Jenelle wrote in recently and described her way of using credit cards:

Unlike your advice to minimize your credit cards, I actually have eight open credit cards that I use all the time. These cards cover all of my purchases but each one has a particular bonus program that I can take specific advantage of. Twice a month, I just log onto the online service for each card and pay each one off in full.

In essence, Janelle is describing having a portfolio of credit cards, enabling you to use the one with a very high reward benefit with every purchase. In some ways, this plan does make a lot of sense, but there are some severe drawbacks as well. The trick is finding a routine that works for you. Let’s take a closer look.

My Would-Be “Credit Card Portfolio”
In order to figure out what this situation would look like for me, I went through all of my spending over the last month and figured out several general areas of spending, mostly based on where I spent the money. From there, I started looking for credit cards that specifically lined up with those areas.

Gas expenses (21% of spending) could be shaved big time if I focused exclusively on one gas station. For instance, the BP Card earns 5% cash back on all purchases at BP, so if you use that as your exclusive station, you’ve got an immediate 5% rebate on all of you gas spending.

Other automotive expenses (5% of spending) could be covered by the Discover Open Road card, which gives a 5% cash back bonus on all automotive expenses.

Online shopping (21% of spending) allows you to use something like the Amazon.com Visa, which gives you 3% in rebates for all purchases at Amazon.com, which works well for us since we buy bulk items there, among other things.

Department store shopping (14% of spending) almost always offers a decent rewards card for in-store shopping. Since we mostly shop at Target (a Super Target is the nearest department store to us), we can get a card there that gives us a 10% off coupon for an entire shopping trip for every $500 run through the card. If you shop there spending $100 every trip, saving up big purchases to spend $300 when you have a 10% off coupon (saving $30), that means you save $30 on every $500 in purchases, or about 6% back.

Grocery store shopping (29% of spending) and other purchases (11% of spending) would perhaps best be covered by the American Express Blue Cash card, which offers 1% cash back up to $6,500 worth of spending, then 5% cash back on all purchases after that. If you spent $12,000 on the card in a year (by running some of your bills through it, for example, and doing all of your grocery store shopping with it), for instance, you’d wind up with an effective rate of about 3% over the course of a year.

So let’s say I spent $1,500 a month through these cards at the percentages described. On the gas card, I would spend $315 and earn $15.75 in cash rebates. On the other automotive card, I’d spend $75 and earn $3.75 cash back. On the Amazon Visa, I’d spend $315 and earn $9.45 in rebates. With the Target Visa, I’d spend $210 and get $12.60 back. On the remaining card, I’d spend $600 and earn $18 back. All told, my returns would be $56.55 over that month on spending of $1,500 - that’s approaching a 4% return on the spending. For my life, at least, it would work pretty well, at least at first glance.

Dangers and Drawbacks
As with anything involving credit cards, there are a lot of dangers and drawbacks to this plan. As I said before when commenting on the credit card “holy wars”:

look at credit cards as being like a very dangerous power tool. If you’re careful and take the proper precautions, they can save you time and shower some rewards on you as well. On the other hand, if you use credit cards with reckless abandon, you run the serious risk of some intense financial damage to yourself.

Using this “credit card portfolio” idea amplifies the above statement. A 4% return across all of your spending is nice, but it’s fraught with complications and potential traps.

There’s more maintenance effort. Having several cards with active balances on them means more footwork. As Jenelle described, she puts in significant time just maintaining the cards, going through a session twice a month where she logs onto eight different online accounts. Not only that, you then have eight accounts sending you all sorts of stuff in the mail - and you do get stuff, even if you opt out. Even if this whole process only added up to an hour each month, it’d still only net me a little bit more than the straight 3% I get from my current card use - is that extra hour of online busywork worth $14 or so? It isn’t for me.

There’s a greater risk of identity theft. Using this plan means you have more open lines of credit, which means a slightly increased risk of identity theft. If you have several cards, after all, it’s easier to lose one and not notice it for a while. If you have several numbers out there, it’s easier for one of them to be nabbed.

One mistake undoes the benefits. If you’re late even once on just one of these cards, you’ll undo the benefits you gained. In other words, to excel beyond just using one or two cards, you have to be eternally vigilant.

Having a lot of credit cards can make it psychologically easier to buy unnecessary stuff. “But I can get 4% cash back if I buy it” is not a reason that should be ringing through your head when considering a purchase. Instead, ask yourself whether the purchase is really worthwhile at all - ignore any “benefit” from the card.

Having a lot of credit cards with low balances and high credit limits can be bad for your credit score. Sure, your debt-to-credit ratio is low, but 10% of your credit score involves the types of credit you have access to and use, and having a lot of revolving credit is not a good thing.

Overall, there are too many drawbacks to such a plan to make it worthwhile for me. I’m not going to invest the time or energy to do that much card-hopping and account maintenance to just get an extra percent back on my purchases. I’ll stick with my original simple plan, I think.

Two things worth noting that are somewhat interconnected.

First, last Saturday I was on Darla Shine’s nationally syndicated Happy Housewives radio program - you can catch the old episode in podcast form Darla’s podcast feed, and I’m on the April 26, 2008 edition smack in the middle of the show. It was a lot of fun - well, more than anything, it helped me break through my radio nervousness - and I got to spread around some good money-saving advice to listeners on several hundred radio stations.

Second, and somewhat connected to this, I’ve begun to use Twitter to let people know about things like the radio appearance and also little random thoughts and interesting URLs I find throughout the day. If you’re interested, take a peek at my recent twitters and keep it bookmarked - I added a link to it on the main site’s sidebar so you can jump in on it in the future. If you’re a regular Twitter user, by all means follow me - I tend not to fill mine up with much blather.

Anyway, unless something truly big happens, I’ll announce any radio or television or public speaking engagements from now on via Twitter. That way, if you happen to be nearby or have a radio or television handy, you can tune in or even meet up with me.

Here are some articles of interest from the last week.

