Lists

COMMENTS FROM READERS are one of HumbleDollar’s greatest strengths. Just finished perusing an article? If you don’t scan the comments posted below, you’re often missing out on some savvy financial insights and eye-opening personal stories.
With an eye to tapping into this strength, I launched the Voices section two years ago. My hope: The questions—now 133 in total—would offer a way to organize readers’ collective wisdom and become a go-to resource for those seeking help on a particular financial topic.

THE BEAR MARKET HAS now dragged on for 15 months—and no doubt plenty of anguished investors are second-guessing their allocation to stocks. But as for me, I grow more enthusiastic with every drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In fact, I’d be happy to see the bear market last a few months longer, so I can finish fully funding various tax-advantaged accounts for 2023.
Not only are stocks better value than they were 15 months ago,

RETIREMENT IS LIFE’S most daunting financial puzzle, not least because many of the decisions we make are difficult or impossible to reverse. To make matters worse, we’re often making decisions we’ve never made before, so we have no real expertise.
What sort of decisions am I talking about? Here are 10 examples.
1. When should I quit work? Needless to say, this is the most important retirement decision. Once you quit the workforce,

A FEW MONTHS BACK, this site’s editor suggested I write an article about the “10 things I learned about money from four years traveling the globe.” I thought, hey, if someone wants to pay me $60 to write about travel, I’m in. I’m hoping he’ll next suggest I write an article about drinking bourbon.
Starting in September 2017, my wife and I traveled the world for four straight years. Travel can be wondrous. Filled with new tastes,

WE BUY ALL KINDS of investments and financial products. But what is it that you haven’t bought, do you have a good reason for not buying—or is there a gaping hole in your finances?
Below are some of the investments and financial products I’ve chosen not to own. The list, of course, isn’t comprehensive—and I didn’t bother to touch on financial products that are beyond the pale. Equity-indexed annuities, anyone? How about leveraged exchange-traded funds?

IN FORT LAUDERDALE, an unusual property sits wedged in among a row of waterfront mansions. It’s a 35-acre patch of wooded wilderness with just a single home, called Bonnet House. It was for many decades the winter residence of a woman named Evelyn Bartlett.
She first began spending winters at Bonnet House in the 1930s, and she continued to live there following her husband’s death in the 1950s. By the 1980s, however, the property’s assessed value had reached $30 million,

I’VE PENNED MORE THAN 450 articles for HumbleDollar, so picking 10 favorites could have been a laborious task—if I’d bothered to look back through all the articles I’ve written.
But instead, I took an easier route, simply listing the articles that I could most easily recall. What made these articles memorable? Some were quite personal, while others broached ideas that I continue to grapple with to this day.

Really Useful Engine (Dec.

IF YOU KICK AROUND Wall Street for long enough, you’ll witness all kinds of investment fads—special purpose acquisition companies, cryptocurrencies, meme stocks, to name just a few. Each bubble differs, but the eventual comeuppance always feels brutally familiar.
But there aren’t just fads among investments. There are also fads among investment concepts. But while naïve investors tend to get caught up in investment bubbles, it’s the brainy types who fall in love with investment concepts,

I STARTED WRITING for HumbleDollar almost five years ago—and it’s become a big part of my retirement.

Some folks have likened me to Andy Rooney. It’s a comparison I’ve happily embraced. I try to offer pointed opinions leavened by a measure of humor. Here are my 10 favorite articles that I’ve written for the site.

Choosing Badly (April 24, 2018). This was my first piece for HumbleDollar. Employer-sponsored 401(k) plans are underutilized and misused.

IT’S HUMAN NATURE to be impressed by things that sound sophisticated or seem complex. In the world of personal finance, this certainly applies to the planning tool known as Monte Carlo analysis.
Its roots go back to the 1940s, when it was developed by Stanislaw Ulam, a physicist working on the Manhattan Project. Today, it’s a popular way to assess the strength of a proposed retirement plan. If you’ve seen presentations indicating that a financial plan has a particular probability of success,

I ADMIRE SUPER-SAVERS. I really do.
You know who I’m talking about: Ordinary people making ordinary salaries who are somehow able to sock away half or more of their disposable income and who accumulate enough to step away from the working world long before the rest of us.
We hear about these people all the time on podcasts. The couple who banked $1 million over the course of a decade by scrimping and saving.

HERE ARE MY TEN favorite articles that I’ve written over the three-plus years I’ve been a part of the HumbleDollar community. Although I write my share of technical and analytical articles, the ones I like the most have a human element.
As my wife will attest, I’m a bit of a softy, and care deeply about my family and friends. I like happy endings and want to see people succeed, especially the generations to come.

ONE WINTER DAY IN 2016, I jotted down a few comments about the financial markets and emailed them to a group of clients. I received a few responses—some of them positive—so I did the same thing the following week, and I’ve continued that practice every week since.
For better or worse, when it comes to investment markets, there’s always something new to discuss. But it can also be helpful to pause and revisit key investment principles from time to time.

IN SEPTEMBER 2014, The Wall Street Journal published a column entitled “The Simple Secret to Building Wealth.” An early paragraph began thus: “Wealth is born of great savings habits.”
As I read along, I found myself not only agreeing, but also wondering if the author had secretly consulted with my wife prior to penning the column. The similarities between his suggestions and our savings habits were striking.
I wrote an email to the author—who,

MY SIMPLE BUT successful financial life is the result of four lessons I learned through the school of hard knocks.
Lesson No. 1, learned as a child growing up on a farm: Chores are not optional and are never accompanied by cash bribes. Lesson No. 2, learned as a college student: Spend all your time studying, working jobs and sleeping, and you can earn a degree without taking out a loan. Lesson No. 3,