Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb

For many folks who are planning for their financial futures, the cardinal sins are well known: overspending and under saving.

But for high net worth investors who have already achieved financial security many times over, a different kind of mistake may be quietly taking root, and it may be costing more than money. The real risk? Not spending enough of your wealth while you can still enjoy it.

Traditional financial planning guidance focuses on accumulation: saving diligently, investing wisely and avoiding lifestyle inflation. This advice is irrefutably sound, but only up to a point. What happens when you’ve already “won the game”? You’ve saved more than enough to retire comfortably, your portfolio is healthy, and your children’s educations are funded.

Yet many still live as though scarcity lurks around the corner.

Recent research reveals a surprising trend. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that married retirees with at least $100,000 in assets withdrew just 2.1% annually — barely half the commonly recommended 4% rule. Even among the wealthy, a deeply ingrained fear of running out of money often keeps people from tapping into savings, preferring to rely on guaranteed income sources such as a pension or Social Security.

This caution is understandable but often unnecessary. Many families are in a financial position where thoughtful spending poses no real threat to long-term security. Instead, underspending can result in missed opportunities during the healthiest and most active years of life. In some cases we see older parents whose wealth could help move their children and grandchildren to greater financial security but choose not to.

And it’s not just about spending more on travel and luxury. Many delay meaningful experiences — supporting family goals, philanthropy, or even health-enhancing investments — until it’s too late. Gerontologists and financial advisers alike know this to be true: by the time people feel “safe enough” to spend, their energy, health or time may be in short supply.

Why do so many people fall into this trap? Decades of saving can entrench a scarcity mindset. Cognitive biases like loss aversion cause people to avoid drawing down assets, even when logic suggests they can afford to. Mental accounting, where money is treated differently depending on its origin, also plays a role. Many retirees view their investment accounts as “untouchable,” preserving them for future generations or rainy days that never come.

So what’s the alternative? First, consider dynamic withdrawal strategies that adjust based on portfolio performance, rather than rigid rules. Second, explore converting part of your portfolio into guaranteed income strategies that can provide psychological permission to spend a bit more freely. Finally, work with a financial adviser who doesn’t just plan for asset growth, but helps coach you toward a life well-lived.

At the core, wealth is a tool, not just for security or legacy, but for joy, purpose and presence. If you’ve done the work to build a strong financial foundation, don’t let an outdated mindset hold you back.

Because sometimes, the biggest financial mistake isn’t spending too much — it’s not spending enough.

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The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb are financial advisers at Wealth Enhancement Group and co-hosts of “Your Money” on WCCO 830 AM on Sunday mornings. Email Bruce and Peg at yourmoney@wealthenhancement.com. Securities offered through LPL Financial, member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services offered through Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services, LLC, a registered investment advisor. Wealth Enhancement Group and Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services are separate entities from LPL Financial.

 

At the newly remodeled Landmark Tower on St. Peter Street, fans of tony downtown living can kick up their feet in “The Anjelica,” a 575-square-foot studio that rents for about $1,400 monthly, or upgrade to “The Bruce,” a one-bedroom apartment spanning some 880 square feet, which goes for about $2,260.

Kaylah Kennedy, the property manager at the Landmark Tower Apartments, stands in one of the bedrooms in the model room in St Paul on Thursday, June 19, 2025. (Bennett Moger / Pioneer Press)

No, the 187 units in downtown St. Paul’s newest residential destination — a former office building converted into luxury housing — aren’t exactly cheap, but panache is the point. The 1980s theme is hard to miss in the names of about 40 different room layouts, ranging in sizes up to “The Diana,” a 2,100-square-foot, two-bedroom, three-bath penthouse. With gorgeous skyline views fit for a princess, it leases for $5,305.

The latest era for the 41-year-old Landmark Tower officially began last month with a grand opening of sorts. Following a $97 million conversion, it reopened its doors as a 187-unit luxury apartment building on the first 18 levels.

As of June 1, about 40 households had signed leases for apartments ranging in size from 613-square-foot one-bedrooms to 2,100-square-foot penthouses. The average size is 974 square feet, according to a spokesperson for developer Sherman Associates. Rents range from about $1,400 to $5,300 per month.

A view from the rooftop deck at Landmark Tower in downtown St. Paul on Thursday, June 19, 2025. (Bennett Moger / Pioneer Press)

National Register of Historic Places

Not every student of history would consider construction dating to the early 1980s as commemorable, but landing Landmark Tower on the National Register of Historic Places in 2022 was a key step toward ushering the former office building into its latest incarnation.

For the developer, saving the structure from the fate of some nearby beleaguered downtown properties — some of which have been foreclosed upon — required no small amount of public investment, including a $21 million city-driven tax incentive, among a wide variety of financing.

“These are not easy to get done,” said company principal George Sherman, during last month’s grand opening. With regard to office-to-residential conversions and the revival of historic properties, “not all of them are going to work out. The ones that can work out, we should lean into and make happen, because it’s critical for our downtowns.”

