WHAT DO BEN FRANKLIN, Charles Darwin and David Cassidy all have in common? All have advised us not to waste life’s precious time.
Almost everything about money translates into time. Money can buy us time—either more free time or more time spent on higher-value activities. Money can purchase a nicer house or car, a luxury vacation, greater financial support for our children, fun toys or experiences, reduced financial stress—and, eventually, a comfortable retirement. The financial independence-retire early,

I’VE BEEN ENGAGING IN the same end-of-the-year ritual for decades. Right after Christmas, I take a day or two—preferably away from home—to reflect, pray, meditate and write in my journal about the past year and the year that lies ahead.

It’s a time for me to think about what I’ve done, what I haven’t done and what I hope to do in the new year. In this review, I include my financial, spiritual, emotional and physical lives.

MY MOM TOOK ME to a local credit union in 1981, when I was 14 years old, to open my first savings account. I don’t remember how much money I initially deposited. But back then, I had two sources of income. Each summer, I sold a pig at our 4-H fair livestock auction. That typically provided me with $200—funds I budgeted for school clothes and supplies.
I also earned money by showing livestock at our county fair.

DEPRESSION IS BAD not just for your health, but also for your wealth. In 2001, Prof. Robert Leahy touched on the corrosive influence of a person’s mood on his approach to the financial markets. Although intuitively plausible, his observation has never received the attention I think it deserves.
The notion of cognitive bias is a cornerstone of the burgeoning field of behavioral finance. Set in motion by the pioneering research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1974,

I HAVE A RITUAL ON New Year’s Day—and it has nothing to do with making resolutions or watching college bowl games on TV.
Every Jan. 1, I pull up my handy financial planning spreadsheet on my laptop and input year-end numbers for my investment portfolio based on where the various funds closed out the year. I created the spreadsheet 20 years ago when I was in my early 40s, had just gone through a financially devastating divorce,

AT A PARTY GIVEN BY a billionaire on affluent Shelter Island, New York, author Kurt Vonnegut informs his friend, Joseph Heller, that their host had recently made more money in a single day than Heller had earned in total from his hugely popular novel, Catch-22.
To that, Heller replies, “But I have something he will never have.”
“And what is that?” asks Vonnegut.
“Enough,” says Heller. “Enough.”
The story may be apocryphal—I’ve read a similar version featuring J.D.

DENNIS DEVOURED the computer screen with an intensity he usually reserved for his trading platform. He’d just arrived in Manhattan from St. Louis for an investment banking position he couldn’t refuse, and was hunting for a two-bedroom apartment.
“These rents look like down payments,” he muttered to himself. But this was no time for complaining. Dennis checked his watch and turned on CNBC. It was the first Friday of the month and the employment report was due out momentarily.

SOME PROFESSIONAL investors make a living through arbitrage, exploiting small, short-term differences in the price of stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. For the average investor, such trades can seem far too complicated. Still, I often look for opportunities for what I call “everyday arbitrage”—situations where I can take advantage of a difference in, say, tax rates or a product’s price.
Here’s an example: In a recent article, I wrote about how 2022’s higher interest rates will significantly reduce the payouts that some retirees will receive from the 2023 lump-sum option on their pension.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE end-of-the-year rituals is watching Turner Classic Movies’ annual memorial to those in the film business who have died during the past year.

Each year, I’m reminded of people who have entertained and often strongly influenced me. It’s four bittersweet minutes of smiling, crying and reliving memories. Movies, and especially holiday movies, have been as important in inspiring and teaching me as any scripture I’ve ever read and any sermon I’ve heard or given.

I HAVE READ THAT confession is good for the soul. I suspect it’s also good for our financial health—or, at least, I hope so. I have a confession to make as a usually loyal fan, regular reader and occasional contributor to HumbleDollar.

I’ve read less than a dozen of the site’s articles in 2022, and I’ve checked my portfolio just as infrequently. This is a new practice for me. I share it somewhat reluctantly because it may or may not be healthy.

HOW WE THINK ABOUT money affects almost every aspect of our lives. All the landmark decisions we make have a thread of money influence running through them. I’m talking about college, career, marriage, kids, the people and places we associate with—even how we spend our time. If we don’t make these decisions intentionally, we’ll drift downstream, carried by the current of the most popular money management ideas.
That brings me to a study recently published by the Journal of Retirement and entitled,

EVERY DECEMBER, I watch two Christmas movies—movies I’ve been watching for as long as I can remember.
My favorite is A Christmas Carol, based on the novel by Charles Dickens. It’s about the mean and miserable Ebenezer Scrooge, a money lender who constantly bullies his poor clerk, Bob Cratchit, and rejects his nephew Fred’s wishes for a merry Christmas.
Scrooge lives only for money. He has no real friends or family, and cares only about his own well-being.

IN BEHAVIORAL FINANCE, there’s an important concept that doesn’t get a lot of attention: It’s called temporal discounting. The idea is that we view our current and future selves, to some degree, as different people—and there’s a tendency to discount the needs of the “other” person. It’s an interesting idea because, even for the most diligent planners and savers, there’s an inherent tension between the financial needs of today and those of tomorrow.

Take the “latte factor,” which argues that a young person could accumulate nearly $1 million in savings simply by forgoing a daily coffee and muffin.

IT’S BEEN A TUMULTUOUS year for diversified investors. Usually, when stocks are down, bonds are up. Not this year. The U.S. stock and bond markets have both suffered double-digit losses. That includes the Treasury bond market, widely considered to be a secure and low-risk place to invest.
A widely accepted measure of risk is a portfolio’s stock-to-bond ratio. More in stocks usually means more risk. But in 2022, whatever an investor’s stock-to-bond mix, investment results have likely been painful.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT your future self will want. This is the tantalizing hypothesis of Hidden Brain podcast host Shankar Vedantam, who argues that we’re constantly becoming new people.
Vedantam offers the example of a hospice nurse who, having witnessed so much misery in her dying patients, made her husband promise never to extend her life if she became terminally ill. Yet, when her body was ravaged by ALS, often called Lou Gehrig’s disease,