Most people fail to see the simplest truth - and when it comes to homeless people, the simple truth is you put your pants on the same way they do. Although, you might have laundered yours a bit more recently, that doesn't mean the homeless person likes being smelly.

A homeless person spends all 24 hours of the day to survive. In the first three parts of this series, I explained why I'm homeless today with my significant other, and gave a little insight to the lengths homeless people must go to in order to eat, sleep, and get around town. It's particularly tough getting out of this situation, and here's another reason why.

The city where I am is not exactly the most intelligently designed. Near the center of town you will find most of the meals provided for homeless people. Breakfast is 34 blocks west (a little more than 3 miles), but that is the only exception within walking distance.

However, to use a phone or any of the resources at the unemployment office, you have to travel another 4 miles north from breakfast and run the risk of missing lunch at the center of town - 4 miles south, and 3 miles east of the unemployment office. If you're walking, that would be impossible. Fortunately, some places give out bus passes. They aren't available all of the time, so if you don't have a bike or a phone, you don't have a reliable way to check up on or call potential employers.

It takes making a plan and strict discipline in order to get a job while homeless. The time between meals and sleep is scarce, and if you don't have a safe place for your things, it will take longer to get from place to place. Some homeless shelters will help with transportation, meals, and showers - but unless you're single / don't mind being separated, aren't unnerved by the occassional gay person, and can stomach the food, then it isn't really a viable option.

The lesson to be learned in these last 4 articles - don't look down on the homeles. They really do work very hard. For some, it drives them crazy. For others, it drives them to drugs - but for a select few, it drives them to achieve.

You may think the smelly and obviously homeless gentleman sitting at the corner with his hand held out is lazy, a drunkard, or addicted to some drug. In a lot of the cases, you would be right - but I contend that some of them became that way because it literally takes all day just to survive.

In the first and second parts of this series, I explained why I'm homeless today with my significant other, and shined a bit of light on what a homeless person has to do in order to eat and sleep. Now I'll elaborate on why it is so hard to get out of the situation.

Unless you keep your things with you at all times or have a locked place to keep them, you run the risk of having it stolen every time you leave it somewhere. Fear of losing what few things you have will keep a person pretty well tied down to a small area. It's tough walking much more than a few blocks at a time carrying 60lbs of luggage. Now imagine doing that every day to chase after meals and a place to sleep - you can forget looking for a job.

Fortunately, we have the majority of our stuff stored with a friend who is also letting us take showers too. With the bicycles we acquired today from a very generous man (he has probably been giving bikes to the homeless for a few years now), we are much more mobile.

You won't last much longer than a few days standing and walking for 16 to 20 hours a day, every day. Bicycles mean we can go more than 6 blocks without a break, get there faster, and do so without aggravating our feet much more. When we were walking everywhere, it would take until lunch to make the 34 block hike from the breakfast location to the lunch location. Now we just might be able to fit in some job hunting time - and that too is an altogether different story.

In the first part of this series, I explained why I'm homeless now with my significant other, and a little peek into the day of a homeless person. Now I'll take you through a bit of what the nights are like.

There are plenty of homeless shelters around here. Tons of them, in fact - but we can't qualify for anything that will let us stay together. If you're under 21, have kids, or are a veteran, you have a place. If you're HIV positive, mentally ill, or addicted to drugs, you have a place. But if you're a heterosexual couple in your mid-twenties and wish to sleep in the same room - sorry, no dice.

If you're sitting there wondering "how much worse could it get?" - well, hang on for a moment and I'll tell you. I recently moved to Florida, a place most would call paradise, but it hasn't been as much for me. You see, a glitch and a misunderstading happened on my trip down, and I arrived without a dime to my name.

For the last 5 days I and my significant other have been homeless. Thanks to the "help" you get here, we haven't managed to accomplish much, and we have slept outside every night - including the last two nights, which happened to set new records for the coldest nights in Florida to date.

