think of at least two different scenarios where "definitely buy annuities" would be better advice. Most of the time the correct advice is "consider carefully whether to buy an annuity, because it may be appropriate in your situation and you won't find out from an annuity salesman." That means you DO need to find out from books like this, and it totally dropped the ball on it.
The other quibble was that it didn't really talk about percentages you need to be saving. I've seen some really decent scholarship saying that the savings RATE is really super important, more than the amount you've got saved at any given moment, in terms of being able to reproduce your desired lifestyle.
That said, it hit some really good moments when it discussed estate planning up front (hello, dying is actually an important aspect of your retirement plan) and it also did a good job of trying to squelch lifestyle inflation after your kids leave home before you retire (the extra money freed up when they leave home is not for ramping up lifestyle, it's for fixing your beleaguered retirement plan.)
All in all, I'd recommend the book as an easy read with a few good ideas, but I'd pair it with a different book on when and why you'd want to convert your 401(k) into an annuity. I'll have to let you know when I find that one.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Planning issues related to DOMA's design
Several years ago Gill v. OPM ruled that DOMA was unconstitutional in the 1st District. Then the court determined that DOMA would only be constitutional if there were a compelling reason to discriminate. After due consideration of any compelling reasons to discriminate, I came to the conclusion that DOMA would not be able to overcome that standard. At that time I started filing people "married filing joint" if they benefited from doing so, and went back and put protective claims in for people as far back as 2008 if they would benefit. So the short version is that I don't have any clients where I did both spouse's returns that need to amend an old return to file jointly; if it benefited you, we already did it. Happily, no one is being forced to amend to file jointly if they don't want to (and most people don't want to - more on that below.)
But it turns out there's ANOTHER reason to amend your old returns. If you were someone who got health insurance for your spouse through your workplace, you had a weirdness on your W-2 that we can now go back and change, and with the new W-2s in hand, amend 2010, 2011 and 2012. Apparently, no one is being forced to be consistent in their tax treatment. What that means is that you can still amend your 2010 return to show lower income on a revised W-2 without having to amend to file jointly.
Basically, if you had imputed health insurance on your W-2 there are good reasons to ask your employer to revise your W-2s. This pertains to you if you had "imputed income" from your employer's share of your spouse's income AND if you paid for your spouse's insurance out of your own payroll deductions, too, since now we can revise your W-2 to show that those expenses should have been before Federal taxes, Social Security Taxes and Medicare taxes. The procedure is that you need to get a revised W-2 from your employer for 2010, 2011 and 2012. We have time to fix 2011 and 2012, but 2010 is going to expire soon so it's good if we can get that moving ASAP. Ask me if you need help, or check out this paper on how to do it. https://www.talx.com/News/TaxIntelligence/2013-10-ETS-Tax-Intelligence-DOMA.pdf
If I didn't do both returns for you and your spouse there is a possibility that you might wish to amend 2010, 2011 and 2012 to file jointly. Most of the time we find people have a better outcome if they file as two single people, but there is one scenario where you save on taxes if your marriage is recognized: where you earn very little and your spouse earns quite a lot. So two people making $40K would have higher taxes if they marry, but one person making $70K and another making $10K would be better off at tax time because of being married. (Sorry, married people, Married Filing Separately is usually the worst of all the options.) You are considered married based on your status on December 31st. If you are a situation where I didn't already do both tax returns AND you have uneven incomes, give my office a call to schedule some time to explore whether we want to amend old years. Again,2010 is the time-critical one; the chance to amend it expires on 4/15/14 unless you filed for an extension in 2010. Note that it's a good idea to ask for the W-2 to be revised first and do both amends at once.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
New location!
Big news! After eleven years in a home office, I'm moving 8 doors down the street to a great place to expand my practice. It's the grey building two up from the YMCA. Stay tuned for news about new staff hires!
I'm probably not going to be in the new building until mid-January, though, so if we're meeting before that please come to my old location: 3 Grinnell St., at the corner of Crescent, Grinnell and Highland Avenues. See directions here.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Book Review: "Debt-Proof Your Marraige" by Mary Hunt
The subtitle of "Debt-Proof Your Marriage" is "How to achieve financial harmony: become effective money partners; create a get-out-of-debt plan that works, be prepared for unexpected expenses; slash mortgage payback time in half; deal effectively with roller coaster income." Quite a mouthful, but I'd say it pretty much delivers.