Series I Bonds Look Attractive Right Now Want to know how to get a 6% return on your cash right now? Buy some Series I savings bonds. If you buy right now, the fixed rate is 1.2% which, coupled with the upcoming increase in inflation numbers, will give Series I bonds an estimated return of 6.06% return annually. For a bond issued by the federal government, which is about as safe as can be, that’s a sweet return. (@ blueprint for financial prosperity)

How to Be a Good Partner to a Stay-At-Home Spouse Some of these apply to a spouse working from home as well, which is what our situation more or less is. For example, I usually stop working for about half an hour before my wife gets home so that when she comes in the door (often with kids in tow), I’m in “parenting” mode and she can go decompress for a while (usually in on the couch feeding our infant daughter). Find a routine that works for both of you and talk about anything that makes either one of you uncomfortable. (@ brip blap)

25 Great Coupon Tricks That Can Cut Your Grocery Bill By 80% This is a really strong collection of tips that add up to a huge amount of grocery savings. My favorite is matching the high-dollar coupon with the cheapest version of the item. For a long time, my wife and I were getting Luvs diapers almost for free by doing this - we found their smallest packs on sale for $4.39 and had a bunch of $3 off coupons, so we just kept hitting that sale day in and day out. (@ the digerati life)

Recycling Jeans: Things to Do with Denim When It’s Dead I tend to wear jeans into oblivion by yanking out really ratty pairs for yard work and such, but these are still good tips. (@ personal finance advice)

Allowance Versus Commissions for Kids My parents tried a commissions-based system for me for a while. I was smart when negotiating - I got them to list about fifty tasks that were optional that paid a specific commission. Then I went obsessive for a week, did a whole ton of stuff, and got my parents to keep initialing. At the end of the week, I was due $36 in commissions. I got the cash, but the commissions plan went out the window. (@ frugal dad)

Enabling the Perpetually Poor This is something of a follow-up to last week’s article about the language that some people use as an excuse to not become self-reliant. Often, they reach this point because they were enabled - people “helped” them along the way by giving them undue assistance, and when that crutch isn’t there, they blame “the man.” (@ gather little by little)

Maybe Higher Food Prices Are Actually Good For Us as a Society If the fear of financial meltdown pushes people towards this kind of behavior instead of fear-based food shopping, then it really can be helpful. (@ generation x finance)

This is the thirteenth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the first portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 141 until the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” on page 153.

If the rest of the book wasn’t troubling enough, this chapter basically took it over the line. After reading it, I wanted to march downstairs, toss out every toy with a licensed character on it, and pitch the television out in the dumpster.

Chapter eight of Born to Buy describes the results of an extensive survey on the connections between children, media, consumer culture, and physical, emotional, and psychological well-being. The results are pretty disheartening, to say the least - there’s a direct correlation between media exposure and obesity, media exposure and antisocial behavior, media exposure and violent behavior, and media exposure and mental health issues.

Needless to say, this chapter was very intense for me. There were many specific aspects described here that reminded me of my childhood in many different ways, and I attribute most of those remembered experiences to setting the groundwork for my own rampant consumerism and subsequent financial meltdown. Let’s dig in to some of the more interesting - and troubling - specifics.

A Look at Some Specific Results from the Survey
As Schor describes on page 144:

The Survey on Children, Media, and Consumer Culture has now been taken by 300 children between the ages of ten and thirteen, in and around Boston, Massachusetts. These children come from varied socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, and span the spectrum from avid spenders and TV watchers to kids who are mostly isolated from commercial culture. Three hundred may sound like a small number in comparison to national polls, which typically start at a thousand, but within the psychological literature that are most closely related to this study, 300 children is actually a large sample size. Most important, it’s far bigger than is needed to establish statistical reliability and confidence in the findings.

In other words, this data holds up to scientific rigor. I went through a few of the references and Schor’s survey here is spot-on - it’s good science.

So what kinds of questions and answers were given? Schor provides a long list of questions and responses on pages 149 to 151. One result, however, really surprised me: 88.0% of surveyed children either agree or strongly agree that when they go somewhere special, they usually like to buy something.

In other words, a special event revolves around the acquisition of material goods for more than seven out of eight children. Somehow, that makes me really sad inside.

Another aspect of the survey I found disturbing is that a large portion of the children consistently believed that the brand of a product was directly connected to the quality of it - perception above reality. These are children aged ten to thirteen years old, and the majority of them are already convinced that two identical tee shirts can be distinguished in terms of quality if one of them says abercrombie and fitch on it.

The pervasive consumer culture is real, and it is altering how children perceive the world. The next piece of the chapter looks at the effects of that alteration.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the next portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 153 at the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” and continuing until the subheading “Statistical Result: Consumer Involvement Undermines Children’s Well-Being” on page 167.

One of my most loyal readers, a person named Brad who first emailed me about The Simple Dollar about a week after it launched, sent me an email this week that really struck a chord with me. Here’s the key part.

Ever since I was a little kid, all I’ve wanted to do was play professional golf. I can’t dream of a better life than playing golf for a living, or even working in some way professionally in a way connected to golf.

Right now I work in an office and the closest I get to this is playing a couple of rounds each weekend. During the week, I’m too busy to hit the greens.

This makes me depressed. I hear you talking about reaching your dreams and I’m happy for you, but then I look around my office and I see mine slipping away and I get sad.

All right, a confession.

I fail at writing. A lot.

I’ve been writing in my personal journal every single day since 1991. When I started digging into my writing passion (writing in a little leatherbound journal my grandmother got me for Christmas 1990 when I was only twelve years old), I read that one should write at least 1,000 words each day. So I have. Since January 1991. Every. Single. Day. At this point, I’ve been writing 1,000 or more words a day for the majority of my life - and it’s usually more words. Way more.

In high school, I entered essay competitions and other contests and did middling at best. I probably would have given up then, feeling much the same way our friend here feels like giving up, if it hadn’t been for the constant and often subtle encouragement by my high school English teacher. Randy, if you’re out there reading this, I wouldn’t be writing for a living right now if it wasn’t for you.

I kept it up in college and in my early professional life. I wrote two full novels and a pile of short stories. I had a few glimmers of success with it, even going so far as to get what I considered to be a very strong bite from a publisher in 2003, but most of it was a pile of rejection letters. Failure, over and over again.

I kept writing. Why? I loved it. I still love it with every ounce of my being. I love writing short stories. I love writing essays. I love making words flow together. I love how they transfer meaning to someone else, to people I’ve never met and will likely never meet.

Finally, after seventeen years of this, I’m finally seeing a little bit of success with writing. Why is this happening? There are a lot of reasons: I intentionally write very conversationally, which works well on the internet; I’m writing about a topic that’s near to people’s hearts; and I have a lot of great readers who help me out and inspire me over and over again.

