For quite a while, I’ve been interested in how dollar cost averaging works for a regular, steady investment, so I spent some time and used the S&P 500 as a model to see how it worked in the real world.

Wait! What’s dollar cost averaging?
Dollar cost averaging is an investment philosophy in which you buy a particular investment regularly over a period of time with an equal amount of cash each time. When the investment’s value is high, you don’t get as many shares for your dollar; when the value is low, you get more shares for the dollar. In essence, this is what you do when you automatically contribute to your 401(k) out of your paycheck.

Here’s a very simple example:

Let’s look at a year in which the value of a stock starts at 100, goes up 10 a month until June (the peak), then stays steady for the rest of the year. You paid $134.94 per share with dollar cost averaging. If you instead bought in at the start of the year with your complete investment, then you paid only $100 per share.

On the other hand, let’s look at the reverse market: the stock starts at 100, goes down 10 a month until June, then stays steady the rest of the year. If you invested it all right off the bat, you spent $100 a share for stocks now worth $50, but if you used dollar cost averaging on a monthly basis, you only paid an average of $58.66 per share.

Dollar cost averaging in the real world
To get some real numbers to work with, I downloaded historical data for the S&P 500 since 1950. I used the S&P 500 because that is the index matched by my index fund investment of choice, the Vanguard 500.

I decided to focus on monthly investments in three periods: the last year, January 2006 - January 2007; the entire 2000 decade so far, January 2000 - January 2007; and the dot-com bust, January 2000 - January 2003.

Dollar cost averaging in 2006
In 2006, the S&P 500 went steadily upwards. Using dollar cost averaging and investing $1000 at the start of each month in 2006, you would wind up on January 2, 2007 with an investment worth $13,110.37, a gain of 9.26%.

However, if you had invested the entire $12,000 in on January 3, 2006, your investment would be worth $13,482.66 on January 2, 2007, a gain of 12.36%.

Thus, in a market that’s steadily rising, dollar cost averaging causes you to lose some of your gains.

Dollar cost averaging in 2000-2002
From January 2000 to January 2003, the S&P 500 took a major hit, dropping from a month-ending peak of 1454.60 to a month-ending valley of 815.28. Using dollar cost averaging and investing $1,000 at the start of each month in 2000-2002, you would wind up on January 2, 2003 with an investment worth $26,463.88, a loss of 26.48%. Ouch.

But it’s far, far worse if you invested that $36,000 up front. If you put $36,000 into the S&P 500 on January 3, 2000, it has a value of $22,091.13 on January 2, 2003, a loss of 38.63%.

Thus, in a market that’s steadily falling, dollar cost averaging protects you against some losses.

Dollar cost averaging in the 2000s so far
What about over a longer span that incorporates both the down market of 2000-2003 and the subsequent rise since then? Using dollar cost averaging and again investing $1,000 each month, on January 2, 2007 your investment of $84,000 would have a value of $105,086.15, a gain of 25.1%.

On the other hand, if you invested the entire $84,000 on January 3, 2000, it would have a value of $86,637.23 on January 2, 2007, a gain of 3.14%. This is an astounding win for dollar cost averaging.

In a market that falls and then rises, dollar cost averaging is incredibly strong.

What can we conclude?
Dollar cost averaging (what you do by default in your 401(k) investments) is a great strategy to use if you’re uncertain about the future of the market. However, if you are unquestionably confident of a bull market, the best strategy is to buy in completely right now rather than averaging it out (which is effectively what you do when you move into a new investment in your portfolio).

In short, for the average investor who is not a prognosticator, your best strategy to minimize your risk is to set up a regular, automatic investment plan and then forget about it. That plan is effectively going to handle the dollar cost averaging for you; just trust that the strategy will protect you against terrible losses in the long run.

As we grow closer to the move, we’re continually hunting for boxes in which to pack our belongings. One interesting side effect of the packing, though, is that it forces us to consider every item we own - and it’s convinced us to get rid of a few.

Motivation For Frugality - It’s Not Always About The Money For me, it was about the money at first, but eventually it became kind of an art form - it’s something I’ve attempted to explain in a post several times, but it never comes out in a way that sounds rational. (@ money, matter, and more musings)

Do You Know If Your Credit Card Uses The Dual-Cycle Or Average Daily Balance Calculation? This little question can make a huge difference in your credit card bills, especially over time. Jeremy lays it all out here. (@ generation x finance)

True Cost of a New Car: It Ain’t Pretty The depreciation on a brand new car is stunning. (@ it’s your money)

The Simple Dollar Retro: What’s Keeping You Financially From Living Your Dream? This was an excellent little thought exercise for getting your ducks all in a row. Give it a shot.

