Everyday living costs play a major role in how much money you need to retire.

A new state-by-state analysis from personal finance website GOBankingRates shows that the estimated total savings needed to retire at 65 can differ by as much as $1.46 million depending on where you live.

In Hawaii, retirees need about $2.2 million to stop working at 65 and cover essential living expenses for 25 years, including housing, groceries, transportation, utilities and health-care costs. That is the highest estimated minimum of any state. By comparison, Oklahoma has the lowest estimated total, at $735,284, to cover the same basic costs.

The analysis is based on the average living costs for retirees 65 or older in each state, drawn from the latest data published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. From there, GOBankingRates subtracted average Social Security payments and estimated the savings needed to cover the remaining expenses using an annual 4% withdrawal rate.

The resulting figures represent a baseline for covering essential costs and don’t factor in discretionary spending such as travel, dining or entertainment. Additionally, the estimates don’t account for factors such as inflation, lifestyle changes or unexpected costs.

Housing is the biggest factor in annual retirement costs, as it varies by roughly $30,000 annually between states. Utilities and health-care costs can range by as much as $5,000 annually, the study finds.

Here’s a look the minimum amount of savings needed to retire at 65 in each state, in alphabetical order.

• Annual cost of living: $53,999
• Savings you need to retire: $789,037

• Annual cost of living: $78,449
• Savings you need to retire: $1,400,286

• Annual cost of living: $66,838
• Savings you need to retire: $1,110,019

• Annual cost of living: $54,859
• Savings you need to retire: $810,538

• Annual cost of living: $83,978
• Savings you need to retire: $1,538,508

• Annual cost of living: $63,091
• Savings you need to retire: $1,016,336

• Annual cost of living: $70,094
• Savings you need to retire: $1,191,417

• Annual cost of living: $63,152
• Savings you need to retire: $1,017,871

• Annual cost of living: $61,125
• Savings you need to retire: $967,190

• Annual cost of living: $56,395
• Savings you need to retire: $848,933

• Annual cost of living: $110,393
• Savings you need to retire: $2,198,902

• Annual cost of living: $60,818
• Savings you need to retire: $959,511

• Annual cost of living: $58,913
• Savings you need to retire: $911,901

• Annual cost of living: $55,657
• Savings you need to retire: $830,504

• Annual cost of living: $55,473
• Savings you need to retire: $825,896

• Annual cost of living: $54,613
• Savings you need to retire: $804,395

• Annual cost of living: $56,456
• Savings you need to retire: $850,469

• Annual cost of living: $56,947
• Savings you need to retire: $862,756

• Annual cost of living: $70,155
• Savings you need to retire: $1,192,953

• Annual cost of living: $73,043
• Savings you need to retire: $1,265,135

• Annual cost of living: $92,639
• Savings you need to retire: $1,755,055

• Annual cost of living: $58,176
• Savings you need to retire: $893,472

• Annual cost of living: $57,869
• Savings you need to retire: $885,793

• Annual cost of living: $52,524
• Savings you need to retire: $752,178

• Annual cost of living: $54,674
• Savings you need to retire: $805,931

• Annual cost of living: $67,452
• Savings you need to retire: $1,125,377

• Annual cost of living: $56,272
• Savings you need to retire: $845,862

• Annual cost of living: $60,572
• Savings you need to retire: $953,368

• Annual cost of living: $67,084
• Savings you need to retire: $1,116,163

• Annual cost of living: $70,401
• Savings you need to retire: $1,199,096

• Annual cost of living: $56,825
• Savings you need to retire: $859,684

• Annual cost of living: $77,773
• Savings you need to retire: $1,383,392

• Annual cost of living: $59,835
• Savings you need to retire: $934,938

• Annual cost of living: $56,087
• Savings you need to retire: $841,254

• Annual cost of living: $57,009
• Savings you need to retire: $864,291

• Annual cost of living: $51,849
• Savings you need to retire: $735,284

• Annual cost of living: $68,681
• Savings you need to retire: $1,156,093

• Annual cost of living: $59,650
• Savings you need to retire: $930,331

• Annual cost of living: $69,664
• Savings you need to retire: $1,180,666

• Annual cost of living: $56,825
• Savings you need to retire: $859,684

