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The long-running bull market has been historic, having taken the Dow Jones Industrial Average from just above 6,000 a decade ago to just over 27,000 earlier this year.

The long-running bull market has been historic, having taken the Dow Jones Industrial Average from just above 6,000 a decade ago to just over 27,000 earlier this year.

Managing finances properly is mainly common sense. While we’ve all made financial mistakes, most of those mistakes are easily rectified, particularly when promptly corrected. However, there are some financial decisions that can be much harder to recover from. Here are just a few of them:

Stepped-up volatility has become the order of the day on Wall Street, something that had not been the case for much of this year.

A college education, while a worthy achievement, does not come cheaply. Forbes has estimated that the price of a college education has increased 8 times faster than wages, making it a struggle for even upper middle-class families.

The waters have turned choppy on Wall Street, with international brewing that may continue to affect our economy and financial markets. Thus, our market, which had set one record after another, has come under pressure recently.

Managing finances properly is mainly common sense. While we’ve all made financial mistakes, most of those mistakes are easily rectified, particularly when promptly corrected. However, there are some financial decisions that can be much harder to recover from. Here are just a few of them:

The economy is stumbling out of the gate this year, with the painful government shutdown, a sudden drop in existing home sales, and a marked downturn in consumer sentiment behind much of this early 2019 slowdown. Of course, the big story is the shutdown.

Personal finance, like just about everything else, is mainly common sense. Advice like “don’t spend more than you make; start investing while you’re young; don’t loan money to friends with the expectation of getting it back,” have been around for generations, and most likely will survive the next few generations as well.

Earnings reporting season is well under way, with expectations for the recently ended fourth quarter still quite positive. In all, forecasts call for another double-digit percentage rise in S&P 500 earnings, as companies capitalize on recent economic gains.