+1 hank For me, it would be awesome to to earn 4% in my Fido MMA !

Gouging of customers by shippers maybe causing a bit of inflation ! If you didn't get a chance to watch 60 minutes last night, see if you can find it somewhere.
Have a sunny week, Derf
A link to 60 minute
https://armchairinvesting.freeforums.net/thread/900/inflation?page=19&scrollTo=22817

"In this game, I find I'm more on the side of the providers. Especially PCPs, where as @sma3 noted, margins are razor thin. Which is not to say that I haven't seen gross abuses of the system by providers. But I haven't seen nearly the level of nickel and diming that the insurers do that drives up administrative costs. Just MHO."
+1

@laurenduvall
I am glad you and others find it useful. I do this so there is one central location with the information is aggregated for investors and in order to prevent questions as to why did my fund decline 8% when the market was up 1% today. I have previously read some posters wish there was a central location as to where investors wish they could obtain this information and look at it collectively which is why I do this every year.
Some posters have linked this page to other board's web page to benefit its readers.
I am open to suggestions for ways to improve this annual post. All suggestions need to be run through the MFO management for their final approval.

Love "experts" predictions, see (link)
Example: In 05/2012 (article)
Question:You have become famous for your cyclically adjusted 10-year price/earnings ratio. What do the latest numbers say about future stock market returns?
Shiller: we found a correlation between that ratio and the next 10 years' return.
If you plug in today's P/E of about 22, it would be predicting something like an annualized 4% return after inflation.
FD: reality, the SP500 made 15+% average anually since that date and much better than countries with lower PE10.
==============
I would love if markets collapse because I would be out. I have been doing it for years and why my biggest loss from any top since 2018 was less than 1%. I made money every week in March of 2020.
How do I know? VIX is one of my indicators, the rest is in a lock box.
The key is to be mostly invested. I'm in the market at 99+%(never cash) at 90+% of the time.

@Crash-in the above comment, "to be held harmless" means that your SS benefit (net of Medicare deduction) will be the same as the prior year, that is no change. Probably most will not be affected by this, since their SS increase will be more than the $21.60 increase in Medicare each month, considering that 5.9 % is a rather large SS increase.

Your tax dollars at work.
Well, yes. Part B premiums cover about 1/4 of the cost of providing health care to participants. Tax dollars pay for the other 3/4. So the government is increasing the tax dollars it is contributing toward recipients' care from $445.50/mo (3 x $148.50) to $510.30.
Medicare is one of the only places in which the government has actively sought to hold down medical costs. That's true even in the ACA, where despite the hype, most of the cost containment measures were on the Medicare side.
You're right that in some areas Congress doesn't have a backbone. For example, deferred and then eliminated the Cadillac tax.

In a sense, the whole claims system is a game. The insurers do everything they can to come up with excuses to deny or delay paying the fair amount on claims.
My doctor's office had a claim denied because they had not stated explicitly that the coding was in ICD-10 (the current coding system) rather than ICD-9, which had been obsolete for years. They had to refile with no changes, just a declaration that it was coded correctly.
Medicare Advantage insurers game the government by trying to make their customers appear as sick as possible. The way the system works, "To provide an incentive for insurers to cover sicker patients, the plans are paid commensurately more for their care."
So the insurers push customers to accept a one time in-home visit from an insurer's clinician to find any condition that would get the insurer more money. Of course that's not what the insurers tell their customers the visit is for. And it raises all our costs.
"If you are healthy and the visit results in an increased risk score, you won’t have to pay more for your care. But the higher Medicare reimbursement your insurer receives may contribute to the nation’s rising health care costs."
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/medicare-advantage-when-insurance-companies-make-house-calls-201512168844
In this game, I find I'm more on the side of the providers. Especially PCPs, where as @sma3 noted, margins are razor thin. Which is not to say that I haven't seen gross abuses of the system by providers. But I haven't seen nearly the level of nickel and diming that the insurers do that drives up administrative costs. Just MHO.

@Simon,
I own a Shelton Capital fund, but have never seen the distribution amounts posted. SBH amounts are still not posted yet. Grandeur Peak, Vanguard, Rondure, Matthews Asia and FMI Funds are several funds that have still not posted yet as of this morning.
I believe this is the link where the information will be posted once it is determined for SBH:
https://sbhfunds.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Distribution-Information-2021_10.pdf

Here's the benefits sheet on the old Select Client Services.
https://individual.troweprice.com/staticFiles/Retail/Shared/PDFs/FullBenefits.pdf
Something else missing on the new Summit Program benefits sheet is Turbotax. The online version was free at the $250K level, and downloaded products were free at the $1M level.
I'd say that they were more targeting the mass affluent than the high net worth investors. Really, is that free subscription to Kiplinger's Personal Finance at the $1M level going to get you to double your $500K investment with them?

$250k seems to be lot of dough for the privilege of getting TRP’s closed funds.

