Imagine your great-grandchildren hearing your advice — in your own voice — 50 years from now. Legacy planning has less to do with death than it does with keeping your stories, principles, words of wisdom, jokes, and so much more from disappearing after you’ve gone. I asked my parents (ages 98 and 85) to define legacy planning, and they gave me the same definition you probably thought of, too. They spoke about wills and trusts. But many of today’s financial planners, including one of my friends,

Move-in day, tuition deadlines, a new apartment to furnish, a part-time job to land before the first loan or rent payment comes due… Late summer creates a financial obstacle course for students and the parents and grandparents helping them navigate it. Scammers know it — and time their attacks accordingly.

Today is Labor Day -- will you wear white after today? At some point after 2013 (about the time I transitioned from a 20-year teaching career into a writing career, which included the wonderful ability to work from home), the fashion industry and I

If you’ve done any job-hunting since 2020, you’ve probably experienced this scenario: You apply for a job for which you’re clearly qualified, and before you’ve even recorded the job app on your spreadsheet, a rejection arrives in minutes. Trust me. A human didn’t read your resume — a software platform did. And it decided (rightly or wrongly) that you weren’t worth a second look.

Many people find comfort in telling themselves that old debt, if ignored long enough, disappears. After seven years, it falls off your credit report, and that’s that. Case closed. Ghost exorcised. It’s a lovely story, but it’s also a fallacy. And a growing industry of debt collectors is counting on this misbelief.

One inheritance never appears in a will: a credit score. But you can give this gift years before a young person has a job, an apartment, or an idea of what a credit score is for. The tool making this gift possible is the authorized user strategy, sometimes called piggybacking. More families are using this multi-generational plan to help their kids (and grandkids) get a head start.

Imagine not having to shop anymore because your “agent” does it for you. That’s the pitch, at least. One of the 2026 buzzwords is agentic commerce, and if you’ve noticed a “Buy” button in a chatbot or heard your kids say they let AI handle their grocery reorders to save time, welcome to a new trend. Agentic commerce is real, growing quickly, and worth understanding before it appears in your digital shopping cart (or online account) with little fanfare or warning.

A regulatory change buried in federal financial aid law is handing grandparents one of the strongest college-funding tools in years. It’s not exactly new — it took effect with the 2024-2025 FAFSA — but its implications are flying under the radar for most families. Here’s the TL;DR: Grandparents can fund a 529 college savings account for a grandchild and pay tuition directly from it with zero impact on that student’s financial aid eligibility. Before 2024, that wasn’t the case.

Before a scammer asks for a wire transfer, gift card, or your bank login, they usually ask for something much smaller: quiet.

Please. I beg you from the bottom of my toes: stop punishing your feet for existing in three dimensions. Would you be willing to choose shoes that won’t cause bunions? I prefer living life barefoot (always have). But the Hokas I bought last spring (and first sneakers I’ve owned in decades)? Life-changing. Seriously.

Most retirees treat their home equity as a last resort, but a growing body of research suggests that thinking is backward. Used strategically, a home equity conversion mortgage (HECM) line of credit can work as a volatility buffer. When the market drops, you can withdraw cash, tax-free, to avoid selling investments at the wrong time.

I’ve worked in the tech world for a long time. Even while teaching high school Latin and English, I freelanced on the side — and I fell into the tech industry thanks to an editor friend who was desperate for a writer who could follow a brief. My favorite sub-sectors in technology include the Internet of Things (IoT), EdTech (educational technology), semiconductors, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and cybersecurity. Once I transitioned to writing and UX design full-time, many of my clie

What if you could buy a home in 2026 and pay 2021 interest rates? In a market where new rates sit higher than the historic lows from just a few years ago, a savvy group of assumers is bypassing the bank’s current offers entirely. Instead, they’re stepping into the seller’s shoes and taking over (or assuming) mortgages with rates as low as 2.5% or 3%.

Far too many women transitioning into perimenopause or menopause navigate that journey alone (or at least not with the...

At some point after 2013 (about the time I transitioned from a 20-year teaching career into a writing career,...

It’s a specific kind of ache, isn’t it? That hollow space inside when you realize you’re looking at a...

There are two times of year when the first thing I do upon waking is take inventory of what...

If you’ve ever walked into your doctor’s office with a feeling that something just seems off, but you can’t put your finger on it or clearly articulate what that “offness” is, you’re not alone. Discovering a new ache, trying to soothe a lingering ache, or a persistent tender spot isn’t uncommon when we get into […]

You go to collect the mail, and among the bills and flyers sits a small package. It has your name and address on it. You didn’t order anything, but open it anyway. Maybe it’s a gift from one of your kids or grandkids? Instead of a homemade present or something you did order (and forgot […]

Biohacking’s been a thing since The Washington Post coined the term in the late 1980s. I vaguely remember hearing it as a college student but I didn’t give it much thought. At the time, it meant an amateur, DIY approach to biotechnology. By the early 2000s, hacker and DIY biology communities used it to describe […]