This is a simple question that I ask myself that helps me stay debt free. It may sound infantile or even stupid to some, but if you take the question seriously each time you ask it as I have, it has saved me from making a lot of poor purchases over the year. I know because when I was younger, I did live paycheck to paycheck. The question is:

Is anything that I own that’s worth living paycheck to paycheck to pay for?

Is the new car that I want worth living paycheck to...

We all know that we should plan for an emergency. From an early age, we’re taught to have an evacuation plan in case of fire and how to call 911 if we need help. If you live in hurricane, tornado, wildfire, or snowstorm country, you’re taught to keep a kit handy with the supplies you’ll need to survive until things return to normal. But how many of us give any advance thought to preparing for a financial emergency? What would happen if you lost your job tomorrow, or the main earner in your family...

Television has given us a lot of relationships with characters who we can never meet. I remember characters from a lot of TV shows better than I am able to recall certain childhood friends and classmates and I am pretty sure that I still know the TV characters better than I have known a lot of people with whom I once interacted every day. I am sure that you have television memories, too, and that some are shared with almost everyone you know while others are all but forgotten by most of us. ...

We are friends with a couple I’ll call the Joneses. The Joneses are exactly what they sound like. They are the ones on the block with the latest cars, toys, and gizmos. Despite that, they are nice people and we’ve been friends for years. Each year we go on vacation together to a small resort in the mountains. This year we are going but the Joneses are not.

When I called Mrs. Jones to make arrangements, she hemmed and hawed about how things were so busy this year and things were crazy...

It is an accepted part of self-help wisdom that it takes twenty-one days to develop a new habit and make it stick. This has been found to be true in weight loss, smoking cessation, reducing alcohol consumption, and many other regimens designed to create positive habits. It can also be applied to your finances. If you are having trouble getting motivated to create a better financial life, a dedicated effort over just twenty-one days can create better money management habits.

Of course,...