Apparently she wrote a book called "Debt Proof Living" and this is the revamped and remarketed version that throws in marital advice. I think it's great. With very few exceptions I agreed entirely with all of her prescriptions. I sometimes call things by different names, but she is describing the same organs in this financial body as I see, and solves the same problems in the same way that I solve them.
There were only two or three places where I'd diverge from her, so let me get those out of the way.
First, she writes from (and for) a Christian audience and has a few compartmentalized sections that are aimed at that market. One is about gifting, the other is about trusting in God. To be honest, I do the same functions without God in the mix; I think you need to gift for psychological reasons; if you say "I am too poor, I can't afford to give" then it becomes true. You're the one who decides what "too poor" means. If you say "I am well off enough that I can afford to share" then it ALSO becomes true. It's a binary switch and the person who flips it is you. I tell all my clients to find a charity that reflects their values and then give money in such a way to "make the world a better place because you exist by funding your values." She says it's because God wants you to. Whatever, same diff to me.
The trusting in God thing goes like this: just give this system a try. Don't worry about how it will work out, just do the right/smart/hard thing for a bit and maybe God will rescue you with a lottery winnings or a raise or an inheritance. Because God's a cool dude and it could happen. I see this as a trick to get you to start rescuing yourself. If you need to feel like the rescuer is just around the corner, that there's a deux ex machina intervention to this story, that's fine by me. But, uh, in the meantime how about just getting started. You know, while you wait.
So, yeah, I'd agree with what she says and leave faith out of it, but a great many people have faith as an important central source of power in their lives and it's fine with me if they want to tap that.
I also thought her insistence on binders and pieces of paper was too old-fashioned, but am fine about giving her the benefit of the doubt on this one. Not everyone has a free app on their smartphone for tracking spending, and I've certainly seen how having Quicken just be on my laptop saddles me with being the 100% of the time bill-payer/financial-partner in a marriage. Maybe she's right on this one.
The only other place I might have differed is on her insistence on closing out credit cards. She has a great section on reading credit reports - very useful. But she also talks about sending certified letters and checking credit reports to make sure they're closed, etc. I do not see the point in this. She also mentions elsewhere that you can "put your credit on ice" by putting them in a block of water and keeping them in the freezer. I think this is a fine idea for all your credit cards. Closing accounts can actually HARM your credit rating! This is because one of the metrics for how well you handle credit is how much of all your available credit lines are currently used. So if you have a cumulative of $9K in credit card debt and three cards with $10K credit lines, you go from 9/30 ratio from 9/10 ratio if you close two of those cards. Better to have the credit line and not use it! That actually reflects credit maturity, in fact.
But I say this as someone whose roofer wants to do a $10,000 improvement this winter and I do *not* have $10K in my home improvement pot. (Yes, this is the same scenario as this time last year, it's a reoccurring problem. This house swallows $10K in home improvements a year and I had "decided" I wouldn't do it for a few years when I had two kids in college but, uh, my "decision" turned out to not be pertinent to the house's needs.) So here I am needing to come up with $10K again and I'm awfully glad I have a couple of 0% cash advance offers on my credit card. Maybe this reflects that I'm a lousy manager of debt, but I don't think so; I'd say instead that I'm an advanced user of debt. I'll pay down that credit card in full before the 0% rate expires. This is a $30,000 home improvement and I'm doing it $10K/year over three years rather than getting a home equity loan of $30K with closing costs and 10 years of repayment. Point is, there are times when having a credit line available with no fees and no requalifying is awfully useful. Her advice is really only useful here for the people who really are rank amateurs.
Which brings me to the other issue: this book pretty much assumes you're not unemployed, and there's only a tiny lip service at the end to being self-employed. She makes a good, albeit brief point that you can standardize your cash flow as a self-employed person and this will illuminate if your business is failing, i.e., if you feel you need to get $3,000/month and your business cannot handle paying you $3,000 every single month then you need to go get a better job.
