Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity, personal development, or entrepreneurship book.

Remember the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance? It came out several years ago and starred Matt Damon as a drunken golfer who was wasting his skills and Will Smith as his mystical caddy/mentor. The movie was middling, but a close friend of mine who is an avid golfer swore up and down to me that I needed to read the book instead, as it was far, far better than the movie. And my friend was right – The Legend of Bagger Vance is actually an excellent novel that was turned into a middling movie.

So why do I bring this up now? Steven Pressfield, the fellow who wrote the novel The Legend of Bagger Vance, has actually written a ton of books, both fictional and nonfictional – Bagger Vance is just one in the pile.

Independent of my enjoyment of Bagger Vance, another acquaintance of mine, upon hearing that I had decided to make a sincere attempt at a writing career, pressed The War of Art into my hands. This acquaintance told me repeatedly that this book was simply the best thing he’d ever read on how to be productive in creative work and that I needed to read it. Since I truly enjoyed Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, which focused on more or less the same topic, I accepted the book with interest, fully intending to read it, but it eventually wound up in the nether regions of my “to be read” pile.

One day, though, it all clicked. I was glancing through my “to be read” books when I noticed the author name on The War of Art … and it rang a faint bell. A bit of research later and I quickly realized that this was a book well worth my time to read – a book on productive creative work by someone whose creative works had affected me in the past.

The War of Art, more than anything else, is about resistance – the resistance we feel whenever we take on something that truly challenges us. On first glance, one might think that he’s just talking about creative endeavors like writing or art, but most everything in the book actually applies to any personal challenge – starting a diet, starting a business, and so on.

The book is divided into three major sections – within each is a collection of twenty five or so very short essays on that particular aspect of resistance. Let’s take a look at a sampling of what the book offers.

Book One: Resistance – Defining the Enemy
Whenever you set a goal for yourself, you meet resistance. Even if the goal is something as simple as cleaning the kitchen, there’s still some resistance – it’s easier to just flop down in a comfortable chair and read a book, isn’t it?

As the goal gets bigger, the resistance gets stronger, and I can speak from personal experience on this one. During the process of writing 365 Ways to Live Cheap (My first book! Only $7.95 on Amazon! Buy it now!), I would often find new and creative ways to avoid digging into the seemingly never-ending task of actually writing a book that totaled almost 60,000 words in the first draft (later edited down to about 46,000 or so). Not only would I convince myself to do other things, I’d also get sucked into a purgatory of rewriting little elements along the way so that I would spend an entire afternoon on the book and not really add to my word count at all.

Resistance applies strongly to non-creative works as well. Ever tried to diet? The first few days go really well, then you hit some resistance. You’re hungry. You can’t stop thinking about that pint of ice cream in the freezer or that big hamburger you can get just down the street. The seeming ease of the diet that you felt in the first few days meets major resistance – and many people eventually can’t break through that resistance, failing in their diet.

I felt resistance simply in starting up The Simple Dollar. There were many, many evenings where I simply didn’t want to check my email. I didn’t want to brainstorm and write new posts. I didn’t want to tweak the site design. I didn’t want to approve comments. It was only by constantly pushing myself hard against that resistance – making myself devote time every single day to these activities come rain or shine – that I was able to eventually break through and make The Simple Dollar into something successful.

I’ve really just scratched the surface when it comes to Pressfield’s insights about resistance – he touches on ego, criticism, procrastination, and many other major aspects of resistance in this section as well.

Book Two: Combating Resistance – Turning Pro
So how do we combat resistance? Pressfield’s advice is something I already alluded to above – you have to treat your creative work like a job. You have to show up every day prepared to work at it, no matter what, and we work hard to master the techniques involved, not just the sheer joy of creation.

For those who want to start in their spare time, that means setting aside time every single day, no matter what else is going on. That means some deliberate practice.

