Debt

Taxes, whether we admit it or not, drive a lot of our personal finance decisions. Avoiding or lowering them can influence where we choose to live, what kind of car we buy, where we send our children to school, whether we purchase a house, and many other everyday decisions. Everyone tries to limit the amount of taxes they pay. Taxes play a large role when we invest for retirement, as well.

Credit cards: A minimum payment might help you in the short term but could be one of your most expensive decisions.

Want to be your credit card company’s favorite customer? Just max out your card’s limit, agree to pay interest at a rate of 18 percent to 25 percent, and make only the minimum payment each month.

It’s hard to predict the best days in the markets, and the cost of missing them can be high.

Managing finances properly is mainly common sense. While we’ve all made financial mistakes, most of those mistakes are easily rectified, particularly when promptly corrected. However, there are some financial decisions that can be much harder to recover from. Here are just a few of them:

It’s official: Money is stressful. Surveys consistently show that money is the top source of stress for American adults. More than a quarter of Americans say they feel stressed about money most or all of the time. Only 30 percent rate their financial security as high, and more than two-thirds believe that more money would make them happier.

When most people think of retirement, fears about financial challenges frequently come up. With so many people not having any retirement savings at all, benefits like Social Security often make up most or all of the income that retirees get.

Since World War II, obesity rates in the United States have skyrocketed, our net national savings rate has plummeted and American adults and kids alike have allocated a rapidly rising proportion of their free time to staring at electrons dancing on screens.

Dealing with debt is nerve-racking, but debt when you’re approaching retirement can be downright scary. The conventional wisdom is that you should try to retire debt-free, but fewer and fewer people are actually doing that.