It's actually happening. My oldest son, Chris, heads off to college tomorrow, starting at Southeastern University in Lakeland as a music major. He'll be sharing a dorm room with three other guys in bunk beds, which honestly doesn't sound all that appealing to his dad. His meal plan includes Chick-fil-A and a few other fast-food spots, which is a world away from Penn State, where my food choices were much more limited and much less appetizing. It was mostly gruel, if I remember correctly.
His two younger brothers are both back at Cardinal Mooney High School. My youngest dropped Honors Algebra 2 after deciding the teacher was "terrible", and he claims twenty other students dropped it too. I suspect that number is a bit inflated. I don't remember having the option to drop a class just because I didn't like the teacher.
Meanwhile, our daughter is settled into a house in a nice residential neighborhood near the University of Florida in Gainesville, right between her church and campus. I know she reads these newsletters, so hi, Senay!
On a different note, Dalanee's father turned 80 this week. We celebrated with his favorites, hamburgers and hot dogs, surrounded by fourteen grandkids, all of whom live locally. What a blessing that is.
Pam Poundcake retired in the winter of 2026. She'd spent forty years running a fortune cookie factory, a job she loved. In 2025, something strange happened. During a routine quality check, she cracked open a cookie that read, "It's time to retire. You've made fortune cookies long enough."
That's an oddly specific fortune, Pam thought.
Lucky for her, she'd started investing young. At 22, she put $200 a month into her 401k, all of it in the stock market, and never touched the allocation again. She should have raised her contribution over the years. She never got around to it. Still, that steady $200 a month grew into over a million dollars.
Now that Pam had no paycheck coming in, she felt a knot in her stomach. I have nothing to fall back on. If this crashes, I don't know what I'd do. I’m not making money anymore.
That fear is what sends so many new retirees looking for quick, defensive moves the moment their income stops. Once the paycheck disappears, every dollar suddenly feels louder.
I've watched this exact story play out more times than I can count. People ignore their 401k's for decades, then, on the day they retire, they can't stop thinking about them.
And this is where the real damage happens: the ping-pong.
Pam sat down with a broker. He told her the market could be fine in the long term, but a bad first couple of years of retirement could wreck everything. He had a "guaranteed" product for that. It sounded reassuring. It was also misleading.
Pulling five percent a year from a portfolio doesn't sink you just because the market has a rough start. Markets recover quickly, and over time, stocks beat guarantees by a wide margin (roughly 10% versus 3% for CDs over the last 30 years).
You may have heard of this kind of scare tactic before. And I assure you, these companies take advantage of the artificial fear they are creating. Fear is what pays them. Most of these guaranteed products carry steep fees and lock your money up tight.
So Pam bought an annuity. Five years later, a friend introduced her to a financial planner who said the annuity was garbage and sold her something "better." She paid penalties to get out, and ended up in a worse product.
Three years after that, frustrated with the returns, she found an advisor who actually gave her good advice: get into a simple, diversified mix of stocks and bonds. But he couldn't touch her money until she escaped the product she was in. More penalties. No way around it.
Five years later, that advisor retired.
Pam sighed. I finally found someone I trusted, and now I have to start over. And so it went again. New advisor, new pitch, new fees. Each bounce left her a little worse off than before. Ping. Pong. Ping. Pong.
Sit with that for a second. How is anyone supposed to navigate this for twenty or thirty years of retirement? How many people are lined up to take a swing at Pam along the way?
Will you have sharp financial judgment at 82? At 92? The salespeople never stop knocking.
I wish I had a tidy answer. There's too much money on the table for the industry to leave retirees alone. They'll churn your accounts, drown you in noise, and count on you not knowing who to trust.
I usually try to end on an upbeat note. This one's harder, because the forces working against retirees are well-funded and relentless. My voice is small next to theirs.
So here's what I can offer: keep reading these newsletters, turn off the TV, and try to get referred to an established fiduciary. And also run away when any advisor you talk to says "guaranteed".
Be Blessed,
Dave