Be aware — I smell some capital gains coming from a lot of your growth style mutual funds. I am getting notice that some of the ones I know are declaring as high as a 12 percent capital gain.

Capital gains are not bad in my view; get them out of the way while tax rates are relatively low.

Anyway, be aware you may owe some taxes, but your adviser should be letting you know.

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It looks like the Social Security wage base is rising next year. You will be taxed for Social Security on up to $118,000 of earnings.

The Medicare tax of 1.45 percent kicks in for couples earning over $250,000.

Speaking of Social Security, your benefits are going up 1.7 percent next year so if you get $1,500 a month your benefits will rise about 25 bucks. That’s three cups of coffee.

You will be able to make more money in 2015 if you are under 66 and get Social Security and have a job. You can earn $15,720 in 2015 before you start losing benefits. Your earnings limits stop when you turn 66.

All this stuff is from my friends at Kiplinger.

The basic Medicare payment will stay at $104.90 in 2015. That’s the third year in a row it has not gone up.

Now this is scary. More than 1 in 3 Americans, one third, have no other source of retirement income other than Social Security. Social Security is supposed to be a supplement to retirement, not the whole retirement.

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You know everybody, the best thing you can do for your children is talk to them about saving money for retirement. Now they are not going to listen to you, but at least you tried.

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No wonder companies are moving outside the United States. Even profits of personal service companies which include things like law, health, engineering etc. are taxed at a flat 35 percent.

Paying nothing is also not fair, but surely there is a middle ground, you know what I mean?

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What is going on with the stock market? This has not been fun.

As I write this on Oct. 29, we are still up nicely for the year but the gyrations have been almost violent. Up 200 one day and down 200 the next.

Now having said that, October historically has been volatile.

But that doesn’t mean we have to like it. People ask me when it goes down, “what should I do?” They want me to say “sell.”

What I have always said is that most of the money is made in bad markets. I mean it is pretty basic. If you are trying to buy low and sell high, how do you do that if stocks don’t go down?

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Getting back to what is going on. Energy related stocks are getting pounded, for lack of a better word. The big boys seem to be getting pounded less than the little but almost no one is immune.

I saw gas this morning at $3.15 which means that generally gas prices are down some 15 percent plus this year. When energy prices go down, generally the stock market goes along because all of these companies are making less money so that makes their stocks less appealing.

I saw a couple of energy related companies whose stock price was down over 50 percent from the high this year. Ouch! Maybe they got ahead of themselves. Who knows?

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Generally, small stocks are down for the year, mid-sized are up a few percentage points and the large ones are up about 7 percent.

The Wilshire 5000, a measurement of most stocks traded, is up about 6 percent. Gold is cold, natural gas is way down and oil has been weak as you know.

Airline stocks were down, supposedly on Ebola fears. What are we going to do, start walking to Europe? Oh, I get it; we are just not going to go.

If it’s more than 300 yards, my wife flies.

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How about some potential good news? November has been the third best performing month for the Standard and Poor’s 500 for over two decades.

The average gain during that time has been about 1.5 percent.

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The wife came into the Man Cave the other day as I was busily at work. She said, “What are you doing?”

I said “I am making some large posters drumming up public support for the National Sarcastic Society. ... Like we need their support.”

She doesn’t think I’m funny.