The lounge on the sixth floor of Landmark Tower in St. Paul on Thursday, June 19, 2025. (Bennett Moger / Pioneer Press)

Together with the reinvention of a nearby Ecolab tower into luxury residences dubbed The Stella, and commercial momentum in the Osborn 370 office building and the Hamm’s Building, some see the two blocks of St. Peter and Wabasha Street nearest Rice Park as bright spots.

“This is going to lead the way for more projects in this neighborhood,” said Chang Suh, chief executive officer of the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, one of the building’s many financial backers, during the mid-May opening celebration. “It’s going to bring more homes, more retail, more shopping. It’s just going to bring more promise.”

From office to residential

Shortly after opening in 1984, the Amhoist Tower in downtown St. Paul — a 25-story office and condominium building — attracted a handful of judicial offices. And with them, they drew the first women to sit on the newly created Minnesota Court of Appeals: Judge Harriet Lansing, who had served as St. Paul’s first female city attorney in the 1970s, and Judge Susanne Sedgwick, who died of cancer in 1988.

The American Hoist and Derrick Co., a heavy equipment manufacturer, relocated its headquarters to Denver within a few years, and the structure at 345 St. Peter St. eventually came to be known as Landmark Tower.

The tower’s commercial and residential histories have often been somewhat at odds, with the building’s first 18 floors fully leased by offices by the late 1980s, even as the top seven floors struggled to find condo buyers.

By 2022, that story had flipped, when only some 10% of the commercial spaces were occupied.

In came Sherman Associates, a Minneapolis-based developer eager to see the building reinvented as a purely residential destination. That effort would require $97 million from a range of financing sources, including no shortage of public backing. State and federal historic tax credits, $21 million in city-driven tax incentives known as tax increment financing, or TIF, and support from a public pension fund — the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust — all proved to be instrumental.

The kitchen and living area of a unit at Landmark Tower in St. Paul on Thursday, June 19, 2025. (Bennett Moger / Pioneer Press)

Tax credit to aid conversion

Not every developer will be so lucky as to land so many backers, and not every downtown building may be spared from demolition.

A growing number of downtown officials have acknowledged that some vacant properties may eventually have to come down.

With those fears in mind, municipal leaders, housing advocates, labor unions, historic preservationists and others have called for lawmakers to approve a six-year tax credit that would help developers convert more underused buildings into residences or other uses. The “Credit for the Conversion of Underutilized Buildings,” or “CUB” credit, would defray 30% of qualified conversion costs, provided that 75% of the building’s interior and exterior are preserved. The bill has yet to be approved.

Landmark Tower “relied really heavily on TIF,” said Erin Hanafin Berg, director of the Rethos Policy Institute, which promotes best practices around historic preservation. “That’s borrowing from our own tax base. … If there’s ever a time for more proactive action, it’s now.”

The fitness studio and group fitness room on the sixth floor of the Landmark Tower Apartments in St Paul on Thursday, June 19th, 2025. (Bennett Moger / Pioneer Press)

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By JOEY CAPPELLETTI and MATT BROWN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mike Lee has in recent years become one of the Senate’s most prolific social media posters, his presence seen in thousands of posts, often late at night, about politics. Fellow senators have grown accustomed to the Utah Republican’s pugnacious online persona, mostly brushing it off in the name of collegiality.

That is, until this past week.

His posts, after the June 14 fatal shooting of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, incensed Lee’s colleagues, particularly senators who were friends with the victims. It all added to the charged atmosphere in the Capitol as lawmakers once more confronted political violence in America.

As the Senate convened for the week, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., marched past a crowd of reporters and headed toward the Senate floor: “I can’t talk right now, I have to go find Sen. Lee.”

Smith, whose name was listed in the suspected shooter’s notebooks recovered by law enforcement officials, spoke to Lee for several minutes. The next day, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., did the same. By midday Tuesday, Lee had deleted his tweets.

“I would say he seemed surprised to be confronted,” Smith later told reporters.

The shooting unfolds

On the morning of June 14, Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., announced that former state House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, had been shot and killed in their home outside Minneapolis. Another Democratic lawmaker, state Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, were critically injured, in a shooting at their home nearby.

The next day, as police searched for the shooter, Lee posted a photo of the alleged shooter with the caption “Nightmare on Waltz street” — an apparent misspelled attempt to shift blame toward Walz, who was his party’s vice presidential nominee in 2024.

In a separate post on his personal account, @BasedMikeLee, the senator shared photos of the alleged suspect alongside the caption: “this is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way.”

On his official Senate social media account, Lee was “condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families.”

A spokesperson for Lee did not respond to a request for comment.

The man arrested, Vance Luther Boelter, 57, held deeply religious and politically conservative views. After moving to Minnesota about a decade ago, Boelter volunteered for a position on a state workforce development board, first appointed by then-Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, in 2016, and later by Walz.

Boelter has been charged with two counts of murder and two of attempted murder.

Lee’s online posts draw bipartisan backlash

Once a critic of Donald Trump, Lee has since become one of the president’s most loyal allies. Lee’s online persona is well established, but this year it has become especially prominent: a Salt Lake Tribune analysis found that in the first three months of 2025, Lee averaged nearly 100 posts per day on X.

