I’M KNOWN AS A FRUGAL, rational and practical spender. My husband Jim likes to remind me that, six months into dating, my first birthday present to him was prefaced with, “I think I know what you want and need.” It was a three-compartment laundry hamper to separate his clothes before washing.
But one area where I’m neither rational nor practical is cats. I wholeheartedly agree with Jim Kerr’s recent dog story, where he wrote that a pet is a terrible investment—if we’re only considering money.

I’VE SPENT THE PAST seven or eight years lamenting our cash position, both the interest it was earning and the size of it. The former was too little, the latter too much.
Some years ago, we sold an investment property with the idea of buying another somewhere we might potentially retire. But as I noted in a recent article, we’ve never been able to settle on where that would be. We were also constantly thinking we were going to move or be moved away from the Houston area,

I’M STILL AMAZED WHEN I speak with friends and neighbors who have no idea what their home is worth. They tell me they might sell in the near future. When I ask them how much they think they’ll get, they say something like, “I’m not sure, I’m meeting a real estate agent next week.”
Homeowners always need to know how much their home is worth. You can’t wait until your boss tells you about a great opportunity in Honolulu to start determining your home’s value.

MY WIFE VICKY AND I have lately been discussing—yet again—when to claim our Social Security retirement benefits. We’re fortunate to have multiple sources of retirement income, including a defined benefit pension, traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs and two health savings accounts.
To date, we had assumed we’d both delay claiming Social Security until age 70, so we get the largest benefits possible. Until then, we’d planned to live on my pension, any consulting income I earn,

AT THE FIRST Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting I attended, Charlie Munger was explaining an investment that the company had made. He said it was likely to provide satisfactory returns.
At the time, that seemed like an odd statement. Satisfactory? Not great returns. Not market-beating results. Not returns of 10% or 15% per year. Not even market average performance. Just satisfactory.
Since that meeting, I’ve come to appreciate satisfactory returns. Satisfactory covers a wide range,

BONDS ARE OFTEN SEEN as the safe harbor in a retiree’s portfolio. But that sure hasn’t been the case this year.
As the long era of easy monetary policy—one that dates back to 2008—has come to an end, bond owners have been handed hefty losses. With interest rates rising and the Federal Reserve tightening, many investors have come to understand the risks they run with bonds.
Was there a way to know the risk beforehand?

I DIDN’T WIN the Powerball lottery—this time.
That’s too bad because I knew exactly what I’d have done with the money. I’ll bet you did, too.
I was ready to pay for the education of all of our nieces’ children. “Go where you wanna go,” as the song says. My favorite charity would also have been on the list. Laurel House, a domestic violence agency, does tremendous work in Montgomery County, where we live in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

IN A FEW MINUTES, I’ll be off to play a round of golf with friends I met after we moved to our condo in 2018.

Golf is a crazy game, insane actually. It’s immensely frustrating and yet has a way of providing devious incentives to keep you playing—like hitting that last good shot of the day after 75 lousy ones. Not unlike stock-picking.

This week, I shot a 39 on the first nine holes.

I TEND TO KEEP MORE cash than the average investor, so the recent rise in interest rates paid on savings has my attention. In fact, 2022’s pitiful performance by bonds has caused me to shift even more money into cash.
We have online savings accounts at CIT Bank, Synchrony, Marcus and American Express. CIT is currently paying 3.25%, Synchrony 3%, Marcus 3% and American Express 2.75%. The rates have climbed so frequently this year that they’ll probably be higher by the time you read this.

THERE ARE USUALLY TWO answers to every personal-finance question: There’s what the calculator says—and then there’s how you feel about it. What does that mean in practice? Let’s look at an example.

Suppose you’re considering when to claim Social Security. Many retirees struggle with this question. On the one hand, the government offers a strong incentive to wait: For each year you forgo Social Security—up to age 70—your future benefit will grow by some 8%.

I DID IT AGAIN. I correctly identified a trend but jumped too soon.
When interest rates plummeted as the Federal Reserve reacted to COVID-19, I had a ladder of certificates of deposit. Some of these CDs are only now reaching maturity. Each step of the ladder yielded 2% to 3%. This looked good in comparison to the low rates available through most of the COVID period.
As the short-term CDs in the ladder matured,

WHEN MARKETS PLUNGE, investors start questioning whether they have the right mix of stocks, bonds and cash. That’s no great surprise: Bear markets hammer home the investment risks we’re taking—and many folks discover their portfolio is too aggressive for their taste.
That’s a useful insight for the future. But it’s hardly one you want to act upon when, even after Thursday’s rally, the broad stock market remains down some 16% for the year-to-date and the bond market is off 14%.

I’M A BIG BELIEVER in retiring gradually, rather than declaring you’re done on a single retirement day. This lessens the change to your routine and your identity. One of the main appeals of a phased approach to retirement is that you can craft it to meet your needs. You may want to shift from fulltime work to part-time consulting, or perhaps lend your talents to a nonprofit or a startup.
To do that, you’ll need to figure out what you want,

NETFLIX ISSUED ITS third-quarter earnings report last month—and it was stellar. Just when everyone thought its growth was done, the streaming service added 2.4 million new subscribers. Quarterly revenue increased 5.9% year over year to $7.93 billion.
More important, cash from operations and free cash flow grew rapidly, up 261% and 14% respectively. For long-term investors, these are the metrics that matter most because they show the business is making money.
Netflix wanted us to know this,

A NEW RESEARCH report confirms that there are darn few reasons to consider an actively managed fund over an index fund—and, indeed, this year’s bear market has made the case for active funds even weaker.
Remember active fund managers, those stars of TV and magazines in days of yore? Purportedly, they could beat their relevant indexes by buying the best-performing stocks and bonds, shifting sector and country weights, and sidestepping market pitfalls. That notion seems almost quaint today—because it’s been proved so thoroughly and repeatedly wrong.