Consumer Reports has asked me to eliminate the content of my summaries and any other references to the content of Consumer Reports. I have complied.

I was leafing through the July issue of SmartMoney (the Wall Street Journal’s sister magazine) mostly because of the cover article, 7 Money Mistakes … And How To Avoid Them. Here are the seven mistakes in a nutshell:

#1. Saving with the right hand and spending with the left
#2. Playing it too safe
#3. Looking into a cloudy crystal ball
#4. Living in the moment
#5. Throwing good money after bad
#6. Letting your ego get in the way
#7. Following the crowd

The article was quite interesting and applicable to investors and non-investors alike, though the points themselves weren’t concisely written. Here’s how I would summarize their seven mistakes:

#1. Get a grip on your spending before you invest
Pay off all of your credit card debt before you even think about investing. If you get any sort of boon, don’t think of it as party time – use it to pay down debt or actually invest for the future. Learn how to be a little bit frugal, and cut out some of the big unnecessary purchases – you don’t need a new BMW.

#2. If you’re going to invest, invest
Once you have your financial house in order and plenty of money in a cash emergency fund, invest that money. Put your cash in investments that you can be confident in for a while – then let it sit there for a while. Don’t sell quickly to grab short term gains and don’t sell to avoid potential big losses, either. Wait until there’s truly a good reason to make a portfolio change.

#3. Don’t forget risk
Don’t put all of your money in one place – make sure that you’re invested in at least a few different things. Especially don’t put all of your cash in risky investments like lots of small-cap stocks.

#4. Get started ASAP
If you haven’t started your 401(k), do it now. Don’t hesitate another second, even if you don’t know what you’re doing. Just tell the person to put your money in the most conservative investment and worry about it later if you’re caught up in investment paralysis.

#5. Be sensible with your portfolio
If both the numbers and your gut are truly telling you something is a bad investment, stop putting new money in it for a while. If your gut still keeps telling you it’s bad even a long time after you stopped putting in new money, then move that chunk to something else. Don’t just keep tossing in money when it doesn’t work for you.

#6. Check your ego at the door
Don’t ever think you’re a killer investor – the second you believe that, the second your portfolio will fall apart. Don’t make frequent trades or else the fees will eat you alive.

#7. If everyone else is doing it, don’t do it
If you see the same talking point over and over, that means it’s time to avoid that investment. For example, only a fool would invest in ethanol stocks right now.

These are pretty good rules to live by, but aside from the first one, they don’t really cover the basics that allow you to actually invest your money. So, to complement these seven mistakes, I wrote my own set of seven mistakes people make when they are investing. Let’s take a look:

The Simple Dollar’s 7 Money Mistakes To Avoid
… before you even worry about SmartMoney’s mistakes

#1. Ignoring frugality
If you can trim $200 a month from your monthly budget, that’s the same as a $200 a month investment gain. Look for ways to trim your own spending, and the best place to look is your daily routine. When you flip on the light switch, are those bulbs energy efficient? Do you stop for a bagel and coffee each morning? Do you eat an expensive lunch with coworkers every day? Do you drink or smoke habitually? Do you subscribe to magazines or cable channels that you don’t utilize? Is your bank constantly dinging you with stupid fees? All of these changes can recoup huge money, but many investors forget about them and instead spend their time sweating over how to eke out an extra 1% from their portfolio.

#2. Paying any high interest debt
By high interest, I mean an interest rate higher than the 5.05% you could earn in a high-yield savings account. If you’re paying more than that in interest, you’re basically tossing money down the tubes. Eliminate all high interest debt before you even think about investing – don’t justify a little bit of it. High interest debt is like an investment with a large negative return – the longer you refuse to pay it, the bigger your losses are.

#3. Financing any purchases, from furniture to automobiles
Often, people wake up to the fact that credit card debt is bad, but then they still go put all sorts of things on purchase plans, paying high interest rates to have it now. Another mistake. If you’re going to buy a car in two or three years, start making the payments now into a high yield savings account, then use that to pay for most of – if not all of – the car. This way, interest works for you rather than against you.

