Margaret Giles, Morningstar

Many of the best investing moves are made on autopilot. Just look at the track record of automatic payroll deductions and savings increases.

Other investing decisions, like a transition into retirement, require a more hands-on approach.

Christine Benz, Morningstar’s director of personal finance and retirement planning, recommends taking a preemptive approach as you get closer to retirement. The key is to visualize what you want your retirement to look like while you have enough time to make any adjustments you might need to get you there.

Here are five steps to take now if you plan to retire in the next five years:

1. Consider the role of work in retirement

Decide whether some kind of work is realistically part of your retirement plan. That income stream can make your retirement spending simpler, but it shouldn’t be the linchpin of your whole plan. That’s because you may not be able to work even if you want to.

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2. Track your expenses

Understand what you’re actually spending today and see whether your spending will change over the next few years and into retirement. Getting a grasp of your future spending needs will help you determine whether your plan is on track.

3. Check up on Social Security

For most people, Social Security is a key source of income in retirement. Create an account on the Social Security website and make sure they have your correct information. This will let you model out different Social Security claiming dates using your own information.

4. Assess your current retirement savings

Look at your spending and subtract Social Security to get a sense of what you’ll need from your portfolio. If your spending doesn’t align with roughly 4% or less of your portfolio, you may need to make some changes. Consider saving more, investing differently, putting off your planned retirement date, or adjusting how much you plan to spend in retirement.

5. Derisk your portfolio

As you get within 10 years of retirement, you’ll want to make sure that your asset allocation can help protect your retirement plan from getting derailed by market volatility. If equity losses happen early on in your retirement, you can spend from your safer assets and wait until the market recovers to pull from your stock portfolio.

By thinking about retirement preemptively, you’ll have a better sense of when you want to retire and what you want it to be like. Plus, you can make any course corrections needed to make it happen.

This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance

Margaret Giles is a senior editor of content development for Morningstar.

To say that sage grouse now are extinct in western North Dakota might be stretching things — but only slightly — after surveys of the leks, the birds’ communal mating grounds, this spring failed to find a single male on the mating grounds, a Game and Fish Department biologist says.

This was the first year that state and federal surveyors failed to count a single male sage grouse in Bowman County, the last place in western North Dakota with a remnant population of the beleaguered grouse species, said Jesse Kolar, the Game and Fish Department’s upland game management supervisor in Dickinson.

Zero. Nada. None.

They did count one female, Kolar says.

“I wouldn’t say they’re extinct from North Dakota, but I do think you could argue they’re functionally extinct,” Kolar said. “I don’t think they’re going to bounce back from as low as they are right now to any meaningful numbers.”

Unless, of course, the western grouse species has “some really successful production years” in adjacent areas of South Dakota and Montana, “which hasn’t been the recent trend,” Kolar said.

The decline in North Dakota’s sage grouse population dates back as far as the 1950s, Kolar says, but the downtrend worsened in 2006 or 2007, when West Nile virus was confirmed in the species.

“That was a significant factor and possibly the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said. “Once our (lek count) numbers dipped below 150 males, we’ve never seen consistent rebounds in the population.”

North Dakota’s last sage grouse season was in 2007.

A variety of factors are behind the decline, Kolar says, including loss of the Big Sagebrush species — Artemisia tridentanta — upon which the birds rely, rangeland conversion, agriculture and energy development.

Ideally, sage grouse prefer 10- to 20-square-mile tracts of Big Sagebrush habitat that is relatively undisturbed, Kolar says.

“In North Dakota, we haven’t had that for many years,” he said. “That’s why I sometimes say it’s surprising they held on for as long as they have.”

The frustrating part, Kolar says, is there’s no single cause behind the species’ disappearance from the western North Dakota landscape.

“If it were just energy development, we could go and combat energy development in a part of their range and try to set up a core where we didn’t have energy development,” Kolar said. “Or, if it were just agricultural development, we could do habitat easements and find a big enough core where we could really protect it from agricultural conversion.

“But no, it’s an ‘all of the above’ (scenario).”

In an effort to jumpstart the population, the Game and Fish Department translocated sage grouse from Wyoming from 2017 to 2020. The department translocated 205 sage grouse — 60 males, 84 females and 61 chicks — during the four-year effort.

“We tried a lot of different things, spent a lot of money trying to supplement the population and unfortunately, none of that worked,” said Bill Haase, wildlife chief for the North Dakota Game and Fish Department.

From a low of five male sage grouse in 2017, the count rebounded to 29 in 2019, Kolar says — still far below the previous high of 199 males in 2007. That was followed by 74 in 2008 “and steady declines after,” he said.

The rebound in 2019 could be due, at least in part, to the department’s translocations, Kolar says, but surveyors didn’t see many males with leg bands during the spring lek surveys, which would have indicated Wyoming birds.

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“It’s a bit unclear as to what caused the rebound, especially since areas outside of our translocation area also rebounded,” Kolar said. “Ultimately, the expensive translocations were not feasible to continue long-term, and we saw an immediate decline following the translocation project — further supporting the futility of continuing translocation efforts.”

Given the declines, Game and Fish isn’t investing as much effort into sage grouse counts as it did 10 years ago. The department used to count all historic leks two to three times every spring, Kolar says, but many of those hadn’t had sage grouse for more than 15 years, and so efforts in those areas were discontinued.

“I’ve done searches from the air to see if any of those have re-ignited, but searches have not turned up any grouse that we were not finding from the ground,” Kolar said. “It’s likely that there were a handful of sage grouse males remaining in North Dakota that we did not detect, but not likely that we’re missing enough to change the story of a decline toward extirpation from the state.”

