MY WIFE RECENTLY traveled to Connecticut for a week to help with loose ends following her brother-in-law’s unexpected heart surgery. I was left to fend for myself, with only three hard-boiled eggs, two ounces of nearly expired low-fat milk, half a jar of gourmet salsa and a moldy cucumber to keep me company.
Boredom quickly set in. For some inexplicable reason, I had an uncontrollable urge to spend money. The first activity that entered my forebrain was visiting a casino.

MANY YEARS AGO, a Wall Street Journal article quoted a source as saying, and I paraphrase, “Young-old age should last as long as possible, while old-old age should last 15 minutes.” Those of us who have visited nursing homes can all relate to this.
Public health initiatives and medical breakthroughs have extended lifespans significantly over the past 100 years. In his bestselling book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity, Peter Attia argues that we should focus not just on lifespan,

ON ONE OF OUR TRIPS to visit my in-laws in South Carolina, my mother-in-law asked me what I thought of her home in a 55-plus retirement community.
“It looks like a house,” I said sarcastically.
Her response gave me food for thought. She said, “I feel rich living here.”
My mother-in-law’s home was far from being a McMansion. It was a single-story two-bedroom house, but it had cathedral ceilings. I think it was the high ceilings that,

I WAS FASCINATED with retirement planning during the final decade of my career. I read many financial books and focused on saving diligently. Yet, after retiring several months ago following a 39-year career as a research and development engineer, I had a rude awakening.
You can plan all you want, but then comes an unexpected situation that derails everything. As boxer Mike Tyson famously said, “Everybody has plans until they get hit for the first time.”
In the brief time I’ve been retired,

I’M STILL KICKING myself for not getting a new Medicare Part D prescription drug plan during the enrollment period for 2023, even though our premium had gone up significantly. Most people, it seems, are like me: They stick with their current plan, rather than shopping for one that meets their needs at a lower cost.
For 2024, I vowed to do better.
Medicare’s open enrollment period ran from Oct. 15 to Dec. 7, 2023.

MANY FOLKS EQUATE a stock market downturn with losing money. I often hear comments like, “I lost money yesterday. The stock market went down.”
I believe this impression of loss is an illusion, one that can be detrimental to our financial health—because it blinds us to certain fundamental truths.
1. Illusion of lost money. You only lose money if you sell shares at a loss. If you don’t sell amid a downturn,

WHAT’S VERNON SMITH been doing since he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics at age 75, and why should you care?
At 97, Smith is still on the faculty of the business and law schools at Chapman University. When he’s not traveling the country delivering lectures, he usually spends 10 hours a week writing and researching.
I read about Smith in a recent article in the AARP Bulletin devoted to super-agers, defined as those over age 80 with the brain of a person 20 to 30 years younger.

THIS YEAR SAW THE passing of two giants of the investment world. The first was Harry Markowitz, who in the 1950s developed a concept now known as Modern Portfolio Theory. His key insight was one that today we view as so fundamental that it’s easy to take it for granted: Markowitz was the first to articulate and quantify the importance of diversification. He later won a Nobel Prize for his work.
This year also saw the passing of Charlie Munger.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO with your money next year? The same things you should have done this year, and the year before, and the year before that.
The rules for a successful life—financially and otherwise—are, I believe, pretty timeless. What rules? Here are 24 of my favorites.
1. Ask why. If you don’t know where you’re going with your finances, you’ll likely end up somewhere you don’t like. What are your money goals for 2024 and beyond?

IN A RECENT ONLINE discussion, I compared the benefits of an immediate-fixed annuity with the 4% retirement-income rule. The 4% rule suggests that investors can withdraw 4% from a well-balanced investment portfolio in the first year of retirement, and then add annual inflation adjustments without fear of running out of money over a 30-year retirement.
Using the NewRetirement annuity calculator, I found that a 65-year-old man could purchase an immediate annuity for $1 million,

THE FIRST TIME I remember realizing that “time flies” was during my senior year of high school. One of my class periods each day involved working in the school’s main office. My primary duty was to walk the hallways, gathering attendance sheets from each classroom.
It was a highly repetitive task, each day a replica of the prior one, with the route through the hallways never changing. On one of those days, I recall thinking,

MY WIFE WAS STILL waking up from the general anesthesia. She’d had a Cesarean, or C-section. Meanwhile, I was in the nursery, helping the nurse record my newborn son’s vitals.
The Harry Chapin song Cat’s in the Cradle came over the loudspeaker. For readers unfamiliar with the song, it tells the story of a dad who is more interested in his job than his son. Having kids was never my priority. Making money was,

REMEMBER WHEN YOU got that first AARP card in the mail? I must have been 50, not at all ready to begin thinking about senior discounts, and slightly offended. That was 12 years ago.

Well, I’m feeling that way again. You see, the grim reaper—oops, I mean retirement—is getting close. That means it’s time to reduce my exposure to stocks, while boosting my holdings of income-oriented investments. It’s a strange feeling for someone who has spent his life investing almost exclusively for capital appreciation.

WE OFTEN IMAGINE WE know something about the future that’s unknowable—and the result can be costly investment mistakes. Below is an edited excerpt from the new book “From Zero to Millionaire: A Simple, Effective, and Stress-Free Way to Invest in the Stock Market,” published by Harriman House.
“I don’t think the United States is going to survive.”
Several years ago, I was having lunch with a friend in a San Francisco restaurant when he made this confession. 

IS A STORM COMING? Long before I discovered HumbleDollar, I regularly read articles by Scott Burns. Now in his 80s, Burns was a popular financial columnist who wrote for the Boston Herald and later The Dallas Morning News. He’s a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, so he’s comfortable presenting quantitative arguments. Burns is an advocate of low-cost index funds, and he helped popularize couch potato investing,