Kris called me at seven o’clock last night, just as I was sitting down to write the Friday “Ask the Readers” post. I was sorting through this week’s questions when the phone rang.
“Are you busy?” she asked. “Can you do me favor?”
“Maybe,” I said. “It depends on what it is.”
“Ryan’s car broke down,” Kris said. “He’s stranded here at the lab and can’t get home. Can you give him a ride across town?”
“Sure,” I said. But I did the mental math: The trip would take me a couple of hours. Because I hadn’t yet started on the morning’s post, I knew I’d be up late.
I drove to Kris’ office to pick up Ryan. Ryan’s a young man, just out of college. He did some temp work in the construction industry before getting a job as a scientist. He and his girlfriend are getting married in two weeks. They just rented a house together and [...]

Over the past few months, GRS readers been recommending two applications that I haven’t found time to mention — until today. These two utilities perform simple but important tasks. One is a password manager, and the other allows you to share your documents — including financial documents — across multiple computers.
KeePass
Here, for example, is an e-mail I received from a reader who asked to remain anonymous. He’s one of the many to sing the praises of KeePass.

This tool might be part of your paperless personal finance system:

I set up all of my online passwords in a program called KeePass on a memory stick; it has some clever functions that let you avoid typing in URLs, login names, and passwords on public computers and thus defeat keystroke-capture fraud agents. I’ve found it very useful — it’s much faster and easier than using the old password log in my PDA.

KeePass is a free open source password manager [...]

Sometimes the best personal finance books aren’t about personal finance.
In June 2006, for example, I shared a brief review of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. Ostensibly this book is about creativity and overcoming procrastination, but I found its lessons valuable for pursuing my financial goals. Last year I read Mastery by George Leonard. On the surface, this book has nothing to do with money, yet it’s one of the best books about money I’ve ever read.
John C. Maxwell’s Failing Forward is another of this ilk. It’s not meant to be a personal finance book, yet I’m willing to bet that more of you can improve your financial lives by reading it than by reading The Automatic Millionaire or Personal Finance for Dummies (though these are both fine books). Why? Because books like Failing Forward apply to your entire life rather than just one part of it.
Failing forward
I clearly remember a period during the [...]

This is a guest post from Robert Brokamp of The Motley Fool. Robert is a Certified Financial Planner and the advisor for The Motley Fool’s Rule Your Retirement service. He contributes one new article to Get Rich Slowly every two weeks.
I don’t want to dump on your boss. She/he/it gives you a job (assuming you still have one). Besides a paycheck, you also get some benefits. One perk might be a retirement plan such as a 401(k). Your boss doesn’t have to do that; in fact, it would be easier on her/him/it if there were no plan, since such things cost money, take up time, and expose the company to lawsuits.
So I want to start by commending your company for sponsoring a plan.
That said, there’s been a disturbing trend over the past several years: Companies are shifting more of the cost of the plan onto their employees, and not necessarily being up front [...]

The August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research arrived in my mailbox yesterday. It contains an interesting article from Nicolao, Irwin, and Goodman entitled “Happiness for Sale: Do Experiential Purchases Make Consumers Happier than Material Purchases?” This is a topic we’ve skirted at Get Rich Slowly, but never fully explored. Many readers have offered anecdotal evidence that they get more “bang for their buck” by spending money on experiences instead of Stuff.
This new research supports that idea — but only for experiences that turn out well. Good experiences do bring greater happiness to consumers than buying Stuff. But bad experiences make us more unhappy than bad purchases. From the article:

Our results replicate those of Van Boven and Gilovich (2003), showing that, for positive purchases, experiences lead to greater happiness than material purchases. Also, there is a sense in which our results support the experience recommendation because we show that on average the most happiness [...]

I haven’t made the time to piece together a “links roundup” lately, which is too bad. I’ve collected a lot of articles worth mentioning, even if they don’t merit full posts of their own.
I try to share many of these stories on Twitter, but I’ve collected three that deserve special attention. They’re each packed with money-saving ideas for everyday shopping.
Real Simple’s “Save on Everyday Stuff”
Last week, Real Simple published a collection of tips for how to save on everyday stuff you need. This list of nearly 40 tips is divided into several categories:

How to save on your grocery bill
How to save on garden supplies
How to save on cell phone plans
How to save on car expenses
How to save on home repairs
How to save on medical bills

This is a seemingly random collection of ideas, ranging from “purchases oranges, onions, and potatoes in bags” and “find out an item’s cost per unit” to “forget the 3,000-mile [...]