I have a confession, shameful as it may be for someone who has spent decades studying retirement policy and advising individuals and institutions on how to save for and think about retirement: When I bought my apartment a few years ago, I raided my retirement account for the down payment.

Yes, I am well aware of the sacrosanct rule — never take money out of a retirement account before you turn 59.5 — but I did it anyway.

And you know what? It was among the best financial decisions I’ve ever made. I am not sure it’s right for everyone, but it should be an option, and President Donald Trump is right to want to make it available to all Americans.

My circumstances were exceptional. I bought my apartment during the pandemic, when people were allowed to take up to $100,000 out of their accounts without paying a penalty. If I’d had to pay the penalty, it would have been a bad decision (as it was, I incurred a large tax liability, which took three years to pay off).

The president’s plan would allow prospective homebuyers to take money out of their 401(k) accounts without penalty to make a down payment. It is worth noting you can currently take up to $10,000 without penalty if you are a first-time homebuyer. The details of the proposal are still being worked out, but presumably the limit would be higher and the option available to all homebuyers.

Does that mean everyone should spend their retirement money on a house? Not necessarily. For me, there were two main reasons I took advantage of the program, and neither had anything to do with the pandemic. One was the record low mortgage rates at the time. The other was my personal financial situation.

When I looked at my finances to figure out what I could afford, I was stunned that almost all my assets — more than 80% — were in retirement accounts, and most of those were in stocks. Maybe that’s because I tend to overprioritize saving for retirement, or because I’ve worked at places that offered a generous match, or because I wanted to use most of my disposable income to feed my shopping habit. But even I had to admit the amount of my portfolio in retirement accounts violated the life-cycle investing principles that I was trained in.

The goal is smooth, predictable consumption — including housing today, not just retirement income for tomorrow. It also occurred to me that I could stand to diversify a bit and have less in stocks and more in real estate (at least that’s how I explained my decision to the co-op board). If I took on homeownership, I also needed to be more liquid, which made reducing my retirement accounts the right choice.

From a strict financial standpoint, my decision is hard to defend: Stock prices have gone up more than real-estate prices in Manhattan since 2021. But rents have increased even more, and I’ve locked in my housing costs at a low mortgage rate and am building some equity. For me, and assuming apartment prices don’t completely crash, it was a good decision.

Again, and as grateful as I am to have had that choice, it does not make sense for everyone. In general, cleaning out your retirement account to make a leveraged bet on a single asset is not a wise financial move. It’s better to build up diversified savings before investing in real estate, and it’s important to have a healthy retirement balance.

About 55% of American households — a record high — have retirement accounts of some kind. On average, those accounts make up 27% of their net worth, a figure that falls to 22% for people under 45. Even though this group is relatively rich in retirement assets, they are often the ones struggling to afford a down payment.

Another concern is that too many people will have less money for retirement. A house is not just a place to live today; financially speaking, it tends to be people’s largest asset in retirement. Most retirees are overexposed to housing. Among retirement savers over age 65, home equity makes up 50% of their net worth; cash assets are only 28%. Absent better reverse mortgage options, this keeps retirees from spending a large share of their wealth, and means some are scrimping on their non-housing expenses.

There is also the possibility that this plan, by making more cash available, will increase demand for housing — and if new housing isn’t built, that will only push prices up further.

Policy issues aside, if this proposal becomes reality, the main issue facing most Americans will be whether they should use their retirement money to buy a house. I don’t mean to brag, but given my academic expertise and homebuying experience, I may be uniquely qualified to address this question. And my answer is this: It depends.

For me it was a good decision, because I needed diversification and could take advantage of unusually low mortgage rates. If buying a home leaves you overexposed to housing, under-saved for retirement, or taking on a mortgage you can’t afford, then it’s probably not a good option. But it would be nice to have a choice to make.

