Check out Bari on the cover of Experience Life magazine!

Bari is on the cover of the March 2010 issue~

We're so excited to have Bari as a cover girl in addition to all the other amazing work she does here at CB. If you'd like to take a sneak peek behind the scenes at the shoot, here's your chance in this little video.

Hello everyone! It's a new year, and we are ready to offer you some fun new content.

One of the things that has been buzzing around here is talk about all the options you have nowadays when it comes to being conscious about finance.

Once upon a time, it was the old fashioned pencil and paper. Then we added the ledger and calculator,  then computer accounting software, which led to programs like Quicken, Quickbooks, and others.

Many of us have been hearing about new rules regarding credit cards. It is very important to be clear about what this will mean for each of us who use them.

Many thanks to LeAnne Ozaine Smith of Spend On Purpose, who was kind enough to share the following list translating what the new rules are into language we all can understand.

Check her out at www.spendonpurpose.com

As many of us have, I learned to use Quicken as my Conscious Bookkeeping tool of choice when studying with Bari.

However, since then I have heard a lot about Mint.com and its abilities to help manage money. It looked fancy and tempting, as did moving to an online Quicken app that would let me manage money on the road with my iPhone. What bliss! Making my iPhone my electronic stylie accoutrement? Sounds like paradise.

But how is a conscious bookkeeper to choose among all these options?

I met Patti recently at a networking event in Los Angeles, and loved her specialty: teaching kids to manage money. Don't all of us wish he had had Patti when we were growing up? I was so excited to have her on the site and am delighted to share her guest post today! so now, take it away, Patti! (be sure to read her amazing bio at the bottom, where you can learn about her book: How to ditch your allowance and be richer than your parents)

In the last post, I talked about "The Compact," a group which began in SF and aims to eliminate spending entirely aside from food and toiletries.

I have given a lot of thought to how to integrate this idea of spending less while continuing to get the benefit of experiences I associate with spending money.

This past week, I learned about something called "The Compact." It started as a San Francisco group devoted to buying nothing new other than Food, toiletries and medicine. It is acceptable to buy used and to borrow or barter. This got me thinking. I have long been an advocate of voluntary simplicity, loved Janet Luhr's book, Simple Living, and have looked for many ways in my own life to cut costs and to be more conscious in how I choose to spend money. And while a certain part of me heaves a sigh of relief about no trips out to shop for a year, or for life as some of these members imply, there is part of me that balks at this method. This is not only because I enjoy finding new things and have recently discovered a new passion for earrings, it is also because when I do choose to spend money, I relish the opportunity to support those I purchase from. A good example is my love of Etsy, a site where designers and artists can sell their goods directly to the consumer. I have bought jewelry, clothes, art and gifts from this site and have loved the contacts and connections buying from these amazing people have created. So how to embrace simplicity while still enjoying the process of shopping with purpose? I think this is a challenge we each must face individually. What is your philosophy around spending? Has it changed in the last year? How do you decide who you would like to support with your money. Please share in the comments below!

This week, I found the video above and was so happy to see the concept of investing spelled out in such a no-nonsense way. 

This past year, we have seen a lot of crazy shifts in the market and in the language the media uses to talk about money. One of the things I always try to do with clients is to help them get down to the core of the issue and take the emotion out of the concept they are working with.

This week, I received the very informative results of a survey that Ramit Sethi had conducted on his readers. (You will remember Ramit from my previous post on his work and his new book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich).

Hello, Money Door Blog community!

I am back from a wonderful vacation in Spain with my family, and am excited ot be with you again. Being in Europe and watching the way Spain values time so differently than we do in the US (dinner at 10pm, afternoon siesta before going back to work in the evening) got me to thinking about how other countries value money.

I found a fascinating article on England's changing relationship to cash from BBC news from earlier this year and realized its points were mirrored in my own relationship to money.