This article is by GRS staff writer Adam Baker. Despite his best attempts, Baker struggles to budget while adapting to life in New Zealand.
Earlier this week J.D. tackled an important issue with his tenet Large Amounts Matter Too.
This concept goes by many names:

Focus on big wins.
Pick the low-hanging fruit
Attack high-leverage areas.

You get the point: It’s efficient to do things that have major impact with minimum effort. J.D. wrote:
Some people spend so much time sweating the small stuff that they don’t bother to do the same on the big stuff. They’re penny wise and pound foolish, negating their daily scrimping and saving by making poor financial decisions that burden them for years. Kris has a co-worker who once bought an SUV for $43,000. After a year, he decided to trade it in, but could only get $23,000 for it. Ouch!
His advice is spot on. An intense dedication to frugality can often do more harm than good. [...]

This post is from GRS staff writer April Dykman.
A college professor once told my journalism class that freelance writing is something you should do on the side. It’s not anything you could make a living at full-time. 
I graduated and worked at an office job until I decided I wanted to become self-employed and do something that would give me more free time to write. A real job and a writer on the side, just like the professor had suggested. I went into real estate.
To say it was an awful fit would be an understatement. The very thought of cold-calling made me want to stay in bed with the covers over my head. What’s worse is that I wrote a total of one article that year. What in the world happened?
“Freelance writing can’t be a successful business.” That was my limiting belief. (To be fair, it was a belief I held long before the well-meaning professor reinforced [...]

As important as I believe National Save for Retirement Week is, I have to confess that after four days (five, if you count Sunday), I’m bored of it. My short attention span has dwindled. (Imagine the difficulties I’m having as I try to concentrate on writing a book for three months solid!)
Instead, I want to shift gears for a moment and talk about a subject with immediate real-life implications: the dangers of perfection.
Good vs. perfect
While doing research for my book (Your Money: The Missing Manual), I re-read The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. The Paradox of Choice is about how we think that choice will make us happy — but it doesn’t. In fact, too much choice just might turn you into a basket case, especially if you’re a certain type of person.
Schwartz describes his research into two groups of people, Maximizers and Satisficers:

Maximizers are those who only accept the best. Every time they [...]

This post is from GRS staff writer April Dykman.
A lot has been made of the minimalist lifestyle on personal finance blogs. Some readers love it; some think it sounds like a miserable existence. But rather than focus on how much or how little we possess as a measure of our degree of minimalism, it seems more important to get to the underlying question: How does your happiness relate to the things you own (or don’t own)?
Non-attachment
The Yoga Sutras, a foundational yoga text, outlines a set of moral codes. One code is the concept of aparigraha, which has been translated as “not grasping,” “non-possessiveness,” “non-hoarding,” and “non-attachment.”
This concept is particularly applicable to personal finance. Think about what you believe will make you happy — status, a higher salary, relationships, possessions. Can you enjoy these things, or are are you constantly in fear of losing them?
Non-attachment isn’t about living an extreme, minimalist lifestyle. Non-attachment is letting go of [...]

Yesterday I shared a guest post from Leo of Zen Habits. His guide to minimalist money was a sort of overview of good financial skills, useful information for those in the first stage of personal finance. But some long-time GRS readers couldn’t relate to Leo’s post.
Today’s post goes in the opposite direction. It’s a meditation for those in the third stage of personal finance (or beyond), and it’s probably going to seem foreign to those who are still struggling to get debt under control.
The evolution of spending
Before I developed smart money skills, I spent without thinking. I accumulated debt because I had no self-control. I bought what I wanted, even when I couldn’t afford it.
To repay my debt and build wealth, I learned to be frugal. I was never able to completely discard my tendency to spend, but I curbed it sharply. In fact, I became so frugal that I would debate whether to use [...]

On today’s episode of The Personal Finance Hour, I joined Jim from Bargaineering to discuss the relationship between money and happiness. Will more money make you happier? Are we happy when we get the things we want? Does happiness have a genetic set-point? And just what can we do to make ourselves more fulfilled?
Our discussion — which included calls from Neal and Baker — covered some of the material from my review of Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, but also delved deep into the things I’ve learned while conducting research for the first chapter of my upcoming book.
Though the show is over now, there are a few ways you hear it as a podcast. You can listen through an audio feed at the show page, or you can also listen through this widget:

We’re also on iTunes! You can subscribe to The Personal Finance Hour as a weekly podcast by following this link (which will open iTunes).
Jim [...]