I JUST WENT TO SEE a lawyer about making changes to my trust and will. It’s been some 20 years since I had my revocable living trust drawn up, and a lot of things in my life have changed since then. 
For most folks, it’s difficult to decide how they want their estate distributed upon their death. Consider five questions:

Should the division of your assets be based solely on relationships, leaving your assets to immediate family,

WANT GREATER financial success? It may all start at the local gym and in the fresh food aisle.
“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” —Benjamin Franklin.
Well, Ben, if only it were that simple. While the timing of our repose may not produce all of these outcomes, this aphorism offers food for thought. Are there connections between cognitive ability, physical health and wealth accumulation?

I’M ONE OF THE LUCKY Americans with a pension. I know firsthand the sense of financial security that comes with steady monthly income.
Others don’t have it so easy. I worry a great deal about the majority of Americans—including my four children—who have no pension, and instead will rely on Social Security and their investments for their retirement income. My fear: Even if these folks are saving regularly, they don’t really understand how to invest or how to manage their nest egg once retired.

STOCK MARKET INDEXES are at all-time highs, share prices are expensive relative to earnings and global economic growth is slowing. Is it time to consider rebalancing our portfolios and perhaps adopting a more defensive approach?
If you believe in rebalancing—maintaining a relatively consistent allocation to stocks and bonds—then, at some point in this bull market, you must sell stocks. I am hugely hesitant to do so, for three reasons. First, I am fundamentally a buy-and-hold forever investor,

MY FATHER-IN-LAW—known to his family as Papa—passed away earlier this month. After 96 years, he had developed a number of money habits that were unconventional but quite effective, including these three:
1. Focused frugality. Papa was frugal, but not in the conventional sense. He didn’t practice extreme frugality and saw no virtue in intentional self-denial. Rather, he practiced what I would call focused frugality. If something was important—his children’s education, for example—he was happy to write that check.

IDEAS ARE TOOLS THAT can help us see the world with greater clarity. Indeed, I find myself returning to certain financial notions again and again, because they’re so fundamental to understanding the world of finance and how we can make our lives better.
What are the most important ideas? I decided to create a new chapter for HumbleDollar’s online money guide, which covers the 15 notions I consider most crucial:

Humility
Simplicity
Control
Instincts
Future Self
Hedonic Treadmill
Signaling
Human Capital
Be an Owner
Risk and Reward
Opportunity Cost
Compounding
Skewness
Risk Pooling
Enough

Arguably,

U.S. CREDIT CARD fraud topped $8 billion in 2015 and should surpass $12 billion next year. You can reduce your exposure to such incidents with a few simple steps. Why bother? Won’t the bank pick up the tab when unauthorized purchases show up on your account? Generally, yes, thanks to the Fair Credit Billing Act and the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. But there may be limitations on that protection, based on how quickly you notify your bank when you discover unauthorized charges.

THE SUDDEN BULL MOVE of 1991 enraged me. Mr. Market waved the red flag and I charged. Forget balanced, S&P 500 and large-cap value funds. I was gonna get me one of them aggressive funds that goes up 99% in a year.
I greedily and resentfully scanned the list of 1991’s 10 top-performing mutual funds. Why didn’t I own any of them? Oppenheimer Global Biotech was up 121%. Vanguard Windsor II, which I owned around that time,

I’VE READ A LOT of articles about why Americans aren’t saving enough for retirement. Most of the articles lay the blame on our spending habits and the debts we’re servicing.
For instance, some point the finger at the gourmet coffee we buy each morning. Suze Orman says, “You need to think about it as: You are peeing $1 million down the drain as you are drinking that coffee.”
Similarly, others point out we’re spending too much on unnecessary items like vacations,

SOCIAL SECURITY remains a great mystery to many Americans and is widely misunderstood. For instance, when Social Security’s trustees release their annual report, we get vastly different interpretations. One group will read the report and conclude there’s a “surplus” and plenty of money to improve benefits. Meanwhile, another concludes that the program is in fiscal trouble and fixing it is vital.
Headlines frequently state the program is going bankrupt. It isn’t. Today’s level of benefits may not be sustainable,

THE CLASH, THE U.K. punk-rock group, famously asked, “Should I stay or should I go?” Retirees and job changers need to tackle the same question when they leave their employer.
At that juncture, you have four options for your 401(k) or 403(b) account: You can leave the balance in your old employer’s plan, roll over the balance to a new employer’s plan, roll over the balance to an IRA or close out the account.

FRAUD WEARS MANY faces. But depending on who you believe, potentially the most unusual is that of Jeanne Louise Calment. For years, the French-born Calment, who claimed to have been born in 1875, was celebrated as the world’s oldest person. By the time she died in 1997, she would have been 122— if she’d been telling the truth. New research, however, casts doubt on Calment’s claim. 
The real story, it turns out, may be that Calment actually died many decades earlier—in the 1930s.

STOCKS MARCH EVER higher, portfolios get ever fatter and yet the conundrum facing investors remains the same. We have no idea what will happen next to share prices—and no reliable way of figuring it out. Consider:

Valuations are rich, but they have been for much of the past three decades. Indeed, if above-average valuations were your signal to sell, you likely would have dumped stocks long ago and missed out on substantial gains. The reality: Valuations don’t predict short-term returns,

OUR WEALTH IS usually measured by net worth, which is total assets minus all debt. But there’s an alternative measure—which is to assign our wealth to the purposes it serves. What purposes? Two come to mind: physical and social.
Let’s start with physical wealth. We’re talking here about a family’s ability to maintain basic physical comforts, such as enjoying decent food, a comfortable home, a reliable car and access to good health care.
You don’t have to be rich to afford these.

IN THE PAST, WE’VE always bought certified preowned cars. We know new cars lose a big chunk of their value when you drive them off the lot, so we had our eye on a used car when we started our search earlier this year.
Our goal was a Mercedes Benz GLC 300 AWD 4MATIC. My husband enjoys the negotiating and drama that comes with buying a car, so he investigated choices, checked out prices at dealerships and was ready to start his usual two-to-three-month car hunt.