Cleaning up your finances can be a big project, but small steps will get the job done. You've got big plans to move your finances to the next level, but where do you start? Consider this: you can't move forward unless you know exactly where you are!

First, schedule a couple of hours - and no more - to spend some time with the paperwork you already have. Bank and mortgage statements, retirement and investment account information, prospectus mailings, tax forms - all that stuff you set to the side because you didn't have the time to give it the attention it deserves. Now is the time to go through each and every sheet.

At first blush the user environment for Fidelity isn't very intuitive. Although I like the fact it doesn't log me out when I close the page, I can definitely see that being a problem if someone uses a communal computer. Outside of that, the customer service has been superb, and I've even had a few pleasant surprises.

If you're like me and get most of your income through PayPal, Fidelity definitely seems to be PayPal friendly. It only took about 2 days to attach my Fidelity account to PayPal, and all deposits have gone through in just two to three days. On top of that, the Fidelity Visa Gold Check Card has a couple nice perks.

Part 1 and Part 2 explain the beginnings of currency and loans as we know it, but that truly is just the beginning. When last we left our bankers, they were just starting to loan out their depositors' gold without their knowledge or consent. Of course, eventually people caught on, and the government stepped in to regulate exactly how much bankers could loan.

The snowball grew over time, and bankers still wanted more. They pushed the limits, and regulations eventually allowed bankers to loan out a certain multiplier of what was currently on deposit. In other words, if the banker had $10,000 in their safe, they could loan out as much as 9 times that, or $90,000.

In the first part of this series I introduced the beginnings of our economic system as we know it. Once upon a time, money held value in its own right, and banks simply kept it safe. Then something changed. People wanted something lighter to carry and started using their deposit receipts as currency.

Once receipts as currency caught on, the bankers got a bright idea. At the time, the town banker was the most trusted and well-known person around. Of course he would be – he's keeping your money safe. At the same time, people also knew the banker had a lot of money. So when they needed a little extra to get by, who did the townspeople ask?

What makes me a bad American? I don't have debt. I don't have an auto loan, mortgage, or credit card to feed money into the economy. I am actually making it harder for you and everyone else to pay off their debts because I have not created money by getting a loan.

It's surprising, but true. If everyone were to pay off their debts, which is literally impossible, there would be no money. The way our economy is set up – and every economy with a central bank, for that matter – makes bankruptcy inevitable for at least some of the population. Even worse, this economic system cannot be sustained indefinitely.

I recently chose to switch from Wachovia to Fidelity for my banking needs. The decision to switch was easy, but finding the right bank took quite a while. I don't care about frills like earning interest or overdraft protection – I just wanted some way to pay the people I need to pay without paying anything extra. Simple, right?

Not when you travel as much as I do. In the last year, I've lived in more places than I can count on two hands and in a total of 6 states. Fortunately I don't have to worry about things like cashing checks, otherwise I would be in a real bind unless I went with a national chain. Instead, I just have a little issue with getting cash out when I need it.

Hi Stephanie,

I have already discussed this with another member of your team, but you may as well know why I am closing my accounts with Wachovia.

For one, in light of the Bailout, I have lost respect for banking institutions which also lend, for not declaring bankruptcy and instead forcing the general populous to be responsible for your poor decisions. Furthermore, this kind of mismanagement can only continue to infect the rest of the business, and I fear for the continued availability of my funds.

If you're like most folks, you don't have enough money in your savings accounts. "Enough money" means you have six to nine months of living expenses in a liquid account that you can access if the need arises. That's enough money to cover your rent or mortgage, your car payments, your food and clothing and phones, your mad money, your cable - whatever you spend every month.

If the unexpected happens -unemployment, a serious accident, a death in the family - you've got enough savings to cover your expenses without putting additional strain on yourself.

