The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much support of the muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical almanac he has, and so being sure of the information when he wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. The solstice he does not observe; the equinox he knows as little; and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in his mind. His notebooks impair his memory; his libraries overload his wit; the insurance-office increases the number of accidents
- Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

I checked a book of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays out of the library on my college campus based on the recommendation of a college professor that I had built a casual friendship with. She had seen me reading something different and something challenging in the hallway of the English building on campus and eventually started dropping recommendations my way – and one of the first ones was to “read Emerson, slowly, so you can really grasp what he’s saying.”

There were a dozen essays or so in that collection, but the one that jumped out at me then and has stuck with me through the years is Self-Reliance. It’s not the easiest thing to read, as Emerson uses a style of English almost two hundred years old that seems almost foreign to our natural language today, but there is so much useful truth in there that it’s well worth absorbing.

Simply put, Emerson argues that the more we rely on others, the less control we have over our own life. He looks at that idea from a number of angles: intellectual independence, emotional independence, physical independence, and so on.

Toward the end of the essay (which I quoted above), Emerson makes the point that when we become reliant on technologies that we don’t fully understand, we cede some control of our lives to other people. Think about it for a moment. If you don’t know how to fix the plumbing in your house, you’re not in control of the situation if a pipe blows – the plumber is. If you can’t replace a switch in your home, you’re reliant on the handyman/electrician.

Those reliances are very expensive. Plumbers know that you’re reliant on them for your life to continue as normal, so they can charge exorbitant rates and take their sweet time solving the problem. This costs you money. If a pipe blows at two in the morning on a Saturday and you can’t fix it quickly, not only are you going to have to pay the plumber a huge amount to come out on Sunday, you’re also going to have to deal with the cost of a great deal of cleanup and (possibly) repair of other things in your home.

This extends to every aspect of life. If you know how to cook a good, quick meal at home, you’re not reliant on restaurants. If you grow your own garden (or are at least capable of it), you’re not reliant on the produce section at the grocery store. If you learn how to do most of the maintenance on your car, you’re not reliant on the garage.

The fewer things you’re reliant on, the easier it is to move towards financial independence, too. You can handle emergencies without having to pay for an expert to come in. You can make day-to-day choices that save you money (like preparing food at home). Even better, your overall living expenses go down, meaning the threshold of savings you need to be truly financially independent is lower.

That Emerson wrote about this very thing in 1843 simply shows the universal truth of the idea: self-reliance always pays off.

My wife has the week off this week and we’re enjoying it.

Our kids are going to have their first overnight stay at their grandparents while my wife and I go for an overnight trip with another married couple that we’ve known literally for decades.

We’re also going to spend a few days staying at my parents’ home, a period of time in which I intend to go visit my high school English teacher (the man who convinced me I should be a writer) and present him with a signed copy of my book.

Most interestingly of all, though, is that we’re going to buy a car this week. Through most of our search, we’ve focused on late model used options, but with the astounding deals being offered on new cars (and the exceptional financing on them), we may end up actually buying new because of this topsy-turvy economy. I’ll write about this in detail once the purchase is complete and we’ve had a bit of time to reflect on it.

The best part, though, is a lot of time with the family. If the weather cooperates, some long afternoons at the park are definitely in order.

Should The One-In, One-Out Rule Apply to Friends? This is an utterly fascinating rumination on the number of friendships a person can sustain and the “one in, one out” rule that’s very useful in keeping a good grip on the number of possessions you accumulate. (@ unclutterer)

How The Economic Crisis Challenges Our Financial Beliefs For me, at least, the economic crisis is certainly testing my financial beliefs, but I’m still an optimist. I have yet to see anything that has shown me this is anything worse than a deep recession. (@ wisebread)

Delayed Gratification: A Hard Lesson for My Teenage Son This is a brilliant example of the parenting process and how life gives us great opportunities to teach values. It’s easy to see here how a different lesson could have been taught, but the author was prescient enough to make a good lesson out of the situation. (@ gather little by little)

Walking the Line Between Frugality and Pack-Rattery This is a balance that we’re trying to accomplish in our own lives. My wife has some strong packrat tendencies, and I’m not immune to it myself. (@ personal finance advice)

Mission Accomplished: Our Shiny New Mortgage Home refinancing is a great way to save some serious money if you’re not upside down in your mortgage and you can reduce your rate by more than 1%. For us, the problem is the latter – we can’t find a refinancing opportunity that actually saves us money over the long haul because our current rate is quite low. (@ get rich slowly)

A recent comment by Mindy provided an interesting insight into how many people view frugality:

I know I’m a little late coming to this discussion but, unless I missed it among the large volume of comments, no one is counting the amount of time spent making stuff in order to save. The link to the laundry detergent got me thinking about this. Sounds like a [significant amount] of time in order to save 27 cents per load of wash (I’m pretty sure that’s the statistic he quotes).

The question at hand revolved around my recipe for homemade laundry detergent. I estimated that my homemade detergent would save about eighteen cents per load over buying Tide with Bleach in bulk.

For many people, that’s an open and shut case right there. Eighteen cents? For fifteen minutes of effort? That’s enough to make people walk away without even considering the solution any further.

