Do women need specialized personal finance resources specific to our gender? That's what some financial advice books seem to imply. Slate writer Hannah Seligson points out that bookseller Amazon.com has a "money management for women" category, but no category specifically for men.

Some of the cheekier titles in the category include:

• Shoo, Jimmy Choo!: The Modern Girl's Guide to Spending Less and Saving More
• Does This Make My Assets Look Fat?: A Woman's Guide to Finding Financial Empowerment and Success
• Addicted to Shopping and Other Issues Women Have with Money
• Divanomics: How to Still Be Fabulous When You're Broke
• How to Shop for Free: Shopping Secrets for Smart Women Who Love to Get Something for Nothing

There seems to be a general theme around spending. Even as I was writing this post I saw an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where, to cover up his own overspending, Raymond blames his wife Debra for compulsive spending.

Last night, I joined a large group at Powell's Books in Portland to see my friend Chris Guillebeau speak on the last stop of his 50-state book tour. Afterward, I got to chat with several GRS readers, including Dakota and Katy. I also talked with Tsilli Pines, whom I've mentioned here several times before.

"You look great," Tsilli said. "You've lost a lot of weight." She and I talked about fitness, about Crossfit, and about growing old. She told me how inspiring it is to see her in-laws staying fit as they turn seventy.

Aligning spending and values
"That's one of my goals," I told her. "I may have been unfit when I was younger, but now I want to be fit when I'm older. And I'm willing to spend a little money to do it."

Last week, Isaac asked Get Rich Slowly readers for advice on how to handle life after grad school. He's about to enter the workforce and needed tips on what to do until he gets his first paycheck. Isaac was very pleased with your helpful responses.

This week, we've got a chance to help somebody even younger than Isaac. Nico is 18, a sophomore in college, and financially clueless. He needs help! Here's his story:

I'm pretty young — about to start my sophomore year of college — and I literally have absolutely no knowledge of anything financial. I do have a simple student account with a paltry amount of money in it, and that's really about it. So yeah, the majority of your site goes over my head and some things are quite intimidating.

Shopping momentum is the bane of many budgets. You may have a good grip on your money most of the time, but once you've opened up your wallet to make one purchase, it's easy to just keep spending.

People sometimes experience shopping momentum during times of stress or transition: when they're traveling, when there's a crisis at home or at work, during a big life change like a move or welcoming a new baby. You've just laid out a lot of money for an unusual expense, and something in your brain tells you it's time to spend more.

Shopping momentum
Crazy as it sounds, this is a real psychological phenomenon. Research at the Stanford Graduate School of Business showed that people who buy one item are more likely to continue buying others.

One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Web is tracking data about your Internet use — everything from comments you leave on websites to health information and financial status — and selling it to companies that want to target ads to specific customer profiles. Algorithms are even used to make predictions about you based on your profile, from how likely is it that you'll repay a loan to where you'll probably spend your summer vacation.

According to an investigation by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), your browsing information, minus your name, can be sold wholesale ("a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand") or customized ("26-year-old Southern fans of [the movie] '50 First Dates'"). There can be as many as 100 middlemen between your mouse click and an advertiser.

Machines are, in some respects, much smarter than we are. Specifically, their ability to collect data about us far outpaces our own ability to know who we are and what we do.

Your computer can't tell you why you eat, spend money, sleep, or watch TV. But it can tell you with much greater accuracy than your own memory the minute, often embarrassing details of when and how you do those things.

Any regular reader of this blog is familiar with the importance of tracking the money that moves through your life. It's the first principle of many money gurus, and a nearly religious commitment for some of us who do it (myself included).

As soon as you start thinking about how to live more lightly on the earth, your eyes start opening to the myriad ways you can do that. You can eat only organic food. You can bike to work instead of driving. You can insist on high-efficiency appliances. You can line dry your clothes.

Some of these lifestyle shifts will save you money. Others are expensive. Often, I hear cost used as a reason not to "go green". In fact, environmentally damaging products and lifestyle choices are only affordable because we're not paying the full cost of them. While you enjoy your cheap plastic toys, people in the developing world are paying the price in terms of pollution, exploitative labor, and natural resource consumption.

Most of us want to do right by the environment. We'd love to have pesticide-free homes and diets. We want our spending to support small farms, local businesses, and fair wages for workers in the developing world. That doesn't mean we necessarily have the available cash to do what our values dictate.

Note: I'm afraid this post is long and rambling. So sue me. I've been meaning to write about this subject for a long time, and finally felt moved to do so. This article may be amateurish, but that's kind of the point...

My father was a serial entrepreneur — he was always starting businesses. But more than that, he was a serial inventor, a master of DIY, an amateur everything.

When I was a boy, my father: Continue reading...

This article was written by WC, a guy in Chicago that writes about money at The Writer's Coin.

In May, I will celebrate my two-year anniversary with M, my favorite person in the world. I thought I knew a lot about everything before we got married, but now I'm wiser. So for all the newlyweds out there, or the ones thinking of walking the plank getting married, here are some things you should know.

There is no I

Marriage is all about the "we". It's not "your" money or "my" money, it's "our" money. It isn't your retirement, it's our retirement. It's not an easy concept to grasp, but you'd better adjust because when you get married you really don't have a choice. The sooner you accept it, the easier it will be. Don't fight it...As you'll see, this will become a recurring theme throughout your married life.

For many people, mindful consumerism starts with questioning the desire to buy Stuff. The reason might be to save money or avoid clutter — maybe both. It's the first part of a journey to differentiate needs from wants and make mindful decisions about where to spend our hard-earned money.

But at some point, most of us will consume. We'll buy food or clothing or household items. We'll need to replace something, fix something, or upgrade something. When we make these purchases, we're playing a role in a process. Much goes into creating a product and getting it on the shelf, though as a consumer, we don't see that process. We don't know if the companies involved in bringing it to us have decent working conditions for employees, pollute water systems, or include additives that pose health risks to our families.