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He Said I Wasn’t Very Nice

Dan Smith | Jun 18, 2026

"Dan, I'd be impressed if a salesperson scaled our five-foot-high wrought iron gates to present themselves at the door. If they immediately understood the phrase 'no thanks,' I might even consider opening them so they didn't have to climb back over on the way out."

- Mark Crothers

What Addiction Couldn’t Take: My Sister’s Story

Andrew Clements | Jun 17, 2026

"Tory's life was vibrant, service-oriented, purpose-filled. You've created a love-filled snapshot of your sister's soul. Thank you for this. Every human being is more than the direct and indirect tolls of a disorder. Each deserves to be remembered for their special gifts, their ideas, their contributions and dreams and accomplishments. As for addiction, "it became the kind of shadow that never fully disappeared, no matter how much help, hope, or determination surrounded it". It reminds me of the famous lines from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” Losses, or the lack of wins, build slowly and it seems we forever will have more time, more chances for turnaround. At least some prevail and survive and we rejoice at this, hoping the same for our dear loved ones. Then, the suddenness of loss. I am so sorry for your family's double loss, of Tory and of Jonathan. You include here an assessment of the financial cost, which might have derived from her earnings and savings, or yours, or possibly social agencies. In my own life, it's buying a cup of coffee for a homeless person sitting outside the neighborhood donut shop, or paying for a night at a motel to give a loved one a place where they might safely if briefly sleep and shower. I've helped with rent for a family member whose disorder has contributed to inability to hold onto a job. You name it, a panoply of troubles. Over time, these add up to big money that won't be there for me or them to handle other emergencies, retirement, ordinary expenses, or discretionary extras for oneself or other people. One oft-recommended strategy is "tough love", refusing any financial support for a family member in trouble. That might save money for me, I guess, but in my long experience I know of few successes, where the person in need recovers, prompted by the withdrawal of outside resources. It'd be great if this strategy worked better, we'd all have more money in our pockets and our loved ones would be healthy. As a civil society the cost of addiction and other disorders is a huge line item in many municipal budgets, borne by taxpayers or generated through outsized fees to spread these costs across many persons. I wish there were better solutions for families and individuals seeking help. Thanks for including the SAMSHA number, too, I bookmarked it to share around."

- Catherine

Fixing Social Security is not that hard, here’s how

R Quinn | Jun 13, 2026

"I found https://www.fisherinvestments.com/en-us/insights/market-commentary/the-politics-and-practicalities-of-the-social-security-trust-fund useful on this topic."

- Mark Gardner

Many seniors think we paid for our Social Security benefits based on the FICA taxes we paid. Let’s dispel that myth- we didn’t

R Quinn | Jun 15, 2026

"Why did you ask “Where did their benefits go?” If you know how pensions and SS work you surely know the answer. To put it another way which you also know, they were an actuarial gain for the trust "

- R Quinn

Risk Adjusted: The Family Ledger

Mark Crothers | Jun 18, 2026

"Marcus, your final remark made me laugh! On a more serious note, your point about presence is spot on, and working on this post stirred up some echoes of my own career as a business owner. There were so many times I couldn't make it to my girls' sporting events or dance rehearsals because of my workload. Now that I'm retired and have the time to follow my two grandchildren's every interest, I'm more aware of what I missed back then — and it makes me wish I'd made more of an effort during my career."

- Mark Crothers

HD Reader’s Demographics

Mark Bergman | Jun 16, 2026

"Glad to be of service! Ha! Just calling them as I see them."

- Mike Lynch

…..taxes and you

Dan Smith | Jun 11, 2026

"Is that really true about the minimum tax on older cars? I always have older cars, and this year I paid: 2005 Sienna: state: $66, town: $82.50 2004 Sentra: state: $48, town: $42.50 2012 Focus: state: $54.50, town $48.00 1980 man lift: state: $40, town $30.50 2003 popup camper: state: $13.20, town $35.50 various one-axle trailers: state: $13,20 (one was $3.30), town $10.50"

- Jon Daley

Interesting insight

Mike A | Jun 13, 2026

"I wonder about this, too. I find I can live on my Social Security income alone (admittedly, it would be a spartan lifestyle), but I've reached the age of RMDs. I spend part of my RMD and save/invest the balance. At the same time, the boom you've described is growing both my investment and retirement accounts - in spite of all the bad news we're pounded with each day. One of my two kids is doing very well for himself. The other was doing fine until all the wheels fell off - job loss, divorce, kid expenses, etc. I can be a financial backstop as needed and within reason, but not forever. In your second to last paragraph you refer to Boomers not being immortal. That's all well-and-good, the end comes to us all. But I intend to keep living as well and as long as possible - so the Boomer wealth transfer will need to wait!"