• Annual cost of living: $56,395
• Savings you need to retire: $848,933

• Annual cost of living: $55,473
• Savings you need to retire: $825,896

• Annual cost of living: $55,780
• Savings you need to retire: $833,575

• Annual cost of living: $60,879
• Savings you need to retire: $961,047

• Annual cost of living: $69,848
• Savings you need to retire: $1,185,274

• Annual cost of living: $61,493
• Savings you need to retire: $976,405

• Annual cost of living: $69,971
• Savings you need to retire: $1,188,345

• Annual cost of living: $54,122
• Savings you need to retire: $792,109

• Annual cost of living: $60,019
• Savings you need to retire: $939,546

• Annual cost of living: $58,545
• Savings you need to retire: $902,686

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When a child is upset, most parents reach for the same question instinctively: “What’s wrong?”

It’s well-intentioned and it comes from care. But after years of teaching conscious parenting and studying over 200 kids, I’ve seen how often that question does the opposite of what parents hope. Instead of opening children up, it can shut them down.

Emotional intelligence develops when children feel safe enough to reflect. Without that foundation, even the most caring questions can feel overwhelming in the moment.

Across my research, one sentence reliably helped children pause, reflect, and communicate more openly: “Tell me what feels hard right now.”

This magic phrase works because it matches how children actually experience emotions in real life. Rather than pushing for clarity or explanations, it creates the conditions where insight can emerge naturally.

During meltdowns, after-school emotional releases, or moments of sudden irritability, children are already on edge. The word “hard” feels human and non-threatening. It signals to your child that they aren’t in trouble and don’t need to justify their feelings, making it easier to stay engaged instead of shutting down or pushing back.

Children don’t need to label emotions precisely. They can describe a situation, a sensation, or a moment that felt overwhelming. Over time, this gently expands emotional language, allowing insight to develop naturally rather than being forced before a child has the words.

Before problem-solving, before advice, before correction, this phrase tells a child: “I can handle what you’re feeling.” Emotional intelligence grows in welcoming environments where emotions are met with steadiness instead of urgency.

Rather than demanding an explanation, this question invites reflection. The child decides how much to share and when, reinforcing a sense of agency over their emotional experience, which is an essential foundation for self-regulation and confidence.

When children feel emotionally safe, their stress response begins to settle. This phrase is especially effective when behavior feels disproportionate or confusing because it prioritizes regulation before reasoning.

By focusing on what feels hard, parents communicate that emotions can be noticed without being rushed or fixed. It teaches kids that feelings can be experienced and moved through rather than avoided or suppressed.

Children learn emotional intelligence through experience, not instruction. When parents respond with calm curiosity instead of control or urgency, they model how to approach emotions with steadiness and reflection. These are skills children eventually apply to themselves.

Our job as parents is to create an environment where our children feel safe sharing their inner worlds. When you adjust your language, you shape the emotional tone of your relationship. Over time, children learn that their feelings are important signals that deserve attention.

Reem Raouda is a leading voice in conscious parenting and the creator of the BOUND and FOUNDATIONS journals, now offered together as her Emotional Safety Bundle. She is widely recognized for her expertise in children’s emotional well-being and for redefining what it means to raise emotionally healthy kids. Connect with her on Instagram.

Want to give your kids the ultimate advantage? Sign up for CNBC’s new online course, How to Raise Financially Smart Kids. Learn how to build healthy financial habits today to set your children up for greater success in the future. 

If Indiana University wins the 2026 College Football Playoff National Championship on Monday, fans will owe some thanks to one of the football program’s biggest financial donors: billionaire Mark Cuban.

