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What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Retention bonus versus retirement
2. Don’t want anything for Christmas
3. Angry about politics
4. Saving versus paying off debts
5. Buy it for life: coats
6. Frugality and minimalism
7. Living off dividends
8. Inflation and retirement
9. Am I paranoid about risk?

A broken leg is a bigger bummer when you don’t have insurance to pay for it, so make sure you’re covered. Photo: Ted Eytan

Life after college graduation can be an overwhelming experience. Your whole world is changing. You may be both thrilled and sad to be done with your college days, excited for the new beginning, and nervous about what the future holds.

College may have been the first time you were somewhat on your own financially. But now it’s a whole new ball game as a young adult. Now you’re repaying those student loans you took out, hopefully managing a full-time income, and navigating a life that’s far different from your dorm days.

Like it or not, Christmas is less than six weeks away. If your family is anything like our family, the weeks around Christmas are jam-packed with events with friends and extended family members, wrapping and exchanging and opening gifts, preparing and eating meals, and generally fighting off the winter blues with a huge dose of Christmas cheer.

The problem, of course, is that it can be really expensive. The little expenses during all of this really add up, which can result in some very difficult and stressful moments as the holidays pass through.

I’m not going to argue for or against philosophical changes to the season. Some families I know have certainly taken a very different approach to the holidays, such as giving each other only handmade gifts or restricting all gifts given or received to the $10 limit. Others skip the big Christmas dinner altogether and have a very simple meal.

To me, personal finance is about far more than just dollars and cents. Not only does the money you earn open a lot of doors and give you a lot of opportunities, those things are connected to almost every element of your life.

It’s not surprising, then, that making a change in one little part of your life can have a much bigger impact than you originally thought.

A Change Is Like a Stone Tossed Into a Still Pond

I like to think of my life as being like a pond.

The realities of my life are the bottom of the pond. My children, my wife, my personality, my career, my internal challenges – things like that make up the rules and boundaries of how I live.

The pond is filled with the time and energy and skills and resources that I bring to the table. There’s only so much area that I can cover with what I have, and some areas have to be covered more deeply than others – those are the deeper parts of the pond, like family.