Thanks to Forest Wander for the picture.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end – Seneca

As I write this, Sarah and I are completely debt free.

We have no mortgage. We have no car loans. We have no student loans. We have no credit card balances. We have no consumer loans of any other type. We have a healthy emergency fund that will keep us from falling back into debt very easily. We have a healthy amount of savings for our next car and for our next appliance replacement or two. We’re saving for retirement, for our children’s college education, and for our dream home. We both have steady incomes for the time being, incomes that exceed our monthly expenses.

Our monthly bills right now, taken as a whole, are lower than they’ve been at any point in our married lives.

So, what’s next?

It’s a question that Sarah and I have been struggling with for the last few weeks. What is our next step?

Up to this point, there’s been a clearly-defined path to follow. Build up an emergency fund. Get rid of your high interest debt. Build up a bigger emergency fund. Start saving for retirement and for your children’s education. Pay off your lower interest debt. In most cases, own – meaning without any debt – your living quarters, whether it’s a home or a condo or something else.

It’s a long and difficult journey. It took us almost a decade to follow that path, and that’s with us living rather frugally and me working a lot of hours, both at my full-time job, on The Simple Dollar, and on countless freelancing gigs over the last several years (Sarah made this route possible with her spectacular efforts with household concerns.)

In a lot of ways, it required us to change who we are. I don’t have the motivation any more to spend money in the way I did a decade ago. It’s not something I even want to return to, and Sarah feels almost exactly the same way.

Now, though, there’s no clear path for us to follow. We’ve reached the point in our financial journey where th advice begins to diverge heavily.

Some people say that when you have a good foundation, you should “live a little” and do things like travel or own a nice car. Others suggest investing aggressively so you can move towards a life where you no longer have to work for a living. Some point toward entrepreneurship. Others simply say to keep things nice and steady until opportunity knocks.

As different as those paths seem, there are a few fundamental things they all agree on.

First, you need a goal. Without a goal, you’re going to simply spin in place and, as the saying goes, the devil finds work for idle hands to do. The multitude of ideas above are all goals, they’re just different ones that require a different path to get there.

Second, you need communication. Sarah and I have no interest in going down different roads at this point. We’ve travelled this far together and we want to keep going together, wherever that path may lead. However, left to our own devices, we would have somewhat different visions for that path. Without communication and discussion – a great deal of it, actually – we could easily find ourselves going in different directions at this point.

The fundamental question is whether I want to be setting my goals or our goals. I’d far rather set our goals, even if that doesn’t mean having things perfectly my way. We agree on a lot of things, and the value of resolving the other parts together is much greater than what we would get out of addressing them separately and drifting apart.

So, what do we want? What’s next for us?

We’re establishing a list of things for the future that we both agree on. This is in addition to our dream home. We both want to travel a significant amount with our children when they’re older and can appreciate it and grow from it. We both want to increase our giving to charity. We both want to retire as early as we can so we can focus our energy on charitable work.

These are the things we want from our lives. They’re simple things. They are what makes us happy.

We’re not going to move until we can build our dream home out of pocket. We are not going to return to indebtedness again. If that means slow progress toward the house we want to someday build, so be it. Debt introduced an incredible amount of stress to our lives, and there’s no material thing that’s worth bringing that back into our lives.

The same holds true for any of our other plans. We’re not going to do anything that leads us anywhere close to debt ever again for any non-essential reason.

We have a home.

We have what we need.

We have no debts.

Most importantly, we have each other.

Everything else will follow.

Your dishwasher gets hot. Your dishwasher also gets moist, meaning it’s harder to cool down the air around it. Your refrigerator gets cold. So does your freezer.

Why would you put a device that gets hot next to a device that gets cold? No insulation is perfect, after all, so they would both be using energy to fight the effects of the appliance next door.

So many elements of frugality and personal finance come down to paying attention to the details. This is one of those little detail things that so many people will overlook, but over time it just continually costs you money.

When we moved into our current home, one of the things that annoyed me about it was the relatively small kitchen. It wasn’t much larger than the kitchen in our small apartment, having only a small counter that the other did not have.

Even worse, the refrigerator was installed next to the dishwasher, and the only way to fix it would involve an extensive reworking of our kitchen, as the cabinets are all formed around slots for the appliances.

