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...

The nation added an estimated 29,000 jobs in September. That figure fell well short of the consensus forecast of 84,000 and was accompanied by a 60,000 reduction to the prior two months’ tallies. Likewise, the unemployment rate ticked up from 4.1% to 4.2%. However, there were some encouraging signs, including the increase in the labor force participation rate, to 61.8%, and a gain in manufacturing and construction jobs. Inflation is still high, but the rate...

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...