I liked this book quite a lot. I liked it a lot better than Elizabeth Warren's "All Your Worth", although Warren had good ideas about how to set up a budget that I haven't seen elsewhere. It was more useful for people early in the accumulation years or anyone seriously in debt, but I'd prefer Henry Hebeler's "Getting Started in a Financially Secure Retirement" for anyone really trying to get a budget nailed down in or near retirement. If you are self-employed without marriage problems you can skip this book entirely, though, and go straight to "The Money Book for Freelancers, Part-Time and the Self-employed"by Denise Kiernan. I liked it a whole hell of a lot better than anything by Suze Orman (I'm not going to bother searching back through my reviews to link to that) and it was similar, but slightly nicer, than Dave Ramsey, and slightly different than Jean Chatsky's book, although it covered mostly the same things. (Chatsky talked more about insurance.) Fact is, the basic elements of how to have a good financial life don't really differ that much. It's like fat loss methods; what ever method of eating less and exercising more works for you is fine. The basic problem with all of these methods is that none of them "work". YOU have to do all the work.
It's been a while since I read "Your Money or Your Life" by Dominguez (I can't find the review? Did I not tag it? Or not review it? Could this pre-date my book reviewsl?!?) but that is a more essential book than this one. You need to really grasp what money *IS* before you can feel sufficiently motivated to bother to manage it, in my opinion.
What really stands out in the Mary Hunt book, though, is the wise and kind and useful marital advice. It's slapped on the front of a money management book a bit disjointedly, but the chapters don't have to be long to be right, and they certainly belong here.
Recommended.
Apparently she wrote a book called "Debt Proof Living" and this is the revamped and remarketed version that throws in marital advice. I think it's great. With very few exceptions I agreed entirely with all of her prescriptions. I sometimes call things by different names, but she is describing the same organs in this financial body as I see, and solves the same problems in the same way that I solve them.
There were only two or three places where I'd diverge from her, so let me get those out of the way.
First, she writes from (and for) a Christian audience and has a few compartmentalized sections that are aimed at that market. One is about gifting, the other is about trusting in God. To be honest, I do the same functions without God in the mix; I think you need to gift for psychological reasons; if you say "I am too poor, I can't afford to give" then it becomes true. You're the one who decides what "too poor" means. If you say "I am well off enough that I can afford to share" then it ALSO becomes true. It's a binary switch and the person who flips it is you. I tell all my clients to find a charity that reflects their values and then give money in such a way to "make the world a better place because you exist by funding your values." She says it's because God wants you to. Whatever, same diff to me.
The trusting in God thing goes like this: just give this system a try. Don't worry about how it will work out, just do the right/smart/hard thing for a bit and maybe God will rescue you with a lottery winnings or a raise or an inheritance. Because God's a cool dude and it could happen. I see this as a trick to get you to start rescuing yourself. If you need to feel like the rescuer is just around the corner, that there's a deux ex machina intervention to this story, that's fine by me. But, uh, in the meantime how about just getting started. You know, while you wait.
So, yeah, I'd agree with what she says and leave faith out of it, but a great many people have faith as an important central source of power in their lives and it's fine with me if they want to tap that.
I also thought her insistence on binders and pieces of paper was too old-fashioned, but am fine about giving her the benefit of the doubt on this one. Not everyone has a free app on their smartphone for tracking spending, and I've certainly seen how having Quicken just be on my laptop saddles me with being the 100% of the time bill-payer/financial-partner in a marriage. Maybe she's right on this one.
The only other place I might have differed is on her insistence on closing out credit cards. She has a great section on reading credit reports - very useful. But she also talks about sending certified letters and checking credit reports to make sure they're closed, etc. I do not see the point in this. She also mentions elsewhere that you can "put your credit on ice" by putting them in a block of water and keeping them in the freezer. I think this is a fine idea for all your credit cards. Closing accounts can actually HARM your credit rating! This is because one of the metrics for how well you handle credit is how much of all your available credit lines are currently used. So if you have a cumulative of $9K in credit card debt and three cards with $10K credit lines, you go from 9/30 ratio from 9/10 ratio if you close two of those cards. Better to have the credit line and not use it! That actually reflects credit maturity, in fact.
But I say this as someone whose roofer wants to do a $10,000 improvement this winter and I do *not* have $10K in my home improvement pot. (Yes, this is the same scenario as this time last year, it's a reoccurring problem. This house swallows $10K in home improvements a year and I had "decided" I wouldn't do it for a few years when I had two kids in college but, uh, my "decision" turned out to not be pertinent to the house's needs.) So here I am needing to come up with $10K again and I'm awfully glad I have a couple of 0% cash advance offers on my credit card. Maybe this reflects that I'm a lousy manager of debt, but I don't think so; I'd say instead that I'm an advanced user of debt. I'll pay down that credit card in full before the 0% rate expires. This is a $30,000 home improvement and I'm doing it $10K/year over three years rather than getting a home equity loan of $30K with closing costs and 10 years of repayment. Point is, there are times when having a credit line available with no fees and no requalifying is awfully useful. Her advice is really only useful here for the people who really are rank amateurs.
