Funding College: Then and Now

When I went to college, it seemed relatively simple to cover the costs.

• College Jobs -  In my freshman year, I worked in the cafeteria about 8 hours a week.  It paid about 2X the minimum wage.   As an upper classman, I also tutored and sold class rings.
• Summer Jobs - I was fortunate to get an Engineer Intern summer job right after high school.
• Student Loans -   I took out the maximum ($1500/semester) of federally subsidized student loans in my upper class years.
• Parent Funds -  My parents paid the difference between the costs and what I could cover.

By senior year, I was covering over two thirds of my tuition, room and board costs, and all my personal expenses.  For reference, I attended an Ivy League school.  A friend of mine attended a local state school, lived at home and was able to pay for tuition, fees and books from working a part time job.

Nowadays, I think it would be difficult for students to cover their costs at a local state school. It is likely that parents and student loans will cover the majority of cost, if the family isn't eligible for financial need scholarships.  In  our case, we have been saving for our children's college costs since the day we adopted them.  This has enabled us to cover the eldest's entire education costs at a local state school.  Hoping to cover our youngest's education costs in the future too.

For more on The Practice of Personal Finance, check back every Wednesday for a new segment.

This is not financial nor education advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC

Ouch! The Knife Keeps Falling on the BET Strategy

BET (Buy Expected TACO) strategy didn't work today. Volatility was the main actor today.  The market fell at the open, bounced and continued to fall midday as Iran denied agreeing to any of the U.S. demands to end the war before rebounding in the afternoon then dumping at the close..  

I am still holding and avoiding further buying any BET stocks right now.   There is a reasonable possibility that the stock market may keep drilling further to a bear market 20% drop.  More and bigger TACOs will be needed to prevent this from happening. 

I will wait for the bear market OR additional TACOs to happen before making any significant number of BET purchases. 

For more on Ideas You Can Use, check back every Tuesday for a new segment.

This is not financial, stock picking nor stock investment advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC

Buy Expected TACO (BET) Strategy

The markets were up big yesterday, due to Trump delaying destroying Iran's power infrastructure for 5 days.    It used to be buy the dip (BTD).  Now it's the Buy Expected TACO (BET). 

It appears that Trump is sensitive to the stock market response in the short term.  Trump seems to responds with a TACO when the market dips.  This started about a year ago with the implementation of tariffs in April 2025 and has consistently happened since then.

It's hard to predict what Trump will do.    For now, buy expected TACO seems to be working.   While it seems to be consistently a good strategy until now, it'll work until it doesn't. Once BET stops working, a significant correction may occur.   

As Yogi Berra once said, "It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future."

For more on Ideas You Can Use, check back every Tuesday for a new segment.

This is not financial, stock picking, nor investment advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC

Cataract Surgery Lens Plan

I'm  getting cataract replacement this year.  Currently, the left eye is very near sighted and the right eye is less near sighted and I only wear correction in both eyes for driving and sports. To avoid requiring to use glasses for reading or driving, I'm  going  with right eye at 20/20 and the left eye at about 20/150 (about -3) for near vision.   I won't need any glasses with this vision.  

My brain is already used integrating different focal lengths with my uncorrected vision at 20/400 (L) and 20/200 (R).  Doctor says DMV only requires one eye at 20/50 or better,  I think, to drive without correction

Despite a friend  having excellent results, I decided not to go with multi focal lenses.  

• I tested multi focal contact lenses about 5-10 years ago and didn't like them.   It was the worst of both worlds for me.  I couldn't see close work and distance vision was a slightly blurry sometimes. 
• A tennis player on the court before us said he started with multifocal but had to change to single focus and redo his cataract surgery.   
• My eye doctor said he usually does not recommend multifocal.  He has seen two different people with technically the same conditions get very different results, one good and one bad.

Medicare will still cover glasses 100% to correct vision.  My Medicare Advantage said they would cover contact lenses for 20% copay, which I will probably do for one eye for sports.

I've been testing wearing one contact part of the time to experience how it would be like after cataract surgery.   Although not a perfect replication, I am comfortable enough to proceed with the.  Since one eye is done at a time and the distance eye is done first, I will have a couple weeks to confirm my decison.

For more on Strategies and Plans, check back every Monday for a new segment.

