This article is the eighth of a fourteen-part series that explores the core tenets of Get Rich Slowly.

One reason I got into financial trouble during my early twenties was that I wanted everything right now. I looked at what my parents had, and it didn't occur to me that they'd been working their entire lives to get to that point. I wanted the same level of comfort, and I wanted it today. I wanted what I saw in the magazines and on TV. I wanted to start at the end, not the beginning.

In order to afford that sort of lifestyle, I went into a lot of debt. But even then, I couldn't manage for long. I lived high on the hog for a couple of years, and then found myself back in the Real World — but with lots of extra bills to pay. In an attempt to reach the "finish line" of life sooner, I'd put myself further behind. Continue reading...

Recently I read a blog post so glum I wondered how I might do a well-being check on its anonymous author. “The vacation high wears off” at The Quest for $85,000 describes the aftermath of a trip to visit aging family members. Now the writer's own life feels “shorter” and the three years until her husband's retirement seem unbearably long.

She writes:

It's three more years of watching our precious time on this planet circle the drain. This is what one gets when one spends every single f*cking cent with no regard for the future…I am regretful beyond belief.

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Here's a guest entry from Tynan. This post is about how a professional gambler looks at money.

Small Things Add Up

I was eighteen, and a freshman in college. For the past few years I'd been making a few hundred dollars a month selling Palm Pilots on eBay. It was a lot of money for a teenager with no real expenses, but of course I spent it all. My knowledge of personal finance was fuzzy at best. Naturally I squandered any money I made.

Then, through a strange series of events, I became a professional gambler. It happened fast, and soon my "studies" were being neglected for long nights of blackjack, roulette, and video poker. Eventually I dropped out of school to make serious money, and thus began my real financial education.

Historically, "making six figures" has been to income earners what "becoming a millionaire" has been for those tracking their net worths — a lofty goal achieved by only a select few. And while neither a six-figure earner nor a millionaire can bask in the luxury they could a couple decades ago, there's no doubt that earning over $100,000 a year still puts you in a select group.

In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau says that only 5.63% of individual income earners and only 17.8% of households had incomes of $100,000 or more in 2006. So despite the drop in purchasing power from the days of old, if you earn $100k or more each year, you're still in an elite group.

How can you get into the six-figure club? There are many roads to this golden path (lottery, inheritance, take over a family business, etc.), but many, if not all, of these are out of your control. As such, I'm going to focus on what I consider to be the method that will give the most people the greatest chance of earning $100k or more — by developing a career and growing it over time. Specifically, I'm going to tell you how I got to six figures in seven years and how you can use these principles to do the same.

It seems contradictory, but I love being frugal and I also love spending money. Over the last few years, however, my love of frugality has outweighed my love of spending -- and it's been good for my savings.

Yes, it's OK to spend money sometimes. If you have it, and you're comfortable with your present and future finances, by all means, spend away. But a lot of us, including myself, spend when we shouldn't spend. It's to be expected, I think, in our consumer culture. I can't walk down my block without being sold something every minute or so, from billboards to petitioners to window sales.

Anyway, a couple of readers requested an article on how to avoid spending sprees. It's something I've been thinking about lately anyway, so this was a great reason to give the subject more thought and put something together.

There have been a slew of great articles lately on why resolutions fail, and I agree wholeheartedly with them. I've never had much success with resolutions myself — they always fall by the wayside after a few months, and by summer I don't even remember that I'd set resolutions in the first place.

Nevertheless, I set a lot of goals in 2010 that I reached. For example, last year I accomplished the following goals:

• Learned how to hang out in the pose pictured at right, which gave me a lot of confidence on and off the yoga mat
• Completed yoga teacher training
• Quit my job to freelance full-time
• Started learning to play piano (again, but with some dedication this time)
• Traveled to New York City at Christmastime
• Began to explore cooking French cuisine, starting with crème brulée
• Saved up a decent sum of money to start building our house

These weren't New Year's resolutions. They were goals I'd had for anywhere from six months (headstand) to 10 years (piano). I decided to achieve them and made small changes that would get me closer to reaching them, such as adding a 15-minute appointment to my calendar to practice piano. Sometimes I slacked off and ignored my small-step to-dos, but most of the time I stuck with it.

Some people never take control of their finances because they're afraid that doing so would require them to give up everything they enjoy. I don't believe that's true. Getting out of debt requires hard work and sacrifice, but that doesn't mean you can't have fun along the way.

Aaron recently sent the following e-mail:

You paid off $35,000 in debt in just over three years. Does that mean you were balls-to-the-wall dedicated and had no frills and were dour-faced the whole time? Were you using every spare penny to pay debt? Did you give up all luxuries and all fun? Did paying off the debt consume you?

I've been in debt just once: during and after a two-year-long divorce, a time during which I was also a midlife university student. Good times!

Nineteen months after the divorce decree, I zeroed out my legal debt. I also took a deep breath for the first time in years. Unfortunately, I had no idea what to do with the extra money each month.

What I should have done: Visit a fee-only financial planner.

I recently read a short article in The New Yorker titled "The Cult of Overwork." In it, James Surowiecki writes:

"For decades, junior bankers and Wall Street firms had an unspoken pact: in exchange for reasonably high-paying jobs and a shot at obscene wealth, young analysts agreed to work fifteen hours a day, and forgo anything resembling a normal life."

Reading that, I had a thought. If you're working 75 hours a week, is your job really "high-paying"?

Every couple has its own way of managing money. Some folks share their finances completely. Some — like my wife and me — keep their finances completely separate. Most couples fall somewhere between these two extremes.

Writing for the June issue of Redbook magazine, Virginia Sole-Smith highlighted what she calls the new money rules for couples. Experts don't agree on how couples should manage their money, Sole-Smith says. That's because there's no "one size fits all" solution. What's most important is to find a system that works for you and your circumstances:

Clearly, the real experts are you and your partner, and it's critical to find an arrangement that suits your exact situation, as pairs who bicker over bills once a week or more are 30 percent more likely to get divorced than those who squabble about it less, according to research from Utah State University.