.The Twelve Biggest Personal Finance Mistakes People Make Over and Over Again

By Trent Hamm

As I’ve mentioned before, I get tons of email from people describing the personal finance problems in their lives, commenting critically on things I’ve written, and offering up their own stories of success. Not only that, as The Simple Dollar has become more and more popular, I’ve had more and more opportunities to talk about personal finance with people face to face.

What amazes me is that I see most of the same problems pop up time and time again. Sure, the specifics of the story change, as do the severity of the situation, but these same twelve items come up in almost every story I hear about financial problems. Even worse, quite often multiple items from this list appear in the same tale of woe. I’m not immune to them, either. At the time of my own financial meltdown, I was guilty of the majority of these things. It was only due to a commitment to fixing my financial situation that I was able to overcome these mistakes and set them right.

.Are You A Cheap Person? Or Are You Being Frugal?

ByTodd Kunsman

Saving money and finding ways to make your dollars stretch farther is not necessarily a bad thing by any means. After all, not everyone can live lavishly all the time or never worry about their finances. However, sometimes your money saving ways puts you in a category of being a cheap person. This means you are becoming too obsessed with money, savings, and looking for ways to never spend. The problem is others start to notice and you may begin alienating yourself from friends and family. Instead, you want to practice being frugal and scale back on being cheap.

But what is being cheap about? What are the signs of being a cheapskate? And how can you tell if you are being frugal or cheap? Don’t worry, I’ll explore all these questions below!

.Why It's so Hard to Talk About Money With Friends—and Why You Should Do It Anyway

Jolene Latimer Wed, April 7, 2021

Plenty of us feel totally comfortable talking with our close friends about almost every topic—sex, parenting, even politics. But what about money? In many cases, finances are the final conversational frontier among friends. While many old-school cultural taboos have been broken or at least softened, the stigma surrounding money talk remains—and it's a cultural norm that could actually be robbing women of the very conversations we need to improve our finances.

"You can be embarrassed if you have too little, or embarrassed if you have too much," says Diana Machado, who runs a business in Canada to help women find financial community. "There's no easy outlet to reach out and say, 'I need to talk about finances.'" Conversations about how to earn money and manage it are important in a world that still undervalues women's labor and financial education. Yet many women find themselves uncomfortable bringing up even the topics of salary or earnings (not to mention discussing financial hardships and discrimination) among friends, especially if they were taught growing up never to ask someone how much they make.

.The Do’s and Don’ts of Combining Finances With Your Partner

Sam DiSalvo Wed, April 7, 2021

One of the many things that became “real” once my husband and I got married is our finances. For four years, our only discussion about money was in the notes of Venmo transactions. I had no idea how much he made, and he had no idea how much I made; we just knew we had enough money to split dinners via Venmo.

That all changed when we moved in together and, shortly after, got married. Our short financial conversations had to become longer and include topics such as salaries, taxes and “how come you get so many Amazon packages?”

Here’s what my husband and I have learned after a few terrifying-but-worth-it conversations about combining our finances.

.5 Steps to Embrace Lifestyle Deflation Without Deprivation

The Minimal Investor

Written by Adam on March 28, 2021.

Are you one of the millions of Americans who are currently rethinking their finances? If you want to reset and reevaluate not only your money but what your life will be after the pandemic, there are ways to bring it all into balance without feeling deprived.

Let me know if this sounds familiar. When you were younger, you had less money than you have now. You worked hard, and every dollar you earned was a new opportunity to support yourself, buy something fun or have an exciting experience.

As you progressed in your career, perhaps you upgraded different parts of your life. You worked hard, and every dollar you earned was a new opportunity to support yourself, buy something fun, or have exciting experiences with new people. As you made more money, you probably bought more things. Maybe you upgraded from an apartment to a house. Or from an inexpensive area to the center of a city. Or from a cheap used car to buying your dream car.

.Living Below Your Means: The First Step to Wealth

Written March 4, 2021 by One Frugal Girl

Ask a group of money nerds the best way to get rich, and you’ll likely receive a handful of juicy tips for building your nest egg. While new advice pops up on occasion, most financial gurus stick to a list of tried and true favorites. Living below your means is one such piece of financial advice.

What does it mean to live below your means, and can it really lead to greater wealth?

Living below your means is often defined as paying for all of your bills in full each month. Simply put, you spend less than you earn and never purchase more than you can afford. You can use credit cards to pay for your expenses, but you never need to carry a balance on them.

.Get Rich Versus Stay Rich

Posted March 10, 2021 by blair

I don’t help people get rich, I help them stay rich. My job as a wealth manager is to help clients hold on to their wealth and to preserve and grow it to keep pace with inflation. My number one priority is to ensure that money is there to meet their goals, when they are ready to spend it. There are a lot of ways to get rich. The most reliable way is to spend less than you earn and invest the rest. Repeat consistently for four to five decades, and you are likely to secure a decent retirement. One of my favorite things about being an advisor is hearing the variety of ways people accumulated wealth.

I’ve seen and heard it all. Stock-based compensation is a common route, as is building a successful, privately-owned business. Then there are high earning professions such as medicine and law. In some cases, I work with the second or third generation of a family. One of my colleagues spoke to a true Tesla millionaire recently. They really do exist, and a few actually took some gains off the table.

.Time is Money, but Money Can’t Buy Time

The Physician Philospher

“This broken water heater is going to set us back. If it costs $2,000 to replace, that’s an extra two weeks of payments towards our student loans.” Please, tell me I am not the only one who thinks like this? For a while, my monetary mindset revolved around our biggest financial goal: Paying off our refinanced student loans. Time is money, and I didn’t have the time for costs that slowed our financial progress down.

It is important to realize, though, that money is a means to an end. It is not the end itself. This is a common concept that many struggle with in medicine, particularly if you work in private practice or you work in a shift work specialty.

Time is Money

The first person to use the phrase “Time is Money” was Benjamin Franklin in his book “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One”.