Every month, I spend some time on a personal finance statement. I’m careful to include the current balances on all of my debts and assets, then I add up the assets, subtract the debts off the top, and wind up with a number that, in one single value, represents my financial standing in the world.

I often wish that, when I look at my balance sheet at the end of the month, the difference between my assets and my debts was substantially larger. I would love for that number to be big enough for me to declare true financial independence.

But that number is not my net worth. Nor should it be yours.

The common terminology for that number is net worth, but I’ve always found “net worth” to be a strange way of expressing the idea. To me, the mere sum of one’s assets minus one’s debts is a good financial indicator, but it’s far from what I would call “net worth.”

As I take a look down my list of assets, I see things like our home, our savings and checking account balances, our retirement accounts, and so on.

But are those really all of our assets?

I view our close family and friends as major assets. These people help lift us up through thick and thin. They provide great friendship and social situations when times are good, and are there for encouragement (and more tangible help) when times are bad. Certainly, they’re an asset in our lives.

I look at our health as an asset. We’re all in good health. My wife and I are able to earn money because of our good health.

I view The Simple Dollar and its audience as a huge asset. Both provide constant encouragement for me to keep a strong focus on my financial health, plus both inspire me to greater things.

There are many other things in my life that are assets, too, that don’t show up on a balance sheet: our extended social network, the body of knowledge and education that my wife and I can draw on, our talents – these are all assets that can’t be truly quantified, but they all contribute significant value to our lives.

The same type of thinking continues as I move down to the debt part of the balance sheet.

I’m indebted to a lot of people for things they’ve helped me with in life. If called, I would gladly help any of those people with virtually anything they asked for.

I feel a great deal of spiritual indebtedness to the people and things in the world around me. I feel as though it is my responsibility to do what I can to make the world a better place.

I owe quite a bit of time to various groups and responsibilities – and, as you know, time is money.

To put it simply, my real net worth is more than just a sum of financial assets and debts. Compared to the wholeness and beauty of life, one’s financial net worth is just the beginning.

Homemade pizza night is a weekly occurrence at our house. For us, there is simply nothing that quite matches homemade pizza for appealing to all of us – it’s infinitely flexible, incredibly cheap, fun to make (and it gets everyone involved, even the small children), and quite delicious. Best of all, if you plan ahead a bit, it doesn’t take long to make, either – you can have a made-from-scratch pizza on the table in a half an hour if you’ve done some reasonable prep work the night before.

Here’s a step-by-step guide (along with some surprising and unusual hints) for making some great homemade pizza for your family.

What You’ll Need

For this, I’m going to make a pretty simple American-style pizza with my family’s three favorite toppings – Italian turkey sausage, turkey pepperoni, and black olives, with a mix of mozzarella and cheddar cheese on top. Here’s what you’ll need to make it yourself:

A nifty checklist for you:

flour
water
olive oil
dry yeast
salt
tomato sauce
oregano (and other spices to your liking)
whatever toppings you desire (we’re using turkey sausage, turkey pepperoni, and black olives)

What’s nice is that all of these things, aside from the toppings, can easily be found in a well-stocked pantry and refrigerator. When we want to make homemade pizza, quite often we don’t have to buy a single thing – it’s all already on hand. Even more importantly, we usually use only a tiny fraction of the items – a single container of salt, for instance, would provide enough salt for many, many pizzas. As a result, the actual cost of assembling a pizza is pretty low – my estimate for the pizza assembled here is in the $5 range since most of the items are fractionally used and the rest are picked up in bulk when they’re on sale.

Making the Dough
You can do this the night before.

The first step in the process is making the dough. Sure, you can pick up a kit if you’d like, but it’s about the same amount of effort in the kitchen (and notably cheaper) to just do it yourself from scratch, plus you don’t have to worry about remembering the kit.

Here’s what you need:

3 cups flour
1 cup water (or other liquid – see below)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon dry yeast
1 teaspoon salt

Pizza Tip #1 Instead of using water, I often like to substitute about two-thirds of a bottle of beer for the water. It adds a great flavor, color, and aroma to the crust.

First thing – warm up the water (or other liquid) in the microwave until it’s nice and warm to the touch – not scalding, but not room temperature, either. Then simply drop all of the ingredients into a mixing bowl.