There’s another piece, too. I practice. I’ve written and edited so many things over the years that now the actual art of taking an idea and turning it into a written piece fits on me like a familiar glove. It’s only because of that familiarity that I’m able to write so much for The Simple Dollar - two original columns a day - plus freelance stuff elsewhere. Because of that practice, I am now pretty fast at brainstorming, separating the bad ideas from the good, organizing a good idea into a series of logical points, and fleshing out those points into a written piece.

Great. But that doesn’t help me with my dream.
But it does! There are a ton of lessons in that story that can help anyone with any dream that they want to achieve. Let’s walk through them and see how they fit into my story, into Brad’s story … and into your story as well.

Passion.
Every single morning, when I wake up and lift my feet out of bed, two things cross my mind. The first one usually is a thought related to my wife and my kids - my immediate focus is on getting everyone up, getting them dressed, making sure they’ve eaten something nutritious, and getting them started on their day.

The second thought, though, always revolves around writing. I think about crafting sentences and pulling together ideas. I think about the written word in all of its varieties.

I yearn to write. There are times when I am almost magnetically pulled to a keyboard or to a pad of paper - there’s an idea floating in my head and I have to start recording it.

That’s what passion is. It’s the things in your life that you’re drawn to over and over again. It’s the things that you can scarcely go a day without doing - or at least wanting to.

Brad’s golfing is a perfect example. Every day when he goes home, he yearns to golf and it tears him up not to be able to act on that passion. He has that first piece in hand - he knows dead-on what he’s passionate about.

I have another friend who is incredibly passionate about chess. His home is littered with chess boards, magazines, and books. I finally saw how deep his passion went when I discovered a chess set in his bathroom so he could work through problems while doing his business.

What if you don’t know what you’re passionate about. Not long ago, I listed in great detail seven steps to finding what you’re truly passionate about. Here they are in a nutshell (but that whole article is well worth reading):

1. Maximize your health
2. Ask questions
3. Ignore what’s “cool”
4. Dabble in everything
5. When something piques your interest, try it again - and again
6. Associate with people who share this burgeoning interest of yours
7. Don’t keep pushing it if the passion dries up quickly

Keep doing those steps and you’ll find your passion - or it will find you.

Practice.
I like watching basketball players practice. I’ve watched bad coaches lead practices, mediocre coaches lead practices, and good coaches lead practice.

At first, I thought that basketball practice was about intense scrimmages. I thought that the best way to coach would be to have your team run complete plays over and over again with the coach pointing out flaws and correcting them. In essence, I thought practice would be much like a game with the coach shouting instructions.

Wrong.

The best basketball team I’ve ever seen would have two and a half hour practices - and only scrimmage for ten minutes or so at the very end. Most of the practice was filled with very repetitive drills. They’d sprint from one end of the court to the other to do a layup. They’d run the same exact screen a hundred times. They’d all shoot fifty free throws. They’d do endurance sprints. In other words, the intense part of their practices were nothing like playing a game of basketball - they were instead a bunch of focused little pieces on specific attributes of playing basketball.

I got the opportunity to ask the coach why this was and he made it very simple: these kids would play basketball for fun all the time anyway, so scrimmages were kind of a waste of time. Instead, it was much more important to work on very specific fundamentals.

In other words, practice isn’t just about doing something over and over again. It’s about focusing in on very specific elements and techniques, hammering them in over and over again, and then seeking out feedback on that technique.

Not long ago on the New York Times Freakonomics blog, Stephen Dubner wrote about the value of using deliberate practice to make oneself very good at a particular skill. He broke such practice down into three pieces:

1. Focus on technique as opposed to outcome.
2. Set specific goals.
3. Get good, prompt feedback, and use it.

When writing, I do this by writing on a bunch of different topics. I write articles and guest postings on all sorts of topics. I write short stories. I try mixing up what I do and taking on new things. In order to get feedback on this stuff, I post it online in various places - sometimes as guest posts on blogs, sometimes on community sites where I’ll get comments. This lets me know pretty quickly whether I’m writing well - or I need to work on something.

Alternately, I’ll just take one little piece of a post for The Simple Dollar and polish it, honing a truly great paragraph. This moves me from working on just content creation into working on editing, another piece of the writer’s toolkit.

With my golfing friend, instead of going home each night and lamenting that he doesn’t have the time or cash to go golfing, he should go to a park or a field somewhere where there is a lot of open grass and practice specific shots. Lay a hula hoop on the ground, then back away fifty yards and practice hitting chip shots into that hula hoop for an hour nonstop. Do that every night and your chip shots will get better and better.

The key here is to not “practice” the whole of what you’re doing. The key is to practice specific elements. Focus wholly on the areas where you’re weakest and drill in on them. Do some intense work on just one specific element of what you’re trying to accomplish.

After that, have fun and notice how that practice helped you become more complete in the area you’re passionate about.

Persistence.
Many people know what their passion is and how to practice to get better, but they are content with merely doing so every once in a while. They sit back and get complacent with what they know, only practicing every once in a while for a specific purpose.

For some, that’s enough. My mother-in-law is a very good piano player who can play stunningly well by ear; she also knows quite well how to practice to go from being very good to great. But the persistence isn’t there - she doesn’t sit down at the piano and practice chords over and over again or try banging through highly complex pieces or try mastering some of the more common techniques through repetition.

Persistence is the repetition of practice, and if anything, it’s the most important P. The gap that separates the very good from the great is the repetition of deliberate practice and the ability to keep at it no matter what.

It’s easy to echo countless stories and anecdotes about this. I like the story about Abraham Lincoln - during his adult life he was fired from his job, failed as an independent businessman, had a nervous breakdown, lost elections to the state legislature, state Speaker of the House, the House of Representatives, the Senate, the Senate again, and the Vice Presidency before finally becoming President. There were countless times he should have or could have quit, but he didn’t, and by persisting, he made an indelible mark on history.

I write thirteen articles for The Simple Dollar every single week. I’ve written at least 1,000 words every day for seventeen years. Sometimes, I won’t write anything at all that sets anyone on fire. At other times, I’ll write so much good stuff that it’s running out of my ears. But I don’t give up on those bad weeks - I keep at it because I know that when I stop being persistent about it, that’s when things will start to fall apart.