#4. Not having an emergency fund
What happens if you lose your job and another one isn’t immediately forthcoming? If you don’t have an immediate answer that doesn’t involve panic, then you’re not prepared to be investing. Keep at least a few month’s worth of salary in cash in a savings account for such an emergency, money you can just grab and run with if need be.

#5. Believing that your “future self” will take care of it
This is one of my favorite things to hear because I used to tell myself the very same thing. “I’ll take care of it in the future,” I would say as I whipped out my credit card for some stupid expense and decided to go to Europe instead of getting started with investing. Guess what? Your future self might not have a job or might be sick or might have just had their car break down. Will you want thousands in credit card debt if these things happen?

#6. Spending money as soon as you get it
I know one person who doesn’t have any debt of any kind. Of course, he doesn’t have much of anything else, either. Instead, he lives his life completely by the seat of his pants, spending cash as soon as he gets it having fun. He has a lot of fun, but now he’s starting to realize that when you’re forty five years old and have no assets built up, the world doesn’t seem as much fun as it used to be. Start getting used to putting a little bit away to help “future self” out.

#7. Having big dreams but not making them concrete
You dream of big things, but then keep going through the same routines. What keeps you from having that amazing house or that nice car? A lack of a plan, that’s what. Start looking at what it would really cost, then break it down into small pieces that you can wrap your hands around. Piece by piece, you can have your dreams if you start looking at how to make them happen instead of just wandering along through life.

Once you solve these seven money mistakes, you’ll be on a path where SmartMoney’s mistakes might mean more to you.

I’ve touted the benefits of living in Iowa before, but one of the biggest benefits of all is the wonderful housing market. I was able to get a 2000+ square foot home, built less than ten years ago, for less than $200,000. This success makes me never even want to consider living in an expensive housing market like many of my readers do.

Given that, one of my readers wrote to me with an interesting take on the dichotomy between his expensive housing market and my relatively cheap one:

I live in Cambridge, MA, and the amount of home that you can get for $150,000 or even $250,000 is basically low to nonexistent. A quick MLS search turns up the cheapest single-family home in my city for $339,000. There is a one-bedroom, 427 square foot condo listed for as low as $179,000, which is the lowest-priced listing. So the question I thought you might have some interesting insight into is this: how can those of us who live in higher-priced areas and have children work toward home ownership, assuming that we don’t want to uproot our kids and take them away from their families and out of their schools?

I have been following your blog long enough to know that you live in a cheaper, more rural area, but I think that this might actually allow you to have insight and perspective about this situation that I might not have.

The obvious question that this article brings about is if I were living in a truly expensive housing market, like San Francisco or Cambridge, what would I do without moving away? Here’s my gameplan for anyone living in this situation.

First, get over yourself. Check your ego at the door. Right. Now. This might seem almost arrogant advice, but it’s true. Many of the things you will have to do now will be things that you might not even consider yourself doing. I had to go through an enormous ego check a while back when my son was born and I realized that I needed to be getting my financial house in order. Just check your preconceptions at the door and don’t just say “No, no, that doesn’t work for me” unless you’ve actually given it an earnest shot.

Find the cheapest housing you can possibly stand. My wife and son and I have lived in a crackerbox apartment for the last few years in order to save up for a down payment and to have some cash for the things we would want when we move. My first reaction to the apartment when we walked in was “Over my dead body,” but the more I thought about it and looked at it, the more I realized that I could make this work for a while. If we had been living somewhere more expensive, we would still be stuck in a tiny apartment instead of moving on up to the figurative East Side.

Learn and practice frugality in every dimension of your life You may think it’s silly to spend time doing something that saves only a dollar or two, but just keep doing it in every dimension of your life and that cash seriously adds up. Pick up The Complete Tightwad Gazette (never mind the cheeky name) and study it. Install CFLs in every light socket. Take public transportation everywhere. Find free entertainment (if you live in a hot housing market, likely there are tons of interesting cultural activities around). Use the library instead of the bookstore.

