Recently, I discussed the value of investing in yourself - putting time and money into improving you, not building assets. Today, we’ll look at one area of investing in yourself as part of an ongoing series on the topic, spread out once per weekday over two weeks. If you’d like to review all the entries, look at the investing in yourself subcategory.

The final entry in this series (yes, this is the end of it - I know some have really liked it and others have not liked it so much, so this may either be good or bad news for you) focuses in on the idea of personal growth - becoming a better person with a greater understanding of yourself as well as the world and people around you. Doing so not only increases the comfort you feel with yourself, but it also helps with relating to others in all aspects of your life, personal and professional.

Personal growth is not about taking tests or attending seminars - in fact, most of that stuff is a waste of your time and money. Personal growth really comes from challenging yourself and your beliefs, and doing that well takes time and patience and a willingness to change.

Personal growth is one area of investing in myself that I take very seriously, and I always have. I spend a lot of time on introspection and understanding why people are the way they are. I’ve worked very hard to understand my core values and to also understand the values that others use to operate. Doing this consistently has transformed me as a person, making me much more able to comprehend new situations and also to understand and to control how I respond to them. Here are eight little things you can do to personally grow.

Figure out what your core values are.
Most people have a sense of what’s right and what’s wrong that’s guided by a surprisingly small handful of core values. Whenever you feel inside yourself that something is wrong, ask yourself why you feel that way. Keep trying to break each answer down into more and more fundamental pieces, things that you are sure are right and things that you are sure are wrong. If you invest some time into this, you’ll find that slowly your beliefs and reactions of right and wrong begin to make a lot more sense to you and you can explain them much better as well. More importantly, it becomes much easier to figure out the best ethical and moral decision when something new comes up.

Travel.
By this, I don’t just mean go to a tourist hotspot and see the sights for a few days. I mean genuinely travel. Get off the beaten path, and stay for an extended period - at least more than a few days. If you live in a small town, spend a few weeks in a city. If you live in a city, go live in the country for a while. Visit other parts of the country you live in and, if you can afford to, visit other countries as well. Hitting the sights is fine, but the real value comes from exposing yourself to the life of people that you don’t know.

Read challenging books.
A Stephen King novel is fun, but it doesn’t really stretch your understanding of how human life works. Read challenging stuff. I recommend picking up any novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction or any of the Modern Library’s 100 best novels or best nonfiction works (stick with the editor’s picks, primarily). Almost all of those works will force you to reach a little bit, to understand lives and existences different than your own. When you walk away, you’ll have a deeper understanding of what it means to be different than you, and the more you read, the deeper your appreciation for the varieties of human experience will become.

Explore the varieties of religious experience.
The vast majority of people on earth incorporate some form of religious experience into their lives, whether it’s a Westerner attending an Easter Sunday service at a Protestant church or a trip to a Buddhist temple. I’ve attended a huge variety of religious services and I’ve found that they have a lot more in common than most people tend to think - they all involve people trying to connect with something greater than themselves. It is this commonality, paired with the huge diversity of the specifics of practice and belief, that really make clear that most people on earth are trying to take different, parallel paths to the same goal. Not too many years ago, I used to be afraid of people of different faiths, tending to think that they were either foolish or frightening - now I see them as using the tools they’ve learned to try to experience much the same thing. Try visiting a few religious services of faiths you don’t follow and just watch and listen carefully.

Figure out what you actually want from life.
Almost everyone I know (myself included, at times) spends their time and money chasing the things they think they want from life, while ignoring signs that those might not be the things that they actually want from life. For example, I have a friend who is incredibly passionate about painting. Spend five minutes with her and she’ll almost always move the conversation towards a gorgeous painting she’s seen recently or one she’s working on. Yet she took a job at Home Depot instead of at an art store because the Home Depot job paid $3 an hour more. Why? She needed that $3 an hour. For what? Car payments on an almost-new automobile sitting in her driveway, a car that she only drives on weekends because she takes the metro to work.

It’s really clear from everyone around her that her passion is in the painting. With her passion and skill, she could likely parlay the job at the art store into some opportunities for individual instruction or countless other things that would let her indulge deeply in the things that truly matter to her. Instead, she works at Home Depot in complete drudgery so that she can have an almost-new car sit in her driveway five days a week.

For most of us, it’s not as clear cut, but we often are beholden to things we somewhat want (like a shiny new car) over the things that fuel the passionate fires in our belly (like painting). Figure out what those real fires are and direct as much as you possibly can towards fueling them. It’s a lot easier to drive a 1987 Honda every day to a place you’re passionate about than a 2005 Prius to a job that you hate.

Commit to a large activity that solely benefits someone or something else.
By this, I basically mean volunteer work. Spend some time with any sort of volunteer project, preferably for the benefit of some group that fuels your passion. Perhaps you can spend some time helping out at a soup kitchen or building a Habitat for Humanity house if you sympathize with the poor, or maybe you can start a small volunteer project at a retirement home if you sympathize with the elderly. I know one person who goes to a VA hospital and reads a chapter out of a novel aloud every day.

Spending time helping disadvantaged people shows you quite often how many blessings you actually have in your everyday life. It might seem devastating to you to not get a promotion, but if you spend a day working to help out sick children at a hospital or building a home for an extremely impoverished family, you’ll quickly see how many things you have going for you in your life.

Set one big goal for a year from now, then break it down into bits you can do each day.
One of the most transformative things a person can do with their own life is to set a really big, audacious goal, break it down into small actionable pieces, and then start knocking off those pieces. For example, let’s say that my goal one year from now is to lose fifty pounds. After talking to my doctor, I might realize that the way to do this is to get twenty minutes of exercise a day and to improve my diet. Thus, I set three tiny goals for every single day: do a twenty minute exercise session, eat more vegetables than anything else, and keep my daily fat intake below 50 grams on any given day. These are my goals, every single day, and I literally write them down everywhere I go.