It also means not taking failure to heart. You are going to fail along the way. When you do, don’t quit. Stand up, brush yourself off, and try to understand what went wrong. I tried many different angles for finding success as a writer – submitting short stories all over the place, writing freelance articles for publications, starting different blogs. Virtually all of these were failures. Every single failure taught me something.

Another key aspect: don’t rely on others for validation of your work. There will always be people out there that tell you you’re good and people out there that tell you you’re bad regardless of whether your work actually has merit or not. Ignore them. Focus on always improving, no matter whether you sold three million copies of your last album or you’re selling mix tapes out of your trunk.

Book Three: Beyond Resistance – Higher Realm
The final section of the book takes on something of a more metaphysical feel, with little ideas sprinkled around that complement the second section of the book.

Pressfield clearly thinks of creative work as something of a spiritual process (though not really tied to any religion, per se). He thinks of professional creative work as a process in which you make yourself as open as possible to such ideas – wait for the muse, in other words. To a degree, I understand where he’s coming from here. I find that if I make myself as open as possible to ideas – by doing things like browsing material that’s primed to inspire my ideas and keeping a notebook with me at all times to jot down spare thoughts (Pressfield mentions using a voice recorder for this very purpose).

This happens to be the shortest of the three sections, and for good reason (from my perspective) – it’s the least valuable of the three. Although it does offer up a number of good specific tactics for creative work, much of the section is lost in somewhat directionless talk about metaphysical ideas.

Some Thoughts on The War of Art
Here are three things I think I think about The War of Art.

The anecdotes Pressfield shared throughout this book rang extremely true to me. Pressfield is speaking from the heart here, and I could feel it coming through the words and echoing in my own experiences. With almost every anecdote he had to share about his battles with creative resistance, I could easily recall a similar anecdote from my own life. This made it very easy for me to grasp exactly the points he was trying to make – and made the book feel like a very short and simple read.

Routine, routine, routine. Pressfield’s biggest point seems to be that you should make the creative process a routine part of your life – something you do every day, like clockwork. I agree wholeheartedly. That doesn’t mean that I turn out something great each day – far from it. What it means is that I try each day – and sometimes, the pieces come together and magic happens. Sometimes they don’t, of course, but I’ve found that if I make it part of a routine, magic happens much more often than if I just try things every once in a while (which is how I used to do things during my many years of writing failure).

The metaphysical nature of the third section was a bit much. After two sections of very strong and useful advice and commentary on resistance, Pressfield suddenly veered down a path of deep introspection on metaphysical and spiritual topics that felt really out of tune with the rest of the book. It provided interesting reading, but it almost felt like that section came from a completely different book. Don’t be shocked if, while reading The War of Art, you find an abrupt shift between the second and third sections.

Is The War of Art Worth Reading?
My take on this book is pretty simple. The first two sections (the third section is largely forgettable) are a very approachable and easily readable version of a book I reviewed and loved several months ago – Robert Fritz’s excellent The Path of Least Resistance. Fritz’s book, while loaded with great ideas on the topic of resistance against creative progress, is a bit dense and difficult to get into, whereas Pressfield’s book is very easy to pick up and get into.

The problem is that what it gains in readability, it lacks in depth. The War of Art is a perfect bedside table book, with good ideas processed into bite-sized chunks for easy digestion. Is it easily accessible yet still full of useful information? Yes. Is it as in depth as other books on the same topic? No.

So, should you read this one? I think The War of Art is useful and informative and can be read pretty quickly by someone interested in creative resistance and how to overcome it. However, if you find that there’s not quite enough meat on the bones for you, The Path of Least Resistance is a much more in-depth look at the topic – and I tend to prefer, for my own reading, the more dense works.

Quite often, when you see an advertisement trumpeting the amazing annual rate of return of an investment, you’re not seeing the full picture of how good that investment really is. The annual rate of return, while an interesting metric, doesn’t really tell you how much money you can expect to earn in an investment over a period of several years – in fact, you’ll almost always earn substantially less than you think if you expect to get that advertised rate.

How does this work? Let’s take a look at a real world example – the S&P 500. Here are the annual rates of return of the S&P 500 over eight recent years.

