The hardest part of being a writer isn't the writing itself—it's the long slog while waiting for other people to agree to pay you for the pleasure. I always knew I wanted to write, but a childhood of watching my schoolteacher mother have to go on strikes every summer to keep funding made me gun-shy of getting a degree where my only fallback seemed to be teaching. So I opted for the Michael Crichton plan: I'd become a doctor, get rich, and then write. I then went through three years of getting a microbiology degree before getting sidetracked and moving across the country with no job skills.

Here's a list of [...]

Jake Smith is a name I've made up for the person who sent me this email: I'm a physician in my early forties. I make $450-500K. I read a lot about finance and I know that technically I am in the 1%, but I don't feel rich at all. I don't know if it was the way I was raised or because for a time I was living paycheck to paycheck or if it's because I have three kids (and hence, eventually will have three tuitions to pay), but I don't feel wealthy yet. Maybe it's because I live in an affluent suburb of a big city and most of [...]

My brother and I have been standing in line—we are the line—for 10 minutes while the man in front of us sets up his payments for four otter pops and one sucker.

He is paying with Tashlumim. Real old-fashioned credit. There are tons of little stores like this all over the country—single owner, providing a few blocks with 16-, 20- or 24-hour access to fundamental groceries: bread, hummus, milk, cottage cheese. And yes, otter pops and suckers. These stores are neighborhood institutions, neighbors helping neighbors. Hence the Tashlumim.

After it's been settled, with a "Shabbat shalom, hamud," we're up. we pay for our chocolate milk with cash, but we don't [...]

Almost two years ago, I performed one of my sporadic online bank balance checks, cringing at the damage I knew I inflicted the weekend prior. To my horror, five hundred dollars were missing. I have a shopping problem, but I’m nowhere near that crazy.

I opened up the statement and scanned the charges, sifting out the activity that was most definitely mine. Clothes, yes. Bars, yes. Six visits to different gas stations in two days? Me thinks not.

I immediately called up Chase Bank to report the fraud. The customer service rep on the other end was calm and helpful—she’d heard this story before. All I needed to do was [...]

After graduating college, I pulled together a poetry tour of the East Coast with three friends. We couch-surfed and split small sums from homemade book sales and venue entry fees. Our biggest check—$2,000—came from working with a small city's public library. That money made it possible for us to break even after a month on the road, but only just. It was a start, we thought.

Years later, one friend is in graduate school for archival science; another is in school to become a Unitarian Universalist minister; and the third works at cash-for-gold stand in the mall. I schedule appointments at the office of a moving company.

None of us [...]

Last year, my husband and I cracked the $100,000 income barrier, a mark my parents didn't hit until they were well into their 40s—at least, I think they didn't. I suppose all those trips they took to food pantries when I was a kid could have simply been a cover, masking my family's secret hidden wealth.

Our combined $102,000 puts us just into the top 20 percent of households in the country, according to U.S. Census data. We are indisputably comfortably well-off, solidly lower-upper- or higher-middle-class depending on your point of view. While we don't spend much (we're too weighed down by crazy levels of student debt and a [...]

Summer internship season is nearly upon us, and for young "professionals," this means living out of a suitcase, crashing on someone's couch, and navigating a huge and terrible city where you know no one…at least for a little bit.

The "jobs" don't come to you, so you gotta go to the "jobs." This is how you live in the big city for work and no profit.

1. Pack judiciously. Bring unwrinkleable work clothes (knits are best, but if you roll your wovens/silks they won't get too awful looking), not too many pairs of shoes (3 is plenty), and extra underwear. Don't forget things like deodorant. Put the things you'll need [...]

The Great Gatsby got a modern upgrade last week thanks to Baz Luhrmann’s directing, Leo’s acting, Jay-Z’s soundtrack, and Prada’s costumes, but those aren’t the only reasons the film should resonate with a 2013 audience. Gatsby’s Roaring 20’s lifestyle—full closet, extravagant parties, boats, cars, and especially his mansion—has something to teach us about an era of more recent cultural memory: the Clinton-Bush boom years and the Great Recession that followed.

I’m sure you’ve all seen/read it by now, so you know the gist: (The Great) Jay Gatsby rose from economic obscurity to a life of luxury, defined by his towering house and the raucous parties he throws there. He believed [...]

My husband and I put almost all of our expenses on our Costco American Express card. Dinner, groceries, gas, travel—it all goes on the card. And then once a month, I use money from our joint checking account to pay the bill in full. Sometimes we've had an expensive month: We've been doing a lot of traveling lately, and we're preparing for a cross-country move, so our credit card bills have been much higher than usual lately. When that happens, I figure out how much more money we need, and we each transfer that amount from our individual accounts to the joint one (we have a standard amount we put [...]

Chanan is arguably the preeminent cat photography team in the country. The name "Chanan" is a roundabout abbreviation and concatenation of the husband-wife duo's first names, Richard and Nancy. Richard has been photographing cats as his primary occupation since 1976 (his entry into this improbable niche came by way of his mother, an avid cat breeder), and Nancy has assisted him for much of that time. Over the decades, Chanan have cultivated, and established themselves as the principal purveyors of, the favored portraiture aesthetic of cat breeders worldwide.

