Pay Dirt is Slate’s money advice column. Have a question? Send it to Kristin and Ilyce here. (It’s anonymous!)

Dear Pay Dirt,

We are in good financial shape. I’m 50, and my spouse is 47. We both have retirement funds worth around $300,000, and put about 15 percent of our income toward them every year. We have 529s for our two kids’ college, and two and years years left to continue saving for them. We have zero debt except our mortgage and one year’s worth of income in a CD ladder at three, six, nine, and 12 months, that I just keep rolling into new CDs.

After a family member’s passing, we received an inheritance of $450,000, all in the form of being beneficiaries on their accounts. We currently owe $264,000 on our home with an interest rate of 6 percent. I would like to pay it off, and use the remaining money to fulfill our dream of owning a small piece of mountain property that we can use for camping and hunting. It wouldn’t really be much of an investment, like a potential VRBO property could be, but it would be ours. My spouse just wants to save it all, given the current state of things. I say, we are in great shape, and in spite of current affairs, we should use part of the windfall to fulfill a dream. As a compromise, I could forgo the property, but I would really like to pay off the mortgage and start funneling that payment into our retirement instead. What is our best move?

—Should We Get the Dream?

Dear the Dream,

When the economy is as volatile as it is now, it’s not a great idea to spend down all your cash. You don’t know what’s going to happen next.

I do like the idea of paying down the mortgage on your house. You’ll effectively “earn” 6 percent on every dollar you prepay. That will save you something each month, and you can toss those freed-up funds into a Roth IRA in addition to your 401(k), which will help bolster your retirement savings. While $300,000 sounds like a lot of money, it’s not a lot when it comes to retirement, unless you have a bunch of pensions to go along with it.

I’m less keen on buying vacant property that you’ll use from time to time to go camping and hunting. All real estate, even vacant land, requires upkeep and the payment of real estate taxes and insurance premiums. There’s liability associated with it—even if you post signs reminding others that the land is private. It feels as though the smarter move is to treat yourself to a few camping trips and keep the remainder of your inheritance invested for future use. You can always revisit the idea in a couple of years or once the economic volatility settles down. At that time, you can evaluate whether this is still a priority for you both.

Please keep questions short (

Dear Pay Dirt,

I’m 26 years old and working my first job that has benefits after leaving graduate school/academia. I make just over $40,000 working at a university, which is a livable but not great wage where I live. I’m otherwise in a decent financial situation, with no debt and $10,000 in a savings account. I just finished building my savings up to that goal after spending some while job searching. Now, I have to figure out what to do with the $100 to $200 (depending on what expenses came up) that I was putting away from each paycheck. My original plan was to build up my savings, then start making additional contributions to my retirement, since I feel a bit behind on retirement savings and am definitely not on track to have my salary saved by age 30 with the automatic contributions.

However, with the current administration, my job feels less stable. My position isn’t directly impacted yet, but I’m worried I could get let go because of funding cuts or other worrying trends. I’m also worried about rising prices, and the investments associated with my retirement plan don’t seem to be doing well. All of that makes me want to just horde money in my savings account so that if I do lose my job, I have more of a safety net for what could be a really tough job search (I was keeping a list of places to apply when it’s time to move on from this job, and multiple organizations on that list have furloughed most of their staff). However, it also doesn’t feel smart to plan for the short term over the long term, especially when I’m doing decently well right now. I don’t feel like I have a strong understanding of the economy or money management. How do I make the smart decision in uncertain times?

—Stressed Out and Confused

Dear Stressed Out and Confused,

I love that you’ve been able to save such a significant amount of money while staying debt-free. Yay for you! Although you’re worried about not having a deep understanding of the economy or money management, you do understand the most important thing: Spend less than you make.

As I’ve often said, in uncertain times, it’s smart to have extra cash to stash away in a savings account. Now you’re in a position to save an extra $2,400 or more per year. While it doesn’t feel great to watch your investments shrink, that’s what happens with investments. They go up and down, but over time, they rise more than they fall. Since January, the stock market has had a pretty rocky ride, and I think there’s more of that to come.

There are two ways to counterbalance the investing roller coaster. One is “dollar-cost averaging,” where you keep investing the same amount in a regular cadence (weekly, monthly, semi-annually, etc.) no matter where the stock market is. You do that with your 401(k) contributions, which should be taken out of every paycheck. But you can do it with other investments outside of your 401(k), like a Roth IRA.

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The second is called “asset allocation,” which is a fancy way of saying you shouldn’t put all of your investments in any one asset class (like stocks, bonds, or cash) or any single company. So, you buy an index mutual fund that might be tied to the S&P 500 index, which has investments in 500 companies. By itself, that’s a fairly diversified investment, as it includes a lot of companies in different industries. But they’re all big companies. If you wanted to truly diversify your portfolio, you’d want to buy a total index fund, which is a sampling of large, medium, and smaller companies. You could also buy an international fund, a bond fund, and then keep some money in cash. Over time, these investments will counterbalance each other and keep your money growing in the right direction.

But this is for the future. Given that you’re worried about potentially losing your job, the safest thing you can do right now is to keep stashing that money away in your emergency fund. When you’re feeling more stable about your job, you can take some of that cash and start (or contribute to) your Roth IRA or just open up a brokerage account. Or maybe by that time, you’ll have enough saved to put a down payment on a home of your own, which is another good investment.

—Ilyce

Classic Prudie

I love my girlfriend but she grew up in an upper-class bubble where being poor meant missing the yearly family vacation. I grew up without running water for several years. We talked and talked and talked about our life experiences and our expectations about our future together, but sometimes her inability to empathize at all just catches me off guard.

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