If I were to only save eighteen cents from fifteen minutes of work, I wouldn’t bother, either, but here’s the catch: most frugal solutions take advantage of scale. To put it simply, the recipe is worthwhile not because you save eighteen cents per load, but because that batch of detergent you make takes care of fifty two loads of laundry.

I’m not just saving eighteen cents with that fifteen minutes. I’m saving fifty two times that much – $9.36, to be exact. In terms of a comparable wage, that’s $37.44 an hour after taxes for the time spent making the detergent.

The same principle applies to many frugal projects. Take my homemade breakfast burritos. The procedure for making breakfast burritos takes about an hour and each burrito has about seventy cents worth of ingredients in it. In terms of one burrito, it’s not a bargain at all – you can get a breakfast burrito for $2 pretty easily (although I think mine tastes better). However, the recipe makes thirty two burritos at once – you can then store them in the freezer for future use. This cuts the time commitment per burrito to less than two minutes, meaning that your hourly rate after taxes for making the burritos is somewhere on the order of $39.

You can see the same benefit from many different frugal projects. Installing a programmable thermostat, for example, might take you an hour, will cost you $40 or so, and will only shave $5 or $10 off of your monthly energy bill. However, you’re saving that $5 or $10 off of every energy bill thereafter without any change in effort. After five years, your hourly rate after taxes for installing that thermostat is $410 per hour.

The catch, of course, is that you don’t see the savings up front. Instead, it’s metered out gradually to you over time. Each time you eat a homemade burrito, you’re quietly saving $1.30. When you use a cup of the detergent, you only save eighteen cents. And it’s that catch that keeps many people from seeing the bigger picture and taking advantage of how much money frugality can really save you.

Try this: take a lazy Saturday and fill it with frugal projects that have a good long term return for your time investment. Install some energy efficient light bulbs. Install a programmable thermostat. Make a batch of homemade breakfast burritos and maybe a few casseroles for the freezer. Make a batch of homemade laundry detergent. Put your home entertainment center on a single switch so you can cut power to all the devices with just a wrist flick. Swap out your laundry softener with white vinegar.

At the end of that day, you won’t have saved any money. In fact, you’ll have spent quite a bit, and you’ll have used up a day.

What happens next is where frugality pays off. You’ll quietly find yourself spending a lot less money than you used to spend in your monthly budget. It’s suddenly far easier to make ends meet than before. Your food bills are cheaper. Your household supply budget is cheaper. Your energy bill is cheaper. Much of the time, the bills stay cheaper, too.

Then, start applying that savings to your debts – or to your long term savings. You’ll quickly find that those silly frugality tips, like saving a quarter on your laundry load, aren’t that silly after all.

Recently, I read a fascinating comment from Sydney on SmartSpending (I added the bold myself):

I’ve never understood the unending supply of articles telling people to skip a cup of coffee or brown bag lunch just to save a few dollars. It helps, sure, but it won’t save you if you’ve made bad decisions on major expenses. I completely agree that if you plan carefully and take care of the big things – the long term major expenses in your budget – there’s far less need to sweat the small things. So many people buy a more expensive home than they can easily afford, cars they can’t afford, big expensive vacations or a houseful of new furniture they can live without. Even the choice of how many children to have and when has a huge impact on finances.

Yet if you arrange your life so that major expenses are not consuming all of your income and then some, you can actually eat lunch out once awhile, buy that cup of coffee, or see a movie. Quality of life goes up dramatically. At that point, if you want to save on little things also, it becomes a choice, rather than a constant necessity just to survive.

What struck me about the comment is that Sydney immediately ties events that involve spending excess money (“eat lunch out once awhile, buy that cup of coffee, or see a movie”) to quality of life. In other words, the ability to participate in a consumer economy is directly tied to quality of life in this quote.

I have no doubt that Sydney sincerely feels this way. I know that, for a very long time, I felt that way, too. I felt like my life was better if I had the freedom to go out to eat whenever I wanted, buy a video game whenever I wanted, or go out to a movie whenever I felt like it.

Today, I feel differently. While I might enjoy the experience, I no longer feel like a meal eaten out raises my quality of life at all. Instead, the things that bring what I would call “quality” into my life are experiences with my family. A quality experience is eating a homemade dinner with my children at the dining room table. A quality experience is a nap on a lazy Sunday afternoon curled up next to my wife. A quality experience is a picnic at the park or watching my son’s soccer practice.

I believe that tying quality of life to consumer purchases is a personal, conscious decision – one that often results in financial trouble. If you judge your quality of life by the things that you purchase, then you feel worse when you spend less and feel better when you spend more. This situation runs entirely contrary to healthy personal finance management.

A financially healthy mindset, in my opinion, derives quality of life from things that can’t be bought. The source of that quality can vary greatly from person to person, of course, but the real key is that your quality moments in life are wholly unconnected to spending money.

Not there yet? Look for the things in your life that fill you with joy that don’t involve spending money, then work on putting those things front and center. Once you find sources of quality that are separate from spending money, it becomes much easier to cut your spending drastically – and doing that can provide the foundation for a great future.