There’s no doubt that energy is lost in this process. The dishwasher, while running a cycle, puts off a tremendous amount of heat, some of which you can feel on the side of the refrigerator. I often hear the refrigerator kicking on just a minute or two after starting a dishwasher load due to the rise in internal temperature of the refrigerator. It’s actively costing us money.

So, what can we do about this? At the moment, not much. Other than the side-by-side appliance issue, our kitchen is laid out fairly well for its size. Although we’ve looked at alternate arrangements, none of them have provided enough value to be worth the cost of rearranging things.

One short-term fix we’ve done is to insert a piece of thin insulation between the two appliances. There was just enough room for a small piece of insulation to fit between the two, so we purchased a piece of heat-resistant insulation. While this isn’t a perfect fix, it does reduce the heat directly transferred between the two devices.

We also try to make an effort to keep the refrigerator door closed while the dishwasher is running. Opening the refrigerator door while the dishwasher is running causes the cool and dry air to rush out and the warm, damp air to move in, making it that much harder for the refrigerator to do its job.

However, we do plan to build a new house in the future. When we do that, we’ll make sure to avoid having a “hot” appliance next to a “cold” one. In fact, in our latest design sketches (a fun project that Sarah and I work on sometimes in the evenings is doing sketches on the computer of what our dream house would be like), the refrigerator and dishwasher are pretty far apart, with a large counterspace between the refrigerator and the sink and the dishwasher on the other side of the sink.

Another thing to watch out for: avoid having your refrigerator or freezer next to an air vent, particularly if you live in northern climates. During the winter, your air vent will be blowing out hot air, which you don’t want blowing directly onto your refrigerator. This is something else to consider when designing or re-designing a kitchen, as it’s all about the energy efficiency.

Will this save you a lot of money or a little? It’s really hard to measure, as it depends on the modes you’re running in your refrigerator and dishwasher, the amount of insulation between the two, and countless other factors. However, I’d have to be oblivious to not hear our refrigerator kicking on and running almost contiunously when our dishwasher is running. If a simple kitchen design decision will make a real difference in how much your refrigerator is running, it’s well worth keeping in mind as a principle.

This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my “photography intern” for this project.

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Strange credit card fee
2. Handling sudden income increase
3. Great job, next financial move?
4. Children’s movies
5. Keeping papers
6. Determining ownership percentages
7. Taking control
8. Stuck in a condo?
9. 529 plans and multiple children
10. Saving old magazines

On my desk, I keep a stack of papers that reflect “important but not urgent” tasks I need to get taken care of, like submitting an invoice for some work done or cancelling a subscription we’re no longer using.

About once a week, I take a few hours and clear out that “important but not urgent” stack. The day I do that usually ends up being one of the best days of the week because I feel as if I’ve accomplished a lot.

Q1: Strange credit card fee
I have Mastercard credit card linked to American Airlines miles rewards. I’ve had this card for about 15 years, and over the years the available credit limit has gone up to $54,000. We never used up even remotely that much, and currently the card has $2,000 on it which will be paid off by summer if not before. It’s a 0% transfer sum, so no interest is being paid on this amount presently. We have not charged anything to this card in over a year.

Anyway, this months’ statement is the second where I noticed a small fee added to it, 50 cents. It is not a late charge or anything related to a purchase (since there hasn’t been one made). I wonder if this is an “inactive” fee, meaning that they aren’t making money off of us since we are not buying anything and therefore aren’t paying any interest, and the card company needs to get some money out of us and thus is charging this kind of fee. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is one of the card companies work-around to get additional money out of people who pay their bills on time…

I am annoyed by this fee, of course, but am reluctant to cancel the card (we really don’t use it, and once the current amount is paid off, it’ll basically just be laying there in its file.) It is my oldest credit card and with the high available credit limit, it is good to have on my credit report, right? I do pay an annual fee of $50 because it’s a mileage reward card….

I know I can call the card company and complain about this extra fee, but I was wondering if other readers/people have the same fee appearing on their statements. My only other credit cards are a corporate AMEX credit card that I use once or twice a year and pay off promptly and a Discover card that is paid off every month and only has very few dollars charged to it every month (gas). Both these cards are relatively new, less than 3 years and the available credit limits are less than $10,000.
- Bill

You should call your credit card issuer and ask them what the fee is for. It’s hard to tell what it’s for, though an “inactivity fee” is probably a good guess.