What was different this time was the backlash came not just from Democrats.

To Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., Lee’s posts were “insensitive, to say the least, inappropriate, for sure” and “not even true.”

“I just think whenever you rush to a judgment like this, when your political instincts kick in during a tragedy, you probably should realign some priorities,” Cramer said.

Republican state Rep. Nolan West wrote on social media that his respect for Lee had been “rescinded.”

A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., did not respond to a request for comment.

Last Monday night, after Smith’s confrontation with Lee, a senior member of her staff sent a pointed message to Lee’s office.

“It is important for your office to know how much additional pain you’ve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend,” wrote Ed Shelleby, Smith’s deputy chief of staff. He added, “I pray that Senator Lee and your office begin to see the people you work with in this building as colleagues and human beings.”

Lee avoided reporters for much of the week, though he did tell them he had deleted the posts after a “quick” discussion with Klobuchar. Lee has not apologized publicly.

“We had a good discussion, and I’m very glad he took it down,” Klobuchar said at a news conference.

Tragedy prompts reflection in Congress

The uproar came at a tense time for the Senate, which fashions itself as a political institution that values decorum and respect.

Senators are under intense pressure to react to the Trump administration’s fast-paced agenda and multiple global conflicts. Republicans are in high-stakes negotiations over the party’s tax and spending cuts plan. Democrats are anxious about how to confront the administration, especially after federal agents briefly detained Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., at a recent Department of Homeland Security news conference in California.

Lawmakers believe it’s time to lower the temperature.

“I don’t know why Mike took the comments down, but it was the right thing to do,” said Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M. “I appreciate my Republican colleagues who were very clear with their observations. And those that spoke up, I want to commend them.”

He added: “We just all have to talk to each other. And what I learned from this week is people need to lean on each other more, and just get to know each other more as well.”

___

Associated Press reporter Mary Clare Jalonick contributed to this report.

Amy Lindgren

I was talking with a Japanese woman a few weeks ago, here in the U.S. to improve her English, when we ran into one of those inexplicable idioms Americans are so fond of. The conversation turned to travel and I asked what trips were on her bucket list.

Oops. No problem with the word “bucket,” and “list” was certainly clear. But “bucket list”? It only got worse when I used another idiom to explain — “You know, what you want to do before you kick the bucket?”

We figured ourselves out eventually but the exchange got me to thinking: Do we have bucket lists for our careers? When I encounter “bucket list” in usage, the other person is usually referring to a more global set of dreams, with the personal and professional and family and adventure all mixed together. And of course, the ever-present travel goals.

A look online reveals a multitude of articles and even products to help create your own bucket list. There are books, worksheets, financial planning tools … it’s almost a cottage industry in America to write down our dreams and plan our great adventures.

Borrowing from the most common principles I saw in my brief search, I’ll set the stage here for a bucket list that helps you (and me) imagine what might be possible in a fulfilling work life.

• Don’t hold back. Off the top of your head, what would you love to achieve in your career? Don’t be practical; just write stuff down. Maybe your career bucket list would include running your own company or working remotely while sailing around the world or getting a Master’s degree or learning to weld or fixing lawn mowers in your retirement years or earning $100,000 or taking a sabbatical to write your novel or gaining a certain certification or … have I hit yours yet?

Your career bucket list could also include a variety of jobs or work you’ve always wanted to try. Have you ever wanted to work for a rodeo or travel the world for your job, or be the beach lifeguard for a summer? On the list it goes.

• Cluster the answers. For someone wishing to travel to both Australia and New Zealand, it seems somewhat obvious they could plan one trip to cover both destinations. How about your career dreams — are there any that could be combined to support each other?

For example, if you want your own company but also dream of fixing lawn mowers in retirement, maybe your company could relate to lawn mowers in some way.

No worries if things don’t seem to cluster easily. It’s just a step to try, in case any natural pairings emerge.

• Prioritize your answers. If the original list is long, there’s no need to rank them past the first five or so. The idea is to identify a handful that feel important to you, not to micro-stratify a huge list.

• Review your priority answers. To help with this question, you could create a system for marking the items on the list. For example, an asterisk could go next to those things you’ve been considering for a long time, while a bullet could go next to those you think would be the most fun, and perhaps another symbol by those items that would open doors for other things.

Once you’ve marked items for different attributes, you can do some more ranking / prioritizing by notating those that have two or more symbols next to them. These would be the bucket list items that check the most boxes for you.

• Decide what to do. Bucket lists can be just for fun, so you don’t have to do anything at all if you don’t want. Just put the list in a drawer and amuse yourself stumbling on it later. In that case, prepare to be surprised. It turns out that simply writing something down can be the first step in making it happen, even when you don’t have a specific plan. Years from now you might be amazed to see how many bucket list items happened “all on their own.”

On the other hand, making the list might inspire you to achieve certain goals. In that case, you could have the pleasure of checking things off the list as they happen, or perhaps revising the list to include new ideas.

From what I can tell, there’s no best way to handle a bucket list. Just enjoy the process, and hopefully the results as well.

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.