AS THE MARKET plunged earlier this year, I recalled the sage advice of billionaire investor Mark Cuban: “When you don’t know what to do, do nothing.” My wife and I are 100% in index funds, so doing nothing was easier for us than for more active investors. Still, we did take some action and, more important, learned some valuable lessons.
Examples? With the bear market apparently behind us, I decided to create a record of the steps we took,

YOU KNOW THOSE timeless financial principles? Sometimes they don’t age so well.
Since I started writing about money in 1985, all kinds of financial principles have gone out the window—and that’s continued right up until 2020. Indeed, if you’re still hewing to the financial wisdom of the 1980s, you’re likely hurting yourself today. Here are four examples:
1. Goodbye, Peter. In the late 1980s, America’s most celebrated fund manager was Fidelity Magellan’s Peter Lynch.

AS WE MAKE FINANCIAL, political and other decisions, we’re bombarded with messages that supposedly offer helpful information. But as savvy consumers of news and advertising, we need to realize that we aren’t nudged just by the content of these messages. It’s also the packaging that can have a huge influence.
Below are 21 ways that information is packaged to make it more enticing. Think of this list as a follow-up to my earlier article,

THIS PANDEMIC HAS changed the way we live: Many people are physically distancing themselves, washing their hands more often and wearing a mask when they’re around others. But it’s also changed how I think about money—in six ways:
1. Emergency savings. Before the pandemic, I always thought a cash emergency fund equal to six months’ living expenses would be sufficient. Not anymore. The massive economic shutdown has led to millions of unemployed Americans—and it will take longer than six months for many of these folks to find work again.

IT SEEMS THE WORST of this economic crisis may have passed, though the health risks will be with us for some time. What have we learned? For many people, long-discussed financial risks became all too real in 2020.
There are two words that should always be part of our thinking: what if. Those two words aren’t always associated with bad things. What if I win the lottery? I have a plan for that, which varies depending on how much I win and whether it triggers estate taxes.

MANY OF US HAVE found ourselves with free time on our hands. I’ve read that folks are filling their days with shopping, baking, exercising and binge-watching TV. May I suggest another activity, one that may prove profitable?
Over the past few years, I’ve found significant amounts of money in unlikely places. These treasures often come not just with monetary benefits, but also great memories. Here are four places to look:
1. Forgotten savings bonds.

MANY MEMBERS OF THE military live in a crisis-like state. They’re frequently deployed to dangerous places. Their families often have to move every few years.
Today, that sense of crisis is shared by many others. In fact, with 23.1 million Americans unemployed as of April, a government paycheck seems stable by comparison. How can families prep their finances for ongoing economic instability? Here are five of the money principles I advocate in my work counseling soldiers,

FORCED TO SHELTER in place, I’ve used the time at home to organize my finances. I’d already read Marie Kondo’s Tidying Up. But I needed her new book, Joy at Work, to motivate me to organize my digital life. Sometimes, it helps to have a step-by-step guide to prod you to deal with such drudgery. Here are four tips I used to get myself organized:
1. Consolidate fixed costs.

EARLIER THIS YEAR, before the coronavirus hit, my family visited an amusement park. Everyone had fun—except my nine-year-old, who complained about the injustice of the rigged “down the clown” game.
You have probably seen this sort of thing: You’re given a handful of baseballs. Then, standing from about 10 feet away, the challenge is to knock down as many mechanical clowns as possible for a chance to win a prize. It doesn’t appear difficult—you aren’t that far away and the clowns are tightly spaced—but most people walk away empty-handed.

I OFTEN BLOG ABOUT mistakes I’ve made. Why change now? Looking back over my 76 years and the many poor money decisions I’ve made, it’s a wonder I’m in better financial shape than the Social Security trust fund—and yet I am. Here are 10 of my more memorable decisions:

In 1961, when I started working at age 18, I got hooked on the stock market. With little money and earning a bit more than minimum wage,

IS THE STOCK MARKET swoon messing with your head? You don’t want to make this market decline any worse than it has to be. To that end, here are 10 steps that’ll help preserve your sanity and your portfolio:

Avoid touching both your face and leveraged exchange-traded index funds.
Change the password on your investment accounts to “ItsTooLateToSell.”
Downgrade your opinion of investors based on their degree of hysteria.
Don’t watch Contagion,

I’M MANAGING MY MONEY with an eye to making it last another three decades. And yet, everywhere I turn, it seems somebody’s insisting I pay attention to what’s happening in the financial markets right now.
This isn’t just a coronavirus phenomenon. It is, alas, standard operating procedure for the financial media.
I understand the game. I’ve spent most of my career as a journalist, so I realize it’s no small undertaking to fill up a newspaper,

I HAVE DEVOTED MY entire adult life to learning about money. That might sound like cruel-and-unusual punishment, but I’ve mostly enjoyed it. For more than three decades, I’ve spent my days perusing the business pages, reading finance books, scanning academic studies and talking to countless folks about their finances.
Yet, despite this intense financial education, it took me a decade or more to learn many of life’s most important money lessons and, indeed, some key insights have only come to me in recent years.

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,

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,