Pizza Tip #2 Add some additional flavor to the crust by adding in some optional items before you begin mixing the dough. Things I enjoy adding include oregano, black pepper, red pepper flakes, parmesan cheese, garlic, basil, parsley, onion powder, and rosemary.

All you have to do is mix this up until it begins to form a ball. It’s much easier to do this with a stand mixer, which I’m lucky enough to have:

In the end, you want a ball of dough that’s just barely sticky, but not sticky enough to actually leave any residue on your hands. If it’s not sticky at all, add a tablespoon of water and mix it some more. If it’s too sticky, add a tablespoon or two of flour and mix some more.

Once you have the ball, knead it a bit with your hands. Smell it. You can add more flavorful additions if you want as long as you work them into the dough right now. Here’s what my ball looks like.

Then, when you’re satisfied (and ready to simply eat the dough right now), put it back into the bowl and let it rest in a warm, dark place for an hour or so. I usually let my dough rest on the stovetop with a towel over the top:

If you’re preparing the crust the night before, instead of letting the dough rise in a bowl, pat some flour on the outside of the dough ball (to keep it from sticking) and wrap the dough in Saran Wrap or a Ziploc bag with air sucked out and put it in the fridge. It will raise very slowly overnight and be perfect in the morning.

Preparing the Crust
You can do this the morning before.

One big step many people skip in the pizza-making process is pre-baking the pizza crust. Baking your crust in the oven for six minutes or so before putting on toppings prevents the dreaded “doughy crust” that often is the downfall of an otherwise delicious homemade pizza.

So, preheat the oven to 425 F, get out your pizza pan or cookie sheet (I actually just use a big cookie sheet), sprinkle a healthy dose of flour all over it (or use a cooking spray like Pam if you prefer), then spread out the dough over the pan. If you want, you can toss the dough, but I often mess up the dough when I do that, so I usually just stretch it as much as I can in my hands before I put it down.

I then spread it to the edge of the pan, then roll it back just a bit to form a crust edge, like this:

Then, just toss the crust into the oven and bake it for six minutes or so. When it’s done, there will be a few bubbles – just pop them with a fork. You can then put the crust in the refrigerator if you baked it in the morning.

Making the Sauce
You can do this the morning before.

Another thing people often do that’s a big waste of money for pizza is buying a jar of sauce from the store. For less than a dollar, you can make an awesome sauce at home.

It’s easy – just open up a can of tomato sauce, pour it in a bowl, and start jazzing it up. If you use nothing else at all, use a minimum of half a teaspoon of salt, half a teaspoon of oregano, and a quarter teaspoon of black pepper.

However, I strongly encourage you to experiment. Try more oregano, more black pepper, red pepper flakes, parmesan cheese, garlic, basil, parsley, onion powder, or rosemary. Add some of everything you like, stir it, taste it, then add some more. Don’t be afraid to play around.

Once you’re happy, you can store the sauce in the refrigerator all day – or you can go right ahead and start assembling the pizza.

Assembling and Baking the Pizza

You have the crust done. You have the sauce ready to go. Now comes the fun part – assembling and baking the pizza.

I tend to layer things as much as possible – sauce, then toppings, then cheese, then a bit more sauce, then more toppings, then more cheese. You can do whatever you like, of course, but I do recommend having a bit of sauce on the bottom to hold the crust to the toppings.

The best part about the toppings is that the kids can get involved. My son can spread sauce, sprinkle cheese, and toss on toppings – and even my one year old daughter can help a bit.

Pizza Tip #3 When you’re finished assembling the pizza, sprinkle some oregano on top of the cheese just before you toss it in the oven. It brings out the flavor of the cheese like nothing else.

Here’s my assembled pizza:

I bake pizzas in the oven at 400 F for about sixteen minutes, then check them to see how done they are. Depending on the amount of toppings (and whether the crust was cold to begin with), I may have to add a few minutes to the baking time.

Here’s the finished pizza…

… and all that’s left is to slice it up! We slice this pizza into twenty four small, roughly square shaped slices and we usually get through twelve of them at mealtime, leaving half of the pizza for lunch leftovers for the next day or two for my life. Not bad at all for a family meal that everyone can help with that costs only $6 or so.

Good luck! (And leave your pizza tips in the comments!)

Recently, I heard some pretty strong (but valid) criticism of The Simple Dollar (that applies to most personal finance blogs out there):

You are a guy in your [thirties] who lists no credentials except the fact that you made it through a “complete financial meltdown” a few years ago. You have no professional training and don’t even mention where you went to college.

