Understanding how income and wealth impact happiness plays an important role in retirement planning. It helps determine both your need to save and how much risk you need to take (how much you need to allocate to risky assets).

The fourth quarter of 2018 was a pretty miserable one for investors. So how were investors thinking about the market in January? The answer depended on whether you were a Republican or a Democrat!

Improving someone’s financial health is a lot like improving their physical health. The challenges associated with pursuing a better financial outcome include diagnosis of the current situation, development of the appropriate course of action, and sticking with the treatment plan.

Sometimes the best, most rigorously developed financial advice is so obvious, it’s become cliché. And yet, investors often end up abandoning this same advice when market turbulence is on the rise. Why the disconnect? Let’s take a look at five of the most familiar financial adages, and why they’re often much easier said than done.

To say that “money isn’t everything” is more than a cliché. Studies in the early 1970s demonstrated that a sense of well-being, or happiness, had not increased commensurately with income over the previous half century. That trend continues as the modern world has arguably made well being more elusive than ever. But there is a way to find happiness in life, even as an investor.

Haim Mozes' research looks at the relationship between dividend policy and stock returns. Countries with high dividend yields are not necessarily good investment candidates if those high dividend yields are generated by high dividend payout rates or by strongly increasing dividend payout rates.