Personal Finance Advice

While it’s estimated that some 147 million people will participate in Black Friday, this is not the only choice that people had on how to celebrate. The day after Thanksgiving is also Buy Nothing Day, the biggest no spend day of them all. If you decided to shop on Black Friday, you made a conscious [...]

Personal finance is just that. Personal. My choices and actions with money are not going to be the same as your choices and actions. Maybe I dream of travel and you dream of a Lamborghini. Maybe you want to pay for your kids’ college expenses and your neighbor wants a bigger house. Maybe you want [...]

When people start out on the path to better finances, many go overboard and slash their budgets to the bone. (Either that or they cut one tiny thing and claim success). They cut out every little extra expense and leave themselves with nothing but food, utilities, housing, and other essentials. It’s like going on a [...]

Here are some of the articles that I came across this past week that peaked my interest: The Gospel of Consumption: This is an interesting read about how companies figured out how to make us the consumers that we are. “By the late 1920s, America’s business and political elite had found a way to defuse [...]

Home and personal security is a big part of personal finance. After all, you don’t want to work hard for what you have only to have it taken away by thieves. Neither do you want to be physically injured by someone who is after your stuff. While security is a very serious subject, the movie [...]

When it’s time to make financial decisions such as contributing to your retirement, paying down debt, saving for college, buying a home, and building an emergency fund, you need to ask yourself a question. “Will this change my life for the better?” This question is important because it’s the opposite of the question people usually [...]

Each time that I sit down to write an article, I never really know how it will turn out or whether it will be published. That sense of unknowing always takes me back to junior high school when I was always convinced that my papers just wouldn’t measure up to expectation. So far, I have [...]

I have a friend who is incredibly picky, to the detriment of her finances. She demands certain brands of every food and personal product she buys. Even if another brand is cheaper, she won’t buy it. She demands specific features in her cars. On vacation, her hotel room must have certain views and specific amenities. [...]

Just about every time we go on vacation, someone gets sick. I think it’s because we’re all off our normal routines and we’re exposed to a lot more people. We eat food that we don’t normally eat, we stay out later and get less sleep, we’re around large crowds of germy people, and we are [...]

One of the best ways to save money is also the hardest. You have to cultivate patience. In today’s world that moves so fast and where everything is about having and doing things right now, patience is hard to find and even harder to apply. Every day new things are coming out that we want. [...]

We all love our stuff. We like our clothes, our knick knacks, and our DVD’s. We like our photographs, saved letters, mementos of our childhood (or our children’s childhoods), and the stuff we inherit from others. As much as we like stuff, there are many problems with stuff, ranging from the money it costs to [...]

By Karen Norling Eight months ago, my husband, Jim, lost his engineering job at GE Health care here in Ohio. In all those eight months –after dozens and dozens of resumes “snail-mailed” and emailed — not one company has called him for an interview. Not one company has called me for an interview either, despite [...]

It’s hard to believe that I have been writing here for the past year. I thank you for visiting these pages and reading my thoughts on money and saving. I hope you have enjoyed what I have had to offer as much as I have enjoyed sharing it with you. Over the past year, I [...]

Many times, when I help someone with their finances, I discover that their biggest obstacle is that they don’t understand opportunity cost and the impact it has on personal finance. In order to take advantage of an opportunity, something else must always be given up. Opportunity cost is basically what you lose by choosing one [...]

This video from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart is funny and great entertainment: The Daily Show With Jon Stewart M – Th 11p / 10c CNBC Financial Advice thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor But it’s also an important lesson in financial management. The lesson to be learned from this video [...]

Why are you here? I am not asking for your take on the meaning of life or your grand purpose in life (although I am always happy to listen if you want to tell me). Rather, I want to know why you are reading this article at this very moment. Are you here to learn? [...]

Have you ever thought about how much money people waste in a given day? Today, I tried to keep track of all of the waste that I witnessed and I was rather surprised, given our economy, how cavalierly people will still waste their financial resources. It made me think back to a time, about 15 [...]

A couple that we are friendly with recently asked us to go to a play with them. We were interested because the play was one we’d been wanting to see for some time. However, tickets for this production were $60 for the nosebleed section. Add on $12 per ticket in service fees, plus sales tax [...]

I hang out on a lot of finance/frugality related message forums and websites and I’m noticing a disturbing rise in the number of people being mean to those who ask for help. There have always been people who get their shorts in a wad over this or that hot button issue; that’s nothing new. And [...]

A coworker is currently getting her financial house in order for the first time. She is paying off a heap of debt, setting up insurance policies and wills, and generally doing all the things she knew that she should have been doing all along. I’m proud of her. But she came to me the other [...]