By Christine Benz of Morningstar

If a knowledgeable observer trained his or her sights on my choices, what are the trouble spots they would identify? Here are some of the biggies.

I hold too much employer stock

I understand the tax implications of this, so I might as well sell each lot of restricted stock units as soon as it vests because there’s no tax benefit to hanging on longer. And it’s not like I think I possess some inside knowledge that the shares are likely to outperform the broad market.

Instead, the key culprit here is inertia. There’s a little bit of tax dread mixed in, too, as selling them would trigger a big tax bill. I’ve been in the process of divesting from company stock for the past several years, but the allocation is still high.

I hold too much cash

Even when cash yields are higher, as they are today, inflation still gobbles up most of the interest.

Cash has stacked up in our account following bonuses or other windfalls, or during fallow spending periods like 2020. And it just never feels like an especially great time to move the money into long-term investments.

Perhaps most important, having cash on hand confers valuable peace of mind. I like knowing that almost anything could happen, and we’d be able to cover it without touching our long-term investments. I think of cash as one of my luxury goods.

I don’t hold much in bonds

My husband and I should have a good slug of retirement assets in fixed-income investments at our life stage. But our portfolio is oddly barbelled, with a healthy dose of cash alongside a long-term portfolio that’smainly invested in equities.

In a way, I think the cash and the equities work together from a psychological perspective, with the liquid assets giving us peace of mind to stay the course with stocks.

But the lack of bonds isn’t really deliberate. Instead, inertia is probably the main reason. We set up our long-term portfolios with heavy equity allocations in our 30s, and we’ve never really wavered. But this is something that I’d like to address as retirement approaches.

I don’t have a perfect record with ‘asset location’

There’s a fantastic fund I own—but in our taxable brokerage account. If I could do it again, I’d buy this fund in a tax-sheltered account, because it has made some significant capital gains distributions over the years, which have boosted our household’s annual tax bills.

Asset-location problems can be difficult to fix. Even though our reinvested capital gains have helped boost our cost basis, we would still owe a big tax bill if we liquidated the position because of the fund’s gains.

I’m slow to make IRA contributions

Ideally, IRA contributions would go in right around the first of the year, to benefit from tax-sheltered compounding for a longer period. And our IRAs sit right alongside our taxable brokerage account, so transferring funds from the brokerage account to the IRA and converting them to Roth is simple.

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But I’ve sometimes made those IRA contributions right before the deadline, a full 15 months later than when we were first eligible to make them. I’ve also been slow to make the conversions to Roth, periodically letting a few years’ worth of contributions stack up in our IRAs before converting.

The baby bear market of March 2020 provided a good opportunity to convert all the traditional IRA assets to Roth with no tax repercussions. I’ve been walking the straight and narrow—with timely contributions and conversions —ever since.

This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance

Christine Benz is director of personal finance for Morningstar.

OK, I’ll say it. I’m sick of superheroes. I blame the Marvel Cinematic Universe (36 movies and counting over 17 years) and the DC Extended Universe (43 movies and counting, mostly since the late 1970s). Maybe Earth’s not big enough for two universes. They’re running pretty thin these days, down to rebooting reboots, making sequels for prequels and squeezing every ounce from the intellectual property tube to fill out streaming platform minutes.

But there’s always Superman. The Krypton-born alien, orphaned, sent off into space for survival and then raised by adoptive parents in Kansas. He’s now been with American pop culture for 10 decades (eight in film). Despite an outfit modeled after a circus strongman, he’s become a durable, transcendent symbol of the ultimate immigrant and somehow a simultaneous embodiment of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.”

Superman’s the classic American good guy, and so the opening of the new “Superman” with David Corenswet is a great time to think about the real good guys and gals in American life — that is, if you can find any. Where are all the good guys and gals in America? What qualifies someone for the title these days?

The idea has definitely shifted. It’s as if by sheer screen volume the fake superheroes overwhelmed the public consciousness. Superheroes are dialed up so high we can’t hear what real heroes sound like anymore. A 2008 poll in Britain found almost a quarter thought Winston Churchill was fake, while a majority of Britons believed Sherlock Holmes was real.

We’ve become confused: We prefer to watch fake heroes on screen rather than expect real ones to emerge in life. And so the fake ones become the only kind of hero we recognize.

The historian Daniel Boorstin described this transition from heroism to fame in his 1961 book “The Image.” He noted that heroes in American history were typically known for great public contribution through immense difficulty and danger. It didn’t matter much what they looked like because their deeds had saved lives and mattered to so many.

