Balancing your financial goals, wants and needs isn't easy. There always seems to be something else popping up, keeping you from setting aside the money you intended to save at the beginning of the month. If you're trying to reach a money milestone - like saving up $10,000, for instance - here are some strategies that can help.

If there’s one truism when it comes to your money, it’d be not to let your emotions get the best of you: You don’t want to sell when the market’s tanking, splurge on something you can’t afford when you’re in a bad mood, or continually give money to a loved one with no strings attached.

But giving into your emotions can actually be a boon to your finances in the right circumstances. Here’s why.

A job isn’t just a job for many people — we want to be fulfilled, and often we want to be working toward a greater good or some measure of personal growth.

What is it you'll regret most about your life when your time is up? Failure to fulfil your duty and obligations? Or the failure to follow your dreams? New research from Cornell University suggests our biggest regrets have nothing to do with our responsibilities in life.

We like to say that people should "find their passion" to experience success in their careers and therefore, in their lives. If you really love something, it will feel easy and right. Right? That may actually be the worst possible way to approach new ventures.

I'm very good at wanting to buy things. I want to buy a new sound system, for example. This would mean ripping five speakers out of my walls, patching up the holes, and buying a $900 soundbar. My wife points out that the current system works well, and asked me why I want to replace it. And I had to admit why: I have to control the sound system with a second remote, which I hate. My wife pointed out that solving this is not worth $900 and a weekend project. So instead I'm buying a $60 universal remote. This is a better way to reach my real goal, which is feeling in control of my gadgets.

We're just about half-way through the year, so let's take some time to do a check-in on our 2018 money goals.

Welcome back to Mid-Week Meditations, Lifehacker's weekly dip into the pool of stoic wisdom, and a guide to using its waters to reflect on and improve your life.

Actors have a saying: You don't get 100 per cent of the parts you don't audition for. If you're an artistic type, or a writerly type, or even just someone who's looking for a job, you may have found rejections to be so painful that you've just stopped applying for things. Social media and streaming TV is so soothing - why would you put yourself out there for stuff you aren't going to get anyway?

When you realise you need to get something done, you probably think to yourself, "I have to do that soon." But that type of thinking disrupts your motivation in two ways: by messing with your sense of time and robbing you of urgency.

When you're going about your day-to-day, it's easy to put important questions about your career - what you really want to do, how you get there - on the backburner as you complete the tasks you need to get done now. And who wants to think about work in the few hours we have off?

Do you feel as though your social life is out of control? Maybe you (or your kids) have events every evening, when all you want to do is spend a quiet night at home. Maybe you feel like you're spending too much time "touching base" and "picking brains" with people you aren't close to, and not enough time with your friends. Maybe your in-laws want you to spend every Sunday having dinner with them, and you... don't.

Buddying up can help you reach your fitness resolutions - or whatever goal you happen to be chasing. But you don't have to work out together to help each other (couples, breathe a sigh of relief).

Welcome back to Mid-Week Meditations, Lifehacker's weekly dip into the pool of stoic wisdom, and a guide to using its waters to reflect on and improve your life.

Chances are good that you've already decided to ditch your New Year's resolution.

If you're determined to get your life in order in 2018, all you need is a Sharpie, some Post-It notes, a blank wall, and an hour or two of free time.

Just as important as setting New Year's resolutions is figuring out how we reach them, and not getting so bogged down in work that we forget to take care of ourselves. On the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, hosted by the journalist Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow, co-founder of Tech Lady Mafia, human rights technologist Sabrina Hersi Issa advises scheduling a Personal Inventory Day each month as a way to regularly take stock of where your time is going.

New Year's resolutions are usually centred around a big aspirational goal: I'll work out every day, I'll write a book, I'll never eat junk food. But most of us fail at our resolutions. One problem is that we're setting our goals too high. If you want to reach a huge goal, first you have to set a small one.

From across the coffee shop, I noticed a gentleman walking in with a computer. Not a laptop, mind you. With both hands, he carried a full-on desktop, monitor and console included. Surely he's not ... I thought to myself -- but I was wrong. He plopped the machinery down on a table, plugged in, and ordered his coffee while the rest of us looked on in horror.