- Jeff Bond

A Sunday Thought About Money

Mark Crothers | Jun 14, 2026

"I am so jealous...my kids haven't had kids, so my best grandparents' years are going to waste. I thought your grandparents might enjoy this comedy from Kathleen Madigan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LeOMMqvwLI&t=8s. The grandparents' part starts at 1:45."

- Mike Lynch

Bonds vs. Bond Funds

Matt Halperin | Jun 12, 2026

"Thank you all for the comments. Mark's line — "the main issue here is a misalignment of timeline and purpose" — really does get at the heart of it. When you put money into a bond fund without ever looking at the index it's managed against, you're not choosing a risk profile, you're inheriting whatever risk profile that index happens to carry at that moment, and that profile isn't fixed. As the Hartford chart shows, the Agg's duration has swung meaningfully over time, drifting higher as rates fell and issuance patterns shifted, then snapping back as rates rose again. An investor who bought in with a rough mental model of "this is a five-year-ish bond fund" could easily find themselves several years later holding something with a noticeably different interest-rate sensitivity, without ever having made an active decision to change it. That's the randomness I'm pointing to: not that the fund is mismanaged, but that its risk level is set by the bond market's borrowing patterns and the benchmark's construction rules, not by your goals. That's exactly why a bond ladder, or a CD ladder, is a useful alternative for some investors: you pick the duration profile that matches your own timeline and risk tolerance, and it stays matched to that purpose rather than drifting with the index. And the CD ladder point is well taken too. For someone who wants that certainty without dealing with the secondary-market mechanics of individual bonds, a CD ladder is often the simplest way to get there. Matt"

- Matt Halperin

SpaceX IPO: Is Margin Optional?

Mark Gardner | Jun 4, 2026

"A good article from Morningstar explaining the Space X impact on index funds. The SpaceX IPO: How Index Funds Are Adapting | Morningstar"

- Harold Tynes

How well off are Americans compared to the rest of the world? Fun facts.

R Quinn | Jun 16, 2026

"I should modify my comment. Living P to P is always real, just not always necessary and surely not always or mostly associated with low income as generally assumed."

- R Quinn

He Said I Wasn’t Very Nice

Dan Smith | Jun 18, 2026

- Mark Crothers

What Addiction Couldn’t Take: My Sister’s Story

Andrew Clements | Jun 17, 2026

- Catherine

Fixing Social Security is not that hard, here’s how

R Quinn | Jun 13, 2026

"I found https://www.fisherinvestments.com/en-us/insights/market-commentary/the-politics-and-practicalities-of-the-social-security-trust-fund useful on this topic."

- Mark Gardner

Many seniors think we paid for our Social Security benefits based on the FICA taxes we paid. Let’s dispel that myth- we didn’t

R Quinn | Jun 15, 2026

- R Quinn

Risk Adjusted: The Family Ledger

Mark Crothers | Jun 18, 2026

- Mark Crothers

HD Reader’s Demographics

Mark Bergman | Jun 16, 2026

"Glad to be of service! Ha! Just calling them as I see them."

- Mike Lynch

…..taxes and you

Dan Smith | Jun 11, 2026

- Jon Daley

Interesting insight

Mike A | Jun 13, 2026

- Jeff Bond

A Sunday Thought About Money

Mark Crothers | Jun 14, 2026

- Mike Lynch

Manifesto

Jun 19, 2026

NO. 33: WE HAVE two great financial advantages: time and our income-earning ability. To grow wealthy, we should take a slice of each month’s earnings—and invest it for as much time as possible.

