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 much at Starbucks. I really should open an IRA.” It’s easy to say these things to yourself — and you know what? It’s actually easy to do these things, too.
But few people actually follow through. They talk the talk, but they don’t walk the walk. And sometimes they actively try to interfere with those who are bold enough to make changes in their lives. Ramit writes:
Check out this calculator that JLP from AllThingsFinancial made: How Much Can You Save in a Lifetime? Notice how fast money grows at the end. Here’s my bet: The enterprising people — the ones who [...]

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 paid ($1,300), and the number of miles on the odometer (81,762 in 66 months), I calculated that for the past year my average cost per mile is $0.2170 over 20,274 miles. But that’s only for the car itself. I’ve also accumulated the following operating expenses:

Fuel: $1,646.37 ($0.0812 per mile)
Insurance: $762.93 ($0.0376 per mile)
Service: $507.07 ($0.0250 per mile)

My total cost-of-ownership per mile is 36.1 cents, which is not far from the AAA estimate of 37.6 cents. My total cost to run the Focus for the past year was $7,514, which is about 5% less than the national $7,967 annual average cost-of-ownership.
I [...]

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 you can make. Learn what your camera can and cannot do. Make a lot of photographs.
Take a class from your local art school or community college. For a couple hundred bucks, you’ll have access to a professional photographer, to other enthusiastic amateurs, and possibly to expensive darkroom equipment.
Use a tripod. This is a sure-fire way to sharper pictures. You don’t need to spend a fortune; anything is better than hand-held. I’ve been using a cheap $50 tripod for five years and love it for everything except taking photos from the middle of a stream.

If you did just these three things, [...]

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 Sensurround.
The latest Money Magazine “Ask the Expert” question offers better advice about what to do with a windfall. A reader asks:
I recently came into a $3,500 windfall from a tax refund and sale of a vehicle and am wondering whether I’d be better off investing this money in a Roth IRA account or putting it toward my $8,000 in credit card balance? I’ve already been making more than the minimum payment each month toward this debt, but by applying my windfall to the credit card account I’d pay it off even quicker. What do you think is the best [...]

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 week’s couple — Willie and Jennifer Jackson — have good incomes, but are burdened with debt and a late-start on retirement savings. They’ve never paid much attention to where there money goes, so the retirement planner suggests that they keep a budget and become more aware of their financial situation.
The USA Today site also features a Flash-based series of money features, including:

A compatibility quiz,
A budget optimizer,
Information about domestic partners,
Tools for defeating debt,
A fiscal check-up, and
And a “ready to retire?” feature (coming soon).

This is an interesting series — well-worth spending the time to read over a lunch break. It’s great to [...]

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 in the Spanish-American War. At that time only the wealthy could afford telephones; this tax was designed to them while leaving the average person unaffected.
How much will the average person get back?
[Treasure Secretary John Snow] said he could not specify how much of the refund might be made to businesses and how much to individuals, or estimate the size of refund an average individual could expect to get.
When you do get this small windfall, try to spend it on something that will help your financial future — pay-down debt, invest in retirement, buy some groceries — rather than use it [...]