LAST MONTH MARKED 40 years of wedded bliss for my wife and me. I’m amazed at how fast the time has gone. I still remember the day we met. It was at a party celebrating her high school graduation. I gave her a ride to pick up a pack of cigarettes, all the while lecturing her on the dangers of smoking. I believe I saved her from a lifetime of smoking. She saved me from everything else.

LIKE MILLIONS OF other Americans, I’m experiencing serious sticker shock when I gas up the car.
Last week, I was filling up my 2019 Ford F-150 and, for the first time ever, the bill topped $100. That was 21 gallons of regular unleaded at $4.85 a gallon.
Shelling out that kind of cash for a tankful of gas is hard enough for working folks. But for those of us who are retired and living on a set income,

YOU MIGHT WANT TO check your mailbox. Mr. Market has been sending around a book of discount coupons on some great index funds and individual stocks.
Twenty-two percent off the S&P 500’s closing high set earlier this year. Seventeen percent off the Dow Jones Industrial Average. How about a whopping 33% off the Nasdaq Composite?
Still kicking yourself for not scooping up Amazon’s stock (symbol: AMZN) in early 2020 when it was—adjusted for the recent stock split—below $100?

MY WIFE AND I RECENTLY took advantage of one of the most valuable tax breaks for the typical American family. The tax code provides a generous exemption on the profit from the sale of a primary home. Although this is widely known, it also—based on my conversations with a variety of people—seems to be widely misunderstood.
The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 made a major change to the taxation of home sales. Prior to this,

CONSUMERS’ MOOD HAS never been worse—at least according to the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index. The monthly survey, released last Friday morning, paralleled the worse-than-expected Consumer Price Index report. May’s inflation reading notched a fresh four-decade high as Americans—and the rest of the world—grapple with soaring food and energy costs. The issue is front and center, and we all feel it every day.
The hits keep on coming. This weekend, AAA confirmed a grim milestone: The average price of a gallon of regular gas topped $5.

ROBERT SHILLER, in his book Narrative Economics, argues that stories can be a powerful force in moving markets—more so even than facts or data. Recently, I gained a better understanding of why that’s the case.

I was speaking with a fellow and, it seemed, we disagreed on nearly every topic. But the way he presented his arguments made them sound surprisingly persuasive. What I realized is that, in the world of finance,

FOR THE FIRST TIME, retail investors have more money in index funds than actively managed funds. This is based on March 31 figures compiled by Morningstar and reported by columnist Allan Sloan.
Twenty-five years ago, Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle published his remembrance of the 1970s launch of the first index fund geared to main street investors. As I page through the book again, I’m reminded of how close indexing came to failing.
Bogle recounts going on a 12-city roadshow,

EACH OF US TAKES our monthly income and then makes countless decisions—some big, some small—about how to use those dollars. How can we get the most from the money that flows through our hands? I find it helpful to look at this “income allocation” through three prisms.
Divvying it up. We can use our income for three main purposes: spending it today, saving it for tomorrow or giving it to others. Our instinct is to spend today,

I GREW UP IN a lower-middle-class family. We lived in a small apartment where I slept on the living room couch. My father sold cars for a living.

Today, my living standard is quite different. On average, 97% of retirees my age have less income and assets than my wife and me. Our friends are in similar economic circumstances. If they weren’t, they couldn’t live where we do.

The minimum needed to live in our condo community is $24,000 a year.

EBAY CAN BE a fantastic teacher of basic economic principles. I’ve been an active buyer recently, and enjoy watching the interaction among supply, demand and price.
Take the market for business attire. Demand has declined for suits, blazers and jackets. This has happened at the same time that supply has risen, so prices are cheap.
Suits were once the everyday uniform for both men and women. When I started working, I owned six suits in shades of blue and gray: a winter suit,

RONALD REAGAN SAID “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.” Government programs are put in place to address real concerns. But they often come with unintended consequences.
When created in 1965, Medicare addressed the real need of senior citizens who couldn’t afford health care, just as Social Security was established in 1935 to help seniors in poverty. Both have become pillars of American retirement,

I WAS EDITING a fellow graduate student’s paper. She’s in her mid-20s, less than half my age. She’s bright and communicates well in class discussion, but her paper—frankly—was a mess. Great ideas, but she expressed them in overly pretentious language. One bloviated sentence was more than 60 words.
When I asked her why she did this, she said she wanted to “sound smart” by not using the same old words she normally uses. She worried that no one would take her seriously unless she adorned her ideas in the polysyllabic jargon of academia.

WHEN I ASKED MY college class this spring how many had been taught personal finance before, just a single hand went up. That’s why I teach Franco Modigliani’s lifecycle hypothesis of savings to my behavioral economics class.
A brilliant student born to a Jewish family in Rome, Modigliani was awarded first prize in a national economics contest by Mussolini himself. Warned to flee Italy while he still could, Modigliani soon after booked a zig-zagging trip through Switzerland and France before landing in New York in 1939.

THE HIGHEST CREDIT score possible is 850, and I’ve hit that mark in eight of the past 12 months. In the other four months, I had a score of either 844 or 846 under the credit rating formula created by FICO, formerly called Fair Isaac Corp.
A FICO score between 800 and 850 is considered exceptional and gets you the best rates on loans. A score of 670 or more is considered “good,” but more doors and opportunities are available when your score hits 740,

LIKE MANY PEOPLE who read HumbleDollar, I greatly respect Warren Buffett’s opinions and insights. I’ve even attended Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha. Now that it’s broadcast, I reserve the Saturday of the meeting to watch it on the web.
Seeing it from a distance means I miss out on the terrific deals various Berkshire companies offer shareholders who attend in person. By attending virtually, however, I don’t have to navigate the crowds or spend six hours driving to Omaha and another six hours returning home.