WHAT WILL RETIREMENT cost? One solution to this riddle is to save as much as we can and hope it’ll cover our expected expenses. Finding the right answer—the exact amount of savings required—can involve hours of calculation, and even then there’s a fair amount of uncertainty.

At my financial planning firm, we help clients with this calculation. Our starting point: We believe the foundation of most retirement plans should be Social Security. Many Americans choose to take Social Security earlier than their full retirement age (FRA).

I ADVISED LAST OCTOBER that loading up on holiday gifts ahead of the main shopping season probably made sense, given problems with the supply chain. Foreign manufacturers were struggling to produce enough goods, plus many items were stuck in ships anchored off the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. Parents across the country, flush with cash, were frantic about getting their kids the latest hot toys.
What a difference a year makes.

A FAVORITE QUOTE in the world of personal finance comes from Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises.
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Money troubles are a common theme throughout literature. Charles Dickens probably summed it up best. In David Copperfield, a fellow named Micawber laments: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds,

WHAT DO ALL BEAR markets have in common? By definition, stock prices must fall at least 20%. But often, that’s pretty much where the similarity ends.
For instance, ponder the differences between 2020’s one-month, 34% plunge in the S&P 500 and this year’s grinding nine-month descent, which saw the S&P 500 yesterday close 25% below its early January high.
The 2020 slump had folks fretting about the economic shutdown and possible deflation, while this year’s big worry is surging inflation amid a 53-year low in unemployment.

WANNA BET TOM BRADY has the real golden arm? I’ll take the other side of that wager. At the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City in 2009, Patricia Demauro’s golden arm rolled the dice 154 times over four hours and 18 minutes without losing.
Yup, football is back and sports gambling is on a roll. Several states have legalized it, and many others are proceeding in that direction.
My 35-year-old son Ryan, a math jock and sports fanatic,

IN THE COEN BROTHERS’ excellent movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, James Franco’s character is set for a good old-fashioned Wild West hanging. Franco appears to accept his fate, but there’s a poor slob next to him with a noose around his neck crying inconsolably. Franco quizzically turns to him and says, “First time?”
I cracked up when I watched that scene. It has since become a famous meme. I feel like uttering the same phrase when younger friends,

AS A RELATIVE newcomer to the wonderful world of personal finance and investing, I’m quickly learning that there’s more to money than numbers. I’m discovering from my own experiences, as well as that of others, that psychology plays a huge role in how we handle our finances.
We’re human beings, not machines. We aren’t completely logical. Yes, logic helps the process, but logic isn’t how we regularly process and digest information. Instead, we’re driven primarily by our emotions.

MY WIFE RECENTLY ASKED me if there was anything I wanted for my 65th birthday. She was racking her brain for a special gift, but was coming up empty.
I thought for a while, but couldn’t think of anything I really wanted. We have all the stuff we need. We’re blessed with a wonderful family, we live in a great beach town and we have enough assets for a comfortable retirement. We’ve spent 2022 working on our health and fitness,

MY FAVORITE BOOK of all time is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The title may be the only thing that author Stephen Covey has ever written that I don’t like. This book and all of Covey’s work are exploding with life, integrity and meaning. I believe he does an incredible job conceptualizing the most important questions of a well-lived life. If you can’t tell, I’m a bit of a disciple.

WHERE WOULD WE BE without the internet, social media, and our smartphones and smartwatches? Can you remember a time when you couldn’t look up the answer to a trivia question at a cocktail party? I love answering the phone on my watch. It takes me back to Dick Tracy.
There I was, going along happily in my online universe—until I got an email from McAfee’s identity theft protection service alerting me that my phone number had been found on the dark web.

IN THE NAVY, THEY USED to say, “You don’t get what you expect, you get what you inspect.” Inspections played a major role in how the Navy determined the competency and capability of a warship. For nuclear-powered submarines, the most important inspection was the Operational Reactor Safeguard Exam, or ORSE, which rhymes with horse.
A team of experts thoroughly inspected all aspects of a submarine’s nuclear power plant. This covered everything from material readiness (“verdigris on valve stem”),

ONCE YOU GET BEYOND index funds, I’m out of my league, so I ask this as a naive investor. Can someone please explain the stock market to me? Okay, I guess that’s a trick question—because I don’t think anyone can explain the financial markets to anyone.

I’ve heard that markets are forward-looking. If that’s true, how come stocks react wildly to information that has been publicly anticipated for days, even weeks? Why the big surprise?

DURING MARKET CRISES, I’ve sometimes made bad investment decisions—and sometimes I’ve successfully done nothing.
In 2008, I was living and working in Taiwan, meaning I heard what happened to U.S. stocks after the market was closed. When it’s 4 p.m. in New York, it’s 4 a.m. in Taiwan. I was also very busy at work.
This made it easier to do nothing about the 2008 stock market meltdown. I did nothing so well that by 2011,

SERIES I SAVINGS bonds might be the best-performing investment in folks’ portfolios this year. With steep losses in both the stock and bond markets, I bond’s 9.62% current yield looks like a home run. But the playing field could be shifting.
How so? Yields on the federal government’s other inflation-linked bond—Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS)—are up sharply in 2022. Result: TIPS aren’t such a bad buy today and perhaps better than Series I savings bonds.

INFLATION THIS YEAR has been running at more than four times the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%, forcing the central bank to raise interest rates multiple times. As a result, both the stock market and the bond market have been struggling. This has investors searching for alternatives.

At the top of the list for many people is gold, which gained a reputation as a bulwark against inflation in the 1970s. During that decade, when inflation was running hot,