This is not financial nor health advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC

Only a Few Stocks Provided Majority of Our Gains

I recently reviewed my investment results and concluded that the majority of the investment gains were due to a few stocks that we owned.  For example, great returns on GOOGL, NVDA, MSFT, AAPL and VISA contributed a lot to our investment accounts.   A large percentage of the other stocks were either negative or contributed very little.

This is also supported by a chart I found on LinkedIn:

My conclusion:

1. Pick only winning stocks.   Highly unlikely for me to do this consistently or even at all.
2. Diversify enough to also purchase the winning stocks, but also own on the non contributing stocks.  This requires owning numerous stocks and significant effort to manage on an ongoing basis.
3. Buy an index,  which diversifies and periodically eliminates poor performers.  This involves owning just a few EFTs or mutual funds.

I've tried #1 and failed.  I've tried #2 and although returns were positive, my  returns were less than the indices.   I'm moving to #3 for most future investments, and will by only individual stocks on an occasional basis. 

For more on  New Beginnings, check back every Sunday for a new segment.

This is not financial, stock picking nor investment advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC

Services and Utilities That Are Great Time Savers

What a great time to be alive.   There are so many services provided to me that I have much more time than people from 100 years ago.

Here are some of the services that make life easier and better:

• Running water - For drinking, cooking, washing, bathing and human waste removal.  It would take me lots of time to haul water to the house, boil/sterilize it, and disposed of used water.  It only costs us about $200 a month and takes almost no time.
• Garbage collection - For $90/3 months, our garbage is taken away weekly and recycle is taken away every other week. It would take lots of time to haul our garbage to a dump.   Just takes a few minutes a week to put the garbage at the curb.
• Grocery shopping -  Yeah, it still takes several hours a week to grocery shop.  However, that beats the amount of time  growing, harvesting or hunting/cleaning our own food.   
• Electricity -  This powers all of our appliances to use in our house, which saves a lot of time.  Washing machines, dishwashers, furnaces, air conditioning, water heater, oven, stove, refrigerator, etc, etc, etc.   I would be working exclusively on 

These are basics that I take for granted every day and yet, if I didn't have them, I would be spending way more time on getting necessary things done every day.

For more on Reflections and Musings, check back every Saturday for a new segment.

This is not financial nor services advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC

My Rules to Manage Spending in Retirement

I wrote this back in 2017 but forgot to post it.  Most of the points are still relevant so I am posting it now.  We're still following the principles, though the percentages may have changed some.

I am not a big fan of budgeting.   Here are a some rules that we used to control our spending while were saving for retirement.

• Pay yourself first - When I first started working, I would pay all my bills and expenses first and whatever was left at the end of the month was my savings.   Except for my first month of working, I was pretty good at having something left at the end of the month.   Later, I realized a better approach would be to take out my savings first, and the pay my bills and spend on expenses afterwards.
• Buy only what we need -  Marketer are adept at getting consumer to buy stuff.  The challenge to sort the needs from the wants.   Do I really need a smart phone, cable TV, a large screen TV or a luxury car?  The answer is probably not.  Not buying these can reduce spending by hundreds of dollars one time or every month.  A related rule to this is to live below our means.
• Spend only cash - Using only cash is an easy way to limit spending.  Once the cash runs out, the spending stops

By using these rules, it was easier to control spending to better meet savings goals.

However, now that we've both been retired almost ten years, I've concluded we need a different set of spending rules.  We have been living primarily on our retirement savings, so the above spending rules prior to retirement many need to be adjusted.  For us, this is important, since we don't have pensions and are not eligible for Social Security yet.

Here's what we've been doing on an experimentation basis:

• Use an allowance - We've been giving ourselves a monthly allowance that covers our living expenses, except for paying taxes (income and property) and health insurance.  I estimated the amount based on our pre-retirement spending pattern This has seemed to work well for most of the time, even when we have a large expenditure such as a new appliance or a vacation.  This worked well in a low inflation environment, which we may not have in the upcoming years.
• Use a percentage  -  When I add the taxes and insurance in, we are withdrawing about 4% of our  current retirement savings each year.    It was closer to 6% during the great recession in 2009, but our investments have grown since the bottom.  So we use a percentage to allocate our allowance each year.   Also, we may need to adjust the percentage in years where the market declines or advance significantly.
• Keep 3-5 year cushion in cash/cash equivalents - That way if the market decline significantly, we can avoid selling investments for a few years while continuing to make the same withdrawal. This will allow the investments to recover instead of selling them when they are down.

