Yesterday, we learned about my immature behavior in handling a large steady income. I was starting to sink further into debt without really acquiring any assets, and I was building up a lifestyle based around extremely poor spending decisions. Yet, I was about to embark on a path that would make matters much worse.
I was [...]

Continue Reading My Personal Finance Mistakes: Marriage

Yesterday, we watched as I stumbled through college making a series of classic financial errors. Yet I finished (albeit in six years) with a pair of degrees, and I was able to find work utilizing both of them. I was suddenly making more money per year than my parents had made combined in any year, [...]

Continue Reading My Personal Finance Mistakes: First Real Income

Last time, we reviewed the mistakes I made during my earliest days of dealing with my own finances, and it was clear that I was already showing some grave errors in financial planning. After high school, however, I found my way into college, an environment where I would have an opportunity to learn many things, [...]

Continue Reading My Personal Finance Mistakes: The College Years

As I wrote in my first personal finance mistakes post, I learned some pretty terrible money concepts in my childhood. I believed that money was the method to buying instant happiness and that accepting free things was wrong. I also missed out on any opportunity to learn about personal budgeting or finance simply because there [...]

Continue Reading My Personal Finance Mistakes: Not Valuing My Money

A wise man once said “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.” It took me a long time to summon the courage to admit that it was my own mistakes that led me to my financial meltdown. It required me to admit that not only had I been making mistakes since [...]

Continue Reading My Personal Finance Mistakes: The Beginning

Blogging, particularly among a group of bloggers on a specific topic, is a community. We all have the same interests and passions and we find great insight in each other’s thoughts. Naturally, we want other bloggers in this community to succeed, but what can we do to help our brother and sister bloggers? Here are [...]

Continue Reading Seven Ways To Help Your Blogging Friends

Recently, I’ve had several opportunities to seriously consider how money impacts the relationships within my family, and it’s made me develop a number of “rules” with which I interact with my family on a financial basis.
The first situation occurred several months ago, when one of my siblings was suddenly unable to take care of his [...]

Continue Reading Rules For Handling Financial Issues With Extended Family

After seeing yet another of those ubiquitous CapitalOne “What’s in your wallet?” ads, I decided to write about the one credit card that’s in my wallet (now that I’ve learned some hard lessons about the dangers of them). I route almost every minor purchase I make through a Chase Amazon.com credit card for which I [...]

Continue Reading What’s In My Wallet? And What Should Be In Yours?

I grew up in a very poor home. We had so little money that we were required to grow, fish, and hunt for some of our food, and I remember many nights where we had “mystery stew” and other such dishes that were made up of whatever could be thrown into a pot together. To [...]

Continue Reading Educating Children on Fiscal Responsibility

I used to think that clipping coupons was a giant waste of time. “Coupons encourage you to buy extra junk that you don’t need,” I thought to myself whenever I saw a batch of coupons from the newspaper.
Then I had a baby, and I discovered the true value of coupons. Hint: if you buy diapers, [...]

Continue Reading Mastering Coupons (Without Being a Coupon Nut)