I KNOW I’M NOT WISE. Still, I’ve picked up enough wisdom to realize I didn’t have much of it when I was younger. At the very least, 60 years of stubbed toes, slips and falls have shown me that some paths shouldn’t be trod, while a few are worth traveling.
I try to refrain from offering unsolicited advice. But I’ve lately had a growing desire to steer young adults toward choices that escaped my notice when I was their age—with a focus on three areas:
Think about who came before us.

EVERY TIME I HEAR the sage advice to pay off a mortgage before retirement, I wince. Not only will I have a mortgage in retirement, but also I won’t even make my first payment until after I retire—just as my salary plummets to zero.
I hate going against the conventional wisdom. But I really have no choice. As an active duty military officer who, for the past 20-plus years, has had to move every few years,

MY HUSBAND AND I WERE late bloomers when it came to estate planning. Though we took care of the basics when we became parents, such as purchasing term life insurance and naming a guardian, we never had a professionally executed will and trust until 2016, when we were in our late 50s.
Observing my in-laws, now in their 80s, made us realize how important it was to get our own estate-planning house in order.

A RECENT CNBC SURVEY found that more than half of Americans don’t have an emergency fund to handle life’s financial curveballs. The survey also found that seniors are more likely to have an emergency fund than younger adults, and men are more likely to maintain a rainy-day fund than women.

I don’t know how I’d manage if I didn’t have an emergency fund. Now that I’m retired from fulltime work, I try to keep to a fixed budget,

SUPPOSE YOU WERE presented with two prospective investments. On the surface, they look similar, except one has outperformed the other in 12 of the past 15 years. Which one would you choose?
This example isn’t hypothetical. The two investments in question are the S&P 500 and the EAFE Index. The S&P 500 is broadly representative of the U.S. stock market, while EAFE stands for Europe, Australasia and Far East. It’s the most commonly referenced index for developed international stock markets.

HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE financial freedom? That’s the intriguing question I’ve been asked twice in recent weeks by journalists curious about the new HumbleDollar book, My Money Journey: How 30 People Found Financial Freedom—And You Can Too.
Financial freedom is something that pretty much everybody wants, and yet there’s no agreed-upon definition. Still, I think most folks would focus on two key elements: time and money. But I don’t think it’s a simple matter of having lots of dollars and lots of free time.

SPRING TURNS A MAN’S fancy to… wait for it… outdoor power tools. Every April, I’d haul out the gas mower to prep it for the summer season. That meant a trip to the hardware store for oil, a spark plug and an air filter. Then I drove to the gas station for some new fuel.
For an hour, I would pretend that I understood the manly art of maintaining an internal combustion engine. I would gap and change the spark plug,

AS A RETIREE FOR WHOM Social Security payments are my financial foundation, it’s worrying to hear about a potential cut in benefits 11 years from now—because I’ve seen this movie before.
If Congress does nothing, benefits would drop 23% in 2034. It’s an unfathomable situation, but one that most pundits believe is unlikely. Let’s hope. Thankfully, I feel secure that my state pension—one third of my monthly income—will stay solvent.
More than 40 years ago,

YOU’VE PROBABLY HAD the same experience I’ve had when shopping for clothes. Spring’s in the air—a great time to take advantage of the local clothing store’s annual winter clearance sale. You buy that Ralph Lauren cashmere sweater at 20% off and jaunt home basking in glory. But the next day, while out for a walk, you peek at the store’s window display and see the same sweater, but now marked down 30%. You return home bemoaning your impulsivity.

IN THE 1980s, I SPENT nearly 12 weeks in an Australian hospital. I learned that language is not always universal. I was a corporate auditor for General Electric, and the company had sent me to Australia for a three-month assignment. To Yankee ears, Australians have an accent. But at least we speak the same language. Or so I thought.
Within a week of getting to Australia, I was diagnosed with subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE),

I GREW UP IN ENGLAND, with health-care coverage provided by the National Health Service, so I’m extremely sympathetic to people calling for “Medicare for All.” Still, I do wonder whether they realize that Medicare is neither cheap nor simple. My medical costs in 2021 were more than $10,000, with half of that for a single drug. And it would have been even more without the $3,000 a year kicked in by my former employer.

SELLING A HOUSE should be easy. Hire a realtor, find a buyer, the realtor takes a percentage and it’s a done deal. If only.

Try this version instead. Before we could sell our house in 2020, we had to fix a list of defects, including power washing the roof, having a dead tree removed, digging up an already drained oil tank and tearing up the pavers in the driveway to get at the tank.

AH, RETIREMENT. You’re blissfully free of the daily grind. If you’ve made plans for this long-awaited milestone, great. What if you haven’t? You may feel out of sync and out of sorts.

I’ve heard it said that, “The capacity to take a fresh look at all things makes a young person out of an old person.” It’s never too late to look anew at the challenges of retirement, while you still have time to resolve them.

WHERE DOES THE STOCK market stand? After 2022’s decline, is it now fairly valued—or still overvalued?
When I think about questions like this, I’m reminded of an opinion piece written by Robert Shiller a few years back. By way of background, Shiller is a professor at Yale University and a Nobel Prize recipient. Along with a colleague, he created one of the more well-known and well-regarded measures of market valuation: the cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio (CAPE).

I RETIRED ON MAY 27, 2022, which was my 55th birthday. I chose my birthday because it was the earliest date I could leave my job and still be eligible to receive the early retiree health-care benefit offered by my employer.
Mentally, I was ready to go. I’d been employed at a small liberal arts college for 24 years. I’d been there long enough to see an almost complete turnover of the faculty and staff in my department.