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Here are a few posts that I liked but won't get around to posting on. Thought you might enjoy them:

I remember back in the day when index funds were the second-choice of almost every investor.

But based on what I've seen lately, the tide has certainly reversed.

Let's begin with some great thoughts from 20 Something Finance who quotes the following:

“84% of large-cap funds generated lower returns than the S&P 500 in the latest five-year period and 82% fell shy in the past 10 years.”

And yet 67% of all invested U.S. assets were in actively managed funds. Ugh.

The key findings:

“The expense ratio is the most proven predictor of future fund returns.” The takeaway is this: high expense ratios eat in to fund performance, outweighing any other perceived performance benefits. And actively managed funds have higher expense ratios than passively managed funds, and subsequently lower performance.

Here's a post that asks How Wise Are We With Money?

The answer: not wise at all.

Some key highlights (or lowlights, if you prefer):

• 3 in 10 have a long-term savings plan
• 2 in 3 adults don't have a budget
• 33% don't pay their bills on time
• 3 states require a personal finance class to graduate high school

As we've seen over the years here at FMF, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Pick any financial topic -- investing, retirement, emergency fund, etc. -- and there's way more bad news than good news.

It's amazing (in a bad way) that we are so bad off individually as a country when the basic concepts of money management are pretty simple to understand and implement.

What's the solution to this? Financial education? Forced savings? Eliminating the ability to borrow?

Here's an interesting piece where people are listing their top financial regrets. Included in the list:

• Buying a house too early
• Being too financially conservative
• Getting a payday loan
• Marriage (ha!)
• Not buying real estate in 2008
• Start saving earlier

Four of these are on the list of ten worst money mistakes anyone can make (#7, #5, #4, #3). Yikes!

My biggest financial regret is that I didn't start saving and investing sooner. I really got started about five or six years after school, so I effectively wasted those years. Ugh.

How about you? What's your biggest financial regret?