Chicago Tribune financial columnist and best-selling author Gail MarksJarvis answers 10 questions about her life with investing.

Gail MarksJarvis is an award-winning financial columnist for the Chicago Tribune, TV commentator and author of the best-selling and award-winning book “Saving for Retirement (Without Living Like a Pauper or Winning the Lottery)“ (FT Press, 2012). For more information about Gail, check out her biography on CI’s Guest Author page.

For this interview, we include a question suggested by our previous interviewee, Chuck Jaffe: If you could get away scot-free with punching somebody in the face without either jail time or a broken hand, who are you hitting and why? Read on to see her surprising answer.

Jackie: What is your favorite investment book?

Gail: Well, I guess I have to say my own book, “Saving for Retirement,” is my favorite. And the reason is that I think it helps regular people who are scared to death of their 401(k)s and their IRAs; it helps them know what to do. And I think that that’s absolutely essential, not just for individuals, but for our society as we face a major retirement crisis that’s looming.

And, of course, if I had to go beyond my book, it would be Benjamin Graham’s classic, “The Intelligent Investor.” One of the reasons I love that book is his whole explanation of a margin of safety.

Jackie: What was your first investment?

Gail: This is kind of funny because it really dates me. But it was about 1980 and I bought a U.S. Treasury bond that paid almost 16% interest. I just wish I could have bought all kinds of them, but at the time I was right out of school. I had no money and I just bought one.

That shows you what happened during periods of crazy inflation. And then I remember a few years later when Treasuries were only paying 7%. I wouldn’t put any money in them because I thought it was such a rotten return.

Now, all day long I have people calling me, senior citizens who are beside themselves because they got scared of the markets back in 2008 and they put money in CDs and Treasuries and now they’re really hurting because they’re not making any interest. So it’s a huge change from 16%.

Jackie: What was your worst investment?

Gail: This one’s funny too. Back in around 2000 when the technology bubble was about to burst, I read about the mapping of the human genome and got very excited and made an investment in a company called Celera—they were mapping the human genome. It was really exciting. I did it more out of just the fascination with what they were doing at the time, it was so unique. And that stock soared. I can’t remember how much it went up in just like a couple of weeks. But the reason I say it’s funny is that at about that same time I saw the tech bubble coming, and five days before the tech bubble burst I wrote a column telling everyone to get out of tech, but I didn’t sell Celera.

Celera was bio tech instead of information tech. I kept Celera and it didn’t just drift down, it plunged. So I made a killing on it for about two weeks, and then I lost everything. Well, I didn’t lose everything, but I lost a lot.

Another mistake was back during the Clinton presidency when I had purchased a health care sector fund. When [then-First Lady] Hillary Clinton started to talk about health care reform, health care stocks started to get hammered, and I thought it was going to get a lot worse. I bailed out of that fund after losing, I don’t know, I can’t remember what percent. But it wasn’t that bad of a loss. I just thought it was going to be a terrible loss, and I got out of it. And that experience taught me not to bail out of anything based on political or government expectations because those are usually fleeting. Wall Street’s very good at understanding business, but terrible at understanding government and politics.

Jackie: Do you have a particular investment style?

Gail: I think I’m kind of a moderate risk taker, and I tend to invest primarily in funds and index funds. I’m not a very exciting investor. I believe in modern portfolio theory. And, yes, I set up my asset allocation and do dollar cost averaging and it’s simple.

I would say I’m a moderate growth investor.

Jackie: If you had a million dollars right now, how would you spend it?

Gail: I’d have to make a donation with some of it. I’m not sure what that donation would be. I donate money to many, many different types of groups. I don’t know if I’d just give them more or if I’d look for something new. Even though a million dollars probably isn’t enough to do this, I’d love to set up a scholarship fund. Then I would use some of the money to buy a condo overlooking the ocean somewhere. And I’d put away a little money for a vacation fund that I could use each year.

I would also like to set up a special fund that would be for myself, insuring myself for long-term care into the future. You can’t really buy long-term care insurance anymore, and I’d like to just have a designated fund that would go toward that.

When you see what long-term care costs it’s shocking. My parents have needed long-term care, and if you’re providing it 24 hours a day, you’re talking $90,000 a year, which is just outrageous.

Jackie: Do you use any investment software? Do you have a favorite software that you use to track your holdings?

