I would never recommend making heavy use of credit if you're coming up lean at the end of every month. But we do have enough that we could pay off last month's credit card bill and pay for this month's spending.

A large part of adulthood is learning to tell the difference between tasks you should pay someone else to do, and ones you should just do yourself.

Looking at the bright side of having anxiety.

We got married in a judge's private office on a Friday afternoon. Besides my husband, the only other people present were my sister, and three close friends. I told my parents a week before we got married what our plans were, and they asked, "Why so quickly? What's the hurry?" It wasn't quick or sudden for us; we'd been talking about getting married for months. The major impediment we kept circling around was that we didn't want a wedding.

After college, like so many other recent graduates frantically staving off real life (or, in my case, the purgatory of a PhD program), I taught English abroad. I got a gig with the Austrian-American Educational Commission that seemed to be designed solely to encourage post-collegiate irresponsibility. I worked 12—you heard me—12 hours a week, and took home about €1,000 a month after taxes. Even after paying €350 in rent each month for the bigger bedroom in our two-bedroom flat, that €650 still stretched a long way.

In 2012, I learned a lot more about value than I did about money—the value of my family, the value of friendship, and the value of making the best of what you've got.

Billfold pal Sydney Bufkin found a letter written in 1891 from an editor to a writer who was submitting an article to the The Forum, an American periodical that ran from 1886 to 1930, and points out that $75 in 1891 dollars is "$1796.34 in 2010 dollars."