A couple years ago, an extremely influential article entitled A Simpler Way To Save: The 60% Solution popped up on MSN Money. It proposed a very simple way to budget: After analyzing our spending patterns over the past couple of years using our Microsoft Money data file, I determined that we needed to keep our

I received a very sad story from a friend of mine, who I’ll call Roger, that I felt was worth sharing as a cautionary tale: About three months ago, my paternal grandfather was diagnosed with lung and intestinal cancer. He had worked for forty years at a factory that, for most of the time he

If you’ve ever read many personal finance advice books, you’ll find that the vast majority of them encourage the reader to make up a formal budget and write it down (in fact, I even wrote a guide along those lines myself). Without a doubt, making up a formal budget is a very good exercise for

My wife and I have been doing some house hunting in our area lately. We have been watching the real estate fliers carefully and have been driving through nearby towns looking at homes with “For Sale” signs in front. Last night, we drove by a house that somehow just called out to both of us.

Today is a lazy Sunday in the early spring, the first authentic lazy Sunday I’ve had in a long while. The taxes are done and now it’s time for a financial spring cleaning. What’s a financial spring cleaning, you ask? For me, it’s a post tax filing tradition in which I go through all of

My wife and I are expecting our second child in September. As soon as we made the decision to have a second child, we sat down and did a number of calculations on the subject and we quickly realized that the expenses were going to be tremendous. Let’s walk through the expenses just a bit

A friend of mine works for CitiGroup in South Dakota, which is about to experience some massive layoffs. He’s a bit worried about what’s coming down the pike, and so he asked me what I thought he should do. Here’s my advice to him, as well as anyone else who is facing a potential layoff

As I’ve mentioned before, I maintain multiple savings accounts at various institutions, mostly in an effort to keep my different savings goals in discrete places. For the most part, I only deal with two: one is an emergency fund, and the other I refer to as my “short term” fund. What’s a “short term” fund?

Many people complain that budgeting is too confusing and that they have a hard time setting concrete goals for themselves, and when they do set goals, they’re so loose that they are easy to meet but they don’t really generate any significant savings. One major solution to this problem is the so-called 60% Solution, described

When I was first recovering from financial disaster, one of my biggest challenges was convincing myself to actually do the things I knew I needed to do. I would think to myself, “I want to save money,” but when push came to shove, it was so easy to not save money. I’m willing to bet

I’ve been a fan of Ben Stein’s financial writings for years, but this is the first book of his that I’ve picked up. Could it possibly be as good as his columns? Is it worth reading at all? A large portion of the book (chapters 7 through 13) really focus on issues that many people

Having grown up rural and now living rural, I know first hand the types of experiences people can have when they’re caught out in the middle of nowhere and something goes wrong with their car with no help in sight. The end result was expensive towing, lots of time wasted, and in one case, one

Let’s face it: an emergency fund of some sort is a necessity. However, some of my readers think a single emergency fund isn’t enough (remember, this comment was discussing the personal finance of a single person): Aside from the 6 month contingency fund he has saved, does he have emergency funds for insurance deductibles, a

One major part of being financially responsible is to have the proper mindset, and to build the proper mindset can often be quite challenging. Just like anything else, being financially fit requires work, and most of that work goes on between your ears. Here are ten mental exercises you can do any time to strengthen

I spoke on IM with an individual a few days ago who has a six month emergency fund (actually post-tax; it is equal to half of his annual salary) and has also paid off all of his debts. He currently is putting the full amount into his 401(k) and is receiving employee matching, plus he

Every time I see a CapitalOne commercial chirping their promotional “What’s in your wallet?” line, I actually think of my own wallet and what’s inside of it. So, in the interest of openness (and because there are a few interesting things going on), here’s what I keep in my wallet. Minimal identification The only photo

I recently read a provocative article on PsyBlog entitled Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted, which focuses on a concept called “miswanting”: The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future has been termed ‘miswanting’ by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to a range of studies finding we are poor

For the first time ever, my wife paid attention to an advertising campaign produced by a major brokerage firm. In this case, it was the nearly ubiquitous “Talk to Chuck” campaign for Charles Schwab, in which cartoon people discuss their financial needs to the camera. This particular spot showed a man concerned with having to

We’ve all heard the maxim of “taking it one day at a time.” I’ve even discussed making a one day commitment to personal finance change. But for most of us (I can certainly say it’s true for me and my friends and coworkers), the biggest problem to achieving bigger goals, like paying off credit card