Buy a friend; hire a lawyer.

It's daring and challenging to be young and poor, but never to be old and poor. Whatever resources of good health, character, and fortitude you bring to retirement, remember, also, to bring money.

hindsight is not a strategy.

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.

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

You don't date an annuity, you marry it. An annuity isn't a mutual fund that you buy today and sell tomorrow. Nor is it a certificate of deposit, ready for any new use at maturity. When you buy an annuity, you are making (or ought to be making) a 15- or 20-year commitment, at least.

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.