Using a sample consisting of 4,997 married couples from the National Survey of Families and Households, individual emotional distress, the occurrence of couple disagreements, couple fighting, and couple quality time together mediated the relationship between financial strain and personal assessments of marital instability. The overall results suggest that financial strain influences both positive and negative forms of couple interaction which are stronger mediators than personal emotional distress of the relationship between financial strain and marital instability. The results further suggest that there were no gender differences among these linkages. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2007Couple interaction, Disagreements, Financial strain, Marital conflict, Marital instability,

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Sequential decision‐making principles are introduced which can be applied to mutual fund investing. Specific attention is given to the nature of the mutual fund market and the expected pay‐off from a low‐cost information search. Empirical results are based on historical returns and information that is readily available in popular press sources. Substantial variation in historical performance was found and the pay‐off from a market search was positive and substantial in many cases.

Index Terms-Diversified retirement portfolio, income replacement in retirement, retirement account multiple (RAM), withdrawal rate.