If you've ever been to a cat show, you may have seen Chanan in action. They're almost constantly on the road, traveling [...]

The first of April was an anniversary for me of sorts, because it marked the end of my first year on an employer-sponsored health plan since 2005. Before then, I’ve always paid for my own health insurance on the private market either due to being self-employed, or being in a situation where the coverage my employer provides is lower in quality than the insurance I can buy on my own due to some combination of it being cheaper and/or providing superior coverage.

When I first bought my own insurance in '05 it was actually pretty good—my premiums were about $144 per month, low co-pays, a $500 reasonable deductible and coverage [...]

The first opera I saw was "Cosi Fan Tutte," by Mozart. It's about two dudes who disguise themselves as Albanians to trick their respective girlfriends into sleeping with the other dude, to test how (un)faithful they are. Then they whip off their mustaches and say AH HAH! And then basically they all shrug, laugh, and depending on the production either swap back, OR NOT. It's a comedy. Allegedly. The title means "They're all the same." "They" being women.

I went to opera school anyway.

Saying you want to be an opera singer is like saying you want to be an astronaut, in terms of actual job prospects. There is [...]

College Green, Iowa City, Iowa, 1999 My first residence out of college was a single-room sublet with a communal bathroom and kitchen in a giant old house. My roommates and I were in a band and we recorded an album in the attic. I was underemployed, temperatures hit record highs, and I was in the midst of a protracted, summer-long breakup with my college girlfriend. Of course I have fond memories of the place.

Any elisions in this timeline represent long stretches without unpleasant interactions with landlords, and uneventful tenancies make boring stories. I rented many apartments throughout Iowa City and Chicago before my first full-scale landlord-induced meltdown, [...]

Hello, duckling! Long time, no see. Of course, I’d love to have dinner with you and catch up, but to be honest, I'm not feeling inspired to go out to eat tonight. Why don’t you come over to my place instead? It might be a little out of your way, but I think I can make it worth your while, as well as mine. Need some convincing?

1. It’s cheaper Does this part even need to be said? I’ll get it out of the way. Even if you buy a bottle of wine on your way over (you shouldn’t have! but let’s get this puppy opened up), you are obviously [...]

When I was 18, my parents sent me 600 miles away to Northwestern University for a journalism degree worth nearly $200,000. Minus $50,000 in loans and grants, they paid for the whole thing out-of-pocket. I've never understood why. As far as I knew, my family was well-off, but never rich; we had necessities, but rarely luxuries. Why did they spend that much for me to study journalism? For that matter, why and how did they pay for college at all? I put that journalism degree to use and asked them.

Jamie: When did you guys start thinking about college for me and Jennifer?

Mom: Oh, very early. Shortly after you [...]

I work for a wine and spirits distributor, meaning I am the middle man between the wineries/importers/supplier and the restaurants/bars/liquors stores. I've only been doing this for just over a year, but have been in the booze industry for almost five and have had many friends and colleagues work wholesale. So I'm rather acquainted with the industry while still being green (and young, age-wise). Part of my job requires sampling wine to my customers (I have a permit to carry an open container for this reason, and it's a fun time to see new acquaintances reactions to my trunk full of booze). Obviously one could assume a customer would like [...]

Chanel Dubofsky: So, Sarah Seltzer. I'd like to talk about professional jealousy. Do you experience this? If not, this will be a short conversation.

Sarah Seltzer: Haha. Yes, everyone has this problem, right? Particularly in our Facebook age. It is sometimes potent for me because I have a limb in different professions. I envy people who are totally devoted to one subject, because they can hone a "brand" and be known in a shorthand way, like "person X, he is a civil liberties activist." Sometimes I feel like I'm all over the place, so no brand for me. What about you?

CD: I am constantly professionally jealous, even though I [...]

Recently a number of my friends have decided to try subsisting on a food budget of less than $1.50 a day. It's part of the Live Below the Line challenge, intended to draw attention to the problem of extreme poverty—which, though it has fallen dramatically, still affects billions of people.

I caught up with three friends who are doing the challenge: Elizabeth in D.C. and Jim and Rachael in the U.K. I'll let them explain it further.

How did you find out about this project and what made you decide to try it?

Jim: I found out about the challenge from a blog post on The [...]

My friend Sarah's little brothers Nick and Alex are 10 and eight years old, respectively. Sarah is one of my best and oldest friends, so I've known Alex since he was born and Nick since he was just a kneebiter. With their parents' permission, of course, they kindly took some time out from their busy schedules of watching Adventure Time and playing video games to chat with me about their career aspirations, taxes and how best to manage one's money.

What do you guys want to be when you grow up?

Alex: Ninja.

Nick: I'll be a pilot. Wait, actually a basketball player and a pilot.

How come?

Alex: Because [...]

I grew up with money, but I'm bad with money. Right now I'm the kind of bad that has collection agencies calling. The kind of bad that has trashed my credit score. The kind of bad that leaves me feeling like a Rockefeller if I have more than $50 left in my checking by the end of the month—something there hasn't been a single instance of in my working life so far. The norm: Daily alerts from Chase that I have $3.50 in my account the week before a paycheck. And I have a well-paying job.

I have no excuses. Growing up, my family had money. I half assumed [...]