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 my best motivational tools for staying on a good personal finance track is my own personal net

A reader named John writes in about a conundrum with his future roommate: I need to know if my best friend is saving his money wisely, or just being ridiculously cheap. There’s a difference between cheap and frugal, I know this. I’m frugal, but not cheap. I’m not so sure about him. He has 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. One of the most valuable things that a person can do when learning about personal finance issues is to

Over the last week or two, we’ve received a lot of wonderful gifts from our friends and family and our daughter now has a mountain of clothes to cover the next … year or so of her life. She has a wonderful handmade quilt to wrap herself in, too. However, the gifts that really were

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 challenges for most people when it comes to cooking at home is the time; a

A while back, I introduced the very popular concept of a money free weekend, where a person, a couple, or a family elects not to spend any money over a weekend as an experiment in frugality. To aid this, I made a fifteen free things to do during such a weekend, then followed it with

This book takes an interesting tack as compared to other personal finance books. Rather than focusing directly on mechanical personal finance issues, it instead focuses directly on behavioral issues, particularly the traps that people who are good at analysis and memorization (i.e., “smart” people) tend to fall into. I often find myself in this category.

With the very recent birth of my daughter, I won’t be around too much this week, so I prepared some morning roundups in advance that list some of my personal favorite articles from various other personal finance sites. Each day, I’ll feature four of them. Enjoy! Remove Car Dents Quickly And Cheaply Here in the

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. An hour around the house (doing everything here would take more than an hour, but most people have done

Phil writes in: I recently switched jobs very suddenly when a spectacular opportunity came a long to double my salary. I’ve been working at my new job for three months and the regular paychecks have started rolling in. I have maxed out my 401(k) at the new job and there is much more being taken

One of the biggest ways that we save money in our family is by minimizing our food costs. I used to have no qualms dropping a lot of money on food without thinking about it, but when I totaled up my food receipts and realized that close to $1,000 a month was going away in

With the very recent birth of my daughter, I won’t be around too much this week, so I prepared some morning roundups in advance that list some of my personal favorite articles from various other personal finance sites. Each day, I’ll feature four of them. Enjoy! Six Easy Ways To Make $100 Today Good stuff,

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. Many people (myself included, until pretty recently) have a box of “important papers” where they toss things that they

A new graduate is wondering about the financial benefits of having a roommate – are they worth the drawbacks? I’m finally at a place where I’m able to afford living alone – and though I much prefer the cost savings of having a roommate (about $400 a month) I’m heavily considering living alone. My only

Even while my daughter was still in the hospital, I was already doing lots of little things to prepare for her future. I found that, just as with my son, my immediate instinct when holding that little baby in my arms was to protect her and make sure her world was as safe as possible.

With the very recent birth of my daughter, I won’t be around too much this week, so I prepared some morning roundups in advance that list some of my personal favorite articles from various other personal finance sites. Each day, I’ll feature four of them. Enjoy! Conscious Spending: How My Friend Spends $21,000/year On Going

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. Most of my friends have huge shelves full of DVDs and CDs that they rarely listen to or look

As I held my daughter for the first time, I looked down at her and thought several things at once, which I later jotted down in a journal. A few of these are relevant to personal finance – some are not – but overall I thought they painted a great picture of why it’s worthwhile

I’m a big advocate of entrepreneurship and I truly admire people who take the plunge. Here’s a question from a brave reader who went forward with his dream. I’ll call him Walt, for fun, after a character in one of my favorite books: I’m starting a personal training business, and I’ve been marketing for about