My first piece of career advice is find your gifting. Find the thing that you are skilled at and figure out if you can make a living doing it.

We have to protect ourselves by doing our own homework.

The key to making sure your credit stays good is paying the bill on time. If you are paying the balance off even if there is something on the card in recent purchases, you are good.

My first piece of career advice is find your gifting. Find the thing that you are skilled at and figure out if you can make a living doing it.

The number of those 19 to 25 with private insurance increased from 51 to 55.8 percent, and the percentage of uninsured fell from 33.9 percent in 2010 to 28.8 percent during the first half of 2011.

My Big Mama is my No. 1 financial role model. Much of my advice stems from what she taught me. She never made more than $13,000 a year, yet she paid off her home before she retired. She saved money from every paycheck. She taught me to be skeptical. It makes me cry to think that I'm a nationally syndicated personal finance columnist for one of the world's best newspapers and my core advice comes from my black grandmother who was a nurse's aide with just a high school education.

My husband and I are pretty good at leaving money alone until we need it for what we've saved it for.