WE’RE IN OUR SECOND year as nomads, having sold our Texas home and driven away from our storage unit in November 2022. In the few years before that, we often talked about where we wanted to move, but could never quite decide.
When I retired in 2021, we traveled for most of the next 12 months. At the end of it, we still hadn’t decided where we wanted to live, but we knew we wanted a change,

I BEGAN MY CAREER as a part-time employee for an engineering consulting firm. At the time, I was working on my master’s degree in mechanical engineering. I shifted to full-time when I’d wrapped up my coursework but before completing my research and oral defense.
Over the next four years, I finished that degree and passed the national exam to become a registered professional engineer. I also got married, and bought a dog, a second car and a house.

WHEN I WAS A KID, my father would take me trout fishing at the many small lakes of California’s Eastern Sierra mountains. We’d usually “fish off the bottom” using a wad of floating bait attached to a weighted line. We’d then sit on a rock or in our little rowboat, and wait for a fish to come along and take the bait.

It seemed to me that some mornings we waited an awful long time.

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER, I didn’t have a girlfriend. Now that I’m older, I realize not everyone had a girlfriend during their junior high or high school years. But at the time, I felt like I was the only one.
By this time, my father had passed away, so I only had my mother and older brother to confide in. My brother thought I might have a problem that prevented me from seeking female companionship,

BRITISH PHILOSOPHER G.K. Chesterton, in his 1929 book The Thing, introduced an idea now known as “Chesterton’s fence.”
Here’s how he explained it: Imagine two people walking along a road when they discover a fence blocking the way for no apparent reason. As Chesterton tells it, the first person looks at the fence and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” But the second person disagrees: “If you don’t see the use of it,

IF 20-SOMETHINGS ASK me for financial advice, I suggest getting a job right out of college and saving like crazy, so they quickly get themselves on the fast track to financial freedom.
If 60-somethings ask me for advice, I advocate a phased retirement, seeking part-time work in their initial retirement years and, if they enjoy it, perhaps keeping it up into their 70s.
Yeah, I know, I sound like a real killjoy. My advice raises an obvious question: Is there ever a time when we should cut ourselves some slack and not have a job?

“YOU’LL STILL HAVE a retirement. It just won’t be the one you planned on.”
I’ve had to share this sobering assessment with many patients who were hoping to be rewarded for a lifetime of hard work and responsible saving, only to have those hopes dashed by an unforeseen health crisis. The culprit may be an external event like a disabling car accident or crippling fall, or an internal one like stage-four cancer or early onset dementia.

WHEN I WROTE ABOUT the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching 35,000 in 2021, it’ll surprise few to hear that I—like the stock market—was euphoric. I’ll confess that in 2022, as stocks plunged, I felt silly for having written the article.
But here I am again, writing about the latest milestone for our old friend. After flirting with the number in mid-March, the Dow hit an intraday high topping 40,000 on May 16 for the first time in its history.

DEAR DAVID: LAST WEEK, you emailed me, “If you had $20,000, didn’t want to take risk and wanted the best return, how would you invest?” It’s a timeless issue, most likely first asked the day after money was invented.
You may be wondering why, besides asking where your money is currently invested, which turns out to be Bank of America at 0.2%, I haven’t asked about your risk tolerance, current financial situation and future financial needs.

I PASSED ON MANY activities when I was younger because I didn’t think I could do them. I simply didn’t have a great deal of self-confidence. It was only after I had some accomplishments to my name that my attitude changed and I became bolder in my efforts.
Along the way, a saying I came across helped me overcome my lack of self-confidence. It’s attributed to Henry Ford, the father of the first broadly affordable mass-produced American automobile,

PEOPLE DEBATE JUST about everything in personal finance. Among these arguments: how best to measure risk. Partisans on this topic tend to fall into one of two camps.
In the first group are those who believe risk can be distilled down to a single number. For these folks, the most common numerical yardstick is portfolio volatility—that is, the degree to which a portfolio’s price bounces around from year to year. Portfolios exhibiting lower volatility are deemed safer.

GRIEF IS A HEAVY cloak, but when it’s entangled with the financial fallout of a loved one passing without a will, the weight can become unbearable. This was my reality when my mother passed away unexpectedly. There were no clear instructions, no designated beneficiaries, just a confusing mess of assets and debts that threatened to drown me in a sea of paperwork and emotional turmoil.
The Intricacies of Intestacy. Since Mom didn’t have a will,