But pictures and movies changed everything in the 20th century. Heroes became celebrities. We traded away enduring contributions to the public good in exchange for flimsy, flashy fame that works for a paycheck. Value over values; money over all.

This isn’t hard to see. Look at how college sports has been conquered by contracts and name-image-likeness deals. How law firms kowtowed to an administration making unprecedented demands. How media heavyweights keep bending knees to the same. And let’s not get started with social media “influencers” except to say that doing the right and honest thing has been swept aside by the twin tsunamis of popularity and the Almighty Buck.

Where’s our real truth, our real justice, our real American way?

Not in Congress. The “Big Beautiful Bill” is a perfect example. It might take a Mt. Rushmore makeover to honor the profound contributions to cowardice in the votes surrounding this act. Rep. Jeff Crank, R-Colo., couldn’t vote fast enough to add trillions to the national debt despite arguing, less than a year ago, that Congress is “turning a blind eye to this $35 trillion in debt,” that it’s “unsustainable” and that “we have to get our fiscal house in order, and we have to do this for our children and our grandchildren.”

Or Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, long-time fiscal hawk on the debt, who repeatedly railed against the Big Beautiful Bill’s deficit spending in the final stretch. And then he voted for it.

Or Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., known for saying “we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid” because “slashing health insurance for the working poor” would be “both morally and politically suicidal.” That was in May. But come July, Hawley voted to cut Medicaid.

The final vote came down to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. In a mid-June town hall, she said, “I have made clear very early on that we cannot move forward with a bill that makes cuts to Medicaid.” And yet, despite the fact that nearly 40,000 Alaskans (more than 5% of the state’s population) will likely lose their healthcare coverage as a direct result of the bill, Murkowski caved.

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Sarah Longwell, founder and publisher of the Bulwark, spared nothing in her criticism of Murkowski. She wrote that this one action “defines our pathetic political moment,” embodying:

“Selfishness: I’m taking care of me and mine, the rest of you can pound sand;

Lack of accountability: I know the bill is bad, hopefully someone else will fix it;

Cowardice: I’m scared of Trump and his voters and need to go-along to get along with my GOP colleagues;

Moral rot: I know the difference between right and wrong, and actively chose wrong.”

Not exactly Superman. Sounds more like Lex Luthor at his most self-serving and callous.

We don’t need someone faster than a speeding bullet in the House. We don’t need senators leaping tall buildings in a single bound. We don’t need Superman.

But we do need our Clark Kents and Lois Lanes to step up. We do need our real heroes right now. Maybe Crank or Roy or Hawley or Murkowski will see the movie this weekend. Maybe they’ll find some courage for the next vote.

Maybe.

ML Cavanaugh is the author of the forthcoming book “Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before.” A 2002 West Point graduate, Cavanaugh is a retired lieutenant colonel and US Army Strategist who earned two Bronze Star Medals and the Combat Action Badge for his time in the Iraq War. He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

President Donald Trump has taken to routinely maligning Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell as “too late” because interest rates have been on hold at 4.25%-4.5% since he took office.

On Tuesday alone, he characteristically took to social media to demand three percentage points of rate cuts — something that is never going to happen outside of a recession. Trump’s needling aside, the latest inflation data show that Powell’s wait-and-see approach is the exact right tack for today’s economic outlook.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday that the core consumer price index rose 0.2% in June from a month earlier, a slightly encouraging surprise that leaves the year-over-year rate at 2.9%. But the reading remains well above the Fed’s 2% target, and the details of the report show that tariffs are starting to fan higher prices and that larger effects might start to feed through over the next couple of months. (The Fed’s target is technically based on the personal consumption expenditures price index, which will be released later in the month. Core CPI constituents feed into that calculation and the two gauges currently produce similar assessments about the state of U.S. inflation.)

More specifically, core goods rose 0.2% in June from a month earlier, the most brisk pace since February, driven in large part by a jump in household furnishings and supplies — a telltale sign of tariff passthrough. That category (think appliances, rugs, housekeeping supplies, etc.) jumped by 1% from the prior month, the biggest such increase since January 2022. Also notching the biggest month-on-month jump since 2022 were recreation commodities (sporting goods, toys, video equipment, etc.). Not only were tariff impacts undeniable this month, they appeared to be broadening out from what had been a very light and scattered influence in previous months’ data.

Still, this was neither a month to panic nor celebrate. With the backdrop of a steady unemployment rate, it’s time to do as the embattled Fed chair — whom Trump has committed to replacing when his term is up next year — has been advising all along: Wait for more data.