In Brad’s situation, he needs to stop by the park and practice some aspect of his game every single night. By making it an essential part of his day, something he must do without fail, he will put in the huge number of hours he needs to get better.

You know what your passion is. You know what you need to do to get better. Set aside some time right now to get better, every single day. It’s a tough choice, but it’s the one you need to make to pull your dreams closer one baby step at a time.

Patience.
About once a week, I’ll get an email from a disheartened writer. They read The Simple Dollar, thought that they could do the same, then sat down to crank out their own blog. The desire to write burned inside of them, they knew exactly what needed to be done to develop and produce good articles, and they understood the need to write every single day.

What they found out is that after two or three months, their site still only received a handful of visitors. They’d write to me wondering what was wrong, expressing some serious disillusionment. Usually, it didn’t matter what I wrote back to them - they’d usually abandon blogging, often with the sense that it was a scam or something or that the system was rigged against them.

There is no scam. They lacked patience.

Take Brad’s golfing passion, for example. Let’s imagine Brad gets the memo and starts practicing every day at the park for an hour. He practices his chip shots, his putts, and even his iron play from the rough. He hits the same shots over and over again and begins to get a real feel for his game.

Then he goes out on the course and hits an 88. He’s devastated. That was the same score he shot before he even started practicing! He tosses this stupid practice thing in the dumpster and gives up.

Patience, Brad. Look at Tiger Woods. He’s the best golfer in the world and can hit below 70 with stunning regularity, but even he hits a 74 every once in a while. The last time you shot an 88, it was on a day where you were naturally playing a bit above average. Now, when you shoot an 88, it’s an average day. All of that practice managed to shave a consistent stroke or two off of your score, but you’re judging that progress based on one round - and that’s not nearly enough.

In my own life, I went through periods where I was ready to give up the writing dream. I’d write every day, but I’d feel like I was, if anything, getting worse as a writer. I’d see no success in getting anything published - all I’d see were rejections. It often took everything I had to keep going, but I knew that if I stopped, the dream I had of being a writer would never happen. So I kept plugging away.

A while back, I noted nine techniques for developing patience:

Figure out what your actual destination is.
Make a “Plan B,” too.
Take the other side’s perspective.
Break down big goals into tiny ones.
Wait. Just a little.
Recognize that there are some things that you simply can’t control.
Think about the things that make you react on impulse.
Recognize when you do act on impulse.
Forget the results, enjoy the process.

Whenever you feel like you’re about to give up on your dreams even after investing a lot of passion and effort into them, look at these techniques. After all, all you need is just a little patience.

Participation.
Passion, practice, persistence, and patience will make you very, very good at something, but true greatness requires even more. It requires learning from others and also sharing what you know.

Every truly great person got there by participating in a wider community. They either brought something to the table that hadn’t existed before or helped someone else stand on the shoulders of giants. They changed the game, not just for themselves, but for others as well.

For me, this means interacting with other writers. It means participating in interviews. It means mentoring new bloggers. It means sharing what I know freely and also learning what others can teach me along the way.

For Brad, the possibilities of participation are nearly endless. He can teach others how to play golf. He can participate in community events, like organizing charity tournaments at the local public golf course. He can get kids interested in the game he cares so much about. He can use his passion and practice and persistence and patience as tools to not only make himself better, but bring something of value into the lives of others as well.

Don’t know where to start? You can begin by participating in general community events and meeting as many people as you can. You’d be shocked how many opportunities there are to share your passions with others, and from there the word can only spread outward.

It is only through that kind of participation that doors will open and you’ll be able to truly live your dream. Your passion, your improved skills, and your desire to share what you have with the world will make you stand out, and when things fall into place and the right opportunity comes around, you’ll be ready and waiting.

Starting on a Big Dream Right Now
Those five elements are all you need to start in on your dream right now.

Passion. Find it and know it.
Practice. Break your passion down into pieces and deliberately work on the elements.
Persistence. Practice as much as you can on an extremely regular basis, like clockwork.
Patience. Don’t expect to be great in a day, a month, or even a year.
Participation. Find new ways to get involved and share what you know.

Today, my friend, is a great day to get started.

Many thanks to Images of American Political History for helping me find public domain images for this post. For those curious, Passion was represented by Thomas Paine, Practice was represented by Benjamin Franklin, Persistence was represented by Douglas MacArthur, Patience was represented by Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Participation was represented by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The life stories of all of these people taught me valuable lessons about achieving my dreams.

There was a fascinating article yesterday in the New York Times entitled Recession Diet Just One Way to Tighten Belt, which looked directly at the real-world ways consumers alter their spending at the retail level. In other words, the authors, Michael Barbaro and Eric Dash, actually went to a supermarket to watch and learn how spending was changing because of recession fears. A few elements really stood out to me.

Buying the Cheap Stuff

At Save-A-Lot, a discount grocery store in Cleveland, Teresa Rutherford, 51, chided her sister-in-law, Donna Dunaway, 44, for picking up a package of Sara Lee honey ham (eight ounces for $2.49).

“We can’t afford that!” she said. “Get the cheap stuff.” They settled on a 16-ounce package of Deli Pleasures ham for $3.29, or 34 percent less an ounce.

Here, Teresa is clearly advocating buying a cheaper type of cold cut ham, presumably for sandwiches. Yet I’m left with a biting question here: what’s really behind this switch from the high-end ham to the middle-of-the-road ham?

Clearly, the belief here is that price is directly related to quality, and because of that, many people when in corner-cutting mode will simply settle on a cheaper version of the product they’re already buying when they see it on store shelves rather than asking more fundamental questions. To me, this is the equivalent of buying a new GM car instead of a new Lexus without even looking at the late model used options - it’s settling on a mediocre option because you’ve already self-limited your options.

Cutting corners by just buying the slightly less expensive version of the same item isn’t really cutting corners at all. In the book Predictably Irrational (which I enjoyed and reviewed a while back), Dan Ariely (the Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT) dug into this phenomenon repeatedly from different angles.

Relativity Ariely argues on page 4 of his book that when people make buying decisions, they are looking for information, and in most buying situations, the easiest available information is the sticker price. They want guidance, so they use the highest price and the lowest price as “runway lights,” guiding them into a safe place in the middle where they feel like they’re not spending too much, but not buying something cheap, either. Teresa in the ham-buying example is using these runway lights - the high-end ham is too expensive, but she doesn’t go for the low-end Carl Buddig ham for less than $2 a pound, either.