Cuban, whose net worth is estimated at $9.6 billion by Bloomberg, graduated from IU with a degree in management in 1981. He’s a longtime donor to his alma mater, including $5 million for a sports media center in 2015 and $6 million for IU’s rugby team in 2024.

While Cuban hasn’t disclosed the size of his recent donations to IU’s athletic department, it was a “big number,” the billionaire told CBS in October 2025. The team’s recent success under head coach Curt Cignetti, hired in 2024, inspired Cuban to open his checkbook again: The school is “happier this year than last year” after his latest donation, Cuban told Front Office Sports on Jan. 7.

Now, Cignetti’s team is just one win against the University of Miami away from a national championship and Cuban says it’s because the coach understands the most important aspects of building a successful organization.

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“I’ve been part of championship organizations and putting together a team isn’t easy,” Cuban told Bloomington, Indiana’s The Herald-Times on Jan. 10. The billionaire was the majority owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks when that team won an NBA championship in 2011, and remains a minority owner of the team today.

Cuban discussed team-building strategy with Cignetti and came away impressed, he said. The coach assured Cuban that the team would use his donations to recruit a well-rounded roster of players, rather than putting the money toward chasing after just a few high-profile recruits, said Cuban.

“It’s about getting players that know their roles, work as a team, continue to improve and work in the system,” Cuban told the newspaper. “When you have a coach and organization that understands that, that’s how championship teams and organizations are built. That’s why I’ve been so excited to support them.”

Cuban has previously spoken about how good leaders build successful businesses through hiring the right people. Leaders should avoid hiring people who don’t fit their company culture, “because you can’t have conflict on what the vision of the company is,” he said on a March 2021 episode of the “Starting Greatness” podcast. “You’ve got to hire the right people for the right roles.”

Every winning team, or successful business, needs those employees who excel in their specific roles, like the “glue guys” on a basketball team, Cuban added on “Starting Greatness.” Culture and competency are the two biggest considerations for leaders when building a team, Cuban said during a MasterClass course released in February 2024. 

Cuban chose to attend IU because, at the time, the university offered the cheapest tuition out of the country’s top 10 business education programs, he’s said. He’s credited his time at the school for exposing him “to all kinds of different people [and] ideas” while nurturing his early entrepreneurial skills: Cuban opened and ran a local bar as an undergraduate, and picked up extra cash teaching dance lessons.

“Just watching the team I grew up with from the time I was 18 years old [and] to be part of this, wow,” Cuban told The Herald-Times. “What it gives me is far more than anything I could give to IU. No one would know who the hell I am if it wasn’t for Indiana University.”

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On a brisk October afternoon, Ruin — a 15-month-old Dutch Shepherd mix puppy with a dark brindle coat and one floppy ear — takes a break from an obstacle course and perches on a red wooden box inside a barn in Livingston, Montana.

His head sinks into the crook of a Svalinn trainer’s arm, as the trainer deems Ruin one of his favorites. Two hours later, the trainer — now in a foam Michelin-man neck-to-heel suit — crouches near the box, imitating a quiet intruder. He cracks a whip onto a rubber mat. Ruin darts across the barn, leaping teeth-first into that same arm, holding his bite until another trainer yells, “Out.”

Svalinn breeds, raises and sells $175,000 dogs like Ruin who are trained to protect, live and travel with wealthy families. Up to 46 mixed-breed canines at a time live on the company’s 170-acre ranch — located in a town of 9,000 residents, 29 miles east of Bozeman — until they’re roughly age 2. Svalinn brought in $2.97 million in total income and was profitable in 2024, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. (The business hasn’t finalized its 2025 financials.)

After the drill, Ruin rolls onto his back, then licks a reporter’s nose. “What we just saw was a perfect example of the ‘on switch’ and the ‘off switch,’” Svalinn co-founder and president Kim Greene says. “To be able to deploy your dog and get them back into obedience, in just a nanosecond, is a really practiced art.”

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Greene, 51, launched the company, initially called Ridgeback Ltd., in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2005 with her then-husband. It focused on security advising, self-defense training and chaperoning high-profile diplomats through unsafe areas, Greene says.

