ABOUT A DECADE AGO, when I was in college, I lived in an off-campus apartment complex. The complex had an on-site property manager named Joni. She got to live in one of the apartments in exchange for managing leases. Joni was in her 60s and didn’t have any close family, so she was always eager to talk to whoever stopped by her apartment “office.”
Many of my fellow residents tried to minimize their interactions with Joni,

OPEN A FINANCE textbook, and you’ll find discussions of volatility and beta, value-at-risk, the Sharpe ratio, the Sortino ratio, the Treynor ratio and many other quantitative tools for measuring risk. But what should you make of these metrics? Are they an effective way to control risk in your portfolio?
These tools do have decades of research behind them, and they can be useful. But I believe they’re also incomplete. Worse yet, they can be misleading.

WHENEVER FOLKS declare that their goal is to one day write a novel, or get in great physical shape, or learn to speak Italian, my immediate reaction is always the same: If these were things they really had a burning desire to do, they’d have done them already.
Which is why you should be skeptical of the article that follows.
Now that I’ve turned 60, I’m thinking about how I’ll divvy up my time in the years ahead.

WHEN I CLAIMED SOCIAL Security benefits, I had no idea how much there was to know—and how much I didn’t know. Bear in mind that the Social Security website didn’t exist until the late 1990s, and back then only minimal services were accessible through the site. In addition, most people didn’t fully appreciate the advantages of delaying benefits.

In my naïveté, I thought I would go to my local Social Security office to find out what options were available for claiming,

CAN WE REALLY EXPECT Americans to be financially literate and act prudently with their money—when they can’t even return a shopping cart to where it belongs, or stop dropping litter wherever they stand?

I was in the grocery store recently and came out to find a shopping cart pushed into the side of my car. I was parked eight feet from the cart corral. Meanwhile, on my last trip to an ATM, the ground was littered with receipts.

JOINT REPLACEMENT surgery is a rite of passage for many retirees. I’d be willing to wager that a majority of HumbleDollar readers have either had one themselves or know someone who has.
The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons says hip and knee replacements are the most common types of total joint replacement. From 2012 to 2021, 2.55 million of these procedures were performed, according to the American Joint Replacement Registry, which is the academy’s data repository.

BACK IN 1989, AS I was finishing the final semester of my undergraduate degree in India, I managed to bag two decent job offers. The first was from a government organization in my hometown, and the second was from an out-of-state private company in western India. I had a few weeks to make up my mind.
I was leaning toward the second offer. Not only did the idea of living on my own in a faraway town sound adventurous,

IF YOU HAVE READ enough HumbleDollar articles, you’ve probably noticed that frugality has played a major role in the financial success of many of the site’s writers. Peruse the article comments and the site’s “Voices” section, and you’ll find that readers often share the same thriftiness. Frugality is also a key theme running through many of the 30 financial life stories in the forthcoming book, My Money Journey. Sure enough,

INVESTING IS PRETTY simple. If you don’t need to touch your money for 10 years or so, a good chunk of it can be invested in a globally diversified basket of stocks, preferably using very low-cost index funds. The likelihood that your stock holdings will have lost money after a decade is quite low, and exceedingly low if your holding period is 15 years or longer. Moreover, your investment is likely to outperform all other asset classes,

“IT DOESN’T MATTER IF our planned trips might jeopardize our retirement savings.” The word “jeopardize” was spoken with a sarcastic tone.
It was clear my two financial-planning clients didn’t appreciate my message. They were adamant. Their 10 pricey National Geographic trips, which would span the globe, must remain on their bucket list.
So began a challenging chat. Based on their excitement about their retirement wish list, it would have been easier to simply applaud their exotic plans.

RETIREMENT IS SAID to be a time for reviewing and reminiscing. We try to understand who we were and how we came to be who we are. But the health trials of the retirement years can also project us into the future. When couples enter their twilight years, they begin to contemplate how they’d cope if the other died first. I believe “survivor rehearsal” is one way our biology helps us to contain the fear of having to cope on our own.

EXCEPT FOR A SCALLION or cucumber—feel free to add other items—finding something green in your refrigerator is generally not good. This morning, I reached for the butter and caught a glimpse of dark green. It was a wedge of never-opened goat cheese, $5.60 worth. Or, to view it another way, $253 in lost retirement savings over the next 40 years.

Before we left for Florida this winter, we removed from the fridge all items that would not survive six weeks.

IN THE WEEKS SINCE Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) disintegrated, there’s been a fair amount of post-mortem analysis. In the end, two factors drove the bank’s demise.
First, SVB’s customer base was concentrated among venture capital-backed technology companies. Because of that, nearly 90% of deposits topped the FDIC threshold and were thus uninsured.
Second, owing to 2022’s rise in interest rates, SVB’s bond portfolio took a hit. That sparked concern about the bank’s solvency, prompting depositors to overwhelm the bank with withdrawal requests.

THE BEAR MARKET HAS now dragged on for 15 months—and no doubt plenty of anguished investors are second-guessing their allocation to stocks. But as for me, I grow more enthusiastic with every drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In fact, I’d be happy to see the bear market last a few months longer, so I can finish fully funding various tax-advantaged accounts for 2023.
Not only are stocks better value than they were 15 months ago,

THREE YEARS AGO this month, in the middle of the pandemic-driven market meltdown, I went on a dividend-stock buying spree.
I had just turned 60 and was looking to step away from the corporate world in 18 months’ time to take up a second-act career as an author. As part of my retirement plan, I had a sizable money-market account that I planned to live on for a few years before I started taking Social Security and pulling from my retirement accounts.