I first noticed The 48 Laws of Power sitting on the desk of a person who works deep in the bowels of a large insurance company. In an idle moment, not having the faintest clue what the book was about, I picked it up and flipped it open to a random page where I began

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices. One final thing that you can do that can kick your finances into gear is opening up a high-yield

The last two years have taught me many, many things about personal finances. Some of the lessons have been useful and others thought-provoking, but a few have really knocked my socks off and changed the way I view the world. Here are the five lessons I learned that really altered my perspectives. Every time you

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices. If you’ve gone through even a few of the one hour projects in this series, you likely have some

A few weeks ago, I announced that a book club would be starting on The Simple Dollar and that the first book to be read would be Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s Your Money or Your Life. On Monday, October 1, this book club will begin. Here’s how it will work. First of all, you

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices. So many times throughout the day, I come up with useful ideas: ideas for saving money, ideas for preparing

As I’ve mentioned frequently on here, my wife and I have defined a very specific long term goal for ourselves – we intend to buy a piece of land in the country and build a house on it before our oldest child’s sixteenth birthday. In order to have the financial resources in place to do

One of the most consistent worries I have is about how I will educate my children to not make the same financial mistakes I made. How can I imprint good financial decision making on their minds as they grow up in a rather material world? The First National Bank of Dad focuses on this very

I love watching my daughter sleep. I think babies are at their cutest while sleeping, and she’s no different. She’s sitting right beside me as I type this, snoozing away. Network and Self-Marketing: Meet the Thriving Introvert The writer here recommends How to Win Friends and Influence People; I’d add Never Eat Alone as a

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices. It’s something so simple that so many of us overlook in our busy lives: stopping to help people out

Recently, I read through Staying Frugal in the Age of the iPhone, an article on Yahoo! Finance by Anya Kamenetz (whose book, Generation Debt, I reviewed positively a while back). The article basically extols the virtues of frugality and spending less on items – none of the suggestions are particularly unusual and they match up

In the past, I have made many references to my preference for living in a small town over living in an urban area. For me, there’s no question – the advantages of small town rural life far outweigh the advantages of city living. That’s not to say that I think city living is foolish –

A friend of mine sent me an interesting thought problem. Civilization as you know it is about to end. You have the option of taking yourself and ten other people to a desert island with you. Who do you take? I listed the ten most obvious people and thought I was done. But the question

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices. One of the biggest expenditures in many people’s lives is that of bottled and canned beverages, whether it be

The one personal finance issue that I debate internally over quite a bit is whether one should pay off debt or invest if all they have are relatively low interest rate debts (7.5% or less, for instance). All of my remaining debts are below 7% and, thanks to careful frugal living, my spending is quite

Over the last month, our house has held a toddler just entering his “terrible twos” (which basically means energetic, rambunctious, and without a knowledge of society’s basic expectations) and a newborn who has her days and nights largely juxtaposed. In other words, many of the entries for The Simple Dollar this month have been written

My son’s favorite musician is Alison Krauss. He requests A Hundred Miles Or More every night for bedtime lullaby music to the exclusion of all else. If you have a toddler, give that one a shot – it’s a lot of mellow songs by an amazing singer. Why There’s No Reason Not To Buy Store

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices. One of the things I enjoy doing is getting involved with my local community, though with two children in

A reader who I will call Kathy wrote to me with a rather long but quite compelling story that really struck a chord with me. When I read the story, I saw so much of myself and my wife in it in the position we were in about five years ago, and because of that