I’m going to make hamburgers for supper. What should I put in the meat? I usually add Worcestershire sauce, but tonight I want to try something different. Please add your thoughts in the comments. And now for some personal finance posts…

(Financially Sound) Dating Advice For Young People In short, dumping a C-note on your date when you’re young is not much different than tossing cash up in the air. (@ finance 4 youth)

Have We Lost Our Ability To Think Critically? This person basically calls out poor thinking on personal finance blogs - with some very clear points. I try to produce critically thought out posts because if I don’t, my readers let me know loud and clear. (@ kirby on finance)

Stretching Your Leftovers A nice story that connects the original meal, the leftovers, and the money saved, all in one nice story. (@ it’s just money)

To set the mood:

The 1960s were the decade in which my parents grew up. Their parents were the so-called Greatest Generation and I, for one, actually think that moniker is appropriate, considering that their childhood was the Great Depression and their early adulthood was fighting World War II, a set of experiences almost beyond my grasp. My parents (and with some good probability, yours) grew up in the era of the rise of the military-industrial complex, in which people could reasonably expect to get a solid paying job and stay there throughout their lives.

This meant several things:

One, American education was the envy of the world. You simply couldn’t get a better education than the one provided by an American institution. Colleges were yet to be overcrowded as even then only a small minority went to college, so if you were to get post-secondary education in the United States, you were set.

Two, real worker compensation was never higher. In terms of the actual value of a dollar at the time, the average American worker had it made in the 1960s and 1970s. No matter what you did in life, you could fall back on a factory job that would pay you a strong enough wage that you could make it, no matter what.

Three, although the Soviet menace was real, it was distant. Although the Cold War was terrifying in its own way, it never ascended into a fighting war and there was never any sort of direct attack on American soil. The Vietnam War was ongoing, but it was literally on the other side of the globe, abstracting in a way the bitter horrors of war and death.

Four, the art of marketing and consumerism was in a nascent stage. Look at the sophistication of advertising in the 1960s and compare it to now. There were some baby steps, clearly, but the psychological edge of today’s marketing utterly blows away what you would find in those days.

Five, the price of homes in real dollars was extremely low compared to today. The price of a home since 1960 has gone up at a rate much faster than inflation, a bull run that is perhaps finally being slowed or reversed after many years of incredible growth. Thus, someone who bought a home in 1960 stumbled into a killer investment.

Six, employers took long-term care of their employees. If a person worked in a factory for thirty years, the company would guarantee them a pension that would safely enable them to live out the end of their days in a comfortable fashion. If you took care of the company, it took care of you.

Under these assumptions, my parents could buy a home (rather cheap) when they were younger than I am right now merely on the wages earned with just one of them working a seasonal factory job (which paid quite well). Because of this factory job, they now receive a very nice pension after having never put anything into their own retirement plan.

Does this sound like your economic reality? It certainly sounds nothing like mine. My reality is more like this:

It involves employment that treats me more as an independent contractor instead of a real team member, which means I have to save for my own retirement rather than plan on a pension.

It involves homes that are amazingly expensive, even in the relatively cheap area where I live.

It involves no “fall back” plan in the form of abundant factory work that anyone can do. The fall-back jobs that I know of make minimum wage, which is far less than a true living wage in the United States.

My parents regularly offer “advice” on how I should manage my finances based on these assumptions that their childhoods and early adult lives showed them, pointers such as you should buy a house as soon as you’re married and you’re young - you should be buying fun stuff - go ahead and get that monster plasma television. Their hearts are undoubtedly in the right place, and they are speaking things they believe to be true, but they aren’t true for me - if I took their advice, I would be in the poor house.

So what’s my solution? If you are given advice by your parents - or by anyone at all (including me) - consider the assumptions they’re coming from. Are they valid for you? Even if they are, ask yourself does this advice really make sense for me? Don’t just blindly follow any advice.

As the latest issue of Money Magazine just arrived in my mailbox (review forthcoming), it occurred to me that a mention of the Money 70 might be in order during Mutual Fund Week here at The Simple Dollar.

What is the “Money 70″? The Money 70 is a list of mutual funds selected by Money Magazine and followed in each issue of the magazine. You can read the full criteria for selection here, but the basic nutshell is that the funds on the list are generally low cost, focused on shareholder interests, and have a consistent investment strategy. It’s really a healthy list of well-run mutual funds from a variety of investment firms with a variety of goals and strategies.

