Money Tips Network

The sad truth is that many Americans are vastly underprepared when it comes to retirement savings. A 2016 GoBankingRates survey revealed that 33 percent of Americans have nothing saved for retirement at all.

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As a fairly frugal person, I struggle with the fact that two of my favorite hobbies are closely tied with the idea of collecting things.

I love books. I love to curl up with a good book for many hours and get lost in them. Unfortunately, that does mean that I do sometimes buy books and over time I can wind up with a fairly big collection, which is in reality just a big sunk cost.

Similarly, I love big, long, strategic board games. I love to gather a few friends around a table for a few hours and dive deep into strategy, or even to pull out a solitaire game on a rainy afternoon and fill up a table with wooden bits and puzzles to solve. As with books, it does mean that sometimes I buy games and over time I’ve built up a rather large collection of tabletop games.

I’ve had other hobbies in the past that tended to involve buying new things regularly – golf comes to mind, most definitely, but there were other hobbies such as video games as well.

An estate auction can be as much of an opportunity to fill your home as it is to empty someone else’s.

Estate auctions buy items either from the estate sales of people who have passed away or from willing sellers looking to unload excess stuff. Items up for sale can range from small lots of blankets and kitchen wares to larger offerings like cars, boats, and mobile homes, but it’s the items in the middle that offer some of the biggest bargains.

Five years ago, my wife and I purchased our first home: A more than 2,400-square-foot, 19th-century Oregon farmhouse on two acres that also included various outbuildings, an English garden, and a sprawling goat pen complete with two goats (who were given to us as part of the terms of sale).

We’d bought it as a short sale, and the previous owners were kind enough to leave some furnishings behind, but we’d moved from a 650-square-foot apartment and had never lived somewhere with more than 900 square feet of space.

Cruising has long been known as an affordable vacation option for couples and families — specifically if you choose a budget cruise line instead of a luxury brand.

Owning a small business is a labor of love. In addition to investing your money, resources, blood, sweat and tears, you also invest a small part of your soul. You love it. It's your baby — you've nurtured it from nothing to the success it is now.

Saving for retirement requires discipline. Ideally, you are able to amass a nice nest egg by putting aside a big chunk of money each month and investing it wisely. But it doesn't take much for you to get off track.

Join our Tweetchat Thursday, 3/8 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific/ 3p.m. Eastern for lively conversation and a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card or one of two $50 Amazon gift cards! Use #WBChat and #TeachChildrentoSave to participate.

This week's topic: Teaching Children to Save!

When Sarah and I were shopping for houses, there were some houses that I essentially wouldn’t even look at. I’d look at the picture and then quickly find some reason not to bother with even visiting that house.

Why? Pride. I wanted a house that I would be proud to own and proud to have people come and visit.

Here’s the thing, though: my best friend lives in a very dilapidated house, one that he knew was a complete fixer-upper. It was almost scary to visit him at first, but I still did. Now, it’s looking like a nice house, but even if it still looked beat up, I’d still visit him.

I didn’t think of him as weird or as a lesser person because of the house he bought. I thought of him as my friend, who wanted a fixer-upper to live in.

In the end, it was really my weird sense of pride that drove us to avoid a number of houses in our home search, and it was pride that probably helped us pick the house we live in now.