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There is so much noise out there about managing money that its incredibly easy to get distracted when it comes to managing your own. Websites, blogs, and books can cover more information than you'd ever need. Never ending distractions about interest rates, credit scores, IRA vs Roth IRA, taxes, and credit card offers cause analysis paralysis. Tips to track your spending, use every budget category imaginable, pay yourself first, pay bills on time, and pay credit cards off in full every month feel more like challenges than actual tips or…

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Budgeting has a bad reputation. A lot of budgets start off with tracking every purchase for a period of time, and aren't much more specific beyond making a plan to cut back. Other approaches might start off with a hundred categories that you immediately feel the need to use even though you didn't before. Sometimes they'll recommend going with certain percentages for different types of expenses which might be part of the reason people avoid making a budget (math). Any type of proactive budgeting is better than nothing, but there…

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Goals are great. Its fun, and productive even, to think about what you would like to do or accomplish. Goals can be material things like a new car or a dream home. They can be experiences like traveling around the world. They can especially be intangible achievements like learning a new language, getting good grades or passing an important test, or maybe just exercising regularly for six months straight. It feels great to achieve your goals, but is there something more to it? To achieve your goals you have to…

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Spend less than you earn. That's it, end of story. Ahh, if only it were that easy! Like so many other things in life, most of us know what has to be done. We just don't completely know how. But still, spending less than you earn is the only real rule there is in managing money, and its pretty straightforward. The rule is pretty universal. If you and I consistently spend more money than we bring in from our jobs, we'll soon be in debt and go bankrupt. If a…

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