About a week ago, I had a fairly interesting experience at The Gap. I stopped there on a spur of the moment as I was looking for gift ideas, and I was about to leave when I realized that there was only one noticeable employee in the store. That employee was running the only checkout, which had about twelve people in line, and she made no effort to ask for more help, she just kept charging ahead. For a store that previously marketed a rather boutique-like appearance, this lack of customer service was almost shocking.

This morning, I stumbled across a similar sentiment on Seth Godin’s excellent marketing blog (I added my own emphasis):

Today, I visited a Gap store for the first time in a while. We all know that they’ve been having trouble, and it was interesting to see how they’re responding.

They’re closing about 50 stores net this year, trying to make their business match the market. At the same time, it was pretty obvious from my visit that they’re working hard to save money on sales staff, store designers and other expenses. It took me twenty minutes to check out. In the old days, it would have been two minutes. My reading of the Dip is that nickel and diming is a dumb strategy.

They should close 200 or even 500 stores and keep the very best people from each store, redeploying them to their best stores. They should invest in those great stores, invest in design, in targeted marketing. In other words, instead of shrinking themselves back to greatness, they ought to avoid the nickel and diming and go back to what made them great in the first place.

When your current strategy isn’t working, doing the same thing, but just a little less of it, doesn’t make a lot of sense, imo.

I think there’s a lot of useful meat in this situation that one can apply to their own finances.

First of all, individual bits of frugality (i.e., nickel and diming) don’t really help; it only really works if you switch to that mindset. One of the regular criticisms I hear about articles on clipping coupons and such is that, in the end, you’re not saving that much for the effort involved. What is often not seen is that the coupons are just one small piece in a larger philosophy and set of behaviors: using a shopping list, buying items in bulk if the price per unit is cheaper, not being afraid to buy generics, studying the fliers and maximizing sales, and so on. Cutting coupons alone isn’t that cost-effective, but as a part of a more general strategy, it can really help.

Second, it’s often the 800 pound gorilla in our budget that makes things so tight. If you’re racking up huge credit card bills and you realize it’s not working, don’t just resolve to spend a little less with the plastic - rethink your situation and chuck ‘em. If you spend $25 a month on premium cable channels that you never watch, don’t tell yourself “Well, I might watch them…” - get rid of the waste. If you have a third car that is rarely driven, look at the situation and ask if you really need it - you probably don’t. Maybe you’re barely making your house payments - maybe it’s time to move to another area. Don’t just take the big things for granted - look at everything when you’re in trouble.

Third, keeping up appearances is a dangerous game. The Gap has a certain appearance that they’re no longer able to maintain because they’ve expanded too much. The same thing happens when you buy too much stuff to keep up with the Joneses; the bills start coming in and you realize that you’re really in a fix. Instead of following that strategy…

Focusing on your core values is always a winning strategy. What’s really important to you? Perhaps you spend most of your time watching television, so it might make sense to buy a huge LCD television, but then does it make sense to spend a ton of money on other things that are far less important to you? Probably not - it just takes space and creates debt (or at least lost investments).

In the end, Seth sums it up well, so I’ll repeat it again: when your current strategy isn’t working, doing the same thing, but just a little less of it, doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Recently, “Joel” wrote in with the following question about living with his parents after college:

Currently I’m a 22 years old and fresh out of college with a bachelors degree in Computer Science. I have secured a job which puts in me in a great financial situation – I will be bringing home $50,000 a year. This is more than double what I used to make as an intern, and now I’m trying to figure out how to make the best possible use of the increased income. Unfortunately I have roughly $40,000 in student loans which I will have to start paying on in October.

My question for you deals with my current living situation. I have moved back in with my parents, and I’m fairly happy. But how long should I be “mooching” off of them? Only for a couple of months until I find my own place? Or should I consider staying with them for a while longer assuming my parents don’t mind? It might be helpful to know that my parents live in a rural area which is 45 minutes from my job. I could find an apartment in the city where my job is for around $600 a month, but reduce my drive to 15 minutes or so.

Any help or insight on this situation would be greatly appreciated, as would any general advice to recent grads like myself.

