Every day, do two things. One, tell your spouse that you love them and tell them something specific about them that you love. Two, spend half an hour doing something that helps them in some way and expect no compliments or comment from it – do it just because you care about that person. This works better if you focus on something that you know will really matter to your partner. For instance, if your partner loathes doing the dishes, just do them without comment once or twice a week.

Do these two things every day and you’ll be surprised how much better your relationship goes.

Money Lessons Learned from Traveling Well For me, money is better spent on experiences than stuff. (@ saving advice)

Can Money Buy Freedom? It can do that only in a limited sense. On some level, you have to choose to be free from the things that worry you. You can be rich and still be depely worried (and controlled by) lots of things. (@ get rich slowly)

Beware the Entrepreneur’s Recoil If you succeed at something, you tend to become more risk-averse and that often leads to undoing what made you succeed in the first place. (@ jonathan fields)

How to Get the Most from Your Gym Membership & Avoid Burning Out I usually have two things that keep me from really hitting a home run at a gym. The first is the soreness that comes from a period of not exercising. It goes away in a few weeks, but it’s hard to get through. The second is injury and convincing myself to return to the routine after recovering from a minor injury. (@ len penzo)

When you’re a fan of someone’s work and read it faithfully, it’s easy to get caught up in that person’s work. You want a new book. You want a new blog post. You want a new photograph. You want some detail to be corrected. I do this all the time. I can’t tell you how long I’ve pined for the next book in fantasy series that I’ve loved or waited for the next album from the artist I enjoy.

Sometimes, though, the curtain is lifted. There are human beings back there, trying hard to create useful things, handle the feedback they get, and still live some semblance of a normal life. They make mistakes. They have pain and regrets.

For every singer, artist, writer, or other creative person whose work you love, there’s at least one real person back there trying to deal with this complicated mess we call life. They deal with sick children, past regrets, relationships that aren’t going well, and illnesses of their own.

We are all human.

How to Choose a Good Bank as a Freelancer This is a really interesting perspective on choosing a bank, as not every bank account is perfect for everyone. (@ freelance switch)

Finding the Courage to Stay the Course Sticking to a long-term goal can be really hard, especially when you’ve reached a point where there’s a lot of work to do before the next milestone. This is some great advice for sticking to it. (@ dumb little man)

Seven Easy Menu Planning Ideas We do most of these things. These tactics really help with food preparation. (@ living richly on a budget)

Five Free Gifts for Valentine’s Day Don’t sweat over a perfect gift or a box of chocolates or something when a bit of thoughtfulness will do. (@ million ways to save)

My older children have tumbling/gymnastics one night a week, ice skating one night a week, soccer two nights a week when the weather is appropriate, and they both want to join tae kwon do which is one or two nights a week.

What’s too much? I don’t think there is an answer. The only “rule” we have to this point is that we only sacrifice one family dinner a week to activities, though I know that will slip in the future.

Get Your Financial Life on One Page (FLOP) I have something like this saved in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s just a single view of my financial situation that I’m happy with. (@ christian pf)

Do You Have the Courage to Be Wealthy? Being wealthy means making sacrifices to get there and often struggling with new issues when you arrive. (@ watson inc.)

The Calculus of Convenience Convenience certainly does have a value. The challenge is that many people (in my experience) greatly overestimate that value. (@ get rich slowly)

The Habits That Crush Us For me, the crushing habits are ones that eat up unnecessary time. I am “crushed” when I find myself without enough time to do something I want to do with my family or with my friends. (@ zen habits)

It’s completely up to you Some interesting thoughts on having too many choices to really analyze. My solution is to usually cut away big chunks of my options very quickly using rules I’ve thought about in advance. (@ seth godin)

When that happens, I often just wrap myself up in a warm blanket as I work. It’s a big, comfortable thing that’s just cozy to sit in.

In fact, I’m wrapped in it as I type this.

The Purpose of Money Money is a medium of exchange, nothing more. Someone gives you money for your time, your energy, or your things. You give someone else money in exchange for their time, their energy, or their things. Good personal finance is all about maximizing those exchanges. (@ matt about money)

Consumer Is King, Believe It or Not. Act Like One. This is a great response to getting a lemon product. (@ one cent at a time)

A Place of My Own This is a really surprising post. I’m not sure what else to say, but I felt I should link to it. (@ get rich slowly)

Economic Lessons from “Farmville” For me, the real lesson of Farmville is the microtransactions. I’m amazed at how many people will pay a few bucks to get a little bit ahead at this game. (@ free money finance)

The first thing you do when you sit down at the computer “Let me guess: check the incoming. Check email or traffic stats or messages from your boss. Check the tweets you follow or the FB status of friends. You’ve just surrendered not only a block of time but your freshest, best chance to start something new.” Indeed. (@ seth godin)

The funny thing is that it’s usually impossible to really say what the impact of a vote really is until a long while after the vote.

