WHEN I WAS GROWING up, my mother thought the best way to relieve my boredom during summer vacations was to get a job. She was a valued employee at a local business and she knew the firm was hiring.
I asked if part of the job was to calculate change for customers when they made a purchase. That terrified me. My mother said she wasn’t sure, but that I’d learn to do it if it was required.

EVEN THOUGH I’M NOT a doctor, I’ve been around medicine all my life. My father was a general practitioner and I spent my career in hospital administration. I had administrative oversight over three emergency departments of varying sizes. Based on my experience, here are 10 recommendations that may improve your experience should you need to visit an emergency room:
1. If you use the emergency room (ER) for a non-acute medical condition, bring a book.

I’VE WRITTEN BEFORE about stumbling on an unexpected way to save on auto insurance. My education continues: I’ve also learned of a way to save on Medigap coverage.
When I became eligible five years ago for Medicare, I bought Medigap Plan G supplemental coverage from Mutual of Omaha (MOO). Last summer, as my wife was about to become eligible for Medicare, we took another look at Medigap coverage. I was generally happy with MOO’s claims procedures and customer service,

THE MOST GALLING moment came when the notice of a sheriff’s sale was nailed to a tree in our front yard. The message to passersby was all too clear: “Deadbeats live here.”
Except they didn’t. Our house was in foreclosure—but the debts weren’t ours. They belonged to the people we had bought the house from. How did we escape what turned out to be a two-year ordeal? Three words: owner’s title insurance. How did we get caught up in such a mess?

IT SEEMS ALL MY LIFE I’ve been obsessed with one thing: not being average. It would be nice to be the best or the highest rated. But I have been happy simply to avoid average.

I grew up in a very average family. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Throughout school, I was very average. But in my first job as a mail boy, I went to work wearing a dress shirt and tie.

LONG-TERM-CARE insurance and disability insurance can both be part of a comprehensive financial plan. But is it a good idea to have both coverages at the same time, or could one substitute for the other? After all, both policies are designed to help those who are, in some way, infirm.
To answer this question, let’s start with another one: What’s the purpose of insurance? The best use of any type of insurance is to guard against financial disaster.

MORE WEALTH HAS been lost in this year’s stock and bond market decline than in any previous downturn, according to research firm Bespoke Investments. And, no, that doesn’t include the $2 trillion of crypto value that’s gone up in smoke.
A counterpoint to this jarring reality: Folks today are wealthier than during previous bear markets. Goldman Sachs reports that U.S. household net worth as a percentage of disposable personal income remains sharply above pre-pandemic levels.

SINCE THE START OF the year, the stock market has dropped almost 24%. That’s significant, but it pales next to the losses suffered by cryptocurrency investors, with the shellacking continuing into this weekend.
Dogecoin is down more than 90%, and smaller currencies like terra have lost essentially all their value. Even bitcoin and ethereum, which are much more established, have suffered big losses. Ethereum is down around 75% year-to-date, and bitcoin has fallen some 60%.

I RECENTLY MADE a good decision, all thanks to director John Frankenheimer’s penultimate film, Ronin. In it, Robert De Niro plays a mercenary who, early in the movie, refuses to enter the roadway under Paris’s Pont Alexandre III because he’s wary of getting caught in an ambush. It’s a decision that saves his life and that of his colleagues. When he’s later asked about the decision, he replies, “Whenever there is any doubt,

ON MONDAY, MAY 2, I logged onto my Chase bank account—and discovered my balance was $992.43, many thousands of dollars less than I expected. My first thought: I’m going to get hit with a low-balance fee.
That, alas, should have been the least of my worries.
I clicked through to see the account details, and discovered that check No. 1126 had been made out to Milton Cherry for $7,000. But none of the writing on the check was mine,

WHAT SEEMS TRUE about money often turns out to be false. That brings me to the financial paradoxes I’ve come across during my investing journey. Here are my top 12:

The more we try to trade our way to profits, the less likely we are to profit.
The more boring an investment—think index funds—the more exciting the long-run performance will probably be.
The more exciting an investment—name your latest Wall Street concoction, SPAC or anything crypto—the less exciting the long-term results typically are.

HALF OF THE COLLEGE students I taught last semester just graduated. A few are going on to graduate school, but most are starting accounting, finance or other business careers. For my classes with a heavy concentration of seniors, I reserve the last five minutes of the final class to give them a few career tips. In keeping with my overall teaching approach, I keep the message simple: Do what you enjoy.
Now, this isn’t the usual “follow your passion” pitch you hear in so many commencement addresses.

WHEN WE AIM FOR financial independence, what we’re usually trying to do is to convert our current work time into future free time. We exchange our time and labor for money today. The wealth we accumulate then buys us a future that’s free from labor.
Given this exchange of labor for future freedom, what’s the most efficient way to speed our progress? According to a research paper, “Capitalists in the 21st Century,” the best strategy is to own a business.

I WAS PLEASANTLY surprised recently when a lump-sum dividend payment showed up in my brokerage account. It was from a preferred stock I bought a few years ago to boost my investment income. The windfall reminded me of the three criteria I’d used to screen preferred shares:

Taxation. Unlike bond payments, which are taxed as ordinary income, the income payments from most—but not all—preferred stocks enjoy the favorable tax treatment given to qualified dividends.

WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, late in the evening and usually after a few drinks, someone would often play Edith Piaf’s Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, her stirring and defiant 1960 song about regretting nothing.
It’s a sentiment worth recalling as we look back on our financial life. Here are four things we shouldn’t regret:
Saving too much. Is that really something to regret? It’s undoubtedly better than the alternative: saving too little.