Build a cash emergency fund. I would build a few months’ worth of salary in a cash emergency fund in a high-yield savings account. This way, if something bad happens, you aren’t dropping it on the credit card and causing yourself to lose ground on your progress. Once you reach three months or so, let it sit there and let the interest build – only tap it when the only other option is to hit the credit card. Build this emergency fund first before you do anything else and if you do need to hit it, make sure it is built back up before moving on.

Pay off all of your debts before you do anything else. That housing payment is going to be a monster, so you need to be rid of all debts so you can focus on that big debt that is coming. Don’t pay attention to advice about leveraging low interest rates – you’re going to need every penny you can get each month when you move and a required payment of any kind isn’t going to help. Get rid of them now before you even start saving. The most cost-effective way is to start with the highest interest debt you have and throw every possible spare penny at it.

NOW start saving. With no debts, a cheap lifestyle, and an emergency fund in place, you should be able to sock a huge chunk of change away each month. I would put it in a diverse portfolio of four or five low-cost index funds – I’m a huge fan of Vanguard’s offerings. Just keep building up.

Keep yourself motivated. My wife and I window-shopped for houses constantly. We would look at every house for sale and discuss its merits. We saved pictures of houses we liked and put them up everywhere for motivation. This (plus the constant presence of our son) made us constantly realize why we were making hard choices.

Define clear metrics I really found that having a clear progress bar made it easier to keep track of where we were at. I would fill in a percent of the bar each time I saved up that matching amount. To do this, you need to know the approximate price of the house you would buy and also have a good idea of the monthly payment you could actually afford – this will show you how much of the house’s cost you can actually swing on a mortgage. Save for the difference between the two plus about $20,000 (so you can furnish the home – trust me, you’re going to really want to when you move). Then, each time you save 1% of that amount, you can mark it off on your progress bar. For us, thankfully, we knew we could afford the monthly expenses of a house – our goal was just the down payment and a wad of cash to furnish the house after the move.

Keep your nose clean The best way to do this is to eliminate all but your oldest credit card and only use that for occasional online purchases, which you pay off immediately (never, ever let a balance carry over). This keeps your credit nice and healthy so that when you go to get the loan, you’ll be in good shape to get a good rate.

Good luck! From my perspective, you’re going to need it!

When I was young, my family did not have a whole lot of money for trips. Most of our “vacations” were trips to Grandma’s house – she lived a few hours away and had a big house that even had a hidden tunnel in it that let you sneak from one bedroom to another through a door in the back of a closet. To me, this trip (we would stay for four or five days) was the highlight of my summer most years.

However, we did take a few trips besides these. They stuck in my memory then because they were so much fun, but looking back on it now, the ideas behind the trip were pieces of pure genius from my family. Here’s what we did.

We would travel by Amtrak to another part of the country. Most of the time, these trips weren’t particularly far, actually – we were only on the train for a few hours (at least in my mind’s eye). However, one could schedule a trip to almost anywhere in the continental United States using this logic.

We would bring along camping equipment. On this Amtrak trip, we would bring along camping equipment – a tent, sleeping bags, and such. Our actual luggage was usually pretty light – t-shirts, shorts, sandals, and so on.

Upon arrival, we would completely play it by ear We would usually get off in a rural place at mid-day and from there we would completely play it by ear. My father would keep cash on him and he’d simply ask at the train station (or at the nearest business we could find) about local state parks and campgrounds. He would also usually inquire about transportation to this campground – most people would feel most comfortable with a rental car, but he usually asked about a car repair place, headed there, and offered some cash for use of the “loaner” for a few days – the cheapest rental possible, basically.

