Life insurance can be numbingly complicated. Clients often turn off their brains and surrender their judgment to the very agent or planner who brought on their coma in the first place.

hindsight is not a strategy.

Never try to time the bond market. Anyone who claims to know the future of interest rates is certifiable.

No one knows what stocks will do tomorrow, but the evidence is clear as to how they'll perform over 10 or 20 years. They will almost certainly go up.

Auto insurance is a toll bridge, over which every honest driver has to pass.

Quinn's First Law of Investing is never to buy anything whose price you can't follow in the newspapers. An investment without a public marketplace attracts the fabulists the way picnics attract ants. Stock brokers and financial planners can tell you anything they want, because no one really knows what's true. The First Corollary to Quinn's First Law states that, even when the price is in the newspapers, you shouldn't buy anything too complex to explain to the average 12-year-old.

Financial planners who take commissions have a built-in conflict of interest...even with disclosure, my choice would be a Fee-Only planner.