For all the huffing and puffing of the doubters, a home of our own is still the rock on which our hopes are built. Price appreciation aside (and most houses will appreciate, eventually), homeownership is a state of mind. It's your piece of the earth. It's where a family's toes grow roots. It's where the flowers are yours, not God's.

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

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

It seems like only yesterday that savers were dorks. They kept piggy banks. They drove last year's cars. They fished in their change purses for nickels while the superstars flashed credit cards. Today, values have changed. The new object of veneration is not money on the hoof but money in the bank - and the dorks all have it.

The chief function of stock-market forecasters is to make astrologers look respectable.

Lawyers are operators of the toll bridge across which anyone in search of justice has to pass.

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