Look at the big-ticket items, in your budget. Your home or apartment. Your car. Your insurance. If you are overspending on these big monthly bills, then money's draining out of your pocket a lot faster than you can replace it by clipping coupons or buying cheaper coffee.

My response [to fear of being poor]was to study contracts, finance, economics, to plan, to have a goal, to work on that goal. To learn everything I could. I always poked at the things that scared me most.

There's a lot of research on the shift in who deals with money when families get in trouble. In good times, husbands handle the family's finances about 80 percent of the time. But when times turn sour and families start dealing with creditors and managing unpayable bills, women take more active roles.

You know, the old version was about balancing a checkbook. The new version is about the risks of debt, which is so much more widely available. So I think it's important that we design relevant financial literacy courses, and teach them starting early in grade school.

We [US government] have used our taxpayer dollars not only to subsidize these banks but also to subsidize the creditors of those banks and the equity holders in those banks. We could have talked about forcing those investors to take some serious hits on their risky dealings. The idea that taxpayer dollars go in first rather than last - after the equity has been used up - is shocking.

Right now, with millions of Americans still out of work, and struggling to recover from the worst economic downturn since the great depression, with 40 million Americans dealing with student loans, with millions of people working full-time at minimum wage and still living in poverty, with the big banks getting bigger and the workers getting poorer, and seniors struggling to make ends meet, Republicans in Washington have decided the most important thing for them to focus on is how to deny women access to birth control.

It's pretty much how we get anything added to the curriculum. When parents said children needed to be computer literate, the schools started responding. The same thing is true of basic financial literacy.