The business was exciting, stressful and expensive to run, especially while raising twin boys, she says. “We were broke as a joke for a lot of years, so I didn’t even have the luxury of thinking about personal finances. We were hanging on for dear life,” says Greene.

Now, Svalinn has never been financially healthier, she says. And it’s in the right place at the right time: When the company moved to the U.S. in 2013, Greene didn’t know how popular Bozeman would become, especially for wealthy families willing to spend on personal security.

Even if you can afford a Svalinn dog, Greene will try talking you out of the purchase, she says: “This is not a product that’s for everybody. It just isn’t.”

The canines are meant to be family dogs who happen to be highly perceptive and “deployable” if a threat approaches. The company spends two years training each dog in protection, stability, obedience, socialization, agility and, occasionally, scenarios tailored to the pup’s intended family. Svalinn even taught a dog how to ride a horse, trainers say.

Svalinn hires trainers from many different backgrounds — even prioritizing candidates without dog-training experience — so the dogs get used to hearing commands from a variety of voices, says Greene. “Our [clients] don’t need to have superpowers or massive muscles or to bark orders,” she says. “We are laypeople. The dogs are going to laypeople. The dogs have to feel very comfortable knowing that kind of individual.”

A trainer personally delivers each dog to its permanent home and spends about three days teaching the family how to work with the canine, Greene says. Often, the trainer returns 45 days later for a check-in, and many owners later bring their dog to the ranch for boarding and training alongside the younger pups, says Greene.

One customer, retired U.S. Air Force major and Delta Air Lines pilot Stephen Mazzola, says he was attracted to Svalinn over competitors because of the website’s tagline, which emphasizes the dogs’ approachability alongside their discipline: “Bred to love. Trained to protect.”

Mazzola wanted a dog who could be a best friend and keep an eye on his family’s 15-acre property in rural Montana, he says. Their Dutch Shepherd mix Jet has traveled, hiked and attended dinner parties with Mazzola and his wife since April 2024, he says.

“As far as being a member of the family, that is the thing I can’t even put a price tag on,” says Mazzola.

Svalinn’s earliest iteration didn’t involve dogs at all.

Greene met her husband in Afghanistan, where she’d worked as policy advisor to former Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, she says. They moved to Nairobi, one of three major African travel hubs, to start Ridgeback — his “passion project,” she says.

When Greene became pregnant, she researched how to safely navigate Nairobi without a firearm or bodyguard. The couple adopted a Dutch Shepherd mix, Banshee, to “be both my best friend as well as my protector,” she says.

People kept their distance from Banshee’s brindle coat and intense stares, almost as if she was a forcefield, says Greene. Greene’s husband decided to incorporate protection dogs to Ridgeback’s other safety offerings, and the company sent employees to the U.S. to learn how to train the canines, Greene says.

Eight years in, Ridgeback had yet to turn a profit, and the family left Nairobi, Greene says. Terrorism threats had increased in the area and Greene wanted a more hands-on education for her first-grade sons, she says. They moved to Wyoming, and then Montana, seeking an outdoor lifestyle for their children. They also wanted their business to operate near pockets of wealth, Greene adds.

Launching in the U.S. felt like starting over, Greene says. The couple flew 30 dogs overseas, filed for new licenses, changed the company’s name and invested in branding and public relations. Svalinn focused entirely on protection dogs by 2015 and became profitable for the first time two years later, after the couple hired a budget-focused employee, says Greene.

But starting over was costly in other ways, Greene says: “We were dead set on making this happen, and it came at a very high price to our lifestyle … My former husband and I were always into the absolute hardest mountain that we could climb.” The couple divorced in 2019 and Greene’s ex-husband left Svalinn in 2020, with an investor buying a majority of the company’s equity. (Greene declined to name the investor.)

Greene initially wanted to sell her shares of the company, but “when I realized Svalinn was a blank slate, that it wasn’t someone else’s story anymore, that it was my story, I got really excited,” she says. “I realized I actually really love what I do.”

