Is frugality about saving money or making you feel less guilty?

Is frugality about saving money, or making you feel less guilty?

Mental Accounting: Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes

If you think you save, but you still have trouble saving, mental accounting may be one of the reasons. Using behavioral economics, read this in-depth review of “Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes.”

5 things to ask your friends who think “this time is different”

Carl Richards: “Given the decade we just finished, the question about what to do now is becoming part of our national conversation. With the insane amount of noise in the press, here are a few things to think about.

Personal finance is not about more willpower

If you think personal finance is about trying harder, ask yourself: How has that worked for you in the last month? The last year? Have you really saved more? Invested more? New strategy: Automate. I’ll show you how how with tactical steps.

(Plus a chance to meet Tim Ferriss and me for dinner in San Francisco.)

Why your friends don’t save money, eat healthier, or clean their garages

I just wrote a monster guest post at Get Rich Slowly. Here’s an excerpt:
“…This is a common phenomenon: As Laura Levine of the Jump$tart Coalition told me, and I paraphrase, ‘Bob doesn’t want to attend his 401(k) seminar because he’s afraid he’ll see his neighbor there…and that would be equivalent to admitting he didn’t know [...]

Trent says The Scrooge Strategy is “short-sighted” — I respond with a challenge

Do you ever wake up in the morning, roll over, and say, “Man, I wonder what my personal-finance brethren said about me as I was sleeping?” No? Hm, I guess it’s just me. Anyway, stay with me today as we weave the story of toilet paper, toothpaste, a rudimentary SWOT analysis, and a $1,000 challenge [...]