You know my personal finance shtick: There are little things, and there are big things. Pets are both little things and big things.

The purpose of money is enjoyment. If you do all the basic things right, then you can splurge on yourself sometimes.

Most problems in personal finance come from people focusing on the small things, not the big things.

I am in New York for the launch of No Worries. Let’s talk about all the personal finance decisions I made to get here.

Here is the thing with miles and points: People spend a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how to get the miles and points, and then they get the miles and points but never use them.

There was an interview with Suze Orman recently in the style section of The Wall Street Journal. It was not a substantive interview regarding her philosophy about personal finance, but it was revealing nonetheless.

2024 might be a bad year. We might get a recession. We might get a bear market. We might get a housing collapse. We might get a war. We might get political turmoil. Actually, that is definitely going to happen.

Some people get themselves in a big financial jam, like with six figures in credit card or other debt. Then they feel stuck—it will take a decade to pay this off. It is pretty close to checkmate.

Even if you’re not up to your eyeballs in the financial world, you have probably heard that interest rates have come down a bit. Ten-year interest rates have dipped about 1%. Thirty-year fixed-rate mortgages are benchmarked off 10-year interest rates, so mortgage rates have come down about 1%.