Over time, each of these little steps contributes to that big goal. The pounds slowly slip away and before I know it, those fifty pounds are gone. That’s a huge milestone, a huge goal set that I’ve reached. Sure, it’s a vast improvement for my health, but the real power of it is that I’ve reached a big, monstrously audacious goal - and I did it myself.

Set a big old goal for yourself for the next year, one that you can achieve through your own actions, then set daily goals to push you slowly each day. Along the way, you’ll not only achieve something big but learn patience - and other things about yourself as well.

Never stop.
You might try everything else in this entire article and find that none of them really work for you. Or, you might find that only one or two work and the rest are rubbish. Never use that as an excuse to not bother to grow as a person. No matter what, seek out things that challenge the fundamentals of what you believe, both about yourself and others. You’ll either reinforce your deeply-held ideas or you’ll discover that perhaps they weren’t as perfect as you believed they were - and both things are incredibly valuable.

Each Friday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book.

I’ve been anxious to read this book for a while, mostly because it’s been recommented to me by a lot of people that I trust. For example, J.D. over at Get Rich Slowly has often said, in some form or another, “Debt is Slavery is the best personal finance book out there!” while I just roll my eyes gently and clutch my well-worn and loved copy of Your Money or Your Life.

The first thing I noticed about Debt is Slavery is the brevity: weighing in at only 88 pages, it’s a very thin volume. It’s mostly because the author, Michael Mihalik, has focused intently on trimming away every possible little bit of fat from the bone. This book is lean and mean - it doesn’t mince many words at all. For some, that’s good - I like concise factual writings. For others, it’s not - Mihalik is often blunt with some very hard advice for some people to swallow.

Let’s take a deeper look.

A Peek Inside Debt is Slavery

How to Choose a Teacher
The introduction to the book contains a brief section entitled “How to Choose a Teacher” that really stuck with me. Mihalik says to ask two questions: have they done what they are teaching, and do they have your best interests at heart? Those are two profound questions to ask about anyone you’re attempting to learn from, and it’s that logic that has pushed me more and more to start following and trusting individual writers, not specific publications. I have a greater tendency nowadays to trust, for example, an individual writer of a blog than I do a large conglomerate like CNN with different people pushing different agendas and ideas.

Chapter 1 - Debt is Slavery
Mihalik opens the book with what I’ve started to call the “Dave Ramsey argument.” Debt is Slavery makes the case that all debt is bad because it restricts your freedom. Even if you’re borrowing to put yourself in a better position long term, you’re still restricted by having that debt load hanging over you - the monthly debt payments and so on. Mihalik’s solution? No debt of any kind, not even debt that you could pay off if you wanted to.

Chapter 2 - Time May Not Be Money, But Money Definitely Is Time
From there, the book moves on to the concept of the true hourly wage, where you actually sit down and figure out how much money you’re really putting into your pocket in exchange for an hour of your life. It’s usually surprisingly low, and Mihalik’s point is that your time is more valuable than that. In other words, you’re better off earning $20 an hour for 20 hours a work than $10 an hour for 45 hours of work even if the second job pays more. Why? Because if both options are available to you, that extra 25 hours at the $10 an hour job is really only paying you $50 - or $2 an hour.

Remember, what you’re really working for is time - time to enjoy the aspects of your life that bring you happiness and pleasure.

Chapter 3 - Possessions Are a Prison
The third chapter brings another stern point - that the most valuable parts of your life aren’t things, but experiences. Thus, the stuff you buy is effectively paid for by lost experiences. Let’s say, for example, that you spend $2,000 on a flat panel television. That same $2,000 could be used to go to Disney World with your six year old kid. Which one will stick with you emotionally for the rest of your life?

I’m slowly starting to come around to this perspective. My best memories of my life as a husband and a parent are about experiences, not about stuff. Shouldn’t I be devoting my financial resources to more of these experiences instead of accumulating more things?

Chapter 4 - Be Aware of the Ongoing Campaign to Separate You from Your Money
The title of the chapter is intentionally done to send up “kook” flags, but it actually makes a serious point. Marketing is everywhere, and it’s constantly trying to convince you to spend money. There’s the obvious - television ads, etc. - and the less obvious, like giving “trendy” clothing to teenagers who are influencers of their peers.

It takes practice to get used to really identifying the marketing and really figuring out what you want as opposed to what marketing is suggesting to you (or to your peers) that you want. When it really clicks, it becomes much easier to cut down on your possessions in life.

Chapter 5 - Money Buys Freedom
Of course, once you begin to break free from all of this, you begin to spend less and less money. What does that reduced spending really mean? It means that you now have the money to buy freedom. Mihalik uses a great explanation here. If you can get by with only spending 50% of your income each month, then you only have to work half the time - or if you can get by with only spending 25% of your income, you only have to work three quarters of the time. It becomes easier to do things like take a leave of absence from your job to follow up on a dream (like writing a book). Or, in my case, it becomes easier to just walk away from a job to follow something you’ve dreamed about your whole life.

Chapter 6 - Don’t Sell Your Soul For A Salary
Mihalik continues that thought, expounding on the idea that being in control of your spending and free from debt means you don’t have to sell your soul at a job that you detest simply because of the pay.

That, in a nutshell, is what financial freedom is. It’s the freedom to make choices in your life without having to worry about the day to day financial implications. If you hate your job, you can just go find something else to do - the money isn’t going to kill you. Plus, when you do find a career that you’re passionate about, you’ll truly enjoy what you’re doing and the money will follow.

Chapter 7 - Own
The remainder of the book is more along the lines of the “nuts and bolts” of managing your finances. First of all, Mihalik urges people to own the things they use, then use them until they’re truly unusable. Take a car, for example. If you just stick to a cycle of leasing cars because you like the “new car” feel and smell, you’re costing yourself a lot of money - $2,400 a year, post tax, on a $200 monthly lease? That’s a difference of $3,000-4,000 a year in salary. The same is true for housing - once you own a house, you’re not dumping out thousands a month on a mortgage or rent any more. Own the stuff and your monthly financial footprint gets smaller and smaller, giving you more and more freedom.