One year ago, I began my journey as a full-time writer working from home.

Prior to making that leap, I worked full time in a research lab with a small, rather tight-knit group of people and I spent my spare time (when I could find it) working on The Simple Dollar. After a year and a half of essentially managing two careers, I began to realize that it was creating a great deal of wear and tear on my family and on my relationships, so I made a difficult choice – and took a leap of faith on the writing.

I did a status report at the four month mark regarding how the transition was going. Among the highlights:

The huge amount of time that I didn’t have before has opened the door to countless projects
I feel genuinely fulfilled by my work
I miss my old job – at least the socialization aspects of it
I get stir crazy and often have to leave to go do something
Time management is a completely different challenge than before
My biggest frustration is the interruptions
The new money management stresses me out sometimes

That’s actually a great description of the situation as I saw it four months after changing my career. At this point, though, different things have moved to the forefront and other things have moved to the back burner. Here are the big things I’ve noticed after a full year of working from home.

My biggest challenge is often loneliness
This might seem like a strange complaint, but it’s true: the biggest frustration I regularly face is simple loneliness. I miss the ability to simply stroll across the hall and talk to people throughout the day. I miss social interaction, in short. This was made somewhat worse by a very rough Iowa winter, coupled by the fact that I live in a rather rural area, meaning there isn’t a local place I can visit for that interaction.

What’s the solution? One of the best tactics I’ve found is actually just calling people regularly. I call my parents quite often during the afternoon, mostly to hear what they’re up to and recharge my social batteries. Not only do such calls help keep the social circle going, it enables me to get past any loneliness I may be feeling, gives me a sounding board for ideas, and also helps me keep in touch with the concerns of others.

My biggest benefit is time flexibility
The single biggest benefit of working from home is the time flexibility. I can easily address any task that I need to focus on, whether it’s personal or work-related, as it comes up, provided I’ve built up enough of a “buffer” with my work tasks. Aside from a solid three hour block of time each day that I devote to my family (5 PM to 8 PM, roughly), my weekdays are basically filled with whatever task (in any aspect of my life) seems most urgent at the moment.

There are some big caveats here, though. First, I have to maintain a work buffer – that means I usually have quite a few articles already completed and ready to go before you read them. Second, I have to have a good sense of what’s a priority and what isn’t. Both of these attributes take a great deal of time to develop and maintain in order to gain flexibility. Things don’t become flexible just because you’re self-employed – you have to be able to make the situation flexible.

Meditation and prayer have grown in importance for me
When I was at my previous job, I rarely felt like I had time for things like meditation or prayer. They seemed like good ideas, but there was always something else to do. When I switched careers, I made it a goal to get more in touch with my spiritual side – and it’s the best thing I’ve done in terms of my personal growth.

Each day, I spend a bit of time in what I would describe as a mix of meditation and prayer. Most days, I do it twice – once early in the day and once in the late afternoon. These sessions are simple – I usually just attempt to relax myself, empty my mind of cluttered thoughts (I actually jot down everything I think I’ll need to deal with later), then sit still for a long while, clearing my mind of everything. Whatever comes, comes. Doing this twice a day has done wonders in terms of my clarity of thinking in all aspects of my life.

If I ever return to a “nine to five” career, I will take this aspect of my experience with me.

It’s easy to get overly introspective
It is very easy for me to start chasing windmills. I’ll get obsessed with some little detail of some project I’m working on or on some strange idea in my head or some little aspect of my health, and it will draw all of my focus if I’m not careful.

For me, good task management helps. I’ve become devoted to the use of task management tools to keep me going with my work. Whenever I finish a task, I try to move quickly to a new one. If I find a task is becoming overwhelmingly detailed, I stop, make an effort to break it down into smaller pieces, then work on those pieces. I also make an effort to eliminate distractions, and I’ve come to pride myself on days where I stick to my “to-do” list and accomplish as many items as I can on it. Without that kind of guidance, I’d get obsessed with all kinds of wasteful things.

Finding the right balance of not taking on too much is still a challenge
Sometimes, I feel like I can accomplish far more than I’m doing. Other days, I’m hit with a gigantic case of writer’s block and I can’t seem to accomplish anything. Given that I choose what I work on and what to commit to, I can put myself in great danger if I commit to too many things – but I’m also driven enough to want to commit to plenty of projects. There’s a balance there – and it’s still a tricky one.

My solution revolves around doing as much work up front as I can. If I’m going to start a series on The Simple Dollar, I usually have the whole series framed and quite a few of the articles already written. If I’m shopping a freelance article, that article is either done or close to it. My second book is already extensively outlined and half-written, but I still haven’t signed a contract for it.

Doing things this way gives me the maximum amount of freedom to work with my own personal ebb and flow. I can work hard when things are flowing well and not be panicked if I get a big dose of writer’s block.

Careful bookkeeping is essential
When you work for an employer, keeping track of taxes and other expenses is done for you – you just collect your paycheck and do your taxes at the end of the year. Once you’re working for yourself, you have to keep careful track not only of any income, but also of any spending that you do during the year that’s related to your work.

