I’D ALWAYS THOUGHT that saints were long-ago martyrs, those people shown in paintings in the Louvre or the Prado.
That’s why I was surprised to find a plaque honoring a 20th century saint at the church I attend in Newcastle, Maine. The saint, Frances Perkins, had worshipped at that very church, St. Andrew’s Episcopal, until her death in 1965.
Who was Frances Perkins? My friends often draw a blank at the name, although she helped shape our lives.

YIELDS ON SAFE investments—namely Treasurys, certificates of deposit, savings accounts and money market funds—are in the basement. Yes, Series I savings bonds currently offer an annualized 7.12%. But that rate is only guaranteed for six months, plus regular purchases are limited to $10,000 a year.

“Where can I go for yield?” goes the cry heard throughout the land. Nowhere, of course. As put by money manager Raymond DeVoe Jr., “More money has been lost reaching for yield than at the point of a gun.”

Still,

IF YOU WANT PEOPLE to do something, make it easy. That’s the big idea behind a nudge, which helps people do the right thing for themselves. It turns out that nudge has an evil twin, called sludge. Sludge makes the right thing harder to do. If you look around, sludge is everywhere.
“If you cannot get financial aid without filling out a twenty-page form, then you have been subjected to sludge,” behavioral economists Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein write in the new “final” edition of their bestselling book Nudge.

WHAT SEEMS OBVIOUS isn’t always true. Here are seven examples from the financial world:

Just because an investment has performed well doesn’t mean that’s a good guide to the future. This is usually mentioned with regard to stocks. But today, my bigger concern is folks who are extrapolating past bond fund returns. Their strong past performance was driven by a huge drop in interest rates over the past four decades—something that can’t be repeated starting from 2021’s tiny yields.

DURING THE PANDEMIC, I’ve taken to reading the obituaries. I especially enjoy the stories about people who lived a long time. What I’ve found is that many of them volunteered in some fashion or continued to work until late in life. Most didn’t do it because of the money. They did it because it gave them a sense of purpose.
I’ve come to believe that doing work that we love and have a passion for—that’s meaningful to us—serves as our own personal “fountain of youth.”
Ask yourself: Why do rich people,

GOT SOMETHING THAT needs repairing? Faced with the increasing specialization of people’s knowledge, ever-growing technical complexity and our perennial lack of time, it’s often tempting to just call in an expert or even buy a replacement.
But repairs can be costly, which is why we’re told to get multiple bids. One of the “bid” options I always check out: fixing it myself with the guidance of that repository of collective step-by-step knowhow, YouTube. Perhaps not since the Great Library of Alexandria has so much expertise been collected in one spot—along,

I RECENTLY LEFT MY job without having another lined up. Upon quitting, I noticed an immediate mindset shift: I went from thinking about how to grow my money to, instead, thinking about how to preserve it.
As a trained financial planner, I know that many workers will face a similar mental transition as they begin to wind down their careers. But I was surprised at how quickly it happened to me. After all, I’m only age 39,

NOTHING IN INVESTING better exemplifies what the late Donald Rumsfeld called a known unknown than the concept of intrinsic value. The relationship between a company’s current share price and its actual value over its lifetime has always been tenuous—but perhaps never more so.
Before the rise of modern technology, courtesy of Silicon Valley, intrinsic value was difficult to adjudge in a reliable way. Now, ascertaining intrinsic value has become nearly impossible—because “software is eating the world.”

EARLY LAST YEAR, just as the pandemic was starting, we were looking to buy a new home in an area where houses sold quickly—but we feared selling our existing home would be far slower. In addition, home prices in the new area were substantially higher.
We had no first mortgage on our existing house and no desire to take one out for the new home. Still, we wanted to strike quickly if we found the right place to buy,

IN MY LATE 20s, I found that I was 15 pounds heavier than when I was in high school. My cholesterol was over 200 and rising. I was huffing and puffing while mowing the lawn.
I didn’t like where this was going, plus I didn’t want to buy a new set of business suits. I decided that investing in my health was as important as investing for my wealth. If my health was shot by the time I retired,

THE 2017 TAX CUTS and Jobs Act doubled the standard deduction. It’s estimated that 90% of households took the standard deduction in 2018, rather than itemizing, up from 69% in 2017.
The tax-code overhaul essentially means it costs more to donate to your favorite qualifying charities—unless you’re among the 10% whose itemized deductions exceed their standard deduction. To be sure, we shouldn’t give to charity solely for the potential tax benefit. Even if you itemize and hence you can deduct your gift,

MY WIFE AND I CONTINUE to modify our retirement plan in response to changes in our lives. Most of the changes have to do with the timing of both our retirements. But there’s also the puzzling question of which investment accounts we should draw on for income. More on that later.
First, a bit of background: I started receiving my pension at the end of 2017, after I stopped working fulltime. We expected to start drawing on our retirement savings in 2018.