Among Fed policymakers and private sector economists, the general view of tariffs has been that they would hit sometime over the summer. For starters, Trump’s biggest and broadest tariff salvo didn’t come until April. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists estimate that it takes about a month for many imports to reach U.S. shores, and goods were exempt if they were already on the ship at the time of the “Liberation Day” duties.

What’s more, businesses stockpiled inventory in advance of the deadline and Customs and Border Protection allows many importers to delay payments for up to a month and a half. Hence, many forecasters expected June to be the start of a tariff-impact story that could become more evident in July and August.

Powell has been broadly in that camp. At the post-decision press conference in June, he said that he expected to learn more “over the summer” about tariffs. “We hadn’t expected them to show up much by now, and they haven’t,” he said. “And we will see the extent to which they do over the coming months.” In markets, his comments have been broadly interpreted to mean that further rate cuts were possible (though hardly guaranteed) as soon as September, and that still feels appropriate. By that time, the committee will have additional inflation data in hand for the months of July and August.

Unfortunately, Trump has used his social media platform to advocate for more immediate cuts, and his Council of Economic Advisers recently published an analysis that found no evidence that tariffs have caused “any economically meaningful inflation.” Inflation Insights President Omair Sharif wrote Monday that the council had gotten ahead of itself. “Setting aside the methodology for a moment, if the main point of the CEA’s analysis is to suggest that tariffs are not impacting inflation, then I think they’ve spiked the ball at the 50-yard line,” he said.

It’s entirely possible, of course, that tariff impacts could spread further and that the Fed will still lower policy rates. The central bank doesn’t have to wait for inflation to return to 2% to start lowering rates again; rates are clearly at a level that the median Fed policymaker would deem restrictive. Powell and his colleagues just need to gain confidence that it remains on the right trajectory.

Furthermore, tariffs are generally seen as a one-off increase in prices — the sort of supply shock that monetary policy orthodoxy would tell you to “look through.” The ultimate question as it pertains to trade policy is whether tariffs will shock expectations to such an extent that inflation gets back into the bones of the economy. That may depend on both the magnitude of the tariff impacts and their duration. And all of those variables depend, in turn, on whether Trump decides to temper the policies — as he’s occasionally proved willing to do, especially when financial markets react badly.

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To some extent, monetary policy will also depend on what happens with other key categories in the inflation basket. Among major imported goods, the auto sector is a big question mark. While tariffs are driving up car prices and threatening profit margins, the government data showed that prices of both new and used vehicles fell in June from May — a reminder that the duties aren’t the only consideration. Dealers are also contending with high borrowing costs and a general affordability crunch that’s weighing on demand. Many are uncertain about whether they can increase prices without hitting customer traffic and market share.

What’s more, it’s important to remember that core services — which aren’t directly impacted by the tariffs — still constitute about three-quarters of core CPI and about two-thirds of inflation overall. As such, it’s plausible that services disinflation could mitigate the jumps in certain core goods prices, especially if shelter inflation remains as tame as it’s been for the better part of 2025.

With all the crosscurrents, the responsible solution is for policymakers to wait for more evidence, and that’s exactly what the Fed is doing under Powell’s stewardship.

No matter what the partisans around the White House say, the chairman is handling tariff uncertainty about as well as you could ask for.

Jonathan Levin is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist focused on U.S. markets and economics. Previously, he worked as a Bloomberg journalist in the U.S., Brazil and Mexico. He is a CFA charterholder.

A new thriller from an award-winning author, a memoir of confronting epilepsy, and a heads-up about new books detailing the careers of two important Minnesota politicians are just right for summer reading.

(Courtesy of the author)

“The Laughing Dead”: by Jess Lourey (Thomas & Mercer, $16.99)

But I wasn’t a witch. I was a woman who’d been regularly terrorized as a kid and so had sharpened to a razor’s edge the instinct every human possessed. Who hasn’t connected two seemingly unrelated facts to come up with an unexpected truth, or felt a tingle telling them they were being lied to, or had a dream about someone they hadn’t seen in years the night before running into them on the street? — From “The Laughing Dead“

Jess Lourey (Courtesy of the author)

Corpses with twisted grins are at the center of bestselling Minnesotan author Jess Lourey’s fourth carefully crafted thriller featuring BCA cold case agent Evangeline “Van” Reed and her partner, forensic scientist Harry Steinbeck. And a twisted story it is, when the bodies of three teenage girls are found in central  Minnesota and dubbed by the press “the laughing dead” for their ghoulish smiles.

