In partnership with
One Death, Higher Taxes
Here's the math most couples never see coming.
When one spouse passes, the survivor usually keeps most of the household income — but starts filing as a single taxpayer. Same IRA. Same required distributions. Roughly half the standard deduction, and tax brackets that compress to nearly twice the rate at the same income.
It's called the survivor's tax trap, and it's one of the most preventable problems in retirement — if you act while both spouses are alive and rates are still low.
Craig Wear, CFP®, has walked 3,000+ families with $1M+ in IRAs through exactly this planning. His new book, Roth Conversion Reset, lays out the year-by-year framework for converting at today's rates so the tax problem never lands on the person you love most.
The book is free. Full PDF, in your inbox in minutes.
Est. 2026 · Vol. I · The Daily Grievance
Grump News
"The worst thing that happened to me today that you NEED to know about. And some other news stuff."
❖ The Gripe ❖
A Personal Affront, Reported Faithfully
I sat in front of Netflix for forty minutes last night and went to bed having watched nothing. Now I know why it all runs together. They just paid five hundred and eighty-seven million dollars for a company that uses AI to fix movies after they are shot, the lighting, the missing shots. The man who sold it to them says it protects human creativity. That is what people say right before they get rid of it.
❖ The Damage Report ❖
Today's News, Ranked By How Much It Ruined My Mood
🔥 Most Enraging
A study followed seventeen hundred people for decades and found the ones who watched a lot of television in middle age ended up with smaller memory regions in the brain later on. Smaller. It held up even after they accounted for everything else. So the television has been taking something out of me one evening at a time since about 1985. I am reading this on a screen. I see the problem.
😩 Most Exhausting
Astronomers found the first real atmosphere on a rocky planet in another star's warm zone, forty-eight light-years out, by catching helium leaking off the top of it. An atmosphere that has held on for three billion years. Three billion years that planet has kept its air. I have a house with the windows shut and the door closed and I still cannot keep the smell of last night's fish out of the kitchen.
😤 Unreasonably Annoying
Adobe is testing a camera app that looks at the photo you just took and tells you what is wrong with it. The framing, the lighting, the emotional impact. The emotional impact. I pointed a phone at a sunset and now a computer would like a word about my composition. Nobody asked it. I have been taking bad pictures of my family for fifty years and every one of them is fine right where it is.
🤷 Somehow Also Happening
A tequila company built the world's longest foosball table to mark the World Cup, five hundred and twenty-five feet of it, longer than a city block, and let dozens of people play on it in a Brooklyn street. Then they cut it up and gave the pieces to rec centers. So it was the longest in the world for exactly one afternoon, on purpose. That is the only kind of record I trust. The kind that stops being true the moment you set it.
❖ And Some Other Stuff ❖
Briefly, And With Limited Enthusiasm
▸ Scientists discovered a lost branch of Australia's marsupials — Scientists turned up a whole branch of Australian marsupials nobody knew about, three little insect-eaters that lived eighteen million years ago and then vanished. An entire order of animal, gone, and it turned up in some old teeth and jawbones in a drawer. Eighteen million years on this planet and their complete surviving record is a mouthful of teeth. That is still more than I am on track to leave behind.
▸ Some dinosaurs could rise like giants until they grew too big — Scientists worked out that the smaller long-necked dinosaurs could rear up on their hind legs and hold it a while, but the big ones got too heavy to manage it. So there was a size past which standing up became a bad idea. I crossed that line myself about a decade ago. Getting out of a low chair is now a whole production, with a running start and a noise I did not choose to make.
▸ UCLA scientists develop a mineral sunscreen without the chalky white cast — UCLA built a mineral sunscreen that does not leave you gray, by reshaping the zinc particles so they stop clumping together and throwing back white light. A sunscreen you can wear on your face without looking like a mime who wandered into daylight. Took them this long. I have spent every summer of my life either burning or sitting under the umbrella in full chalk, and now they fix it.
Stay annoyed out there.
— The Grump · (and Larry)
Grumpnews: Complaining, professionally, since whenever this started.