Ramit at I Will Teach You to Be Rich has a fantastic post about the difference between:

loving something, and
loving the idea of something.

It’s easy to read about personal finance (or any other area of self-improvement) and to say to yourself, “Yeah. That sounds nice. I really should drive less. I really should stop buying so [...]

The American Automobile Association (AAA) says that, on average, it costs 52.2 cents to drive one mile. To drive a Ford Focus like mine 20,000 miles per year, the average cost is 37.6 cents per mile.
How close are the AAA estimates? I ran some numbers.
Based on the purchase price of my vehicle ($16,500), the interest [...]

Expensive hobbies and a frugal lifestyle can be tough to balance. Few hobbies are more expensive than photography. So what’s a frugal photographer to do? The three best cheap things you can do to improve your photography skill are:

Learn your camera. Read your camera manual, and carry it with you. This is the cheapest improvement [...]

Your Great-Aunt Madge dies and leaves you $20,000. You win the Okefenokee Poker Playoff and take home $2,100. Spacely Sprockets pays out $4,700 in profit sharing.
What should you do with this money?
The typical response is to spend it on something fun, something you don’t really need. Something like a jumbo-sized wide-screen high-definition television with [...]

What do couples fight about more than anything else? Sex. But what’s a close second? Money.
USA Today is running a seven-week series of articles about relationships and finances. Each week the paper profiles a different couple, examining their relationship with money and then asking a financial planner to offer recommendations for improvement.
For example, this [...]

Here’s a piece of news that’s odd but good.
The U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday conceded a legal dispute over the 3 percent federal excise tax on long-distance telephone service and said $13 billion would be refunded to taxpayers.
One-hundred-six years ago, in 1898, the U.S. Congress implemented a long-distance phone tax to help fund operations [...]

“That’s a nice shirt,” José said to me today. José is my shop foreman.
“You like it?” I asked. “I got it cheap!”
“I’ve got one just like it,” he said. “Same color. Same brand. Same everything.”
“How much did you pay? I only paid six dollars for mine,” I said proudly. “I got it at Goodwill.”
“Yeah?” said [...]

All the money books tell you to do it. All the personal finance blogs say it, too. Even your dad has given you the same advice:
Save ten percent of everything you earn.
But it’s hard. That money could be used someplace else. You could pay the phone bill, could pay down debt, could buy a new [...]

Most of us have financial blindspots. One of mine is books. I love books. I have a large library that grows larger all the time.
When I first embarked upon my quest for frugality, I began tracking every penny I spent. I was shocked to learn how much I spent on my book habit. In the [...]

Should you buy or rent? That’s a question we each face at some point.
It doesn’t always make sense to buy. Depending on your location, your marital status, your income level, how long you intend to live in a particular location, and a handful of other variables, renting may actually make more sense than purchasing [...]