Jonathan Clements

IT’S BEEN AN unpleasant seven weeks for the stock market. Is it over? I have no clue. Still, last week’s rally offered investors at least a temporary respite. My suggestion: Use this moment to think about the market’s recent rollercoaster ride—and how you’ve handled it emotionally.
Financial experts distinguish between risk capacity and risk tolerance. It’s a useful distinction. Risk capacity is our objective ability to take risk based on our personal situation, notably the reliability of our paycheck and our investment time horizon.

THE PLOT, THE SCRIPT and the characters may have changed. But we’ve seen this movie before.
The current stock market swoon strikes many folks as unprecedented: It’s the frantic financial sideshow to a devastating global tragedy—one that’s seen 1.1 million people fall ill and 60,000 die, with every expectation that the numbers will be many multiples worse before the COVID-19 pandemic is over.
Yet, on closer inspection, 2020’s bear market doesn’t seem so different from earlier market declines.

IT’S BEEN A TAD OVER five weeks since the S&P 500 hit its all-time high. Five weeks have never felt so long.
It isn’t just all the articles that I’ve been writing and editing. I’ve also been busy with my own finances. I was on the verge of closing on the sale of my apartment here in New York and moving to Philadelphia. But then my buyer’s business collapsed amid the coronavirus slowdown and,

TIMES LIKE THESE test the mettle of investors. Want to pass the test? Here are 27 things to do now:

Keep buying stocks. Remember your regret at failing to load up on bargain-priced shares in early 2009? Don’t make that mistake again.
If you’re panicked and tempted to dump stocks, talk to a friend or, alternatively, hire a financial advisor—one required to act as a fiduciary—to coach you through this decline.
Ponder what makes you happy.

I DON’T KNOW WHEN the coronavirus will stop spreading, when we’ll have a vaccine and how much the economy will slow. I also don’t know at what level the stock market and interest rates will hit bottom—or whether we’ve already seen the worst. And nobody else does, either. But that doesn’t mean we should all just sit on our (frequently washed) hands.
While we don’t know how bad things will get, we’ve seen this movie before.

IS THE STOCK MARKET swoon messing with your head? You don’t want to make this market decline any worse than it has to be. To that end, here are 10 steps that’ll help preserve your sanity and your portfolio:

Avoid touching both your face and leveraged exchange-traded index funds.
Change the password on your investment accounts to “ItsTooLateToSell.”
Downgrade your opinion of investors based on their degree of hysteria.
Don’t watch Contagion,

I’M MANAGING MY MONEY with an eye to making it last another three decades. And yet, everywhere I turn, it seems somebody’s insisting I pay attention to what’s happening in the financial markets right now.
This isn’t just a coronavirus phenomenon. It is, alas, standard operating procedure for the financial media.
I understand the game. I’ve spent most of my career as a journalist, so I realize it’s no small undertaking to fill up a newspaper,

IT’S COME TO THIS: I’m writing an article discussing the virtues of EE savings bonds. To be sure, I’m not currently planning to buy them myself. But they could make a fine investment for more conservative investors who are happy to sit tight for the next two decades.
Yes, the current yield on EE savings bonds is a mere 0.1%. But if you hold EEs for 20 years, the Treasury Department guarantees that your savings bonds will double in value,

HERE’S THE LEAST surprising thing you’ll read this week: You can’t control the financial markets. They’re driven by news—and we simply don’t know what news we’ll get in the weeks and months ahead, whether it’s about the spread of the coronavirus, its impact on the global economy or something else entirely.
But don’t despair: There’s also much that we can control, including how much we save and spend, the amount of investment risk we take,

IMAGINE COVID-19 caused the U.S. economy to shrink 4%. What sort of drop in share prices might this trigger?
As it happens, we already know the answer. Over the 18 months through mid-2009, U.S. inflation-adjusted GDP slipped 4%. Investors—panicked over what the future might bring—drove down the S&P 500 stocks by a jaw-dropping 57%.
In retrospect, this seems like a bit of an overreaction.
To be sure, late 2008 was a wild time. It felt like the global financial system was on the verge of total collapse.

AFTER YEARS OF handwringing, you finally concede that it’s all but impossible to beat the market over the long haul, so you shift your portfolio into index funds. Next up: the truly tough decisions.
Almost every writer for—and reader of—HumbleDollar is a fan of indexing, and there’s no doubt that index funds are a wonderful financial tool. But how will you use that tool? Let the bickering begin.
The differences of opinion show up among the articles we run on HumbleDollar.

I AM AGE 57 AND I’M planning to move, so you might imagine I’d be interested in the best states to retire. On that score, there’s plenty of advice available.
Bankrate says the best option for retirees is Nebraska, followed by Iowa, Missouri, South Dakota and Florida. Meanwhile, WalletHub gives the nod to Florida, with Colorado, New Hampshire, Utah and Wyoming rounding out the top five. Want a third opinion? Blacktower Financial Management puts Iowa at No.

I HAVE DEVOTED MY entire adult life to learning about money. That might sound like cruel-and-unusual punishment, but I’ve mostly enjoyed it. For more than three decades, I’ve spent my days perusing the business pages, reading finance books, scanning academic studies and talking to countless folks about their finances.
Yet, despite this intense financial education, it took me a decade or more to learn many of life’s most important money lessons and, indeed, some key insights have only come to me in recent years.

ON THIS DAY IN 1888, George Cope died at age 65. Two days later, he was buried in Anfield Cemetery in Liverpool, England, where his younger brother Thomas had been laid to rest 40 months earlier.
Together, in 1848, the two brothers had launched a successful tobacco company, which would be acquired more than a century later by Gallaher Group, then a major U.K. multinational tobacco producer. Gallaher itself would subsequently be bought by Japan Tobacco.

FOR THREE YEARS, I lived on Roosevelt Island, in the middle of New York City’s East River. It’s a wonderful place—a quiet, friendly, low-crime oasis in the middle of one of the world’s largest, most frenetic cities.
During my time there, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park opened on the island’s southern tip. The park is named after a 1941 FDR speech, where he articulated “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, of worship,