Take the time to develop a filing system that you understand. Mine tends towards the simple – I mostly just focus on making sure I have every receipt and invoice in a constant place. I also maintain a careful calendar of all financial due dates – quarterly tax dates, for example. Without it, things would get problematic very quickly.

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.
Ten Steps To Financial Success For A Minimum Wage Earner
Seven Tips For Avoiding Boredom During A Financial Turnaround
How to Create A Nifty Visual Savings Goal Reminder

And now for some great reader questions!

Would it be a wise investment to put away cash in a stock that yields 6.6% currently? We have 6 months of cash in a savings account but would this be a smart move with all cash above and beyond the emergency and retirement and bills?
- JayJay

I can’t simply give a “yes” or “no” answer to this question, because it depends heavily on the stock. Clearly, if the stock is paying that large of a dividend, it’s positioned as a value stock, so you need to evaluate it as such.

Is the company stable right now, meaning there’s no big changes in growth, major company crises, or significant shifts in the businesses that the company is engaged in? Does it have a lot of competitors (if they do, that’s bad)? Does it have a long history of paying dividends? Are those dividends steady?

If the company seems quite stable and likely to continue paying a good dividend, then it’s a reasonable place to put your money. But you need to do your homework on the company before you invest.

Do you believe in spirituality?
- Trevor

I spend a lot of my spare time reading and contemplating religion and spirituality. I was really spurred into this by reading Mere Christianity more than a decade ago, and ever since then, I’ve been studying these topics in depth.

I self-identify as a Christian and spend a lot of time participating in a Christian church that does a lot of good in the local community. However, most of my spiritual exploration is done on my own, and I often come to conclusions that are at odds with what one might call mainstream Christianity.

I don’t think the answers are easy. I tend to believe that many people who absolutely subscribe to a particular religion aren’t thinking about things critically and figuring out their own answers – they just accept the answers given to them by others.

It’s a journey, one that has fulfilled me for a long time.

A year ago you recommended TurboTax. Do you still recommend that suite? I have recently entered the work-force and will be grappling with a few issues (I no longer qualify to use the 1040EZ, I have to file in two states, I made several student loan interest payments…) Which version of TurboTax do you recommend?
- ub

I use TurboTax. I have for almost a decade. It’s worked like a charm

I’ll just point out that if JD at Get Rich Slowly (a far bigger blog with consistently more comments) or Leo at Zenhabits can participate in the discussions on their blogs, so can you.
- Jimbo

It would be very easy for me to “participate” in discussions by popping in and saying things like “Good point!” and “I hadn’t considered that!” and the like. To me, though, that contributes nothing to the discussion. I know that there are reasons for doing it – it can encourage people to participate and the like – but it’s just not me. It feels like soulless marketing. Again, that’s my perspective – it’s cool with me if others choose to do it.

I put a lot of consideration into everything I write. If I put up a post or a comment, I want it to add some authentic value to the world. I’ve written entire articles and simply deleted them because I didn’t think they added enough value. To me, most comments I could make add little or no value.

As I’ve mentioned before, I typically don’t dive into the comments with valuable responses because I just disrupt the discussion going on there. Instead, I save them for future posts or mailbags – if you’ll notice, my reader mailbag each week is a direct response to ten comments or questions from the past week.

I still write The Simple Dollar for the same reason that I started writing it: I want to help people figure out their personal finance problems, nothing more, nothing less. That’s why the only book deal – out of several offers – that I agreed to was one where the book sold for only $7.95, so that people could easily afford it – if I write another book, it’s going to be done not to mine money from my readers, but to explicitly reach people who don’t even read The Simple Dollar. That’s why I run the minimum number of ads I have to run in order to pay the bills and keep food on the table – compare the number of ads here to virtually any other site. That’s why I put my content in the public domain, so that resources like community newspapers and the like can reprint my articles without concern.

Every choice I make for this site is in the interest of reaching as many people as possible with good personal finance advice and concepts. I don’t feel that trolling my own comments accomplishes that – I used to invest a lot of energy in doing it, and all it seemed to do was alienate readers and create arguments that weren’t there before.

That doesn’t mean I don’t read the comments and that I don’t participate on occasion – I still do. I just don’t fill comment threads with disruptive material or pointless material – I’m very careful with what I contribute.

what are your thoughts on the Discover credit card? Especially that deal with the cash back at the end of the year?
- Margaret

My wife had a Discover card for a long time, lured in by the same “cash back” offer that interested you. However, she gradually stopped using it and now almost exclusively uses a Visa with a good reward program.

Why did she stop using it? First, the cash back reward wasn’t all that great – it was usually substantially lower than the rewards she could get on other cards. Second, it wasn’t as widely accepted as other cards. Third, they were really intrusive with their calling, often calling us with “courtesy calls” squarely in the middle of family time in order to promote some new deal that they had.

She got fed up with it after a while and switched.

What do you do when your best is not good enough?
- Chris

Many people who find themselves saying things like this are aiming for the stars. They’re expecting to rise to the very top of their field, when the truth is that they’re often lacking the many years of training and experience that the people at the top of the field have.

