I LIKE LEARNING from successful people. If you want to be good at something, why not hear from somebody who’s actually done it?
Back when it was first published, I read The Millionaire Next Door and became fascinated with these folks. Over the next couple of decades, I applied the book’s teachings and eventually reached millionaire status myself.
Along the way, I started writing about personal finance, combining my interest in millionaires with my passion for learning from experts.

MOST OF US WILL never be fabulously wealthy and we’ll never earn huge incomes. Self-help authors, get-rich-quick seminars and motivational speakers might try to convince us otherwise. But if we turn to these folks for assistance, they’re the ones who typically make heaps of money—at our expense.
Such hucksterism doesn’t just carry a short-term cost, however. It also causes us to think about our lives in the wrong way, leaving us with an unwarranted sense of failure and distracting us from the right path forward.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, my retirement account hit a milestone—$250,000. I’d been looking forward to achieving “quarter-millionaire” status for a while, so when it finally happened, I decided to announce it on social media. I took a photo of my computer screen, with the value of my account highlighted, and uploaded the photo. Just as I prepared to make the post public, I decided to obscure the actual balance and edit the text to say my account had reached a “new personal record,” instead of revealing the specific amount.

IF WE COULD VIEW today from 10 years hence, our behavior—financial and otherwise—would be entirely different. We wouldn’t flail around so much in the muck of everyday life, fretting and fighting about nonsense. Instead, we’d focus more on issues that matter to our long-term wellbeing.
Problem is, it seems this sense of perspective can’t be taught by schools and colleges. Instead, it’s learned only through experience. It would be wonderful if we could be wise at age 20,

PORTFOLIO MANAGERS and financial advisors are apt to depict money management as rigorously analytical, and sometimes even as a science. Maybe that’s inevitable in an endeavor where almost every decision ends up with a number, whether it’s the amount of life insurance to buy, the percentage allocation to emerging markets or the age at which you should claim Social Security.
But just because the answer has precision doesn’t mean this is a precise business.

WHAT’S THE STATE of your financial health? Forget your credit score, the past year’s handsome increase in your home’s value or how your salary compares to your brother-in-law’s. In the end, financial fitness comes down to two key numbers.
First, there’s your net worth, which is the value of your assets minus your debts. There’s some debate about what should be included. The easy answer: Don’t delude yourself by counting the value of your car,

WE’RE OFTEN encouraged to follow our instincts. But if we did that, many of us would sit on the couch drinking margaritas, eating Cheez Doodles and cruising online shopping sites, when we should be eating less, saving more and heading to the gym. Often, the key to a better life—financially and otherwise—is to get ourselves to take action we instinctively resist.
This is obvious advice if we’re overweight, rarely exercise, panic when the stock market declines and find our credit-card balances balloon with every passing month.

IF YOU DROVE DRUNK but got home unscathed, you wouldn’t wake up the next morning and think, “I guess it’s okay to get behind the wheel after 13 beers.” Yet, when handling our finances, we do that all the time.
“Markets generate a lot of data, but they don’t generate a lot of clear feedback,” writes academic Terrance Odean in his foreword to Michael Ervolini’s thoughtful book, Managing Equity Portfolios. “Outcomes are noisy.

I PROMISE TO BEHAVE better tomorrow. What happens when tomorrow becomes today? All bets are off.
Our broken promises might involve money, such as committing to spend less, save more and pay down debt. Or they might involve some other aspect of our life, such as committing to eat healthier, exercise more and drink less.
All this highlights our irrationality. We may not be experts in nutrition, physical education and money management. But we have a pretty good idea of how we ought to behave.

MONEY ISN’T AN END in itself. Rather, it’s a means to other ends. But what ends? Some people have a good handle on what they want from their financial life. But for others, it’s a lifelong struggle. They purchase endless possessions that bring only fleeting pleasure. They pursue goals that they belatedly discover aren’t all that important to them. Result: money worries, excessive spending, mountains of debt and fierce family arguments.
How can we avoid this mess?

TOO MUCH CHOICE CAN be paralyzing. This is the reason many 401(k) plans have winnowed the list of funds they offer: Thanks to the smaller selection, participants are less likely to feel overwhelmed—and more likely to make an investment decision, rather than leaving their cash to languish in the plan’s money market fund.
I think this is a good strategy for other areas of our finances. For instance, you may make smarter investment decisions if you limit your choice by,

THINK ABOUT THE BAD stuff that didn’t happen. Very few of us will have a year when we crash the car, our home burns down, our employer goes belly up and our big bet on a single stock goes way down. Yet all of these things could happen, which is why we buy auto and homeowner’s insurance, keep an emergency reserve and avoid big bets on a single stock.
Sound sensible? There are two great dangers.

COLUMNIST RON LIEBER of The New York Times emailed me earlier in the week, asking for help with a special online feature. The task: Grab a 4×6 index card and, in Ron’s words, “write whatever you want on the *lined* side. A list of 10 things. Or 20 if you write small. A picture. A quote. Whatever. But it should add up to Clements’s guide to financial wellness.”
This was trickier than it seemed.

MEIR STATMAN, a finance professor at California’s Santa Clara University, argues that financial decisions—like everyday consumer purchases—have three benefits: utilitarian (what it does for me), expressive (what it says about me) and emotional (how it makes me feel).
As we manage our finances, we insist our goal is strictly utilitarian, and that all we want to do is make money. But in truth, we often make decisions for expressive or emotional reasons—and these other motivations can hurt our stated goal of greater wealth,

MOST OF US STRUGGLE with self-control. We eat too much, exercise too little and spend excessively. One solution: Adopt rigid rules of behavior.
For instance, I make it a rule to exercise every morning for at least 40 minutes, always buy whole wheat bread, avoid caffeine after 9 a.m. and eat fruit as a midmorning snack. I’ve followed these rules for so long that they’re no longer rules, but rather ingrained, unquestioned habits.
Not surprisingly,