Last week, I talked about Carveth Read, the English philosopher who’s famous for saying, “It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.” This, in my view, is one of the most important ideas in personal finance. Last week, the focus was on the “vaguely right” side of the equation. But what [...]
Roughly right
One of the most important ideas in personal finance comes not from a finance expert but from a twentieth century English philosopher named Carveth Read. “It is better to be vaguely right,” he wrote, “than exactly wrong.” Why is this idea important? It gets at the heart of why financial planning [...]
Your future self
In behavioral finance, there’s an important concept that doesn’t get a lot of discussion: It’s called temporal discounting. The idea is that we tend to view our current and future selves, to some degree, as different people. And thus, there’s the tendency to discount the needs of that “other” [...]
The other answer
In personal finance, there are usually two answers to every question: There’s what the calculator says. And then there’s how you feel about it. What does that mean in practice? Let’s look at an example. Suppose you’re considering when to claim Social Security. Many struggle with this question. On [...]
How to tame regret
Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote that it is “better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.” When it comes to matters of the heart, maybe Tennyson was right. But when it comes to personal finance, I’m not sure that’s the case. If you’ve ever seen a gain slip through your fingers, you know [...]
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