One easy solution is to aim a little lower. Don’t immediately aim for the very top. Instead, set goals that are more reachable. Maybe this means adopting a new career path. Maybe this means taking on jobs or tasks that you have told yourself are “beneath” you.

Another thing that everyone should do is practice their basic skills. Work on your communication skills deliberately. Learn a new language and practice it daily. Polish your skills in your spare time in any way you can find. In other words, get better at your craft by practicing the fundamentals. Michael Jordan didn’t become Michael Jordan by playing scrimmages over and over – he would practice little details obsessively until they became natural for him.

A younger member of our extended family is facing foreclosure (as are many these days, it seems). They have consulted a lawyer (helps to have one in the family) and all possible contacts have been made with the lender. Giving the bank a Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure versus hanging on to the bitter end – which is the lesser of two evils? Having a foreclosure and deficiency judgment against their credit either way, it seems to make sense to me to stay in their house as long as possible. What do you think?
- Gayle

Is the person upside down (or close to it) in the house? That’s the real question. If the person in question owes less than what the house could sell for, then they should hang on to the bitter end. If the person owes more than what the house could sell for (or it’s close), they should try to get the bank to accept a deed in lieu of foreclosure.

Here’s the scoop: a deed in lieu of foreclosure basically means that you’re asking the bank to accept the deed to the house in exchange for letting you out of the mortgage. The bank may or may not accept it, depending on their current business state and their policies, too. They’re more likely to accept it if the person has no significant additional assets – if the person has a lot of assets, the bank almost always won’t accept the deed, since they can go after the person’s assets during foreclosure.

Do you play fantasy baseball? How much?
- FM

I usually am involved in two or three fantasy leagues a season. One of them is usually competitive and eats up most of my focus – the others are ones with old friends where we mostly goof off and shoot the breeze. In those “other” leagues, I usually just attempt to acquire the starting lineup of the Cubs with a few ridiculous All Stars added in (last season in one league, I had basically the Cubs starting lineup with A-Rod).

I also play fantasy football as well, but I find fantasy basketball to be really inaccurate, since the players that really make a team good in basketball tend not to have gaudy stats (take Shane Battier, for instance – I’d love to have him on my team, but his stat line looks awful). I enjoy fantasy baseball the most, though, mostly because I’ve been a big fan of baseball all my life.

I didn’t do this before the advent of the internet – using tools like Yahoo! Sports makes it easy and quite fun to get involved in such games.

I am considering a Target Retirement fund, but i have a few questions/concerns. I have a Roth IRA: American Century Investments Equity Income. It has recently won some awards for funds that are doing well despite the current economic situation. Do you think i should transfer it into a Target account? Should i wait? Should i just gradually move it to something more conservative as my ret. age approaches (skip the Target fund altogether)? Any help would be appreciated.
- hb

If you’re happy with your current investment and are willing to manage the transition into more conservative investments yourself, then by all means, do it.

Target Retirement funds are convenient for people who would never dig into specific investments enough to discover things like the American Century Investments Equity Income fund. Instead, Target Retirement funds are merely there to allow people to just toss their money in and not worry about the minutiae of managing the money – it automatically transitions from stocks to bonds as you approach retirement.

If you’re in tune enough that you prefer to manage it yourself with your own funds, then do it. My recommendation would be to use the Target Retirement funds as good guidelines as to what your proportions of stocks, bonds, cash, and real estate should be.

After last week’s question about vegetables, I’m wondering what you feed your kids for breakfast. Most breakfast options that kids want are really unhealthy.
- Mindy

My kids’ favorite breakfast food is oatmeal. They love the stuff, though the younger one usually makes a big mess because she insists on feeding herself (she’s seventeen months old).

If I have time, I like to make steel cut oatmeal for them because it’s more nutritious, but instant oatmeal is substantially better for the kids than most sugary cereals.

My advice, if they’re hesitant, is to jazz it up a bit. Add fresh fruit to it – blueberries, chopped up strawberries, and so on. Add cinnamon. Add a bit of brown sugar.

Most important, eat it yourself. Eat it in front of your kids and make it clear you like it. Kids are almost always more willing to try things if they see you eating them on a regular basis.

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

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

A few weeks ago, I went out to breakfast with a big group. Most of us were engaged in great conversations about blogging and, frankly, Iowa media gossip, but a few people were pretty noticeably withdrawn from the discussion. They were busy checking their Blackberries every five minutes, putting them down and seeming to pay attention, then picking up that Blackberry again.

When the person next to me pulled out his Blackberry for the sixth or seventh time, I asked him if he was expecting something important. “Oh, no, just a crazy start to the day at the office,” he said as his thumbs scrolled through a document. “Shouldn’t you maybe slip out and go put out the fire?” I asked him. “Oh, no, I’d rather be here chatting with you guys,” he said.

Was his statement true? On some level, he might have felt that way, but when he pulled out his Blackberry yet again just a few minutes later, it was clear that both his heart and his mind were already in the office.

Where’s the divide between professional life and personal life for this person? It’s obvious, based on his use of the Blackberry at a breakfast with friends, that the divide is pretty blurry, if there is one at all. That blurring leads to a life that is truly centered around work – and over a long period, often leads to burnout and disenchantment with all of life.

