I received a long email recently from an utterly despondent woman (that I’ll call Ellen) who was caught in a devastating situation. A year ago, she was a stay-at-home mother with three preschool-aged children. Her husband worked at a high-paying job that seemed to have great long-term potential and it seemed as though their life

A few weeks ago, I decided to spend a few hours looking carefully at all of our insurance policies. I knew in general how most of them worked, but in many cases I was a little fuzzy (or more than a little fuzzy) on the specifics. As I studied our homeowner’s insurance policy, I was

One of the common nuggets of financial “wisdom” tossed out there by personal finance writers is the idea of downgrading one’s car insurance to save money. “Cut your collision or comprehensive coverage or raise your deductibles and save a mint!” they’ll say, but such comments don’t take into account the current status of the car

Hundreds of people have emailed me asking questions about the current flooding situation in Iowa. Has my home been affected? How bad is it really? Well, I’ll let the front page of the Des Moines Register speak for itself. Where I’m at (luckily), there’s been only minor ill effect. We’ve had some minor flash flooding

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been carefully considering the above question. I’m twenty nine years old, in good health, with a wife and two young children at home. I don’t commute for work, either, vastly reducing my chance of a disabling accident. In other words, my chance for long-term disability is pretty small. How

One personal finance project that a lot of people overlook is the household inventory. It’s one of those “once in a great while” tasks that’s easy to overlook and forget about, but it’s not very hard and it can pay huge dividends if you’re carrying homeowners’ or renters’ insurance and something goes wrong with your

This week, The Simple Dollar attempts to address challenging questions in personal finance by looking at both sides of the story and figuring out some of the factors you need to look at to make a decision. Over the last few months, I’ve received many, many emails from people thinking about a career change, usually

Eventually, it happens to everyone. Something unexpected and disastrous happens, leaving us with a giant medical bill or some other enormous expense. Maybe you wake up one morning with more than a pint of blood having poured from your ear (it happened to me in college) or you have a heart attack on Thanksgiving morning

I have a close relative who is always complaining about how he’s broke because of various elements of bad luck. His car’s broken down, his water heater leaks, he got a speeding ticket – there’s always some reason why he can’t get ahead financially. The problem is that when times are good, he often spends

My wife and I switched our auto insurance coverage recently and paid our full annual premium up front. It was a painful little payment, even though we had shopped around and such. This led us to both researching various methods with which one could save money on auto insurance. Here are seven useful and applicable

One of my closest friends in the world completed a Ph.D. in mathematics recently and became an actuary for a very large life insurance company. I had lunch with him recently just to catch up on things and we spent about ten minutes talking about life insurance itself. He basically told me that if I

I grew up on the muddy banks of the Mississippi River; it was literally within eyeshot of my parents’ land. My father was a small-scale commercial fisherman, so I spent a lot of time on the river in my youth – and I really understood its amazing grace and power. We lived on a hill

Yesterday, I posted a nice story about an individual who saved a great deal of money by reading his auto insurance policy. I posted the story as an example of why you should read your policy in more detail, nothing more. However, my readers (as they often do) took the post into a completely different

Last night, I was contacted on instant messenger by an individual who had an interesting question about his automobile: My entire engine is going to have to be replaced and the cost of it is more than the remaining monthly payments on my car. Should I try to sell off the car now or should

It’s true. After all the financial advice I give out on this site, I keep a decent amount of cash “under my mattress” (actually, it’s in another secure place in my home, but it’s effectively the same thing). At first, this seems to fly right in the face of everything I preach on this site.

I recently had a heart-to-heart with my parents where I convinced them to cash in a whole life insurance policy that they bought for me when I was very young. They bought it for me when they were concerned that I wouldn’t live very long due to some poor health in my early childhood, but