I don’t claim to be a guru, but I have had sufficient education to know that financial expertise is not something that can be learned through experience and introspection. Intuition in this area can be very misleading.

[...] People should not make financial decisions based on what their neighbor says, on the spoutings of someone on a website, or on what your gut is telling you. Seek out a qualified professional and get a second opinion.

This is just a blunt restatement of criticism that I hear on a daily basis. I hear time and time again that I’m not a financial expert, that what I write is of dubious benefit, and that I should just shut my mouth and let the “experts” do the talking.

So, let’s go through this step by step.

First of all, I’m not a financial guru, nor do I claim to be. All I can do is share my experiences and what I’ve learned along the way. I spend a lot of time educating myself on financial topics (see those weekly extremely detailed book reviews? I’ve been doing those every week for three years), trying new things, and asking questions. More importantly, I try to apply as much as I can to my life to see whether it actually works or not.

I choose to share all of that on The Simple Dollar and, more importantly, I include with it a lot of details of my own life. That’s an important distinction from the work of most financial “gurus” who offer up advice. Why? All advice comes from a perspective of some kind. Different people have different individual risk tolerances. They have different life experiences that have led them to different values.

The end result is that most financial “gurus” offer at least somewhat differing advice from one another. One easy example that comes to mind is the differing perspectives that Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman and David Bach have on repaying a list of debts. Ramsey advocates paying off the one with the smallest balance first. Bach recommends paying off the one with the highest interest rate first. Orman suggests a hybrid plan, where you focus on the highest interest rate debt but make more than the minimum payment on the other debts.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? It’s not that simple. All three of the plans have advantages and disadvantages. Ramsey’s plan has the psychological benefit of a quick success – it’s easiest to eliminate your lowest balance debt. Orman’s plan also has a psychological perk – you’re making up ground against all of your debts. Bach’s plan is the best one from a pure mathematical perspective – over the long haul, it wins, but you may have to wait a long time to feel the success of removing a debt.

Ramsey and Bach and Orman came to these conclusions because of their life experiences, their own research and investigation, their own risk tolerance, and so on.

You can find many, many differences between financial “experts” along these lines. Most of the time, the differences are more a matter of perspective than a matter of fact. But here’s the catch – different solutions often work better for different people. Dave Ramsey’s solutions might work best for some of you. Suze Orman might give the right advice for others.

The catch is that you can’t know which one is “right” for you or “wrong” for you at first glance.

What’s the solution, then? Get your personal finance information from multiple viewpoints. Try to find answers that work well for you and follow them. Most importantly, don’t simply follow the advice of the first person you read.

So why do I write? I try to synthesize as many different viewpoints as I can find, figure out how they fit in my life, and share that experience with you. That’s the same package you’ll get from any personal finance blogger who is passionate about their audience and aren’t just trying to sell stuff.

Perhaps you gain value from that – if you’re a regular reader, you probably do gain some value from that.

That doesn’t mean, however, that The Simple Dollar is any sort of substitute for doing your own legwork and finding your own answers. Take my viewpoint as one of many – with mine, you might not have the value of a degree in finance, but you do know where I’m coming from in terms of background, life experiences, and perspective.

Good blogs bring something to the table that can’t be brought with a book and a television show – a synthesis of ideas, an interaction with readers, and a perspective that is nuanced and clear. After all, there are almost 3,000 articles at The Simple Dollar now, and readers who have been following over the long haul have a very strong, detailed picture of who I am and where I’m coming from. That’s an aspect no “guru” can give you from an infomercial.

Oh, and by the way, I went to Iowa State University.

One of the things my wife and I both pride ourselves on is coming up with inexpensive and creative solutions for common problems. We like using white vinegar as a fabric softener – it’s inexpensive and accomplishes the same goal. We like eating leftovers. My wife just spent two weeks hand-sewing stuffed animals that she made for our children out of a pile of old sweaters she got for pennies from a used clothing store.

We’ve come to enjoy these things. We both take a lot of pleasure out of frugal projects and frugal choices in our life.

The joy doesn’t come directly from saving money, though that’s nice. Instead, our joy comes from the fact that we’re not wasting resources. We’re finding uses for things that would otherwise go unused or might get thrown away. We’re also discovering creative new uses for common things, like our use of white vinegar as a fabric softener.

