I’ve been lucky: My father taught me one particularly invaluable lesson. He used to say, “If you spend more than you take in, you go broke!” I paid attention, so, no matter the ups and downs of my working life, I never spent more than I earned. The only debts I incurred were small mortgages on houses we lived in. While we worked, I had an IRA and my wife had a 401K. Then, more luck: My mother-in-law left us a small inheritance with which I paid off the mortgage on our current house, and an act of kindness on my part led a friend to leave us her house when she died, and recently the V.A. awarded me disability compensation for my ALS. I’m truly risk-averse, so our investments are conservative, and we lost nothing, not a dime, in the current meltdown. As I said, I paid attention to my dad’s lesson.