What did you do? Once we were camped out, we would often see local attractions, particularly free ones. It was trips like these that made me fall in love with Americana – things like the world’s largest twine ball, for example. Things like these are completely kitschy fun. We also enjoyed the natural beauty of the state parks – exploring the trails and such. The best part of rural state parks is that they’re quite safe for families – we were basically allowed to wander wherever we wanted in the park, even at a young age, and we would rarely see other people at all.

We’d usually spend at least part of the time learning how to do something new, usually something bordering on survivalism. We would start fires using nothing but the materials around us, make fishing poles with nothing but a Swiss army knife and what we could find, and so on. We’d catch fish, dress them ourselves, and eat them for supper. It was incredibly fun, challenged us all to be creative and learn new things, and yet it was incredibly relaxing – our biggest worry would be finding another piece of fallen wood for the camp fire.

What did it cost? There would be seven or eight of us on these trips and we would stay for a week. What did it cost? According to my calculations, some of those trips to another part of the country for a week, including travel and food and other supplies, would be less than $500 in today’s money (assuming you had the basic camping equipment). That’s a frugal vacation – and one your family would talk about for years to come!

If you take nothing else from this, remember that the fun of a vacation is in the time spent with people you love, not in the places you go. You don’t need to blow thousands on a trip to DisneyWorld to have an amazing vacation.

Colored in bright orange and subtitled The Sensible Plan For Making It All Work, this book is really effective at getting your attention on the bookshelf, but when I picked it up and leafed through it, my initial reaction was that it was just another personal finance book, no different than a truckload of others.

The “gimmick” here is that it’s written by Jonathan and David Murray, identical twins who happen to be investment advisors (hence the cheeky Two For The Money title). They use this throughout the book, injecting short blog-like bits where the two of them debate a financial issue – these were among the most interesting parts of the book, actually.

Does this book really offer anything that can’t be found elsewhere, or is there something that the Murray boys offer that can’t really be found somewhere else? Let’s dig in and find out.

A Deeper Look At Two For The Money

The book is laid out in an attention-grabbing fashion – it conveys a nice sense of being easy to read and easy to dig into, something that’s important for personal finance books, as they can often get quite boring. As I mentioned above, the chapters are broken up by brief articles that come off almost like blog posts; about half of them are entitled Double Take and feature a debate on a particular point between Jonathan and David, usually with one taking a conservative perspective and the other one touting aggressiveness, and the rest are entitled Tools for the Money and merely provide more detail on a specific issue. In short, this book is well-designed for browsing – if that’s how you absorb a book, it’s a big thumbs up for Two For The Money.

Chapter 1 – How Much Is Enough?
The book opens with defining goals, something dear to my own life. It goes through the major financial targets that most of us have, like retirement and our children’s college education, and then looks at how much we realistically want and expect from these things before finally putting a real price tag on them.

The perspective here on retirement was pretty refreshing. Rather than just spouting off a number that indicates how much you’ll “need” in retirement, it instead walks through several potential retirement scenarios – different standards of living in retirement – and basically uses that model to really figure up how much you’ll need. According to that model, I won’t need all that much – most of my interests in retirement are rather inexpensive ones, mostly revolving around grandchildren, reading, and volunteer work.

Chapter 2 – Getting Organized
Most of the advice from this chapter has already been discussed here on The Simple Dollar; it boils down to a need to organize and store your personal finance documents. Many people overlook this, but I find myself often looking back at earlier statements and bills when piecing together questions, particularly in terms of my spending habits.

The Murrays probably don’t realize it, but they actually advocate an approach vaguely similar to GTD for dealing with all of your paperwork – process it, deal with the quick stuff, and file away the statements that may be needed for later reference. It’s much better than the chaos system of management I’ve seen in many places, including my own kitchen table on occasion.