Chapter 8 - Spend Less Than You Earn By Controlling Your Expenses
Here, Mihalik encourages good ol’ frugality, mostly in the form of minimizing your monthly bills. His advice is pretty general, but it basically adds up to looking through all of your regular expenses for places to cut fat. Do you need extra cable channels? Do you need Netflix? Do you need web access on your cell phone? Do you need a brand new car with the requisite payments? Probably not, and those things are keeping you from acquiring freedom.

Chapter 9 - Save 50 Percent of Your Salary
He’s pretty blunt on this one, too. Save 50% of your salary, period. Make that your goal. In 2007, if you figure money spent on overpayment of debts as “saving,” we did exactly this - and it made us feel a lot more freedom in our lives. In 2008, we hope to be able to do the same.

Chapter 10 - Control Your Money or Your Money Will Control You
Mihalik introduces a very simple form of budgeting here. Basically, he shows a method where you take all of your monthly bills and match them up with each of your paychecks. Then, you essentially make other expenses - like food and entertainment - bills as well and match them up with paychecks. The goal is to set things up so there’s some left over after each paycheck, and that left over can be the amount that you automatically start saving for the future.

Chapter 11 - A Bonus
You’re never as young again as you are right now, so why not get started?

Buy or Don’t Buy?

In a lot of ways, Debt is Slavery came off as a condensed and very blunt version of Your Money or Your Life. That’s really the highest compliment that I could pay Debt is Slavery - it’s got a lot of similarity to my single favorite personal finance book of all.

Mihalik does a great job of really nailing home a handful of few key points: stop spending money needlessly, avoid debt, be frugal, move towards extreme savings, ignore the marketing. Because the book is so brief, Mihalik is really blunt and straightforward with the points - there’s not much fluff.

As useful as that bluntness is - and in terms of just pure advice, it’s very useful - the brevity of the book means that the pieces that were cut were the human pieces. The best part of Your Money or Your Life was the humanity of it - Dominguez and Robin and some of the people they talked about really came off as three dimensional humans. Mihalik’s book dispenses with most of that and goes straight to the advice.

Which one is better? It really depends on what you value. For me, I’ll stick with Your Money or Your Life, but if direct and clear advice is what you’re really looking for, you couldn’t do much better than Debt is Slavery.

Recently, I discussed the value of investing in yourself - putting time and money into improving you, not building assets. Today, we’ll look at one area of investing in yourself as part of an ongoing series on the topic, spread out once per weekday over two weeks. If you’d like to review all the entries, look at the investing in yourself subcategory.

If this article seems to be too much about “basic life skills” for your tastes, stop for a moment and think about people you’ve met who put little or no effort into their personal appearance. Think of people with bad breath or greasy hair and how your opinion of them subtly changed when you noticed these things. This advice is primarily for those people, but also as a reminder to everyone that the small efforts of personal appearance are tiny investments that do pay off.

Personal appearance is one of those subtle things that’s difficult to quantify. Mostly, it’s a collection of a lot of small investments of time and effort that add up to a slight but noticeable tweak in how people think of you. The difference is real, and over time these small differences in a lot of interactions and events can really add up. Keeping clean and keeping up a good appearance are also great ways to simply feel good - I know for me personally, few things make me feel better than a hot, soaking shower. Even better, personal appearance is something that you can maximize - or at least significantly improve - with just a bit of effort. Here are a bevy of little steps you should be taking to maximize the value of your personal appearance, from the obvious to the subtle.

Maintain a daily hygiene schedule.
For some people, setting aside time each and every day for basic personal hygiene is a challenge. They’re wrapped up in work, super-involved with their families, and have too many things going on, so they’ll just skip an evening shower and make things look all right in the morning, or they’ll simply fall into bed without thinking about it and then get up so late in the morning that they have to bolt out the door to start taking charge of their responsibilities.

Hygiene is important. Schedule some time each day to take care of things. I usually do my hygiene tasks the moment I wake up, and I have a litany of things that I go through as part of the routine. If you don’t have an established routine that is simply a fundamental part of your day, start one. Literally make a list of things to do and do them every day. That time you invest will pay off in the long run because you’ll be constantly providing a subtle positive cue to others about yourself - and you’ll feel better, too.

Take a bath or shower and clean thoroughly.
When I was in school, I bathed in a shared shower situation with a lot of other people and I witnessed people standing under the shower for a few minutes, flopping a bit of soap lather on themselves, rinsing it off, and getting out. If that sounds like your average shower, you need to start scrubbing a bit more. Lather up a washcloth with a lot of soap and use it to scrub down all of your body. Rub vigorously everywhere, then rinse. If the place produces significant odor, do it two or three times. Trust me - at the end of the day, this will leave you feeling much fresher than if you just take an ultra-quickie shower.

Don’t use antibacterial soap.
Antibacterial soap might kill off some of the bacteria on your skin, but that’s bad for two reasons. First of all, it lowers your own resistance to a variety of bacteria, making you more susceptible to bacteria-borne illness. Second, if a soap kills off 99.9% of bacteria, the 0.1% that’s left is going to be resistant to that soap and will thrive. In the words of Dr. Stuart Levy, a microbiologist at Tufts University: “Dousing everything we touch with antibacterial soaps and taking antibiotic medications at the first sign of a cold can upset the natural balance of microorganisms in and around us, leaving behind only the superbugs.” Use some quality soap, but don’t use antibacterial soap - it has no real benefit and may in fact make you sick over the long haul.

Brush your teeth, floss, and get dental checkups.
One of the first things I notice about a person is whether their breath smells badly. For some people, this is a medical condition; for others, it’s a side effect of too much garlic. Either way, you can go a long way towards preventing it by practicing good oral hygiene. Brush your teeth every day and floss them, too. Also, visit the dentist sometimes to make sure your teeth are still in good shape.

A clean mouth and clean teeth give you a nice smile and fresh breath, both of which are major positives for one’s personal appearance. It just takes a good scrubbing in the morning to cause it, so don’t skip over brushing your teeth.