In 2000, the S&P 500 returned -10.14%.
In 2001, the S&P 500 returned -13.04%.
In 2002, the S&P 500 returned -23.37%.
In 2003, the S&P 500 returned 26.39%.
In 2004, the S&P 500 returned 9.00%.
In 2005, the S&P 500 returned 3.01%.
In 2006, the S&P 500 returned 12.80%.
In 2007, the S&P 500 returned 3.81%.

Annual rate of return Almost all advertising for mutual funds uses the average annual rate of return to talk about how “good” that investment is. It’s pretty easy to calculate the average annual rate of return – just add up all the numbers and divide by the number of years.

In the above case, the average annual rate of return is 1.06% (it’s actually -3.31% if you want to include the abysmal 2008 in your numbers). Considering that this period includes two severe recessionary markets and only one bull market, that’s actually fairly reasonable.

One would expect, then, that an investment of $100 in that fund from 2000 to 2007 would earn 1.06% each year, leaving us with a total of $108.80 after the eight years, right?

Actually, that’s wrong – but it’s what the investment advertisers would like you to think.

How it actually works If you walk through the numbers, year by year, you’ll see that in fact you would wind up with less than $108.08 in your investment.

In 2000, the S&P 500 returned -10.14%, meaning your $100 investment became worth $89.86.
In 2001, the S&P 500 returned -13.04%, meaning your $89.86 investment became worth $78.14.
In 2002, the S&P 500 returned -23.37%, meaning your $78.14 investment became worth $59.88.
In 2003, the S&P 500 returned 26.39%, meaning your $59.88 investment became worth $75.68.
In 2004, the S&P 500 returned 9.00%, meaning your $75.68 investment became worth $82.49.
In 2005, the S&P 500 returned 3.01%, meaning your $82.49 investment became worth $84.97.
In 2006, the S&P 500 returned 12.80%, meaning your $84.97 investment became worth $93.05.
In 2007, the S&P 500 returned 3.81%, meaning your $93.05 investment became $96.60.

So, while the ad might brag about a 1.06% annual rate of return, the truth is that you actually lost a bit of money in that investment.

Why? The average annual growth rate – which grew 1.06% over the period, remember – is only accurate if you reset the investment to $100 each and every year at the end of the year. That means that at the end of each losing year, you contribute enough extra money to bring the balance back to $100, and at the end of each winning year, you take out all of your gains.

That’s not how most people invest – we tend to buy and hold, not take out our gains every year. Thus, the “average annual rate of return” really doesn’t mean too much to us. Investment houses use it because it’s a simple and accurate number that is almost always higher than the real returns we would see if we were investing.

What can you do? If you’re considering an investment, don’t pay any attention to the average annual rate of return. Instead, focus entirely on the compound annual growth rate – that’s the interest rate that truly reflects how much you’ll earn over a longer-term investment if you just buy and hold. Look for that number in the investment literature – and if you can’t find it, ask for it.

This started off as an email to a reader, but I thought that many other readers might find this of some value.

Recently, I received a long email from a very distraught woman (that I’ll call Mary) who has finally come to the realization that she will not be able to retire in seven years as has been her plan all along.

For the past twenty five years, she’s been contributing a regular small amount to her company’s optional retirement plan – about 7% of her salary. Her company has also chipped in about 3% on that savings, bringing her to about 10% of her salary each year in total savings.

She invested that money pretty conservatively – but it’s an investment plan that seems reasonable to me. Half of the money went into bonds – mostly treasury notes. The other one went into the S&P 500 as an index fund.

On average, over the past twenty five years, her plan has returned 7.5% – and that’s a number she’s become quite comfortable with. As her retirement age approached, she began to use that number to calculate forward from her current state – and this enabled her to plan for retirement in 2015.

Then 2008 came along, and at the end of the year, she received her statement. Her stocks had dropped 39% on the year, wiping out about 16% of her overall retirement savings. This one single year had dropped her annual returns from a 7.5% average to almost a 7% average.