Chapter 3 – Build a Budget, Find the Free Money, and Get Out of Debt
Here’s the “basics of personal finance” chapter that’s almost traditional in books like these, and, like usual, it’s not given quite enough detail to be useful. The basics of setting up a budget, cutting out some of the big wastes in your monthly spending, getting rid of your credit cards, and so on are here, but they’re covered rather quickly. There are much better books for looking at personal money management – if this is the information you’re looking for, look at a book like the excellent All Your Worth (read my review).

Having said that, they do advocate the “debt snowball” technique, which I’m a big fan of. For those of you unaware, basically it means taking as much as you can of your monthly income and directly applying it to debt repayment, starting with the smallest debt and working up to the largest. Why a snowball? Each time you get a debt paid off, that minimum payment is added to your “snowball,” which then rolls downhill onto your next debt. Eventually, your snowball is huge and hammering away at your biggest debt (usually your mortgage). Best of all, when it’s over, you already know how to manage your money well and suddenly you have a big chunk of change each month to invest.

Chapter 4 – Saving More Money Starting Now!
This chapter is a twenty page compression of the material in David Bach’s The Automatic Millionaire (read my review). Basically, the idea is that you need to cut down on your silly expenditures (Bach’s “latte factor”) and start saving that money instead, preferably in an automatic fashion so you don’t even have to think about it.

It seems almost stupidly simple – stop buying dumb stuff and save the money instead – yet it’s actually much more difficult than it seems or else everyone would be doing it. The average savings rate in the United States right now is actually negative (meaning the average American literally spends more than he or she earns), which means that just by cutting down a little and actually building savings, you’re in better shape than the average American. Think about that – it’s a powerful motivator when you consider how many Americans right now are just swimming in debt, clutching to their Gucci handbags, hoping that Visa and Mastercard don’t eat them alive.

Chapter 5 – How to Get Rich the Prudent Way
This chapter is loaded with basic investment advice, which boils down to seven rules:

1. Let time be your ally. Focus on at least five to ten years out, and grow your wealth steadily through compounding.

2. Maintain realistic expectations. From 1928 to 2005, the S&P 500 has gained an average of about 10 percent annually, and experts often use that figure to calculate long term returns. For your planning purposes, be more conservative. Use 8 percent to be safe.

3. Diversify across asset classes. Smart investors hold a mix of stocks, bonds, and commodities. The mix may vary depending on your age and temperament, but the basic principle of diversification holds true today.

4. Hire a professional financial advisor you trust. Let him or her worry about the market.

5. Keep your costs down. Look for investments with low fees, and don’t do a lot of trading, which can generate higher commissions and taxes.

6. Invest regularly. Take advantage of dollar cost averaging to maximize returns.

7. Don’t worry too much about the market.

Good rules, all of them, and the chapter merely expands on each one a bit.

Chapter 6 – Twins’ Tips for Successful Investing
This chapter is literally a list of seventeen tips on various investment specifics, each one a page or two in length. The investment advice is generally pretty conservative: don’t chase specific sectors, be a value investor, use dollar cost averaging to your advantage, the best way to double your money is to double your investment, and so on.

Although I agree with most of their advice, I don’t agree that most people need an investment professional to help them out. I realize that the Murrays are actually investment professionals and it would be counterintuitive for them to suggest that they’re unnecessary, but I think John Bogle’s philosophy, spelled out in The Little Book of Common Sense Investing (see my review), is pretty spot-on – just stick with low-cost index funds, balance things yourself to minimize risk, and you’ll be fine.

Chapter 7 – The New Retirement
Here, the Murrays focus directly on retirement. Not planning for retirement, but the actual issues facing people when they reach their late sixties and early seventies and are actually looking at retiring. Basically, the book says that if you’re happy, keep working and building for the future by investing in disability insurance and so on, but if you’re ready to hang it up, build up an emergency fund before you take that leap.

The advice here is pretty specific to baby boomers and not really applicable to what my retirement situation will be like, so I largely skimmed this chapter. I don’t plan on retiring for a very long time, and even then, it will be more of a “retirement” – I’m not wired to sit around all day without being mentally or physically productive in some way.