Joel’s situation is fairly typical among recent college graduates, and it’s a situation that is fraught with a lot of issues, both financial and emotional. Here’s my advice for figuring out the best path through a situation like this for all parties involved.

Figure out what you want Are you ready to be on your own with all the opportunities that it affords? Or would you prefer to get a big head start on your student loans while in a safer environment? The answer there has a lot to do with your personality and personal needs than anything else.

Know the true costs You will be spending $600 a month on rent. You’ll also be responsible for your own food preparation and other bills. On the other hand, you’ll also be shaving a half an hour and at least a gallon of gas off of the commute each way. Have a firm grasp on what the real costs are and what the move would do to your budget, and also know how quickly you could pay off your loans if you weren’t faced with those costs.

Observe and respect your parents’ needs Are they enjoying an empty nest? Or are they really happy to have you there? By “mooching” off your parents, you are affecting their lifestyle as they move towards retirement - don’t make yourself an additional burden on people who have given you so much already.

Have a serious discussion about the situation Everyone involved is an adult, so have an adult conversation about it. Everyone involved should lay all of their cards on the table and talk sincerely about their expectations - no holding back. It may be that your parents actually expect you to or want you to move out sooner rather than later, or it may be that they actually want you at home for as long as possible. Perhaps they expect you to help significantly with the household chores and food preparation, or maybe they’d like to see a small amount of rent paid.

Plan to get out eventually If you do decide to stay, define a timeframe for when you do plan to spread your wings and fly on your own, even if it is multiple years in the future. An indefinite situation is never a healthy one, and having a target date in mind makes it much easier to plan for that date.

Have regular serious discussions about the situation if you decide to stay It may seem like a great idea at first, but after six months, the situation may be souring and it could be time to move on. On occasion, touch base with your parents and make sure that the situation is still working for all involved.

If it works for both parents and children, this type of situation can be very useful for a young professional just getting started. The biggest pitfall to avoid, though, is a situation where one member is harboring hard feelings that can fester and ruin a perfectly healthy relationship, one that is far more valuable than any dollar amount.

My wife and I regularly check out cookbooks from our local library to scavenge for new ideas for our cooking repertoire. While most of the time, the recipes are complex and the ingredients expensive, we occasionally check out an interesting one that really hits a frugal sweet spot.

This week, we checked out Cook Once, Eat Twice because it promised a pile of recipes that you can make in a slow cooker and then reuse the leftovers in another distinct recipe. Generally, we use recipe collections like this one to learn techniques and things that go well together, so we were hoping to learn more about making reusable foods in the crock pot.

How does it work? The recipes in the book come in pairs, one on the left page and one on the right page when you open it. The one on the left is a slow cooker recipe; the one on the right takes the leftovers from the slow cooker recipe and applies them to another dish.

For example, Saturday evening we had chicken succotash (basically, a chicken stew with corn and lima beans), then on Sunday evening, we used the remaining succotash to make a chicken and cheese casserole. Each one took about fifteen minutes of prep time.

How can this fit into my day? The workflow that we found that works best for us is to prepare the crock pot meal one morning before work and set it to cook while you’re at work. Then, in the evening, enjoy that meal, then prepare the second meal for tomorrow. The next evening, just come home, pop it in the oven, and you’re ready to go.

How tasty is it? What we found was that in terms of required effort, most of the recipes in this book were incredibly easy and also (for the most part) quite tasty. We both expected that all of the recipes would taste the same both the first time around and the second time around, and this was true for at least one of them (the crock pot beef stew that turns into beef stroganoff), but then we tried the chicken succotash / chicken and cheese casserole and found it to be far more tasty.

What’s the cost? The chicken succotash meal pairing cost about $17 in ingredients all told. It provided three meals each for my wife, my son, and I, making the average meal cost slip below the $2 mark. Considering these were complete dinners with good nutritional value (chicken, beans, corn, carrots, other vegetables, etc.) and they didn’t take long to prepare, this was a very impressive cost.

We’re looking forward to trying out more ideas from the book in the coming week, but so far we’re impressed with the quality and simplicity of the meals and their inexpensive nature. Give it a shot by stopping by your local library and checking out a copy.

At our house, it was a very sleepy Sunday. We all spent most of the day quite drowsy and my son even went to bed almost an hour before his regular bedtime. Is it something in the air, perhaps related to the fact that the days recently have been among the longest of the year? Who knows, but it makes for heavy eyelids.