Obviously, marketers are aware of this and thus price accordingly. They want to ensure not that those middle prices are a good deal, but that the fattest profit margins are connected to the item that sells the most. Thus, quite often the items in the middle tiers at a grocery store are the worst bang for the buck you can buy - they’ve got the highest profit margin for the store.

Anchoring Similarly, people often judge what a “fair” price is based on the first price that they ever associate to a given product - that becomes the anchor price for all future buying decisions and an anchor price is very difficult to do away with, as Ariely describes on page 30.

In this ham-buying example, Teresa and Donna likely have different anchor prices for ham in general, but they also might not be anchoring on the same item, either, and this is probably likely given how different they thought the acceptable price for ham was at the beginning. One person’s definition of acceptable ham is different from another’s, so Teresa might go home and find the cheap ham to be completely unacceptable. The best solution would have been to buy a small amount of the cheaper ham and a regular amount of the usual ham and actually find out whether the cheaper one is acceptable.

My question is why is $3.29 a pound ham a necessary purchase at all? If you’re truly being frugal with your money and didn’t necessarily put a premium on the quality of your ham (which, if you’re willing to compromise while standing at the store shelf, is likely a given), why not try the lowest-end ham and work up from there? Or, even better, drop the ham entirely and eat leftovers for lunch?

Another quote from the story really shook me:

Ms. Dunaway, a homemaker, used to splurge on the ingredients for homemade lasagna, her husband’s favorite, before food prices began to surge this year.

“Now he’s lucky to get a 99-cent lasagna TV dinner, or maybe some Manwich out of a can,” she said. “I just can’t afford to be buying all that good meat and cheese like I used to.”

Ms. Dunaway was willing to make homemade lasagna, which means that food preparation time isn’t that big of a deal - she has ample time to prepare meals. Yet she’s replaced this with a 99 cent lasagna TV dinner or some Manwich out of a can? That’s cutting corners in the short run, but adding a lot of cost over the long run due to the consequences of an unhealthy diet.

The problem is clear - when the economy is bad, people cut corners, but cutting corners on food not only often undermines what you’re trying to accomplish, but can have bad long-term consequences for your health.

The Solution: A Cheap and Healthy Diet
If you want to “cut corners” when buying food, don’t turn to the junk food aisle and don’t “settle” for middle-of-the-road inferior versions of other foods, either. Instead, make a sensible plan and stick to it. Here’s what you do.

Use your grocery flyer. Each week, grab a flyer for the upcoming week at the grocery store. Look at what fresh produce, fresh meats, and healthy staple foods are on sale in the upcoming week.

Make a meal plan. Using those items, figure out what meals you’re going to eat over the next week. Focus on simple stuff that you know how to make and tasty stuff that you know you’ll be interested in eating.

Focus on inexpensive staple foods. If you’re looking for foods to supplement what you have, look at inexpensive staple foods, especially anything that can be bought in large quantities and stored. Beans come to mind - a pound of dried beans can be purchased very cheaply, provide a lot of nutrition and protein, and can go a very long way.

If you make frugal choices to begin with, you can choose the high-quality version of that item. For example, once you’ve made the decision to give beans a serious try in your diet, you can choose organic beans or fresh herbs and spices to give them a rich flavor. Choices like these are quite frugal - you’ve already made a great cost-saving choice by going with beans and flavoring them up the way you like them best is a great way to keep yourself eating them.

Avoid the junk temptation - it’s cheap and tasty now, but has long term consequences. For most people, it’s a lot easier for the moment to just say, “Why bother?” and head down the junk and prepackaged food aisle for some easily prepared and rather tasty meals. Resist that temptation at all costs. Stick with staple foods and fresh foods - you’ll be much better off over the long haul.

Use a grocery list. Once you know what you’re eating, make out a grocery list containing exactly what you need for the coming week - and only what you need. When you get to the store, only put stuff in your cart that appears on the list. Do that and you’ll be in great shape at the checkout aisle.

Use what you learn - and don’t lie to yourself. Many people give this a sincere try and wind up preparing foods that they frankly don’t like too much. If you don’t like a dish, don’t blame the process - blame the dish. Just simply note that you didn’t like it and try something different. Many people give up on an ingredient or a process simply because they didn’t like the first permutation. You know what? It’s the anchoring problem from earlier in the article all over again.

Make meals in advance. If you find something really tasty on sale, make a bunch of meals with that food, freeze them, and enjoy them later. That way, you don’t just get to enjoy the benefits of the sale now, but for as long as the meals last in your freezer.

Afraid to cook? Many people are trying to cut back right now, but don’t have the basic kitchen skills needed to make things work. My suggestion is to head down to your local library and pick up Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. Make some very simple recipes using some very simple ingredients. Learn a little bit at a time. Pay attention to what you like that also happens to be healthy (for me, tomatoes and onions and garlic are right up on that list, for instance). Use those in abundance, especially when they’re on sale.

Each Monday, The Simple Dollar opens up the reader mailbags and answers ten to twenty simple questions offered up by the readers on personal finance topics and many other things. Got a question? Ask it in the comments. You might also enjoy the archive of earlier reader mailbags.

As usual, we’ll start things off with a few links to older articles that directly answer questions I’ve heard recently.
How to set up multiple savings accounts from within ING Direct
A book you should read before talking to your family about money
Personal finance explained on five business cards

And now for some great reader questions!

You say that Lost is the only [television] show you watch. Do you not have cable? Is your TV digital-ready?
- Jeff

This question more or less follows up on this article about financial reasons to turn off your television, where I mentioned that we watch very little television at all.

My family has one television in the home, in the family room in the basement. Most days, it never turns on - the majority of the days when it is on, it’s used for playing games on the Wii or, about once a week, watching a DVD. The only time we turn it on other than that is in the evening when we’re doing mindless tasks like folding laundry, when there’s a major news event (and we cycle through the news networks), or when Lost is on. That’s it.

When the children are awake and in the house, the television basically never turns on unless it’s by request to watch one of several DVDs that our son has received as gifts over the last year or so. With the weather being nice, he hasn’t requested watching one in weeks.

We’ve seriously contemplated having the cable taken out because of how little we use it, but we have the cable in a package deal with internet and telephony and our bill would only go down $10 if we removed it.