However, if the card is often inactive, I’m not sure I would want to pay a $50 annual fee for the card. I would only pay it if I were clearly getting more than $50 worth of value from this card beyond the cards I could get for free.

If it is an “inactivity fee,” I’d assess whether or not you’re going to need spectacular credit in the next couple of years. Do you have a car loan or a mortgage coming up? If not, cancel the card. If you do, hold off until the big purchase is finished, then cancel the card.

Q2: Handling sudden income increase
I have something of an unusual question, particularly during these times. After college, as well as several years of alternating unemployment and minimum-wage jobs, (we’re both 27) my fiancee and I are now both employed in extremely well paying (six figures each) positions for the foreseeable future. We are incredibly lucky to be in this position, especially in the current economic climate and given our lack of debts (we both attended college on full scholarships, and each bought our cars used for cash). We’re already setting aside enough for our 401ks to max them out by the end of the year, and have been fortunate enough to give sizable amounts to several charities we favor. The only problem is… what else should we do? Besides filling up an emergency fund, should extra money just go into a savings account? Should we look at CDs and IRAs?

Most of all, are there any books you would recommend that are more tailored to our situation? Personal finance seems split between getting out of debt and playing the stock market, neither of which really apply to us; since we don’t really have problems with overspending, I feel like we’re sort of left adrift. Adrift and extremely extremely lucky and fortunate, but adrift nonetheless. Thanks for any help you might be able to offer.
- Ron

You need to sit down together and assess your goals. Do you want to buy a house? Do you want to have any children? Where do you guys want to be in five years? In ten years?

Your plan for the extra money should follow the answers to those questions. If you’re saving for a short-term goal (less than, say, five years), I would just keep all of the money in cash or in CDs, as the volatility of other investments probably isn’t worth it.

For a book to read, I’d suggest The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing, which is my favorite book on investing I’ve ever read.

Q3: Great job, next financial move?
At 25 I landed my dream job. Its fun flexible and has a great six figure salary. When I finished school in May of 2011, I racked up a few thousand dollars in credit card debt to bridge me over to my first paycheck, which came in September. As of January this year, I’ve paid off all credit card debt and have 54,000 left on my student loans (at 6.7% and 7.6% interest) and about 1,000 in emergency funds. I’m still living like a poor college student and am planning to pay all my student loans by January 2013. I haven’t been able to invest in a 401(k) because my employer only offers it after you’ve been with the company for 6 months. Because I only worked several months last year, I am in a smaller tax bracket than I will be in 2012. I’d like to invest some money in an IRA or Roth IRA before I file my taxes for 2011. Basically, I’d like to take full advantage of being in a lower tax bracket while I can (for instance, next year I won’t be able to claim up to 2,500 plaid toward student loan interest) and was wondering if I should divert money I’m intending to pay toward my student loans to open an IRA or Roth IRA and which type one would would be the wisest choice for my 2011 income.
- Lana

If you qualify for a Roth IRA based on your income, I’d choose a Roth IRA. I think it’s a good idea to diversify your retirement money in both pre- and post-tax retirement accounts since no one knows what the future will hold.

As to whether you shoud divert loan repayment money into a Roth, it’s really an apples-and-oranges decision. There are good arguments to be made both ways on it.

If I were in your shoes, I’d probably fund the Roth fully before making extra payments on the student loans. The big reason is that, if push came to shove, I could always withdraw the contributions from the Roth at a later date if I so chose.

Q4: Children’s movies
What movies do you let your children watch on your “movie nights”?
- Alex

If it says “Pixar” on the label, we’re generally okay with it. Many of our family movie nights involve Pixar films.

We also often watch Studio Ghibli films, but we’re a bit selective on those as some can have scenes that might frighten really young children (like the fate of the parents at the start of Spirited Away).

These two categories give us about 25 movies to choose from, so we just rotate them. We also have a few additional Disney movies in the mix.

The thing to remember is that movie night with my family isn’t about the move so much as it is about the whole family cuddling up under blankets together, laughing together, and enjoying time together.

Q5: Keeping papers
I’ve got a well controlled financial situation, but I’m overwhelmed by the paperwork. I get statements from multiple bank accounts, investment accounts, 401ks, etc. I get bills for the utilities and my credit card and such. I’ve got my tax returns. Some of these “papers” are actually digital, but most of them are paper still. I’m planning to get a house in the next year, and I imagine there will be a ton of paper involved with that as well.

