Our parents and grandparents both taught us that making mistakes was part of life.

Some mistakes are easier to recover from than others. But when it comes to money and time, the closer you are to retirement, the less time you have to recover from bad money moves.

My advice is not to take any chances you can’t afford. As you near retirement, you’ll need to spend more time creating an investment approach that aligns each account to its specific goal for cash flow requirements during retirement.

The worst times for your investment portfolio to take a hit are somewhere in the five years before and five years after you retire. Some have called this the red retirement zone. Lose money...

I’ve always been a numbers guy. In elementary school, if anyone made fun of my disproportionately large head, I would withhold answers to math homework. Yes, I was an egghead in more ways than one.

Of course, I love to think about the intersection of words and numbers. The other day I heard someone say “to the tenth degree.” As a number and word nerd, I knew this was wrong. In fact, to the tenth degree is a large amount; however, the correct term is “to the nth degree.”

To the nth degree means “as much as possible.” In math terms, to the nth degree means the highest power of the variable in a polynomial — think something “squared,” which would be a number with a...

Dear Editor,

We received news that the hospital, RMCH, will be applying for Critical Access designation.  We look forward to learning more about how this designation will impact our community and the care that RMCH provides.  Importantly, we would like to see how the community can support the hospital leadership in this transition.

We hope that CEO Whitaker will organize town halls with the community.  These would be an opportunity to encourage honest dialogue and questions.  The trust of the community has been badly worn, and dialogue can be a path to healing and understanding.

It is important to operate health care entities with standards of transparency and commitment to...

Talking about unpaired socks is like talking about the need to eat food — it happens to everyone. Anyone in the history of humanity who has ever done a load of laundry has ended up with a missing twin sock. This is what it means to be human. Death, taxes, missing socks.

Fortunately for my five-year-old daughter, this isn’t a problem. She purposefully mismatches her socks, matching her constantly imaginative personality. Maeve sees unpaired socks as an opportunity for self-expression.

There is a verbal equivalent of unpaired socks — unpaired words. And, just like missing socks, you’ve encountered them, thought about them… yearned for them, even.

Unpaired words are words...