Testosterone therapy could help boost women's sex drive as they age, but risks exist, experts say

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Saul Loeb/GettyDonald Trump Jr. reposted a claim Sunday that Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during her interview with Oprah Winfrey.The accusation was quickly debunked by supporters of the Democratic presidential nominee, who insisted that Winfrey was using the teleprompter and not Harris.The lines on the prompter were reportedly being fed to the former daytime TV queen as she wound up the virtual interview Thursday.Read more at The Daily Beast.

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NBCFrom good doctors to sexy doctors to funny doctors to Chicago doctors, network TV has no shortage of medical professionals wandering its fictional hospital halls. Now NBC has a new twist on the age-old formula: What if there were a doctor with… face blindness?Okay, to be fair, face blindness is just one of the many quirks that characterize Zachary Quinto’s brilliant neurosurgeon Dr. Oliver Wolf. He also swims in the Hudson River, obsesses over his plants, hates interacting with his co-workers, and will do anything for his patients, including smuggling them across town on his motorcycle when he thinks they need a day out. Still, it’s hard to ignore the hook that sounds like the set-up for a joke even though it’s at least somewhat based on reality.Brilliant Minds, which premieres Sept. 23, is loosely inspired by real-life neurologist Oliver Sacks, who had prosopagnosia (aka. face blindness) and published stories of unique medical cases like his own in popular books like 1985’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. While Sacks was born in interwar London and started his career in the 1960s, Brilliant Minds sets its story in an overcrowded, understaffed present-day Bronx hospital that’s the only place in town still willing to take a chance on Dr. Wolf’s rule-bending approach.Read more at The Daily Beast.

MubiWho would ever want to turn Demi Moore into a monster? That’s precisely what director and writer Coralie Fargeat does in Moore’s latest film, The Substance, which is in theaters now. And as it happens, the transformation is a career-defining role for Moore.In the film, Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who, on her 50th birthday, is fired from her long-running fitness show. In her grief about losing her job and aging, she begins taking a drug, referred to as “The Substance,” that promises to make her into a better and younger version of herself.Taking The Substance is not exactly what it seems. Elisabeth essentially births, in quite grotesque fashion, a younger version of herself, called Sue and played by Margaret Qualley. There are processes that must be followed to keep Sue and Elisabeth separate. When Sue goes haywire and ignores those rules, there are unexpected, monstrous side effects that slowly change Elisabeth’s body in disgusting ways.Read more at The Daily Beast.

"I am currently unable to bear the financial burden of the ongoing litigation against [Julia Haart], nor can I afford to sustain the fees for my own legal counsel,” he wrote.

Jay-Z's group would give an initial $15 million to the local community, plus ongoing grants based on .5% of the casino's performance, they say.

World peace. Calorie-free cheesecake. Sensible politicians with your interests at heart. Like all these pipe dreams, investment strategies promising both growth and capital preservation are phony baloney.