How long do I need to be hanging on to the various paper and digital copies of all of this paper work? Do you have a preferred method for handling the onslaught of papers?
- Alan

If you’re just keeping paper copies, I’d keep most of them for seven years. I would keep tax returns and other truly key documents forever.

However, I think the best solution is to just make digital archives of everything. Scan all of the paperwork onto your computer using a document scanner. Then, just keep them forever on backed-up hard drives and other formats.

This can take up some serious hard drive space, but then you have an archive of all of your documents. It takes some time, but I think it’s really worth it.

Q6: Determining ownership percentages
My fiance and I are getting married next fall. We will most likely be purchasing a home before we get married. I currently make about 70k per year and she makes about 26k per year. We will be looking to purchase a home in Southern California in the price range of 365k-400k. I will have roughly 80k saved for a down payment/closing costs and my fiance will have roughly 8-10k saved for the down payment/closing costs. She is currently working on paying off 8k of student loans. My question is, what is a fair way to determine percentages of home ownership with the varying amounts of money that we have available for a home purchase and considering our difference in annual income?
- Mike

I would be extremely wary about taking on a mortgage that’s more than double your combined salaries, even with low interest rates. Such a situation is practically begging for Murphy’s Law to take effect.

I don’t think there is one fair way to determine ownership percentages in this situation. It has far more to do with your relationship than anyone else’s ideas of fairness.

My wife and I have had income inequality since the day we were married, but as far as we’re both concerned, everything is a 50/50 split. We’re in this together for the long haul and we’re constantly helping each other in terms of emotional support and other assistance, so it just makes sense to have a 50/50 split.

Q7: Taking control
I recently turned eighteen and my parents are slowly turning over control of my finances to me. However, I have no idea what to do or where to start! Do you have any suggestions for getting started on the right track to ensure financial stability in the future?
- Shawn

I would start with a basic personal finance book. I’m not sure exactly what experiences you’re going through right now, but I would guess that college is either a current experience or one that’s in the near future for you.

If that’s the case, I’d probably suggest Please Send Money by Dara Duguay. It’s a great “getting started” personal finance book.

On the other hand, the book that had the single greatest impact on my thinking with regards to my money was Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin.

I feel both are well worth reading in your situation.

Q8: Stuck in a condo?
When housing values started to slide we started making larger principle payments on our condo to stay above water. Eventually the value was going down so quickly we couldn’t keep up. We borrowed $340,000 in 2004 and the current value of our condo is around $200,000 on a good day. We still owe $250,000. Two years ago we stopped putting money toward paying down the principle and started living even more frugally and managed to save up $100,000. The plan was to pay down the principle and refinance into a loan that allows us to rent out the condo then save a down payment to purchase a house. This is due to our family doubling in size since our condo purchase. Now that we have saved up the $100,000 and lived so lean to make it there the idea of throwing it away for a place we have grown out of anyway is pretty painful. Short Sale or Foreclosure don’t seem to be options since we can afford our payments. What other choice do we have?
- Randall

Sadly, your options are fairly limited.

You can just hand your keys to the bank, which will severely damage your credit and make it difficult to borrow anything for the house you want for quite a while.

You can keep living where you’re at and keep saving until you can simply pay off the condo. If you do this, I’d start making extra payments on the condo mortgage rather than sticking the money into savings. Then, you could save for a down payment for a house while trying to sell the condo.

You can also just pay down your condo right now so that you’re at a break-even point on it, then start focusing on your next house immediately.

I don’t know which is the right choice. The second one is probably the safest and most conservative option, which is what I’d go with because that’s how I usually react to such situations.

Q9: 529 plans and multiple children
We have two kids but only 1 529 account setup. Should we increase the contribution to that one account or open another one for the 2nd child? I am not sure if it matters or quite frankly if two kids can even share one account – but I know I didn’t find the answer easily on the web page for the Iowa 529 plan.
- Espen

You would simply open up a new 529 account with your second child as beneficiary.

With many college savings plans, you’d basically manage them together, as they’d appear under the same login name online and they’d send paperwork together. This is exactly how Iowa’s plan works.

I have three seperate 529 plans, one for each of my children. They’re easy to manage together.