So, why do I tune in? I guess I just like politics from a “fan’s” perspective. It often seems to me like a complicated high-stakes game.

What If I Lost My Career? Envision, then Act This is spectacular advice for people facing a rocky path in their career. At some point, you have to consider restarting your career, and this is really good food for thought if you’re in that situation. (@ free money finance)

Career Fairs, Part One and Part Two Career fairs can be completely useless or incredibly valuable for a potential job seeker. It all depends on the preparation you put into it and how seriously you approach it. I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t approach career fairs with enough seriousness when in college. (@ penny pinching professional)

Unfinished Business I think that anyone who has a successful career or is running a successful small business is going to eventually face the “black hole inbox” where there’s simply more stuff there to do than there’s time and energy to do it. If you’re doing something of value, people are going to want your attention and effort. I think this is some great advice on dealing with it. (@ unclutterer)

“How Can I Stop Being Overwhelmed by Big Projects?” My solution is to not take on too many of them and focus as intensely as I can at the next step in the project. (@ happiness project)

Clearing Your Life for a New Year This is a good process to do regularly, not just when a new year occurs. (@ zen habits)

A few months ago, I would have then spent several hours reading documentation and trying to figure out what was wrong. There would have been a decent chance that I would have broken the site in the process. I would have been stressed out, lost the chance to write multiple posts, and walked away wishing I could be doing something else with my time.

Now? I shot an email to my technical contact at Cut Media. They did some stuff. It seems to have been fixed. It took me about two minutes, without stress about breaking the site or anything else.

This is why I made the choice that I did to join forces with Cut Media. They’re good at handling the things that I’m bad at and don’t enjoy. I might not have the financial options I had before, but I have a lot more freedom and a lot less stress.

Terry Gilliam on Ideas, Unlearning, and Avoiding Debt Terry Gilliam is a former member of the Monty Python comedy troupe (he usually did the animation work) and moved on to directing films. I really enjoyed this interview from him about finances and creative careers. (@ the 99 percent)

I’m Investing 100% of my 2012 Income One member of this couple is investing her entire 2012 salary into building a small business with multiple employees. That’s a pretty strong move. (@ afford anything)

College Kids Need Skills, Not Good Grades The problem, of course, is finding ways to evaluate skill sets. Theoretically, that’s what classes are supposed to do, but my experience has been that many of the “A” students in classes aren’t the ones I would want as employees. (@ thousandaire)

The chance of a lifetime The current economic conditions aren’t bad. They’re the chance of a lifetime. (@ seth godin)

Solving problems Leaning away from problems rarely pays off. (@ seth godin)

Getting Out of Debt: Make That New Year’s Resolution Work These tactics are geared towards financial resolutions, but they really work for almost any goal you throw at them. (@ consumerism commentary)

Keeping new year’s resolutions from NPR’s Science Friday This post summarizes a great episode of NPR’s Science Friday that discusses the psychology behind resolutions. (@ unclutterer)

Should You Have GOALS or RESOLUTIONS? The words often mean similar things, but can have very different connotations that put you in different mindsets. (@ happiness project)

Resolve This! “Resolutions are about want, but they are useless without will and action.” Indeed. (@ jonathan fields)

Part of the challenge is that we like to celebrate a full Christmas day with just the five of us, but actually doing that on Christmas Day doesn’t always work out.

Our solution is that our immediate family celebrates Christmas on a day that’s convenient in relation to the travel. We exchange all of our gifts for each other, play games, and often watch a Christmas movie (or a new movie received as a gift).

This way, if we need to travel on Christmas Day or have a bunch of family over, we still get to enjoy that family Christmas morning, with the children running into our rooms at five in the morning waking us up and so on, at our own house.

For us, that day is tomorrow.

(And, yes, Santa finds our children wherever they’re at on Christmas Day and fills their stockings with goodies.)

