AS A BANKER, I GOT a ringside seat from which to watch the many ways that people are separated from their hard-earned money. Some are illegal. Some are legal, but unethical. And many, while legal and ethical, would be unnecessary with a little more knowledge about managing money.
For me, the most disturbing experiences were when scammers extracted money from the naïve and innocent. I’ve seen the pain of customers who found out that their elderly mother had given her life savings to a manipulative TV preacher.

DURING MY SCHOOL days growing up in India, my exposure to English literature was confined to textbooks that reprinted essays and short stories, or portions thereof. One of them was a humorous piece by Stephen Leacock from his book Winnowed Wisdom.
The excerpt was titled “Old Proverbs Made New” and it seemed funny even to a middle-schooler with a limited grasp of the English language. It argued, with examples, that proverbs get outdated and need to be rewritten.

MY FIRST JOB AFTER college was at a global engineering firm. A roommate also worked there. It was a tedious office job, but my bosses thought I had potential and encouraged me to study engineering, which I didn’t.
Instead, I quit and went to graduate school to study linguistics, a field where I observed the most professors having the most fun. My last paycheck at the engineering firm included an extra sum. It was a refund for a retirement account that had failed to vest because I hadn’t stayed long enough.

WHEN WE MOVED to California from India in spring 2014, it was a culture shock—and not just because of the much higher standard of living. Financial life in the U.S. is very different. Here are just some of the surprises that my husband and I have encountered over the past seven years:
Health care. I remember walking into my first U.S. doctor’s appointment. I froze—unaware that I had to pay a $50 copay for each visit,

MY FATHER WAS A CAR salesman who, for many years, worked totally on commission, with no paid vacation. In 1953, when I was 10 years old, we went to Cape Cod for a week. A friend gave him a tip on a great place to stay. In his enthusiasm, my father booked for a week and paid in advance.
The place turned out to be worse than a Second World War army barracks. My mother refused to stay.

I KEPT THE LANDLINE number that my mother had when she was alive. I thought there might be friends I wasn’t aware of who would try to phone her. Indeed, I received calls from people like Helen who lives in Arizona, Cheryl in Colorado and Jan from Michigan. Eventually, however, the phone went silent, except for those annoying sales calls.
But I still kept the phone number. I just couldn’t give it up. It was costing me an extra $50 a month,

FOR MORE THAN a year, veteran investment manager Jeremy Grantham has been arguing that the U.S. stock market is in a bubble. And not just an ordinary bubble, but “an epic bubble… one of the great bubbles of financial history, right along with the South Sea bubble, 1929, and 2000.”
And yet, despite Grantham’s concerns, the market has only continued to march higher. In a recent interview, Grantham reiterated his concerns in even stronger terms.

THERE ARE MANY WAYS to fritter away our wealth. Pay high investment costs. Day trade stocks. Buy timeshares. Marry a spender. Purchase variable annuities. Retire too early. Buy leveraged exchange-traded funds. Mimic the spending of our wealthy friends. The list goes on and on.
But anybody can ruin themselves slowly—and plenty of people do. What’s really attention grabbing is when it happens quickly. Want to blow up your financial life? Here are nine ways to ruin yourself in a hurry:
1.

HISTORY IS FULL of fringe investments that make headlines after rapid—and often inexplicable and indefensible—price increases. Bitcoin is one of the latest examples, leaving even casual observers asking, “What is it and should I buy some?”
First traded in 2009, bitcoin is the best-known cryptocurrency. Thousands of others have been introduced, but many have since died. That’s one problem with trying to pick the right digital currency to purchase: There are low barriers to entry.

EARLY IN MY CAREER, one of my mentors at work used to talk about “excess paychecks.” He was a single, senior engineer who lived frugally. Back then, the concept seemed ridiculous to me. But I’ve come to realize he was right: Most of us don’t need every dollar we’re paid for living expenses, so we should think carefully about where to stash the excess.
That notion came to mind recently when taking to a friend.

AFTER 14 YEARS ON active duty with the U.S. Army, I recently walked away from being a fulltime soldier. At age 39, it’s the only professional life I’ve known. I plan to complete my 20 years of service in the U.S. Army Reserve, which will earn me a reduced pension.
It would be hard to argue this was a smart financial decision. While defined benefit plans have mostly been replaced by defined contribution plans such as 401(k),

RAMPANT SPECULATION in parts of the market has been obvious for months. Less obvious is whether investors collectively will pay a substantial price for it. Can a reflation trade end up piercing a market bubble?
Stocks posted solid gains in February—with the S&P 500 touching a record high on Feb. 12—but the final week felt a bit precarious, even if the benchmark ended the month down just 3.5% from that high. (Insert your favorite adjective to describe the correction so far: normal,

ECONOMIST JOHN Maynard Keynes once observed that, “It is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” This is probably true in many realms. It’s certainly true in the investment world.
As the last 12 months have demonstrated, extreme and unexpected events can and do happen. But analysts whose job it is to make economic forecasts rarely go too far out on a limb. Sure, there are some forecasters who will take a chance with a view that’s far outside the consensus.

SHOULD LEAVING money to our children be a formal part of our financial strategy—or should we focus on our own wants and needs, and let the chips fall where they may?
My wife and I have four children ages 45 to 50. They’re all married and, between them, have 13 children ages five to 17. They’re also all college graduates, with almost the entire cost paid by my wife and me. Three have master’s degrees.

THIS IS AN ARTICLE about not writing an article. It started with a Vox piece about the changes in society wrought by the 2007 introduction of the iPhone. One graph that caught my eye showed chewing gum sales steadily declining from 2007 to 2017, which was when the Vox article was published.
No economist would ever tie an economic trend to any one factor, but the article proffered an interesting hypothesis. It suggested that,