LONG-TERM CARE is the elephant in the room that many of us try mightily to ignore. It’s a potentially huge expense: A semi-private room in a nursing home costs an average $89,297 a year, according to Genworth Financial.
But what should we do about it? For answers, I turned to Christine Benz, director of personal finance at Chicago financial researchers Morningstar Inc., where she’s worked for more than 25 years. Benz has written extensively on long-term care (LTC).

IF YOU’RE GOING TO form one new financial habit this year, make it good recordkeeping. A system that’s easy to follow will improve your financial life both today and for years to come. With all of the annual investment statements and tax documents you’re about to get, this is a great time to start.
Whenever I go to my mailbox, I’m on the receiving end of countless advertisements, credit card offers, insurance notices and more.

I’VE LATELY HAD THIS desire to spend money—not on big-ticket items like a car, boat or expensive watch, but on just about everything else.
When I go to the grocery store, I don’t look at prices anymore. If I want something, I just buy it. When eating out, I don’t look at the prices on the menu. I just order. I have a cable, internet and landline package that costs me $136 a month,

GOT A VACATION home? There’s an overlooked tax break if you rent it out—but a potential tax hit if you sell.
First, the tax break: Long-standing rules allow homeowners to completely sidestep taxes on rental income—provided they meet a key requirement: They rent out their cottage or condo for less than 15 days during the year.
That can be a great tax break for those who own dwellings near annual events where rents soar for short periods.

SOME PEOPLE SEE Medicare-for-All as the utopia for health care, resulting in lower costs, higher quality and universal coverage. Others see M4A—a common shorthand for Medicare-for-All—as destroying health care in America, with total control residing in the hands of government bureaucrats.
Neither assessment is correct. Consider eight points:

Every health care system in the world has problems. Each system struggles with rising costs driven by factors like aging populations, development of new drugs and new medical technology,

THE NEW YEAR BRINGS the opportunity for fresh beginnings. You may be motivated to set a big goal, create a business plan or start a new diet. While I encourage you to always push yourself forward, I’d offer one piece of advice: Start small.
Do you look at your goals and feel overwhelmed? I have this feeling when looking at the total amount I need saved for my eventual financial independence. To help, I reverse engineer the process and focus on the amount I need to save this month.

WHEN I STARTED writing my column for The Wall Street Journal in 1994, active money managers dominated the investment scene and index funds were struggling to get noticed. A quarter century later, most money remains actively managed, rather than indexed. The triumph of indexing is not yet complete.
Still, everybody knows which way the wind is blowing. Over the decade through 2017, index funds focused on U.S. stocks—both the mutual-fund and the exchange-traded varieties—attracted $1.6 trillion in new money,

THE TOP COUNTRIES for gender-equal pay are Iceland, Norway and Finland, according to the World Economic Forum. As it happens, those three countries also rank among the top four countries for Gross National Happiness. The U.S. didn’t crack the top 10 on either list.
The gender wage gap is a major problem in the U.S.—and it affects all of us. Over half of American families are dual income. That means women not receiving their financial due impoverishes American families.

IF YOU’VE EVER ASKED for career advice, you were probably told to “follow your passion.” This seems like great advice. Who wouldn’t want to do what they’re passionate about every day?
The reality: What you’re passionate about may not be a viable career. I’m passionate about the game of golf. But I fell short of making it my career, despite playing collegiately.
There have been plenty of times when I’ve thought I needed to change direction.

FOR CHRISTMAS, I bought Rachel a saucepan and a universal travel charger for her smartphone. The previous year, I bought her a pair of gloves and socks. She likes gifts that are practical and good value. During December, we prefer to spend our Christmas money on weekend trips. We live in Los Angeles county and this year we went to La Jolla and Las Vegas.
We like to collect pictures of our adventures. We not only store them on the cloud,

ROBERT SOROS, son of billionaire hedge fund manager George Soros, has a surprising explanation for his father’s success: “You know the reason he changes his position on the market or whatever is because his back starts killing him.”
You read that right: The younger Soros attributes his father’s success to a sort of sixth sense—as if he can feel the market in his bones. He goes on: “My father will sit down and give you theories to explain why he does this or that.” But,

LIKE THE COBBLER whose children have no shoes, I get so busy with this website and other projects that I tend to neglect my own portfolio. I think of it as benign neglect: If you’re invested in a globally diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds, there isn’t much reason to look or much need to trade.
But for the past week or so, I’ve been doing plenty of looking—and a little trading.
By the market close on Dec.

WORKERS TODAY HAVE income taxes and Social Security taxes withheld from their paychecks. But it didn’t always work that way: The withholding system experienced a difficult birth—in the middle of the Second World War.
The wide-ranging 1943 tax act included a provision that authorized withholding. But President Franklin Roosevelt thought the legislation too complicated, so he vetoed it, saying, “The American taxpayer had been promised of late that tax laws and returns will be drastically simplified.

IT MIGHT SEEM RISKY to write about the gifts my kids will receive later today. Won’t that ruin the surprise? Probably not. My children and stepchildren aren’t, I suspect, regular HumbleDollar readers.
My wife and I tag-teamed on gifts this year. Her job was to find one or two items for each kid that we could wrap and throw under the tree. This works well, because she likes shopping—and I loathe it.

I RECENTLY RECEIVED some odd communications from mutual fund giant Vanguard Group.
First, it sent a white paper, “Here today, gone tomorrow: The impact of economic surprises on asset returns.” As the title suggests, this paper examines the relationship between the economy and the stock market. In particular, the authors asked whether accurate economic forecasts could help an active trader profit in the stock market. Their conclusion: To beat a simple buy-and-hold strategy, an investor’s predictions would need to be accurate 75% of the time.