When Svalinn moved to Montana, Greene invited prospective clients to the ranch and heard “crickets on the other end” of the phone, she says. “Now, five years later, the answer is, ‘We’ve been looking to come there’ or ‘We come there once a year.’”

The American West sports a growing population of wealthy residents and tourists for multiple reasons: national parks, nostalgia for rural lifestyles and the absence of estate, inheritance and sales taxes, says Yale University sociology professor Justin Farrell, author of 2020 book “Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West.”

The ultra-wealthy are also investing in their personal and family’s security, a trend amplified by incidents of public violence toward public figures, says James Hamilton, founder of Hamilton Security Group and a former FBI special agent. Many billionaires have comprehensive security programs, which could include protection dogs, surveillance cameras, safe rooms and a fleet of staff, Hamilton says.

Svalinn’s clients aren’t usually billionaires, Greene notes, but the business is still a logical beneficiary of the trend. Yet Greene doesn’t want to train a dog for every interested buyer, she says, to protect the brand’s exclusivity and quality control. “I would much rather stay boutique and very bespoke,” she says.

Despite once referring to herself as a “reluctant leader,” Greene says she finally feels comfortable with the business and her place within it. “This is my dream life, and it’s wrapped up in my dream job,” she says. “It’s wrapped up in a business that encompasses my whole life with my children … being in this beautiful place [and] doing the activities that I love with people I love being with.”

After the October day of training, Greene takes her own dog, Highlander, onto a small hill overlooking the ranch. They see the barn, snuggled in a valley between snow-capped mountains, cloaked in amber grass and sagebrush.

After a moment of quiet, they walk back down the hill toward the barn. Together, they disappear inside.

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Warren Buffett is used to giving advice.

For decades, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman has sat before a packed arena during his company’s annual shareholder meetings, fielding investor questions on everything from artificial intelligence to the ins and outs of the insurance business to marriage advice.

In “Warren Buffett: A Life and Legacy,” which airs on Jan. 18 at 3 p.m. E.T. on CNBC, Becky Quick asks the Oracle of Omaha about some of the toughest questions and best advice he’s ever given. Buffett eventually arrives at a challenge he used to pose to college students.

Buffett would ask the students to consider a scenario in which, given a class of 300 or so of their peers, they could receive 10% of the lifetime earnings of five of them. Who would they choose — and why? And who would they sell short? The people you chose, he says, wouldn’t necessarily be the best looking or the smartest or the most athletic.

“Of course, I explained at the end, you can be the person that you would buy,” Buffett says. “There is nothing impossible. Because it isn’t whether you can throw a football 60 yards, and it … isn’t the one with the highest IQ. You can be one of the five.”

So what could get you on the list of someone with high expected lifetime earnings?

“It’s luck, a lot of it. If you choose the right parents, you’re rich when you come out,” Buffett says. “You’ve won the lottery — the ovarian lottery.”

But Buffett told students they could still be one of the people in the room their classmates should bet on.

“You can do it by being a good person, by reading a lot, by spending less than you take in,” he says. “I just told them you can spend 110% of what you earn once, and then you used it up. The rest of your life you’re underwater.”

Buffett makes sure to emphasize the latter point. While certain types of loans, such as a mortgage, may make sense in some instances, you generally want to avoid going into debt, Buffett says.

“Beyond a certain point, if you get in a hole or anything, it is difficult to dig out,” he says. “It isn’t that it’s impossible, and I give credit to people to do it. But do it the easy way.”

Of course, you’re not going to end up being one of the top earners among your peers if you don’t work hard and focus on self-improvement, Buffett says. He recalls longtime partner Charlie Munger’s habit of “selling himself” his most productive hour of the day — spending one hour each morning focusing exclusively on improving his mind and selling the rest of his working ours to clients.

“That’s not crazy,” Buffett says. “Your future is your future, and you can’t expect anybody else to do it.”

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