As you know, Vanguard investors need $1M (Flagship status) to access certain closed Vanguard funds.

Many European countries do not use single payer systems.

Everyone in France must buy health insurance, sold by a number of nonprofit funds [i.e. multiple payers]. ...
Switzerland has a universal health care system, requiring all to buy insurance. The plans resemble those in the United States under the Affordable Care Act: offered by private insurance companies, community rated and guaranteed-issue, with prices varying by things like breadth of network, size of deductible and ease of seeing a specialist.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/18/upshot/best-health-care-system-country-bracket.html
See also: International Health Systems for Single Payer Advocates
https://www.pnhp.org/single_payer_resources/international_health_systems_for_single_payer_advocates.php
Even with a single payer system (e.g. original Medicare), providers would still need to code claims to receive payment for services rendered:

What are ICD Diagnosis Codes Used For?
Help Medicare claims paying offices process Medicare claims

https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coordination-of-Benefits-and-Recovery/Mandatory-Insurer-Reporting-For-Non-Group-Health-Plans/NGHP-Training-Material/Downloads/ICD-Diagnosis-Code-Requirements-Part-I.pdf (see slide 5)
Codings are used not just for billing purposes but to keep accurate records and communicate clearly. From the UK's National Health Service, describing a coder's job:

You begin by recording the stay of an elderly woman who had a hip operation two days ago. From her medical notes, you find out the ward she stayed on before surgery, how long her operation took, her recovery time and any other treatment she received. Then you use the special alphanumeric code you've been trained in and record everything on the computer system.
These records can be understood throughout the NHS and used to plan for future patient care.

https://www.stepintothenhs.nhs.uk/careers/clinical-coder

Very insightful for sure. I went back to view her YouTube interviews in the last 10 years and they are consistently informative. Toward the end she picked Cathy Woods’s ETF, AKKK as an example of innovation that drive this economy.

Yes, I understand what you're expressing/your point. Charts lend a nice view, for me.
When bonds had more correlation to equity moves, this chart provides an interesting view. If one was really astute about market moves, a sell/buy rotation between EDV (Vanguard long bond) and SPY would have paid a handsome return over the years. From the chart begin (limited by EDV inception) one's money would have returned the same value through March, 2017, for EDV and SPY. Most folks would never guess this, if the question were on an exam.
And yes, one may still make money with hard play in bonds............as in a play between TBT (rising rates) and TMF (falling rates); or others.
You may plug in any of the tickers you listed, as the chart link is an active/to use chart.
CHART

I was looking at some of my old notes today. I see I forgot a couple of the ETF's I was looking into. Descriptions are from etf.com.
RNRG

RNRG offers exposure to companies that produce energy from renewable sources including wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, and biofuels including YieldCos — a holding company for renewable energy projects that have been spun off by a larger energy utility. The portfolio is market-cap-weighted, with a cap of 6% on individual names. While YieldCos are sometimes marketed as MLPs for renewables, note that these firms use a traditional C-corp structure with no inherent tax benefits. Dividends from the fund are taxable. The Fund name and investment strategies changed effective November 19, 2018. The fund originally tracked the Indxx Global YieldCo Index through November 16, 2018 and the Indxx YieldCo & Renewable Energy Income Index thereafter. On Feb. 1, 2021, the fund name, ticker (YLCO) and index changed, dropping its focus on YieldCos while still including them in the fund.

You can read more about yieldco's here:
https://cleanenergysolutions.org/instruments/yieldcos
SIMS is similar to GRID, but gets into more than just smart electrical transmission:

SIMS is passively-managed to provide exposure to firms which the index provider defines as companies involved in: smart building infrastructure, smart power grids, intelligent transportation infrastructure, or intelligent water infrastructure. Each company is further classified as either “core” or “non-core,” depending on the level of involvement in innovative infrastructure. The index is initially equally weighted, but then tilts the overall portfolio weight towards core firms by 20%. As a result, pure plays are overweighted. Prior to June 25, 2019 the fund traded under the ticker XKII.

Thanks for the insight from the provider's perspective. As a patient (or in business terms, as a customer), I've wound up delving into not just CPT codes but their modifiers. In one doctor's office after I started questioning some things, they sent their claims coder out to talk with me and we had a friendly ten minute discussion. Among other things, we talked about how absurd the whole system is.
I've gone to providers and pointed out that the insurer didn't process the claim correctly and that the provider (not me) should be getting more money. More often than not the response was that it wasn't worth their time and effort to refile and that there's a certain amount of slack built into the system.
It goes the other way as well. I was infuriated when, a year after an insurer had properly denied a doctor's claim for a procedure already included in a global surgical package, the insurer spontaneously paid the claim.
Regarding tests prescribed by out-of-network physicians being covered: my experience is that they are. As I noted above, under ACA I went to a doctor who wasn't covered. The blood work that he prescribed was always covered, so long as it was sent to an in-network lab. (Let's not get into how the drawing of blood is paid for; it depends on who draws the blood!)

