I JUST READ THAT the 4% rule is making a comeback. From where, I thought?

Under the 4% rule, you withdraw 4% of your nest egg in the first year of retirement. If you had $1 million, you’d take 4%, or $40,000. In year two, you’d add inflation to your previous year’s withdrawal. Say inflation ran at 6%. You’d multiply $40,000 by that 6% to get the second-year adjustment of $2,400. Add that to the prior year’s $40,000,

HIGHLY INTELLIGENT people sometimes don’t know much about investing. Still, they can have a misplaced confidence in their own abilities and feel certain they require no help. In the end, it’s often their adult children who sort things out—which, in this particular case, meant me.
Five years ago, my 84-year-old mother and 85-year-old stepfather moved from the mountains of Colorado to Georgia to live closer to my wife and me. For more than 20 years,

AS IF WE DIDN’T already have enough evidence, here’s further proof that stock market predictions have little value: A year ago, 24 highly regarded stock market pundits forecasted that the S&P 500 would close out 2022 at 4,904, according to data posted by CNBC’s Brian Sullivan. That 4,904 was the average, with their predictions ranging from a low of 4,400 to a high of 5,330. The S&P 500’s actual 2022 close was 3,840.
Meanwhile,

THERE’S TRADITIONAL career advice, such as clarify your goals, master essential skills, promote yourself, network and work smarter, not harder—whatever that means.
While this general advice is great, it’s no sure-fire formula. There’s no guarantee that if you work hard and smart, you’ll get a promotion and a pay raise. Traditional career advice tends to assume that you, your boss and the company are all behaving logically, and that the system reflects that logic.

LAST FRIDAY’S U.S. JOBS report was just what the doctor ordered. While much attention gets paid to the headline change in employment—which was a solid 223,000 gain in December—the bullish news was in the report’s details.
Average hourly earnings, a key measure of wage growth, were up 4.6% from a year ago, significantly less than the 5% consensus expectation. Weekly hours worked were also a smidgen less than forecasted—another “cool” reading on the inflation front.

ONE OF THE MOST important ideas in personal finance comes not from a financial expert but from a 20th century English philosopher named Carveth Read. “It is better to be vaguely right,” he wrote, “than exactly wrong.”
Why is this idea important? It gets to the heart of why financial planning can be so tricky. For starters, few people—if any—can claim to be perfectly rational when it comes to money decisions. But more to the point,

AROUND THE TURN of the year, investment experts issue their forecasts for the next 12 months. Bloomberg says it has gathered more than 500 market predictions for 2023, with many forecasting a rough year for the financial markets.
I’ve done my research as well, and I’m now prepared to offer my forecast: There’s an 80% chance that the S&P 500 will return between -10% and 30% in 2023.
I can’t claim this as original work.

I GREATLY VALUE honesty. I think it’s important to be scrupulously honest with others and brutally honest with ourselves. That brings me to HumbleDollar’s annual report card.
After steady growth over the site’s first five years, our sixth year—2022—saw mixed success. Below are five key metrics that I track. These numbers, I believe, tell you not only about HumbleDollar, but also a little about the mood of Americans over the past 12 months.

IF EVERYONE WOULD just follow my advice when managing their money, all our financial problems would evaporate.

I’m kidding, I’m kidding.

From recently viewing a YouTube video, I learned it’s necessary to track all spending, have a budget and be mindful of spending habits. Nope and nope—but yes to watching our spending habits.

Managing money boils down to discipline and responsibility. You may not be able to keep up with the Joneses, take that vacation you desire or get that next tattoo.

DEPRESSION IS BAD not just for your health, but also for your wealth. In 2001, Prof. Robert Leahy touched on the corrosive influence of a person’s mood on his approach to the financial markets. Although intuitively plausible, his observation has never received the attention I think it deserves.
The notion of cognitive bias is a cornerstone of the burgeoning field of behavioral finance. Set in motion by the pioneering research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1974,

I HAVE A RITUAL ON New Year’s Day—and it has nothing to do with making resolutions or watching college bowl games on TV.
Every Jan. 1, I pull up my handy financial planning spreadsheet on my laptop and input year-end numbers for my investment portfolio based on where the various funds closed out the year. I created the spreadsheet 20 years ago when I was in my early 40s, had just gone through a financially devastating divorce,

RETIREMENT PLANNING videos and books can be frustrating because of the conflicting advice from so-called experts. Often, these experts are outside the mainstream. They retired in their 30s, or saved 50% of their income, or claim to be living so frugally in retirement that they need to replace just half of their old salary.

I prefer to think more about average Americans facing the reality and challenges of planning for retirement in the real world.

THE TWO SECURE ACTS—2019’s and 2022’s—may inadvertently increase the federal and state tax rates on tax-deferred retirement accounts, such as 401(k)s, 403(b)s and IRAs. While well-intentioned, the laws result in required withdrawals being bunched into fewer years—which could push people into higher tax brackets. But there are ways this tax toll might be lightened or avoided, as you’ll see.
With tax-deferred accounts, the normal advice is to delay taxable distributions for as long as possible to give more time for investment growth.

I STEP INTO THE OLD farmhouse where I grew up and am momentarily confused.

Where’s the blue sofa under the living room bay window with its plump pillows and cozy blankets that my mother likes to throw over her as she reads the morning paper? Where’s the coffee table with the covered pewter candy dish filled with M&Ms and Hershey Kisses? Where’s the rickety table where our family of eight crowded around for countless meals in the tiny but somehow adequate kitchen?

IN FALL 2021, I WROTE about my father-in-law’s impending death due to cancer. He died a few months after publication. I had the honor of writing his obituary. Like my wife and her family, I have found myself wanting to call him many times since he died.
I was born in the early 1980s. That means that, until very recently, all I’ve known is a falling interest rate environment. People from my father-in-law’s generation knew environments like today—when interest rates and inflation rose together,