The thing is, if our priorities were different, we could easily afford different solutions. We could buy the best laundry detergent and it wouldn’t break us. We could eat gourmet meals every night and our budget could handle it. We could just buy our kids new stuffed animals instead of making them.

Four years ago, I would have viewed the cheaper route as being the “deprived” route. I firmly believed that the more expensive option was the better option and, if you had the money for it, that’s the way you should always go. If you’re earning plenty of money, then you should be spending that money, right?

In a way, I almost looked down upon people who were frugal, particularly people who were actively choosing frugality over simply buying the best. I felt pride in my possessions and experiences – and I authentically looked at people who chose different paths as needlessly depriving themselves.

What changed? I found that, as I tried different tactics in my life, I was very happy when I could make something work well, especially when I didn’t expect it. I was honestly surprised when I discovered how well white vinegar worked as a fabric softener – and I wanted to share that discovery. My wife thoroughly enjoyed the process of making homemade stuffed animals – and she used the leftover material to make pot holders.

Eventually, I reached a point where I no longer felt like I needed to spend lots of money to find the best things in life for me. I found quite a bit more happiness in finding ways to do things that weren’t wasteful, in terms of money, time, or other resources.

Whenever I see someone look at frugal tactics and conclude that the person must be living a deprived life, I understand where they are coming from, because I was there not all that long ago.

What I’ve learned in the interim, though, is that a sense of being deprived – provided, of course, that your basic needs are met – is just a negative state of mind. All it does is convince you to spend more to make the feeling go away – and, at the same time, overlook opportunities in life that can help you get into better financial shape.

Frugality isn’t choosing to be deprived – it’s just a different way of looking at things.

When I was nineteen, one of my college professors wanted me to stick around campus for the summer to help him with a large project. Unfortunately, the project would really only employ me for about fifteen hours a week, so to supplement that time, he helped me hunt for another job on campus. Eventually, he connected me with another job, one that seemed really intriguing on the surface and seemed like a lot of fun for the first week or so.

It turned out to be the worst job of my life.

My job was largely to perform menial tasks in a plant research lab. Most of my work initially centered around making large batches of agar – basically, I followed one of several recipes to make a particular type of gelatin upon which bacteria could grow in petri dishes. This was fun – I actually enjoyed it and I learned quite a bit from this. I asked tons of questions about why I was making this particular agar, what people were doing on their projects, and so on.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm and expressed interest was a big mistake. Most of the other low-level workers quickly disliked my enthusiasm. They would glare at me when I asked questions (even though the scientists were usually very happy to answer them) and make comments like “Why do you care?”

After a few weeks, this resentment turned to sabotage. Several batches of the agar I made turned out completely wrong – and eventually I realized that several of the ingredients in those agars had been stored and labeled incorrectly. Obviously, the scientists in the lab were fairly upset with me for wasting a lot of time and quite a bit of lab supplies, so I began to be given worse and worse tasks. Most of the other workers in the lab basically refused to speak to me because I had been deemed a “favorite” early on because of my enthusiasm. So, what began as an exciting job started to really turn to drudgery.

Eventually, I found myself in a basement at midnight shoveling dirt into a sieve and shaking it to produce finer dirt for planting – and I realized that I hated this job. I was expected to get through several hundred pounds of dirt a night, go home, get some sleep, and be back at work in the morning for my morning tasks, followed by some afternoon hours working for the professor that originally got me the job. I was essentially working about fifteen hours a day at this point spread out through a twenty four hour day in such a way that I couldn’t get more than two or three hours of sleep.

It finally came to a head one morning. I was exhausted after a long night of shoveling dirt. At about four in the morning, I fell asleep on a bench outside of the lab, which is where I slept until about seven or so when one of the scientists came bursting out of the lab, yelling at me. Apparently, someone had spilled one of the chemicals all over the lab and, since I had obviously been there for a while, I must have been the person that did it. I didn’t know what the chemical was, but I was pretty concerned that it was carcinogenic. The scientist, however, was so irate at the mess that he ordered me to start cleaning it immediately.

I refused.

I was fired.

To this day, I don’t know why the chemical was there, but I’m vaguely sure that one of the coworkers who disliked me was responsible for it – and may have even planted the idea in the scientist’s head that I had done it. But that’s water under the bridge now.

