It’s been almost 58 years since my parents decided to immigrate to the U.S. for a better future for me. That’s the reason they gave as to why they uprooted our  lives in Athens, Greece.  I did not like their decision and for years afterward I let them  know that I preferred my life in Greece.  My parents knew what I didn’t know which was that America was a land of opportunity and I could educate myself and eventually have a better standard of living than in Greece.

“Does any part of your busy schedule stem from a feeling that you need to be busy?”
That sentence is part of a question posed by Edmund Marsh to Dr. Lefty. It ties in with an article I began to formulate a while back.  
Should I Start a New Business?
The obvious answer is a resounding NO. Still, there’s a little gremlin inside me who        sometimes shows his ugly little gremlin head; you should buy that building,

If stocks don’t win, everybody likely loses.
Stocks are a gauge of the global economy’s health. Are share prices in a multi-year slump? The world’s economy must be in the dumpster—and that’s bad news for all investors.
Conventional wisdom says we can avoid stock-market mayhem by hiding out in bonds and cash investments, and that’s usually true. But if economic growth stalls out or even reverses for multiple years, it won’t just be stocks that suffer.

My dad’s brother passed away two years ago. I liked him, but I didn’t really know him well; the last time I’d seen him was at my mum’s funeral, about a year before his own. I’d kept my distance from that side of the family; ours was really just a wedding-and-funeral relationship. My uncle was a character. A dodgy character.
Here’s one example of his pedigree. Unbelievable as it sounds, back in the 60s and early 70s,

Today marks the one-year anniversary of my retirement after a 35-year career as a university professor. Since I wrote it about it several times leading up to that day, and another one after six months, I thought I’d add some thoughts about the first year “out” has gone for me.
Overall, it’s been great. Maybe my biggest surprise has been how little I miss my job. My identity was so intertwined with my academic career for so long that I worried I’d have one of those loss-of-identity depression spirals that you read about.

Would you “waste money” on something of questionable value? Something that receives only a passing glance or less, that is fleetingly or not at all appreciated, that is mostly discarded within days and is often a mere obstacle to the prize within? I bet you would and have, possibly multiple times a year.
I try to resist, but it is fruitless, we are cornered. There are other ways to approach the situation, but most of us are trapped by convention.

More than forty years after we first met, Mrs. Dolezal sent me a letter shortly before she passed away.
By then I had long since finished school, built a business with my twin brother, retired, and settled into a comfortable life. The years between us had quietly slipped away.
As I read her letter, one passage stopped me in my tracks.
“You are like a son for me. I shall never forget the kindness and strength you showed me after the devastating shock of my husband’s death… You were a young man at the time but you took on a heroic task… I shall never forget what you did for me and my children.”

For the past seven years, I worked in contemporary art. Four months ago, I left galleries for a financial institution. I expected to discover a world governed by fundamentals rather than stories. Instead, I found different stories being told with greater precision.
Many people classify art as “speculation” while assuming publicly traded securities are “investments.” But numerous financial assets—meme stocks, cryptocurrencies, SPACs, and even highly sought-after private companies like SpaceX—derive a substantial portion of their value from narrative,

Yesterday I spent the day reading “Money and Me” in basically one sitting. I kept thinking I should do something else beside read,  I found myself saying  – “just a few more chapters” –  and before I knew it I had finished the book. That is definitely not to brag, but to shine a light once more on what a special, insightful person Jonathan was. I felt like he was talking to me in ways I wish someone had when I was starting out and navigating adulthood,

Nice! On top of other recent gains, the only individual stock I owned was up two days in a row and had reached the sell price I had in mind for months. Shortly before the market closed on Friday, I logged in to E*TRADE and stepped off the rollercoaster ride once and for all.
The sale came almost 17 years to the day that I first purchased that company stock via an employee stock purchase program (ESPP).

I thought I had overcome it when I retired and the numbers in the spreadsheet said it was practically a sure thing – financial security for life for my wife and me, and something meaningful left over for the children. It was a wonderfully liberating feeling when, freshly retired, we bought a home for our retirement near our families, a new car and joined the golf club, for the first time without a second thought.
So why have I spent the last three days waiting to change the battery in my mouse when it’s clearly ready to give up the ghost?

In a previous post I recounted how luck and stupidity kickstarted my retirement savings journey, but I glossed over one important detail: the cost.
In the mid-eighties, high-fee front-loading was standard practice, and these products were typically sold by people whose entire compensation depended on shifting them. The pressure to sell was enormous, and the salespeople were good at their jobs.
My twenty-year-old self walked straight into one of them. He was slick, he was persuasive,

These are not the four pillars you’ll find in most personal finance books. Nobody’s selling a course called “How Stupidity Made Me Rich”. But they’re the answer to how I retired at 58 with a pension portfolio that’s pretty decent. I think that honesty is worth more than another article about discipline and vision.
Let me start with the luck, because it’s important to be clear about what I mean. I don’t mean timing the market or backing the right stock.

I read daily about seniors who can’t pay their bills in retirement, who say it’s unfair for them to pay property taxes for schools, who say they deserve higher SS COLAs etc.
Some people, through no fault of their own, because of uncontrollable misfortune, did not have the ability to save and build retirement income at whatever level they were throughout life. But those folks are far from the majority. 
So what happened that after forty years of working so many seniors seem poorly positioned to live in retirement?

THE INVESTMENT WORLD is full of storytellers. And while these folks might be entertaining, they generally aren’t very helpful. There’s one category of stories, however, that I do think is useful: They’re what I might call investment fables. They’re apocryphal stories that likely aren’t real. But they’re helpful nonetheless because each carries a useful lesson. Here are some of the more popular ones.
Consumer choice. In 1999, Richard Mille and a partner launched a company to make wristwatches.