Personal Finance Advice

With New Year’s just past and most people still in the honeymoon phase of their resolutions, it’s worth a brief look at how many self-improvement activities benefit your finances, and how studying one area can have a positive impact on the other. I’ll confess to being something of a self-improvement junkie. Not because my life [...]

Financial gurus often talk about spending on experiences rather than stuff. The idea is that stuff will break, become obsolete, or never get used in the first place, whereas experiences will stay with you for a lifetime. Experiences are said to be more valuable than stuff. To hear some people talk, you should be able [...]

Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older, but I find myself becoming more content with my life. It’s not that anything has changed greatly in recent years. I haven’t won millions of dollars, bought a new house or car, or taken a fancy vacation. In fact, very little that’s happened in the last few years [...]

Never underestimate how big of an impact a small gesture can make. It really is amazing that simple things can have such an impact. Just saying something can have a huge impact, but it isn’t limited to words. Think about your own experiences and how a little gesture at the right moment made all the [...]

One of the things that makes getting ones finances in order difficult is the assumption that pleasure costs money. The truth is that it really doesn’t have to. The more that you enjoy the simple pleasures in life that don’t cost anything, the easier it is to get yourself out of the consumer mindset that [...]

I’m a big fan of the yoga program “Inhale” on the Oxygen network. The host, Steve Ross, likes to say (when talking about mental health) that, “Psychology is based on suffering. Yoga is based on bliss.” What he means is that psychology generally assumes some misery is present and tries to rectify it. You’re depressed, [...]

When you set out to choose your occupation, should you choose a higher paying job or work that you love? I never questioned it myself. I couldn’t imagine spending eight to ten hours a day for thirty years doing work that I hated or merely tolerated. I looked for work that if I didn’t love [...]

In my house we’ve had a tough couple of months with deaths, health scares, and general work-related stress. We’ve been tired, sad, and angry. There’s been a definite need in this house to feel better. We’ve needed some cheering up and calming down. In our spendier days we would have gone out to eat, gone [...]

We talk a lot about money: How to get it, how to spend it, where to spend it, and how to save it. For all the time we devote to talking about, worrying about, and dealing with money, you’d think it was the most important thing in the world. If the time spent obsessing about [...]

Conventional wisdom says that you should have a budget to get the most out of your money. While I believe a budget is a good thing to have when money is tight and you are first learning how to take reign of your personal finances, the ultimate goal should be not to have a budget [...]