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

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February in Minnesota is not merely cold. It is a form of hostile weather engineered to test the limits of human endurance. Around here, a “heat wave” is anything above zero; it’s a place where your mittens have mittens. Just walking from your car to the front door constitutes a minor expedition, with frost forming on every exposed inch of skin. Not only can you see your breath, you could, if you were so inclined, snap it over your knee and use it to chill a Mountain Dew for several hours.

So naturally, this was the month I decided to stand on the roof of the school in nothing but a diaper and a red cape.

Yes. A diaper. And a red cape. In sub-zero weather. Let that sink in.

It was just after sunrise, the pale, unforgiving light spilling across the parking lot as the first yellow buses rumbled in, their engines doing little to combat the cold. There I stood — your mostly exposed janitor — awaiting hundreds of little scholars, ready to pour inside with brains full of knowledge and no idea what horrors awaited them on the roof.

Because February is “I Love to Read Month,” and what better way to kick things off than by becoming a half-naked superhero I barely even knew anything about — except that he almost certainly did not live in Minnesota.

I was Captain Underpants: Frostbite Edition.

February is also every elementary school custodian’s least favorite month. Salt stains in the hallways, snow tracked in like we were hosting the Winter Olympics, boilers wheezing like an elderly donkey with an asthma condition, and a calendar bursting with “I Love to Read” events.

Someone — I blame the Media Center Specialist — thought it would be a good idea to kick things off with a bang. She was probably thinking: Hmm … who could we get to stand on the roof, at 10 below, almost naked, and get our students excited about “I Love to Read Month”? Who has no sense of self-preservation and will probably do anything if we sneak chocolate chip cookies into the deal? Ah, yes … I know just the man. This will be wild, for sure, cutting-edge, perhaps. Brilliant? Absolutely. This has Mr Glende written all over it.

So there I was, atop the roof, in a giant homemade diaper and red cape, playing none other than the great literary hero Captain Underpants.

Keep in mind, this was before adult diapers were a thing. If you wanted to fashion a size-XXL undergarment, one had to become an amateur engineer, a seamstress, and, I suspect, a minor sorcerer. I raided the custodial supply closet in ways Mr. Whipple would never have approved of.

At the time, it seemed like a brilliant plan to get kids excited about reading. Looking back, would I do it again? The jury is still out. The kids howled. The teachers laughed. The principal gave me two thumbs up.  The district office … not so much. Apparently, having an adult male with more than his guy thighs exposed, waving at children from a rooftop in a diaper and cape is frowned upon. Who knew?

And then the local paper got wind of it. Soon enough, my Captain Underpants body was splashed across the front page, framed as if I were either a folk hero or a public menace. I might as well have tacked my photograph on the post office wall next to the “Most Wanted” posters.

But the kids loved it. Years later, when I run into former students, it’s never, “Hey, Mr. Glende, remember when I puked in Science class, and you had to clean it up?” No. It’s always, “Remember when you were Captain Underpants on the roof?”

Sometimes, custodians are more than a mop and a ring of keys. Like Captain Underpants, who drank Extra-Strength Super Power Juice to gain his powers, I got mine from a pre-dawn chug of Mountain Dew. For one glorious, frostbitten morning, I wasn’t just the guy who fixed leaky sinks, shoveled snow and whispered to the boilers.

By the time the last bus had dropped off its precious cargo, my diaper was crunchy, my cape frozen into something resembling a roofing shingle, and I couldn’t feel my tongue. I was asking myself, “Do school custodians do this in Florida? Where’s the fun in that?”

But to the kids, I wasn’t just a janitor. I was Captain Underpants: Frostbite Edition — a frozen, slightly ridiculous, but wholly heroic figure in the cruel, magnificent theater of February.

Mark Glende, Rosemount, is an elementary school custodian. “I write about real-life stories with a slight twist of humor,” he says. “I’m not smart enough to make this stuff up.”

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Take your pick of genres this week. We’ve got nonfiction about homelessness and St. Paul’s early settlers, plus fiction from a bestselling Norwegian writer.