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Wikimedia CommonsA swimmer who scratched a racial slur onto the body of another student is no longer enrolled at Gettysburg College, the school said. The incident, in which the N-word was allegedly cut into a student’s chest using a box cutter, happened at a gathering of the Pennsylvania college’s swim team at which the victim was the only person of color, the victim’s family said in a statement. “The reprehensible act was committed by a fellow student-athlete, someone he considered his friend, someone whom he trusted,” the victim’s family added, saying their loved one was the victim of a “hate crime.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Sally Rooney at the Hay Festival on May 28, 2017, in Hay-on-Wye, United Kingdom. | David Levenson/Getty Images Intermezzo, the first new book by Sally Rooney in three years, comes freighted with expectations. What will our first great millennial novelist do next? Will her new offering leave readers as emotionally wrecked as her previous works?  Rooney, who is Irish, writes elegant, emotionally rich novels, mostly about young people in Dublin struggling to navigate their endlessly fraught love lives under late capitalism. Her first two novels, Conversations with Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018), were both runaway successes. They were adapted into hit TV shows and launched the careers of their young stars. Professionally beautiful people kept getting photographed carrying the books around, with covers in strategically prominent places, like they were the hot new handbag of the season. With her last offering, 2021’s Beautiful World, Where Are You?, her publishers took the accessorizing literally: Big-name influencers could score a Beautiful World bucket hat and a Beautiful World tote bag to wear with their Beautiful World book.  @fsgbooks What’s in our #SallyRooney tote bag? #fsgbooks #booktok #augustblue #whatsinmybag ♬ capacious bag – SSENSE Rooney is that rarest of creatures, a unicorn of the 21st century, a celebrity author of literary fiction. Any new book by her faces a certain amount of unavoidable scrutiny: After all this time, does she still live up to the hype? I’m happy to report that Intermezzo is exquisite. While the experimental and polarizing Beautiful World stayed largely out of the minds of its characters, with occasionally chilly results, Intermezzo is all rich inner monologue, as deeply felt as Normal People.  What’s more, it offers something for which Rooney seems to have been looking for a long time: a new way forward through the central concerns of her work. Here, love is played out through familial relationships rather than just romances, with male characters rather than dry intellectual women — and Rooney appears, for the first time, to be ready to stop apologizing for the romanticism of her work. Rooney’s previous novels played with Austen/Brontë tropes. In Normal People, college students Connell and Marianne are clearly meant for each other, but they keep breaking up in part because of their class differences. In Conversations with Friends, young Frances has to navigate her love for older, married Nick. This is the stuff of the marriage novels of 19th-century England, updated with texting and Marxism. Intermezzo, in contrast, is a play on the great Russian novels. It’s interested in questions about God, how we care for each other, and what gives life meaning. At the center of Intermezzo are two brothers, Peter and Ivan, lapsed Catholics who are struggling with the recent death of their father. Peter is 32, a lawyer, fastidious about the cut of his suits and the fabric of his scarves and the way he smiles at strangers, so as “to convey to the world at large a genial disposition.” Ivan is 22 and painfully awkward, still wearing braces, and considers himself almost incapable of interacting with other people.  “Certain kind of panache in his absolute disregard for the material world,” Peter thinks of Ivan. “Peter is the kind of person who goes along the surface of life very smoothly,” Ivan thinks of Peter. As a pair, they form a kind of study in different ways self-hatred can manifest: through either indifference to the outside world or meticulous attention to it.  We meet Peter and Ivan in the immediate aftermath of their father’s funeral, but both of them have other problems to deal with. Peter is still in love with his ex-girlfriend Sylvie, but after a vaguely-described traumatic injury has left her unable to have sex, she’s broken things off with him. (The plot devices you can get away with when you’re Sally Rooney!) Now he’s entangled with a college student and camgirl named Naomi, and fears he might be falling in love with her, too.   All this Rooney narrates in textured, impressionistic sentence fragments, thoughts flitting across Peter’s mind like birds you see flapping across a window pane, there and then gone. “The old life of pleasure gone and never returning,” Peter thinks as he waits to meet lost Sylvie: “accept, or else delude yourself, all the same in the end. The will to live so much stronger than anyone imagines.” He thinks about suicide, and whether God would ever forgive him for it.  Meanwhile, Ivan, a once-precocious teen chess prodigy who has seen his ranking drop in recent years, lives his life in complete sentences, clauses piled upon clauses, his inner monologue so sweetly innocent as to become transparent. “He feels himself to have been formed, somehow, with something other than life in mind,” Ivan thinks of himself. “He has his good qualities, kind of, but none of them have much to do with living in the world that he actually lives in, the only world that can be said in a fairly real way to exist.”  