How do you keep track of your to-do list?
- Martin

I’ve been using Next Action for a long time to manage my to-dos - before that, I used Remember the Milk (which I stopped using after some data loss a long time ago).

Recently, though, I switched to using a Mac and I’ve been slowly converting things to iGTD. I really like the interface and I’ve settled into it for day-to-day stuff related to The Simple Dollar, but I have so much stuff still in Next Action that the full transition is taking a while.

If I were to start all over again from scratch, if I were on a PC I’d use Remember the Milk. On a Mac, I’d use iGTD.

I am looking to purchase a few suits for a new position that I have at work. I am hoping to find something of quality that will last a while. Any recommendations on purchasing suits, dress shirts,etc? Do I go for what I can afford now- or try to save a little more and purchase something more expensive for the long run? How do you get past name brand=high quality? Any help would be appreciated.
- Alex K

Go for quality and durability. I don’t have any specific brand recommendations - my suggestion is to find the best-dressed person in the office and ask them where they go for clothes. Go there and get yourself a quality wardrobe that will last.

This will be a significant upfront investment, but having quality clothes that make you gently stand out in a positive light - and that will last you a long time - will pay big dividends over the long haul in an office environment.

Is homemade beer cost-effective to make?
- John

It depends entirely on what kind of beer you drink. If you’re a “six of Miller High Life” kind of guy, it’s cheaper to just buy the stuff by the case at your local liquor store. In other words, if you drink primarily mainstream American pilsners and other pale beers - Miller, Budweiser, Busch, Old Milwaukee, Natural Light, PBR, etc. - brewing your own isn’t very cost effective.

On the other hand, if you are a person who enjoys an occasional beer but is partial to craft beers, microbreweries, and higher-end stuff, home brewing can save you money and be a lot of fun. As I type this, in fact, I have a batch of nut brown ale aging in the bottles, a batch of oatmeal stout in the glass carboy fermenting, and I’m going to brew up another batch next Monday when my sister-in-law comes to visit - that’ll be an attempt at a wheat ale with some coriander in it.

In each of those cases, homebrewing is significantly cheaper than buying six packs of the beer in stores and I get much more enjoyment out of the homebrewed beers as well. Of course, one extra “cost” of this hobby is that I tend to share my batches heavily with friends and family - giving away a bottle here and a six-pack there cuts into the profit margins, but doing that also helps build friendships, too.

I also noticed that you don’t seem to get 8 hours or sleep a night. Do you ever find yourself suffering for it, or are you one of the lucky ones who can get by on less?
- Laura G

My sleep actually varies. Right now, I will go through strings of about five hours of sleep a night for a few nights, then have a “catch up” night where I sleep eight or nine hours. After two or three days of five hour nights, I really start feeling the effects - I get very sleepy during the day and usually end up taking a brief nap in the afternoon. If that happens, I make sure to go to bed early that night.

When I was in college, I tried a lot of radical sleep schedules. I did one where I only slept in short naps every four hours around the clock (it actually worked for a while until societal needs forced me off the schedule). For about two semesters, I was largely nocturnal, taking two evening classes and three early morning classes and sleeping from about 10 AM to about 5 PM every day (yes, and starting the day off with supper). If you work at it and don’t have societal constraints, you’ll often find that alternative sleep schedules make you really productive.

The best way I’ve heard for subtly adjusting your sleep patterns is to alter it slowly. Start going to sleep about thirty minutes earlier and set your alarm to get up thirty minutes earlier, then see how productive you are during those morning thirty minutes. Then, if you actually want to reduce your sleep, start going to sleep a bit later until you find a point that works for you. If you find yourself getting drowsy a lot, pull back - being awake more hours doesn’t help if you’re sleepy during those hours.

You have a two year old child and a younger girl. Do you know of any good children’s books that teach frugal values?
- Milton

My son has a pile of books that teach all kinds of lessons, from colors and numbers to the value of friendship. Only one sticks out at me as showing frugal values, though, and that’s Joseph Had a Little Overcoat. It’s a story about a farmer named Joseph who buys himself a nice overcoat, but when it wears out, Joseph doesn’t toss it out. He finds other uses for it - a jacket, a vest, a scarf, a necktie, a handkerchief, and finally a button. Eventually, the button falls apart, too, but Joseph is still left with something - a really great story (the book itself).

I think overall it’s just a bit over the head of my son at this point (he’s two and a half), but the idea of the book is fantastic from a frugality standpoint.

What do you think about couples cohabitating before marriage? Morally and financially? Do you think it is a good idea?
- Andrew

I have no objection to it morally or financially, and for many couples I think it can be a good idea. Marriage is intended to be a lifelong commitment, so to rush into it without knowing what day-to-day home life with your partner will be like seems to me to be risking an awful lot. You’re far better off finding out that there are deep incompatibilities before your wedding day than afterwards. Note that I’m talking about sharing a domicile here - living as roommates. I’m not talking about sexual contact, which is an entirely different can of worms that hinges heavily on a person’s individual beliefs - and an issue that I’m not going to touch on here with a ten foot pole.

What about gold investments? How much should I have in gold?
- Mac

For 99% of the investors in the world, gold’s not a necessity. It’s merely just another way to diversify, just as bonds and real estate are, and throughout history, most of the time gold has underperformed everything.

Gold has a lot of hype right now because it’s had a very nice run over the past few years, but it’s mostly driven by three things: a dropping dollar, an increase in the real cost of oil, and a herd of new investors driven by speculation and fear. All three of those effects are temporary and over the next decade or so, gold will correct itself to historical norms - which means that gold’s definitely not a good place for a novice investor to put his or her money right now.

If you have a huge portfolio, a small amount of gold is fine simply for diversification, but for most investors, there are far better things to do with your money. Buy some well-diversified international stocks instead.

Is it possible to make bread (or pizza) dough in advance and then refrigerate or freeze to bake later? In the case of pizza, can I prep the whole thing, freeze it, then bake later?
- breena

Homemade pizza and bread dough are incredibly frugal ways to save some money at home. You can make them for pennies and get a lot of enjoyment out of them.

You can freeze both bread and pizza dough in advance, but when you unthaw it, you need to let the yeast get going and rise again, so you’ll have to put it in a relatively warm place for an hour or two after it’s unthawed.