Q10: Saving old magazines
I have this tendency to save old magazines, particularly cooking magazines and project magazines. The problem is that my closet is starting to get full of them. How do I get rid of this clutter without losing that information?
- Jill

I have this exact same problem with food and project magazines. They tend to really build up over time!

What I do is once a year or so, I go through the magazines and look for things I’m actually going to use. In a food magazine, for example, there might be five or ten recipes I actually want to save. I actually cut out the pages, scan them onto my computer, then throw all of it away.

It takes some time, but I have this wonderful archive of pages on my computer to browse through. I give the files sensible names so I can easily find them again.

Got any questions? Email them to me or leave them in the comments and I’ll attempt to answer them in a future mailbag (which, by way of full disclosure, may also get re-posted on other websites that pick up my blog). However, I do receive hundreds of questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.

The reason that my photography intern and I decided to use virtually the same exact picture for this entry as entry #18 in this series (outlining powdered laundry detergent) is because the two recipes are very similar.

Just simply mix together one cup of borax and one cup of baking soda or washing soda in a tub. If you wish, you can add a small bit of OxyClean to the batch or a small bit of store-purchased dishwashing detergent – you need one or the other to act as the active detergent ingredient if you’re washing any dishes that are fairly dirty. All you need is a tablespoon or two of this stuff (depending on the size of your dishwasher) to get things fairly clean.

If you want to replace the “finishing” liquid (Jet Dry, for example), just use a tablespoon of vinegar. There’s no smell – just shine on your dishes.

There’s a theme worth noticing here. Between the two recipes, we’re using borax, baking soda, washing soda, OxyClean, a bar of soap, and vinegar. I also keep some club soda These ingredients together manage to clean laundry thoroughly and clean dishes thoroughly.

If you carry that thought out to its logical conclusion, these ingredients can pretty much clean anything in your home thoroughly.

For example, when I’m cleaning windows, I fill up a spray bottle with one part vinegar to two parts water, with perhaps a tiny amount of another cleaning agent (whether it’s dish soap, borax, or something else). I stir it thoroughly, then head to the windows.

If I’m washing dishes by hand, I make a bit of paste out of borax, washing soda, and water, then just use a tiny amount of this on a sponge to clean almost any dish I have.

If I’m facing a carpet stain, I put some baking soda on the spot (a teaspoon or two), spread it thoroughly into the spot, then pour a couple teaspoons of vinegar on top. There’s a fair amount of foam, which I then scrub into the spot.

If there’s a dark stain on clothing and I see it immediately, I put some club soda on it.

If I have any acne (I often did in my twenties, but haven’t had any in a while), I make a paste out of baking soda and water and put it right on the spot before I go to bed.

Heck, if I want to whiten my teeth at home, I brush with baking soda and then use a bit of vinegar while brushing. If my stomach feels out of whack, I usually put a bit of baking soda in a glass of water and drink it (I usually burp like a madman for a while, but my stomach feels better).

I could keep listing things, but the truth is that most home cleaning tasks and even other simple things can be handled with some combination of the ingredients listed above.

The best part? Those ingredients are cheap. I can get a giant bag of baking soda or a jug of vinegar at my local warehouse club for a very low price. Even things like borax and washing soda are pretty inexpensive at my local Fareway.

Why use a product with a brand name and an expensive price on it when homemade mixtures like these will do the job?

This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my “photography intern” for this project.

Sometimes, I wonder what the line is between an appropriate amount of youth activities and too many activities is.

My older children have tumbling/gymnastics one night a week, ice skating one night a week, soccer two nights a week when the weather is appropriate, and they both want to join tae kwon do which is one or two nights a week.

What’s too much? I don’t think there is an answer. The only “rule” we have to this point is that we only sacrifice one family dinner a week to activities, though I know that will slip in the future.

Get Your Financial Life on One Page (FLOP) I have something like this saved in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s just a single view of my financial situation that I’m happy with. (@ christian pf)

Do You Have the Courage to Be Wealthy? Being wealthy means making sacrifices to get there and often struggling with new issues when you arrive. (@ watson inc.)