This has worked so far.  So we are going to continue this approach of giving ourselves a 4% allowance.  An adjustment we may make is to increase our withdrawal slightly after a good investment year and either increase our spending that year, or set it aside for additional spending in a future year.  Another adjustment may be giving ourselves a raise periodically, especially after several years of good return.

Finally, we'll need to get used to spending down some principal as we balance withdrawals with mostly earnings and part principal.  This will be a toughest adjustment for us to get used to  since our pre-retirement goal was to always maintain or grow our principal.

For more on Reaping the Rewards, check back Fridays for a new segment.

This is not financial, retirement or spending advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC

House and Car Expected Features Creep

Buyers expect much more from their homes and automobiles than when my parents were purchasing these items. Part of the increased costs of cars and houses is due to the increase in expected in these products.

In my parents first purchased house, they had all the contemporary amenities: air conditioning, dishwasher, Formica countertops, intercom system, car port, and a 1/4 acre lot in a newly build subdivision.   The first car my dad bought was a stick shift and maybe a radio.  The second car he bought had automatic transmission and a radio, which was the first car that I drove.   The third car was the same, just automatic transmission and a radio.  Finally, in the fourth car, we got air conditioning.

The first house I bought was a 70 year old fixer upper, from which I learned I wasn't good at renovating houses.  I only had the basics refrigerator, stove over an oven, Formica countertop and steel sink without a garbage disposal.  The second house, which I bought 20 years later had still had a basic kitchen, but also had a laundry room, a whole house vacuum system, whole house stereo speakers,  a finished basement and a three car garage.  It also cost 8 times more. 

The first car I bought new was a manual shift, because I wanted one, with A/C and radio which were now standard.  The second car I bought used was still a manual shift, with A/C, radio and tape deck, electric windows/mirrors and was a convertible.  My third car, was used also, added air bags, ABS brakes and multi CD player.  For my fourth vehicle, which I bought new, I regressed and bought a manual pickup truck, with air bags, ABS brakes, A/C and radio/cassette player.

 Of course, no one wants to go back to only the base features that were only available many years ago.  And I realize that a portion the increased costs for houses and automobiles may be due to features that are now expected. 

For more on Crossing Generations, check back every Thursday for a new segment.

This is not financial, car buying, nor home buying advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC

Avoid Living Above One's Means

It's not easy with all the spending temptation that are available nowadays.  However, going into debt live above one's means will have a negative impact on wealth building.

Although it requires discipline, living below one's means is better option to me.  Of course, one should still buy what is definitely needed.   

One strategy that worked for me is to "pay myself first."    By that, I mean put a significant portion of take home salary into savings, starting with 10%, keep increasing and putting raises and bonuses in savings until reaching 20%.  Invest that 20% and avoid using it, if possible, since this should be in addition to emergency funds or saving for large purchases.

Another strategy is to pay off credit card statements completely before or at the due date, to avoid late fees and interest charges.   This keeps one living within one's means.

Finally, if all else fails, live on a cash basis. It forces one to liven within one's means.

For more on The Practice of Personal Finance, check back every Wednesday for a new segment.

This is not financial nor wealth building advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC

Appliances are Great Time Savers

Appliances that can independently do most of the work are the best time savers.  Washing machines, dryers, dishwashers and robotic vacuums are great examples.  One just needs to press the start button and that frees up time to do other activities while the work is being done.

Other appliances involve one's participation but significantly reduces the time and effort.  I include automobiles, lawn mowers and vacuum cleaners in this class.  I still have to spend time and effort but it is much less than if I didn't have an automobile, lawn mower, and vacuum cleaner.

To me, it's worth the cost of the appliance, even if they are expensive, many times over if it either frees me from doing major work or significantly reduces my time and effort.

For more on Ideas You Can Use, check back every Tuesday  for a new segment.

This is not financial nor appliance advice. Please consult a professional advisor.

Copyright © 2026 Achievement Catalyst, LLC