Blessed by the Potato

It’s been a long time since I’ve put up a weekly round-up post. It made sense to stop the practice: when I barely post once a week to begin with, all that would be left is round-up posts. For those visiting for the first time because of the inclusion in this week’s Carnival of Wealth, welcome! I wrote a welcome post not so long ago that still applies if you need to get oriented here.

First off, I submitted my last post on the cone of probability to the Carnival of Wealth, Dollars to Dollars Edition over at Control Your Cash. A quick note of correction: I have links to the past ~3 years of archived posts in the sidebar, but the WordPress archives actually go back about 9 years — I just truncated the sidebar because it was ridiculously long (and also anything before that point is really just whining about grad school and World of Warcraft and not really worth going back to).

Michael James is writing a book about retirement. Well, he hasn’t said he is in so many words, but he has been knocking out post after post examining how to safely turn an investment portfolio into spending money: Two posts on the 4% rule-of-thumb, and adjusting it for fees. A retirement income strategy of holding a certain portion in fixed income/cash and investing the rest, with follow-ups on this cushioned strategy. Revisiting that strategy he works out some example cases with a smoothing filter on adjusting spending to market returns, and some historical perspective. Finally, some thoughts on treating your whole portfolio like a RRIF.

Sandi gets a post up at Spring just in time for inclusion, talking about budgeting as the most important aspect of personal finance (even though it sucks).

I don’t read many parenting blogs, but recently came across Illustrated with Crappy Pictures and she’s hilarious. If you have to start somewhere in the archives, you might as well with this post: “Parties without cookies are not really parties at all. They are just groups of people feeling disappointed.”