This morning, Kris and I signed our divorce papers. (They won’t be filed until I’ve been approved for health insurance, however.) Tomorrow, she and I fly to Buenos Aires to begin three weeks exploring South America together.

We’re both looking forward to this as a chance to test whether our friendship can be strong even after marriage. Many folks think we’re making a huge mistake, but we think things will be fine. Still, I have a back-up plan. If at any point Kris decides she’d rather I were elsewhere, I’ll jet to Lima, the city from which our final flight departs in a few weeks.

Because we’re traveling, my presence here may be a little light. But when I return in March, as promised, I intend to be more active on the blog than I have in months — or years. We’ll kick that off with the third annual GRS video contest!

Now it’s time to look at some other personal finance stories from around the web.

First up, resident GRS economist (and forums supervisor) Stephen wrote to tell me that he has three Turbotax Premier Online prepaid codes we can give away. If you’d like a code, comment below. I’ll contact the first three people who respond (provided your e-mail address is real and I can reach you) to set you up with your codes. Please don’t respond if you don’t plan to use the software. (And I have no idea if it’s any good. I’ve never used it before.)

Next, Beth from Smart Green Media pointed me to an interview with philosopher Jacob Needleman. For those who complained that my post on Monday was “philosophy lite”, you may enjoy Needleman’s take on the relationship between money and meaning.

Staying philosophical, Nelson and Canadian Finance Blog wonders how many of your Needs are actually Needs? I’d argue that the things Nelson picks on are obviously wants (travel, cell phones, Netflix), but his larger point still stands: If you’re struggling to make ends meet, it’s time to cut things from your budget, even if they’re things you use and love every day.

Over at Pocketmint, Karawynn — the woman who inspired me to start blogging over a decade ago — has spent the past few weeks exploring what she calls the conflict-free family budget. In the first part of this series, Karawynn explains why a new system was needed. In part two, she describes the plan as she and her partner implemented it. Next, she reveals how the plan worked for her family. And in the final part, published yesterday, she discusses how to customize the plan to your situation.

Finally, my friend Amy writes a wine blog. She recently partnered with Erin Chase from $5 Dinners to produce a free e-book entitled Dinner and Wine for $20 or Less. Sounds like a winning (and tasty) combination to me!

This is a guest post by Dee Bauer from SmallHouseLife.com, where she shares information about abundant living in small spaces.

Do you sometimes wonder if you’ll ever be financially stable enough to retire? Or maybe it’s not so much about retirement as it is about financial independence. Personally, I don’t want to wait until I’m in my 60s to enjoy financial freedom and extended leisure time!

As a result of one decision, my husband and I took a giant leap toward our “independence day,” as we like to call it. In sharing our story, maybe you, too, will feel inclined to take this unconventional step toward a brighter financial future.

What did we do? We downsized our home. What’s really amazing is that we had just completed building our gorgeous dream home when we made the decision to downsize. Talk about bad timing! And it took us two years to sell because the real estate market had gone south.

Note: It’s usually a good idea to live in a home at least two years anyway, so you don’t have to pay taxes on the profit. Consult your CPA about this.

Could downsizing be for you? In a world where most people tend to live beyond their means, it’s not exactly a popular choice. Here is how my husband and I came to the decision.

1. We discussed what we wanted most in our lives.
The first step is to clearly define what is most important to you. My husband tends to think in terms of how much things cost. I’ll bring up an idea, and he’ll say, “but that will cost such and such.” To which I inevitably reply, “but, if money was no object, what would we want?”

I believe you can’t get to the heart of what’s most important in life unless you first remove the barriers. Unfortunately money can be a roadblock if we let it, so I like to remove it while brainstorming. If we had allowed money to be an obstacle, we never would have achieved our goal because we would have said, “We can’t afford it.”

So take the time to find out what you want, then try and figure out how to get it.

We put our heads together for several months, trying not to get caught up in the”what ifs” or the “we cant’s.” After many heart-to-heart talks, the desire that resonated the loudest for both of us was financial independence.

Oh, great! But how to get there?

2. Once we were clear on our heart’s desire, we started planning.
Without a plan, a goal is only a dream or a wish. Here’s what we noticed almost immediately: if financial independence had just become our number one priority, then what were we doing with a big, shiny new mortgage? I said, “Sell the house!” But my husband resisted at first. We build houses for a living and he thought it looked better for our business if we lived in an amazing house. There’s probably some truth to that, but we had made our decision, so now the focus was how to bring it to fruition.

We talked about it for weeks, mulling over different ideas to achieve our goal. There was always the option to generate extra income, but since extended free time was a close second to our desire for financial independence, neither of us wanted to do that.

