ABOUT ONCE A WEEK, someone will say to me, “I don’t understand bonds.” Sometimes, they’ll state it in stronger terms: “I don’t like bonds.”
Fundamentally, bonds are just IOUs. If you buy a $1,000 Treasury bond, you’re simply lending the government $1,000. The Treasury will then pay you interest twice a year and return your $1,000 when the bond matures. That part is straightforward. What’s more of a mystery is why we should own bonds and what we should expect from them.

MY FIRST REACTION ON hearing my cancer diagnosis: I’m okay with this. My reaction a few hours later: I’m being self-centered.
My time is short, though how short remains an open question. Still, my truncated life expectancy makes something of a mockery of my pre-diagnosis comments about how we should view retirement not as the finish line, but rather as the beginning of a journey that might last two or three decades and perhaps account for almost half of our adult life.

WE MAKE CONSTANT tradeoffs as we allocate our time and money across our life’s many competing demands. What if we feel like all is not right in our world? We may be confronting the seven choices below—and favoring one option at the expense of the other, leaving us with what feels like an unbalanced life.
1. Between doing what we should and doing what we want. Here, I’m thinking about taking care of ourselves physically.

I HAVE LONG HELD a grudge against Los Angeles, and not just because they stole the Dodgers from Brooklyn when I was a kid. It’s a city where too much value is placed on how you look, a metric where I don’t score particularly high. By contrast, New York City—my old stomping ground—is principled more on what you know, and on that score I feel I deserve at least a gentleman’s C.
That said,

FORMER NEW YORK CITY Mayor Ed Koch used to frequently ask the city’s residents, “How am I doing?”
When I was younger, I’d ask myself that same question. I was always trying to keep up with others, whether it was socially, academically, athletically or financially. My big fear was that I wasn’t going to make it. I could never let down my guard, relax and take it easy. I was always having to compensate for whatever I was deficient in.

I TOOK MY REQUIRED minimum distribution, or RMD, at the end of July. I was planning on taking it at the end of the year, but my allocation to stocks was more than five percentage points above my target of 40%. I thought selling some of my stocks would be a good way to rebalance my portfolio and fund my RMD, so I sold a portion of my overweight in Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (symbol: VTI).

COULD SOMETHING like the Great Depression happen again? During that unpleasant episode, the stock market dropped 90%, unemployment rose to 25% and gross domestic product fell 30%. In making a financial plan, is this a scenario we should worry about?
While no one can predict the future, it’s worth taking a closer look at one key variable: the Federal Reserve. Today, the Fed has a reputation for helping smooth out economic cycles. But those who worry about Depression-like scenarios point out how powerless the Fed was to prevent the collapse that occurred in the 1920s and 30s.

THE OLDER WE GET, the easier it is to see the progress we’ve made, both as individuals and as a society. But I’m not just thinking about personal wealth, higher standards of living, better health care and extraordinary technological advances.
As I look back, I also see impressive progress in our financial thinking. Here are eight notions that were conventional wisdom half a century ago—but which today aren’t universally accepted and, in my estimation,

I WAS A VICTIM OF identity theft. It wasn’t anything I did. Rather, it was what my former employer did.
During the pandemic, many employees were working remotely, including a member of the human resources department. She received an email from the CEO requesting that she send him the W-2s for all employees. So she did. Unfortunately, the email wasn’t from the CEO. It was sent from a shopping mall in Saudi Arabia.
As soon as she hit send,

WHEN I ASKED MY brother what to bring to my newly purchased winter home in Tucson, his response was succinct: “Money. Lots. And extra credit cards.”
The voice of experience, he bought a so-called park unit five years ago before home prices soared, up 47% since early 2020 . My expenses in buying my place—and making it into what I wanted—had me selling beaten-down shares in a total bond fund to refill my cash accounts.

ANY BABY BOOMER WHO grew up around New York City is probably familiar with the name Robert Moses. He was the city planner who wielded enormous power over the development of New York from the 1920s to the 1960s.
Having grown up on Long Island, I saw his work firsthand in two main highways, the Long Island Expressway and the Northern State Parkway. They were designed to appear park-like, with arched bridges, wide grass run-offs and trees alongside the entire route.

I MAY BE WRONG, but I’m pretty sure Vanguard Group doesn’t have a secret plan to control the U.S. banking system. Not everyone is so confident, however.
There’s a federal regulation that no investor can buy more than 10% of the shares of a U.S. bank without regulatory approval if it’s seeking to “control” the bank. Thanks to the popularity of its index funds, Vanguard funds collectively owned 12.5% of State Street’s shares as of June 30.

DIVIDENDS ARE a seemingly mundane topic. But like many areas of personal finance, it’s one that still generates debate. The most common question: All else being equal, if one stock pays a dividend and another doesn’t, shouldn’t an investor prefer the one that pays the dividend? We’ll examine this question, and then broaden the lens to look at dividend strategies more generally.
To better understand how dividends work, let’s look at Procter & Gamble.

DEATH AND TAXES are inevitable—and, as I keep getting reminded, also inextricably entwined.
I’m not so fortunate that I need worry about federal estate taxes. That privilege belongs to those who die with $13.61 million in 2024. But that doesn’t mean the taxman isn’t hovering over my demise, raising a host of lesser issues.
Paying the piper. Over the past few years, my focus has been on making big Roth conversions while staying within the 24% federal income-tax bracket.

I’VE DECIDED UPON MY retirement date: July 1, 2025. We just passed the one-year countdown point, so I thought I’d share some of my ideas and plans for my final year in the workforce.
This countdown idea, of course, isn’t original with me. Indeed, there are apps that you can put on your phone to count down the time until retirement. I was primarily inspired by a retirement blogger named Fritz Gilbert. He’s way more decisive than I am.