The end result of that swing? Unless the stock market has a gigantic rebound over the next few years, Mary won’t be retiring on time.

For most of you, Mary’s story is pretty ho-hum. Almost every baby boomer is going through some version of what Mary is dealing with right now – I can certainly say that the boomers I know are working through what to do.

What intrigued me was that Mary didn’t want help for herself. She wanted to know what exactly she should have done in the past to not put herself in this situation. In her words:

My daughter just started a great job. We’ve talked a lot about this and she doesn’t have any idea what to do with her own money now. She’s worried about being stuck in my situation later on. What should she do differently than what I did?

Here are seven tactics I recommend for Mary’s daughter (aside from get started now).

Contribute a little more. If you’ve decided to contribute 7% to your retirement account, make it 8%. If you’re at 8%, consider bumping it up to 10%. You’ll likely not notice the difference in terms of your day to day spending, but bumping your retirement savings up from 8% to 10% gives you 25% more money to work with in your retirement account – money that might help you retire early, but might also simply help you survive another down year.

Don’t repeat the same formula when you’re 60. If you’re just starting out, going aggressive with your retirement savings is fine – you have plenty of years to recover from any early down years. However, don’t just keep riding with that same strategy because it’s comfortable and it’s worked in the past. Over time, you should gradually move your money into something more conservative – that usually means out of stocks and into something more stable, like bonds.

An easy way to do that is with a target retirement fund. Most retirement plans offer an option called a “target retirement fund.” The way it works is pretty simple – they do the gradual shift to more conservative investments for you over time, so you’re not caught holding the bag when it comes to another 2008.

Assume some bad years – and don’t be despondent when they happen. Over the course of a career, there will be some bad economic years. Know this up front – you can’t expect every single year to reward you with a big return. When the bad years happen, remember the good years – and if you’re getting close to retirement and realize you can’t afford a really bad year, make your retirement allocations more conservative.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Many people feel as though retirement planning is a burden they must carry themselves – and they often put it off or make bad choices simply because they’re unsure what they’re doing. Don’t fall into this trap – ask for help. Ask the person in your workplace who manages such plans. If you’re really unsure, ask a fee-only investment advisor for help. Don’t put it off simply because of ignorance – get educated and get going.

Don’t invest in something you don’t understand or seems risky to you. This is a great rule to follow. If you’re looking at your investment options and you don’t understand some of the options, learn more about them on your own. If you’re still confused – or if it seems overly risky – don’t invest. Everyone has a different level of risk tolerance, and you’ll only regret it if you exceed your risk tolerance, particularly in your retirement account.

Don’t plan for a “full” retirement. Assume that your retirement will contain some degree of activity that can earn an income. Many people after retiring seek out some sort of activity to fill their time and a part-time job or a seasonal job can be just the ticket. Instead of trying to figure out how you can possibly replace your whole income in retirement, focus on just replacing most of your income under the assumption that you’ll want to remain active in retirement.

Recently, I’ve begun following the Frugal Traveler blog, hosted by the New York Times and written by Matt Gross. The title of the blog is reasonably accurate – it focuses on how to cut costs while traveling. For me, though, the most interesting aspect of the blog is that it clearly shows the wide diversity in what people think of as frugal.

Take two recent posts. The first is an interview with Leon Logothetis, who hosts the “reality” show “Amazing Adventures of a Nobody” on the Fox Reality Channel. The premise of the show is simple – Leon attempts to travel from point A to point B on just $5 a day (or five euros a day or five pounds a day, depending on his exact location). In effect, Leon’s approach to travel (at least in the context of his show) involves hitchhiking and relying on the good will of others in order to get around – riding (and sometimes crossing) the fine line between frugal and cheap, from my perspective.

The very next post? How to skim off a bit of money on your Vermont resort skiing trip by using the bus. For me, this goes in the opposite direction – a skiing trip at a resort is pretty much the opposite of frugal.

