Money Tips Network

When you are busy — whether it is with your kids, caring for an aging parent, investing in friendships, or diving into a job you love — it can be especially hard to feel attractive.

The average American changes jobs — if not careers — multiple times in his or her lifetime.

Many of these career shifts, however, occur at the start of a person's working years, when they're zig-zagging from childcare to catering gigs in order to pay off car payments and college loans....

It’s a good thing that I am a planner by nature because, dealing with personal finance as I do involves a lot of long-term planning. So it might seem a little odd for me to take this position, but there are times when your finances might be better for not having made a plan — or at least for not being completely ruled by your plans.

Don’t take this too literally because planning has its place, but planning can also become tyrannical. It intimidates people from undertaking projects. Once a project is undertaken, too much reliance on planning can make people blind to better alternatives.

So the message here is don’t let planning become obsessive. The following are some examples of when freedom from planning can come in handy:

As I explained last week, I’m on a quest to find the best retirement plan to roll over my old 401(k). I’m going to conduct the most thorough research I can — publicly — and then put my money where my mouth is, literally rolling over my old 401(k), worth approximately $85,000, into the best plan I can find.

Today, I will take a deep dive into the online financial advisor Betterment, one of the true automated account options out there.

These financial fears keep Americans up at night. Fortunately, we can prepare for many of them. Photo: Joe Penna

A tornado sweeps through your town and leaves nothing but death and destruction in its wake. An electrical fire burns your house and everything in it to the ground.

A hacker steals your identity and runs up tens of thousands of dollars in debt before you realize what’s happened. Or, a distracted driver gets into a severe, life-changing accident that involves not only your car, but you.

These are the things Americans worry most about, according to a survey conducted by Travelers Insurance from July 21-28, 2014. Here are some more interesting details on the results of the survey.

Excerpted from “Creating Money, Creating Meaning” by Orna Ross

A core understanding in “Creating Money, Creating Meaning” is that how you do money is how you do life. Your bank statement is the most accurate statement you have of your real, lived values (as opposed to those you talk about).

If money is making you unhappy right now, it’s important to close the gap between the values you talk and think about and those you actually live, as revealed by your earning and spending.

As we continue to explore the best solutions for small business today, we’ll focus on email marketing services. Make sure you visit Saving Money in Your Startup – Part 4, where Joe discusses the four basic steps to setting up your business’s email marketing.

Email marketing services are vital for managing and interacting with your customers. In this article, we’ll do a deep dive into each of the top email marketing picks followed by an explanation of important features you want to explore before choosing a provider. I’ve broken down the top picks into those with only paid services, and therefore more features, and those that offer continuous, but limited, free services.

This article is part of a series in which The Simple Dollar is doing some deep dive research into money saving tools that will help your business save money, grow and run more smoothly.

Each year, I go to Gencon (a convention in Indianapolis held every August) with a fairy large and ever-shifting group of guys ranging in age from early twenties and still in college to mid-forties and in full career mode. Some are married with children, while others are married without kids and still others are single. I’ve known most of these guys for years, some of them for decades.

During the travel and the periods in hotel rooms when we’re not actively at the convention, we would have a lot of life conversations of the type you would expect from people who have known each other for many years. We caught up on how our lives were going and how our careers were going, among countless other topics.

Being disorganized with your bills can make your debt worse. Photo: Brendan C.

The average American household with a credit card carries more than $15,000 in credit card debt, according to debt.org. Add to that $1.2 trillion (and growing) in student loan debt, sprinkle in car loans, a mortgage, personal loans, and medical debt, and we’ve got ourselves an issue.

How did we get here?

The reasons we’re in debt, of course, vary from person to person. But there are some habits and behaviors that can lead to debt or cause existing debt to grow instead of dissipate.

Here are nine habits that might be adding more debt to your life, and suggestions for breaking those habits before they get worse: