MINDFUL. INTENTIONAL. Purposeful. These are the buzzwords of our time—and they make me slightly queasy, with their whiff of self-centered, self-satisfied self-indulgence.
Yet it seems those are my goals.
On Monday, a moving van will arrive to take my worldly possessions to a house in Philadelphia that, I hope, will be my last. All this has made me ponder what I want from the years that remain. Three items top my wish list:
Do good work.

IN AN EARLIER ARTICLE, I wrote about a catastrophic stock market loss that taught me—the hard way—about the benefits of diversification and the importance of managing my own investments. That loss derailed our plans to build a large and expensive home in the hills overlooking Austin, Texas.
We were heartbroken at the time. This had been our dream for several years. But it’s funny how life works out sometimes—and it may have been the best thing that ever happened to us.

THERE ARE FINANCIAL issues on which reasonable people can disagree. This article is not about those issues. Instead, it’s about issues where people disagree—because one side has a fundamental misunderstanding.
These misunderstandings, I fear, are leading folks to shortchange themselves financially—and we’re talking here about some of the most important money decisions we make. Examples? Based on the comments I’ve received, here are three widespread misconceptions:
1. Commissions equal trading costs. If you think it’s free to trade stocks because you aren’t paying a brokerage commission,

IN SUMMER 2012, MY boss of 17 years announced he planned to retire the following year. I had enjoyed working for him and considered him both a mentor and a friend, and I had some trepidation about working for a new manager at this late stage in my career. While I enjoyed my job and was good at it, and I liked most of the people I worked with, it was a stressful, demanding position,

YOU NO DOUBT remember Peter Lynch, the celebrated manager of Fidelity Magellan Fund. He quit Magellan’s helm when he was just 46 years old. His comment at the time: “You remind yourself that nobody on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I’d spent more time at the office’.”
Nothing brings more clarity to money’s limitations than consideration of our mortality. A few weeks ago, I thought about this truth as I lay awake all night,

DO ELECTIONS AFFECT the stock market? Last week, I cited an analysis by Vanguard Group that attempted to answer this question. The study’s verdict: “It’s understandable to have concerns about the election. But as far as your portfolio and the markets are concerned, history suggests it will be a nonissue.” Specifically, Vanguard’s analysis cited evidence that investment returns are no different in election years than in non-election years.
I agree with Vanguard’s overall recommendation—to stay the course with your financial plan.

MANAGING MONEY is ridiculously simple—and unbelievably hard.
Figuring out what we should do with our dollars is typically straightforward: We should save regularly, diversify broadly, rebalance occasionally and so on. Instead, the tough part is getting ourselves to do what we intellectually know is right.
Take the notion of buying low and selling high. Every investor knows that’s the goal—and yet, when the S&P 500 slumped 34% earlier this year, many folks just couldn’t bring themselves to buy stocks.

I BEGAN MY CAREER in investments as a junior analyst at a public endowment fund. It was 1980 and I’d just finished my last investment class at college, where I learned about Modern Portfolio Theory. Why, decades later, is it still called “Modern”?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was below 1000, versus today’s 27000. Men wore suits in 100-degree Texas heat. We had individual offices. We researched companies by reading brokerage reports, talking to brokers and requesting annual reports from companies.

LIKE OTHERS, I TOOK my first part-time job as a teenager and, once working fulltime, stayed at it steadily for decades. Being an adult meant being a worker, affiliated with some firm or another, one industry or another.
My plans for ever exiting the labor force were vague: “Save for the future, so someday you will retire with honor and dignity to spend your waning days as you desire.” I saved steadily,

THIS IS THE STORY of a bitter life lesson that taught me two things: the desirability of managing my own investments and the perils of putting almost all my eggs in one basket.
In the late 1980s—and early in our marriage—my wife and I were busy raising four kids, while also managing two demanding careers. Our dream was to build a beautiful house on a large wooded lot that we owned in the hills west of Austin,

BY EARLY 2009, I HAD been investing for 22 years. My wife had invested for a bit longer, and our savings were starting to seem like a significant chunk of money. I was reasonably happy with our investments. Still, I knew that—for those 22 years—we had been paying too much in investment expenses, thanks to the high-fee funds in our employer-sponsored retirement accounts.
Another source of frustration was that our money was spread over seven financial accounts and 14 mutual funds.

INVESTING IS ALL about picking the “best” investments—or so I thought. It took a lot of years to realize that this was the wrong focus. Instead, selecting a portfolio of good, reliable investments and sticking with them is what really worked for me and for my clients.
Sound simple? It can be—but the maintenance is surprisingly hard. We’re talking here about periodic rebalancing. That involves setting target percentages for a portfolio’s various investments and then occasionally buying and selling,

IN THE BOOK OF JOAN, a tribute to the comedian Joan Rivers, her daughter Melissa shares some of her late mother’s quirks. Among them: Her mother always drove 40 miles per hour. Regardless of where she was—on the highway, in a school zone, in the driveway—she always drove 40 miles per hour. Melissa’s conclusion: For passengers, this could be hair-raising, but at least her mother was consistent.
When it comes to investing,

EVERY SO OFTEN, I’m asked about my biggest investment mistakes—and I really don’t have much to say. Yes, like many others, I dabbled in individual stocks and actively managed mutual funds early in my investing career. Yes, like everybody who’s truly diversified, there are always parts of my portfolio that are generating disappointing short-term results. But such things don’t cause me any regrets.
Instead, as I look back, my big financial regrets fall into four buckets:
Pound foolish.

THERE’S NO SUBJECT that gets me more worked up than market volatility—and especially the danger posed by high-frequency trading (HFT). Volatility has become part of the “new normal,” thanks to fundamental changes in how the market operates.
Remember the flash crash of 2010? I haven’t forgotten the unsettling events of May 6, 2010, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 600 points in just five minutes. For a few minutes, starting around 2:45 p.m.,