The plot devices you can get away with when you’re Sally Rooney! Ivan finds himself steadily more depressed to be living a life organized around chess, as he feels he probably hit his peak at age 15. His life starts to turn around when he meets 36-year-old Margaret, an elegant divorcée living in a small town where Ivan plays an exhibition chess game. Margaret becomes the third point-of-view character of Intermezzo, thinking in sedate, polished sentences about her confusing attraction to Ivan and how, playing chess, “his hands look precise and elegant, like the hands of a surgeon or a pianist.”  Their developing relationship is redemptive for Ivan, who has always considered himself beneath the attention of women, but ruinous for Margaret’s reputation in her conservative town. And while Peter is himself dating a college student, he doesn’t think it plausible that a “normal woman” of Margaret’s age would want anything to do with Ivan. The fight the brothers have over Margaret spirals out of control to be about their entire lives: how they cared for their father, how they should care for the family dog, what they owe to one another. One of the big questions in this novel is the question of God. Ivan thinks that he can find God when playing really good chess: “It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all.” Margaret, meanwhile, says that she doesn’t think about God in terms of beauty. “I suppose my idea of God is more to do with morality. What’s right and wrong,” she says. This binary between beauty and morality is traditionally at the center of Rooney novels. Her books are obsessed with whether or not it’s all right to live a life focused on aesthetic pleasure — playing chess like Ivan or writing stories like Connell in Normal People— when so much is wrong with the world and there’s so much political work to be done. By extension, they are obsessed with novels as an art form that exists so that their readers can experience beauty. “It feels intellectually unserious to concern himself with fictional people marrying one another,” thinks Connell in Normal People when he finds himself in “a state of strange emotional agitation” over Jane Austen’s Emma. Meanwhile, celebrity novelist Alice declares in Beautiful World that the problem with Western contemporary literature is that it relies on “suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth,” disowning her own work as insufficiently engaged with real human suffering.  Her books are obsessed with whether or not it’s all right to live a life focused on aesthetic pleasure when so much is wrong with the world Is it all right, Rooney novels tend to wonder, fretfully, to devote your life to the beauty of novels when, after all, probably the only morally correct thing to do in our current society is to start a Marxist revolution and blow up pipelines? Strikingly, though, in Intermezzo, Rooney introduces this binary and then collapses it almost immediately. “To me, it seems like it might be all related,” Ivan says. “Like, I don’t know, to find beauty in life, maybe it’s related to right and wrong.” As the novel goes on, Rooney continues to develop this idea: that perhaps the things in our lives that are beautiful and bring us joy should be embraced, even if other people might think that they’re wrong, and that perhaps this will lead us to goodness as God understands it. In chess, an intermezzo is an “in-between” move that turns a game in an unexpected direction. One way of reading Rooney’s Intermezzo might be as a bridge piece between the books she wrote in her 20s and what’s coming in her 30s: the novels that wondered if they had the right to exist, and the books that are done apologizing for what they are: richly realized novels about love and friendship and the way that both can make us whole as human beings. In the meantime, Intermezzo works beautifully as a book all its own. It’s as tender and lovely as you could ask for, and beneath the elegant rise and fall of Rooney’s oceanic sentences, the waters go deep.

Here’s everything you need to know as Jayden Daniels and the Washington Commanders meet Joe Burrow’s Cincinnati Bengals on “Monday Night Football.”

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In June 2022, the man known online as “Conservative Anthony” drove me to a couple of what he calls migrant “hot spots,” by the border in El Paso, Texas. He’s made a career out of migrant hunting; he stalks and confronts people he suspects of being migrants while livestreaming the encounters on his website, Border Network News, and many social-media accounts. He has given border tours to Republican lawmakers, including Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and was captured in January 6 videos chanting “Our house!” as the mob left the Capitol.Conservative Anthony’s real name is Pedro Antonio Aguero. He was born and raised in El Paso, a child of Mexican immigrants. Like many Latinos in South Texas, he grew up a Democrat. But Aguero now believes that the Democratic Party is allowing an “invasion” across the southern border. And the popularity of his content—his followers total more than 100,000 across different social-media platforms—suggests that he’s not alone. This essay