I DEVOTE A GOOD amount of time to learning, not because I worry about cognitive decline—though that’s a worthy reason—but because I enjoy sampling a host of subjects, everything from meditation to music theories.
Before online courses became popular, my self-directed learning involved watching lecture DVDs. I later discovered many free online offerings from reputed universities, including Stanford, Harvard, Yale, MIT and Princeton.
When the pandemic forced me to spend more time at home,

COULD I BE WRONG about indexing?
Every investor soon learns that being wrong is a frequent malady, particularly on the day-to-day decisions of when to buy. Those minor errors are, as we also learn, part of the “game” of investing and are best ignored. But what if there’s evidence that conflicts with your longer-term thinking and expectations? What if evidence conflicts with your central beliefs?
I suspect it could happen to me.
After 60 years of experience and study of investing,

SELLING COVERED calls can sound like a winning investment strategy, especially to yield-hungry investors frustrated by today’s low interest rates. Wouldn’t you know it? There are exchange-traded funds (ETFs) designed to mimic the strategy.
For background, covered calls are a yield-enhancement play that involve selling call options against stocks that you own. The call option gives you extra income, but—during the life of the option—your gains are capped at the call option’s strike price.

IF YOU FIND YOURSELF with a loved one in hospital who can’t make medical decisions, it can be overwhelming, intimidating and emotionally charged. Decisions are needed and each family member is conflicted: What would I want? What would the patient want? What do I want for the patient? The result can be sharp family disagreements.
Death, the prospect of death or even thinking about death is so loaded with emotion that it can hinder our willingness to prepare.

PREPARING FOR infirmity is one of the most important—and least popular—parts of financial planning. A neighbor’s recent stroke provides a stark example of this challenge. He’s in his mid-80s and has some underlying health problems.
Our neighbor lives in a second-story condominium, with external stairs as access. The stairs end at a narrow deck, with a right-hand turn into the home. An overhang blocks the screen door from opening fully.
When he had a stroke,

MY FIRST RESOLUTION for 2022 is to clean up my investment portfolio. While my garage and my closets are in good order, I shudder when I review my brokerage account.
Over the years, I’ve accumulated close to 20 mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. Overall, I’ve done well with these investments—most of which are based on stock market indexes—but it’s an unnecessary hodge-podge. By the end of the year, I plan to sell a majority of these positions and consolidate the proceeds in a target-date fund.

MINUTES FROM the latest Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, which were released last Wednesday, roiled financial markets. Stocks fell sharply, with both the Nasdaq Composite and Russell 2000 falling more than 3% that day. On the week, the Nasdaq was down 4.5%, the S&P 500 down 1.9% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average 0.3% lower. What did investors read in the minutes that gave them such pause?
For background, FOMC minutes are released three weeks after the meeting itself.

ARE LONG-SUFFERING value investors and those with a large allocation to foreign stocks finally about to get some relief? The new year has seen significant relative strength by both areas of the market. Meanwhile, after peaking in the first half of 2021, highflying small- and mid-cap growth companies continue to get hammered. Mega-cap tech shares have also lately succumbed to selling pressure.
What’s worked thus far in 2022 are the boring old large-cap blue chip names.

I WROTE PREVIOUSLY about my parents being victims of financial abuse by one of my brothers. Recently, I returned to Bangkok, which gave me a chance to discuss this situation at length with the entire family, including my other brothers and my uncle.

When the financial abuse of an elderly person is committed by a stranger, the rest of the family often has no chance to see warning signs. But 90% of abusers are family members or trusted individuals.

JUST HOURS INTO the new year, I received an email from a concerned investor. His worry: the state of the market—the S&P 500, in particular. With hundreds of constituent companies, the S&P index has the veneer of broad diversification. But scratch the surface, and it seems to carry more risk than investors might like. The issue: It’s top heavy.

As a group, the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 account for more than 30% of its overall value.

TOO MUCH FREE TIME, coupled with easy access to the internet, create a problem for this retiree. I obsessively check my IRA at least once—and often several times—each day.
I retired two years early with an above-average Social Security payment and a decent state pension, but not a whole lot in my IRA, which is my only retirement savings. Experts say I need much more, but a job loss in my late 50s, and the inability to find an equivalent position in my field and at the same pay level,

WHEN I WAS WORKING fulltime, my 401(k) and health savings account contributions were automatically pulled from my biweekly paycheck and dumped into the respective accounts. But when I left the nine-to-five world a year ago, the onus fell on me to invest the profits from my small business. I sent off money to some low-cost funds a few times during 2021, but it wasn’t as regular as it should have been.
My resolution: Make my taxable account investing more automated this year.

ONE OF THE GREAT pleasures of having grown children is seeing them do things better than you ever did.
My son, who’s in his mid-20s, is already well beyond me in terms of investments. When I was his age, I was still bouncing around in grad school, living off teaching stipends and dreaming of one day being a novelist. I had no concept of what a mutual fund was, how to trade stocks and bonds,

LIVING A HEALTHY lifestyle is one of the most important aspects of a happy retirement. It is, alas, also one of the most difficult goals for many of us to achieve. A 2005 Boston College Center for Retirement Research study concluded that health was the second most important factor in determining the happiness of retirees—and those with poor health “experience dramatically lower levels of well-being.”
I stopped working fulltime on March 31, 2017. My health,

I’VE BEEN REVIEWING my past writing on HumbleDollar, my own blog and social media. I notice I often throw out personal details, such as the second home we own, paying for our children’s college and our spending on travel. My intention isn’t to boast.

In fact, I don’t even think of myself as wealthy, though the statistics say my wife and I are above average. Perhaps that’s because what we have today was accumulated over 60 years,