Five Ways to Save Money in Your First Job This is a great collection of tactics for any new graduate. (@ humble savers)

25 Ways to Make This the Best Christmas Season Ever We already incorporate a lot of these into our family traditions. (@ pick the brain)

Recovering from Divorce A divorce can be a real mess. Marriage is something to enter into with care, because if you do it without really knowing who you’re marrying, you’ve got a good chance of entering into an unhappy arrangement. (@ get rich slowly)

Are You Celebrating Christmas with Your Kids in January? This reminds me of my mother-in-law’s extended family. They celebrated their extended family Christmas in mid-November, which meant that it was out of the way before Christmas madness. (@ money ning)

The Economics of Christmas Lights I posted this last year, but few articles have made me re-think where I live more than this one. (@ seth godin)

Tuesday morning, she’s completely fine. She spends the entire day jumping on Dad’s lap and singing songs and jumping on Dad’s lap and playing dress-up and jumping on Dad’s lap and doing puzzles.

Her resilience is beautiful.

Survival of the Fittest in the Workplace and Myths about Fairness I’m a believer that you should always view yourself as a freelancer at work. You should give value to the organization you work for, but you shouldn’t be controlled by them, either. (@ squirrelers)

Quashing the Self-Improvement Urge My counter-argument to this interesting argument is that if you don’t focus on improving, you will eventually be replaced by someone who will. If you’ve reached a place of security and comfort, then that’s no big deal, but a lot of people aren’t in that place. For me, I enjoy getting better at a skill, which is icing on top of the cake. (@ zen habits)

Avoiding Competitive Shopping for Fun and Profit Even if you got a bigger deal than the other person, you still spent money for something. Businesses don’t exist if they’re losing money on such transactions. (@ get rich slowly)

“I Am Here” Sometimes, those are the most valuable three words you can say. (@ seth godin)

For me, the best solution is to simply spend some time reflecting on that challenge. I put aside feeble attempts to work and focus on that which is bothering me.

If I do that, I tend to find resolution much sooner, and once I find resolution, the words and the focus return.

10 Reasons Your Freelance Career Is Failing I’d advise people who are considering freelance work to read this before making the leap. It’s even more important then because you can shore up these things before you even get started. (@ freelance switch)

Ten Easy to Plan, Cheap, and Fun At-Home Date Ideas When my wife and I have a date night, we usually wind up playing a board game together. It gets us face to face and talking at the table. Board games are a great conversation starter. (@ money help for christians)

Why I Still Read The Tightwad Gazette The Tightwad Gazette was a popular printed newsletter in the 1990s focusing on frugality issues. I actually still leaf through it, too. (@ saving advice)

The economics of Christmas lights Most of the houses in my neighborhood have Christmas lights. It makes for a beautiful sight on a December evening. (@ seth godin)

The other parent essentially has free time. Sometimes, we just relax. Other times, we work on household tasks. Often, I write – in fact, I’m drafting this post while Sarah is handling the bedtime routine.

Finish What You Start I’m far more impressed by someone who does one thing and finishes it than the person who does ten things but never really finishes anything. (@ get rich slowly)

7 Mental Mistakes That Stop You From Living a Life of Freedom and Peace I think we all find ourselves slipping into these traps at some time or another. The key is minimizing, not eliminating. (@ dumb little man)

Shifting Expectations: How to Adapt to New Job Responsibilities My experience has been that the best way to handle shifting responsibilities is communication. If you’re not sure what you should be taking on and what should take priority, talk it over with your boss. Be open about it. (@ the 99 percent)

4 Things That Keep You From Your Goals For me, the biggest thing that holds me back is inertia – the pattern of established habits. If I can make myself break a routine and establish a new one, I usually find success. That’s the really hard part, though. (@ pick the brain)

Our youngest is putting words together in new ways every day now and he’s just reveling in this ability to express himself. It’s a joy to watch.

Golden Handcuffs – Why Can’t I Leave My Job? Golden handcuffs are a real problem, particularly for younger professionals who set themselves up in a lifestyle that’s unsustainable without their job. (@ your life, their life)

How to Tell Your Children Santa Is Broke This is really good advice for people who find themselves in a tough situation like this. (@ money q and a)

The Need to Save Money is Life and Death This is an incredibly painful story, but it makes a good point: if you’re not saving, you’re giving into pure magical thinking. (@ free money finance)

Can You Tell Your Spouse They Don’t Make Enough Money? It depends a lot on what you’ve clearly established as the values in your marriage. If you’re both career-oriented people who are shooting for huge incomes so you can live a particular lifestyle, this could be brought up, I would think. If you convinced your spouse to be a stay-at-home parent and aren’t happy with their salary after they return to work after a five year layoff, I’d suggest not bringing it up. (@ dinks finance)

It’s really the simple things that make life worthwhile.

