The Secure Act 2.0 was finally passed as just one part of a massive funding package by the outgoing congress just before Christmas on December 23, 2022, and signed into law by the president as the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, an omnibus spending bill authorizing roughly $1.7 trillion in new Federal spending (yikes!). You’re … Read more
This article is part of the Biblically-Informed Framework for Retirement Stewardship (BIFRS) series. It was initially published on January 4, 2023, and updated in February 2026. An important preliminary note: Given the significant losses sustained by both the stock and bond markets in 2022, I started 2023 with a series of articles about “safe” retirement … Read more
This article is part of the Biblically-Informed Framework for Retirement Stewardship (BIFRS). It was initially published in June 2022 and updated in March 2026. I recently read an interesting study on retirement from A.G. Edwards and AgeWave. It was published in 2022 but remains highly relevant. The study covered a lot of ground and was … Read more
This article is part of the Retirement Financial Life Equation (RFLE) series. It was initially published in October 2022 and updated in December 2025. If you read much about retirement finance, you’ll see a lot of hyperbolic rhetoric about “Required Minimum Distributions,” or “RMDs.” You’d think RMDs are going to sneak up on you and … Read more
This article is part of the RFLE series. It was initially published on September 7, 2022, and updated in March of 2026. When I initially wrote this article in September 2022, we were in the midst of what appeared to be an economic crisis. Inflation was running at 8-9%, the Fed was aggressively raising interest … Read more
Some months ago, I received an email from a reader who was considering a particular mutual fund investment and had this question: I was looking at the holdings of a particular mutual fund and noticed a few gaming (i.e., casino games/gambling) companies in the holdings. What are your thoughts on that as believers? It is … Read more
If you believe, as I do, that we’re likely in a period of “epochal change” (which I defined as the next few decades not being like they were for the last few), we’re left with the question I posed at the conclusion of my previous article: What to do? The most important thing Before I … Read more
This article is part of the Biblically Informed Framework for Retirement Stewardship (BIFRS) series. It was originally published in 2022 and updated in 2026. When I originally wrote this article in December 2022, I was 70 years old and eagerly anticipating my eligibility for Qualified Charitable Distributions at age 70½. I was fascinated by the … Read more
I recently came across the phrase “epochal change.” It was used to describe the domestic and global economic changes that I discussed in a recent article titled “A Challenging Time for Retirement Investors.” The basic idea is that we have reached a historical inflection point due to dramatic economic and political changes. Of course, we … Read more
