Yesterday, I proctored the A.P. English Literature exam. That means three and a half solid hours of doing nothing but walking around a big, silent room watching a bunch of 18-year-olds furiously writing. Left alone with my thoughts, I naturally started running numbers in my head. ... Read more...
Teaching Financial Literacy in High Schools is a Crappy Idea
As many of you probably know, April is financial literacy month. This is the 30-day period we're supposed to be teaching others, particularly our children, about developing sound financial habits. As a person who teaches kids for a living and blogs about finances as a hobby, ... Read more...
Our Finances, Like Our Lives, Have Ups and Downs
Even though I've been serious about personal finance for about four years, I still feel like I have so much to learn. Since I started this blog at the end of 2008, my finances have basically been steadily improving. I paid off a lot of debt, including a couple of credit cards, ... Read more...
Money Messages: Wiz Khalifa, Pop Culture, and Stuff People Say
"I'm gonna spend it all, why wait for another day I'ma take all this money I own and blow it all away Cause I can't take it when I'm gone, gone, gone, gone." -Wiz Khalifa, "When I'm Gone" Since the city of Pittsburgh holds a special place in my heart, I'm pretty much ... Read more...
The Truth About Succeeding
I used to smoke cigarettes. And like most smokers, I absolutely loved smoking. I loved having a cigarette with some coffee, a cigarette with a glass of wine, a cigarette in the car. In fact, every single day, to this day, I have the impulse to pull out a cigarette every timeI get ... Read more...
Tough Love
Every once in a while, I have to give one of my students some tough love. What I basically say to them - without actually saying it - is that they're screwing up. Maybe that sounds harsh, but every so often a little dose of honesty does a teenager some good. We live in an almost ... Read more...
Freud on Personal Finance
Sigmund Freud: probably the most famous and influential psychologists of all time.SourceThe founder of psychoanalytic theory, Freud is credited with creating the "talk therapy" approach to solving psychological problems that we take for granted today. In addition, our popular ... Read more...
I Have Some Controversial Ideas about Money
Actually, I have some controversial ideas about a lot of things, but since we're talking about money here, that's all I'll share. For today. To be fair, it's possible that the thoughts I'm about to share aren't controversial - they could just be straight-up wrong. And I hope ... Read more...
Are You an Iceberg or a Snowflake?
I'm not sure where I heard about of these concepts (maybe Dave Ramsey?), but I know I didn't come up with them: the "iceberg" approach to paying off debt/saving or the "snowflake." Have you heard of this?Basically, if you're more a believer in the "iceberg" method you like to ... Read more...
Rules
As a Type A person, the world seems (to me) to be filled with rules: get straight As. Go to college. Get a job. Find a husband. Have a baby. Buy a house. Lose the baby weight. When I got serious about my finances a few years ago, a whole new set of rules popped up: pay off debt. ... Read more...