Every single day gives us a new morning. We’ve awakened to a day that is free from mistakes. It’s full of hours and hours of opportunity. Do we fill those hours with doing the same old thing that got us into the state that we’re in today? Or do we throw aside some of those

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” – Jim Rohn At the start of 2006, my life was in financial disarray. I’ve described many times what I did to turn it around. I clamped down hard on my spending. I started saving for the future. I learned a

There have been many, many times over the past several years when I have felt completely overwhelmed by the huge gap between where I am right now and where I want to be. My big dream is to reach true financial independence. By that, I mean that I have enough money socked away in relatively

Once a month, our banks and credit card issuers send us a statement in the mail (or online) outlining every single item that we spent our money on over the last month. We can see a big list of the checks we wrote, the stores we swiped our card at, the online shops we conducted

When Sarah and I were first married, we maintained the two separate checking accounts that we had when we were single. Mostly, we kept it this way out of convenience, as we both were in the routine of paying monthly bills. To keep things straightforward, we divided up the shared monthly bills. We were each

One of my favorite places to visit is Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa. It’s an independent bookstore with a wonderful atmosphere and I truly love the opportunities I get to browse through the books there. The problem is that when I go into a retailer without a specific purchase in mind but with

Over the past several months, the art of reading has really clicked with our oldest child. A year ago, he would parse a simple sentence in a book with great nervousness, sounding out each individual word very carefully and moving at such a slow pace that there was almost no narrative or educational value to

It is really, really easy to fall into a trap of paying lip service to the things we think ought to be important but that we don’t actually find important in our day to day lives. “Oh, I should be spending less money,” says someone waiting in line for a large coffee and a breakfast

In my closet, I have every issue of MAKE Magazine ever produced. I really enjoy reading issues of MAKE. The magazine is all about technology-oriented do-it-yourself projects, like making your own homemade musical instrument and wiring it up to a homemade soundboard so you can record the music you make or making a homemade remote

One of the most powerful things I’ve learned over the last few years is that older children and teenagers often learn the most powerful life lessons from experiences they can directly relate to. The problem is that personal finance isn’t often directly relatable to their life. Quite often, parents and teachers rely on lectures and

I’m involved with a charitable organization (that I’ll choose to leave nameless) that is undergoing what I might call an identity crisis. The staff of this charity has made a ton of commitments on an organization-wide level. They’ve pledged help to many different local groups and causes and those commitments are impressive and good ones.

Let’s start off by looking at what I mean by “top-down” versus “bottom-up.” A “top-down” approach to something means you take something large and break it down into smaller pieces. For example, if you’re making a meal, you would be taking a “top-down” approach if you walked into the kitchen with a specific recipe already

Most of our desires last for only a moment or two. A person might spy a snack that looks good at the checkout and wants it, but if that person waits a few minutes, it’s forgotten. A person might see a coffee shop drive-thru on the way to work and feels really tempted, but if

It’s a decision that people make over and over again in their lives. Are we playing this scenario to win? Or are we playing this scenario not to lose? Let’s be clear what I’m talking about here. Playing to win means taking some calculated risk in order to achieve greater rewards. It often means doing

Where do you want to be a year from now? Would you like to have some debts paid off? Maybe you dream of having finished an art project or a major home improvement project. Perhaps you dream of having a social circle to participate in. We all have things we’d love to accomplish, things that

Jennifer writes in: My parents have been giving me $1,000 a month since I graduated from college three years ago. When my career first started, I really needed that money as I was an unpaid intern for several months at first while I built up my resume, then my first job paid less than minimum

It happens to a lot of people – myself included. One day, something triggers a change inside of you. You get really sick of paying money to the credit card companies and finally you reach the tipping point where the drawbacks of living a debt-filled life outweigh the benefits. You’re sick of it. You cut

When I look back to the middle of the last decade – roughly 2002 to 2006 – I see a lot of great memories. I see my marriage to my wife. I see the birth of our first child. I see myself at a pair of jobs that I enjoyed quite a lot. I see

We are emotional people. We react to situations with a wide range of emotions: joy, fear, anger, mirth. On the other hand, money is about as non-emotional as you can get. Money is simply a method of exchange between goods and services. The problem that most of us run into when it comes to personal