Even though the experience was a terrible one, I did learn some valuable lessons.

Build strong relationships with all of your coworkers as early as possible. Sure, we all want a strong relationship with our boss, but we also need a strong relationship with everyone we rely on in the workplace. Spend time getting to know all of these people on a personal level and make an effort to take a genuine interest in who they are and what they’re working on. The people around you can make or break you in countless little ways.

There is value in doing even the most menial job well. Many people, when charged with tasks that they think are “below” them, don’t put real effort into doing that simple task well. I fell into that trap with some of my later menial tasks at that lab. I felt like I should be doing interesting stuff in the lab – actually assisting on projects instead of down in the basement shoveling dirt. So I didn’t bother to put any pride in my work. I’d shovel around dirt in a sloppy fashion, letting big chunks miss the sieve entirely. I’d spend the absolute minimum amount of effort I could when moving the dirt, often making a big wheelbarrow of the dirt into an obstacle instead of putting it in a place where it was useful.

What I didn’t see is that doing sloppy work on these minimal tasks did nothing more than make me look far worse than before. Simple tasks are a great opportunity for you to show your excellence, because you can easily go far beyond the minimum.

Procedures can be annoying, but they can also save you in a pinch. One big problem with the lab was the lack of standard procedures for many tasks. I would be told how to do something, but the procedure was rarely documented at all. This came to a head when I was ordered to clean up the substance – there was no procedure in place at all for handling cleaning up an unknown chemical.

If you are charged with a new task that will be done regularly, take notes on the procedure you follow, document it, and share the documentation. This will virtually never be a bad thing. Even if you’re the only person doing it, it can help demonstrate how you’re making the workplace better, but the best result is that it gets others to document things. If there had been documentation on how to clean up the mess, I could have easily turned to that documentation. Instead, I was forced to make a choice and refuse to clean it up – and that resulted in my firing.

Every experience we have in life teaches us something if we’re willing to open ourselves to the lessons that it can provide. What did you learn from your worst job?

Sharon writes in:

I created a debt repayment plan just as you suggested, but I had one real problem. I borrowed $1,000 from my mother with no interest, which would mean it should be the last debt I repay on that plan, but every time I see my mother, I feel guilty knowing I’m repaying another debt first. Should I talk to her about it? What should I do?

My belief is this: unless you have a very clear and explicit understanding with a friend or family member that you’ve borrowed money from, repaying that person should be the highest priority of all of your debts.

Most of the time, that doesn’t make sense on paper. Quite often, loans from family members are interest free, which means that you’re money ahead by paying off those debts last, only after getting rid of all other debts.

But the nuances of life aren’t always reflected on paper.

When you borrow money from a family member, you’re borrowing more than just money. You’re also borrowing against the trust and understanding that you’ve built up in that relationship over time. By turning your friend or family member into a lender and transforming yourself into a borrower, you put a new dynamic into that relationship, one that is bound to strain it over time whether you see it or not.

That relationship is a valuable one. If you have a relationship with someone that’s filled with enough trust that the person is willing to lend you money so flexibly, that’s a relationship you need to keep strong because it will provide value to you throughout your life in many, many ways.

Their choice to lend money to you wasn’t a business decision, calculated based on your credit. It’s based on the strength of your relationship. Thus, you should always repay such loans in good faith and in reasonable time.

Sometimes, though, it’s not that easy.

If you can’t repay the person right now, let them know. The worst thing you can do if you’ve borrowed money from someone is to give them the impression that you’ve forgotten about that debt. Quite often, the other person is wondering if you’re ever going to get around to paying you back. Thus, the best solution is to bring up the debt occasionally and let the other person know that you haven’t forgotten about it, but that your financial situation isn’t in order yet. Take this upon yourself – your relationship with that person deserves it.

If you’re feeling resentful (or feeling other emotions you don’t like) when you think about the debt, that’s a very clear sign that you need to repay it soon. If this happens, the money is introducing an element to the relationship that is damaging things. Don’t let that happen – take care of it as quickly as you can, and realize your emotions on the subject are actually much more complicated than they seem at first glance.

My rule of thumb is that lending money doesn’t mix well at all with personal relationships and should be avoided at all costs. If you’re in a situation where you have borrowed money, make a concerted effort to pay it back – or at least make it clear that you’re not just blowing off the debt. It’s the best thing you can do to ensure that your relationship survives the loan.