The Calculus of Convenience Convenience certainly does have a value. The challenge is that many people (in my experience) greatly overestimate that value. (@ get rich slowly)

The Habits That Crush Us For me, the crushing habits are ones that eat up unnecessary time. I am “crushed” when I find myself without enough time to do something I want to do with my family or with my friends. (@ zen habits)

It’s completely up to you Some interesting thoughts on having too many choices to really analyze. My solution is to usually cut away big chunks of my options very quickly using rules I’ve thought about in advance. (@ seth godin)

Our dishwasher has an abundance of cycles and options. With just a few buttons, we can choose a light cycle, a normal cycle, a heavy cycle, a steam cycle, and a few other options that, frankly, I’ve never even tried out. Our washing machine is much the same way.

Honestly, though, I just use the light cycle for virtually everything that I wash, from pots and pans to plates and cups, from underwear and shirts to pants and socks.

Why just use the lightest cycle? For starters, most of the things we wash really aren’t all that soiled. Our plates usually look clean or have maybe a bit of sauce or dressing on them. Our bowls maybe have a bit of milk residue from cereal or a bit of juice left behind from chili. Many of our shirts and pants look quite clean and are washed mostly out of knowledge of the skin cells and other detritus hidden within that even a basic cleansing will largely remove.

Yes, sometimes we have items that are more soiled than that. Those items are usually treated individually. Exceptionally dirty dishes are usually washed by hand or left to soak in hot, soapy water.

Stained items of clothing are pre-treated to make the stain easy to remove. Soiled clothes are often washed outside with the hose over the garden (so that the extra water just waters the garden) before they ever come inside.

The big reason that we do the shorter cycles, though, is that light cycles use less energy and less water than heavier cycles. They generally have a significantly shorter running cycle, which means that less energy and less water is used during those cycles.

Exact numbers depend heavily on the model, of course, but the lightest cycle on our dishwasher runs in about 40% of the time of the longest cycle, for example.

How much money does that really add up to? It depends heavily on the actual model you’re using, the water temperature choices you make when running a load (the colder, the better), and your actual rates for water and electricity.

Based on my own estimations from the models we use, running a short load compared to a long load in the washing machine saves us about $0.12 and about twenty minutes, and we save about $0.25 and almost an hour running the short load in the dishwasher. If you assume a load a day, that adds up to $43.80 a year for the washing machine and $91.25 a year on the dishwasher – and that doesn’t even include the time savings!

Do the items still get clean? As far as I can determine, they get just as clean as longer cycles when looking at ordinary laundry and dishes. They smell fine, look clean, and pass muster when touching them as well.

This saves us both time and money, as any good frugality tip should. If our loads run in less time, use less water, and use less energy, our bills go down and our time invested in washing dishes and clothes goes down as well. That’s a double win, because it means more money in the pocket and less time in the laundry room or at the sink.

This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my “photography intern” for this project.

I think that instinct, that storytelling instinct, rescued me most of my life. – Armistead Maupin

Image courtesy of PhotoSteve.

As many of you know, I’m spending a lot of my spare time lately working on a pair of novels. It’s been a challenging experience – but an enjoyable one.

For me, one of the biggest parts of writing fiction is understanding who the characters are. In order to write something interesting about a character, I need to know to at least some level of depth who these people are.

One thing that I’ve come to realize is that it’s very difficult to write a truly evil character or a truly good character. Characters tend to operate based on the morals and values they themselves hold and the idea of “good” and “evil” has far more to do with the reader than it does with the characters themselves.

In the same way, the characters I create – and this holds true for every person I’ve met, too – has an “ideal” of how they would like to act in a given situation and a “reality” for how they usually act. The “ideal” path is usually what they see as the best way to act, whereas the “reality” is how they would normally act in that situation.

For example, a person might see it as an ideal to give food to the homeless people that they meet, because they believe in the idea that everyone deserves to have some sustenance in their belly. However, the reality of doing that is a lot harder when you’re trying to make your way to work and pass twenty homeless people. Can you bring them all food? Sure, you can, but it eventually becomes an obstacle to the other things that the person needs to do in life.

Reality eventually (and often) trumps the ideal, in other words.

Yet, the people we respect and remember are the people who managed to achieve their ideal with some regularity. When I think back to some of the people in my life that really made an impact on me, they’re people that went above and beyond the call of duty to help me. I remember an uncle who would always make an effort to make me laugh. I remember an academic advisor who made lots of phone calls to help me find a summer internship. I remember a friend who pretty much helped me through every step of my early career.

