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.

The shortest period of time lies between the minute you put some money away for a rainy day and the unexpected arrival of rain.

Savings will not make you rich. Only canny investments do that. The role of savings is to keep you from becoming poor.

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.

It's a fact: stock investors sometimes lose money on their way to wealth. Get over it.

Buy a friend; hire a lawyer.