Why do I care about personal finance?

I keep a careful watch over my website's visitor statistics. I can draw a pretty reasonable correlation in the number of visitors each day to that particular day's topic. What I find is that I get the most hits on days where I talk about something somewhat controversial, like my opinions on drunk driving. Second in popularity are writings about technology or photography (my most popular post by far has been the one where I described the relationship between ISO, shutter speed, and aperture). Bringing up the rear, unfortunately, are my writings on my favorite topic: personal finance.

So why do I keep it up? Why is it my favorite thing to write about? In college, I didn't major in finance nor have I ever worked as a financial adviser. My family is not wealthy, nor am I. I live a relatively normal financial life and have relatively normal debts and assets that are made up of mortgage, auto, and student loans as well as savings, checking, retirement, and college accounts. And I'm certainly no Jim Cramer when it comes to picking stocks.

So again, why do I write about personal finance five days a week? Because I think that it's an enormous problem in our country. I think that mismanaged personal finances, preventable financial irresponsibility, and a sense of consumer entitlement have knocked the legs out from under our dollar. Americans have blindly wasted their money for years -- and I used to do it, too. Money falls from our pockets like snow from the sky, leading to the highest levels of revolving debt in history. Americans' inability -- or refusal -- to regularly assess the health of their personal finances has, in my opinion, become the largest cause of our current economic instability.

I know people with absolutely no savings that will put a new hi-def TV on a credit card. I know people with remarkably low income that eat out every single day just for mere convenience. I know people that are so far in credit card debt that they're literally afraid to sum up their balances, yet continue to shop, shop, shop to their hearts' delight. And I have people close to me with no savings, excessive debt, and an award-winning ability to self-justify frivolous spending.

I'm very lucky and thankful to have escaped from this type of behavior. As I have mentioned before on this site, upon graduating from college I had nearly $10,000 in credit card debt, most of which came from a distorted sense of entitlement and my ridiculous perception of a credit limit being analogous to a checking account balance. When I was 19, my cell phone was shut off for non-payment. By the second half of my junior year, I had even racked up a heap of debt with my fraternity.

It wasn't until my early to mid-twenties that I understood I was killing my future. Refusing to assess my financial damage was no different than refusing to go to the doctor in fear of hearing bad news. But after forcing myself to diagnose the disease, I vowed to cure it. I created a plan to get out of debt, save my money, and -- most importantly -- get some sleep at night.

It's tough to deny that the nation's economy is in trouble, and it's easy to blame it on George Bush, ExxonMobil, or the credit card companies. It's even easier to say that everything will be fixed once John McCain or Barack Obama takes office. But I hate to deliver the bad news to the country that fixing our problems won't be that simple. To solve our nation's economic crisis, we'll need to take it upon ourselves to make more responsible financial decisions. We need to go back to the basics; like Clark Howard once said about college, "If you don't have the green, you don't get the pizza."

In my opinion, the remedy for our economic downturn is difficult, yet not complicated: a grassroots movement of financial responsibility that is based on the principles of planning, monitoring, and measuring. So on those days that I "sacrifice" my web traffic, all I'm trying to do is do my part and get the word out.