Should I Get a Prenup? Yes! I think there’s actually a pretty compelling argument for a prenupital agreement as a form of “marital insurance.” It’s similar to the logic of why you would buy car insurance – you don’t intend to wreck your car or have a storm knock a tree onto it, but why not have protection against it in case it happens? (@ thousandaire)

Your Do Over Guide: What Would You Do Differently? I’ve actually had a draft of a post going over this very topic. What would I do differently if I could stick myself into my 18 year old body again. If I could turn the clock back to 1996, what would I do differently? This great post has made my wheels start turning again. (@ watson inc.)

A Sucker Punch of Personal Finance to America Has the economic downturn made America more conscious of personal finances? I think the answer is yes, but I think that there will be a rollback pretty quickly when the economy improves. (@ lazy man and money)

After You’ve Done Your Best… If you’ve built everything in your life around avoiding failure, you’ve probably succeeded at that, but you’ve likely also avoided big successes, too. (@ seth godin)

What to Do with a Wedding Dress? My wife’s dress is still hanging in the closet. I think there’s an emotional tie there that’s pretty deep, not so much as a symbol of the wedding, but as a symbol of the marriage. (@ unclutterer)

7 Ways to Simplify Your Life The one that really works for me at this point in my life is “early to bed and early to rise.” If I get a good night of sleep so that I can rise with the children and still feel fully rested, I tend to have a very productive day. I think the key is simply knowing yourself well enough to know when you’re most productive during a day and rework your day so you can capitalize on that. (@ pick the brain)

Selling Thrift Store Finds for Profit on eBay I have profited several times from thrift store finds, but it was almost exclusively due to trading or due to finding something at a very inexpensive price that worked perfectly as a gift. Thrifting is really worthwhile, but you’ve got to be willing to walk by 999 pieces of junk to find the one gem. (@ minting nickels)

Manging versus Micromanaging Your Money I think that micromanaging can eventually grow into simply having very strong natural behaviors for conserving money. I believe that’s exactly what happened to me over a multi-year period. (@ broke professionals)

What good interview questions are actually trying to discover During the job interviews I’ve had and that I’ve conducted, I’ve felt that it was really valuable to know what traits the person asking the questions is looking for. This is actually a pretty good list. (@ seth’s blog)

He brought home his first report card, which showed pretty solid progress in almost every area. He has a few little things to work on, but it mostly seems good.

I’ve got a pretty good sense as to what I’ll hear at this conference, much as I’ve had a good sense as to what our children’s preschool teachers would say about our kids before they even said it.

Too Frugal For Your Own Good There’s a giant difference between frugal and cheap, which is the area Watson is really looking at here. (@ watson inc.)

give up hope (it’s a good thing to do. really.) Hope is mostly a bad thing because it’s a crutch that prevents you from taking action or making decisions. (@ white hot truth)

What Are the Differences Between the Rich and the Poor? I think the biggest difference is unexpected events. Another huge difference is brain chemistry. While the behaviors we control do play a pretty big part, both of those things have a giant impact and our ability to alter them is limited. (@ get rich slowly)

5 Things That Are Destroying Your Success I agree with all of these, and I think almost all of them can be corrected with better choices in the moment. (@ pick the brain)

What I’ve found is that some days it works like a charm and I’m ready to just tackle whatever comes my way. Other days, I simply wake up really groggy and I’m in worse shape than before.

On the whole, it’s a wash right now, but I can see the potential.

How I Make $250,000 a Year Investing This was an entertaining overview article on real estate investing. While it doesn’t really get into specifics, it gives you enough that you could start chasing down specifics if you’re interested. (@ good financial cents)

It’s Okay to Spend Money on Things You Really Want “Freely spend your money on things you receive a lot of value from, but mercilessly slash expenses elsewhere.” The trick, of course, is actually knowing yourself well enough to distinguish between things that provide genuine value and things that are simply shorter-term desires (@ pt money)

Does Buying a House Make You Happy? I think buying a home can make you happy, but as the old song went, a house is not a home. (@ christian pf)

When Is It Okay to Start Worrying? It’s never okay to start worrying, because worrying is never a useful product of your time. (@ seth godin)

Instead of focusing strictly on the writing (as I often spend my time doing), I stepped back and tried to look at the bigger picture. What do I have already available to me that would be of value to my readers? What can I do to ensure long-term income from everything I’ve done with The Simple Dollar?

I think I’ve come up with some interesting answers and I hope to put a lot of them in place over the next year. Wait and see.

Long term planning can really be exciting.