Chapter 8 – The Heart of the Matter: Finance for Couples
Again, this chapter is a compression of the great material spelled out in another well-known personal finance book – this time around, it’s David Bach’s Smart Couples Finish Rich (read my review). Basically, the best thing you can do to keep a healthy financial situation with your partner is communicate. Talk about money, even if it seems uncomfortable or boring. If you don’t have a grip on your money – and a grip on where you both stand with money – life will present a lot of financial and personal challenges for you.

I did quite like the mention of an emergency file that you both prepare so that, in the event of the demise of one member of the couple, the other has everything under control. My wife and I have one of these, but it is going to need a significant revision soon because I need to mention several aspects of The Simple Dollar in it – so let that be a lesson to you, if you make one, don’t let it sit there and get all cobwebbed and out of date.

Chapter 9 – Kids and Money
For me, as a newer parent, this chapter was particularly interesting, as it covered the gamut of issues from introducing your child to basic money topics to teaching your adolescent about responsibility and earning money to helping out your young adult children with college. The advice is largely solid and is mostly focused on making sure that your children leave your care without a big financial burden and a good understanding of how money works.

In general, the brothers seem to believe strongly in what I like to call “self-reliance with a safety net;” don’t just hand them things, but give them the opportunity to work for things and discover themselves in the process. For example, they debate on the concept of having a teenager work – one of the twins was strongly in favor of having a teenager find a job, while the other one said that they should also explore options like unpaid internships. Either way, your child is learning something valuable about himself or herself – and about the world.

Chapter 10 – Taking Care of Your Aging Parents
The last meaty chapter in the book focuses on taking care of your parents as they reach their advanced years. The biggest portion of the chapter strongly encourages you to have a deep financial talk with your parents about their estate and discuss with them openly how they want their estate handled in their final years and after their passing so that all of their ducks are in a row.

There’s also significant attention paid to long term care insurance – a very nice four page primer near the end of the book on the topic. If this is something you’re beginning to think about with your parents, you might want to pick up this book at your local bookstore and give that bit a read – it’s on page 294.

Chapter 11 – It’s About Your Life
The book wraps up with a fluffy farewell chapter, five pages that just conclude with the astute point that it’s your life and the decisions you make now will have echoes down the road.

Buy or Don’t Buy?

In short, if you’ve never read a general personal finance book, this one is an enjoyable place to start. Two For The Money was a rather enjoyable read with very solid advice on a wide array of topics. Unfortunately, this area of “general personal finance” books is quite crowded and while this book is a very good one, if you’ve already read a general personal finance book or three, this one won’t really bring anything new to the table.

Two For The Money is the thirty-third of fifty-two books in The Simple Dollar’s series 52 Personal Finance Books in 52 Weeks.

Before my son was born, we used to do a lot of things out and about in the evening – we’d go to museums, to movies, to art galleries, and so on, almost every evening. When he was born, a lot of that changed – now we stay home a lot, play with our son, put him to bed, and usually do something quiet together at home. It sounds boring, but when I think back to the fun of doing stuff like teaching my son how to put on his own pants and then rocking him to sleep while singing him Oasis songs (did I mention that his favorite album is (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?) and I wouldn’t trade that for any movie or museum visit – we can do that when he’s older.

How Credit Scores Affect Your Loan Rates -Or- Why All Spending Is Not Equal The Digerati Life does an excellent job here of outlining how different credit scores directly affect real world loans – a compelling argument for why you should keep your credit nose clean. (@ the digerati life)

Summer Reading Made Easy I used to be involved in summer reading programs at the library. They were sponsored by a local couple who were big advocates of youth reading. We had to read books and write very short book reports on them (one page handwritten, if I remember right) and there were various rewards for meeting certain thresholds. I remember a big pizza party for the people who wrote 20 in a summer. (@ wise bread)

Finances and Caring For Your Elderly Relative Right now, parents of my friends are dealing with this with their own parents – luckily, our parents aren’t in this situation. Still, this is stellar advice – and interesting, too. (@ dual income no kids)

The Simple Dollar Retro: The Green Dollar: Being Environmentally Conscious Can Save You Money I’m a bit of a greenie (a recurring theme around here); this is one of the better ones along those lines.