Truths

Jun 19, 2026

NO. 76: TAX DEFERRAL lets you use dollars that’ll eventually go to Uncle Sam to earn extra gains for yourself. An example: If you invested $1,000 at 6% a year and paid 22% in taxes every year, you would have $3,944 after 30 years. But if you put off the 22% tax bill for 30 years by funding a tax-deferred retirement account, you’d end up with $4,700, or 19% more.

humans

Jun 18, 2026

NO. 75: WE'RE HAPPIER when we count our blessings. All of us have reasons to be happy—we just need to keep those things in mind. If we spend a few minutes pondering our friends and family, the lovely things we own and the great experiences we’ve had, we can squeeze more happiness out of our past spending and get more joy out of each day.

think

Jun 18, 2026

SKEWNESS. The most a stock can lose is 100%, but its potential gain is unlimited. Every year, a minority of stocks with huge returns skew the market higher, so most stocks end up trailing the averages. The irony: The big winners make beating the market seem easy—and yet betting on a handful of stocks will likely result in market-lagging performance.

Money Guide

Manifesto

Jun 19, 2026

Spotlight: Markets

Decision Frameworks

Adam M. Grossman | Nov 29, 2025

IN THE SUMMER of 1966, author John McPhee spent two weeks lying on a picnic table in his backyard. Why?
McPhee was suffering from writer’s block. As he described it, “I had assembled enough material to fill a silo, and now I had no idea what to do with it.”
Investors find themselves in a similar situation today. There’s no shortage of financial information around us. But that doesn’t make it easier to know what to do with it.

Managing Investment Risk

Adam M. Grossman | Feb 28, 2026

BEFORE ITS FAILURE in 2008, Lehman Brothers had been one of the most prominent investment firms in the United States. After 158 years in business, what caused it to collapse so suddenly? In a word: complexity.
Lehman had been involved in the securitization of mortgages, a process that resulted in taking something relatively simple—a home mortgage—and turning it into something much more complicated, thus obscuring its true risk level. That was the proximate cause for the firm’s failure.

Private Equity Traps

Adam M. Grossman | Nov 15, 2025

IN APRIL 2005, art dealers Robert Simon and Alex Parish traveled to New Orleans to attend an auction. They were particularly interested in a work titled Salvator Mundi. The painting was in bad shape, having been neglected for years. But Simon and Parish ended up bidding on it and taking it home for $10,000.
After some restoration work, the pair succeeded in having it authenticated as a work of Leonardo da Vinci.

Financial Trauma

Mark Crothers | Feb 14, 2026

SOMETIMES WORLD events beyond your control create a hard reset point in your financial life. A before and after. For me, that point was the 2007 Great Financial Crisis (GFC). The psychological scars still reverberate into my current life.

Looking back, I was aware of something rumbling about in the financial landscape but didn’t take much notice due to being deeply involved in running my business. Little did I realize the impact heading my way.

Endowment Lessons

Adam M. Grossman | Feb 21, 2026

LAST YEAR, an unusual story made the news: The University of Chicago was reportedly looking to sell an entity known as the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP). The story came and went quietly, but it’s worth pausing to understand it.
CRSP’s origins date back to the 1960s. Its initial goal was to build a database of historical stock prices. This is harder than it might seem. Before trading was computerized, stock prices were maintained on paper.

Pricing the Impossible

Adam M. Grossman | May 9, 2026

AN UNUSUAL STORY hit the news this week. GameStop, the struggling video game retailer, announced a bid to buy eBay. The offer was unexpected, but what surprised investors more was the economics of the proposed deal. eBay is many times larger than GameStop, making it difficult to understand how GameStop would be able to finance the acquisition.
GameStop has offered $56 billion for eBay, comprised of cash and stock. For the cash portion, according to its May 3 press release,

All You Need to Know

Greg Spears | Sep 4, 2023

I WAS HAVING DINNER in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with a new friend, Joseph. He told me of his frustration with his financial advisor. The two might meet for an hour, but afterward Joseph still didn’t know what to do. “Explain it to me like I’m five,” he said to me. So I did. Joseph has a PhD from an Ivy League university, so he doesn’t need a kindergarten story. Yet I understand his frustration. Finance has its own vocabulary that quickly climbs into clouds of abstraction. What are the essential steps we need to take to do well financially? I’d contend the basics are straightforward—save and invest for a lifetime. I’ll cover the details in a moment. You also need to understand a little human psychology because there are roadblocks in the way. If this were easy, as they say, everyone would do it. Any good financial plan starts with a clear goal in mind. Nobel laureate Franco Modigliani held that our financial journey’s main objective is to create a smooth level of income over our lifetime. The biggest challenge is to save enough during our working years to avoid a drop in income in old age, which would cause pain and dislocation. It’s easy to tell people to save—advisors do it all the time. Yet it’s also hard for many Americans to do. Why? Humans have what the great English economist A. C. Pigou described as a “faulty telescopic facility” that makes today’s needs feel urgent and future needs only dimly perceived. Here’s another way to express it: “The future is an idea we have to conjure in our minds, not something that we perceive with our senses,” writes Bina Venkataraman, a former climate advisor to the Obama administration. “What we want today, by contrast, we can often…