has been adapted from Paola Ramos’s new book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America. Aguero is an extreme example of a broader phenomenon. Many Latinos have shifted to the right on immigration in recent years, warming up to the ideas of building a wall, shutting down the southern border, and even conducting mass deportations. Support for Donald Trump among Latino voters grew by 8 percentage points from the 2016 to the 2020 presidential election, and polls suggest that Trump continues to make inroads with Latino voters leading up to the 2024 election. Anti-immigrant sentiment often comes from a place of fear. People may be afraid that immigrants will take something from them: jobs, opportunities, or, perhaps more profoundly, a sense of their own national and cultural identity. But I have come to understand that anti-immigrant Latinos aren’t just afraid of loss. Unlike white Americans, they also have something to prove: that they, too, belong in America. “I don’t lock the doors because I hate the people outside,” Aguero told me. “I lock the doors because I love the people inside.”[Read: Why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters]Aguero’s online persona is intimidating. But when I met him, he struck me as shy. He avoided eye contact and spoke with a shaky voice and a frontero accent. He had agreed to allow me to shadow him for a couple of hours for a Vice News story. He picked me up at a gas station in El Paso. When I opened the door, I saw that a friend of his, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, was sitting in the back. We’d be going on one of the surveillance runs Aguero makes along the border to get footage for his social-media channels.“I live and breathe the border,” Aguero told me. “It makes it hard to even have a relationship or even friendships at times, because I’m just so obsessively, compulsively dedicated to this.”As we drove, he told me about the evolution of his political views. As a young man, he had studied for a real-estate license. While at school, he’d volunteered with Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke, a fellow El Paso native. One day in class, Aguero’s professor challenged him to articulate why he was helping Beto. “I didn’t have an answer,” he told me. His professor responded with a proverb: “Dead fish go with the flow.” Aguero remembers this as the moment when he began questioning his loyalty to Democrats. He quit working for O’Rourke and eventually found a home in conservativism, and a particular interest in immigration issues.In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center flagged Aguero’s connections to the United Constitutional Patriots, a now-defunct militia group that would detain migrant families along the New Mexico border, at times holding them at gunpoint before turning them over to law enforcement. Aguero would often patrol and post videos with UCP members, and occasionally identified himself as the group’s spokesperson.In 2020, Aguero ran as a Republican to represent Beto’s former district, which includes most of El Paso and its suburbs. He lost the primary—by a lot. He told me that his politics don’t fit the traditional GOP framework either. Aguero blames Democrats and Republicans for the country’s immigration crisis. Both parties, Aguero believes, deceive the public, saying they “work together to control the masses.”Riding in the car, Aguero told me that while he is patrolling remote locations, the first thing he looks for are footprints, discarded clothes, plastic water bottles, and other trash. We eventually got out of the car and followed a trail of footprints that led us into underground tunnels that smugglers and immigrants use to hide from Border Patrol agents on the U.S. side of the border. We eventually came across piles of T-shirts, candy wrappers, backpacks, and electrolyte water, all left by immigrants who had shed their belongings as they struggled to survive the desert heat. (A Swiss NGO counted more than 700 migrants who died or went missing while trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, making it the world’s most lethal land crossing.)We also found belts and shoelaces strewn across the ground, indicating Border Patrol apprehensions. When undocumented immigrants are caught, agents typically have them remove their laces and belts—items that are deemed dangerous because they can be used as weapons or to commit suicide—before escorting them to detention centers.Despite Aguero’s vigilance, we didn’t run into any immigrants that day. But he assured me that, before he picked me up, he had spotted someone he thought was undocumented, and tailed him around El Paso, recording him until Border Patrol officers arrived. “They made the apprehension,” he told me proudly in between sips of an energy drink.Many people would empathize with those making this crossing, but Aguero does not. He often criticizes mainstream news outlets for portraying asylum seekers as vulnerable people, and was keen to convince me that the people crossing the border—“all males looking like Ninja Turtles”—were dangerous. Online, I had seen Aguero call immigrants “roaches.” Many of the young men he chased had the same accent as Aguero, the same color skin—their ancestors came from the same places. I got the feeling that by hunting them, he was distancing himself from them, and from his own foreignness.A couple of months after my encounter with Aguero, during the 2022 midterms, I covered the