Hmmm…now what? We kept circling back to the fact that if we sold our new home and downsized to a more modest house, we could greatly improve our finances and be on a fast track toward early retirement.

3. Implementing the plan and taking action.
Most of our family, neighbors, and friends thought we were crazy. Or at the least, a little weird. I mean who gives up a beautiful new home like that? Especially right after it was built.

But we were ready. We were clear about what we wanted, as well as the course of action to achieve it.

If you think downsizing might be a possibility for you, be sure to also consider all the financial perks it can bring. A smaller mortgage payment (or possibly no mortgage at all) is only one of the many financial benefits. Typically you’ll pay less in taxes and insurance, along with less cost for upkeep and maintenance. It can really add up and make quite a difference in your bottom line.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Is downsizing something you’d consider? If so, what would keep you from doing it?

This is a post from staff writer Robert Brokamp of The Motley Fool. Robert is a Certified Financial Planner and the adviser for The Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement service. He contributes one new article to Get Rich Slowly every two weeks.

I’ve been saving for retirement since my mid-20s, and I write a retirement-planning newsletter every month. Yet here’s the thing: I don’t plan to ever fully retire. And while most people list “retirement” as their number one investing goal, I don’t think most other people should retire, either — at least not at age 64 for men and 62 for women, which are the average retirement ages these days, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

I question the value and wisdom of retirement for financial reasons, for health reasons, and for “why should we encourage people to sit on their butts all day” reasons. However, in this post, I’ll question retirement from a risk perspective: Can anyone really be sure that their savings and benefits will last for a few decades? Let’s take a closer look.

1. Social Security has “issues.”
I’ve written before that all the talk of people getting nothing from Social Security is overblown; everyone will get something. But there are enough problems to suggest that younger and wealthier people should expect to get much less than their currently projected benefit. Not that the current benefits are enough to buy beachfront property; the average annual Social Security benefit is just $14,172. If that weren’t scary enough, according to the Social Security Administration, more than half of elderly beneficiaries receive 50% or more of their incomes from Social Security; for 22% of married couples and 43% of unmarried beneficiaries, Social Security provides 90% or more of their incomes. The fact is, most Americans do not do a good job of planning for retirement.

2. Some people have pensions, but they have their own problems.
According to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, approximately 20% of the over-50 crowd receives income from a defined-benefit pension, with an average benefit of almost $18,000. However, the percentage of Americans who will receive a pension is shrinking. Plus, many of these plans don’t have enough money to pay future benefits. (In fact, the massive underfunding of pension plans — particularly state and local plans — is one of the most underappreciated risks facing our country.) And when a company goes bankrupt, as retirees from Kodak recently learned, benefits can be reduced or eliminated. Most private plans are insured by the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), which has the power to take over underfunded plans or those of bankrupt or distressed companies. However, pensioners may not receive their full benefits. Furthermore, the PBGC is on the hook for $107 billion in payments yet has just $81 billion in assets. Government plans are not insured, but their sponsors can always raise taxes — though that’s generally not very popular.

3. Savings to the rescue…or not.
I won’t trot out all the stats about how people don’t save enough, or how the baby boomers, as a group, are entering their golden years with too little gold (that is, net worth — I’m not suggesting that every retiree hoard the shiny metal). That’s bad enough. My concern is that for these (often-too-meager) savings to last, investment markets have to cooperate, and, as we’ve seen over the past decade or so, they often don’t. I’m not predicting Armageddon or anything like that; most of my longterm savings are in the stock market. But investing can be risky; we just don’t know for sure how much a certain stock or even a bond will be worth a decade or two from now. Yes, you can play it safer with CDs or Treasuries, but only if your money will last as long as you do — and keep up with inflation — while earning 2%.

4. Or maybe my home equity will save me…oh, wait.
Several years ago, homeowners could take consolation in the rising value of their homes. Now, with prices down nationwide an average 30%, it’s much more difficult to turn a nest into a nest egg. Of course, this wasn’t supposed to happen. In 2005, Ben Bernanke, then an adviser to President Bush, said on CNBC, “We’ve never had a decline in housing prices on a nationwide basis. What I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize…I don’t think it’s going to drive the economy too far from its full-employment path, though.” This just goes to show that even smart, well-connected people can get things very wrong, and that just because something hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

5. Health care is unpredictable and expensive.
The big wild card in anyone’s finances is health care — what illnesses or accidents will befall them, and how much of the costs will not be paid by insurance. Yes, most folks age 65 or older are eligible for Medicare, and approximately 25% of retirees also get help from former employers. But basic Medicare, by itself, does not provide comprehensive medical and dental care; that costs extra. Plus, the financial challenges facing the Medicare system dwarf any problems Social Security has. As for employer-provided retiree health care, that — like a pension — is a disappearing perk.