Which brings me to the other issue: this book pretty much assumes you're not unemployed, and there's only a tiny lip service at the end to being self-employed. She makes a good, albeit brief point that you can standardize your cash flow as a self-employed person and this will illuminate if your business is failing, i.e., if you feel you need to get $3,000/month and your business cannot handle paying you $3,000 every single month then you need to go get a better job.
I liked this book quite a lot. I liked it a lot better than Elizabeth Warren's "All Your Worth", although Warren had good ideas about how to set up a budget that I haven't seen elsewhere. It was more useful for people early in the accumulation years or anyone seriously in debt, but I'd prefer Henry Hebeler's "Getting Started in a Financially Secure Retirement" for anyone really trying to get a budget nailed down in or near retirement. If you are self-employed without marriage problems you can skip this book entirely, though, and go straight to "The Money Book for Freelancers, Part-Time and the Self-employed"by Denise Kiernan. I liked it a whole hell of a lot better than anything by Suze Orman (I'm not going to bother searching back through my reviews to link to that) and it was similar, but slightly nicer, than Dave Ramsey, and slightly different than Jean Chatsky's book, although it covered mostly the same things. (Chatsky talked more about insurance.) Fact is, the basic elements of how to have a good financial life don't really differ that much. It's like fat loss methods; what ever method of eating less and exercising more works for you is fine. The basic problem with all of these methods is that none of them "work". YOU have to do all the work.
It's been a while since I read "Your Money or Your Life" by Dominguez (I can't find the review? Did I not tag it? Or not review it? Could this pre-date my book reviewsl?!?) but that is a more essential book than this one. You need to really grasp what money *IS* before you can feel sufficiently motivated to bother to manage it, in my opinion.
What really stands out in the Mary Hunt book, though, is the wise and kind and useful marital advice. It's slapped on the front of a money management book a bit disjointedly, but the chapters don't have to be long to be right, and they certainly belong here.
Recommended.
Friday, August 24, 2012
Book Review: The New Retirementality by Mitch Anthony
Mitch Anthony is a sales consultant to the financial services industry. He's not actually an investment adviser, he teaches investment advisers how to get clients. His skill is in inspirational public speaking. If I had known this up front I would not have bothered to read this book. But it was interesting. "The New Retirementality: Planning Your Life and Living Your Dreams... At Any Age You Want (Third Edition)" was a bit of a hodge podge.
The first part of the book appears intended to help grasshoppers feel okay about not having saved for retirement. He comes at why this is okay from a bunch of happy angles. For example, he doesn't see why you can't just start now and get 15% return on your investments if you want to play it safe, or maybe 50% return if you care to gamble a little. Oh, did I mention, this was originally written at the top of the internet bubble in the late 90's?
And, hey, if investing isn't your thing, you can always sell your house at an enormous profit and move to a cheaper location. But, uh, he also suggests you keep your social circles intact. Maybe by cheaper location he means an apartment in your same town. (The second edition was written in 2003.)
His other main thrust is that it's perfectly fine to not save because you can keep working. After all, people really benefit from working. It helps their soul. All you have to do is find a vocation that you love and structure it so you can work part-time. He then goes into a few chapters stolen straight out of "What Color Is Your Parachute" to inspire you to go find a job that makes you happier. Because, he says, the workplace is so desperate for employees that they will gladly bend over backwards to accommodate aging baby boomers. (Did I mention that the most recent edition was written in 2008?)
But, anyway, to "retire" is to get sick and die. (He has a causation vs. correlation problem here, in my opinion.) Instead of being incapacitated by old age, though, he suggests that it is way better to stay vibrant and young, which you can do by continuing to work. And don't you worry none about social security imploding. This is the baby boom we're talking about, and they are rule-breakers! Not ones to let simple math get in the way! No one dare defy the Baby Boomers when they want something. So relax. Take a cruise now if you want. You'll be fine later.
