Personal finance, my story, mistakes, and what I've learned
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)
I have a little jar that sits on my dresser. Inside it is my pocket change from the last several days.
It seems like such a simple idea, but it can be quite powerful if you keep up with it. Instead of dumping excess pocket change into a vending machine, I keep it in my pocket. [...]
Continue Reading The Power of the Pocket Change Jar
Several months ago, I sat down with my finances and took a good hard look at things. I was in approximately $10,000 of credit card debt spread out over three cards, and that’s not counting my student loans or vehicle loans. I also had no money in savings and – even scarier – I wanted [...]
Continue Reading I’m In Big Financial Trouble – Where Do I Start?
