Curtis Edmark

A retirement countdown helps organize savings, taxes, health costs, and income planning before work ends. A retirement countdown  helps you retire rich by matching every stage of your working life with the right money move: saving early, reducing tax drag, protecting income, planning health costs, and turning assets into reliable cash flow. “Rich” in retirement does not only mean a large account balance. It means you have enough income, flexibility, health-cost planning, tax control, and purpose to live without every market swing deciding your mood. This guide shows what to do at 30+ years out, 20 years out, 10 years out, 5 years out, 2 years out, 1 year out, and the first stage after you leave full-time work. 30+ Years to Go: Build the Machine Before Life Gets Expensive When retirement is decades away, your job is to make saving automatic and invest in a way that gives compounding time to do the heavy lifting. You do not need to live like every dollar belongs to your f...

Artemis II’s Moon Joy offers leaders a practical model for building trust, purpose, and stronger team connection. The “ Moon Joy ” effect at work is what happens when a team turns pressure, purpose, trust, and visible humanity into shared momentum. Leaders recreate it by making work human-first, building psychological safety, and showing real vulnerability without losing accountability. Artemis II was a space mission, but the public response was also a leadership case study. NASA’s first crewed Artemis flight lasted 9 days, 1 hour, and 32 minutes, launched on April 1, 2026, splashed down on April 10, 2026, and carried Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen around the Moon. NASA later kept the public energy alive through “Moon Joy June,” a month-long creative challenge tied to the mission’s emotional pull. Why Did Artemis II Create So Much “Moon Joy”? Artemis II created “Moon Joy” because the crew made a ...

Long-term care planning helps families prepare for future care costs before a crisis. Many people will need long-term care after age 65, but most older adults don’t have insurance built to pay for it. Medicare does not cover most long-term care, and only 15% of people age 65 and older have long-term care insurance, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. That gap leaves families trying to solve a care problem after it has already become a money problem. You need to know what long-term care means, what regular health coverage leaves out, what care costs now, and how to build a funding plan before a parent, spouse, or future version of you needs daily help. As a retirement planner, I’d rather see you make one informed decision in your 50s or 60s than five rushed decisions during a hospital discharge. What Is Long-Term Care, and Why Is It Different From Medical Care? Long-term care  is help with daily living when you can’t safely manage per...

Smart AI use helps reduce waste by matching prompts, models, and outputs to real work needs. Smart AI use means treating each prompt as a resource decision: use AI where it improves the work, choose the lightest capable model, and reduce wasted output before it reaches the data center. You don’t need to quit AI to use it responsibly. You need a cleaner operating habit: fewer throwaway prompts, better model choices, tighter outputs, smarter visual decisions, and less always-on automation. The environmental cost of one short text prompt may be small, but billions of prompts, larger models, image tools, video tools, and expanding data centers change the math fast. Start Here: Understand What Your AI Footprint Actually Includes Your AI footprint comes from more than the answer on your screen. It includes the computing needed to process your input, generate output, keep servers ready, cool data centers, and power the supporting systems behind the model. Google’s measurement of Ge...