Yet, from reading the comments, it was clear that each article appealed to some people and drove away others. Many people argued that the article about Leon was simply way too cheap, while some others stated that the advice about Vermont ski resorts was simply out of their price range.

So, what’s the take home message here? I came up with three conclusions.

First, frugality means different things to different people. My personal sense of what’s frugal and what is not is likely different than your sense. I consider it worthwhile to make my own laundry detergent, for example, while others consider such an activity a complete waste of time. On the other hand, I know some people who are diligent about using only one sheet of toilet paper, calculating that every wasteful use of the toilet costs them money – I consider that cheap, not frugal.

Just because someone has a different definition of frugality doesn’t mean they’re right or wrong – just different. Our personal idea of what it means to be frugal – or cheap or a spendthrift – comes from a lifetime of experiences – and none of us have identical experiences. In my childhood, for example, I consumed a lot of wild game, simply because it was very frugal for us to catch it and use it ourselves. That’s an experience that many people simply don’t have – and thus they process such things far differently than I do.

Instead of calling someone “cheap” or say that they’re wasting money, look for ways you can apply some of what they’re saying. When I leaf through The Complete Tightwad Gazette, I don’t necessarily jump on board with every idea that I see. Some of the ideas simply warrant a simple “no” from me. Others seem right up my alley, and yet others make me stroke my chin and think for a bit. Not all of Amy’s advice – or anyone’s advice – is going to apply to me, but if at least some of it appears to be applicable to my life, I’m going to be rewarded by reading the whole thing, even if I don’t use all of it (or even most of it).

And with that, I think I’ll go curl up with The Complete Tightwad Gazette again and see if any good ideas come to mind.

This is the fifteenth in a weekly series of articles providing a chapter-by-chapter in-depth “book club” reading of Benjamin Graham’s investing classic The Intelligent Investor. Warren Buffett describes this book: “I read the first edition of this book early in 1950, when I was nineteen. I thought then that it was by far the best book about investing ever written. I still think it is.” I’m reading from the 2003 HarperBusiness Essentials paperback edition. This entry covers the fourteenth chapter, which is on pages 347 to 366, and the Jason Zweig commentary, on pages 367 to 375.

I’ve been writing these chapter-by-chapter discussions of The Intelligent Investor on my second read-through of the book.

The first time I read the book was roughly a year ago. To me, it came across quite like most good books – it built to a climax that contained the key portion of the book, which occurred about two-thirds of the way through. Prior to that climax was a ton of “setup” material – putting all the pieces in place so that the climax could be understood, processed, and enjoyed. The material after the climax was largely clarification and continuation – a bit more detail.

From my perspective, this chapter and the next (Stock Selection for the Enterprising Investor) serve as the climax of The Intelligent Investor. These chapters really outline what exactly Graham’s stock selection philosophy is in great detail.

This first chapter in the pair focuses on a more conservative philosophy for picking individual stocks, which personally appeals to me more than aggressive strategies. My personal philosophy for stock investing tends to stick pretty strongly to broad-based index funds – I have very little confidence that I can regularly pick stocks that will do substantially better than comparable index funds.

Chapter 14 – Stock Selection for the Defensive Investor
Graham’s strategy for defensive investors is actually pretty straightforward. He recommends that you start off with a broad index of funds – he uses the Dow Jones Industrial Average for his example, but the philosophy would work just as well with the S&P 500 or the Wilshire if you so wanted (and you could easily do that with computer-based tools).

Once you have this list, Graham suggests applying seven criteria to each stock on that list, in this order:

1. Adequate size of the enterprise Don’t invest in small companies, in other words. A defensive investor avoids stocks that would be considered small-cap.

2. A sufficiently strong financial condition The assets of any good defensive company should be at least twice the debts of that company.

3. Earnings stability The company must have had positive earnings each of the last ten years.

4. Dividend record The company must have made uninterrupted dividend payments each year for the past twenty years.

5. Earnings growth The company must have seen an increase of at least 33% in per-share earnings as compared to ten years ago.