The One-Life Solution, by Dr. Henry Cloud, focuses on this very problem, one that seems incredibly prevalent in modern life. How do we have a successful career without it completely dominating every aspect of our lives? Let’s dig in and see what Cloud has to say.

Identifying the Problem – and the Solution
Cloud gets right to the point. The reason many people find that their personal lives are being overrun by their careers is that they fail to set boundaries between their work and their personal lives. Boundaries create structure within your life, enabling you to firmly separate the professional and personal aspects of your life. Cloud argues that people who fail to create these boundaries are lacking an internal core that gives them the strength to simply put their foot down on issues of personal-professional separation.

Your Vision and Your Boundaries
On some level, people want to be wanted, but when that’s coupled with an inability to set boundaries, it often results in one’s professional life dominating their entire life. Boundaries include six key elements: ownership (who’s running the show), control (who can set the limits), freedom (how much or how little energy one can devote to something), responsibility (who faces the consequences of failure), limits (when and where does a certain part of life begin and end), and protection (disallowing negatives from one part of life to intrude on another part). Most of us struggle with one or more pieces of this puzzle most of the time.

Structure and Boundaries
You are a distinct person. You have your own wants and needs that are completely separate from the needs and wants of everyone else. Boundary issues usually occur when you allow the needs and wants of others to supersede your own wants and needs. For example, you need a certain amount of uninterrupted time each day to focus on your personal needs and interests. When you allow that time to be interrupted because a colleague wants you to do something, you’re giving up much more than a few hours. You’re showing that you’re willing to sacrifice your needs for their wants – a sure sign that you’re not standing up for yourself.

Reclaiming Your Power
So, how do you fix the problem? It’s not as hard as you might think, actually. The first step is to simply take inventory of your life and figure out the areas where you’re failing to set up boundaries. Are you accepting projects that are poorly defined? Are you allowing work projects to interrupt the time you spend with family? Are you incapable of saying “no”? Do you feel guilt about things potentially left undone? Try to identify what is compelling you to violate the barriers you want in your life.

The Audit
Once you start to figure out what exactly is wrong, take an audit of your life. Be mindful and look for the situations where you find yourself falling prey to violating the separation you want. Who is causing you to break these barriers? What projects are causing the problems, and why? Study your own life carefully and look for the patterns. One good way of doing this is by keeping a detailed time diary for a month or two, detailing what you’re doing every fifteen minutes or half hour of every single day.

The Laws of Boundaries
It’s very difficult to give up the patterns of life that leave you with little true personal time. Here, Cloud offers some tough encouragement to make some changes. The piece of the chapter that really hit home with me was the idea that you sow what you reap. One of the big reasons why I felt a need to draw a boundary between my personal life and my professional life was that I worried about becoming the father in the song Cats in the Cradle – a person who didn’t have enough time for my kids when they were young, only to find that they didn’t have enough time for me when they grew up. I then reflected on my own relationship with my parents, particularly with my mother – she always made plenty of time for me and now, as an adult, I love making time for her. She’s not just my mom, she’s one of my best friends, because I know she will always be there for me until she draws her last breath, and I, without hesitation, will be there for her. You sow what you reap.

You and Your Words
Quite often, when faced with situations where someone or something is trying to stretch out of its barriers, we know that we should say no, but our words undermine what we want. We find ourselves agreeing and then, later, we regret it desperately. Cloud walks through many common situations where this occurs, but the real underlying message here is to always ask for more information when you’re unsure and take time before giving your answer (so you can realize that you need to say no or at least set some limits on the commitment).

Make the “No-Choice” Choices First
What about the things that you simply can’t choose? I know a big handful of system administrators who are constantly on call for their job – if the servers go down at 2 AM, they get called and they go in to the office. For them, this is not a choice – it’s a requirement. Cloud argues that there is no aspect of professional life that is truly a “no choice.” In fact, he argues that any “requirement” that truly reduces the quality of your life should be discussed in detail in an attempt to find a better solution that doesn’t knock down barriers in your life.

Follow the Misery and Make a Rule
What if your job isn’t filled with strict requirements to fill your life, but it somehow seems to eat up all of your time? Quite often, there’s just a single root cause (or perhaps two). Spend some time evaluating why you let those walls break down. Track those influences down to their root cause. Is it a person who pushes too much? Is it a confluence of too many responsibilities? Dig down to that root cause, then develop a clear rule to handle it and give you the space you need – and make that rule clear to the people who may simply expect you to break it.

Time, Space, and E-Mail
With the prevalence of Blackberries and other such devices, many people carry their jobs along with them in their pocket. In many ways, it makes the work-life barrier very low – you can just pick up that device and check in on your work quite quickly, after all. My solution for this kind of problem is the same as Cloud’s: turn the device off and leave it somewhere where you can’t easily access it. If something is constantly breaking down your barriers, you need to avoid that thing. This ties directly into the need to focus on tasks – the best way to get something important done is to simply shut off all possible distractions. Close the email program. Turn off the phone. Shut the web browser. Then, focus on what you need to get done.