This CHART is TAIL vs SPY for one year (253 business days). You may drag (left) at the 253 day area and travel backwards for a moving one year period, OR you may right click the 253 day and select ALL (or other choices) to view the total pattern back to the 2017 inception date for TAIL. You may ALSO right click in the chart and select ANIMATE. ANIMATE is not encouraged if one has consumed excess alcoholic beverage or has other certain medical circumstances. :)
Remain curious,
Catch

One can use Portfolio Visualizer (PV) to see how he arrived at the age 70 investment portfolio values. PV shows slightly lower values. That is possibly because when one asks PV for a 6% rate of return, it doesn't use 6%/12 (0.5 basis points) for the monthly return, but 0.487 basis points (compounds to 6% annually). Just a guess.
Here's the PV setup for 6%. Mouse over the graph for the 8 year (age 62-age 70) result.
On the withdrawal side (after age 70), the video makes two simplifying assumptions:

• You will die at age 90. 5% withdrawal x 20 years = 100%. That leaves longevity risk.
• The real rate of return of the portfolio is zero. This addresses @bee's point that the portfolio grows over time. The video's portfolio does grow in nominal returns at precisely the rate of inflation.

bee does a nice job with PV in showing how one might have invested in the past. Kudos for incorporating a couple of bear stock markets in the mix. That said, there are two implicit, and IMHO fairly aggressive, assumptions made:

• The funds selected (or any fund of one's choosing) will continue to outperform the market. I've added a 60/40 S&P 500/bond market mix (rebalanced annually). This didn't survive 15 years. PV link.
• The markets going forward will produce real returns similar to those of the past 20 years. Schwab is projecting average real returns over the next decade of around 4.5% in the stock market and negative bond returns. And that's before considering higher inflation - the projection was from last May, before inflation took off.

Source page: https://www.schwab.com/resource-center/insights/content/why-market-returns-may-be-lower-in-the-future
With respect to sheltering the portfolio from taxes via a Roth IRA: this assumes that the part time worker is not already putting that money into an IRA (and maxing out), else contributing more to an IRA might not be an option. In any case, one could not contribute even half the age 62 benefits to SS. $1400 x 12 mo = $16,800. Including the $1K catch up amount, the max that one can contribute to an IRA is $7K.
Looking at the Roth conversion option: let's assume one is in the 12% tax bracket, no state taxes. If one converted $140K and somehow managed to remain in the 12% bracket, then that would use up the $16.8K in SS, thus effectively adding that amount to the Roth IRA. In reality, that would move one into the 22% or 24% bracket; hardly a good strategy. Not to mention that this would make more of the SS benefits taxable. Further, in order to execute this plan for eight years, one would need to have $1.12M in a traditional IRA available for conversion.
This has a better chance of being feasible if one is in a higher tax bracket (that would reduce the amount of the conversion necessary to incur $16.8K in taxes). However, given the correlation between income and longevity, the higher income person is also more subject to longevity risk and thus would likely benefit more from the lifetime income guaranteed by SS.

Regarding the annuity option: we don't know where the cost figure comes from, or what type of annuity it is. Though I agree with what I think is @JonGaltIII's assumption - life only, no inflation adjustments. One can buy joint and survivor annuities, but they cost more. I don't believe there are any inflation adjusted fixed immediate annuities left on the market, but there should still be some that provide for annual increases of a fixed amount (say, 2%). Of course those also cost more.
If there is the possibility of a surviving spouse, that just makes SS look even better. With SS, if the spouse with the larger benefits dies first, the surviving spouse gets those benefits instead of one's own. Unless one expects both spouses to live past the break even point (~82 give or take), the optimal strategy is often for the lower benefit spouse to take SS early (62) and the higher benefit spouse to defer to age 70.

@Old_Joe
I retired in 2019 after 40 years in primary care medical practice, both self employed and as an employee.
When I was self employed, my livelihood and the salaries of all of our employees depended on the knowledge and expertise of the billing staff, who worked long hours to get us every dollar they could out of the insurance companies. Despite many hours talking to them, I still do not understand medical billing. We paid these folks good salaries to sit on the phone for hours and wrangle with other staff at Blue Cross for example, over $15 or $20. But we figured if they spent 30 minutes collecting $50 we were ahead of the game.
A lot of physicians don't bother, or hire a billing service, who just tries once. In primary care, however, the margins are so thin ( our overhead never dropped below 55%) every dollar counted.
I think we would have been better off charging $50 a visit, cash. We would have needed far fewer staff, but it was unclear ( and I could never get an answer) if we didn't take insurance, if our patients would have had any of their tests or prescriptions covered. That is where the real costs in health care are, not doctor's salaries, especially primary care.
Once I joined a hospital owned practice, it was their problem, but I can tell you collections and efficiency fell off the cliff.
It is in the financial interest of the insurance companies to make this as complicated as possible, as they live off of the 25% America spends on administrative expenses. Highest in the world!