In each case, the “regular” thing would have been easy. I’m sure my uncle was sometimes in a down mood, but he found ways to tell me a joke and make me laugh even when he was in a hospital bed. I’m sure my academic advisor had an army of students to help, but he spent a lot of time helping me find great opportunities. I’m sure my friend could have simply not given the job notices and other opportunities a second thought, but he made the effort to bring them to my attention.

It is their consistent ability to go beyond what was “regular” and strive for something more that set them apart.

Over the years, I’ve interacted with lots and lots of people. I don’t remember the vast majority of those interactions. The ones that stick are the ones where someone did something exceptional.

That distinction between the “regular” and the “ideal” is what makes for the memorable people in my life and it makes for interesting characters in my writing.

It also makes for a powerful guideline for my own life.

Most of the things we do in our lives are going to be of the “regular” variety. Think of the example of the person whose ideal is feeding the homeless – if they stuck to that ideal, they’d never make it to work. We’re going to do the “regular” thing most of the time.

The question is when do we choose to go for something better than the regular thing? When do we go from living our ordinary lives to doing something more?

Here’s another way to think of it. When your life is over and someone describes you by saying “that person was a really good…”, what is the word that’s going to come next in that sentence?

Whatever it is, that should be your ideal and that should be the thing where you try to avoid taking the regular route. Cut corners elsewhere. Do this one thing in an exceptional fashion.

When I’m writing a story, I don’t really want to focus on the boring parts of a person’s life. I want to write about the “ideals” that the person achieved. What happened when that person did something that went beyond what their ordinary life called for? It might be something as simple as giving away a meal each day to a person in need. It might be being the person that just says, “Don’t worry about it; I’ll take care of it.” It might be leading a group. It might be turning on all of your teaching skills to really reach a group of students.

Quite often, though, you’ll find that doing that one thing really well requires resources and money. That’s where personal finance comes in. Good personal finance skills are often one of the underpinings of achieving that “ideal.” Doing the right thing with your money is often just as important an “ideal” as other things you might be doing because it makes those other ideals possible. Other skills often help, too, such as strong communication skills and organization skills and self-control.

Going for the ideal means taking control of what you’re doing. It means doing something powerful and positive that you know, in your gut, that you’re capable of. It means changing the world, sometimes in a big way, but often in a small one – but, in the end, is there really any difference between the two?

It’s your story. Make it a good one.

This seems like common sense at first glance. If you run your dishwasher, your washing machine, or your dryer with only half a load of clothes or dishes, you’re losing out in terms of efficiency.

Even if you run the machine with small load settings, the machine is still using most of the water and most of the energy of a full load.

Let’s look at some actual numbers. A typical household can save 3,400 gallons of water a year by running full laundry loads instead of half loads, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Given a national average of $1.50 per 1,000 gallons of water, that’s an annual savings of $5.15 from just the water in the washing machine over the course of a year.

What about energy costs? Numbers vary, but the sources I’ve seen seem to estimate that a small load of clothes (say, half a load) will use somewhere between 60% and 75% of the energy of a large load of clothes.

In other words, a single large load saves you about 25% to 50% of the energy of two small loads. In terms of dollars and cents, depending on your washing machine, the annual savings can easily add up to $10 or more.

Similar principles apply with dishwashers. A single full load uses more water and more energy than a half load, but a full load uses far less energy and water than two half loads.

So, why would you ever not run a full load?

Perhaps you have a specific garment that you wish to wear. If that’s the case, hand-washing a single item is quicker and far more efficient than running a load of laundry. Just simply wash the item in a sink with a bit of detergent. Soak it in water with a bit of detergent, then wring it out and repeat a few times. Rinse it, then hang the garment up to air dry it and you’re done.

What if you’re single and don’t have that many clothes? This was a challenge I had when I was single. For a time in college, I had just over a load’s worth of clothes. I would literally wear my last set of clean clothes on a Saturday while doing my laundry. The solution is pretty simple: develop a clear laundry routine where you wear your last set of clean clothes while doing your laundry.

Sometimes, you have a small set of garments that have specific washing instructions. Again, if it’s a single item (or two or three items), wash by hand. If you’ve got a small load of these items, add items to the load that can easily wash with those specific instructions (like t-shirts, which clean well in almost anything).

Similar principles apply with dishes. If they’re special items, wash them by hand. Otherwise, fill up your dishwasher (as much as you can) before running it. It’s that simple.

Running a full load saves you time and money. It’s just a matter of choosing to do it.

This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my “photography intern” for this project.