You might think that you're alone in your particular financial predicament, but you're not. Perhaps you have only a few thousand dollars in savings, or maybe you've got a giant goose egg to fall back on, but wherever you are on the financial spectrum, you're not the only one. In addition to being broke, are you falling behind on your mortgage payments? Or worse, falling behind on your rent, but dream of owning your own house? Remember this: many people have been where you are and have financially recovered.

You know you need to take small steps to get started on the road to financial stability, but those are the toughest ones to make, and here's the first: pay in cash.

With banks crashing left and right thanks to making bad financial decisions, there aren't many “professionals� left to trust with your money – and in this economy, you need to be really smart with every last dollar. Without a professional to help, you're left to do all that digging on your own – but where to start?

Look no further - here are 9 fabulous financial tools you can use to shave a few bucks off your monthly budget.

It has always mystified me how some people can pick a job out of high school or college and stay in it for their entire life. When I was a little girl, considering what I would do for work, I thought that "one true job" ideal was expected and normal - but then I found out differently.

At first I beat myself up. "Why can't I keep a job longer than a few months to a couple years? What is wrong with me?" Truth be told, sticking to one job for almost your entire life can actually be more of a curse than a blessing - and could even be extremely problematic if your job can't grow with your needs.

There are so many rules and catches and "if this then that" little gotcha's in personal finance - no wonder so few people can accrue any real interest in managing money. How much do you invest? How do you invest? How much should you keep liquid?

Well, the only good way to find out is to try it out. But, not everyone has an endless stream of cash to blow on the financial learning curve. Unless, of course, you play with fake money...

Ah to be young - but there is definitely a downside. Being green with "the green stuff," in this economy, is not only scary, it's also pretty hard to learn the best ways to do right with your money when hardly anyone else knows what they are doing anymore.

You just need to learn it all on your own - invent your own rules - because this is one lesson everyone is learning now too. So think of your "lack" of knowledge in money management as an advantage, since you're not an old dog trying to learn new tricks.

Even a few years ago jobs for those with a bit more than a few gray hairs were scarce. Now, everyone is hurting for a job - and semi-retirees are far from an exception. Adding insult to injury, did you know most states have outlawed folks over a certain age from driving (and hence getting a low impact job) altogether?

With gas prices rising and social support wages declining, what is a certain silvery someone to do?

So you're sitting in the same gray cubicle, thinking the same thought - “some day, I'll start my own business, and break away from this hell.� But then you start to realize how much it costs, and if you're really serious, eventually you come up with a figure - “if only I had $200,000, I could start a business.�

The truth is – you don't need any money to start a business. I dropped out of the rat race completely 4 years ago with hardly a dime to my name, but I have managed to survive and even live my ideal lifestyle the entire time.

In this “slowing economy,� you're probably worried about your job – and quite rightly, too. Most larger companies will definitely lay off a few thousand workers, and if one of them is you, what are you going to do? Well, how about start a business?

I'm sure you know by now most of those “business opportunities� that charge money to join are scams (most people I know ended up in debt because of them too). You can do exactly what they're doing, and not pay them a dime – or you can start a myriad of other businesses absolutely free as well.

For many of us, dealing with financial matters is emotionally stressful. Bills in our mail, notices in our email inboxes, voicemail messages - all of these have the potential to add up to one major headache. Equally difficult is the research we need to perform to get ahead with our finances - 401k options, mutual funds, stocks. Often, conventional wisdom suggests that we should try to keep our emotions out of money affairs, since they're often negative and only lead to
more stress, or worse, less action.

Don't get mad or frustrated. Consider the very obvious, but rarely taken alternative path: get *excited* about your money.

Do you have 3 to 6 months of living expenses tucked away in a safe place? Some people are fanatical about it - “I don't care if you're Donald Trump, you need an emergency fund� - but I subscribe to a more situationally based philosophy.

Take for instance, I don't owe anyone any money – no student loans, no car loans, no mortgages, no balance on a credit line – and I am in control of my paycheck. However, I also travel a great deal. Before you read on, ask yourself if you think I need an emergency fund.