This series of six articles is intended to help you navigate and put into practice basic financial information that will help you make sound decisions that provide a higher assurance of financial security than you otherwise could have counted on IF you accept—AND adopt—fundamental principles and rules that will require the development of your own self-discipline to make these recommendations secondary habits over time. These articles could also become the basis for a syllabus in a high school finance course that could be offered in our public schools.
- SAVE: We will examine the discipline of saving, not from the standpoint of absolute dollars or percentages of your paycheck but in terms of an attitude toward saving that inclines you to save as much as possible, while ignoring the formulaic approaches that either don’t always work or are impossible to accomplish given the cash flow you currently generate. More than one in four Americans (28 percent) have savings below $1,000. Rising living costs are the primary barrier to saving more (66 percent), followed by debt repayment (31 percent).
