THE INSURANCE MARKET for long-term-care coverage has had a checkered history—and yet there’s an increasing need for LTC insurance among aging baby boomers. My advice: Forget the original standalone insurance products and instead focus on the new hybrid policies.
What went wrong with the original standalone products? They proved to be underpriced. With policyholders living longer, insurers found themselves paying out more than anticipated. Policyholders also didn’t drop their policies as often as insurers expected—and the low lapse rate meant insurance companies had less chance to book profits while incurring no LTC expenses.

IT’S GRADUATION season. Entering the workforce? Here are five steps to help you jumpstart your financial life:
1. Manage your debt. If you’re like many graduates, you have student loans. Depending on how much you owe, you may be wondering how best to allocate your new paycheck. Should you direct every available dollar toward your loans or does it also make sense to begin saving? While everyone’s situation is unique, I have two suggestions.

AS I GROW OLDER, I find I become ever more deliberate in how I spend my time and money. How can I get maximum happiness from the dollars I have? How can I get the most from the years that remain? As I wrestle with these questions, six notions have come into much sharper focus:
1. Fewer hassles mean greater happiness. When I was in my 20s, I owned a series of clunkers that turned every trip into a nail-biter.

IF YOU’RE IN a financial hole, is it prudent to keep digging?
There are 60 million Americans covered by Medicare, including 20 million who have opted for Medicare Advantage. These beneficiaries paid for their coverage through payroll taxes during their working years, and they currently pay with premiums and out-of-pocket cost sharing, as well as through taxes on Social Security benefits.
Still, this covers only a portion of total costs. In 2013, 38% of Medicare’s costs came from payroll taxes and 13% from Medicare premiums,

MY MOTHER IS 95 years old and in fairly good shape for her age. Yes, she repeats herself quite often. When she does, I tend to let it go in one ear and out the other.
When she talks about my father, however, I listen very closely. One day, as I was backing the car out of the garage, she looked at all the cabinets my father built and said for the umpteenth time,

HOLDING DOWN LIVING expenses is one part of the equation in achieving financial independence. But the other part is diligently and consistently saving and investing money.
On that score, my husband Jim and I enjoyed four “lucky breaks” that accelerated our push for financial independence. Together, they helped catapult us into early retirement in just 15 years.
1. The Great Recession may have caused much short-term financial harm, but it also offered a great long-term opportunity.

I WAS 51 YEARS OLD when I ate prime rib for the first time. As it turned out, it was a life-changing moment. It might be difficult to believe eating a choice cut of beef could lead to an altered understanding of financial priorities, but it did.
I grew up in a fairly typical 1970s middle class family. Hamburger Helper, tuna casserole and peanut butter sandwiches made up the bulk of my diet. Our family rarely ate out and,

MY BIGGEST INITIAL mistake as a financial planner: underestimating the power of emotions. My office is located near top universities such as Harvard, MIT and Boston University. I assumed my well-educated clients, many with strong quantitative backgrounds, were simply looking to me for additional analytical insights.
Instead, my clients proved to be as human as everybody else. One top academic statistician, who claimed to be frugal and cautious, shared with me an annuity policy he purchased from a close friend at his church.

YOU’VE NO DOUBT heard this before: Asset allocation is the single most important investment decision. If you have the right mix of stocks, bonds, cash and maybe real estate, you sharply increase your chances of success. 
But how do you pick the right mix? There are rules of thumb based on age, there’s a statistical approach called Modern Portfolio Theory, there are risk tolerance questionnaires and there are cash flow-based approaches. Each delivers a different answer—because each emphasizes different factors.

I’M A FAN OF EMERGING stock markets—for two key reasons. But I also have qualms—for two key reasons.
Readers frequently write to me about emerging markets, and those messages usually coincide with periods of stomach-churning volatility, which is what we’ve witnessed recently: MSCI’s emerging markets index tumbled 15% in 2018 and was up just 4% in 2019’s first five months—after being up as much as 14% earlier this year. But as I tell my nervous correspondents,

I’VE BEEN READING about how people aren’t saving enough money, and how almost half of all Americans carry a balance on their credit cards. Looking to be more financially prudent? Here are 10 pointers on how to build wealth and gain financial security over your lifetime:
1. Save—for a reason. Saving money is the key to building a substantial portfolio. One secret to being a good saver: Have something worthwhile to save for. It might be homeownership or early financial independence.

IN EARLY MAY, I WROTE about 16 ways that people waste money on everything from tattoos to shoes to children’s toys. That blog was subsequently posted on MarketWatch, where it collected almost 800 comments, most positive, but many not so much.
I was called out of touch, accused of having an entitlement mentality, talking down to people, privileged and more. I had clearly touched a nerve. Some commenters went into great detail about how difficult their lives were and how there was no money to waste.

JIM AND I GOT married 16 years ago in our modest home. We spent just $500 and only invited immediate family members. Back then, we didn’t have any clue where life would take us. Neither of us planned to retire early, let alone retire abroad.
Still, how we got married was a sign of how we wanted to live—in a financially prudent manner. We set out to keep our living costs under control, and that set us on a path to financial independence,

DAD GAVE ME $1,000 in the mid-1980s on condition I start an IRA and make my own annual contributions, which I did at least some of the time. He recommended doing business with Vanguard Group, which was headquartered near my hometown of Wayne, Pennsylvania.
I can remember reading about the STAR fund, Windsor II, Wellington, Wellesley, the gold and precious metals fund, and the very highly regarded health care and energy funds.

LOOKING TO PAY for your child’s college? With costs increasing at an alarming rate, you may feel like you’re swimming upstream. Much like saving for retirement, you need to begin socking away money for college as early as possible. Each year that passes is one less year that your savings have the opportunity to grow.
Start by getting a clear picture of college costs today. You can use the Department of Education’s College Scorecard to look up the annual cost of specific colleges.