Getting Your Balance Sheet in Order
Here, Cloud connects all of this to personal finance. Many people put up with such issues at work and allow work to pervade their personal life because they simply cannot afford to lose the job. If they say “no,” they’re worried the boss will simply find someone who will say “yes” and you’ll be jobless. This is a brilliant argument for sound financial planning. You should always have a strong emergency fund to help protect you against job loss. Living below your means at all times is simply a strong tactic, all around – your boss then loses that bit of financial leverage over you.

End Some Things Now
If there is a long term negative in the workplace – an uncooperative employee, an inscrutable task – that does nothing more than bring down everyone that is involved with it, it’s vital that some sort of resolution is reached as soon as possible. Negatives that don’t seem to ever be going away do nothing more than bring you down and likely bring others down as well. Address it now, not later.

Communicating Your Boundaries
One final stumbling block: how do you make it clear to others what your boundaries are without creating additional problems? This is difficult for nearly everyone. The best approach is to explain things calmly – don’t get angry or aggressive, but state things clearly and firmly. Remember, no aspect of your life should ever have absolute dominion over your whole life. In the end, you get what you tolerate.

Is The One-Life Solution Worth Reading?
Some people have a natural knack for feeling completely in control of their life. For others, it’s not quite so easy, and their personal boundaries seem to get trampled over and over again. If you find yourself in that latter camp, The One-Life Solution is an excellent read. It’s thorough, detailed, and insightful – you will wind up with a lot of food for thought and a lot of tactics to use to handle your situation.

If anything, The One-Life Solution is a bit too broad. Cloud gets into specifics with many workplace and life-boundary issues, but so many different scenarios are addressed that the book sometimes feels unfocused. If you’re looking for solutions for a specific problem, there are large swaths of the book that can be skimmed.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of great advice between the covers here.

This article has been requested by a small army of readers. For many of you, this article won’t apply much at all – for a few of you, hopefully this article will prove quite useful.

As I mentioned a while back, I received an iPod Touch as a Christmas gift this year. An iPod Touch, for those unaware, is basically an iPhone without the phone – but also without the ridiculously high monthly phone bill. Over the past three months, I’ve used it a ton – but not as an iPod. Instead, I’ve been exploring the mountains of free applications available for it that you can download at your convenience right on the device.

There are literally tens of thousands of applications available for the iPod Touch and you can simply browse through them at your heart’s content, downloading the ones you want to try. Many of these applications are completely free – no cost at all – but many of the truly useful ones do come with a fee.

Given my interests, it’s not surprising that I’ve dug deeply into the personal finance and productivity applications available for the iPhone/iPod Touch. I’ve literally tried out hundreds of these applications over the last three months and, in the end, I’ve found only ten that I would actually recommend to others – and six of them are free.

An aside: I do not think the iPod Touch or iPhone is a necessary purchase for anyone. While I have found uses for it, I do not think it is worth the out-of-pocket entry price. Don’t view this as a list of reasons to buy one – look at it as a list of very useful things if you already have one.

Let’s dig in.

Six Essential Money-Saving Free Applications
These six tools are free for download from the App Store. I use each of them on a regular basis, particularly Bloomberg and the tip calculator.

Mobile Banking
Several different banks (Bank of America, Chase, PNC, and Citi among them, as well as several smaller banks that use a combination tool from AT&T) offer tools for the iPod Touch/iPhone that allow you to access online banking from anywhere. Depending on the bank, these offer the ability to check your account balances, do online bill pay, and even locate nearby ATMs (if you’re using an iPhone). These tools are perfect for doing your bills while you’re waiting at the doctor’s office, for example. Hey, ING Direct! If you’re listening, such an app would be an awesome addition to your tools!

Bloomberg
Bloomberg’s stock-tracking app is a huge improvement over the default “Stocks” tool that comes by default on every iPhone/iPod Touch. The tool provides financial headlines, a stock market ticker, and the ability to set up your own portfolio of stocks and index funds to follow. The data this tool provides is a great way to do basic research into stocks and index funds on the go, though it’s not a perfect tool for day traders. It’s just what I needed, though. [App Store]

My Budget Money Management
There are several free budgeting tools for the iPhone/iPod Touch – this one is the best of the lot, by far (in my opinion). It’s pretty easy, actually – you just define any number of spending categories you want (Auto, Entertainment, etc. – it comes with ten categories by default, but you can remove and add to your heart’s desire), how much you want to spend in that category, then just enter expenses as the month goes along. If you already have a household budget worked up in a spreadsheet or on paper, it’s pretty easy to switch. Even better, if you have a Mac, there’s a desktop client for My Budget that enables you to do most of the work on your computer, then do the little expense entries on your handheld device. [App Store]

Mint.com
Mint is a nice service for managing your finances all in one place, but I have some personal information security concerns about it. If you’ve decided for yourself that the benefits are worth it, then Mint’s iPhone/iPod Touch application is really useful for keeping an eye on all of your finances easily in one place on the road. There were a few other personal data aggregation tools for the iPhone/iPod Touch that were quite slick, but the security of such tools makes me nervous (and thus makes me not recommend it). [App Store]