(Courtesy of Small Pond Books)

“Not So Far From Home: Owning Homelessness in My Own Backyard”: by Charlie Quimby (Small Pond Books, $19.95)

Charlie Quimby (Courtesy of the author)

Who is the smiling man on the cover of this involving book about volunteering at places helping the homeless? And why is he holding a big bunch of keys? You’ll have to read Quimby’s first-person account to find out.

Quimby divides his time between his native Grand Junction, Colo., and Minneapolis, where he worked with Peace House Community and People Serving People.

If Quimby’s name sounds familiar and you are on social media, you might have run into his stories about cutting hair in his blog Across the Great Divide. What’s so interesting about his experiences is that he walks the fine line as both participant in the daily lives of men and women who need help and as nonjudgmental observer. A thread running through the book is his concerns as a writer. How far can he go in telling clients’ stories? Should he reveal he’s a writer to those who don’t know him? Most writers need conclusions to stories. But Quimby can’t do that  because so many of his clients are transients.

Quimby acknowledges homelessness is a problem, but volunteers can make a difference doing such simple acts as cutting the hair of a man who hasn’t taken his hat off all winter. His message — we have to see these men and women as human beings and not a societal problem. They are as diverse as any population.

Volunteers often are needed for low-level jobs that Quimby does willingly, including keeping track of how long a person is taking for a shower, arbitrating the line for use of two bathrooms, and moderating use of washers and driers. Also, lots of vacuuming. When he’s with pre-kindergartners he invents games, reads to a kid who’s moved several times and needs a warm lap, and spends a lot of time assisting with hand-washing. When a child leaves, he hopes all will go well with the family.

Once a week, Quimby facilitated discussions among clients, asking big questions about life, death and their philosophies of life. These conversations might surprise those who think of unhoused men and women as not too bright, drunk or somehow lesser. Mostly, the folks he quotes in these Big Issues conversations are as thoughtful as anyone in a middle-class living room.

Quimby found his calling as a “street barber” while volunteering at the Day Center in Grand Junction: While carefully cutting hair in whatever style the person wanted, he listened to stories from his clients because not many people listen to the homeless.

Don’t expect to see the phrase “colorful characters” here. By the time you finish his book you will see that phrase as a stereotype of a population that makes news only when a tent camp is pulled down by government. This book should change that perception.

Quimby is the author of novels “Monument Road” and “Inhabited.” His writing career has spanned plays, newspapers, corporate communications, speech writing and public policy think tanks.

Teaser quote: “The people who pass through the Peace House doors come for asylum, not to be analyzed. In telling these stories, I am neither a mental health expert nor a dispassionate reporter; disorders or personal failings are not my material to share. I observe with an eye for their resilience, humor, intelligence. and generosity – and depict how these good qualities persist despite trauma, bad luck, poverty, social stigma, and structural injustice.”

“Wolf Hour”: by Jo Nesbo (Knopf, $30)

Jo Nesbo lives in Oslo, but we consider him an honorary Minnesotan because his crime/mystery novels are so popular here, including the Harry Hole series set in his home country. “Wolf Hour” is a stand-alone thriller, his first set entirely in Minneapolis, where Nesbo stayed for months researching the story and navigating the city to ensure authenticity. The story is told through two timelines, six years apart, as a Norwegian detective and crime writer investigates a string of murders that begins with the murder of a small-time criminal and gun dealer who is shot down in the street. It grows more perplexing as the body count rises. It is filled with understated commentary on American politics, including gun control, as well as very unusual characters

Nesbo’s Harry Hole novels inspired a Netflix series premiering later this year. His books have sold 60 million copies worldwide and he is recipient of the Raymond Chandler award, Italy’s highest literary honor.

Teaser quote: “Bob groaned and started to walk, once again cursing the fact that Minneapolis and Saint Paul were the biggest urban centers in the country without a subway system. It was too far to walk all the way home to Phillips. But he ought to be able to make it as far as Dinkytown, and from there he could pick up a bus outside Bernie’s Bar.”