Get dental or orthodontic work, if necessary.
When my “adult” teeth first came in, several of the front ones came in highly crooked and it left me feeling very self-conscious. I avoided smiling and looked rather surly much of the time, and when I would occasionally flash my teeth, the inside of my mouth looked like a mangled train wreck. Not pretty, and not good for my social interactions. Thankfully, my father’s health insurance was able to cover braces for these and, after the correction, my teeth appear perfectly straight.

Having your teeth fixed is a wonderful investment. Many health care plans will cover dental corrections, so if you have any issues with your teeth, mention them to your dentist or seek out an orthodontist. Most dental corrections are simple and very cost effective investments for improving your personal appearance, so seek them out.

Use deodorant.
A scentless odor-blocking deodorant, preferably one that does an effective job of absorbing moisture, can do wonders for both minimizing any potential body odor and for keeping any moisture from appearing on your clothing. Most deodorants work pretty well for the average person - don’t overthink it, just apply it.

Keep your hair clean and trimmed evenly, at the very least.
Again, a fairly obvious tip: keep your hair clean, combed, and trimmed. I like to keep my hair very short - it’s easy to make it look professional and very easy to keep clean. In fact, for quite a while, I kept it at stubble length - it looked good and was almost no maintenance at all.

The important thing is to keep it clean. Clean hair, even if it’s a bit disheveled or not cut perfectly, does wonders for a person’s appearance. When you take a shower or bath, give your hair a thorough scrubbing.

Shave, or keep your beard trimmed.
Almost every guy in America goes through a beard phase - some for longer than others. I was no exception. For a few years, I had a strong lumberjack look going. My beard grows in very thick, so it was hard to even keep trimmed well and now I have to shave twice a day to keep a clean-shaven appearance.

Why bother? Again, it’s a subtle symbol of your attention to detail. An unshaven face on most males looks pretty unkempt and unprofessional and gives off subtle signs of “I don’t care.”

Minimize body artwork unless it clearly doesn’t matter or is beneficial to your career.
Personally, I’m all in favor of people expressing themselves through body art. While I’ve personally never utilized any, both of my brothers have a wide assortment of body art and some of it is simply stunning. However, I’ve personally witnessed this body art causing a social stigma for my middle brother, who has several pieces visibly evident beyond his clothing. He’s been avoided on the street, passed over for work promotions, and faced various subtle social stigmas because of the art.

If you choose to have body art, be aware that for many people, such art is in fact a social stigma and that you will suffer for it in various ways, both subtle and non-subtle. In some careers and some social strata, body art is inconsequential or even encouraged, but this is far from true for all careers and all social strata. In a nutshell, be very careful of the long-term consequences if you are considering some form of permanent body art.

Dress well, usually a touch above what is considered the norm.
Observe what the standard dress code is in your workplace, then strive to dress just a slight notch better than that. Not enough so that you stick out, but enough so that you look very crisp and fresh compared to the rest of the crowd. If everyone wears t-shirts and blue jeans in a work environment, wear ones that are crisp and clean. If you’re in a highly casual office environment, stick to business casual. If everyone wears dress shirts and Dockers, keep your clothes clean and pressed and bust out a tie on occasion.

Of course, this doesn’t work in all work cultures. At a minimum, make sure what you’re wearing is clean and presentable, though, as people will visit and draw a number of conclusions based on your appearance - a bunch of grungy guys in cubicle-land doesn’t instill heavy confidence in the higher-ups.

Greet everyone you meet, shake hands, smile, and willingly engage in conversation.
Once a day or so, I make the rounds to all of the offices and cubicles near where I work, greeting everyone and saying hello. As a result, I have a fairly solid relationship with everyone nearby. Whenever someone new comes into the office, I greet them and shake their hands firmly.

All of this only takes a few moments, but it creates a very positive impression of you in a social sense, particularly when combined with good hygiene and good appearance. It only takes a few greetings from a well-scrubbed person to develop some level of positive feelings towards that person, and that’s something that’s always good to have in your corner.

Here’s the bottom line: keep yourself clean and presentable, dress well, and interact positively with others. It takes time, effort, and a bit of money to pull that off, but if you do, you’ll create an overall positive impression of yourself with everyone you interact with, and that positive impression is something very, very valuable to have.

Just this morning, I was leafing through my favorite personal finance book of all, Your Money or Your Life, when I came across the idea of the “purge and splurge” cycle. From page 148, discussing what happens after you start buckling down and paying serious attention to your financial state:

In the first month of recording your figures you might confront one of our national foibles. Your income entry might well be lower than your expense entry. You may have spent more than you earned. (It is, after all, the American way.) Seeing this reality might come as a bit of a shock. Chances are you’ll want things to change - and change now. Accustomed to budgets, diets, and New Year’s resolutions, you swear on a stack of bank statements and credit cards that next month will be better.

This is when people often go on a “wallet fast” with the kind of zeal characteristic of first-time dieters. They scrimp. They save. They deprive themselves and their families, putting everyone on beans, rice, and oatmeal rations. They concentrate daily on that expenses line, determined to cut it in half in one short month. Amazingly enough, many do. Entering the expense figure the second month, they proudly note a steep decline.

This kind of austerity, however, isn’t sustainable. By the third month expenses often rebound with a vengeance, making up for the second month deprivation.

Now what?

I’ve been there. Have I ever been there. In the years before my financial meltdown, I went through this “purge and splurge” cycle several times. I’d have one month where I really cut back and saved a lot of money, then I’d “reward” myself in the next month by massively overspending on unnecessary stuff. When the bills came in, I’d panic again and go into belt-tightening mode, just to toss it all out the door once again.

There were several big things that I was doing wrong, though - things that I didn’t see at the time because I didn’t really understand how personal finance worked. If you’re having trouble escaping this cycle, just as I once did, here are some techniques to try.

Use a longer period for evaluation. Don’t just look at your spending over one month - that doesn’t really matter. Instead, look at your spending over a long period, like six months, and compare that to your income over that period. The short term really doesn’t matter that much - the difference is made over the long term.