6. If I only knew when I’ll die.
From a financial perspective, retirement is a mathematical equation that answers the question: Will I run out of money before I run out of life? You’ll need a lot more money if you die a centenarian than if you die an octogenarian (which is how long the average person lasts, once she or he has made it to age 65). There are plenty of longevity calculators that will factor in your health, family history, and upholstery-potato habits to come up with an estimate of when you’ll join that Great Spa in the Sky (I sure hope there are massages in heaven.). The standard financial-planning advice is that you should assume you’ll live to 90 or 95. But the truth is, no one really knows their date of death, yet it’s a very important variable in the calculus of retirement.

A caboodle of question marks
The bottom line is, no one can say for certain what their various sources of retirement income will provide a decade or three hence, or whether that income (whatever it is) will be enough to cover the income they’ll need at that point. That said, there are plenty of ways to mitigate all the risks of retirement, which I write about in my newsletter and in my GRS posts. But for now, I’ll just put the question to you: Do you think retirement is too risky? How do you plan to address any potential problems?

Finally, the message of this post is most definitely not “stop saving for retirement.” I continue to max out my 401(k), despite my hope that I’ll be able to work forever. Nevertheless, many people are forced to retire due to bad health or a bad economy. Plus, I’m just 42. By the time I’m 72, I may have changed my mind — or my body has changed it for me — and I’ll actually be ready to sit on my butt all day.

This is a guest post by Fiona Lippey. Fiona is the author of the bestselling book The $21 Challenge and founder of Australia’s largest frugal website, SimpleSavings.net.

If you want to save money, and I mean really save money, then you’re going to have to stop buying Stuff. You have reduce the amount you consume. Today I want to share the system I’ve been using for the last 15 years to reduce my spending and make sure I don’t get tricked out of my hard-earned cash.

Question 1: Stop! Is this a good decision?
Before you reach for your cash, before you grab your credit card, before you pick up the item up from the sales rack, pause for just a minute. Stop yourself and think about whether or not you are about to make a good or a bad decision. A marketer or salesperson’s job is to make you think you need something that five minutes earlier you didn’t know existed. Find a way to trigger your internal alarm bell, so you can stop for a second and move on to question number two.

Question 2: Are you hungry?
If your belly is empty then your decision making is impaired. Our bodies get confused between the desire for food and inedible objects. So if you are hungry, step away, eat something, then wait for 15 minutes before moving on to question three.

Question 3: Is there something else?
There are so many other things you could buy. Is this item really the one you want to spend your hard-earned money on? There are other things you could achieve with this money. Will you be limiting yourself by making the purchase? If you have decided that this is the only thing you want, go to question four.

Question 4: Is it worth the effort?
Every time you reach for your cash, ask yourself if it is really worth the effort. If every $15 you spend is an hour you’re going to have to work, is it worth the effort? Or should you leave your money in your wallet? (It’s so much easier than having to earn extra money!) Now, if you have decided the purchase is really is worth the bother, move on to the fifth question.

Question 5: What will you gain?
Next, work out what you or your family will gain by buying the item. What are the longterm consequences? Will it improve your health and happiness or genuinely give you more free time? How? If you cannot answer these questions positively, then leave your money in your wallet. It is important that you be really skeptical when you answer this question. Now move to question six.

Question 6: What will you lose?
When you buy an item, you both gain something and lose something. If you are lucky, the only thing you lose is cash and the time it took you to earn that money. But this is not always the case. A great example of this is a computer game. You gain entertainment, but you might lose quality time with your family. Once you are certain you have accounted for everything you could lose, move on to the next question.

Question 7: Is there a better way?
Now it is time to shop around for a better price and work out the smartest way to buy it. How can you get the best value for your dollar in the minimum time possible? Occasionally, working it out for yourself will take more time than you save (when calculating your time as an hourly wage), but you will get satisfaction in knowing that you’ve found a great deal and are doing the best for your family. Once you have researched your purchase and found the best way to buy it, go to question eight.

Question 8: Do you have the cash to spare?
Most of the time, buying things on credit is stupid. So if you don’t have the cash, remain free, walk away, and live happily ever after. Consumer purchases aren’t worth burdening yourself with debt. This means you should avoid credit cards, layaways, interest-free loans, mortgage refinancing facilities, etc. Only buy something if you have the spare cash — and if you don’t, go home and save until you do.

If want to save yourself some money, write down the eight steps and put them in your wallet! Every penny you save is one you don’t have to earn!