election in Texas’s Fifteenth Congressional District—a long drive east from El Paso. The district, part of which sits along the southern border, is more than 80 percent Latino and has traditionally been a Democratic stronghold. I was expecting voters to rally around Michelle Vallejo, the 33-year-old Latina running as a progressive Democrat who campaigned around town in blue jeans, Tejano boots, and a star-spangled button-down. During her campaign, she stood beside her father, Daniel, acknowledging her humble Mexican roots.But another Latina, the conservative Monica De La Cruz, had a narrative that voters found more appealing. “People are upset that while they waited their turn to immigrate to the United States, Democrats are actively ignoring laws on the books and allowing millions of migrants to come into our country illegally,” read one of her campaign emails to voters. Democrats, it went on, welcome them because “if they’re given enough handouts, these migrants will eventually be Democrat voters.” De La Cruz made history by flipping the district red.That kind of rhetoric shares some elements with the“Great Replacement” theory—the idea of a coordinated effort to replace white people with immigrants and people of color. Eric Ward, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center and an expert on authoritarianism, told me, “It’s used to justify this idea that we are not dealing with an immigration crisis, but we are in an existential war for the preservation of white America.”De La Cruz’s victory surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. I’ve come across many other Latinos who, although not as militant as Aguero, are starting to harbor similar anti-immigrant feelings. When I was in El Paso, I spent an evening at the home of Dolores Chacon, a Mexican immigrant and Trump supporter who lives in a humble home overlooking the border wall. I had never seen a house so physically close to the border—just a few feet. Chacon had put up what she called a “freedom fence” to secure her property from immigrants. From her backyard, I could hear the rumbles of Ciudad Juárez and, every now and then, the screech of an American Border Patrol car engaged in a high-speed chase.[From the March 2022 issue: There’s no such thing as ‘the Latino vote’]That night, Chacon and I hosted a roundtable discussion for Vice News on immigration in her home with about 10 other Latinos. They were teachers, entrepreneurs, and local politicians; old and young; light- and dark-skinned; naturalized citizens and American-born; lifelong Republicans and recent converts. Most of them were the descendants of immigrants.“We have to call the things what they are … They are criminals because they are breaking the law,” Irene Armendariz Jackson, a grandmother who is now running for Congress, called out. “I’m talking about pedophiles. I’m talking about murderers. I’m talking about rapists.”“Why doesn’t Nancy Pelosi let them all into her house?!” Jennifer Ivey, a farmer whose mother is from Mexico City, yelled.“Now that we have that monkey virus. Now we’re gonna have to get another vaccine!” Chacon said, laughing, referring to Black Haitian immigrants at the border. (The World Health Organization has renamed monkeypox “mpox,” because the original virus name plays into “racist and stigmatizing language.”)The most telling part of our conversation was when the group started talking about American culture and identity. Milcha Bermudez, who had the strongest Spanish accent in the room and had lived in Mexico for years, kept insisting that her point be heard.“It’s very important that they assimilate,” she reiterated, wearing a red MAGA hat.“When you say that immigrants should assimilate, what does it look like to ‘be an American’?” I asked the group.“This is a free country. We have a certain way of living here,” Bermudez said.Armendariz Jackson added that “people come into the country with their culture” and might not understand “there’s an American culture, and part of the American culture and traditions are our laws, our flag.”Our laws, our flag. Research suggests that opposition to immigration may have less to do with economic anxieties about jobs and wages than it does with cultural identity. Jens Hainmueller, a professor at Stanford, and Daniel Hopkins, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, reviewed more than 100 studies about attitudes toward immigration from more than two dozen countries. The pair concluded that nativism is rooted in a fear that newcomers will distort national identity and corrode cultural norms. Natives, Hainmueller and Hopkins noted, don’t care that much about the race and ethnicity of immigrants as long as they learn the language.The more Latinos migrate to the United States, the more they have struggled to prove themselves as “real Americans.” A 2021 study investigated how white people’s attitudes toward Mexican and Black Americans shifted from 1970 to 2010. In places that experienced higher levels of Mexican immigration, white people grew more hostile toward Mexicans and warmer toward Black people. The findings suggest that xenophobia against Latinos runs so deep, it can subdue even this nation’s most pernicious form of prejudice: anti-Blackness.If assimilation is what Latinos seek—and, of course, many of them do—then their embrace of nativism should come as no surprise. The political scientist Benjamin R. Knoll began predicting in the early 2000s that this would happen. Knoll, who at the time