So, I’ve recorded six test episodes of my podcast over the last few weeks as I try to figure out my “voice” and how exactly I want the podcast to go. I recorded one, sent it to a small handful of readers, got some feedback, and moved on.

The first four or so were awful and left me doubting whether I even wanted to do this. By awful, I don’t mean that the recording or material was bad – I mean that they were really boring. Quite frankly, I wouldn’t listen to them.

With the last two, though, I think I’m starting to really hit my stride. I moved it in a very conversational direction and suddenly, somehow, it’s clicking well. It’s almost turning into an audio version of the reader mailbags, to be honest, with a lot of anecdotes mixed in.

Don’t worry, it’s coming. This is called a “teaser.”

Lance Armstrong’s Guide to Getting What You Want in Life This is a strong collection of advice no matter what you’re trying to tackle in life. “If you worried about falling off the bike, you’d never get on,” for example, is stellar career advice. (@ dumb little man)

Beware of Pretty Things: 4 Reasons I’m Keeping My Ugly, Old Stuff This is passive frugality at its best. Hold on to your old stuff and you might just find that it’s better than you think. (@ wisebread)

Your Recession Budget What was interesting about this article was the list of what people are dumping from their budget. I find it amazing that the most common thing people were dumping was GameFly (basically, Netflix for video games). (@ consumerism commentary)

The Cost of Watching Television As I’ve said before, if our cable service wasn’t basically a nearly-free add-on to our internet bill, we probably wouldn’t have it at all and just enjoy Hulu.com and what we can get over the air. It really is expensive. (@ frugal dad)

Accused of Being a Spendthrift This is a great response to my article on being accused of being a cheapskate. (@ make love, not debt)

One of the most common ideas expressed in personal finance books is distinguishing between three different kinds of income:

Active income is earned through your active effort – in other words, the money you make from your job. Your paycheck is active income. Income from any side businesses you have is active income. Incidental earnings, like finding money on the street, is active income, too, since you actually had to contribute effort to receive it at all.

Passive income is income that you receive without continual active effort. Income from a rental property is passive income. Book royalties are passive income. A website you set up once, put ads on, and walked away from is passive income.

Portfolio income is income that you receive from your financial investments. Interest from your savings account is portfolio income, as are dividends from your stock holdings or income from selling an investment.

What intrigues me about this division of incomes is that it lines up well with different types of frugality.

First of all, there’s active frugality. Active frugality results from continuous effort and continuous choices to save money. Using a shopping list at the grocery store is active frugality – you have to make up a shopping list each time, but you’re rewarded with the money you save on the shopping trip.

On the other hand, passive frugality is the result of simply not doing something. Choosing to continue to use a crock pot with a broken lid handle is an example of passive frugality. Wearing well-worn socks is another example. Driving your car until it completely breaks down is yet another example. Simply put, you can save a lot of money by simply using things until they’re completely used up.

A third type of frugality is what I’d call portfolio frugality. Portfolio frugality happens when you make an initial investment of time or money into something that will pay dividends slowly over a long time. Installing energy efficient lighting in your home is a form of portfolio frugality. Putting in a programmable thermostat is portfolio frugality. Putting a black cover over the windows in an unused room is portfolio frugality.

From where I sit, most of the negative reputation that frugality gets comes from active frugality (“it seems like a lot of work to save a little money”) and excessive passive frugality (“what kind of cheapskate has holes in their socks?”). Those forms of frugality tend to run more against the grain of mainstream society and meet more resistance from others.

Thus, if you’re getting started on frugality, I recommend trying out portfolio frugality and a few basic pieces of passive frugality. Do things like swapping your light bulbs out, installing a programmable thermostat, and waiting another year or two to upgrade your computer or cell phone.

As you get more and more used to the pleasures of saving money, you can continue to push things until you find your comfort level. Try out higher levels of passive frugality (can’t you get a few more miles out of those socks?) and dabble in active frugality, too (why not make a grocery list before you go? How about cutting out those stops at the fast food restaurant?). Eventually, you’ll find your own comfort level, where you see yourself saving plenty of money but not behaving in a way that makes you feel “cheap.”

Personally, I really enjoy seeking out “portfolio frugality” options. I love doing things up front that continually save me money over the long haul without my active intervention or without any real change in my quality of life.