Focus on not just avoiding spending, but changing the underlying behaviors that lead to spending. During those belt-tightening periods, I’d still go to bookstores and electronics stores, but I’d walk out the door proud of myself for not spending. The problem was that I was still in the mindset of a consumer - I would still go into the stores, tempt myself, and just use sheer willpower to pull myself away.

There’s only so much pure willpower can do. Use that willpower instead to change the habits that tempt you. Don’t use willpower when you’re in the store drooling over a new goodie - use willpower to decide to take another route home from work every night so you’re not tempted to stop in.

Make changes that are hard to undo during the belt-tightening phase. That’s the perfect time to cancel your credit cards or freeze them up in a big block of ice. Call up your service providers (your cell phone company, your cable company, etc.) and cancel some of the services. Look at your monthly bills and see what else you can trim that will take action to undo. Doing these things will ensure that some of the savings will remain with you, even if your resolve weakens a little.

Set tangible goals on a very regular basis - and keep setting them. Don’t just promise to trim the fat. Set a clear numerical goal to reach and, when you reach it, set another goal for the next month. If a month is hard for you, set week-long goals: I won’t eat fast food this week, for example. Make the goals very concrete and clear so that the things you need to do for success are obvious, then just keep setting them over and over again. Eventually, the techniques will become natural to you.

If you make a mistake, don’t follow it with another one. So you splurged. That doesn’t mean it needs to be followed by more splurging. Recognize that you slipped and then go back to your goals. The point is to keep generally heading in a good direction - everyone slips up on occasion. The winners, though, are the ones who don’t use “I splurged already, so it doesn’t matter” as an excuse to splurge even more.

Investigate new, inexpensive things that you like to do. One big problem that people have when following a newly frugal lifestyle is that they get bored. They wonder if pinching pennies is all there is to life, and they get tempted to spend. My advice is to do some research and load yourself up with as many free and inexpensive activities as you can find. Look up your community calendar and plan for events for the next two months. Check out a series of books from the library. Keep trying things that don’t cost much until you find things that bring you a lot of enjoyment, then start using those things as your regular recreation.

Just a few pages later in Your Money or Your Life, Dominguez and Robin nail the most fundamental key of all:

There are two keys to making this process work for you:

1. Start.
2. Keep going.

That’s really it - success in a nutshell.

Recently, I discussed the value of investing in yourself - putting time and money into improving you, not building assets. Today, we’ll look at one area of investing in yourself as part of an ongoing series on the topic, spread out once per weekday over two weeks. If you’d like to review all the entries, look at the investing in yourself subcategory.

As I sit down to write about the value of investing in your own self-confidence, I keep picturing one of my closest friends. She’s got a lot going for her, but she often finds reasons to think that she’s a bad and/or unworthy person and she often doesn’t have the self-confidence to step up and grab the ring, even though her talents have entitled her to it.

I’m introverted, but I’m very lucky to have never really doubted myself. I’m pretty confident in my own abilities and thoughts and I rarely hesitate to express them. Yet, at times, I fall prey to a lack of self-confidence myself - things move towards a topic that I don’t know anything about, for example.

Here are some tactics to improve your self-confidence no matter what’s happening around you.

Recognize the things that make you feel less confident and work on them.
For most people, there are specific occasions where one’s self-confidence drains to an absolute minimum. You feel completely unworthy of being in a particular situation and you quite often shrink away - or, at the very least, fail to step up when the opportunity is there for you.

Ask yourself why you don’t step up to the plate, and keep asking “why” until you get a concrete answer. What is the root cause of your lack of self-confidence? For a lot of people, it’s something that can usually be dug out with some introspection. For others, it may require some professional help - a therapist, perhaps. The first step, though, is sitting down and thinking about the situation where your self-confidence failed you, then asking “why” over and over again until you hit something concrete.

Take action on that concrete thing that you discovered. Once you’ve found a specific, concrete thing that diminishes your self-confidence, work on improving it. If you’re self-conscious because of your weight, work on improving your diet and exercise. If you’re self-conscious because of your appearance, practice better hygiene and dress better. If you’re self-conscious because you lack knowledge or technical skill, use your spare time to hit the books. Be proactive and know you’re doing what needs to be done to solve the problem.

Identify your successes - and keep them in mind.
At the other end of the spectrum is the success that you’ve experienced in life. These successes are usually the result of an application of your natural abilities - abilities which you have that are quite strong and quite valuable.

Think about the greatest successes you’ve achieved. Make a list of them. What are the five things that you’ve worked for and accomplished that were the greatest successes? Maybe you completed your college education - or maybe you finally passed organic chemistry. Maybe you were given an award at work for persistence and diligence - or maybe you nailed a long-desired promotion. Make this list and keep it with you.

Recognize that these successes were the result of a lot of positive attributes that you possess. The items on that list were the result of talents and skills that you possess. Persistence. Intelligence. Studiousness. See if you can identify a few traits for each one that helped push you over the edge. These are strong attributes that you already have.

Maximize the focus on the things you know you’re good at.
Once you’ve figured out what your traits are that you’re strong in, the next step is to find activities that maximize those strengths. If you’re a patient person, long-term projects are great. If you’re very good at graphic design, gravitate towards those projects. At the same time, try to minimize projects that don’t match well with your strengths - for example, if you’re terrible at organizing papers, look hard for ways to minimize paperwork.

Working on the things you’re good at will not only hone your skills, but it will improve your confidence. You’ll begin to feel that, yes, you can contribute things of value to society and to your workplace. If you continually fuel that feeling, your confidence will begin to slowly build up and even start to spread to areas where you’re not as blessed with natural gifts.

Minimizing the things you’re bad at reduces the impact that negative confidence can have on you. Reducing the negatives can also be a boost to you. For most of us, there are job tasks that we do that make us feel much less confident. Find ways to minimize your exposure to these tasks at the same time that you’re maximizing your exposure to other tasks.