There are a lot of small financial fears I have about the whole moving process – future costs, lifestyle changes, and such. This is my first go-round as a homeowner, so lots of questions float through my head. Here are three of the most prevalent ones – and my attempt to answer them.

Increased energy bills Although our apartment may be the most energy-inefficient place on earth (a box air conditioner, terrible air flow, and baseboard electric heating), we’re moving to a space with more than triple the square footage of where we currently live. The energy bills are going to go up – I’ve looked at some estimates of their bills, but I don’t know how they lived in comparison to us.

My plan Take all of the energy efficient bulbs we have at our current apartment and move them with us. Install a programmable thermostat shortly after moving (the house may already have one). Lower the water heater down to 125 degrees or so and put a blanket on it. These are the first steps I’ll take, and I plan on many tweaks after that.

Lawn maintenance An ongoing debate between my wife and myself has been how to handle this chore. Should we buy our own lawnmower and maintain it and invest the time, or merely pay the person who has been mowing and trimming the grass for $20 a week? We keep oscillating on this issue, but I believe we’re leaning towards the service at first.

My plan Hire someone to deal with the lawn the first week or two, then evaluate where we’re at when we’re settled in. I have no objection to doing the lawn care myself, but the startup expenses plus the time investment is something I’m going to have to calculate carefully.

Neighbors As I’ve mentioned before, interacting with people sometimes can cause me trepidation. However, we will have to meet our neighbors shortly after moving, one in particular because there are some property boundary line issues that need to be discussed (both ways, there are items that each home apparently owns that reside on or very close to the property line).

My plan My wife and I are planning to go meet all the neighbors shortly after the move one evening, then have a barbecue with them sometime after that. Better put on the social hat, I suppose.

For those homeowners out there, what aspects of moving filled you with trepidation?

I spent $3 on a raspberry chocolate bar the other day. The three of us sat in the parking lot in the rain, breaking off little pieces, giggling, singing along to Gnarls Barkley on the radio, and watching the rain drops bounce on the hood.

Was that $3 an effective use of money? Of course not. A $3 candy bar? It was very good chocolate, but it was $3 that basically disappeared in a few minutes. That $3 could have helped with the grocery bill or any number of other things; instead, we giggled and munched and the money was gone.

The $3 alone isn’t that big of a deal, but repeated over time, it really does add up. Let’s say I bought that same candy bar once a week – that adds up to $156 a year, enough to make a double payment once a year on my student loan and get it paid off years earlier.

The real value of the situation, though, wasn’t in the routine of it – it was a spontaneous moment of enjoyment with my family. It is those little moments, simple things like sitting in a car in the rain and sharing a candy bar and singing to music and laughing, that will be the things I remember in the future about this time, where the three of us were living together in that tiny apartment and he was in his toddler years, just discovering the world.

Was it worth $3? The chocolate bar wasn’t worth it, but the memory of it will be. Even now, I can close my eyes and see the raindrops bouncing on the hood, my bad falsetto singing along on the radio, a bit of chocolate on my son’s lips as he smiles enormously, and my wife just grabbing my hand and squeezing it. Those things were free, but they’re so great that they’re worth any price.

The value was in the uniqueness of the moment. By simply doing that – or something like it – every week, it goes from being a great, fun memory I’ll have of my wife and my son to something ordinary and plain. Trying to recreate that moment is really futile – I just enjoy them as they come along.

So what’s really important here? Those little special moments that cost a few dollars are fine – they are truly the spice of life. The trouble comes in when these special times start becoming routine – not only does the cost become regular, but it ceases to be special and becomes ordinary.