Ripoff Royalty

Greg Spears | Oct 5, 2022

WHEN I WORKED FOR a personal finance magazine in the mid-1990s, I wrote a story about conmen who met their marks in internet chat rooms devoted to stock investing. One of the slickest tricksters went by the name of Josef von Habsburg. He told people he was descended from Austrian royalty. In researching the story, I called the police in von Habsburg’s hometown of Birmingham, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. The local police knew him as Josef Meyers and said he was about as royal as you or me. He was a gifted storyteller, however, who maintained an elaborate false identity for more than 20 years, including speaking English with a vaguely European accent. In investment chat rooms, he’d identify himself as a foreign exchange trader and heir to an Austrian royal fortune. A 61-year-old Texan who met von Habsburg was among those taken in. He sent him $10,000 to invest in a hedge fund that von Habsburg claimed to run. “Very early on I asked him if he was licensed as a broker,” the man told me. “He said, ‘Oh, you have to be.’ I took his word for it.” After the spell of Habsburg’s stories wore off, “I was terribly embarrassed,” the retired IBM executive said. “I knew I’d been screwed.” The types of scams people pull have changed over the years. Cryptocurrency thefts and computer hacking now predominate. What hasn’t changed is human nature, including the desire by some to profit through deception. I thought von Habsburg’s grift was finished once my story was published in February 1995. By then, he’d been charged with securities fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the fake hedge fund case, and been publicly identified as a conman in a national magazine. I went on to other stories and never realized…

The New Economics

Greg Spears | Sep 9, 2021

FROM THE TIME I started covering Washington as a reporter in 1980, politicians have been condemning the federal budget deficit. Ronald Reagan was running for president that year. He excoriated his opponent, President Jimmy Carter, for increasing the federal debt by—brace yourself—$55 billion in 1979. These days, that wouldn’t pay a week’s bar tab for Uncle Sam. With the sole exception of Bill Clinton, every president for 40 years has added to the federal debt, all while campaigning loudly against deficit spending. It’s like seeing the Saturday night drunk singing in the church choir on Sunday morning. Lord be praised, the sinner is saved. Or not. But nothing compares with the bender we’re on today. There’s a new economic theory in Washington, and it contends that deficits don’t matter. You won’t hear many politicians saying that out loud, but their votes suggest we’re in a new economic era governed by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Standard Keynesian economics calls for the government to run a deficit when the economy is depressed. That’s what happened in 2009 when Congress passed a $787 billion stimulus bill to fight the Great Recession. Government deficits can create demand for goods and services when the private sector is struggling, thus restoring the economy to its normal function. Since COVID-19 hobbled the world economy in March 2020, Washington has run deficits of incredible size. Over the past year and a half, Congress has passed six major bills providing $5.3 trillion in rescue spending, according to the deficit-hating Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Still on the runway is a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which is expected to pass into law this fall. Behind that is a $3.5 trillion Democratic wish-list proposal. Washington is spending as if it can simply print more money to pay its obligations. That, in a…

A 529 for Sophia

Greg Spears | Jan 18, 2022

OVER CHRISTMAS, I got the sort of question I love to answer. My daughter’s thoughtful boyfriend had set aside some money for his niece’s college education. What was the best way to invest it? I said that we’d paid for much of our children’s education with money invested in 529 college savings plans. The investment gains went untaxed because we’d spent the money on tuition, room and board. On top of that, our 529 contributions were deductible against our state-income tax in Pennsylvania, where we live. Our daughter’s boyfriend lives in Boston. A quick search revealed that he would need to contribute to a Massachusetts 529 plan to gain a similar state tax deduction. We saw that Fidelity Investments offered a low-cost 529 plan with target-date index funds. The only slight hitch in opening the account was securing his niece’s Social Security number, which he quickly obtained with a call to his brother. Sophia is a cute three-year-old with blonde ringlets, so it’s going to be a while before she reaches college age. One of the best things about opening a 529 plan this early is the potential for compound investment returns. There’s another important advantage, however, to opening a 529 account for one so young. A child with a college savings account in her name is three times more likely to attend college than one without such a fund, according to one study. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to matter how much money is in the account. The expectation of college attendance is set even if the amount saved is just $50. The next step, then, is to tell Sophia about her 529—and her big plans for the future.