Ask The Readers: Personal Finance During A Health Crisis What do you do in the event of a life-threatening medical crisis? How do you deal with it when it actually happens? (@ get rich slowly)

What To Discuss Before You Get Married Most people realize that a basic talk about money is good, but there are a lot of specific and vital issues that get left out with such a cursory examination. (@ dual income no kids)

Does Size Matter: How Small Of A House Are You Willing To Live In? These are interesting scenarios, but they only work if you’re single - I can’t imagine a family of three in such a space. (@ the digerati life)

The Simple Dollar Retro: $1 Kitchen Secrets: Ten Herbs And Spices That Will Make Simple Foods Pop Most people know how to cook an egg or fry a hamburger, but it seems so boring. Here are some herb and spice choices that can make basic foods really pop - and make it much more interesting to cook at home.

Each Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity or personal development book.

I’m a big advocate of the Getting Things Done system of time management, but more than a few readers have written to me stating that GTD simply didn’t do the trick for them, but that other systems helped them get their time in order. One that kept turning up time and time again was Julie Morgenstern’s Time Management From The Inside Out; with such a loyal following, I was quite eager to find out what this book had to say.

Time Management From The Inside Out takes an overall philosophy that time management is not really any different than managing stuff (which makes sense, as the author became well known for her organization philosophies) - you sort through it, decide what’s worth keeping, and arrange that stuff worth keeping in a logical fashion so that one thing flows into another. The big advantage of this metaphor is that it makes blocks of time and the tasks that fill them seem like tangible objects that you can arrange as you wish rather than intangible units that can’t easily be organized.

Does this philosophy really work? Are there tips inside that can be applied to anyone’s life? Let’s dig in and find out!

Getting Inside Time Management From The Inside Out

Part One: Laying The Foundation

The opening section of the book focuses on some of the most basic problems people have with time management. Most of these basic problems, according to Morgenstern, are problems of perception - people view time in ways that isn’t conducive to effective time management.

1: A Whole New Way Of Looking At Time Management
The book’s opening is a brief chapter that outlines the one big metaphor of this entire book. Time, in this book’s eyes, is truly not all that different than a closet. Just as a closet is a small, constrained space that you want to optimally fill with stuff, time is a small, constrained space that you want to optimally fill with tasks.

What’s the big switch for people? It is recognizing that much like the walls and shelves in a closet, time itself has borders. Morgenstern’s philosophy is that people do not truly assign borders to their time - they get distracted and let the things they’re doing float lazily throughout the day. This phenomenon keeps people from really being efficient with their time.

2: What’s Holding You Back?
Most people have difficulty managing their time because of three distinct psychological blocks: technical errors, which are easily resolved problems that can be eliminated quickly through some careful analysis; external realities, which are environmental factors beyond your control; and psychological obstacles, which are internal forces that block you from finding the optimal solution.

The entire chapter focuses in on discovering which of these three blocks is really holding you back from becoming an effective time manager. For example, if your workspace is cluttered and you waste time finding stuff, that’s a technical error that you can easily correct by learning how to organize things. On the other hand, if you find yourself often paralyzed because of a fear of failure, that’s a psychological obstacle to isolate and investigate. The chapter moves through dozens of these possibilities and offers specific advice on how to handle each one.

Part Two: Analyze

The next section focuses mostly on self-analysis, which basically breaks down your preferences and needs so that the latter half of the book can help you build a time management plan that works for you, rather than adapting yourself to a time management plan.

3: Understanding Your Personal Relationship to Time
This entire chapter is an extended self-examination, with a lot of questions along the lines of No matter how busy I get, I always find time for… ? and so on. Why do this? It identifies the true priorities in your life - or at least get you to sit down and really look at them for a bit. In reality, though, this chapter mostly extracts the information needed to go through the next chapter - and from there, the rest of the book.

4: Developing Your Big-Picture Goals
Here, Morgenstern hits upon a few things that I’ve mentioned before on The Simple Dollar: the importance of setting goals and determining values. What do you really want to be doing with your life and how does it really mesh with how you spend your time each day?

Morgenstern’s philosophy, which I strongly agree with, is that if you’re not spending your time in alignment with your big-picture goals, it’s hard to feel motivated and happy about the things you fill your time with, so you find yourself procrastinating and allowing your activities to fill up more time than they should because you dawdle and waste time. A good example of this is how most of us handled classes in college that we couldn’t really see the value of - we would put off work in those classes and often do them in a suboptimal frenzy at the last minute. Why? The benefit of the class to the values of our life was not really apparent to us.

