GOOGLE THE QUESTION, “How many Americans live on a fixed income?” You won’t find an answer. But we all know “fixed income” is used endlessly to describe the plight of us seniors.

For example, there’s this from the National Council on Aging: “Living on a fixed income generally applies to older adults who are no longer working and collecting a regular paycheck. Instead, they depend mostly or entirely on fixed payments from sources such as Social Security,

I’VE MADE A LOT OF investing mistakes in my time. In fact, if I ever wrote a book on investing, the title would probably be Don’t Go There, It Sucks.
I’m a Kentucky hillbilly and, yes, that’s hillbilly talk. Another local colloquialism is, “Careful, or you’ll end up like Scrambo Hill.” I don’t know who Scrambo was. But apparently, he resided around our parts at one time, and you don’t want to end up at the bottom of the barrow like him.

I JUST HAD ANOTHER reminder that, when managing our health and the costs that come with it, we need to be our own best advocates.
Last September, I started developing headaches. Every day, I’d wake up with a dull ache in my left temple area. The headache would often build during the day and, by evening, I was feeling washed out and pretty miserable.
I’m fortunate not to suffer from migraines, but tension headaches have been the bane of my existence for many years.

I WAS RAISED IN a small town in Iowa. My mother died of breast cancer when I was two years old. My father struggled to cope with her death, but he paid the bills and made sure my basic needs were met. Indeed, when I look back, my upbringing seems pretty normal.
I survived high school, but had no clue what I was going to do with my life. One day, my father decided to give me a nudge.

IT’S A COMMON BELIEF that a young person’s first job is important because it teaches life lessons about work and the value of money. There’s a reason this belief is so common: It’s largely true.
Still, letting a young person loose in the world to learn lessons isn’t as straightforward as you might think. I learned the following seven lessons from my first job—some useful, some decidedly less so.
Lesson No. 1: Avoid Celery
My first job was picking strawberries.

RETIREMENT PLANNING is complex because there are so many topics to master. In my chapter for the HumbleDollar book My Money Journey, I organized those topics into four categories: guaranteed income, medical expenses, tax-free accounts and asset allocation. In the book, I went into more depth, but here’s my 10,000-foot view of each one:

Guaranteed income is reliable income that isn’t affected by changes in the stock and bond market,

LIKE MANY IMMIGRANTS living in the U.S., I regularly return to my hometown to visit family and friends. My trips to Kolkata are usually short and jam-packed, seeing not just contemporaries, but also the older generation, including aunts and uncles, my parents’ friends and my friends’ parents.
My two recent visits—one last fall and the other this spring—were no exception, but I had mixed feelings this time. Most of the older generation are now in their 70s and early 80s,

AFTER PENNY READ about lower stock market valuations abroad, she bought an exchange-traded index fund focused on European shares. She showed the article to her friend Peter, who purchased the same fund. But the next day, a large French bank reported difficulty meeting customer withdrawals, stoking fear of a bank run.
The U.S. stock market was down slightly, but European shares got clobbered. Penny was disappointed but believed the government would take steps to ease the crisis and vowed to stay invested.

THOSE WHO LIVE VERY long lives sometimes face an unfair irony: The accomplishments of even towering figures can lose their luster over time—not because they’re proven wrong, but because the ideas they developed become so widely accepted that we forget they were once innovations. The investment world lost one such towering figure last week: the economist Harry Markowitz, who was age 95.
Markowitz first came to prominence in the early 1950s, when his PhD thesis,

AS WE MANAGE OUR financial life, we’re compelled to cope with heaps of uncertainty—which way the stock and bond markets will head, what financial misfortunes will strike, how long we’ll live and so much more.
But there are also ways we can exert a measure of control: spend thoughtfully, save diligently, keep a close eye on risk, hold down investment costs and manage our annual tax bill. To this list, I’d add one other key way to reclaim the advantage: have a good handle on who we are.

IT TOOK FIVE FALSE starts to write this column. Each time, I’d inundate readers with information. So, here’s a sixth try.
Have you ever seen those questions to financial advisors on the internet that say, “I have [insert dollar amount]. Can I retire?”
How the heck could the advisor give a reasonable response? To answer the question, it takes more than simply knowing how much you have in the bank. You need a lot of personal and financial information to make the decision to retire.

WE TRAVEL A LOT, so I try to read up on new places, new deals and what to watch out for. This year, I’ve made two new discoveries—not pleasant ones.
I admit it, I love hotel points. I know I’ve paid for those points, but seeing a “free” hotel bill makes me feel good.
Hotels started their rewards programs when I was traveling for business. I signed up right away. In fact, my rewards account number with one hotel chain starts with 000.

HOW MUCH DO WE PAY for Medicare? You might think that premiums would be fixed, like the prices on a restaurant menu. But instead, the correct answer is “it all depends”—on your income, which isn’t necessarily a good thing in our case.
It’s a fact of life: The more you make, the more you may have to pay for Medicare, the health insurance program for older Americans. Medicare calls its variable pricing system the income-related monthly adjustment amount,

I RECENTLY COMPLETED a course called England: From the Fall of Rome to the Norman Conquest. Before that was Books That Matter: The Federalist Papers. Okay, I’m a nerd, I’ll admit it.
Since I retired, I’ve looked for avenues to broaden and deepen my understanding of subjects that I was taught in high school and at the liberal arts college I attended. Back then, there were college courses,

I NEVER PLANNED TO retire at age 53. I wasn’t an early adopter of the FIRE, or financial independence-retire early, philosophy. In fact, I didn’t start saving seriously until my late 30s, when I left my first husband and finally realized that—unlike pensions in my native U.K.—my U.S. pension didn’t come with an annual cost-of-living adjustment.

Instead, three developments in the late 1990s led me to consider quitting. First, I was no longer enjoying my job.