AS I PULLED UP IN my used Subaru wagon to the high school drop-off line with two grumpy teenagers on the first day of school, I noticed something was different.
Because of the pandemic, our sleepy, semi-rural town in upstate New York had seen an influx of Manhattanites and Brooklyners over the past year. My Subaru was now bracketed by a shiny Tesla sedan and a polished Mercedes SUV. The usual collection of less flashy cars and trucks seemed to be missing.

HOME AFFORDABILITY is finally taking a hit now that mortgage rates have ticked higher. Last May, I wrote that property prices were through the roof but homes were still affordable. The reason: Historically low borrowing rates, coupled with record high median family income, had offset robust home prices.
The National Association of Realtors’ latest figures show housing affordability rivals that of last May. But the figures don’t yet reflect higher interest rates. Freddie Mac posts the latest set of mortgage rates each Thursday.

ROUGHLY A QUARTER of my investment portfolio sits in three Roth retirement accounts. Ever since I first funded a Roth a dozen years ago, I’ve thought of this as money I’d avoid spending for as long as possible, so I milk maximum gain from the tax-free growth. But lately, it’s dawned on me that it’s highly unlikely I’ll ever dip into these accounts—and that realization has triggered a slew of investment decisions.
My three Roth accounts are all at Vanguard Group.

NOT ALL DEBT IS created equal—and that’s especially true when it comes to student loans.
For the vast majority of debt, we can calculate the ongoing monthly payment if we know the interest rate, number of payment periods, current balance and if the payment is due at the beginning or end of the period. But for federal student loans, we may need to know one more variable: the borrower’s discretionary income.
With federal student loans,

I WAS SURPRISED to realize the other day that, despite the varied topics HumbleDollar has addressed, I couldn’t recall a single mention of Sun-Tzu, the 6th century B.C. military commander who purportedly wrote The Art of War. The book is a favorite read of business schools. Even a cursory search on Amazon shows how often Sun-Tzu and The Art of War are invoked regarding business, finance and investing.

THE S&P 500 WAS UP 0.8% last week. It was a wild ride, with the Volatility Index climbing to almost 40—the highest level in 15 months—as investors grappled with the threat of rising interest rates. The Federal Reserve is steadfast in its plans to aggressively raise short-term interest rates. Bank of America Global Research was the buzz of Wall Street on Friday morning, with its economic team saying it now expects the Fed to hike rates by a quarter-point at all seven remaining meetings this year.

OVER THE PAST TWO years, we’ve seen everything from tornadoes to devastating fires to hurricanes, often at unusual times and in unexpected places. That got my husband and me thinking about how to prepare for what may come our way—and how we could document what we might lose.
We decided to make a home movie. Our new phones are perfect for taking videos. What better proof of what we have? You’ve probably seen the suggestion that you do this,

DOES IT MAKE SENSE to heed the advice of experts? This doesn’t seem like a hard question. I certainly listen to my doctor and to many others with specialized expertise. As a society, we all rely on experts—from civil engineers to airline pilots to firefighters—for our health and safety.
At the same time, however, human judgment seems to be riddled with flaws. Consider these examples:

After reading his senior thesis, Michael Lewis’s advisor at Princeton University gave him this advice: Whatever you do,

MANY OF THE WORLD’S religions view humility as an admirable trait to which we should all aspire. It’s frequently associated with poverty, as practiced by devout orders like Buddhist monks and the Sisters of Mercy. But when it comes to investing, humility can—ironically—make you significantly wealthier.

As documented by the behavioral finance research, overconfidence can lead to worse investment returns when investors presume, without justification, that they’re skilled at, say, picking market-beating stocks. The research on indexing versus active stock fund management overwhelmingly shows that,

TO BE AWARDED a triple-A credit rating was once a priority for some of the biggest and best-known U.S. companies. Only the financially strongest companies, organizations and governments can earn a triple-A rating.
The triple-A rating typically bestows the lowest borrowing rates and suggests the highest ability to repay bondholders. But the triple-A club has been shrinking over the past four decades. Apple recently became only the third current corporate member of this exclusive club.

THERE’S AN EXPERIENCE I keep thinking about. I was visiting Italy pre-pandemic, enjoying a great dinner with a lovely family. I was introduced to two nonnas—grandmothers in Italian—who were in their 80s. Although fine physically, they were both suffering from dementia.
That got me thinking about how that could have happened. I’ve read plenty of research on how retiring to a simple lifestyle, and not being challenged mentally, accelerates cognitive decline. I wondered whether that’s what happened to the two nonnas.

MY HUSBAND AND I purchased a home near Phoenix, Arizona, in 2019. It was the second house we’d bought in less than a year, so we were only able to come up with a 10% down payment. That’s meant paying $70 a month for the past 30 months to cover the cost of private mortgage insurance (PMI).
With property values in the Phoenix area up 30% since 2020, I knew I should contact our mortgage company to see if we could get the PMI payment removed.

I REALIZE MOST FOLKS don’t find personal finance as enthralling as I do, so I apologize in advance—this article’s topic is the least thrilling of all. It’s time to talk about life insurance.
I’ve been trying to come up with a good analogy for life insurance. The best I can think of: Life insurance is like the airbags in your car. No one ever gets excited about airbags. No one ever shows off the airbags in their new car.

IN THE COMPUTER gaming world—and I’ll openly admit to occupying that realm often—one measure of a game’s value is its replayability. If you shell out $60 and play a game through to the end, how likely are you to do it again? Each time you replay, you’re getting more value from your initial outlay, making it a better decision.
I sometimes use that economic logic to try to persuade my wife it’s better for me to “shoot and loot”

I ONCE JOINED a book club led by an amazingly smart guy. We were reading a challenging book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the philosopher, investor and probabilities expert. Our discussion leader was a Chartered Financial Analyst who had solved one of the most enduring riddles at Vanguard Group, where I worked at the time.
For many years—decades, really—Vanguard hadn’t offered an international bond fund. Our founder, Jack Bogle, wasn’t a fan of international investing in general.