6. Moderate price/earnings ratio The stock’s price must be nome more than 15 times the company’s earnings over the past three years.

7. Moderate ratio of price to assets The company shouldn’t have a stock value 50% greater than the total value of the company’s assets.

If you apply all of these criteria, even to every stock available, you’ll find the list of acceptable stocks at the end to be very, very small – if you find any at all. If you do find a stock that matches these criteria, it’s almost assuredly going to be a very steady value.

If you want to play around with these criteria using all publicly available stocks, it’s pretty easy to set up Yahoo’s Stock Screener. I used all of these criteria and didn’t find a single matching stock, but when I experimented a bit and loosened some of the criteria just a touch, I did find quite a few matches. This would be a great place to start for a defensive investor looking to jump into individual stocks.

Commentary on Chapter 14
Zweig’s message is simple: the easiest method for a defensive investor to invest in stocks today is by buying a broad-based index fund and simply sitting on it. This broad-based fund will match the stock market, have very little cost, and require very little effort from the buyer.

He does walk through each of Graham’s seven criteria for good defensive stocks and uses them to analyze the S&P 500 as it sat in early 2003 (when prices were pretty low). Zweig actually found that a sizable percentage of the S&P 500 passed each individual criteria, but he doesn’t mention how many companies pass all of the criteria – I’m willing to bet that it’s a very low number, if any at all.

Next Friday, we’ll take a look at Chapter 15: Stock Selection for the Enterprising Investor.

A few days ago, I was in a pretty down mood. I mostly just wanted to curl up somewhere and hide from the whole world. I felt like a failure, mostly in a professional sense, but in a bit of a personal sense as well. I was really doubting my ability to write anything that could reach anyone.

I went for a drive. I had a weak reason for going – I intended to pick up a few items at the grocery store – but it was an trivial reason. I really didn’t need to go out at all. I didn’t really think that much about where I was going, either. I just felt like driving – simply doing something to make myself feel better.

Before I could blink, I found myself wandering around an electronics store. In my hands, I held a pair of headphones, and I was fully intending to buy them. Why? On the rare occasions when I actually listen to my iPod while walking around (instead of having it linked to speakers), I’m fairly frustrated by the “bud” headphones that come with the device, as they don’t fit in my ears very well. It’s not enough of an issue that I would ever rationally buy a pair of headphones to replace it – I might put it on my Amazon wish list (in case a desperate relative needs a gift idea for me at Christmas) and forget about it.

It was a complete impulse buy – something I hadn’t done in quite a while. I looked at the headphones for a while, even though I had already decided that I wasn’t actually going to walk out of the store with them. The question I kept asking myself, though, is why did I wind up in this situation?

This whole episode made it very clear to me how strong the emotional component to shopping really is. This entire journey – from leaving my house to going to the electronics store to holding a potentially expensive purchase in my hands (these were nice headphones).

I was in an emotional trough – and my immediate, almost automatic, reaction to that emotional trough was to buy something. It’s amazing to me that, almost three years after my financial epiphany, it’s still so easy to turn back to an old emotional crutch.

I’ve had a few days to reflect on this, and here’s what I’ve been thinking.

There can be – and there is for me – a strong emotional component to buying. This is something I’ve talked about quite often on The Simple Dollar, but this stunning little adventure outlines how true this is. If I were in a better mood, I would not have went to the electronics store. I was simply seeking a quick and easy mood lift – and I was seeking it through buying.

There’s an addiction component here as well. As I wrote the above story, I couldn’t help but think of how I was reminded of how people I know dealt with substance addictions. They would stay seemingly clear for years, then suddenly relapse back into their addiction. Almost always, I’d later find that the people who relapsed were suffering through a difficult time when they relapsed.