Cardboard toilet paper rolls. Egg cartons. Vintage film slides. Most people wouldn’t think of these as art supplies, but the St. Paul nonprofit ArtStart sees potential for these materials to become projects such as fairy houses, lanterns and jewelry.

And after 32 years of providing affordable art materials at its ArtScraps Creative Reuse Materials and Idea Center on St. Clair Avenue, the nonprofit is purchasing the building in the Macalester-Groveland neighborhood.

“We’re really happy to have the building, because it helps us keep doing what we’re doing,” said executive director Anne Sawyer.

ArtStart collects donations of recycled materials and art supplies and sells them back to the public at low prices at its ArtScraps center. The organization also offers youth art camps, workshops in libraries and artist residencies in schools across the Twin Cities.

Sawyer said the nonprofit moved into the building on St. Clair Avenue in 1993, but didn’t have funding to purchase the building at the time.

ArtStart paid for a large portion of the building’s down payment this year with a grant from the F.R. Bigelow Foundation. Now the nonprofit is fundraising for the rest of the building’s payment and repairs, partly because it’s receiving less support from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

The Arts Board is giving less to organizations such as ArtStart this year because the board received about 25% less funding from the Minnesota Legislature, according to Sue Jens, executive director of the Minnesota State Arts Board.

“The fund is supported with sales tax revenue. So if sales tax revenue decreases, then the funds available in that are also lower,” Jens said.

ArtStart has currently raised $4,000 of its $10,000 goal, and is asking the community to help.

Community impact

A customer walks out of ArtStart’s ArtScraps ReUse Center in St. Paul on Thursday, July 24, 2025. (Bennett Moger / Pioneer Press)

ArtStart supported artist residencies in 20 St. Paul schools and provided 17,000 children and adults with workshops and camps during the 2024 fiscal year.

Puppeteer and artist Kallie Melvin was born in India and adopted to St. Paul. She attended the first ArtStart “Passport to India” youth camp 30 years ago as a student. This summer, she taught students how to make shadow puppets at the 2025 “Passport to India” camp.

“I had this opportunity to teach an art form from the country that I’m from with ArtStart,” Melvin said. “It was so amazing to just see the kids really drawn into creating their own puppets.”

Melvin said that as a kid, she would go to ArtScraps to find materials for crafts and school display boards.

“It’s just this really fun, vibrant place, even from the outside,” Melvin said. “Going there to get things for school projects was so exciting.”

Kris Klas is an adult basic education science teacher at the Hubbs Center in St. Paul. She often gets materials for hands-on classroom work and experiments at ArtScraps.

Klas said she’s especially grateful for ArtScraps now that Joann Fabrics and the nearby Treadle Yard Goods are closed.

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“We live in St. Paul, we don’t have a car, and we’re like, ‘How are we going to get fabric anymore?’” she said.

Klas also gets supplies from ArtScraps for leather working, block printing and home remodeling. She was looking for fabric for placemats at ArtScraps on Thursday.

“They bring so much light to the community. They’re just such a wonderful resource,” Melvin said. “It’s really exciting that they were able to buy the building.”

Sawyer said people can contribute to the ArtStart campaign by donating on Facebook at facebook.com/artstart.artscraps, mailing a check to the store at 1459 St. Clair Ave. or rounding up their next in-store purchase at ArtScraps.

Today is Saturday, July 26, the 207th day of 2025. There are 158 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On July 26, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, prohibiting discrimination based on mental or physical disabilities.

Also on this date:

In 1775, the Continental Congress established a Post Office and appointed Benjamin Franklin its Postmaster-General.

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In 1847, the western African country of Liberia, founded by freed American slaves, declared its independence.

In 1863, Sam Houston, former president of the Republic of Texas, died in Huntsville at age 70.

In 1945, Winston Churchill resigned as Britain’s prime minister after his Conservatives were soundly defeated by the Labour Party. Clement Attlee succeeded him.

In 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act, which reorganized America’s armed forces as the National Military Establishment and created the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the U.S. military.

In 1953, Fidel Castro began his revolt against Fulgencio Batista (fool-HEN’-see-oh bah-TEES’-tah) with an unsuccessful attack on an army barracks in eastern Cuba. (Castro ousted Batista in 1959.)

In 1971, Apollo 15 was launched from Cape Kennedy on America’s fourth successful manned mission to the moon.

In 2002, the Republican-led House voted to create an enormous Homeland Security Department in the biggest government reorganization in decades.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

In 2018, the last six members of a Japanese doomsday cult who remained on death row were executed for a series of crimes in the 1990s, including a gas attack on Tokyo subways that killed 13 people. Previously, seven other cult members were executed on July 6 of that year.

In 2020, a procession with the casket of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, where Lewis and other civil rights marchers were beaten 55 years earlier.

Today’s Birthdays:

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard is 86.
Football Hall of Famer Bob Lilly is 86.
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Darlene Love is 84.
The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger is 82.
Actor Helen Mirren is 80.
Rock musician Roger Taylor (Queen) is 76.
Olympic gold medal figure skater Dorothy Hamill is 69.
Actor Kevin Spacey is 66.
Actor Sandra Bullock is 61.
Actor Jeremy Piven is 60.
Actor Jason Statham is 58.
Actor Olivia Williams is 57.
Actor Kate Beckinsale is 52.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is 45.
Actor Juliet Rylance is 45.
Actor Monica Raymund is 39.
Actor Francia Raisa is 37.
Actor-singer Taylor Momsen is 32.
Actor Elizabeth Gillies is 32.
Actor Thomasin McKenzie is 25.