Part Three: Strategize

This section is what many people think of when they think of time management: laying out a schedule and picking out appropriate tools for managing that schedule.

5: Time Mapping: Creating Your Ideal Balance
Morgenstern argues against laying out a very tight schedule, because for most people it’s just a matter of time before they break it and it falls apart. Instead, she argues on behalf of “time mapping” - taking the values (or “life areas”) defined in chapter four and assigning blocks of time to each one. I went through this whole exercise and defined several areas for me (work, family, writing, self, and knowledge were the big ones), then actually went and laid out blocks of time each day over a week to devote to each one. It seemed to work quite well.

One big advantage to this is that over time you can easily shift blocks around so that they flow well together. For me, I discovered that it was good to have family and self blocks near each other; they flowed together well. In a similar vein, writing and knowledge blocks flowed together very well, because I would often have my creative juices flowing after spending time reading. This led to me actually going to bed earlier and not reading before bed; instead, I started waking up earlier, spending some “self” time waking up and taking a shower, then reading for an hour (”knowledge” time), then writing for an hour or two before anyone else wakes up.

What about multitasking, when you can use time to multitask between two groups? By all means, do that - schedule blocks of time when you’re doing both, like an hour-long block of time on Saturdays where you call your mother and talk to her with a headset while you’re cleaning house (family and self), or when you’re reading a book on a flight (work and knowledge).

6: Selecting a Planner That Works For You
I’ve discovered that in many cases the traditional planner doesn’t work very well for me and neither do electronic models. Instead, what I often do is maintain a large desk calendar where I keep everything, a general weekly schedule that I basically have memorized, and then a portable planner that’s just a listing of appointments that I carry with me. During the day, I jot down notes in my small, plain reporter notebook and then transfer scheduled pieces to my desk calendar in the evenings.

This scheme probably won’t work for you; as Morgenstern points out in the chapter, the best schedule management scheme is different for each person. Instead, this chapter basically moves through the options available and highlights the good and bad about each one. It turns out that in terms of scheduling, I’m actually a very visual and tactile person, so the options for visual and tactile people were of great interest to me.

Part Four: Attack

Now that you’ve defined time blocks, how can you fill them effectively? This final section of the book focuses on a five-pronged attack for filling that time in an effective fashion, the SPACE methodology:
Sort potential tasks by category
Purge whatever tasks you can
Assign a home to tasks you have decided to do
Containerize tasks to keep them within the time alloted
Equalize - refine, maintain, and adapt your schedule

In my eyes, this logical flow has a lot in common with Getting Things Done; let’s dig into this final section and find out more.

7: Sort
Basically, for each item on your to-do list, ask yourself which of your time blocks the item fits well in and how long it will take to do. When you have to estimate, estimate long so that your schedule has some flexibility in it - the more rigid it is, the harder it will be to maintain things over a long period.

Another effective technique is to break larger tasks down into smaller tasks that are much clearer in terms of the time needed to actually do them. For example, you may have no idea how long it will take to change the oil in your car, but if you break it down into smaller steps, such as the time it takes to get newspapers laid down, the time to drain the oil, and so on, you can come up with a pretty good estimate of the time investment (and actually have a hole in the middle to do something else while the oil is draining).

8: Purge
If you can get rid of some of the short tasks immediately, do them. I like the Getting Things Done rule of thumb - if it takes less than a few minutes, do it immedately and get it off the list of things to do.

Morgenstern goes further than that, though; she suggests asking yourself if a task is really important or not and completely tossing it if it isn’t. For example, if you get an invitation to an event and you don’t want to attend, just send a gentle thank you note and mark the event off your list - don’t even bother doing anything more with it. Similarly, if it’s a task someone else could be doing, just go ahead and delegate that task as soon as you can and get rid of it from your to-do list. There are a lot of parallels here with pieces of the Getting Things Done model, really.

9: Assign A Home
Once you’ve trimmed down the list, then you can start placing tasks on your schedule into the appropriate time blocks. Since you already have time estimates on everything, you can realistically put tasks into various places on your schedule and then immediately see how that block is filling up with activities - plus, the time estimates prevent you from overfilling a block.

This chapter also has some great suggestions on how to make regular activities routine, such as buying all of your greeting cards for the year at once, filling out all of the envelopes, putting a date where the stamp should be, then sending close to that date by slapping the stamp on top and dropping it in the mail. This is a great way to handle birthday cards to family members, for example.

