WHAT SHOULD BE THE first rule of personal finance? My vote: Always look for ways to stay in the center lane—that is, to take a balanced approach. As 2024 gets underway, here are 10 ways you could apply this principle.
1. Housekeeping. Over time, many of us accumulate a grab bag of investments—some good, some not-so-good. Those in the not-so-good category can pose a challenge. Suppose you own an expensive mutual fund.

HUMBLEDOLLAR JUST marked its seventh birthday. I didn’t set out to launch a site that would devour endless hours of my time and derail my plans for something that looked like a normal retirement. But I have no regrets.
The site hasn’t been a huge success. Still, I find running it to be hugely satisfying. It’s the reason I typically crawl out of bed before 5 a.m., and do so happily. Here are five key lessons I’ve learned from my first seven years running HumbleDollar—lessons that I suspect may be useful to others,

MANY FOLKS EQUATE a stock market downturn with losing money. I often hear comments like, “I lost money yesterday. The stock market went down.”
I believe this impression of loss is an illusion, one that can be detrimental to our financial health—because it blinds us to certain fundamental truths.
1. Illusion of lost money. You only lose money if you sell shares at a loss. If you don’t sell amid a downturn,

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO with your money next year? The same things you should have done this year, and the year before, and the year before that.
The rules for a successful life—financially and otherwise—are, I believe, pretty timeless. What rules? Here are 24 of my favorites.
1. Ask why. If you don’t know where you’re going with your finances, you’ll likely end up somewhere you don’t like. What are your money goals for 2024 and beyond?

I SPENT A GOOD portion of my early adult life in neighborhood taverns. Back then, I sold beer for a living. You can imagine that I saw and heard some crazy things. Remember the sitcom Cheers? I knew doppelgangers for each and every Cheers character.
But the things I heard in those bars didn’t come close to the things I heard later when I worked as an income-tax preparer.

HERE’S A RECIPE FOR disaster: a good internet connection, plenty of storage space, lots of time on your hands—and credit cards.
Impulsive shopping has a name, oniomania, and the above recipe makes it all too easy. If you have a credit card, research suggests you’ll spend significantly more than if you were paying with cash or a check. The availability of 24/7 online shopping makes it just that much worse.
Here are eight signs—besides the pile of packages outside our front door each day—that tells me impulsive spending has reached our house:
1.

PROGRESS IN RECENT decades has been remarkable. We no longer do math using slide rules, talk on phones attached to walls, choose from just a handful of TV channels or drive clutching an unfolded map.
Less obvious—but arguably just as important—has been the progress in our financial thinking. Looking back over the post-World War II period, I see five key phases in our thinking about money, and those phases roughly parallel the needs and wants of the baby boomers,

I DON’T KNOW THAT MY life has been all that different from that of others. Still, what’s happened to me has—I believe—been good preparation for retirement. Here are seven life lessons I learned on my journey from childhood through to my departure from the workforce just before my 70th birthday.
Lesson No. 1: Doing it yourself can save big money. My older brother got me interested in cars. This was the late 1950s and 1960s,

IT’S HARD TO OVERSTATE how challenging it is to generate retirement income: We need our money to last at least as long as we do, and yet we don’t know how financial markets will perform, what the inflation rate will be, whether we’ll get hit with hefty long-term-care costs and how long we’ll live.
Moreover, the generic advice offered inevitably doesn’t work for many—and perhaps most—folks because we all start retirement with different attitudes,

LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE, I’ve made both bad and good decisions during my financial journey, and those have affected the financial well-being of my now-older self. Here’s what I consider my five worst financial decisions, followed by my five best:
1. Contributing too little to my 401(k) early on. I’ve confessed to this in a prior article. I missed out on a lot of potential growth by making only token contributions to my 401(k) during my 20s.

MY DAD LIVED TO BE age 92 and my mom is going strong at 95. I was involved with my father’s care as he struggled with dementia, and I continue to assist my mother, who still lives independently.
Helping an elderly family member? Here are 16 important lessons that I’ve learned.
1. Don’t be blind. My dad started developing dementia five years before his cognitive ability totally fell off a cliff. No one in the family wanted to recognize his deterioration,

AN IRONY OF PERSONAL finance is that retirement can take work. More than once I’ve heard a retiree express this sentiment: “Working was easy. Retirement is complicated.”
There is, I think, a lot of truth to this. When retirement appears on the horizon, numerous questions enter the picture. There are, of course, financial concerns: “How much will I need? Do I have enough? How should I invest my savings?” These questions are important, but they aren’t the only ones.

WHAT’S THE FIRST RULE of personal finance? To answer this question, let’s look at the financial lives of two notable individuals, starting with musician MC Hammer.
When Hammer gained fame in the 1980s, he made millions. But unfortunately, his spending quickly outpaced his income. Hammer bought 19 racehorses, employed a personal staff of 200 and built a $30 million house with a 17-car garage. The result, sadly, was bankruptcy.
If MC Hammer represents one extreme of financial management,

WE ALL LIKE TO THINK we’re consistent in our views. I certainly do. Yet, as I recall how I thought about the financial world two decades ago and how I think about it today, I’m amazed at how much my views have changed.
Here are five pieces of advice that I give now—but which I wouldn’t have given two decades ago:
1. Don’t waste time on investing. In the early 2000s, I thought endlessly about how to structure a portfolio,

MY WIFE KEEPS COMING up with ideas for where we should travel next. She says, “How about New Orleans, Savannah or Charleston?” My wife can’t get enough of traveling. I’d rather hang around the house for a while.
This year, we experienced long flight delays on our last two trips back from Europe, so right now I’m not anxious to get on another plane. The most recent headache was our flight home from Ireland.