It's our final installment of our Do It Yourself Bailout series. Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner has taken us on a financial journey; she's helped us learn how to invest the right way, trick ourselves into saving, and understand the art of negotiating. Today, we talk about a big piece of your financial and personal life: your spouse or partner. 

If you’re like a lot of people, the idea of investing seems overwhelming, mysterious and downright frightening. The wild ride, you reason, just isn’t for you. That argument may make sense for money you know you’ll need to get your hands on within the next ten years. But for money you don’t plan to touch for longer, it can be riskier to keep your cash in a savings account that does not keep up with inflation.

After you pay off high-rate credit card debt, put money into tax-favored retirement plans (particularly those with company matches) and save six months’ worth of living expenses in a bank savings account (to bail you out if you lose your job or have a major emergency), you should consider investing at least a portion of your money. Some steps to consider:

We are closer than ever to getting our financial life in order here on The Takeaway. This is week nine of our series, Do It Yourself Bailout. Since the beginning of the series Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner, author of "Get a Financial Life" has tackled our trickiest money issues in order to help us all get on sound financial footing. We have talked about how to trick yourself into saving more money and whether you should prioritise your retirement savings over saving for your kid's college, among many other money questions.

It's week eight of The Takeaway's Do It Yourself Bailout with our friend Beth Kobliner, author of "Get a Financial Life", and we're taking a good long look in the mirror at our spending habits: where we're saving, if we're saving enough and whether we can do more to bail ourselves out of the financial mess that many of us are in.  This week's question to ask yourself: are you spending too much on insurance? Or not enough?

We've been talking with Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner, author of "Get a Financial Life", about how to get ourselves on strong financial footing, with our Do It Yourself Bailout series. This week, Beth helps us with a big dilemma: If we can't afford to do both, should we sock away money every month for retirement or save for our kids' college?

Everyone has at least one family member who loves to negotiate, whether they fight for a good deal on a new car or a free dessert: They just don't stop until they've gotten a concession on the price. Well, Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner, author of "Get a Financial Life", thinks we should look to that family member for inspiration in making our very own DIY Bailout. She says everyone should aspire to the art of deal making.

Think you’ve tried everything to save more money but are still coming up short of your goals? Here are five tips to boost your bottom line, based in the increasingly popular field of behavioral economics.

The government bailout of the big banks on Wall Street is still headline news. But nobody we know got a bailout, and lots of people are trying to figure out how to make it through the recession. Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner, author of "Get a Financial Life", is helping us construct our own bailout; this week, she teaches us now to trick ourselves into saving money.

Only two weeks and a day until tax time! If you had a rough 2009, however, there may be a silver lining. If your income went down last year, you might qualify for more deductions and credits than you did in 2008. And even if you didn’t lose your job, there’s a lot you can do to help save yourself some cash:

UPDATED: 8:10 p.m. 

Alex Goldmark, Senior Producer, here on the evening shift. 

We continue to follow the developments in health care reform, clashes in Israel, and of course the NCAA tournament. Our curiosity was also piqued by a recent study on women of color and wealth. They found: 

"Single black and Hispanic women have one penny of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by white women."

We'll find out how bad it is, and why. Also as part of our DIY bailout series, we'll have some suggestions for building your own wealth. 

We'll also check in on the fiscal health of our nation as Moody's hints at lowering America's bond rating and the Federal Reserve plans to keep interest rates low based on moderate economic expectations.