So, take action! Go talk to your supervisor and suggest that you focus more on the tasks that your skills point you towards and less on the ones that your skills don’t support. It won’t take long for you to feel a big new surge of confidence about your place in the workplace. At that point, start tackling some of the tasks that you don’t feel as confident about. You’ll find that you address them with a whole new light.

Surround yourself with people that build you up, not tear you down.
For a period of time in my life, I had a group of friends that were extremely negative about everything. They were critical of everything outside of the group and were often quite negative towards other members of the group as well. I would often enjoy the sarcasm in the moment, but later on, I would generally feel pretty awful about myself. The best thing I’ve probably ever done in my life is to move on from that circle of friends.

If people in your life only seem to bring you down or always seem to express a lot of negativity and bile, create some separation. Reduce your exposure to the negative people in your life. If your current social circle is leaving you feeling negative, withdraw a bit and see if you can find other sources for socialization. I’ve done this multiple times in my own life, actually.

At the same time, if someone in your life is often very positive and fills you with a positive feeling as well, spend more time with that person. My current circle of close friends and family all support me in a positive fashion. They’d do about anything for me and I for them. While my trusted circle isn’t very big, it is very valuable and positive and I attribute a lot of the success I have in life to their constant support.

Stick to your core principles and values.
Many people, at some point in their lives, face a personal dilemma. Do I do what others are suggesting that I do, which involves abandoning some of my principles, or do I make the choice that’s in line with my own values? Almost every time, the choice that involves abandoning your values is the choice that will leave you feeling far worse about yourself and your confidence in the choices you make.

If you’re about to do something that is setting off warning bells and flashing lights for you, strongly reconsider that choice. Just step back for a bit and think about why you’re making that decision. If those reasons are deeply disconcerting to you, don’t go forward with it.

Trust your heart over your mind. I’ve found over and over again in my life that when it comes to the root of a decision, my heart is usually guiding me the right way. My mind serves to clear the path for my heart. For example, when I stood at the precipice of the decision to quit my job, my heart was telling me to leap while my mind said, “No!” I decided to trust my heart, and then I let my mind do as much securing and preparation for that leap as it possibly could. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made, and it filled me with a lot of confidence that it was the right decision once I made it.

If you don’t know, say so.
This is a common self-confidence destroyer: someone will ask a question, you give an answer you’re completely unsure about, and you’re left afterwards feeling as though you did something wrong. At one of my previous jobs, I was in a position where I had to do this regularly, and by the time I finally left, I felt completely worthless.

Think about it from the audience perspective. Saying “I don’t know” is much more clear and confident than delivering a factually incorrect answer. Even if it’s an answer that reveals the limits of your knowledge, it also reveals that you’re committed to accuracy, that you’re honest, and that you’re not going to load someone up with a nonsense answer.

Offer to figure out the correct facts and deliver them later. If someone asks a question and you don’t know, it’s always better to offer to look up the answer and deliver that answer to the person. Not only will it educate you, but it will give you an opportunity to show that you follow through in what you say.

Act confident, even if you’re not.
If all else fails, putting on an appearance of confidence helps you feel more confident. Try the following tips.

Sit up straight in meetings. Don’t look bored - look attentive. Take notes on what’s being said.

Shake hands firmly. Look people in the eye when they talk, but don’t stare at them. Do the same when delivering an answer. Make eye contact with as many people as you can without being obvious about it.

Be assertive in your answers. If you know the answer, just deliver it firmly. If you don’t know, state that you’re unsure but do it firmly.

Most of all, notice when you do things that don’t exude confidence and try to correct them. If you’re slouching, don’t slouch. If you’re getting bored, start writing something down that will engage your mind. If you’re offered a handshake, take it and shake it firmly - if you’re not offered one, offer your hand. These are signs that you are confident - and when people start reacting to you as though you have confidence, your own true confidence will grow.

Since turning in my resignation, things have been absolutely crazy, with my current employers making tons and tons of requests of me, mostly in terms of making preparations for my eventual replacement. One part of this is a trip to the east coast, which I’m about to depart on - probably the last business trip I’ll take until (hopefully) I go on a book tour.

Anyway, here are some interesting articles of note.

The Art of Negotiation: Fifteen Steps to Success Good advice for any situation where you might be negotiating, from a job interview to a raise request to attempting to sell a book deal. (@ dumb little man)

Becoming a Saver When You Like To Spend This isn’t easy, and it’s something that took years of battling for me to get under control. (@ gather little by little)

Decimate Those “Someday” Projects with Triangulation Basically, be proactive. I have a lot of huge goals, but they’ll never happen if I don’t take that first step. (@ life clever)

College at Stanford Is Now Effectively Free. So What’s Your Excuse? I was accepted at several top-tier schools, but I couldn’t afford to go to any of them. Their financial aid packages still left me paying more each year than my parents had ever brought in - and that didn’t include the burden of traveling. I wound up going to a state school. (@ i will teach you to be rich)

What Would You Do If You Knew You Couldn’t Fail? I like this question better than “what would you do if you had a million dollars?” because it eliminates the easy “do nothing at all” answer that a lot of people give. This one actually nails what you’re passionate about. (@ jonathan fields / awake at the wheel)

The Simple Dollar Retro: Making A Major Life Change: Is It Time For Kathy To Abandon The City? A great look at the desire to move from the city to the country.

I Blew $5,000 in Learning How Not to Invest Investing is definitely one of those things that is greatly helped by educating yourself before you jump into the deep end of the pool. (@ generation x finance)

Five Things To Do To (Or For) Your Accountant At Tax Time At least through this year, I do my own taxes - I love the numbers. In future years, though, we’re thinking about using an accountant of some kind. (@ freelance switch)

Reasons for Rise in Mid-Life Suicides I know of at least a few depressed people in their midlife years - I think it’s a realization that a lot of their youthful dreams aren’t going to happen. The comments here are excellent. (@ my open wallet)

Friences and Money: Coping with Social Spending Situations I’ve found that switching to more frugal activities often reveals who your friends are - and who the people who just hang around and do expensive stuff are. (@ get rich slowly)

They Want to Make Money Fast When I was in college, there was a guy in the dorms who tried out every pyramid scheme known to man in an effort to get rich quickly. They all tanked. He would have been better off working on his actual studies. (@ the digerati life)

The Simple Dollar Retro: Should Men And Women Receive Different Personal Finance Advice? This post opened up quite a bit of controversy.

