Q: I don’t see how I’m ever going to be able to retire. I’m 50 and earn $60,000 a year; my wife makes $40,000, and we have saved nothing. I need a job where I can earn more money, or I’ll be broke for the rest of my life. – Jake

Kate: $100,000 a year is a lot of money. The bottom line is this: You and your wife are spending too much. Many people confuse income with retained wealth: Income is what you earn per year; wealth is what you don’t spend, but save and accumulate. If you could start now to live well beneath your means, you are much more likely to end up wealthy.

Dale: We live in a culture where many of our brightest people are devoted to finding new ways to separate us from our incomes, so self-discipline has powerful foes. We end up falling into the “20 percent fallacy.” Talk to people about finances, and most believe that if only they made 20 percent more, they’d be set. However, should they get such a raise, within a year or two they are right back to “if only.” The way out is to combine a higher-paying job with an automatic-investment program. Only if the money goes into investments before you see it do you have a chance to accumulate savings. For most people, getting from “if only” to “only if” is their one shot at wealth.

Q: Thanks for running my previous letter about inappropriate and stupid interview questions. My point was that some human resource interviews are an exercise in amateur psychology of the worst sort. If you’ve applied for a job, and you are asked questions about “stamina,” “affability,” “loyalty” and so forth, who in his or her right mind would respond negatively? “Do you have good stamina?” “Naw, I tend to poop out after about 15 minutes and slip off to take a nap.” Natural modesty for most people would forbid them from bragging too much, of course; and one would think that a respondent who might say, “I’m strong as a bull and can work 14 hours without a break!” would be discounted. – Clay

Kate: We spend a lot of time in our job-search groups teaching people to brag. Here’s our joke question: “How good were you at that job?”

Typical answer: “Very good!”

Next question: “How good?”

Typical response: “Very, very good!”

I hope you can see that such responses are useless. The answer must be specific and positive. Whether you or I like the question is not relevant. What IS relevant is what kind of answer works. Bragging, if not carried to an extreme, works. Modesty does not. Thus, the two extremes you mentioned are both doomed. How about an answer in the middle, one that takes the interviewer seriously and gets across the point that you do indeed have stamina?

Dale: I once watched a television interviewer ask the novelist Norman Mailer a series of inane questions. He eventually leaned over as if to peek at the clipboard in her lap and said, “What’s on the next page?” And I can see how you might yearn to interrupt a job interview with, “Why ask such a dumb question?” But what if you asked yourself a smart question: “What are they concerned about that makes them ask that question?” Then, if you have come prepared with a list of accomplishments to talk about, and you have asked questions before and during the interview that helped you figure out just what kind of person the company wants to hire, you are set to give a great answer to a bad question. If you know they are concerned about getting a team player, and they ask about stamina, you say: “I never let down the team. I always do my part and a bit more. One time ….” Then you are off telling a story of working until midnight or whatever. Forget the interviewer’s technique, and start making the answer better than the question.