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All of us have a fear or two that keeps us up through the night. Maybe it’s debt or being unable to take care of your family. Maybe it’s a lack of money for retirement. Maybe it’s a health issue or early death.

My biggest fear, without a doubt, is passing away before my children reach adulthood. I’m not worried that Sarah will be able to provide a good childhood for my children. My worry is that they won’t have the two-parent opportunities that they have now and that they will wonder what kind of person their father was when they reach adulthood.

My second biggest fear is that I’m not doing enough to create lots of income streams for steady income for my family. Let’s say, for some reason, that my arrangement for writing The Simple Dollar ceased. I have some additional sources of income, but not nearly as many as I would like. I’ve dabbled in many things over the years, meaning that I have lots of “trickles.”

Recently, I’ve been reading the wonderful book The Up Side of Down by Megan McArdle, someone whose writings I’ve enjoyed for a very long time.

The premise of the book is that, at some point in our lives, we’re going to fail. We’ll fail at a relationship or at launching a business or at a college course. Most of us will fail quite often.

McArdle’s argument is that failure is usually far more illuminating than success. When you fail, you have to deal with that failure. You learn internal coping mechanisms that show you how to emotionally handle it, for starters.

A reader passed along this interesting interview from the Wall Street Journal with Mark Cuban. For those unfamiliar, Cuban is a billionaire who made a significant amount of his wealth in the early days of the internet era. His argument in this interview? Diversification is “for idiots.”

First of all, let’s talk about what diversification actually means.

Diversification means that you’re investing in a number of different things so that you’re not as badly affected if one of them falls. For example, when the stock market falls in price, that doesn’t mean that real estate will also fall.

So, let’s say you have half of your money in stocks and half of your money in real estate. If stocks fall 40% this year and real estate stays steady, you’ll only lose 20% of your money. Of course, on the other hand, if the stock market goes up 20% and real estate stays the same, then you will only gain 10%.

This article first appeared at U.S. News and World Report Money.

A lot of American families have a lot of credit card debt. The average U.S. household credit card debt is $15,270. That’s almost a third of the annual median household income in the United States.

On top of that, 72% of Americans are living in a paycheck-to-paycheck situation, meaning that if they have an employment disruption or a major expense, they’re going to have to immediately start skipping bills.