10: Containerize
Basically, this is all about minimizing interruption within your time zones. For example, if email is a constant distraction, set a small task at the beginning and end of the time block to focus on email, then ignore it the rest of the time. Do the same thing for phone calls, people who drop by to interrupt you, and so on. If you need to focus, eliminate all distractions and make it clear to others that you’re not open to distraction by using a clear sign, like a closed door.

I find the more I do this, the more I seem to get done in a set period of time. In fact, it is because of this phenomenon that I have convinced my wife to convert the smallest bedroom into an office, because when I focus on my writing in a quiet environment, I get far more done than when I’m surrounded by interruptions. Thus, during writing times, I can just go here, close the door, and focus on content.

11: Equalize
The book finishes with a very nice tying things up chapter. The idea here is very simple: a time management plan is never static and it changes as your needs do. Re-evaluation should be a regular, consistent process - Morgenstern recommends doing it every other month as a matter of routine.

Buy or Don’t Buy?

Getting Things Done is what I use to actually get things done; it’s a great framework that works very well for me. However, Time Management From The Inside Out offers a lot of additional material that does a great job of surrounding the GTD methodology with some sensible time management techniques.

In a nutshell, I didn’t find anything world-shattering in Time Management From The Inside Out; what I did find, though, are a lot of little things that can complement the things I do already. This book met a particular need of mine in terms of really looking at and defining where my blocks of time needed to be and after thinking about the material inside, I did make some changes to my daily routine that seem to already be paying dividends.

In short, buy this book if you’re looking for some great additional tips for time management - this book is loaded with them and will provide some good food for thought. If you already feel your time is quite efficient, thank you, don’t bother - but then you probably wouldn’t be interested in a book on time management anyway.

Earlier today, I opened a can of worms by suggesting that, if your budget is overly tight, you may wish to consider looking for a new home for your pet. My mention of this issue was extremely brief (not nearly enough to actually explore the issue in detail), but a number of readers grabbed ahold of this point and ran with it. Thus, I decided to move this discussion to a separate post so these issues could be explored in more detail.

Pets can be wonderful, valuable companions. I was particularly attached to my own dog growing up - some of my best memories are of playing Frisbee with him in the yard for hours every night after school. I’d toss the frisbee and he’d pause for a few seconds, then give chase at top speed, leaping in the air to catch it, then run back to me to be greeted with a playful petting and a scratch behind the ears. He used to sleep in my bed with me, too, right next to me, curled up next to my chest. I know full well how much a pet can mean to a person - and how much a person can mean to a pet.

Pet Considerations First of all, the decision to acquire a pet is a serious one and should merit some careful consideration. Pets require constant upkeep and attention - if you are unsure if you want a pet or do not know the effort involved in maintenance, look for a situation where you can perhaps watch someone else’s pet for a period while that person is traveling. Pets also have a constant cost - vet visits, food, litter, and other costs are regular and consistent.

You should also consider that a pet will begin to look on you as its caretaker and will form a deep bond with you. If you don’t believe that you will be able to care for a pet over a long period of time, you should strongly consider not getting one. A pet should be a long term commitment - if you’re not up for that, then you should strongly consider not getting a pet.

Unwanted Pets However, there’s a serious problem with pet ownership - what is the appropriate thing to do if the pet is no longer wanted by the owner? If this weren’t an issue, there would not be stray pets and pet shelters wouldn’t stay in business. I don’t feel that taking a pet to a shelter is a good choice - pets don’t deserve to live in a cage, ever. Some would argue that once you have a pet, it should be yours forever because the pet is attached to you, but that’s not healthy either - if the owner no longer wants the pet, it’s not psychologically a good situation for the pet or the owner.

I’m a strong believer in pet adoption, similar to how I feel about human adoption - it’s the most humane solution to a situation where a pet is not wanted by an owner, and that’s what I advocated earlier today. If an owner has a pet that they no longer want or can properly care for, or they discover that the responsibilities of pet ownership are a burden they aren’t prepared to handle, that owner should be responsible enough to find a safe, healthy home for that pet.

To summarize, if there are issues in your home and in your life that are causing an uncomfortable relationship between you and your pet (and finances can indeed be one of them), then you should consider selling your pet to or having your pet adopted by a loving family. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for the pet to continue in a stressful environment.

I expect the comments on this post to be quite interesting.