A Story Of Debt

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that my bank was offering a deal to temporarily reduce my APR.  After reading all the fine print three times through, I made a plan to save up as much money as possible before March 5th when the offer expired.  I had to wait until the last moment to [...]

When I was younger, I don’t remember ever thinking much about how people spend their money.  In the years when my mom was single, money was obviously an issue for us, but she worked hard and did everything she had to do to make sure we had what we needed.  As they got older and [...]

There’s this book out by the author of The Millionaire Next Door called Stop Acting Rich.  I have not read either book, though my understanding of author Thomas Stanley’s philosophy is that millionaires live frugally and that’s how they grow and maintain their wealth.  This reminds me of the only millionaire I’ve ever known–an old [...]

For the last week, I’ve been having this debate in my head about whether or not to create a want list.  A want list would be a list of things I want to buy when I get out of debt.  It seemed like a good idea at first.  That way, instead of obsessing over something [...]

To me, there is a stigma to the words “I’m busy” or at least to saying them out loud to other people.  I wrote about it on my personal blog once.  Even now that I know I am really busy, I can’t quite get over the stigma.  But, I’ll ignore that feeling for now, because [...]

I was driving home from the grocery store several days ago, going through the numbers in my head to figure out if I could still make my January goal.  I do this all the time and I get very stressed about whether I can make my goal or not.  The goals are not easy; they [...]

My process for paying bills is really boring.  I’m writing about it only because it stands in contrast to the interesting ways other people go about it.  I don’t pay attention to the mint.com alerts or put anything on a calendar or set all my bills in a neat little pile on the corner of [...]

Money problems run in families.  But, I didn’t learn this behavior from my parents.  My parents have always been very responsible with their money.  Very conservative.  They don’t spend it when they don’t have it.  And even now that they are doing quite well for themselves, they live frugally.  Both of my parents are among [...]