WITH THE ADVANTAGE of advanced age and flawless hindsight, I now believe the three most important contributors to retirement prosperity are a robust savings rate, an aggressive allocation to stocks and funding tax-free accounts, both Roth and health savings accounts (HSAs).
What about other financial factors, such as the investments we pick, whether we buy income annuities, when we claim Social Security and what Medicare choices we make? These matter on the margin, but I don’t think they’re as crucial to a successful retirement. 

MY WIFE WENT TO New York for five days with a friend. I don’t mind because I could use the rest. Over the past year, we’ve traveled from the West Coast to Europe three times, flown across the country to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Tennessee, and taken a number of car trips.
My wife loves traveling and has a lot of energy. Because of all the air miles she’s logged, she’s now qualified for United Airlines Premier Gold status.

IN WASHINGTON, 2025 is beginning to look a lot like 2017. Republicans again control the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives. But a key difference between then and now is that today the Republican majority in the House is far narrower.
This means more negotiation will be required, and agreement on a new tax bill may take months. In the meantime, here are some key areas that investors will want to keep an eye on.

IT’S THE ONE ASSET we’re all born with, and it pretty much defines our financial life. I’m talking here about our human capital, our ability to pull in a paycheck.
That paycheck—or the lack thereof—drives our ability to save, service debt and take investment risk. It also dictates our insurance needs and how much emergency money we should hold. Put it all together, and our human capital should arguably determine how we manage our money over our lifetime.

DRIVING CROSSTOWN, my brother and I stopped at an onramp, where a man held a cardboard sign.
“Does anyone give these people money?” my brother asked, then immediately answered his own question by mentioning a friend who hands out bottles of water instead. “Anything helps,” read the man’s sign.
“Sure,” I said. “I’ve seen people pass $5 bills out the window.” A single dollar used to be enough for a panhandler to end his shift and shuffle off to the nearest mini-market.

WHEN I WAS a teenager in the 1960s, the popular expression was, “Do your own thing.” We baby boomers were supposed to reject our parents’ ways of thinking and do what we thought better. These better things included growing our hair long, wearing blue jeans, having beards, not wearing bras and making love, not war.
I liked this “do your own thing” way of thinking. But I also discovered that doing your own thing,

A QUOTE OFTEN attributed to Mark Twain goes as follows: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
This certainly applies to personal finance, and it’s why it can be helpful to take a step back sometimes to revisit widely held notions—including these six.
1. Social Security. You may have heard of Social Security’s “earnings test,” which can reduce the size of monthly checks for those who continue working after claiming benefits.

I MOVED FROM LONDON to New York City in 1986, when I was age 23. That’s when my financial education truly began.
I’d previously studied economics for three years and spent a year writing about the international financial markets for Euromoney magazine. Still, I knew almost nothing about investing, insurance, homeownership and other topics crucial to managing a household’s finances.
I’ve learned a ton since, and the focus of that education keeps changing,

TWELVE PERCENT. THIS is a pivotal number in my financial life.
What does it refer to? Is it the average annual return on my investments? I wish. Is it the percentage of my pre-tax income that I dedicate to retirement savings? No. That number, including pension and 403(b) contributions, is closer to 25%.
Instead, that 12% is the slice of my pre-tax income reserved for housing. When picking a place to live, I’m a cheapskate.

MANY FINANCIAL planners say you shouldn’t look at your investment portfolio too often because it may prompt you to make poor decisions based on short-term stock market performance. I try to follow this advice, even though it would be easy for me to take a peek, because we have almost all our money with Vanguard Group.
Ever since we consolidated our investments, I’ve noticed a change in my wife’s attitude toward money: Rachel is more willing to spend.

WHEN I ATTENDED Sunday school as a child, I was taught that God is always watching over me. It was a frightening notion, but one I grew accustomed to. My mother would often remind me to “watch your Ps and Qs,” though I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. Nonetheless, I understood the importance of behaving properly.
Today, it seems we have a different form of surveillance. As George Orwell so aptly depicted in his book 1984,

MICHAEL BURRY IS a hedge fund manager who gained fame betting against the housing market in 2008. When that market collapsed, Burry made a fortune, and that cemented his reputation as a market seer. Burry was later portrayed as the central character in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short.
But in the years since, Burry’s predictions haven’t turned out as well. Five years ago, he spooked index-fund investors when he argued that they might have trouble accessing their funds.

RETIREES ENDLESSLY debate how best to draw down their retirement savings, and yet it all comes down to two simple rules: Don’t spend too much each year, and don’t sell stocks during down markets.
How do we put these two rules into action? Retirees can pick from a host of withdrawal strategies, including the five popular choices listed below. You’d likely fare just fine with any of the five strategies—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pick carefully.

STOCKS, BONDS, CASH—and a house owned free and clear. For many, that’s the recipe for a financially successful retirement. Our homes represent a central pillar of middle-class status. With a paid-off mortgage, we have an affordable place to spend our old age.
Yet signing up for decades of house payments has become controversial for its high opportunity cost—what you give up to pay the mortgage. Has a home mortgage, with its long, slow road to payoff,

MY SON IS A FRESHMAN in high school, and I’m beginning to be more purposeful about his baseball aspirations. But after dropping $85 on a one-hour pitching lesson, I was wondering, was my money well spent?
My search for an answer began with the Netflix series Receiver. I tuned in to see football player George Kittle, a former University of Iowa Hawkeye and bigtime professional wrestling fan. Kittle was kind enough to send autographed memorabilia for a softball fundraiser we had a few years ago.