Money Tips Network

The best travel and rewards credit cards offer a tantalizing game of risk. If you can charge your purchases and rack up rewards without carrying a balance or paying interest, you usually win.

Being adequately prepared for retirement involves far more than simply squirreling away money in a 401(k), annuity, or some other savings vehicle and sailing off into the sunset.

When laying the foundation for one’s golden years, it’s also a good idea to have conversations with a handful of key people in your life – such as your spouse or domestic partner, children, employer, and maybe even employees if you’re a small business owner.

Nearly all of these people will either be impacted by your retirement or will personally have an impact upon it, making such conversations incredibly important.

Whether you're an art lover, a history buff, a space geek, or just have a curious mind, nothing will quench that inquisitive thirst like wandering around a museum.

As I’ve mentioned a few times on The Simple Dollar recently, I’ve been using Julia Cameron’s “three morning pages” journaling technique most mornings and it has genuinely been a life changer. It’s helped me reflect on lots of different ideas and viewpoints that I have. It’s helped me to reflect on choices I’ve made and relationships I have. It’s helped me reflect on the state of my life and where I want it to go.

(For those unfamiliar, “three morning pages” is a journaling technique in which, each day, a person pulls out a journal and a pen and fills three pages by writing down whatever comes into their mind. What’s on your mind right now? That’s the prompt every single morning. Then, you just write that down. I find that in the process of writing out a thought in a sentence or two, the next step in that line of thinking begins to emerge, and then I write that out, and the process repeats itself until I hit some really useful conclusions.)

Let’s start off with a fact that’s “mildly interesting” on the surface, but takes on a whole different set of meanings when you dig in a little bit.

The average American household spends $7,203 a year on food, of which $4,049 is spent on food at home and $3,154 is spent on food away from home.

Let’s break that down a little bit into numbers that are more practical for how you and I live our lives.

Each month, the average American household spends $600 on food, of which $337 is spent on food at home and $263 is spent on food away from home.

Each week, the average American household spends $139 on food, of which $78 is spent on food at home and $61 is spent on food away from home.

There's never a good time to lose a wallet or a purse. Here are the steps we went through when we had a lost wallet to deal with …

“I lost my wallet.”

Not the worst words to hear over the phone on a Friday afternoon, of course, but certainly not the best, either.

Almost ten years ago to the day, my wife lost her wallet while visiting some friends in DC.  She had all of her credit cards, her ATM/debit cards, and her driver's license in that wallet.  I found this out about 1:30 PM Friday, right before the weekend.

What to do if you have a lost wallet

Here are the steps I went through:

I recently learned an amazing fact: During the height of the Cold War, a Russian military officer named Stanislav Petrov got an alert on his computer that the United States had launched a nuclear weapon at Moscow. Petrov was in charge of launching a nuke back at America should Russia feel threatened — and at that moment, he had every reason to do so. But rather than retaliate, he chose to do nothing. He felt that it was a false alarm.

Thankfully, his instincts were right. Had Petrov fired a nuke at America, untold numbers of people would have lost their lives. By doing nothing, he might have saved the whole human race from a terrible nuclear war.

That story got me thinking about the power of doing nothing in the face of information that makes you feel compelled to take action.

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This week's topic: Job Hunting! Learn about where to find jobs, using a recruiter, out of the box job hunting strategies, and more!

Somewhere between 30% and 35% of Americans identify themselves as being “happy” with their life, according to recent polling by Harris.

That means that somewhere between 65% and 70% of Americans are actually unhappy with their life.

Why is that?

Naturally (given that this is The Simple Dollar), my eye turns to finances. When I look at the data there, a number pops out at me: 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. In other words, 78% of Americans would struggle financially if they were to miss a single paycheck.

If you look at that number side by side with the number of Americans that are unhappy, you see a lot of overlap.