Recently, I discussed the value of investing in yourself - putting time and money into improving you, not building assets. Today, we’ll look at one area of investing in yourself as part of an ongoing series on the topic, spread out once per weekday over two weeks. If you’d like to review all the entries, look at the investing in yourself subcategory.

Just a week ago, I touted the benefits of investing in yourself via exercise, and it met with a lot of interesting discussion, including the astute point that exercise and diet are two halves of the same coin when it comes to managing your short-term and long-term health.

It’s true: the food you eat every day has a profound effect on your long term health. High-calorie and high-fat foods might be convenient now, but that time you save right now is taken away from you at the end of your life as a result of unhealthy eating. Even more so, bad eating reduces the quality of your daily life even now in your healthy years. It’s easy to witness this effect - try eating very healthy for a few days and you’ll notice a significant change in how you feel. I often notice it after just one meal - a very healthy breakfast (oatmeal and/or fresh fruits) makes a huge difference for me.

I’m not talking about dieting for weight loss here - I’m talking about eating well for a lifetime of good health. Such eating usually results in weight loss, especially as you transition to it from less healthy eating, but the best way to invest in yourself with your diet is to eat naturally nutritious foods in a balanced fashion.

But what is a nutritious diet? This concept has been heavily marketed over the last decade or so, often to the point that it’s hard for the average consumer to separate fact from perception. I’ve read a lot of books related to food over the last several years (and I’ve discussed a few on here, including In Defense of Food and Volumetrics) and I’ve found that time and time again, a few basic principles are all you really need to cover your bases for a healthy diet.

Prepare more food at home.
At a restaurant of any kind, you’re relying on the food preparers to make selections for you and their primary interest is providing a tasty meal at a fair cost (with different levels of taste and cost depending on the establishment). Most restaurants aren’t really concerned in the least about the long-term health implications of the food you eat - they’re mostly just concerned that it’s tasty and that it pleases you in the short term.

When you prepare food at home, you have more control over the stuff you put into your body. You can make choices that lead towards a healthier lifestyle. When you make pasta, you can substitute in whole wheat - or even make some of your own. You can choose from a wide variety of spaghetti sauces, or else boil up some tomatoes yourself. You can buy a cheap loaf of bread, an artisan loaf, or make one yourself from just a handful of ingredients (flour, sugar, salt, and yeast).

Here are some tips if you’re afraid to make that leap.

Get a cookbook that focuses on teaching technique with a gentle hand. My favorite cookbook along these lines is Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. If there’s something basic that I’m unfamiliar with, this is the book I turn to for tips on getting started. Better yet, Bittman’s recipes tend to lean toward the healthy side (for the most part) and are quite simple to follow.

At first, focus on simple stuff that you’ll find tasty. Don’t try to make something intriguing but nearly impossible right off the bat. Also, don’t decide that the day you’re going to start cooking at home is the day you’re going vegan. Start off making comfort foods, even if they’re not the most healthy dishes you can make, and choose ones that aren’t overly complex. For me, spaghetti with a tomato sauce is the perfect meal for people just starting to cook at home - it’s very simple to prepare in its basic form, most of the stuff you’ll need is easy to acquire, and when you want to start kicking it up in complexity and healthiness (making sauce or pasta or breadsticks from scratch), the basic form is very adaptable.

Eat more vegetables, especially leafy ones.
Our bodies are designed to eat more fruits and vegetables than meat. This harkens back to our hunter-gatherer days, where our diets would consist of mostly gathered fruits, nuts, and vegetables and an occasional large helping of meat when a hunt would be successful. Millions of years of adaptation attuned our biochemistry to this - only in the last few hundred years has our diet changed significantly from that basic structure.

Eat a wide variety of vegetables and fruits, especially fresh ones. Try everything. You’ll find some you like and some you don’t - that’s okay. Just make sure you’re not eating the same vegetable over and over or it will get boring (and it’s not particularly the most healthy choice, either). You’ll also find some stuff that surprises you - my parents both hated okra and so I never tried it until I was in my mid-twenties, when I discovered that I quite liked it.

Eat at least one salad a day. I really, really enjoy a basic salad (lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, etc.) with a bit of ranch or blue cheese dressing on it. It’s a very healthy thing to eat, very easy to prepare, and not very expensive, either. We eat one as part of our evening meal almost every night and I occasionally eat one as my lunch, too.

Eat a larger portion of vegetables than meat at any given meal. It’s not very fair to give an exact amount for each one because there are so many variables, but you can rarely go wrong with simply making sure there are more vegetables on your plate than there is meat. Keep that as a constant rule of thumb and you’ll be doing fine.

Avoid heavily processed foods.
Again, the logic for this harkens back to the foods that our bodies are biochemically adapted to eat. We’re made to eat the nutrients found in fresh foods, not the ones found in heavily processed foods. Here are a few things to keep your eye out for.

High-fructose corn syrup appears in a lot of foods. It’s a sugar substitute in many industrial foods because it’s cheaper, easy to blend, and leads to a long shelf life. Because of these properties, HFCS appears in abundance in expected foods and even pops up in significant quantities in food you wouldn’t expect. The consequence of this is that it raises your sweetener intake significantly - and increased sugar intake is not a good thing. You’re far better off just sticking with naturally-occurring sugars - if you need a sugar fix, eat an orange or a banana and avoid foods with HFCS.

Startling health claims are usually a sure sign that a food has been significantly altered in an industrial process, quite often with additives of some sort that are very hard to figure out from the label. Don’t buy a processed food because it has plant sterols added to it - just go eat a vegetable instead.

A large number of ingredients that you can’t easily identify is another sign of serious processing. Again, staple foods have all of the nutritional value that a person needs, so why would you consume this stuff, especially if you don’t know what it is? When you buy a food, check the ingredients label and if you start seeing a lot of stuff you don’t know, reconsider putting it into your body unless you’ve done the research on this stuff.