(Courtesy of Sky Blue Waters Publishing)

“Saints and Sinners: The Pioneers of Saint Paul”: by Gary Brueggemann (Sky Blue Publishing, $41.68)

This detailed history of St. Paul is 736 pages long, not counting index and notes. It is surely the most thorough history of our city. Beginning 200 years ago, it is the culmination of historian Brueggemann’s 50-year career of studying Minnesota.

The book’s 10 chapters begin with frontier settling (“The Land of Little Crow”), continuing through the founding of Fort Snelling, first settlers in the land that became St. Paul, the treaty that triggered the rise of the city, Pig’s Eye Parrant and the rise of the Fountain Cave settlement, and the founding of St. Paul.

In an afterword, there are biographies of people well known to us (and some forgotten) who played a part in our city’s history. It begins with Major Lawrence Taliaferro (associated with Fort Snelling) and concludes with Charles Bazille, the city’s first professional carpenter.

Brueggemann’s writing is smooth and easy to read and his book is a tour de force that should be in every library.

Teaser quote: “The pioneers of Saint Paul were not Quakers or Puritans but most of them were faithful Christians (predominantly French-Canadian Catholics) — simple, humble, backwoods farmers and traders with little or no formal education and very little money. True, a few of them were indeed of low character: Crude, decadent, some of them rogues and whiskey-traders.”

The author will read from his book at 6 p.m. Jan. 26 at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, 530 Victoria St., St. Paul.

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To justify offering tax incentives to a developer to replace three properties at Grand Avenue and Victoria Street, the city of St. Paul hired consultants to evaluate whether the buildings would be considered “structurally substandard” by the state definition.

In other words, would repair costs to bring the buildings up to code exceed 15% of replacement costs?

The team with Minneapolis-based LHB who conducted the structural analysis and Aug. 13 inspection was company vice president Michael A. Fischer and inspector Phil Fisher. They found repair costs would total 29% of replacement costs for the buildings as a whole, and each building individually also would exceed the 15% threshold.

The mall that housed Juut Salon Spa, Paper Source and Trade Winds clothing would cost $2.9 million to replace and more than $708,000 to repair, based on 30 significant deficiencies, according to the LHB report. The central part of the mall dates to 1915.

Chief among needed improvements, the building needs $181,000 in roof repairs, $157,000 for HVAC replacement, $156,000 for code-compliant lighting and $74,000 for new windows. Other deficiencies ranged from electrical wiring to egress, damaged sidewalks, stairs, fire caulking and exterior brick and mortar improvements.

Adjoining the mall, the building that once housed Billy’s on Grand and more recently the Gather Eatery and Bar would cost $1.3 million to replace or $500,000 to repair, according to the LHB report, which found 20 significant deficiencies. The largest necessary improvements would be a $266,000 HVAC system, $61,000 in roof repairs and $40,000 to replace failed windows.

Other defects ranged from below-code electrical wiring, lighting, fire protection and egress to stairs, sprinklers, fire caulking and emergency lighting.

“The windows are failing, allowing for water intrusion, which is contrary to code,” reads the report. “The exterior concrete blocks and mortar are failing, allowing for water intrusion, which is contrary to code. Roofing materials are failing …”

Built in 1894, the three-story wood-frame house at 841 Grand Ave. previously served as a residential rental property.

The LHB inspection found the building, which would cost $449,000 to replace with the same general design, would need more than $151,000 in repairs to bring it up to modern building codes, even before correcting energy code deficiencies. That includes some $72,000 in necessary window and siding repair and $13,000 in roof repair.

“The foundation is deteriorating and should be reinforced, per code,” reads the report, which chronicled 30 separate deficiencies. “The southwest corner of the building is separating from the main structure and should be repaired to prevent water intrusion, per code.” Other areas falling below code in the report ranged from restrooms and kitchens to HVAC, egress, interior and exterior stairs, flooring and damaged sidewalks.

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