When I was a kid, each year my Christmas stocking had a large orange in the toe. I always thought of this as a bit strange, so when I was a bit older, I asked my parents about the orange. It turns out that oranges were pretty hard to…

Megan writes in: Congratulations on your third child! My husband and I are expecting our second child in February. I hope you’ll write an article about how to save money when another child comes along. Your wish is my command, Megan. Here are some of the ways we’re preparing…

Right now, I’m deeply involved with the editing process for my upcoming second book. My first book was fairly easy to edit. Since it was mostly a list of ways to live cheap, the edits were either “does this way to live cheap fit in the book?” or grammatical…

Lately, my wife and I have been studying ways to reduce our weekly grocery bill. We’ve been using several tactics to do this, which I will discuss one at a time over a series of articles. Salads before dinner are a common staple at our house. For a long…

Over the past week, I’ve been conducting a quiet poll among friends and family concerning whether or not they shop at thrift stores. I received a few “yes” answers, but a surprisingly large number of “no” answers. Without arguing about the reasons, I also asked them why they didn’t…

One of the biggest personal and professional frustrations that I have (and that a lot of others seem to share) is that there’s never enough time to get to the important things we want to do. We want to do things like… + visit an old relative + create…

Each Monday, The Simple Dollar opens up the reader mailbags and answers ten to twenty simple questions offered up by the readers on personal finance topics and many other things. Got a question? Ask it in the comments. You might also enjoy the archive of earlier reader mailbags .…

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal growth, personal productivity, or career book. This is a book I wish I had my hands on about two years ago. I was working at a job I liked, but I also felt that there were several directions in which…

Quite often, I’m emailed about a subject so frequently that I decide that, instead of just writing the same answer again and again, I should just write an article about it so I can point new emailers to the article. That way, not only will they get my response,…

Many newer readers of The Simple Dollar haven’t been exposed to the hundreds of great articles in the archives of the site, so this is a weekly series that highlights the five best posts from one year ago this week, two years ago this week, and three years ago…