Buy foods from people who care about food quality.
The best way to buy food is to buy it from other people: people you can talk to and can tell you how it was made or grown or produced. Around here, I’m a big fan of the local Picket Fences Creamery. They’re local, give public tours pretty much whenever you want, maintain a blog, have “Sample Sundays” where you can stop by and try lots of the things they make, and generally wear their passion for what they do on their sleeve. They make a quality product out in the open that I can witness and know what goes into the food.

Buy local. Whenever you have a chance, buy your food from a local source, particularly one where you can literally visit the place where the food came from and follow it every step along the way. This way, you know exactly what’s in that food. You can carry that even further and have a garden yourself.

Attend a farmer’s market. I love our local farmers market - I get a lot of produce there during the right season and I’ve even considered selling something there a few times. Here are some tips for newcomers - the best advice I can give is to just go, see what’s there, and talk to people. You might even consider getting involved in a co-op, where you pay for a share of a farm and in exchange they deliver vegetables to you on a regular basis.

Set time aside for meals if at all possible, and avoid eating on the run.
One of the true highlights of my day is dinner with my family. We all sit around the dinner table - even my six month old daughter in her high chair - and we eat together with conversation. My wife and I talk about politics and current events, my son tells us about his day’s adventures at daycare (usually involving a blue truck), and my daughter usually passes around a lot of smiles and gurgles at everyone.

Taking the time to devote to food is not only spiritually fulfilling, but it can be beneficial to your diet as well.

Never eat alone. Dinner conversation is the single best way to keep you from bolting down your food. Get engaged in the conversation and eat the meal slowly - you’ll find yourself enjoying the food more and not eating as much of it.

If you must eat on the road, avoid places where they bring the food directly to your car. It’s a pretty safe rule of thumb that food preparation that is put directly into your car is probably not the healthiest choice to make. If you do have to eat on the run, bring something from home or stop at a grocery store to get something remotely healthy. A drive-thru is a dangerous place for your health, no matter how yummy it is.

In a nutshell, I think Michael Pollan nails it when he says “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Live by that and you’ll be all right.

As I’ve mentioned many times before, all of my taxable investing, as well as my Roth IRA, is done directly through Vanguard.

I use Vanguard because I trust them - they’re a nonprofit that has a stellar long-term record and their index fund investment options are quite strong. I’m not alone in feeling this way - for example, Paul Farrell, in his book The Lazy Person’s Guide to Investing (read my review) states the following on page 167 of the paperback:

Specifically, Vanguard’s no-load index funds hav become the benchmark and the standard against which every other fund, index or active, and all fund families are measured. They are the proverbial pain in the [rear] for the vast majority of their competition in the mutual fund industry.

… and that’s after the quote from the other day where Farrell said “Bottom line: if you want predictable performance, pick cheap funds. That means no-load index funds.”

In a nutshell, if you’re looking for a place to sock away your money for the long term (more than five years, at least), Vanguard is a great place to put it.

There’s only one problem: most of the funds that Vanguard offers have a $3,000 minimum for investing. For a lot of people just getting started, that’s a hard minimum investment to swallow. A lot of people want to get started with just $50 a month or so - with that amount, it’d take 60 months - five years - to build up the minimum just to buy in. That’s a long wait.

So what are the options? Let’s look at a few of them.

Save up the cash in a savings account. This is the method I used when saving up for my first fund purchase. Since I use ING Direct for my primary checking and savings, I just set up a sub-account specifically for that purpose, then I set up an automatic transfer of a small amount into that account each week. Then I just sat back and waited, using the interest on that account as a bit of wind in my sails.

The “save up cash in a savings account” option has the advantage that your money will slowly grow over time as you save towards the goal - it’s not at risk at all.

Invest in another fund. There are similar index funds to the Vanguard offerings sold by other investment houses, often with lower minimum investments required. However, in almost every case, these funds have a higher expense ratio - meaning that the investment house skims more off the top for the investment. For example, the Vanguard 500 (VFINX), which matches the stocks held in the S&P 500, has an expense ratio of 0.18% - over the course of a year, for every $1,000 you have in that fund, Vanguard uses $1.80 for the expense of managing the fund. Many other similar funds to the Vanguard 500 at other houses have expense ratios at 0.5% or above - for every $1,000 in that fund, the company uses $5 for fund management.

While there are deals out there if you dig for them (and I’m pretty much expecting someone to find a fund with a competitive expense ratio and then comment about it), Vanguard’s funds are easy because they’re so consistent across the board. They’re always among the cheapest.

Buy an ETF through a brokerage. Another popular option is to just buy a very similar ETF through a brokerage. For those unaware, an ETF is an exchange traded fund - basically, it functions like a single stock that matches the value of a particular index. A specific exaple is the Spider ETF, which matches the S&P 500 in much the same way that the Vanguard 500 does.

There are some big benefits to this. You only have to match whatever minimums your brokerage sets out for you, and these are usually quite low. Their expense ratio is usually very low - Spider’s expenses are lower than the Vanguard 500. Plus, if you use a fee-free brokerage like Zecco, you don’t have to pay any commissions on buying and selling.

However, in the end, they’re still not the best deal, as pointed out by this Forbes article. For starters, ETFs hold onto your dividends for quite a while, whereas funds pay out dividends quite quickly. There can be as much as a three month difference between the two, and if you’re reinvesting, that alone can easily make up the tiny difference in expense ratios. Plus, when you buy in, you effectively have to pay a small premium on the value (the bid-ask spread) in order to find someone selling that ETF - for Spider, this is usually around 0.07%. If you’re using a brokerage that charges fees, that’s another extra cost - investing directly with Vanguard doesn’t cost a dime. These make up the difference and more, making ETFs a slightly worse deal than investing directly in funds.

My recommendation? Set up a savings account and start saving your nickels and dimes. With a little patience, you’ll be there in no time and then you can buy into an excellent fund.