YEARS AGO, I SPENT a few days in Bangkok touring the city. A highlight of my short stopover was the temple of Wat Traimit, which houses a five-and-a-half metric ton Golden Buddha, made of approximately $250 million of gold.
Cast more than 700 years ago, the statue symbolized the prosperity and cultural heritage of Sukhothai, the first Thai kingdom. Sometime in the 18th century, the statue was completely plastered over to conceal its value from Burmese invaders.

I’M SAYING GOODBYE to an old friend I’ve known for 35 years. We had a special relationship that enriched my life in many ways. Although I’ll be moving to a new city and will never see my old friend again, I’ll always be grateful for our relationship, and how it helped me financially and emotionally.
You see, as I put my dear little friend—a one-bedroom, 789-square-foot condominium—up for sale, I’ve come to realize how important it was to have a home that helped me live below my means.

THE JAPANESE JUST “celebrated” the 30th anniversary of their stock market’s peak. The Nikkei 225 hit an all-time high of 38,916 in December 1989. Today, it stands at 23,320, or 40% below 1989’s level.
“But the Japanese stock market in the 1980s was the mother of all bubbles,” you might respond. Perhaps. But what about the Nasdaq bubble of the late ’90s? True, the Nasdaq Composite Index has finally returned to its 2000 peak.

THERE’S LATELY BEEN much buzz about the FIRE—or financial independence/retire early—movement. The idea is to get yourself to the point where you don’t have to work anymore at a younger age than the traditional retiree.
There’s a wide spectrum of strategies, with a lot of the FIRE community relying on extreme frugality to supersize their savings. Others gun for something called FatFIRE: Think startup company that has a “liquidity event,” which leaves employees with millions in the bank,

AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK, I run across the sort of portfolio I like to call a “broker’s special.” While each is different, they typically include some mix of the following:

A handful of mutual funds with names like “New Economy” or “New Discovery” or “New Perspectives.”
Some commodity funds.
10 or 20 individual stocks.
Funds with names heavy on buzzwords such as “infrastructure” and “renewable energy.”
And, in some cases, master limited partnerships,

ON THIS DAY IN 1888, George Cope died at age 65. Two days later, he was buried in Anfield Cemetery in Liverpool, England, where his younger brother Thomas had been laid to rest 40 months earlier.
Together, in 1848, the two brothers had launched a successful tobacco company, which would be acquired more than a century later by Gallaher Group, then a major U.K. multinational tobacco producer. Gallaher itself would subsequently be bought by Japan Tobacco.

FROM AN EARLY AGE, I was amazed at the power of mathematics to model our world and solve real world problems. In engineering school, we studied a host of mathematical techniques that did just that. But I wish we’d spent more time on probability and statistics.
In 1989, I read a book that gave me a broader view of how probabilistic our world is and, at the same time, made me aware of how ill-prepared the general population is to understand these concepts.

EXPERTS OFTEN SUGGEST putting bonds or bond funds in retirement accounts. I think this is kind of dumb—or, at the very least, it places the focus on the wrong thing.
It’s always a good idea to consider taxes. But my experience is that many people place too much emphasis on taxes, often to their own detriment. Municipal bonds are a great example of this: Many people who purchase them are in lower tax brackets,

MEET IRMAA. YOU WON’T like her. IRMAA is short for income-related monthly adjustment amount. It’s a premium surcharge levied on those covered by Medicare Part B and Part D—and who have income above certain thresholds.
In 2020, the standard premium for Part B, which covers outpatient care, is $144.60 a month. That’s what you pay if you file taxes as a single individual and your modified adjusted gross income is $87,000 or less, or if you’re married filing jointly with annual income of $174,000 and below.

ONE OF THE BIGGEST financial mistakes people make is not contributing to their employer’s 401(k). Nearly 20% of Americans are guilty of this. But that’s hardly the only mistake that folks make. As you strive for a comfortable retirement, here are seven other missteps you’ll want to avoid:
1. Poor tax planning. Try to estimate whether your tax bracket will be higher or lower in retirement. If you think it will be higher,

FROM LISTENING TO financial talk radio shows, it seems the hot topic these days is the SECURE Act and how it’s hurt the middle class. One caller had $2 million in his IRA, and was worried about the impact of the stretch IRA’s elimination on his children and grandchildren.
What am I missing here? I thought IRAs were a vehicle to help average Americans save for their retirement, not an estate-planning tool. Under the new law,

IN BERKSHIRE Hathaway’s 2006 annual report, Warren Buffett devoted several paragraphs to scathing criticism of the hedge fund industry. Their fees, Buffett wrote, were so exorbitant and so stacked against investors that they amounted to a “grotesque arrangement.”
Indeed, Buffett has frequently recommended that individual investors opt for low-cost index funds. To reinforce this point, he issued a public challenge in 2007: He would bet anyone $1 million that, over a 10-year period, a simple S&P 500-index fund would beat the performance of a portfolio of hedge funds.

FOR THREE YEARS, I lived on Roosevelt Island, in the middle of New York City’s East River. It’s a wonderful place—a quiet, friendly, low-crime oasis in the middle of one of the world’s largest, most frenetic cities.
During my time there, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park opened on the island’s southern tip. The park is named after a 1941 FDR speech, where he articulated “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, of worship,

I’M A BIG FAN OF health savings accounts, or HSAs. They’re becoming more popular as a way to pay for medical costs—and, in the right circumstances, they can also be a valuable addition to your retirement plan.
What’s so great about HSAs? If used properly, they’re triple tax-favored. You get a tax deduction when you deposit funds. The growth thereafter is tax-deferred. And if you use distributions to pay for qualified medical expenses, withdrawals are tax-free.

FINANCIAL MARKETS are often quick to punish investment sins. By contrast, if we err with our borrowing, spending and other personal-finance issues, problems might not show up until years later—but the damage can be just as great. Here, to complement last week’s list of 12 deadly investment sins, are 12 deadly personal-finance sins:
1. Pride: Keeping up with the Jones by buying luxury cars and fancy clothes.
Antidote: Realize the folly of buying depreciating assets you don’t need,