Another great way to freeze pizza dough, though, is to make a bunch of crusts up in advance, roll them out, and then bake them on a pizza stone for about eight minutes with no toppings, just long enough for the dough to just barely start forming a crust. Then you can freeze these wrapped in Saran Wrap quite easily and when you want to make a pizza, pull it out, put the toppings on, and then throw it straight in the oven.

Would you ever discourage your kids from marrying someone who does not make as good an income as they do or what they are accostomed to?
- Michelle

No, absolutely not. Once you’ve got enough income to eat and keep a roof over your head, extra money doesn’t mean nearly as much as a healthy relationship with someone you truly love.

The only way I’d ever advise my child not to get married is if I felt that the person they were considering marrying was not going to love them with their whole heart. If that potential partner showed signs of meanness, cruelty, or untrustworthiness, I’d certainly talk to my child seriously about it. Not having enough income? Not really much of a worry at all.

Got any questions? Ask them in the comments and I’ll use them in future mailbags.

This is the twelfth discussion in a “book club” series on Born to Buy by Juliet Schor, which focuses on consumerism issues and young children. You can jump back to the first discussion if you’d like. This discussion covers the latter half of the seventh chapter, “Habit Formation,” starting on page 130 at the subheading “Who’s Responsible, Parents or Advertisers?” and finishing out the chapter, ending on page 139.

I’ll be frank: I feel that the responsibility for consumer education falls squarely on the shoulders of parents. Parents are the ones that make the choice to turn on the television and allow their children to watch it. Parents are the ones that allow their children to drive purchasing decisions. Parents are the primary educators of their children. Most important, parents are the ones making food choices, and they’re the ones choosing to put prepackaged foods or fresh foods on the table. Add those up and it’s pretty clear to me that marketing is like a never-ending flow of water - but parents are the tap, able to slow down or turn off the flow as desired. You’re a parent, you’re responsible.

I’m a parent of two kids and I know quite well that this is a difficult stance to take. It’s really easy to get irate at marketers and blame them for creating clever packaging. I’ve watched my son nearly bounce off the wall for specific treats already - and I’m aware that the biggest part of that is clever methods by marketers. Seriously, what child wouldn’t want smiling, cheese-flavored fish crackers in a brightly colored bag? The marketers make it tough - they make the crackers out of whole grain and the nutrition facts on the package indicate that they aren’t entirely unhealthy…

And that’s where the rubber meets the road. I’m a parent. I’m the one making that purchasing decision. Beyond that, my son is sitting there taking cues from me - parents are the first role models that a child has, not the marketers. It’s up to me to make the right decision - all marketers do is make that right decision a little bit tougher.

Schor’s Counterargument
Schor makes a strong counterargument to this case on page 130:

A second industry theme is that parents can “just say no.” Paul Kurnit takes the view that “if you don’t want your child to eat pre-sweetened cereals, don’t buy them. If you don’t want your child to eat at McDonald’s, don’t take your child to McDonald’s. I mean, on some level it is truly that simple.” [Child marketer Amanda] Carlson concurs: “They [the parents] should set the guidelines. They should set precedents. They should be good examples, which they’re not, in terms of how to eat healthfully.”

A careful look at industry practices suggests things aren’t as simple as Kurnit and others claim. The soft drink companies have demanded exclusive access in schools. The chains dominate highway rest stops, airports, malls, and other public places, so fast or junk food is usually all that’s available. Agriculture and food lobbies have pushed through food disparagement laws in twelve states where they’re politically powerful. (These laws make certain statements about food products illegal.)

The argument that Schor is making is that governments have given the food industry unfair advantage over consumers, and I do agree that these moves do make it harder for parents to make good choices.

But the answers are out there and they’re not really very hard to follow, either. In Michael Pollan’s excellent book on modern eating, In Defense of Food (which I discussed a while back), he basically boils down everything a parent needs to know about a healthy modern diet into just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Obviously, a bit of clarification is needed here - by “food,” he means not prepackaged stuff, but as much fresh stuff as you can get into the diet. Stick to the fresh produce section and the meat counter at your local grocery - that’s where the vast majority of your grocery shopping should be.

What about the convenience situations, like when you’re on a road trip and the only easy options are fast foods? That’s easy, too - plan in advance and pack a “road picnic.” It takes about ten minutes and enables you to stop off at a nice park to eat a meal instead of at Mickey D’s. If you just want to cure the munchies, pack a bag of baby carrots or a 100% juice box instead of an order of fries and a giant Slurpee.

What about emotional contradictions, with things like GoGurt? On page 131:

Carlson explained that the marketers are “using words like health … wholesome. Teddy Grahams are probably wholesome … You have the goodness of graham … There’s definitely a halo. I mean, parents will look at Lucky Charms and say, ‘Well, it’s oats.’ They look at Go-gurt that has twelve grams of sugar and say, ‘Well, it’s yogurt. It’s got that bacteria in it that’s good for you.’” Taking advantage of these emotional contradictions has contributed to a pervasive loosening of parental rules around food. Faced with the barrage of food advertisement, too few parents have been able to hold their ground.

When I read this, I don’t blame the barrage of food advertisement, I blame the inability of a parent to walk down the yogurt aisle and compare the nutrition facts label between several kinds of yogurt and make the choice that’s best for their kids. Reading, understanding, and knowing how to use a nutrition facts label is vital for any parent in the modern world - if you can’t do that or are unwilling to, you’re shortchanging your child.

Sure, there are obstacles, but the ultimate responsibility is up to the parent.

The next discussion, coming in two days, will cover the first portion of the eighth chapter, “How Consumer Culture Undermines Children’s Well Being,” starting on page 140 and continuing until the subheading “Patterns of Media Use” on page 153.

Over the next few Sundays, I’m going to post a conversation I’ve had with a person I know who has made interesting financial choices in their lives. Hopefully, these discussions will be enlightening and entertaining.

This conversation is one that’s been long awaited by my readers. This time, my conversation is with my wife, who basically answered most of the questions that readers have tossed in her direction over the past few months. I hope you’ll find that she’s as eloquent and thoughtful as I do. I think she also reveals the true reason why I made a career change recently and tosses out a bit of personal finance advice, too. If you have more follow-up questions, ask in the comments - I’ll encourage her to read them and perhaps add her own thoughts.

You currently live in a situation where you work outside the home, while your husband works inside the home. What are the advantages of that, as you see them?