was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, remembers a woman scoffing at the notion that Latinos could be nativists as he presented an early version of his dissertation, about immigration attitudes, at a political-science conference in Chicago. Knoll concluded that as Latinos continued to assimilate into American society, their pro-immigration bias would slowly dissipate, and “perhaps eventually disappear altogether.”The quest to fit into American society is driving some Latinos toward extreme nativism; after all, nothing is more nationalistic than making immigrants, a sworn enemy of many white Americans, your enemy as well.Toward the end of the day I spent driving around El Paso with Aguero, I broached a subject that had been on my mind for many hours. Aguero, who constantly referred to immigrants as “illegals,” has a criminal record himself.In 2003 and again in 2004, he was arrested for possession of marijuana. (The charges were later dropped, but he was convicted for possession of drug paraphernalia.) In 2010, he was sentenced to two years of probation for assaulting a woman, having punched her in the face after she refused a kiss. He did not comply with the probation requirements, so he was sentenced to three days in jail in 2012. And in 2015, he pleaded guilty to a third-degree felony after getting in a car crash while driving intoxicated, seriously injuring a passenger in his car. I mentioned to him that I knew of these convictions, and asked: “Should I be more scared of migrants than, say, someone like you?”“Well, I’m an American citizen. I’m not out here breaking into other countries,” he said. “These people are in America!”Aguero spends as many as nine hours a day alone in his car, scanning the desert. He knows people think it’s weird, he said: They tell him so. “I travel with the music off a lot of the time.”“And what do you think about?” I asked.“Just everything,” he responded.But I was sure it must get lonely out there, surveilling the border—hunting shadows of himself.This essay has been adapted from Paola Ramos’s new book, Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America.

On the Money is a monthly advice column. If you want advice on spending, saving, or investing — or any of the complicated emotions that may come up as you prepare to make big financial decisions — you can submit your question on this form. Here, we answer two questions asked by Vox readers, which have been edited and condensed. I’m debating whether to pay off a personal loan with a savings account or keep the savings and keep paying the loan. I have no other debts but that personal loan of $25K. I’m 42 years old with two jobs in Hawai’i, and it’s been frustrating. My thought is to pay it off and start all over with no savings. Please help. Dear Personal Loan, I followed up with you to get some more information about your finances, including the interest rate on your loan, and here are the numbers worth considering: Personal loan interest: 5.75% Monthly minimum payment: $738 Monthly income from both jobs: $1,500 Monthly discretionary income: $200 The original balance on your 60-month loan was $35,000 when you took it out in August 2023. In a year, you’ve taken the balance down to $24,800, which you accomplished by pulling back on discretionary purchases and putting more money toward your loan. Well done, especially on a budget as tight as yours. I also learned that your savings account has $5,000 in it and that you’re considering pulling $20,000 out of your life insurance mutual fund. This would leave you with no money in your savings account and no money in your life insurance account — but you’d have no debt. Is the trade worth it?  From my perspective, you’ve successfully paid off 30 percent of your personal loan in a single year. If you stick it out for the next two or three years, you could get the personal loan paid off entirely. Yes, that means a few more years of careful budgeting and limited discretionary purchases. It also means putting more than half of your monthly income toward your debt. If you took the other option — paying off the loan with savings and life insurance — your first priority after paying off your personal loan would be to replenish your savings account. If you save every penny that would have gone toward personal loan payments, you should have the $5,000 taken care of in about six months.  The trouble is that you won’t have much of an emergency fund if something should happen to you in those six months. Your budget doesn’t give you much extra cash at the end of the month, and the last thing you want to do is turn an unexpected expense into unexpected debt. Yes, there are scenarios in which a family member could help out, or you could get a 0 percent APR credit card to cover the cost and pay it off before the regular interest rate kicks in. That said, I’d avoid dipping into your savings to pay your loan if at all possible. The life insurance, on the other hand, has possibilities. If you have a permanent life policy that allows you to withdraw the cash value without any penalty, there’s an argument to be made for paying down $20,000 of your debt right away and paying off the remainder of your personal loan out of your carefully budgeted income. You’d save a lot of money in interest that way, and you’d get to keep your $5,000 emergency fund. Which means the real question is whether you need the money in your life insurance policy. Do you have dependents who could benefit from the $20,000 if something were to happen to you? The budget you showed me didn’t appear to include expenses related to a partner or children, but I don’t want to assume. The other question is why you took out the personal loan in the first place. The answer may be personal, but it’s worth considering. In 2023, you borrowed $30,000, and I’d hate to see you find yourself in a situation where you needed to take out another five-figure loan a year from now. That’s why I’d still recommend paying off the loan the way you’ve been doing. At 5.75 percent APR and $800 in monthly payments, you’ll clear out your debt in two years and 10 months. It’ll cost you $2,112.11 in interest, which may seem like more than you want to pay, but during that time your $5,000 in savings could accumulate as much as $625 in interest (if you have a high-yield savings account with 4.25 percent APY, for example) and your life insurance mutual fund might be earning a 6 percent return.   You get to decide what’s best for you, but at least you understand your options. Read more from On the Money Should you combine finances with your partner? How to cope with inflation and lifestyle creep How are you supposed to start investing? Do you have questions related to personal finance? Submit them here. Is it prudent to have a variety of mutual funds, like a work-provided 401(k)/403(b) and a personal IRA, as well as one or two additional investment accounts? Or is it more efficient to have just one account like the work-provided 403(b)? Dear Prudent, Employer-sponsored retirement plans are great. I always recommend signing up for them, especially if you get a company match. These plans allow you to save pre-tax dollars, which allows you to put more of your earnings directly into your retirement fund while simultaneously reducing your tax burden. Yes, you will pay taxes on your withdrawals later on, but many people are in a lower tax bracket by then. More importantly, many employers automatically match your 401(k) or 403(b) contributions up to a certain percentage. As the financial advisers like to say, that’s “free money.”  That said, these kinds of investment accounts are not at all what you’d consider “efficient.” 401(k) accounts, which are designed to help private-sector employees save for their own retirements, and 403(b) accounts, which are often available to nonprofit employees, teachers, and people who work for the government, can help you set aside money for the future — but in many cases, the types of investments you can make through employer-sponsored accounts are relatively limited. Not only are you tied to the investment provider associated with your employer’s plan, but you may only get to choose from a small number of investment options. If I recall correctly, I didn’t even get to pick my investments the last time I had a 403(b). The onboarding program asked me to select my risk level — low, medium, or high — and then created a portfolio for me.   Which is all fine and good, and I still recommend signing up for these kinds of things, but the odds are that you’re going to be invested in funds that may offer lower returns and higher expense ratios than what you might get if you opened your own IRA and created your own portfolio after comparing the options available at various top brokerages. You can’t do anything about returns, of course — not even if you choose the extremely popular total-market funds that people tend to recommend on investing forums — but you can do something about expense ratios. Basically, investment providers determine in advance how much it’s going to cost you for them to manage the fund; they provide that number in the form of an expense ratio, and you can compare expense ratios before you make investments. Lower expense ratios are generally better, since you get to keep more of the money you invest.  However, employer-sponsored retirement plan providers don’t really have an incentive to keep expense ratios low because they know you don’t have any other choice. If your employer’s 403(b) is with a certain provider, you can’t just switch your 403(b) investments to a different provider, so you’re stuck paying whatever the provider decides to charge. This isn’t to suggest that investing in an employer-sponsored account is a waste of money. Employer-sponsored accounts are great, especially for people who might not otherwise be incentivized to save for retirement. It’s just to hint that putting everything into the employer-sponsored retirement account may not be the most efficient use of your money. I can’t give you investment advice because I’m not an investment adviser, but I can suggest that you contribute as much as is required into your 403(b) to get the tax break and the company match, and put the rest of your retirement savings into an IRA that you can control. Traditional IRAs allow you to contribute pre-tax dollars and reduce your taxable income during your prime earning years, and Roth IRAs allow you to contribute post-tax dollars and withdraw your contributions (but not your returns) ahead of schedule if you need to. Since IRAs max out at a certain dollar amount per year, you may also want to consider opening a brokerage account that isn’t necessarily tied to retirement and continue your investing journey that way. It’ll take a little extra time to compare all of the possibilities and make the best choices for your financial situation, but it could be worth it.

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