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This article is by staff writer William Cowie.

You’ve seen them before: 10 mistakes that could ruin your retirement, 6 things to avoid, and so on. But … I don’t know if you’ve noticed that many of those lists are copies of each other. Make no mistake: Common sense is common sense, and there’s only so many ways to catalog it.

The common sense behind any successful savings or investment plan? Rhythm, or doing the same thing month after month. When that rhythm gets disrupted, it can take months, even years sometimes, to get established in a new rhythm. It’s a funny thing about saving or investing: the more you have to think about it, the less you generally do of it. The best savings plans, therefore, are usually the ones that run on auto-pilot. Starting over — no matter the cause — is costly.

This article is by staff writer William Cowie.

Tax season is fast approaching and, if you are among the diligent, chances are you have already started your annual tax preparation. Close to 40 percent of all Americans use software to do their tax preparation on their own computers, according to the National Retail Foundation; and TurboTax (sold by Intuit, and maker of the ever-popular Quicken and QuickBooks products) is the most popular of the tax-prep software products in use today.

TurboTax has been around for more than 20 years, and it grew in popularity largely because it is reasonably priced, user friendly, and just works. A key factor in its success has also been its consistency. If you do something once a year, it’s nice to know you don’t have to relearn it every year. It should come as no surprise, then, that many have been using TurboTax for more than a decade.

This article is by staff writer William Cowie.

A few weeks ago, we asked the question “What is your investment strategy?” and described the survey Get Rich Slowly did of attitudes toward investing and a few related subjects. In that post, we noted, with a degree of surprise, that over 40 percent of respondents did not invest at all — and that the youngest respondents were the largest group of non-investors. What follows might help explain why young people are more reluctant to invest at this point.

This article is by staff writer Lisa Aberle.

Sometimes you find clues of your kids’ financial education progress in the strangest places.

“Dear Santa” – began my seven-year-old daughter’s letter, published in our local newspaper - “May I have more money? I will save it to buy a house or car.” (I know. I still can’t believe she wrote it, either.) “I want for my brother a horse that is real…” and “For my baby brother; he needs more clothes. Can you bring my Mom and Dad more money to buy food?” (Uh, what?)