Stop Crying That There Are No Jobs. Create One. In other words, what are you doing right now to build yourself a job? Stop looking at employers to solve all of your problems for you. Instead, dust off whatever entrepreneurial drive you have and start creating something for yourself. (@ afford anything)

Getting an additional job to pay off debt is actually worth more than the salary… A part-time job that has the entire paycheck go toward debt earns a lot more than the $8 per hour it seems to earn. It’s also earning the interest rate on your debt by paying it off early. If you’re earning $8 an hour in your spare time and that money enables you to get rid of a 20% debt three years early, each hour you work is actually earning you $13.82. (@ grumpy rumblings of the untenured)

The New American Family: Flexibility and Unconventional Lifestyles to Make Ends Meet If it was not for my flexible schedule, our family life would be tremendously difficult. I can’t even guess how many times I would have had to let our kids down or let my wife down over the past few years. (@ free from broke)

Is Lifestyle Inflation Unavoidable? If you’re not thinking critically about your life choices, I think lifestyle inflation is unavoidable. The key to success is to constantly think critically about your life. (@ retire by 40)

Simple strategies for changing a bad habit This is just a good set of ideas if you’re struggling with altering some portion of your behavior. (@ unclutterer)

Tossing a Frisbee back and forth with your children.

Holding your wife’s hand while you’re both enjoying watching a movie.

Getting into bed after a long day.

Many of the best pleasures in life are very simple ones.

My Kid Flooded Our Home. What’s the Worst (Most Expensive) Mistake Your Kids Have Made? Our living room carpet is simply in need of replacement. It’s a nightmarish pattern of stains. However, we’re trying to make it last until all of our kids are old enough that spills aren’t nearly as frequent. (@ darwin’s money)

Roads not taken Every moment of your life, you have the chance to make a better choice. You never regret it when you take the challenging and rewarding road. You often regret it when you take the easy path. (@ seth’s blog)

Got the Urge to Splurge? Use These Strategies to Fight It (or Not) I wrote about this topic a few days ago. I’m pretty happy with the method I use, but these are some other worthwhile tactics to think about. (@ get rich slowly)

How to Kill Your Painful Habit of Wishful Thinking Most of the reasons we have for wishful thinking serve to simply distract us from the situation at hand. If you want a better life, focus on that situation at hand. (@ dumb little man)

The room is so quiet that my fingers sound like drums on the keyboard. I can hear the hum of the fan on my laptop.

Best of all, I can hear him gently breathing in his crib just a few feet away from me.

Sleep well, little guy. Daddy has some writing to do.

Expanding the circle of “missed” If you suddenly picked up and moved to the other side of the world without telling anyone, how many people would miss you? I’d argue that the larger the number of people that would miss you, the greater your chances of success both here and there. It’s all about the relationships. (@ seth godin)

Six Reasons Why You Should Panic and One Reason Why You Should Keep Investing Would you really be shocked to learn that the one reason trumps the other six? (@ the dividend guy)

The Real Secret to Achieving Financial Freedom on a Modest Income The real secret is simple. It’s all about really understanding the difference between your wants and your needs and acting in a mature way based on that knowledge. (@ len penzo)

How to Deal with a Job You Hate The biggest suggestion I can offer is to simply remember that you’re swapping time and energy for money. That’s really the equation of a job – nothing more, nothing less. (@ dumb little man)

Each day, I visit quite a few personal finance blogs and blogs on related topics such as personal growth. If I see an article I like, I add it to my “roundup” folder.

When I assemble a roundup article (usually on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning), I just go through all of the links in the “roundup” folder and choose the ones that stick out at me from that group. The number varies, but I try to keep the number of links between four and seven. I think that less than four ends up excluding some great stuff, but more than seven is too many for people to really enjoy.

Navigating The Mixed Messages Of Our Consumer Culture Mixed messages are everywhere. The only way to get ahead is to understand what you value independently of advertising and popular culture and stick with that. (@ matt about money)

Your Will: Give to Kids Equally or Not? I’m definitely in the “it’s your money, do what you want with it” camp. There’s no need to give your estate equally to all of your children. (@ squirrelers)

Does It Pay to Become a Vegetarian? I have not seen a significant increase in overall food spending since becoming a vegetarian. I haven’t seen a big drop, either. I’ve just noticed a shift in the types of things we buy at the store. (@ totally money)

To Boost Your Self Control, Beware the “Licensing Effect” This is a real phenomenon. If you give yourself permission to “cheat” in one fashion, it becomes far easier to cheat in other fashions and before you know it, your goal is kaput. If you make a pledge to yourself, keep it. No exceptions. (@ happiness project)