Made You Look

Greg Spears | Nov 18, 2022

I LOOKED UP OUR investment account balance recently. It’s something I’d avoided doing for months. My wife, the voice of reason, said we might bounce a check if we didn’t know how much was in the money market fund. Confession: I don’t balance our checkbook manually. I waited to log on until after the Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 14% in October, its best month since 1976. I don’t know why the bear lost its grip on the Dow last month, but it seemed like an opportune time to see how much damage had been done. We’d lost nearly as much as we’d paid for our house in 1997, yet our balance was higher than when I retired in July 2020. We’d essentially surrendered the last 18 months of gains—the gains that the market had given us in 2020 and 2021. One of my jobs as a senior editor at Vanguard Group was to make a down market seem palatable to the firm’s investors. When stocks fell sharply, a senior executive would invariably call me from the back of a taxi to suggest that we do a “market story.” By this, he didn’t mean we should write a piece that began, “Sell everything while you can still get out alive.” No, we needed a story that would calmly assure investors that we’ve experienced much worse drops before and the market had always recovered and gone on to new all-time highs—eventually. This has the virtue of being true. But it’s not always easy to be the voice of reason when Mr. Market is having a panic attack. When stocks collapsed in September 2008, I’d written just such a story of reassurance. It was ready to be published on Vanguard’s website. It said Congress had passed a large rescue package to…

Going Naked

Greg Spears | Mar 17, 2025

Every day brings me another insurance offer. In today’s mail, I was invited to insure against identity theft for $34.99 a month. Last week, I was sent a “final notice” to purchase a home warranty. In the same batch of mail, I was offered a $20,000 whole life insurance policy for $132 a month. My most faithful correspondent is my water company. Every month it invites me to insure the water pipes under my lawn for about $1,000 a year. I would pay up to $6,000 in repairs should a pipe fail. Lately, when I buy tickets online, a check box appears offering me coverage that would refund my purchase if I could not attend because of illness. A similar offer appears when I book a hotel room. I’ll bet this isn’t just happening to me. You may be getting a lot of uninvited insurance offers as well. If it helps, here are a couple of rules I learned while studying for the CFP that help me decide what insurance to buy. The first rule is to buy insurance against catastrophes that we cannot afford. Skip coverage against risks that we could pay from savings. This means I’m not buying insurance for two tickets to the Philadelphia Flower Show. I invoke the same rule when I throw away the offer for the water line insurance and the home warranty. If something breaks around the house, I can afford to pay for the usual repairs. I do buy health, homeowners, auto insurance and umbrella insurance policies. If something went seriously wrong in these domains, the cost could be more than I want to bear. Life insurance falls into a gray area. A second rule can help here: Only buy life insurance when someone depends on your earnings. Following this rule, I…

He Said I Wasn’t Very Nice

What Addiction Couldn’t Take: My Sister’s Story

Fixing Social Security is not that hard, here’s how

Many seniors think we paid for our Social Security benefits based on the FICA taxes we paid. Let’s dispel that myth- we didn’t

Risk Adjusted: The Family Ledger

HD Reader’s Demographics

…..taxes and you

Interesting insight

A Sunday Thought About Money

Bonds vs. Bond Funds

SpaceX IPO: Is Margin Optional?

How well off are Americans compared to the rest of the world? Fun facts.

He Said I Wasn’t Very Nice

What Addiction Couldn’t Take: My Sister’s Story

Fixing Social Security is not that hard, here’s how

Many seniors think we paid for our Social Security benefits based on the FICA taxes we paid. Let’s dispel that myth- we didn’t

Risk Adjusted: The Family Ledger

HD Reader’s Demographics

…..taxes and you

Interesting insight

A Sunday Thought About Money

Free Newsletter

Get Educated

Manifesto

Truths

humans

think

Money Guide

Manifesto

Spotlight: Markets

Decision Frameworks

Managing Investment Risk

Private Equity Traps

Financial Trauma

Endowment Lessons

Pricing the Impossible

Spotlight: Spears

All You Need to Know

Ripoff Royalty

The New Economics

A 529 for Sophia

Made You Look

Going Naked