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This article is by staff writer Holly Johnson.

A few days before Christmas, I was having lunch out when I opened an email that appeared to come from American Express:

“Please click this link to authorize a recent charge on your account.”

“Well, that’s weird,” I thought. I hadn’t used my American Express card in several months.

I was stunned as I read the rest of the email. They wanted me to confirm a purchase that was definitely not made by me – a $5,500 order at an online Apple store. And I totally panicked. I mean, I freaked. Someone was obviously going on a wild online shopping spree with my credit card information, right? I had to put a stop to it right that second.

This article is by staff writer Lisa Aberle.

When I (or others) want to improve our financial situations, most excuses involve time. I am too busy to take on another job. I don’t have time to start that business I’ve wanted to start for the last three years. I wish I could really get my financial ducks in a row, but I feel like I’m already using every spare minute of my days.

Note: This article is from J.D. Roth, who founded Get Rich Slowly in 2006. J.D.’s non-financial writing can be found at More Than Money, where he recently wrote about winning the jackpot.

Imagine that you’re a farmer. You live in a rural county where everybody raises sheep.

The county’s farmers, on the whole, prosper. Their flocks tend to grow by 10 percent every year. Some years are better than others. In the best years, the sheep population in the county grows by 40 percent. Little lambs are everywhere! But in the worst years — years filled with frost, famine, and disease — the sheep population can collapse to half of what it was before.

This article is by staff writer William Cowie.

In my previous post, a few commenters brought up the issue of market timing, generally taking me to task for appearing to advocate it. Market timing is a topic of much discussion, primarily in the world of stock investing. With this post, I hope to explain the issue and show how it applies to you, even if you never invest in a stock or mutual fund.

What is market timing?

The oldest investing advice in the book is “buy low and sell high.” Market timing is an attempt to do just that: Sell when the market is high; buy when it’s low. Obvious, right?