Personal Finance Advice

If you value saving money more than keeping friends, I have the perfect article for you. Follow these 10 simple steps and you will not only save money, but also drive away those pesky friends.
Depending on how close the friends are, you may have to complete all 10 items on the checklist and possibly [...]

When my mother died, I worried a lot about my father. How will he cope? What will he eat? Despite my worrying, I didn’t need to worry much about his finances. His forethought saved his financial life, despite our family’s terrible loss.
Dad always has been a stickler for details. This carries over into his [...]

This weekend I read a book called 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save The Earth by John Javna. As the title indicates, it’s a book about living a greener lifestyle. In the book the author talks about “picking the low hanging fruit” when greening your lifestyle. By “low hanging fruit,” he means those [...]

If there’s anything designed to ruin a marriage, it’s money. Not only could tension be created by the amount coming in, but there could be different money styles – a hoarder vs. a spender.
My husband and I, thankfully, have similar styles. He’s more of a tightwad than I am, but we can find the middle [...]

Like any good financial nerd, I spend a lot of time watching and reading the media’s coverage of the economy. Over the last few months the tone has gone from mildly concerned, through concerned, and on to full blown panic. This amuses me because you can literally watch the rhetoric ratchet up and up, [...]

“Is it getting dark outside? Are you having trouble seeing? Turn the lights on!” is the gist of one “Wiggles Tips” segment on The Wiggles television show. These segments introduce the show’s preschool audience to a bit of humor – even they are old enough to know to turn on the lights when it’s dark [...]

I’ll be perfectly honest. Even though I make a living writing about personal finances (and enjoy reading and writing about the subject), I have to make a concerted effort to stay financially motivated with my own finances. For those that have little interest in personal finances, but still want to get their finances in order, [...]

I used to think that social class was directly tied to wealth — if you were rich, you were upper class; if you were poor, you were lower class. If you were neither rich nor poor, you were middle class. Of course, even then I had a sense that because “rich” and “poor” [...]

A few weeks ago I wrote about books that are valuable for every level of financial knowledge. Almost all of those books were “how-to” books or books about developing and implementing investment strategies. This week I’m going to recommend a different type of financial book. These are the books that don’t teach you how to [...]

Frugality and thrift are far from the predominant mindsets in our culture, even among the multitudes of people who are taking control of their finances and paying down debt. In times past (the Great Depression comes to mind), “thrift” was seen as a virtue, but not so much anymore. Frugality could, however, become [...]

I’m a huge fan of reading. I believe that reading, both fiction and non-fiction, is a great way to learn new things and be exposed to more than you typically see in your daily life. If you want to learn something new, like personal finance, you can’t beat a good book. You can go at [...]

Every time I turn on the television or visit Internet news sites, I’m assaulted by bad financial news (and other bad news, as well). We all know that the media likes to focus on the bad and, “If it bleeds, it leads.” These days the financial news is filled with reports of foreclosures, high food [...]

You’ve seen them advertised, you had friends participate in them and maybe even you’ve been sucked in yourself: Get Rich Quick Schemes. If you buy this book about how to invest in real estate, you’ll be rich! If you join this multi-level marketing program you can quit your day job and have more than [...]

I have always assumed that if your career/job pays you decent money that you should have no trouble getting ahead financially as long as you’re responsible with money. But recently an old friend who works in a high powered, high paying, high stress career made me rethink that assumption.
My friend works for a large [...]

I think all of us have been guilty of financial envy at one time or another. “I wish I could afford a car like that” or “I wish we could live in a house like theirs.” It’s not as much of “Keeping up the Joneses” as it is simply envying the Joneses. [...]