THE AGE-OLD DEBATE about not borrowing to buy depreciating assets came up again in a recent HumbleDollar article. Despite being a big proponent of debt-free living, I could relate to the story of borrowing to buy a car. In fact, I’m guilty of having gone deeply into debt in my younger days to feed my passion for music—and I don’t regret it.
I grew up listening to Indian music of various genres,

WHEN I ASKED MY college class this spring how many had been taught personal finance before, just a single hand went up. That’s why I teach Franco Modigliani’s lifecycle hypothesis of savings to my behavioral economics class.
A brilliant student born to a Jewish family in Rome, Modigliani was awarded first prize in a national economics contest by Mussolini himself. Warned to flee Italy while he still could, Modigliani soon after booked a zig-zagging trip through Switzerland and France before landing in New York in 1939.

IT WAS JUNE 3, 2006, and I was in the starting lineup for the New York Yankees. We were in Baltimore, playing against the Orioles at Camden Yards. I went 1-for-4 in my major league debut.

A week later, I had the experience of a lifetime. June 10 was my first start at Yankee Stadium. It was a nationally broadcast Fox Saturday day game against the Oakland A’s. I hit my first major league home run.

RESEARCH SHOWS HOW subtle sales pitches, called nudges, can influence our buying. Think of tricks like putting the more expensive potato chips on eye-level grocery-store shelves. Over time, such nudges create spending habits. Those habits become ingrained, nonthinking ways of dealing with money.
A collection of such poor habits begun in childhood can result in a hard-to-alter lifestyle of poor saving and foolish spending. Even worse, nudging sends a stealth message, especially to children,

INVESTING MAY BE simple, but it’s far from easy. Our mettle is tested during market extremes, whether it’s bubbles or bear markets. Today, both U.S. and international stocks are close to bear market territory. Amazingly, even major bond market segments are sporting double-digit losses, with Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (symbol: BND) down almost 10% in 2022.
What makes years like this one so difficult is our deep aversion to losses. Successful investing is about balancing risk and reward.

AS A YOUNG ENGINEER at General Electric, I took a three-day class on career development. That class strongly influenced my thinking about my career—and my life. The class made use of a great little book by David P. Campbell called If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, You’ll Probably Wind Up Somewhere Else.
The premise of the book is that life is a journey, not a destination. We should set some basic goals that help guide our journey,

PARKINSON’S LAW states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. This law is a pervasive reality—and misguided practice—in much of the working world. But I recall first encountering it before I joined the ranks of the employed.
During the summer before my senior year of college, I spent several weeks in Fort Lewis, Washington, for the ROTC training required for a commission in the Army. On the day when it was my turn to lead my peers,

WE ALL HAVE microphones—be it our social media accounts, our podcast or our blog posts. We all have something we want to say, and we want the world to hear it.
Our venting can be shrill and insufferable at times. Who among us hasn’t grown tired of never-ending political arguments and culture wars? Other times our sharing is just inane: If you’ve ever posted a selfie while looking in a bathroom mirror, you’re guilty.

THERE’S A GROUP of high-income earners who sit just below the billionaire business founders, the C-level suite set and the heiress crowd. Matthew Stewart, in his new book The 9.9 Percent, labels them the “new aristocracy.” Author Richard V. Reeves famously called them “dream hoarders” in his book of the same name.
By all objective criteria, this high-income crowd should be thrilled with their financial gains over the past three years.

WHEN I WAS IN THE Navy, the checklist was a way of life. Everything from a radiation leak to starting an air compressor required one. In emergency situations like flooding, you were expected to take memorized “immediate actions,” and then use a checklist to ensure all the actions were accomplished. For more routine procedures, you would follow the checklist line by line—deviations were not allowed.
While this wasn’t conducive to a creative working environment,

I WAS SURPRISED to realize the other day that, despite the varied topics HumbleDollar has addressed, I couldn’t recall a single mention of Sun-Tzu, the 6th century B.C. military commander who purportedly wrote The Art of War. The book is a favorite read of business schools. Even a cursory search on Amazon shows how often Sun-Tzu and The Art of War are invoked regarding business, finance and investing.

DOES IT MAKE SENSE to heed the advice of experts? This doesn’t seem like a hard question. I certainly listen to my doctor and to many others with specialized expertise. As a society, we all rely on experts—from civil engineers to airline pilots to firefighters—for our health and safety.
At the same time, however, human judgment seems to be riddled with flaws. Consider these examples:

After reading his senior thesis, Michael Lewis’s advisor at Princeton University gave him this advice: Whatever you do,

IT’S NEVER GOOD TO be self-indulgent, and that’s doubly true on a day like this. Still, while the rest of you relish the gifts that came your way this holiday season, let me offer a guided tour of my most prized possessions.
I now have a firm idea of what they are, thanks to a ruthless process of subtraction. I’ve spent the past four months throwing out and selling countless things I don’t greatly care about. 

MY EXPERIENCE WITH COVID-19 began on March 4, 2020. That morning, I got off a plane in Buenos Aries. While standing in line with my passport, I noticed several people wearing masks, so I put one on as well. Back then, we were being told to go about our business. “It’s like a bad cold.” If only.

We boarded our ship for a 30-day cruise, which I documented in five articles for HumbleDollar.

I RARELY PREACH these days—at least in front of congregations—but I still recall how hard it was, every Thanksgiving week, to come up with something new to say about gratitude.

The messages we hear and see this week will be fairly consistent: Buy more food and stuff. But also: Thanks be to God. Thanks for the life we enjoy.

Expressing gratitude is indeed good. Practice more of it in your life, and life will be sweeter.