Once you finish paying for college you could reduce your life insurance.

I understand why many are still poor or struggling to make just a middle-income lifestyle. I'm a fiscal conservative, but I also have compassion for people who make financial mistakes.

I like the idea of having a paperless society.But to be paperless means you have to be so careful with your identity.

When you give people who are being financially responsible money, you are enabling them to continue a bad habit. So you are actually helping by saying, "Love you but no."

Save what you can toward the emergency and life happens fund. But don't worry yourself sick at the slow growth. The point is it's growing even it's just one dollar at at time.

Sometimes your gut is right. And sometimes not.

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.