One powerful solution to this problem is to find other ways to lift my mood. A big part of the emotional valley I’m in is the presence of a pretty fierce Iowa winter (keeping me from going outside as much as I’d like) along with my fairly isolated daily schedule. Solutions? Go outside any time the weather cooperates and take a walk. Get some exercise. Interact with more people – I’m not entirely sure how to do this, but I’m looking for some community groups to join. Improving my mood makes me much less likely to reach out for an emotional crutch – which is what such impulse buying really is for me.

The ten second rule really came through for me here. I stopped at the checkout before making the purchase because the ten second rule is almost instinctual for me at this point. That little ten second pause made me reflect on why I was making that purchase – and I didn’t have a real reason at all. Instead, I put the headphones back on the shelf and walked out the door with money in my pocket and reflection on my mind.

If you are trying to get your financial life under control, you cannot let your emotions control your spending. The act of buying something will not bring you lasting happiness – just a little rush that will go away soon enough, leaving you right back where you were with less money in your pocket.

Good luck.

When my wife and I purchased our home, we moved from an apartment with roughly 800 square feet of floor space into a house with about 2,000 square feet – and along the way, our biggest piece of furniture (an old, shoddy couch) was unable to make the move. This left us with a blank slate for decorating – but it’s not something I’m particularly good at. Part of our budget for the move allowed for this, allowing us to partially furnish our family room and living room by taking advantage of a furniture outlet store.

Fast forward to our current lives. Our three year old son is beginning to regularly visit his friends – and, naturally, that means that we’re getting to know the parents of some of our child’s friends. One of these couples actually has a story very similar to ours – in the last few years, they moved from a tiny apartment into a much larger home and they didn’t move in the door with adequate resources for decorating or furnishing.

Unlike us, however, they did not budget for such furnishing before the move, meaning that when they did move in, their only decorations and furnishings were what they brought from their apartment.

Their solution? Spartan decorating.

Their front room – the one you would enter as soon as you came into their home – is completely empty. It merely serves as a very pleasant entrance into their home. The other rooms are largely decorated and arranged as they were in their old apartment.

Their plan is to slowly replace and upgrade furniture and decorations as opportunities present themselves and they can afford it, but for now, things work for them.

And it works well. The spartan decoration of their front room sets a clean and open tone for the rest of the house – and, best of all, it saves them money and time (it’s pretty easy to clean a room with no decoration or furniture).

There are several useful decorating and home furnishing lessons to be learned here – some obvious, some not so obvious.

First, don’t worry about empty rooms. Many people feel something of an obligation to fill their home with furniture. Don’t. It’s fine to have very sparse rooms in your home. Consider sparsely decorating the room that people see first when they enter so that they don’t immediately get a “cluttered” sense from your home. Not only will sparse decorating save you money, it will also save you time – and you’ll likely find that the “leap” from an apartment to a home costs you more time than you think.

Also, don’t worry about “starter” furniture and decorations, either. My wife and I made the conscious decision to have a decorating/furnishing budget when we moved, but reflecting back on it, it wasn’t really necessary at all. We could have easily left our front room quite barren and used our old furniture in the family room without skipping a beat, then slowly replaced or upgraded the furniture over time.

If you feel the need to furnish every room, don’t overlook used furniture. Look for consignment options as well as thrift stores before you even begin to look at other options. You might find something you like at a low price right off the bat.

What about decorating? This is one area where I think we did quite well – and we still are. Virtually all of our home decoration was hand-crafted by people close to us. We have a lot of photographs hanging up, the best of the thousands of digital photographs my wife and I have taken. We also have quite a bit of original artwork done by friends and family, including a few original paintings (one of which is stunning – done by a relative who actually paints professionally and we have one of her best works).

This not only saved us quite a bit of money, but it also makes almost every decoration in our home have a very personal feeling. If we see anyone looking closely at a decoration, we always have a nice story associated with it – the opportunity we had to take the photograph, the person who made the decoration for us, and so on.

Also, never be afraid to think way outside the box, particularly when reusing things or using items unexpectedly. I’ve seen a very elegant apartment decorated with framed record covers from a person’s collection. Another person simply decorated much of her home in framed Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strips. The picture above depicts an individual using plates for decorative purposes. Look at everything as a potential resource for decoration and you may find something very unique that costs almost nothing.

