Managing your money should be pretty straightforward, but that doesn’t make the task all that easy.

That’s the biggest takeaway from the handful of simple financial instruction lists making the rounds among the New Year’s resolution set.

One list comes in the form of a 4-by-6 notecard that went viral in 2013, now the foundation of a book called “The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated.” Another is the 18 steps at the back of Jonathan Clements’s “Money Guide 2016.” An older but beloved (and newly updated for this column) listcomes from the Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.

Read the article “Dilbert’s Creator Explains How to Manage Your Money” on nytimes.com.