CheckPlease Tip Calculator
How much is an appropriate tip? What if you’re splitting the ticket and tip among several people? Most of the time, when this comes up, people just make ballpark estimates, but a good tip calculator (and this is the best free one available for the iPhone/iPod Touch) can make such calculations easy. Just type in your total, set the percentage tip you want to leave, and the number of people splitting the ticket, and the calculator will tell you what tip you should leave. It also adds the tip to your total, making filling out a credit card receipt quite easy. This is a lot better than just “rounding up” for your tip. [App Store]

Bankarama Lite
Bankarama is basically a checking account ledger on your iPod Touch/iPhone. It’s an incredibly useful way to keep track of recent debit card uses and thus keep you from accidentally overdrafting your account (due to transactions that haven’t hit your account yet). This application would have saved me many times over the years. [App Store]

Four Essential Money-Saving Paid Applications
I also discovered four paid applications that are well worth using. Each of these can easily pay for themselves with even minimal regular use.

Grocery IQ
Cost: $0.99
This is the most effective tool I’ve found for making a truly effective grocery list. Just type in the first three letters or so of an item you want to add to your grocery list and the program automatically fills in the rest of the information and adds it to your grocery list. The list itself is auto-sorted for you into sensible groups – dairy, bread, frozen foods, etc. – so that you can snag all of the items in that area of the store all at once. You can also organize the list by aisle in your favorite store by assigning these item groups to aisles once – after that, your list will automaticlaly list items by aisle as well. This tool has made grocery shopping substantially faster, which means I spend far less time wandering the aisles – which means far fewer impulsive buys at the grocery store and thus money saved. Excellent tool. [App Store]

iXpenseIt
Cost: Free for lite version, $4.99 for full version
While the above “My Budget Money Management” is the best free budgeting tool, it is clearly surpassed by the full version of iXpenseIt. iXpenseIt is pretty much the closest thing to Quicken in your pocket – it’s a thorough, robust, and flexible tool that handles virtually every budgeting or expense tracking task you can throw at it. My recommendation is to try out the free “My Budget Money Management” first to see if it fits your needs, then investigate this tool (by trying out the free “Lite” version) if you’re sorely needing a few particular features. [App Store]

Gas Cubby
Cost: $4.99
I’m almost obsessive about keeping track of the mileage on my truck. I like to see how different things affect the mileage – does it do better on the highway or the city? How much does inflating the tires help (quite a bit, actually)? Does an oil change and other regular maintenance help (actually, a fair amount)? Gas Cubby not only works as a perfect mileage tracker (with plenty of room for notes), but it also functions as a very useful maintenance calendar, alerting you to any and all maintenance you need to do based on your current odometer reading. If you keep a maintenance calendar for your vehicle (a great way to keep your vehicle running well) and also want to keep tabs on your mileage, this is an essential tool. [App Store]

Remember the Milk
Cost: Free (sort of)
I’ve tried almost every task management program on the iPhone/iPod Touch and I keep returning to Remember the Milk. RtM is a free web-based task management tool that I’ve been using for years – and, because I’ve used it so much, I was quite willing to pay extra to support the tool and become a “pro” user (it costs $25 a year, but it’s worth it for me to support a tool I use so often). With that “pro” membership comes an iPod Touch/iPhone application that has all of the functionality of RtM, except that it can be used offline, anywhere you are. The application is usable for two weeks without a “pro” account if you want to try it out. Given that I use this to manage everything in my life – personal things to do, work-related things to do, managing projects – it’s well worth it to me. There are many other options for task management on the iPhone/iPod Touch, but I’ve not found one that matches RtM for me. [App Store]

Bonus: Five Free Google Mobile Tools You Need to Bookmark
Google offers a ton of goodies for people who have mobile devices like the iPhone/iPod Touch. Just point your web browser at these URLs and bookmark them.

Gmail
http://gmail.google.com
I don’t use the email program that comes with the phone at all. Instead, I use Gmail – it centralizes all of my email in one convenient place. The “mobile” view of your email is very easy to read and it lets me check for new messages, read them, and punch out quick responses without much effort.

Google Reader
http://reader.google.com/
I use Google Reader to keep up with about fifty different blogs. The mobile version of the site allows me to browse through the fresh articles on all of these sites in a format that’s very readable on such a small screen.

Google Calendar
http://calendar.google.com
Again, I use this as my primary calendar tool both on my iPod Touch and on the desktop. I find it much more useful than the iPhone/iPod Touch built-in calendar tool, though I do sync up my Google Calendar with it so I can get my appointments and important dates even if I’m offline.

Google Tasks
http://www.gmail.com/tasks
If you’re just looking for a very simple task list on the go, this will probably do exactly what you need. Just add tasks, then check them off as you do them. It’s at least as good as any free task list tool on the iPod Touch/iPhone, plus you can edit it at your desk if you prefer.

Google Notebook
http://m.google.com/notebook
I use this to take longer notes and save them for future reference. Often, I’ll jot down notes on my iPod Touch, then look at them later when I’m at my desk so I can appropriately deal with the idea/material.

Good luck!