Gail: At work I used to have a Bloomberg machine and I was in love with my Bloomberg machine, but we cut it during some of the cost-cutting at my company. Now I have FactSet, and I don’t love it. I like using the Morningstar site. And I keep track of my own records with Quicken.

Jackie: Speaking of Morningstar, do you have a favorite website or blog?

Gail: One of my favorite websites is, of course, AAII.com, then next I would have to say Morningstar. But I’m going all over the Internet all day long: Morningstar, definitely, for watching the funds in particular; TechCrunch for the news; and others would include Business Insider, Zero Hedge, Seeking Alpha, Bloomberg…and so on.

Those are some of my favorites. I spend a good part of every day trolling for investing news and insight in addition to chatting with investment managers and reading research reports.

Jackie: What’s the best advice you could give someone who’s just starting out with investing?

Gail: This is the advice that I give in my book: I show people that if they would start on their first job just putting $20 or $25 a week into a simple index fund, a simple S&P 500 index fund, and just keep that up for their entire life, by the time they retire just that tiny amount of money would give them close to about a million dollars. But people don’t know that’s possible.

There is a non-partisan group called the Employee Benefit Research Institute; it’s a think tank that does good research. They did a survey a few years ago where they asked people if they thought they could save $200,000 ever. Only 25% of people thought they could do that, which is really sad. And here’s the even more sad part: 21% honestly said that they thought they’d be more likely to win the lottery.

And that’s where I got the title of my book, from that research. I try to show people how silly it is to think they’re going to win the lottery when they could start, on their very first job, just putting away $20 or $25 a week and end up with about a million dollars.

It’s true, and there’s also research that’s been done by Annamaria Lusardi who’s at George Washington University. She found that fewer than half of people with college degrees even understand the power of compounding. So if you don’t understand the power of compounding, you don’t understand how letting your credit card interest go is going to kill you over time and you don’t understand how just putting aside $20 or $25 a week in a simple stock market index fund is going to get you a huge amount of money.

Jackie: Do you have any pet peeves?

Gail: What drives me crazy is when someone who’s very experienced with technology will tell you how easy it is to do whatever you need to do—whether it’s how to get through a problem on your computer or a problem on your phone. And they’ll just blurt out in a few quick sentences as to what you have to do, and then they’ll end by saying, “It’s just really easy.” And you’ll be sitting there thinking, “Sure, easy for you.”

And you know what I think about when they do that? I think about if I were going to turn around and say to them, “Well, investing is really easy. You just set up your asset allocation with this large-cap fund equaling 30% of your portfolio and this small-cap fund equaling 10% of your stock portfolio…” And if I were going to go through the whole asset allocation and just blabber away about small-cap funds and large-cap funds and fixed-income funds, they would go, “What do you mean, easy?”

And yet for some reason, the technology people look at you like you’re an idiot if you don’t get what they’re saying right away. Well, I could look at them like they’re idiots about investing, but I’m not going to do that.

Jackie: Good answer. The last question comes from Chuck Jaffe, our previous interviewee.

Gail: Oh, Chuck’s a good friend. He’s a funny guy. I like him a lot.

Jackie: Good, so you’ll understand that this question definitely comes from him: “If you could get away scot-free with punching somebody in the face without either jail time or a broken hand, who are you hitting and why?”

Gail: Well, let’s see. I’m not a violent person so I wouldn’t really punch someone, but I’ll tell you when I had the urge to do it.

I was at a press conference one day, probably a couple years ago, here in Chicago. It was a press conference between the Consumer Financial Protection Board and Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago.

And the concept they were talking about was consumers being defrauded, and what needed to be done to stop people from being defrauded. When they got to the question and answer part of the conference, a TV reporter got called on and asked Emanuel why it was that no one has gone to jail for the financial crisis.

And Emanuel turned to him and said, “All kinds of people have gone to jail. I’ll tell you what, if you don’t know how to read the newspaper, come to my office and I’ll show you how to look this up.”

And I thought: This guy is either ignorant or a bully. And although, like I say, I would never slap anyone, inside my gut I felt like giving him a good slap.

Jackie: So, the mayor of Chicago is on the top of your list, that’s too good! What would you ask our next interviewee if you could choose a question?

Gail: May I reuse Jaffe’s question? I love the question.

Jackie: Alright, I’ll make an exception! Thanks for taking the time to speak with me, Gail.