Many people picture a scam as something obviously off: a strange email, a robotic voice, a too-good-to-be-true offer. The more dangerous version sounds like rescue. A calm, professional voice tells you your bank account has been compromised, and they’re calling to help you fix it before it’s too late. That’s what makes it work. Impersonation scams, where criminals pose as banks, financial institutions and other trusted businesses, have become one of the more common ways...

It's easy to set estate planning aside once you've done a version of it. You sign the paperwork. You name a beneficiary. You mentally close the file. The only thing is, the file keeps changing. Accounts get opened. Families grow. Laws shift. And in the space between signing and revisiting, a handful of reasonable-sounding assumptions can start to stand in for an up-to-date plan. Here are six of those assumptions, along with what tends to...

Many people can tell you their portfolio balance. Far fewer can tell you what else determines whether their retirement actually works. That's understandable. The balance is the number on the statement. It's concrete, and it feels like a score. But judging retirement readiness by that one figure is a little like judging your health by your weight—useful, and nowhere near the whole story. A framework published in the Journal of Financial Planning offers a wider...