At age 25, Jim makes $100,000 a year. He’s constantly traveling for business. He has a large home in which he often doesn’t visit some rooms for months at a time. He eats out every single night. He drives a leased Lexus, which he updates every few years at…

I make financial mistakes. I make a lot of them, actually. What I usually try to do when I screw up is not dwell on them. Instead, I try to identify why I made the mistake and then try to figure out how I can fix that issue. I…

As I’ve mentioned several times over the years, I carry a pocket notebook and a pen with me wherever I go. Whenever I have any sort of an idea or discover any piece of information I might want to use or reflect on later, I don’t hesitate to pull…

Shanna writes in: You’ve written before about how Netflix is a good deal if you’re an avid movie watcher and Gamefly is a good deal if you’re an avid video game player. You’re an avid reader. Have you ever looked at BookSwim ? I have, and I’ve gone back…

If you’re unhappy with some significant portion of your life, at some point you have to wake up in the morning and simply say that you’ve had enough. That key decision often leads to some further difficult ones. It will probably lead to some personal challenges. It will require…

Jenny writes in: In 2008, my husband and I lost about 50% of our retirement savings. We got so scared that we moved all of our savings to very safe investments – cash and bonds. Then, the stock market rebounds and some of our friends have earned back at…

My kids love juice boxes. We usually allow them to have one a day as part of an afternoon snack. We’re pretty picky about the ones we buy, making sure that at the very least they’re 100% juice and, often, we buy juice that has vegetable juice in it,…

Every single one of us has some sort of big project hanging out there in our lives. We’d love to accomplish it, but it seems so big and the free space in our life seems so small. Spend a monent and think about what your big goal is. It…

Kimberly writes in: A few months ago (yep, one of those New Years Resolutions!) I pledged to get a better grip on my finances. I found some personal finance blogs to read and decided to start off by simply tracking where our money went. But it’s impossible!! Every time…

Anthony writes in: My wife and I have two children, ages 2 and 1. We’d like to have more; we both think that four would be a great number, although there’s no particular logical reason for that number. The problem is the expense. With daycare costs, adding each additional…