I’M ABOUT TO MOVE OUT of my home for four or five months. Yeah, this takes some explaining.
In February 2020, when I was planning my move to Philadelphia, I wrote down 10 criteria I’d use to pick my new home. I recently re-read the article—and realized I broke the final two rules I’d laid down for myself.
To be sure, the home search didn’t go quite the way I planned. For starters, there was this little hiccup called the pandemic.

I JUST FINISHED rereading a book every serious investor needs to reread: Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. It was written by Michael Lewis in 2003, but it’s still quite relevant to baseball—and to investing.
It’s the story of the Oakland A’s general manager, Billy Beane, and his struggle to create a competitive baseball team on a limited budget. How does this relate to personal finance? Well, first let me explain my connection to Moneyball.

I WAS HAPPY TO receive this year’s boost to my Social Security benefit—but I’m regularly reminded that it doesn’t match the endless inflation.
A case in point: The same oil change at the same gas station for my 2020 Honda Fit cost me 28% more last week than it did nine months earlier. With detailed invoices, I could compare the reasons for the jump. Surprisingly, it wasn’t the cost of four quarts of full synthetic oil,

I’VE BEEN AN IMPOSTER all my life. In high school, I drove my silver Corvette Stingray into the teachers’ parking lot, revving the engine to announce my arrival. But once I came out from under my shades and joined the throng of students converging on the entrance, I reverted to the shy introvert walking tentatively with his head down.
From time to time, we all take on the role of great pretender to hide our fears of failure and humiliation,

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.