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DON'T LET YOUR HUSBAND DIE BROKE

© Henry L. Lefevre

Being a child of the depression, I find caution well worth the price. I nurture, pamper, and feed my caution to make reasonably sure that I don't end up in the poor house.

The poor house? Well we used to have that fallback alternative. Today, I'm not sure. The poor houses of today don't seem to be sturdy and reliable as they were in my youth. They might no longer be there to provide oldsters with even that option.

My objective today is to keep my tummy thin and my checkbook fat. Since both objectives require discipline, I've developed the following rules to keep my objectives in reach.

1. I avoid consuming more than my body weight during any 48-hours. Food cost money. I also tend to get fat whenever I average more than thirty-six five course per week. Being a lover of food, I find those limits tough, but the alternative to disciplining myself involves putting on weight. Additional rules I follow when controlling my gut were covered in the "Get the Lead Out" article I published last month.

2. I control most of my funds. Letting an advisor take over my checkbook is like letting a hungry cat baby-sit mice. In one case, the cat gets fat and the mice disappear. In the other case, the checkbook gets thin and my funds go the way of the mice. It is bad enough to lose a dollar or two by putting my savings in the wrong dot-com flyer. It's worse to have someone who has no vested interest in my welfare get the pleasure of squandering my funds.

3. I Diversify, making sure that no more than ten-percent of my eggs are located in any one bird nest. That way, if the weakest nest is flimsy or has too many holes, I don't have to scrape two dozen yokes off the sidewalk and turn them into mega-sized omelets. For those who think that I'm overcautious, look at what happened to those who put all of their savings in Enron. Those taken in by Enron lost almost all of that part of their savings. Those who limited their investment in Enron to less than ten-percent of their holdings didn't have to eat scrambled nest eggs nearly as long.

4. I sleep comfortably with part of my savings guarded by the Dogs of the Dow. The Dogs of the Dow represent the ten Dow stocks providing their owners with the highest dividend yields. Historically, the Dogs of the Dow outperform the Dow Jones Averages on a year-to-year basis with very few exceptions. Even the exceptions are minor. As a consequence, this stock strategy provides me with an investment in ten of the largest and most well known companies in America. Those stocks, in turn, provide relatively good dividends. If any Dow stock goes bust, the entire stock market is in trouble. If all ten of the Dogs of the Dow went bust, we would be in a gigantic depression that would make the 1929-1941 fiasco look like Nirvana.