Does this list match your investment philosophy? As I mentioned yesterday, I generally like index funds because they provide diversity without much expense; however, the Money 70 list contains 43 actively managed funds and only twelve index funds. In my opinion, the twelve index funds they show are stellar and the truth is that there are simply far more managed funds out there than index funds because lots of investors either want to beat the market or want a fund that is really conservative that won’t sink in a down market, two things that index funds don’t really protect you from.

I could repeat the contents of the list here, but a simple link to the Money 70 list saves the effort and provides a nice summary table. If you find a fund on that list that looks really interesting, I strongly recommend looking it up at Morningstar, as discussed earlier today.

Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

Depending on your cell phone plan, you may be paying for far more service than you’re using - or not paying for enough service. Either way, you’re handing the cell phone company money for no good reason, and you can eliminate that by just keeping simple tabs on your cell phone usage.

If you’re using Verizon or T-Mobile, you can have your minutes in your web browser window. Just check out the Verizon Minutes Used Firefox plugin or the T-Mobile Minutes Used Firefox plugin to track your minutes. Both are quite useful for keeping track of how many minutes you’ve used without any effort. These both require that you’re using the Firefox web browser - there is no alternative for IE users.

Take a detailed peek at your cell phone bills. Make sure you’re not getting dinged with overage charges or other such charges. If you never see any and are using far fewer minutes than you’re paying for, that’s also a concern.

Call up your cell phone provider and ask for a plan change. If you’re going over your minutes every month, it’s almost always cost-effective to pay a bit more each month for a plan that includes those minutes. On the other hand, if you’re nowhere near your limit each month, then you can save some cash by dropping your total minutes down a bit.

I usually check this every six months or so; it takes about three minutes to figure out if a change is needed and about two minutes more to make that change. In just five minutes, I can often save $60 over the course of six months, which is a very healthy time investment.

While you’re at it, you might also drop any extras from your plan that you don’t use. I send maybe ten text messages a month, but at one time I was paying for unlimited text messaging. Dropping this down to a very small allotment of messages saved me some additional cash.

With so many mutual funds out there, companies loudly promoting their own funds, and people giving half-baked investment advice, how can we know what funds are really right for us? The best route is to take advantage of independent research, and for me, the best choice for independent research in mutual funds is Morningstar.

What is Morningstar? Morningstar is a provider of independent investment research in the United States and abroad. They provide much of this information for free at morningstar.com. Basically, you can use this site to look up independent evaluations on any mutual fund you like - and other investments, too. Morningstar is so trusted that many funds will use their ratings from Morningstar in their advertisements.

Okay, so how do I use it? Hop over to morningstar.com and enter the name of a mutual fund you want to look at. For our purposes, I’ll take a look at the Vanguard 500 (here’s the Morningstar page for that fund in a new window). The first thing you’ll see is a boatload of information about the fund - an almost overwhelming amount to a beginning investor. If you’re overwhelmed, click on the “Data Interpreter” link on the left hand menu, which will automatically explain some of the data for you. I used the “Data Interpreter” heavily when I was just getting started with funds.

Information overload! What’s really important? The biggest things to look at when evaluating a fund with Morningstar’s data is to look at the “Key Stats” box in the upper right. The big things that I look at are the Morningstar Rating (which I’ll discuss below) and the Expense Ratio (which I like to be low). I also look at the trailing returns in the Performance section, but mostly at the five year trend.

What do the stars mean? Each fund evaluated by Morningstar is given a star ranking, from one to five stars, that evaluates the fund in a nutshell. If you want to understand how these stars are generated, Morningstar provides a strong explanation of what they mean. Generally, I don’t spend much time looking at anything below three stars, but if it’s three stars or up, I’ll look at it more closely (as many conservative and index funds are given three stars).

One bad thing, though… As you start to really get into the information provided, you’ll find that some of the neat stuff you want to look at requires a premium membership. What I did was make a lengthy list of things I wanted to look at, signed up for a 14 day trial of the premium membership, looked those up, then cancelled the service. It was worthwhile information, but I simply did not want to pay that much for a service I wouldn’t use with high regularity.

