The cover of this document tells you the whole story. Everything youreally need to
know abut personal \ufb01nance can be summarized in just one page. Spend less than you
earn. Earn more. Live frugal. Do something sensible with the difference. Control your
own destiny. All of the other writing out there on personal \ufb01nance is just details.

In fact, the rest of this documentis just details. What you\u02bcll \ufb01nd in the rest of this
document is a lot of additional detail about the points made on the cover. Beyond that,
this document is heavily footnoted. If you\u02bcre reading this document on a computer, you
can click on those footnote numbers and immediately jump to online resources that
expand upon that point.

This document is being freely distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. What does that mean? It means that this document is free - you can send it to your friends, put it up on your website, or print it out. You can also use if for commercial purposes - if you want to format it as a book and sell it, feel free. You can also modify the contents to your heart\u02bcs desire as long as it\u02bcs shared in the same way - any derivative works must also be shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

I only have two requests. One, if you write about this on your website, include a link
back to the original source of the document -http://www.thesimpledollar.com/onepage/.
Doing this enables new readers to always be able to retrieve the latest version of the
document. Two, if you do something interesting with this document (creating something
new and compelling with it, use it in a classroom, use it in a major media source),
please let me know by dropping me an email attrent@thesimpledollar.com.

Flash forward to April 2006. I had a good job, was married, and had an infant son, but I still hadn\u02bct learned the value of managing my money. To put it simply, I had a \ufb01nancial meltdown[4], capped off by a long night of soul searching while facing a pile of bills that I simply couldn\u02bct afford to pay[5].

That experience woke me up. I dove into personal \ufb01nance books, reading them by the
hundreds[6]. I started throwing the book at our terrible \ufb01nancial state, trying every
tactic that I read about. And it worked. Over the course of two years, we paid off two
car loans, \ufb01ve \ufb01gures\u02bc worth of credit card debt, \ufb01ve \ufb01gures\u02bc worth of student loan debt,
and several personal loans. This turnaround laid the foundation for many things we had
only dreamed about to that point - we bought a home, had another child, built a strong
emergency fund, and, eventually, I was able to change careers and become a writer,
taking a pay drop but living out a dream I\u02bcd had since I was a child.