VALUE STOCKS ARE having quite the year—at least relative to growth shares. This past week underscored that trend, with the value-oriented Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) rising every day. Barring a big drop today, October will mark the index’s best monthly performance since 1976.
Even as the Dow rallied 5.7% last week, the growth-heavy Nasdaq Composite index rose just 2.2%. For the year, the Nasdaq is down 29%, versus less than 10% for the Dow.

I’VE TALKED IN EARLIER articles about asset-liability matching. It’s ​a concept popular with insurance companies to manage investment risk. It’s a very formal approach and not one I would expect an individual investor to follow too literally. But it’s a notion that, in general, can help individuals make asset allocation decisions.
In his book, The Outsiders, William Thorndike highlights another well-known principle in corporate finance that can also be applied to personal finance: It’s called capital allocation.

THE COLUMN I WROTE for The Wall Street Journal for more than 13 years was popular with readers—which was just as well, because it wasn’t always popular with Journal editors.
As best I could tell, top management appreciated the column, as did most of the editors I reported to directly. But others were critical. One editor, during his annual review of my performance, even demanded that I change my approach to writing the column.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, HumbleDollar unveiled its Two-Minute Checkup. All you need to do is input up to nine pieces of information and it spits out advice covering 10 areas of your financial life. When I tried it, I thought it was great—except for one thing. The amount it suggested my wife and I have in emergency cash was $13,000 higher than what we currently had.
I felt comfortable with the amount of cash we were holding,

WHEN I WAS AGE 10, we moved from Ohio to California. My father got a job by answering a help wanted ad in a local newspaper. When we first arrived in 1961, we lived in a 36-unit apartment building in Inglewood. It’s located about two miles from the Forum, where the Los Angeles Lakers and Kings sports teams used to play their home games.
One of our neighbors in the building was an older gentleman called Jack Tarentino.

ONCE I GRADUATED college and started working fulltime, I knew what my first major purchase would be: a sporty new car. I was jealous of the cars my friends drove in high school. I had just spent four years grinding through an undergraduate engineering program. I was ready to reward myself.
To prepare for the purchase, I minimized my expenses. I shared an apartment with two friends who had also just graduated from college.

MY FAVORITE NOVEL by Jules Verne is Around the World in 80 Days, which I first read as a child. It was published in 1872, and documented Phileas Fogg’s attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days.
The book has been made into a play, six movies and a half-dozen television series, including a recent entertaining PBS series. The Three Stooges even released a feature film version in 1963.
The Wikipedia entry for the novel lists 10 real-life attempts to replicate the fictional journey.

REMEMBER THE OLD sayings that “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” and “the carpenter’s house is falling down”? That’s how I felt last month as I frantically tried to enroll in Medicare.
My 65th birthday was in early September. Medicare has an initial enrollment period that lasts seven months. It starts three months before you turn age 65, includes your birth month, and ends three months after the month you turn 65. Suppose you were born on Sept.

I RECENTLY LISTENED to a podcast during which the speakers lamented the death of a colleague who was in his 30s. They mentioned a GoFundMe campaign to assist his family, so I assume the deceased had no life insurance. According to LIMRA, which collects data on the life insurance industry, less than 50% of millennials have individual life insurance.
There are two major types of life insurance: term and whole life. Term insurance is intended to cover a specific period,

WHEN I WAS A KID, I remember being puzzled by all the newspaper stories devoted to a recession. First, the articles said that one might be ahead. Then they said it had arrived. Immediately afterward, the stories shifted to, “Is the recession lifting?”
The same loop is starting in my newsfeed now, with daily stories asking if a recession is ahead. It’s a definite maybe, according to the experts, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

FOR MORE THAN 30 years, my primary hobby has been training dogs. I’ve trained my own dogs, winning multiple performance titles along the way. I’ve also devoted years to coaching dogs, and their owners, as part of a dog sports team. I’ve spent thousands of hours—and thousands of dollars—attending dog competitions.
My husband shares my passion for dog training. He spent nearly three years training one of our German shepherds to be a member of a canine search and rescue team.

WITH THE FINANCIAL markets down sharply, this is a great time to fund a Roth IRA, with its promise of tax-free growth. But the rules can be tricky.
The basics: You place part of your after-tax earned income in a Roth, invest it and—ideally—just leave it to grow. As long as the money stays there until you reach age 59½, and you wait at least five years, you can tap the account without owing a dime in taxes.

AS INFLATION continues to run hot, wage gains for the bottom quartile of income earners are almost keeping pace with consumer prices. Meanwhile, checking account balances for this group remain more than 50% above pre-pandemic levels.
Is everything A-okay? Of course not. Still, I’d argue that many Americans have positioned themselves well to weather an economic downturn. Another sign: Average credit scores are much improved from, say, the mid-2000s, when families were loading up on debt and speculators were snatching up houses only to flip them months later.

WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL, corporate executives often visited for guest lectures. Two of these presentations still stand out in my mind.
The first was the CEO of a company then called Flextronics—now simply Flex. It’s a contract manufacturer that assembles products for other companies. Apple, for example, doesn’t have factories of its own and instead relies on outsourcers like Flex to build its products, usually in Asia.
You might wonder why a presentation like this would be memorable.

FIVE YEARS AGO, I realized I’d spent my adult life doing something that was totally unnecessary—drying my hair with a hair dryer. I’m not sure why I got into the habit, but one day I realized it made zero difference to my appearance. I’m not saying using a hair dryer is a bad use of time for others. But for me, it was a minute or so each day that was completely wasted.
And it isn’t just the hair dryer that I’ve ditched.