“Annuities have a lot going for them, including the ability to create guaranteed streams of lifetime income. But what happens to your annuity if you die sooner than expected?”

One common argument against annuities comes from people who say that if you die sooner than anticipated, your family will get none of your annuity money. That could be true in some cases. However, if you correctly structure an annuity, you can leave something to your family if you die too soon while still providing yourself with lifetime income.

Two basic categories of annuities

There are two categories of annuity products.

One type of annuity helps you accumulate money for retirement, and the other type...

Once relegated to the global financial system’s outermost fringes, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum have entered the mainstream consciousness in a dramatic and disruptive fashion.

Many of us think of cryptocurrency as new. But the idea of creating a more open and accessible financial system with greater privacy and lower costs dates back to the 1980s.

Bitcoin was the first viable cryptocurrency, although there had been several previous attempts at designing more private ways to perform financial transactions.

Initially, Bitcoin enthusiasts were a select group of early adopters, mainly programmers and technologists. Computer programmer Hal Finney was the first to...

In elementary school, we learn that a noun is a “person, place or thing.” Rabbit. Cereal. Toilet. Especially toilet. Words like “toilet” make Mad Libs a hit with my kids when we take road trips.


However, at some point down the line, we learn that an “idea” is also a noun. I don’t know which governing English language body decided this or at what point it became part of the school curriculum, but I’ll bet it was met with the same backlash as Pluto being relegated to a lower-level planet.


Yes, ideas are nouns, and they’re my favorite types of nouns. These ideas were the ones the Founding Fathers often capitalized, and that the Bible extols: joy, honesty, freedom...

Of all the Scrabble letters, Q and Z hold the most value, at 10 points apiece. In 1982, Karl Khoshnaw — the Michael Jordan of Scrabble — used both letters to spell the word “caziques.” Caziques (plural form of a type of oriole) earned Khoshnaw 392 points, which still is the world’s top-scoring single Scrabble move ever.

You don’t see many Q words out there, but one has always intrigued me: queue. I’ve seen the following phrase online in many language humor forums, which probably means Mark Twain said it: “‘Queue’ is just the letter ‘Q’ and four silent vowels waiting in line.”

Queue can’t be a word. It looks ridiculous and feels even more strange to type...