Trent working at home really hasn’t changed our day-to-day routine that much. We still send the kids to daycare, I still go to work, and Trent still works. The only change is the location of his office.

The real benefits have been in the amount of time Trent has freed up in the evenings and on weekends. When Trent was working and doing The Simple Dollar, he would come home and write every evening until supper was ready, and then write again after our son was asleep and I was nursing our daughter. Trent also spent a lot of time writing during the weekends. Now he makes supper some nights, he helps more with cleaning (he’s been doing the greater share of that lately), and he has time to talk to me in the evening, as well as play with the kids. And weekends are much more enjoyable now. We spend time as a family, instead of me trying to find ways to keep the kids entertained and out of Trent’s hair so that he can write.

What are the disadvantages of that, again, as you see them?

There’s the obvious worry of whether or not we’ll have enough money, since we’re losing Trent’s other source of income. And my paychecks are smaller now, since I have to carry his insurance as well as mine and the kids’. And I wonder what will happen if The Simple Dollar loses popularity and stops bringing in income.

Also, there’s a perception by some people that Trent isn’t really “working”, and they treat him that way (including myself and Trent). Some people have asked why we’re keeping the kids in daycare if Trent’s at home. My family is coming in a couple of weeks, and Trent volunteered to go pick up my sister at the airport during the day, if necessary. Some family and friends have come to visit recently, and Trent ended up spending time during the day, which should be work time, cleaning house instead. Trent’s family came last week, and they arrived on Thursday night, instead of Friday. Trent spent Friday morning writing, but then spent the afternoon with them.

Another change that’s more of an annoyance than anything is that I now drop the kids off and pick them up from daycare. That means I have to leave about 15 minutes earlier in the morning. It also means that I’m the only one to remember important things about daycare. Like which kid needs new diapers, when picture day is, or when book orders are due.

Do you feel jealous of your husband’s opportunity to work from home, or are you happy with the way things are?

I’m pretty happy the way things are. I like my job, and I like interacting with my coworkers and students. I am jealous of Trent’s lack of a commute, though. I drive about 35-40 minutes one-way. My total one-way commute, including dropping the kids off, is about an hour.

It’s crazy to live with two young children at home. What are the best ways you know of to save money with kids? What sorts of shortcuts do you use to maximize the quality time with your kids? Do you feel like the splitting of household and parenting chores with your husband is fair? Why/why not?

A big money-saver is to just not give in to the temptation to buy your children whatever you think they need or want. That may seem obvious, especially to people without children, but we parents really love our children. We want them to have things that make them happy. Even if that’s the Spiderman umbrella that they don’t really need, but you can argue to yourself that it really would be useful, and he would really like it. So my first piece of advice would be to consider what your child or children really need, as opposed to what you just think would make them happy. There are a lot of ways to help your kids be happy, and most of them don’t include spending money.

Another money-saver for Trent and I has been to choose breastfeeding over bottle feeding for both of our children. That has saved us a lot of money on formula, and I truly believe that it has kept our kids healthier, which saves us money on doctor bills.

Do you feel there are any major differences between how you and your spouse spend money? Do you feel he is “cheap”? Do you feel he spends too much on personal expenses?

I think Trent budgets everything much more tightly than I do. I don’t think I really spend much more or less than he does, but he has a better idea of where his money has gone.

In the past I would have said that Trent eats out more than I do, but that has changed this year. Since Trent works at home now, he eats leftovers, which I used to take to work. On the other hand, I don’t have time to eat at work much lately with breastpumping, so I’m finding myself stopping at a fast food place on the way home from work more often. I pick up something relatively cheap (usually a kids’ meal) once or twice a week now, and I used to never get fast food. So that’s something I really need to correct.

Do you feel that one person in a marriage should be the “money leader” - in that one person should be managing the finances, paying bills, allotting spending money for both partners - or that it should be more balanced?

I think that really depends on the couple. Each person has their own areas of strength, and each person has a level of control that they want to have over their finances. I truly don’t believe that there’s one right answer to that question.

Do you feel that traditional budgeting in the traditional sense - listing expenses and putting tight caps on specific areas of spending - is worthwhile?

I think that it’s worthwhile to know where your money is going (which I’ve already said I don’t do nearly as well with as Trent does), and to not waste money on extraneous things. I’m not sure how “tight” the caps have to be. I think it’s okay to go over your set caps sometimes, as long as there are other times that you’re staying under them.

I also think that listing expenses and setting caps doesn’t work for everyone, and shouldn’t be considered the only “right” way to budget. Particularly if a person lives alone (no family) and isn’t overspending their budget, and is able to save some money besides, there’s no need for them to budget tightly. If you’re married, though, it can be important to keep more of a traditional budget, so that everyone knows where the money’s going, and how much you have.

Do you feel that your financial situation has improved over the last three years, even with the birth of children? What are the causes of that?

Yes, because I think that both Trent and I are more money-conscious. We definitely spend more now that we have children, but we also spend our money more wisely. We also both make more money than we did three or four years ago, and we have more tax write-offs (a new house, two kids).

Do you try to talk your husband out of spending unnecessarily? If you do, what sorts of tactics do you use? Does he do the same to you (that you notice)?

I think that both Trent and I can talk to each other about unnecessary spending in a pretty straightforward manner. If I were concerned with some particular area of his spending, I would tell him about it. And I think he would do the same for me.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had arguments over money, but not many, and not too serious. I think we’ve also had fewer arguments in recent years, probably because we’ve been slowly shifting towards Trent managing more of our money. As I’ve already said, I don’t do a good job of watching where my money goes. But neither one of us spends extravagently, and we nearly always agree on the things that we do spend money on.

If you could offer one tip on saving money that’s been the most useful to you during your married and parental life, what would you offer up?

Talk to your spouse about money. And I’m not just talking about budgeting and spending caps and how much you’re putting in savings. I’m talking about deciding together how much you both think it’s appropriate to spend on children’s toys, or how much you want to spend on Christmas presents for extended family. And how often you want to eat out or pick up supper on the way home, as opposed to making it? If you want to give to a charity, don’t just do it (as generous as that is), check with your spouse first. It’s their money too, and you can’t just give it away.

Finally, keep in mind that nobody’s perfect. You won’t always spend wisely, and neither will your spouse, children, parents, or even grandparents. If you make mistakes, learn from them (and try not to repeat them).