WE’VE ALL HEARD of the obscure relative—often a long-forgotten uncle or aunt—who leaves behind a surprise inheritance. This usually only happens in fairy tales, trashy novels and screwball comedy movies. I certainly never expected it to happen to me, especially at this late stage. But happen it did—from my lifelong friend Katie, who bequeathed me a generous sum.
I learned I was a beneficiary from the will’s executor and from a subsequent letter from the attorney handling the estate.

BASIC ECONOMICS teaches us that scarce commodities are more precious. This holds true for metals, rocks, food—and time. Which brings me to today’s topic: Time spent with my daughter and only child has reached the rare and precious stage.
In summer 2023, scarcity was far from my mind. My daughter and I traveled to visit Grandmama—my mother—five hours’ drive south of our home. The visit itself was short and mundane, with just the usual catching up with my mother and tending to her business.

BY THE 1990s, New York City had been in decline for decades. What brought about the city’s recovery? It was, in part, the broken windows theory.
Picture a vacant building with one window broken. Most people wouldn’t think much of it. But this one broken window sends a signal—and, soon enough, others get broken. How do you reverse this decline? It’s easy: You get rid of the broken windows, and make sure things stay that way.

SOME YEARS AGO, an elderly neighbor came to our door, asking for a favor. She was looking for packing tape because she’d sold her television and needed to ship it. She went on to say that the buyer, who she’d found on eBay, was in Nigeria. It was, of course, an obvious scam. But for whatever reason, she couldn’t see it.
Today, scams like this are better known and easier to recognize. But what makes online fraud such a problem is that the crooks are always developing new tricks.

WE ALL HATE LOSING—and life, alas, is full of it.
I’m not just talking about investment losses. There are the career successes we never had, the relationships that didn’t pan out and the purchases that fell short of our expectations. Almost all of us, I suspect, can recall countless situations that turned out less gloriously than we’d initially hoped.
Yet, even though my failures pain me, they don’t stop me from getting up each day and trying again.

HUGE AMOUNTS OF TIME and money are spent planning for retirement. The focus is almost entirely financial—running the numbers, so to speak. How much do I need to save to retire by age 65? Can I retire with my current nest egg? What are the chances I’ll run out of money?
No doubt these are the sorts of questions that keep HumbleDollar readers up at night. And, yes, the numbers are important.

I’M RELUCTANT TO ADMIT that HumbleDollar is run using smoke and mirrors. But if someone said that, I’d be hard-pressed to disagree.
I’ve long believed that the principles of sound money management are pretty timeless. What you should be doing with your money this year isn’t a whole lot different from what you should have been doing last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
This notion is baked into how much of the site operates.

I HAVE MY MOTHER to thank for my good savings habits. She opened a savings account in my name when I was a kid. She also made sure I had a Christmas Club savings account every year. I was required to make deposits regularly.
I didn’t mow my neighbor’s lawn, have a newspaper route or sell lemonade on my front lawn. Instead, the money I saved came from the allowance my mother paid me.

WHY IS IT THAT GREAT companies don’t always make great investments? This is a conundrum that’s long puzzled investors because it so clearly flies in the face of intuition.
Indeed, today’s market leaders—companies like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft—are impressive businesses, and their stocks have delivered equally impressive performance, so much so that they and their peers have been dubbed the “Magnificent Seven.” The others in this group are Google parent Alphabet, Facebook parent Meta,

ONE SUMMER MORNING in 2023, my husband Warren and I had an ad hoc business meeting over bowls of cereal. He told me, “The pandemic really hurt my in-person speaker’s business. I’m not sure it’s ever going to come back.” Then I mentioned that my freelance-design income had also really slowed down, the result of a lack of marketing and enthusiasm on my part.
Neither of these was a newsflash. But that was the moment we realized this is what retirement looks like for a self-employed couple in their mid-60s.

I NEVER PURCHASED long-term-care insurance, even though the personal finance magazine I wrote for in the 1990s often recommended it. To the magazine’s editors, it seemed like another logical step in retirement preparation. I had two reasons to decide against it, however.
First, it seemed a huge expense. We were advised to buy it around age 60, long before any presumed decline. I was younger than that and unprepared to pay hundreds a month for decades when I didn’t know if I’d ever use the coverage.

THE BEST WAY TO WIN a contest for the largest tomato is to paint a cantaloupe red and hope the judges don’t notice, or so says an old adage.
What does that have to do with managing money? Newspapers and magazines frequently interview mutual fund managers who have beaten their competitors, and perhaps the S&P 500 as well. Fund-management firms will even run ads touting the performance of these funds.
These interviews sometimes prompt me to do my own research.

MY RETIREMENT IN July 2020 came at a stressful time. I was recovering from knee replacement surgery and we were in the midst of the pandemic. Luckily, I had physical therapy goals to meet, and I’d already purchased a huge supply of reading material. TV, music and my laptop were also there to distract me. In addition, my wife had retired eight months before, so we had each other for company.
As the pandemic stretched on,

ON TELEVISION, I WATCH the Barrett-Jackson auctions of expensive cars. When two bidders want the same car, they drive up the price until one decides enough is enough and drops out.
Why is this car so important to the bidders? In many cases, it’s a well-known car that’s highly valued by car collectors, so it’s treated like an investment with lasting value. Other times, it could be a model that the bidders had admired as teenagers,

I WAS INTRIGUED WHEN an old Dutch painting attributed to a “follower of Rembrandt” came up for auction near me in Maine late last month. It was a portrait of a young woman wearing an elaborately starched ruff collar, the type of clothing depicted in Golden Age paintings from the 1600s.
The country auction house estimated the painting would fetch $10,000 to $15,000. I couldn’t shake the thought—however fleeting—that this might be the real thing.