LIKE MANY IMMIGRANTS living in the U.S., I regularly return to my hometown to visit family and friends. My trips to Kolkata are usually short and jam-packed, seeing not just contemporaries, but also the older generation, including aunts and uncles, my parents’ friends and my friends’ parents.
My two recent visits—one last fall and the other this spring—were no exception, but I had mixed feelings this time. Most of the older generation are now in their 70s and early 80s,

AFTER PENNY READ about lower stock market valuations abroad, she bought an exchange-traded index fund focused on European shares. She showed the article to her friend Peter, who purchased the same fund. But the next day, a large French bank reported difficulty meeting customer withdrawals, stoking fear of a bank run.
The U.S. stock market was down slightly, but European shares got clobbered. Penny was disappointed but believed the government would take steps to ease the crisis and vowed to stay invested.

THOSE WHO LIVE VERY long lives sometimes face an unfair irony: The accomplishments of even towering figures can lose their luster over time—not because they’re proven wrong, but because the ideas they developed become so widely accepted that we forget they were once innovations. The investment world lost one such towering figure last week: the economist Harry Markowitz, who was age 95.
Markowitz first came to prominence in the early 1950s, when his PhD thesis,

AS WE MANAGE OUR financial life, we’re compelled to cope with heaps of uncertainty—which way the stock and bond markets will head, what financial misfortunes will strike, how long we’ll live and so much more.
But there are also ways we can exert a measure of control: spend thoughtfully, save diligently, keep a close eye on risk, hold down investment costs and manage our annual tax bill. To this list, I’d add one other key way to reclaim the advantage: have a good handle on who we are.

IT TOOK FIVE FALSE starts to write this column. Each time, I’d inundate readers with information. So, here’s a sixth try.
Have you ever seen those questions to financial advisors on the internet that say, “I have [insert dollar amount]. Can I retire?”
How the heck could the advisor give a reasonable response? To answer the question, it takes more than simply knowing how much you have in the bank. You need a lot of personal and financial information to make the decision to retire.

WE TRAVEL A LOT, so I try to read up on new places, new deals and what to watch out for. This year, I’ve made two new discoveries—not pleasant ones.
I admit it, I love hotel points. I know I’ve paid for those points, but seeing a “free” hotel bill makes me feel good.
Hotels started their rewards programs when I was traveling for business. I signed up right away. In fact, my rewards account number with one hotel chain starts with 000.

HOW MUCH DO WE PAY for Medicare? You might think that premiums would be fixed, like the prices on a restaurant menu. But instead, the correct answer is “it all depends”—on your income, which isn’t necessarily a good thing in our case.
It’s a fact of life: The more you make, the more you may have to pay for Medicare, the health insurance program for older Americans. Medicare calls its variable pricing system the income-related monthly adjustment amount,

I RECENTLY COMPLETED a course called England: From the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest. Before that was Books That Matter: The Federalist Papers. Okay, I’m a nerd, I’ll admit it.
Since I retired, I’ve looked for avenues to broaden and deepen my understanding of subjects that I was taught in high school and at the liberal arts college I attended. Back then, there were college courses,

I NEVER PLANNED TO retire at age 53. I wasn’t an early adopter of the FIRE, or financial independence-retire early, philosophy. In fact, I didn’t start saving seriously until my late 30s, when I left my first husband and finally realized that—unlike pensions in my native U.K.—my U.S. pension didn’t come with an annual cost-of-living adjustment.

Instead, three developments in the late 1990s led me to consider quitting. First, I was no longer enjoying my job.

I’VE DECIDED TO SELL some of my investments and buy a Bentley. The one I admire would cost about $300,000, including taxes and fees.
Just kidding. Besides, I couldn’t face my four children after such an indecent splurge, knowing that they’re dealing with high-deductible health plans, saving for college and socking away money for retirement—just like millions of other Americans.
While that Bentley purchase would be possible in theory, it would substantially reduce my assets,

THIS SIMPLE EQUATION is arguably the most important in personal finance: income – expenses = savings.
Think back to your early paychecks. Most of your after-tax salary likely went toward housing, food and maybe a few debt payments. For many of us, little was available to save each month for the first year or two of our working lives.
Then one day, on the last day of the month, there was money left over.

AS I MENTIONED IN an earlier article, I’ve been writing for HumbleDollar since 2017. Along the way, I set a personal goal of writing 100 articles, not counting the 36 shorter blog posts I’ve penned. This is my 99th article. I’m almost there.
It may not seem like a lofty goal to many people, but to me it’s been a challenge. After I wrote my first article, it took me a year to write another one.

IN 2014, AN INVESTOR asked Charlie Munger—Warren Buffett’s second-in-command—why he wasn’t investing in Apple. Munger responded that, “No matter what their financial statements showed,” he’d never have a high degree of confidence in the company. “It’s just too hard.”
Buffett agreed. But things changed. Today, Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is Apple’s third-largest shareholder, with holdings valued at more than $150 billion.
What should we conclude from Buffett’s about-face? In recent weeks, I’ve referenced studies on market timing and trading.

MY PORTFOLIO HAS bounced back nicely from October 2022’s stock market low—and that’s a problem: I’ve learned over the decades that I’m not good at handling prosperity.
At issue is the question of when to rebalance my portfolio, in this case selling stocks and buying bonds to bring them back into line with my target percentages. Among experts, there’s no agreed-upon strategy, which is almost an invitation to bad behavior. We investors do better with hard-and-fast rules.

ON JUNE 15, THE NEWS was broken by The Oregonian of a massive hack at Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles, apparently leading to the theft of sensitive details about most of Oregon’s 3.5 million holders of a driver’s license or ID card. Incidents like this, along with the huge 2017 Equifax hack, give criminals cheap and easy access to key personal information that many organizations routinely use to verify our identities and screen our credit applications.