Today we’re honored to host a guest post from the inimitable Nelson Smith from Canadian Dividend Investing on DQYDJ. Enjoy! Each week, Canada’s Globe and Mail (think of it as our country’s own New York Times, complete with the paywall and 14 opinion writers who have the most inane thoughts on things) features a couple […]
Retirement
Why Do Americans Retire?
In our average retirement age in the United States piece we briefly discussed retiring for health reasons… then didn’t dive deeper. Through the lens of 2017 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking responses, today we’ll evaluate retirement reasons for the living retiree population. We’ll touch both why do Americans retire as well as craft a […]
Average Retirement Age in the United States
The average retirement age in the United States among currently living retirees was 59.88 years old. The median living retiree left work at 62 years old, and the most common age to retire was 62 years old. 18.7% of retirees retired at age 62, and a whopping 63.1% retired between the ages of 57 and […]
Riding the Market Weather
June 29th, 2006. It was an innocuous day as the stock market was booming in the post-9/11 recovery. The economy was torrid and the unemployment rate was 4.6% in the USA. That fall, I opened up my checking account with Charles Schwab with their floating-rate free checking account (with no minimums or ATM fees) was paying […]
Selling Out (Part 2 of 4 on my move to San Francisco)
In Part One of this series, I talked about my overall transition to San Francisco. In this entry, I’ll talk about some of the stresses involved in moving and cleaning up the personal finance life along with the move. As I wrote about in a series of posts in 2013, I purchased a house in […]
Geographic Arbitrage
As I mentioned in previous articles, I have moved from Texas to California. With this move came a significant increase in both salary and cost of living. This has led to my savings rate decreasing but my overall dollar savings level staying relatively the same. I wanted to explore the pros and cons of working […]
Taming Your Spending Per Decade
My cowriter and I briefly discussed (verbally, not through some sort of electronic medium) how spending can be roughly modeled by looking at it from different perspectives – one of the key ones being “how old you are”. Enter today’s topic: spending per decade. Even though many pieces of advice are specific, it’s the concepts […]
My Retirement Asset Allocation
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I decided to play around with Morning Star’s X-Ray tool. The tool takes your entire portfolio and analyzes the asset allocation by geography, by risk level, by asset class as well as by type (growth vs. value, etc.). Here is what my current asset allocation across my portfolio is (asset type): […]
September 2014 Goal Assessment
At the end of last year, I stated that I wanted to pay down ~$34,000 in consumer debt (outside of my mortgage). I am writing today to report on both a level of success and a switch in strategy. How am I faring? In short: decently. I am not currently on track to hit my […]
FICO is a Corporation
Much has been written about the recent change in the FICO scoring system from both mainstream media and personal finance blogosphere. Using my compelling inside information and incredible subject matter expertise, I can insist that it will not make much of a difference. What? Huh? First, a little background. Fair Isaac (FICO) is a publicly […]