SOME PROFESSIONAL investors make a living through arbitrage, exploiting small, short-term differences in the price of stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. For the average investor, such trades can seem far too complicated. Still, I often look for opportunities for what I call “everyday arbitrage”—situations where I can take advantage of a difference in, say, tax rates or a product’s price.
Here’s an example: In a recent article, I wrote about how 2022’s higher interest rates will significantly reduce the payouts that some retirees will receive from the 2023 lump-sum option on their pension.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE end-of-the-year rituals is watching Turner Classic Movies’ annual memorial to those in the film business who have died during the past year.

Each year, I’m reminded of people who have entertained and often strongly influenced me. It’s four bittersweet minutes of smiling, crying and reliving memories. Movies, and especially holiday movies, have been as important in inspiring and teaching me as any scripture I’ve ever read and any sermon I’ve heard or given.

I HAVE READ THAT confession is good for the soul. I suspect it’s also good for our financial health—or, at least, I hope so. I have a confession to make as a usually loyal fan, regular reader and occasional contributor to HumbleDollar.

I’ve read less than a dozen of the site’s articles in 2022, and I’ve checked my portfolio just as infrequently. This is a new practice for me. I share it somewhat reluctantly because it may or may not be healthy.

HOW WE THINK ABOUT money affects almost every aspect of our lives. All the landmark decisions we make have a thread of money influence running through them. I’m talking about college, career, marriage, kids, the people and places we associate with—even how we spend our time. If we don’t make these decisions intentionally, we’ll drift downstream, carried by the current of the most popular money management ideas.
That brings me to a study recently published by the Journal of Retirement and entitled,

WHEN I SUBMITTED MY first article to HumbleDollar almost six years ago, I was sure it would be rejected. I was a divorced, middle-aged woman living alone in a small apartment. I assumed my personal finance story wouldn’t be of interest to readers. Now, after writing almost 90 pieces, I realize my insights—while different from many other writers—appeal to some portion of the site’s readership.
Over the years, it’s dawned on me that some of my fellow HumbleDollar contributors have far more wealth than I’ll ever have.

IT’S BEEN A TUMULTUOUS year for diversified investors. Usually, when stocks are down, bonds are up. Not this year. The U.S. stock and bond markets have both suffered double-digit losses. That includes the Treasury bond market, widely considered to be a secure and low-risk place to invest.
A widely accepted measure of risk is a portfolio’s stock-to-bond ratio. More in stocks usually means more risk. But in 2022, whatever an investor’s stock-to-bond mix, investment results have likely been painful.

YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT your future self will want. This is the tantalizing hypothesis of Hidden Brain podcast host Shankar Vedantam, who argues that we’re constantly becoming new people.
Vedantam offers the example of a hospice nurse who, having witnessed so much misery in her dying patients, made her husband promise never to extend her life if she became terminally ill. Yet, when her body was ravaged by ALS, often called Lou Gehrig’s disease,

I FLUNKED MY FIRST two interviews for an academic job. Fifty years ago, I didn’t make the grade at the University of California, Los Angeles, or the University of California, Berkeley, either of which would have made a fitting classroom for an unseasoned but game New Yorker.
Instead, I prevailed at the University of California, Davis, the agricultural mecca of the statewide system. I was sold when I looked at one of those old gas station maps and saw that I’d be close to San Francisco.

MY WIFE AND I ARE expecting our first baby in March. In preparation, we’re converting what used to be an office into a nursery. We’ve bought a crib, glider chair, curtains and dresser for the new room. But we also needed to find a place to put the desk and furniture that was in the office. We decided to move the office into what is currently a quasi-sunroom.
When we bought the home, our inspector disclosed that the sunroom was likely built by the homeowner and wasn’t up to code.

AT A VULNERABLE TIME in my life, I went to a “quantum healer” who said my deceased mother was trying to ask me, “What do you want?”
I kept saying “I don’t know” to the healer and she kept repeating the question, until the answer popped out unexpectedly, “I just want to be alone right now.” The healer said my mother was clapping. That was exactly what I needed to hear to help me clarify my thinking.

PERSONAL FINANCE gurus and bloggers will tell you that lifestyle creep—the tendency for spending to rise along with income—is one of the greatest barriers to building wealth. While that’s sometimes true, I believe it can also be a source of joy and reward.
After all, while we might work hard to get a pay raise or earn a big year-end bonus, what a lot of people are really striving for is the ability to increase their spending.

THERE ARE USUALLY TWO answers to every personal-finance question: There’s what the calculator says—and then there’s how you feel about it. What does that mean in practice? Let’s look at an example.

Suppose you’re considering when to claim Social Security. Many retirees struggle with this question. On the one hand, the government offers a strong incentive to wait: For each year you forgo Social Security—up to age 70—your future benefit will grow by some 8%.

NETFLIX ISSUED ITS third-quarter earnings report last month—and it was stellar. Just when everyone thought its growth was done, the streaming service added 2.4 million new subscribers. Quarterly revenue increased 5.9% year over year to $7.93 billion.
More important, cash from operations and free cash flow grew rapidly, up 261% and 14% respectively. For long-term investors, these are the metrics that matter most because they show the business is making money.
Netflix wanted us to know this,

WHAT’S MY NET WORTH? Do I know? Should I know?
These are questions I’ve thought about long and hard. After tracking the combined net worth of my wife and me for the past five years, I’ve concluded that the answer to that third question—should I know?—is a resounding yes. Before we get to the reasons, let’s start with a few basics.
What is net worth? According to Wikipedia, net worth is “the value of all the nonfinancial and financial assets owned by an individual or institution minus the value of all its outstanding liabilities.” Put another way,

COMPARISONS ARE the death knell of happiness—and they aren’t good for our wallets, either.
If we’re to get the most out of our time and money, we need to devote those two precious resources to things we consider meaningful. But how do we figure out whether something is indeed meaningful to us, and not a reflection of the influence of others?
For “meaningful,” dictionaries offer synonyms such as “important” and “significant.” What we’re talking about are things that have some special emotional resonance,