I love money, but not in the way you might think. My love is a jealous love. I like to sock it away, lock it up, hold onto it, and not let anyone else near my precious stash. I prefer to watch the balance on my savings account grow to having new things. The couch in my living room is about 20 years old, I have several pairs of threadbare corduroys, and I finally just bought a new printer after my previous one of six years decided it had printed its last page.

I'm a saver, and I always have been. Why? Because I learned early on that sometimes you're making money, and sometimes you're not. And when you are in the black, you're doing your future self a favor by putting some away for later, so that you'll never be in the red.

I suppose my parents taught me this lesson by giving me an allowance, and if I wanted to buy something, well, that was on me. I once saved my pennies for more than a year to buy a guitar, and guess what? Twenty-one years later, I still have that guitar (though I haven't played it since I was about 18).

Even during my darkest stretch, right after 9/11, when magazine writers like myself getting couldn't find enough work to buy the peanut butter that sustained us, I was able to save a little. I moved to Chicago, in 2002, with just over $2,000 in the bank, and I'd made only $13,000 that year -- total.

But I realize that not everyone has this knack for hoarding their dollars away. Almost everyone I know never seems to have more than a few hundred bucks to their name, no matter how much they make. Yet if you ask them where it all goes, they honestly can't tell you.

The theme of this week's New York Times Magazine is money, and apropos of the times, how to manage it. Among its more compelling features is a first-hand account by one of the paper's chief economics reporters, Edmund Andrews, detailing his and his wife's brush with bankruptcy.

As Andrews writes, he was the least likely person to find himself broke, $50,000 in credit debt, and facing foreclosure on his suburban Virginia home. But there he was, and he was not alone. Millions of Americans are in this position, some for obvious reasons, but many more who got there just like Andrews and his wife did: by sheer accident.

While I've never been in Andrews' position, I can relate to the story he tells. I can easily imagine waking up in the middle of the night, panicking about money. I have, like Andrews, carried my lunch to avoid spending $7 on a sandwich at the deli well into adulthood. Given the choice between a $10 and $11 glass of wine at dinner, I'll go with the $10 because, as I always tell my girlfriend, "every dollar matters."

So am I cheap, or just prudent? Or are they the same thing?

The answer to that question, I'll wager, lies in the financial status of the person answering the question.

[Image: Kornerbrotchen for Wikimedia Commons]