A reader asks: Have you ever written anything about getting a late start to saving for retirement? My wife and I are in our early 50s and have very little saved. What do we do? This reader is definitely not alone in this situation. According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, around half of all…

These were my favorite books I read in 2016: NON-FICTION Smarter, Faster, Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business Duhigg discusses the science behind motivation and the systems that can actually help people change their behavior which goes far beyond the typical lifehacks and shortcuts. He shows why motivation is a skill…

Meb Faber asked a bunch of us bloggers to give him our top 3-5 most read blog posts of the year. I looked back at my trusty Google Analytics for the first time in a while and discovered that two of my top three in terms of readership were personal finance-related posts. I’ve always said…

“The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.” -Benjamin Graham Investors spend a lot of time trying to figure out what returns the markets will give them in the future. It feels like a weekly occurrence that I see another fund firm or well-known investor trot out their forecasts…

Jonathan Clements wrote my favorite personal finance book of 2016 — How to Think About Money. People have an odd relationship with money because we spend most of our time stressed out about it. This book does a great job of trying to get people into the right frame of mind about their financial decisions and using…

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” – Jim Carrey Tim Ferriss always asks his podcast guests who the first person is that comes to mind when they hear the word ‘success.’ Derek Sivers gave a deeper answer than most….

“The best diet is the one you don’t know you’re on.” – Brian Wansink Of all the analogies that get thrown around on a regular basis about investing and finance — sports, gambling, Seinfeld, piloting a plane, movies, etc. — by far the most accurate for my money is dieting and weight loss. The equations…

The Wall Street Journal had a story yesterday that highlights the dominance of U.S. stocks over the rest of the world in the past few years: Since 2012 alone, the U.S. share of global stock market capitalization has risen from roughly 35% to just over 40% of the total. I tweeted out the following this morning, which…

AQR is arguably one of the top fund firms in the world right now. They manage over $170 billion in a wide variety of quantitative investment strategies. They are able to marry financial research with real-world investible strategies as good as anyone in the marketplace. While they began as a hedge fund firm that catered…

In a recent post I quoted Warren Buffett who said, “The most important skill in finance is salesmanship.” I said that I completely agreed with this statement, but it took me a while to come to this understanding. A few people asked so I decided to expand on these thoughts. I always used to assume that sales were…