Lourey begins with what happened to the three girls who ended up dead in the 1980s. But what the investigators don’t know at first is that there was a fourth teen who lived. That girl, known as Just Judy, came under the spell of a man whom she learned to love and obey as they set up a farm where young girls were kept by the charismatic man who ruled, God-like, over The Mothers and the children. It takes Van and Steinbeck’s team a lot of digging before they realize what happened to Judy and who was responsible for the other girls’ murders. Chapters about Judy’s years running the farm and how women can be in the thrall of a charming but abusive man are interspersed with chapters about the investigation.

The Laughing Dead case gets personal for Van when her old police ID is found at the scene of one of the deaths, much to the delight of a former police colleague who drove her out of the department when he called her a witch because of her uncanny ability to intuit some things. And why does she keep finding red scarves everywhere she goes? As the investigation continues, a secret Van has been keeping her entire life is returning. She is also hiding from Steinbeck important information about the abduction of his sister years earlier, which she learned about when the partners were in Duluth in Lourey’s previous book, “The Reaping.”

Van and Steinbeck are opposites, which makes them a good team. Van is messy, intuitive and ready to take risks. Steinbeck, who dresses like a GQ model, is calm, rational and always there for Van.

Lourey, whose thrillers are sympathetic to women victims of all kinds of crimes, is author of the light-hearted Murder by Month series, Salem’s Cipher thrillers and stand-alone thrillers including the popular “The Quarry Girls.” When Lourey isn’t writing or traveling, she maintains a popular online presence detailing the goofiness of her foster kittens. 

(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press)

“Racing Uphill”: by Stacia Kalinoski  (University of Minnesota Press, $19.95)

The one detail I failed to remember was that each of my seizures had repercussions. The hard-fought reality that my worsening memory would eventually make reporting impossible if the seizures continued had not completely set in. Epilepsy had already taken away my personal life and marathon racing, but the possibility of losing my career seemed impossible. I never could have imagined that a seizure could affect so many other people. — from “Racing Uphill”

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Stacia Kalinoski’s involving memoir, subtitled “Confronting Life With Epilepsy,” is an eye-opening look into a neurological condition that affects 55,000 Minnesotans. Kalinoski’s story is so compelling that her documentary about the disease, “Brainstorm,” was broadcast on public television.

After competing in a variety of sports in high school and in marathons at the University of Minnesota, Kalinoski was climbing the career ladder as a TV reporter at stations in Nebraska and Oregon while continuing to compete in marathons, in denial about her continuing seizures and always pushing herself to do better. She was working at the job she loved at a station in Michigan where her understanding boss wrote a plan for the staff to follow if Stacia had an episode. But when she was 29 she regained consciousness on a couch at the station, and this seizure ended her journalism career. (She later won an Emmy for her reporting.)

There was no longer any way for Kalinoski to hide the electrical storms in her brain and the vivid auras preceding them, so she returned to the Twin Cities searching for a cure. Like a good reporter, she weaves her personal story into her interviews with prominent specialists who explain how seizures spread in the brain, steal memories and create mood disorders. They also cause strange behavior that stigmatizes those with the disease, as Kalinoski found out when she was confronted at a gym by a man who insulted her for what he perceived as strange behavior. That’s one reason she shares her experiences now as a motivational speaker.

It’s fortunate Kalinoski lived in the Twin Cities, where help is available to diagnose and mitigate her epilepsy.  After numerous tests that included brain mapping and visits to doctors at United Hospital, she had the courage to undergo brain surgery.

Her surgery went well, and now she walks instead of running. In the end, she writes:

“There is no doubt that the determination and resilience I found in athletics got me through my job loss and surgery. One phrase you’ll hear repeatedly from coaches and athletes is ‘Don’t give up.’ But it’s more than that… don’t give up on yourself.”

Lori Sturdevant’s name is on new books from Minnesota Historical Society Press about state politicians. “Perpich: A Minnesota Original” written by Ben Schierer with Sturdevant, is about DFLer Rudy Perpich, the state’s longest-serving governor. The book, crafted from oral histories of influential leaders, traces his story from his youth on the Iron Range to his years globetrotting on economic  tours and developing major construction projects. He is also the first governor to have a female lieutenant governor, Marlene Johnson, who tells her story in her recent memoir “Rise to the Challenge” (University of Minnesota Press).

Sturdevant is author of “Martin Sabo: The Making of the Modern Legislature,” about Sabo’s influence on Minnesota state government during his years as DFL speaker of the House of Representatives.