In short, Morningstar is a great place to look up fundamental information about a fund that you might see in an ad or hear about from a friend. It provides the real scoop without any bias.

I’ve been a fan of Ben Stein’s financial writings for years, but this is the first book of his that I’ve picked up. Could it possibly be as good as his columns? Is it worth reading at all?

A large portion of the book (chapters 7 through 13) really focus on issues that many people begin to face in their thirties, and this provides the central meat of the entire book. It provides some general financial rules of thumb in several different dimensions of life during the third decade of life.

On a career in your 30s Basically, the book indicates that for the most part, the biggest acceleration in salary you will have in your life occurs in your 20s because early on is when you can demonstrate the greatest increase in your skill set. How can you leverage this? By remembering that a 10% raise when you’re making $25K is the same net increase as a 5% raise when you’re making $50K (ignoring taxes, of course).

On being single in your 30s The book advocates that as long as you’re single, you should put effort into staying competitive in your career, as married life often can fill up a lot of time that you would have otherwise used in building up your career. Continue to invest in your own human capital with time and money.

On being married and setting up a home in your 30s If you’re married, learn how to start living well within your means and saving money for a home. This means being frugal and cutting down on unnecessary expenditures, and taking that extra money and socking it away until you have a house down payment. If you “can’t” do this, then you are opening yourself up for a lot of risk in the event of job loss.

On having children in your 30s Children are wonderful, beautiful, amazing things - but they’re also expensive things. Plan ahead by having a “saving for baby” account if you’re going to have one in the future, then use that when it comes time to actually have one, as you’ll have start-up costs and a nice increase in your monthly budget.

Investment changes? The book is still in favor of being rather aggressive with retirement savings throughout your thirties, though depending on your specific plan, you may want to readdress things when you get near the end of that decade.

The remainder of the book discusses life at 40 and beyond - we’ll look at that tomorrow.

Yes, You Can Get A Financial Life is the twenty-first of fifty-two books in The Simple Dollar’s series 52 Personal Finance Books in 52 Weeks.

Lately, I’ve been trying to train myself to take a nap during the day, a short half hour one about two in the afternoon. My problem thus far is that I fall asleep for far too long, then I stay up later at night. Anyway, on with personal finance posts.

9 Simple Ways To Build 7 Figures These ladies stumbled across an interesting article by Anya Kamenetz, author of Generation Debt (which I reviewed recently), which discusses nine ways to get rich, the Men’s Health way? (@ no limits ladies)

Readers Offer Their Own Stories of Frugal Living See, look! I’m not the only frugal person out there - and a lot of others have good ideas, too, even if they’re not obsessive bloggers. (via frugal living journal)

How Long Will It Take For You To Be A Millionaire? According to this, and continuing my current savings levels, I would be a millionaire at age 39. (via money crashers)

Everyone has a dream, something that they wish would happen in their life. Perhaps it is business success, or the financial freedom to be a stay at home parent. Maybe it’s just a dream of that shiny new car down the block.

Some people spend their time living their dream - they’re either incredibly lucky, incredibly talented, or have worked quite hard for a long time. Others spend their days chasing the dream. Still others do nothing more than dream. Where are you?

If you’re living your dream and it’s sustainable, congratulations. You’ve made it. Of course, if it’s not sustainable, then the truth is that you’re still chasing the dream and you’re not quite there yet.

If you’re chasing your dream, you’re on the right track. Here’s how you can leverage your dream to make it reachable.

Quantify your dream. What exactly is your dream? Spell it out in as much detail as possible. Then, calculate how much it will actually cost to live that dream in a sustainable fashion. For example, if your dream is an amazing house, how large of a down payment will you need to make it so that you can actually make payments?

Make a dream totem. I discussed this concept in an earlier Five Minute Finances, but the idea is powerful. Make a reminder of that very specific dream and put it in lots of places where you will continually be reminded of it.

However, if you’re doing nothing more than dreaming, stop it right now. Here are some things you can do instead of just dreaming to move down a path toward your dream.

Take a baby step. Let’s say you’re dreaming of a new home every day. Find out how much that home costs so that you have something tangible to work with.

Take another. Usually, people in this boat are unable to move forward because the current of their money flow is working against them. Spend some time looking at your budget to try to find places where you can start reversing that money flow and keeping some for yourself. A great place to start would be 31 Days To Fix Your Finances.