The most important lesson of all, though, is this: form your own ideas of what you want for decoration and furnishing – and look at lots of homes through that lens. Look at the homes of all of your family and friends. Figure out what you actually like and don’t like. Doing this thoroughly will help you develop a good concept of what appeals to you – then you can seek to make those ideas happen as inexpensively as possible.

I’ll go even further: the absolute worst place you can go to shop for furniture is a furniture store; similarly, the worst place you can go to shop for decorations is a home decor shop. Such shops only represent a salesman’s idea of what should go into your home, not your own idea. Formulate your own ideas before you ever walk in the door and you can focus on hunting for bargains instead of convincing yourself that this expensive item is perfect for what you want.

Good luck!

Recently, I wrote a review of Adam Shepard’s book Scratch Beginnings. In the book, Adam describes his attempt to “start from scratch” – employing nothing more than $25, a bag, and the clothes on his back (and not using any personal contacts or resume builders) to see how far he could go in a year.

Largely, Adam succeeded. He was able to get a steady job that paid very well, moved from a homeless shelter to an apartment, and saved thousands of dollars in a little under a year. Adam’s journey shows, quite simply, that a person can lift themselves up by their bootstraps.

But what kind of a person? The comments on that post started to really dig into that question, arguing that even though Adam did start from scratch in a material sense, he had several inherent advantages that he couldn’t just drop at will: a college education, good mental and physical health, his relatively extroverted behavior, relative youth, the fact that he’s white, and the fact that he’s male all give him some inherent advantage.

I absolutely agree. Each of those attributes helped Adam get ahead. In various ways, these attributes helped Adam make personal connections and friendships, enabled him to find work, and helped him to keep the jobs he found.

Many of the readers offered up the opinion that Adam’s inherent advantages made his story invalid. With so many inherent advantages, they argued, most people could lift themselves out of a terrible situation. And this is where our perspectives diverge.

First of all, whether Adam succeeds or not is largely irrelevant – the lessons learned along the way are much more valuable. In this story, Adam himself is relatively incidental. The real meat of the story is the game of life – how can it be played to bring someone success?

Adam’s success only makes it a better story – one with a “happy” ending instead of a “sad” ending. With either ending, though, a good reader would be able to pull out life lessons that they can use for themselves, and that’s the real benefit of a book like Scratch Beginnings – to teach us something new that we can perhaps use in life.

Second, Adam is a pretty poor litmus test for what it takes to make it in America – but so is everyone. Likely, a minority would tell a different tale than Adam. As would a woman. As would a high school dropout. As would a disabled person. Their story would vary in a number of ways – they would have very different challenges, but also different opportunities along the way.

For me, the value in Adam’s story comes not from the idea that a person can lift themselves out of despair but the tactics he used along the way. Most people are aware that it is possible for people to lift themselves up from their situation. People do it all the time. The question is how – and Adam shares those things quite openly.

His tools were simple – and most were things that anyone can do, no matter what the situation:

Practice frugality. Cut every possible corner you can, even if you consider it humiliating or beneath your station. Live in a homeless shelter if you have to, or a tiny apartment.

Use social programs. If you’re eligible for a social program, that program is in place to help you. Take advantage of all of them. Often, there are more programs available for people with inherent disadvantages.

Communicate. Do everything you can to meet others in your situation and share ideas.

Don’t blame others Sure, others have some advantages that you don’t have. That inherent advantage isn’t your fault and it isn’t their fault, either – it’s just the facts of life. Instead of stewing on it, find your own path.

The value in Adam’s story isn’t that he made it – it’s that he tries the above tactics (and many others) and talks about what actually works and what doesn’t.

No matter what your situation, you have the capacity to try something different to improve your hand, whether it’s seeking psychological help or it’s shaving some money from your spending. That’s the lesson to take home here – and that goes far beyond the off-the-cuff observation that some people have inherent advantages over others.