Then he goes into a section on "Your Money and Your Life" which is radically different than the excellent "Your Money or Your Life" by Robins & Dominguez. Mitch Anthony's point is that you shouldn't care about Return on Investment - which he says is outside your control - but instead be concerned about Return on Life. I kind of liked this, to be honest. He said not to be a gerbil on a wheel, but rather to use your money as a sail on the boat taking you places. He said that a good return on life meant:
I agree that you need to have a vision of what you want out of your life, and harness money to achieve that vision rather than just accumulate money for the sake of money alone.
He also had a nice section on "Maslow Meets Retirement" where he asks you to identify the part of your budget that is:
He also gets into a section on "Money Maturity" that appears to have been cribbed from George Kinder's "Seven Stages of Money Maturity". At this point I'm being impressed that he has read all the same books I have. I liked his section on "wealth-care checkup". He says to watch your balance, or else:
And, hey, if investing isn't your thing, you can always sell your house at an enormous profit and move to a cheaper location. But, uh, he also suggests you keep your social circles intact. Maybe by cheaper location he means an apartment in your same town. (The second edition was written in 2003.)
His other main thrust is that it's perfectly fine to not save because you can keep working. After all, people really benefit from working. It helps their soul. All you have to do is find a vocation that you love and structure it so you can work part-time. He then goes into a few chapters stolen straight out of "What Color Is Your Parachute" to inspire you to go find a job that makes you happier. Because, he says, the workplace is so desperate for employees that they will gladly bend over backwards to accommodate aging baby boomers. (Did I mention that the most recent edition was written in 2008?)
But, anyway, to "retire" is to get sick and die. (He has a causation vs. correlation problem here, in my opinion.) Instead of being incapacitated by old age, though, he suggests that it is way better to stay vibrant and young, which you can do by continuing to work. And don't you worry none about social security imploding. This is the baby boom we're talking about, and they are rule-breakers! Not ones to let simple math get in the way! No one dare defy the Baby Boomers when they want something. So relax. Take a cruise now if you want. You'll be fine later.
Then he goes into a section on "Your Money and Your Life" which is radically different than the excellent "Your Money or Your Life" by Robins & Dominguez. Mitch Anthony's point is that you shouldn't care about Return on Investment - which he says is outside your control - but instead be concerned about Return on Life. I kind of liked this, to be honest. He said not to be a gerbil on a wheel, but rather to use your money as a sail on the boat taking you places. He said that a good return on life meant:
- I'm living well within my means.
- I'm investing time, energy and resources in those I love.
- I'm allowing myself to have experiences and live whenever possible.
- I'm saving with discipline.
- I'm not comparing my progress to others who live with a different set of circumstances.
I agree that you need to have a vision of what you want out of your life, and harness money to achieve that vision rather than just accumulate money for the sake of money alone.
He also had a nice section on "Maslow Meets Retirement" where he asks you to identify the part of your budget that is:
- survival,
- safety
- freedom (hobbies, travel)
- gifting,
- dreaming.
He also gets into a section on "Money Maturity" that appears to have been cribbed from George Kinder's "Seven Stages of Money Maturity". At this point I'm being impressed that he has read all the same books I have. I liked his section on "wealth-care checkup". He says to watch your balance, or else:
- Physical rest becomes laziness
- Quietness becomes noncommunication.
- The enjoyment of life becomes intemperance
- Physical pleasure becomes licentiousness
- Enjoyment of food becomes gluttony
- Self-care becomes selfishness
- Self-respect becomes conceit
- Cautiousness becomes anxiety
- Being positive becomes insensitive (his term, mine would be "oblivious")
- Loving kindness becomes overprotection
- Judgement becomes criticism
- Conscientiousness becomes perfectionism
- Interest in possessions of others becomes covetousness
- Generosity becomes wastefulness
The theme emerging here is that you don't need to save for retirement, you just need to find a job you love, stay healthy and age well, and not worry about material things. See? The New Retirementality. Oh, and have an extra $250K stuck aside for health care spending you're really going to want to do, and maybe another $50K to help your centenarian parents when they run out of money. But, hey, other than that kick back and relax. Except when you're at work. Work hard then. Because you've got shit-all to fall back on. But don't worry, be happy!
Oddly, I did get some business management tips from the section on how to find a good employer. I might write those notes up as I'm probably going to be hiring some staff next year (as I work hard getting set up for retirement) and can always use more tips on managing employees.
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