But what those writers don’t realise is that those little treats make life better. I know I can’t get started without my morning coffee, and it’s nice to have a glass of wine or a dinner out once in a while.

Don’t assume that you have to leave a huge legacy to your children, and don’t fall for the sales pitches of insurance salesmen who say that you should. It’s really important to make sure your kids have a good start in life,

But these days people don’t retire in the same way that they did decades ago. People don’t jump from work to retirement anymore; they’ll work less, maybe as a consultant or part time,

A good rule of thumb, then, is don’t invest in anything with high fees or anything with hidden fees.

the senior management will take the customer lists from the old company, start a new company and then contact defrauded investors, saying, “We can help you recover your losses from the first scam. You just need to give us some money to start the recovery process.” This is called “advance-fee fraud.” It’s a variation of the old “Nigerian Prince” scam, and sadly it’s a common trick that gets pulled on people who’ve been scammed once already.

There’s a name for this strategy that you might have heard before, “dollar-cost averaging,” and it has one very powerful little side-effect: It means you buy more stock when the price is low and less stock when the price is high, so you get an average that’s a lot better than you would have had otherwise.

The problem is that’s just not true. Commodity prices are driven by supply and demand, not by inflation, and they can spike or drop by 50% in a year even when inflation is running only about 2%.

Sometimes, that kind of risk can be good—because more volatility means your portfolio can go up as well as down. The only portfolio with zero volatility is cash in the bank, and you can’t retire on the income from cash in the bank

That means that the ETF buys a bundle of stocks that exactly copies what the index will do, and it just sits on them. It doesn’t try to trade them to make extra returns; it doesn’t try to pick which stocks or which sectors will do better than others. It just tries to track its benchmark index, at the lowest possible cost.

It doesn’t try to trade them to make extra returns; it doesn’t try to pick which stocks or which sectors will do better than others. It just tries to track its benchmark index, at the lowest possible cost.

their insurance salesperson probably doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She’s kind and thoughtful, but she’s a sales person.

An emergency fund is especially important if you’re young. When you’re young, you don’t have a lot of expenses, sure, but you don’t have a lot of income either, and it’s important to get in the habit of saving early in your life.