Investing these days is really tough. Fortunately, economics-based financial planning offers clear ways to invest at risk while limiting or, indeed, eliminating your living standard downside.

Upside Investing lets you set a base living standard floor and experience only upside risk from investing in the stock market.

“House poor” is a common expression used to describe people who are wasting too much money on housing, leaving them with too little to spend on everything else. But it can also refer to those who are getting too little housing bang for their buck.

The risk premium on stocks has rarely been higher. Yes, there are investors who think that stocks are safe in the long run. If this were the case, no one would be buying bonds guaranteeing negative real returns.

The safest investment these days is paying off your debts, including your mortgage.

You can go from house poor — spending too much or at least more than you'd like on housing — to becoming house rich and you don't necessarily need to downsize your home to extract more value from it. In our case, we upsized our home while still netting a big sum.

These days mortgages are big enough financial and tax losers that you can potentially do better paying them off than contributing to your 401(k)!

Expected Utility Maximization figures out how aggressively or cautiously you should spend and invest your money to produce the highest lifetime happiness averaged over all the different living standard paths you may experience.

$75K sounds like a great starting salary for a college grad. It's surprisingly not, especially if we're talking making it in LA.

Conventional financial planning uses two rules of thumb. One is the 70% replacement-rate, retirement-spending rule. The other is the 4% retirement-asset, spend-down rule.

Over 4,000 people divorce each day in our country. Some do so after many years of marriage and in the context of very unequal spousal incomes. Such divorces often require alimony to achieve a fair settlement. The question is how much alimony should be provided and for how long? Economics and advanced software can help answer these questions.

You can’t rely on Social Security to provide accurate information on your options. In my experience, over half of what Social Security staff tell people is either flat out wrong, incomplete, or misleading. But now I've come to lear that you can't even rely on Social Security's benefit statement to be accurate.