Almost as soon as my review of Susan Feitelberg’s The Net Worth Workout was posted, several readers wrote to me with great interest about my own weekly personal finance routine. One came from Alex:

How exactly do you fill an hour and a half each week working on your personal finances? I only need to spend a few minutes. Isn’t an hour and a half kind of a waste of time?

I should point out here that I actually spend a lot more than an hour and a half a week thinking about personal finance – after all, I spend a lot of time doing research explicitly for this site. I spend my weekly personal finance session focusing entirely on my own financial situation, although it quite often produces a good handful of ideas for The Simple Dollar.

So, how do I fill this hour and a half each week?

I make sure all my bills are paid. This involves going through all of the mail received in the last week, pulling out the bills, and paying them using online banking. I also pay several bills by checking their balances online on the first Sunday of the month and paying those with online banking.

I check all of my accounts just to make sure they’re in good standing. This usually involves logging onto a small handful of websites and checking my statements and recent transactions there.

On the first Sunday of each month, I prepare a monthly personal finance statement. This usually takes about an hour or so, since it requires collecting a lot of data from various places, organizing it, and doing a lot of comparisons to earlier months (mostly for my own interest).

I read prospectuses for the index funds I’m invested in or considering investing in. Lately, I’ve been reading a big pile of prospectuses from Vanguard. This way, I gain a strong understanding of what their funds are actually indexing and whether or not I want to invest in them myself.

I do research for upcoming major purchases. Lately, this has mostly involved research into automobiles. I take down a lot of notes, then compile them into useful “talking points” for the decision my wife and I are making.

I engage my wife in discussions on some of these issues. We talk about our goals. We talk about how our investments and income are doing. We talk about our plans for big upcoming purchases. We talk about our dreams, too, and about how they’re constantly evolving and growing and changing.

Each week, I try to learn about something new. Sometimes it’s a skill that could be useful for saving money. Other times, it might be learning about how a specific type of investment works. Quite often, the things I learn about here translate directly into Simple Dollar posts, but I do this learning for my own personal growth and I’d do it regardless of whether or not I was writing The Simple Dollar.

This stuff easily fills an hour and a half. In fact, the “hour and a half” is usually just the length of my children’s nap. If they nap for longer, I dig a little deeper and keep reading.

Because of this routine, I feel myself understanding more and more about some of the nuances of how to manage money. I’m more in touch with my risk tolerance, for one, and my knowledge about specific investments seems to be growing by leaps and bounds.

Why not give it a try? You don’t need to spend an hour and a half – just set aside a half an hour each weekend to do this and grow it from there if you feel it’s appropriate.

When I was near my financial low point, I was literally paying hundreds a month in finance charges on my credit cards. That money was an enormous burden at the time, since I didn’t have any savings built up and I was also dealing with the “startup” expenses of having a new baby in the home.

I didn’t know at the time that it’s actually not too hard to get your interest rates reduced on your credit cards, particularly if you’re in a situation like I was in. All you have to do is get your information together, call the credit card company, and be willing to play a little hardball on the phone, and you’ll often get a nice reduction in your interest rate. That will directly help your bottom line.

In fact, if I had been able to get a reduction in all of my credit cards when I was in real trouble, I would have easily saved $100 a month. That money, if used properly at the start of a financial turnaround, can make all the difference in the world. It can be the foundation of an emergency fund, light a fire under a debt repayment plan, repay a family member for a debt, and countless other little things that can make all the difference when you’re trying to turn your finances around.

Is This For You?
This tactic works best if you have a substantial amount of debt sitting on credit cards and have largely been able to make your payments up to this point. A few late payments are quite all right, but if you’re being chased by collection agencies, negotiating with the credit card companies won’t really help.

If you’re not carrying a balance on your card or don’t carry a balance regularly, the credit card company is not going to be particularly interested in helping you out because as a customer, you’re not putting much money into their coffers. Simply put, this tactic works best if you have some leverage – you’re currently paying finance charges on your card and you’re threatening to move it to another account.

Another important factor is your current interest rate. If your rate is already around 7.99% or so, there’s not much the credit card company can do to lower the rate. This tactic works best if you have a rate above 13% or so.

Remember, though, any interest rate reduction will help if you’re carrying a balance. A 1% reduction on a card where you’re carrying a $1,000 balance will save you $10 a year. If your balance is higher, you save more. If your interest rate reduction is higher, you save more. For example, if you have a $5,000 balance and get a 5% rate reduction, you’re saving $250 a year from a single phone call – well worth your while.

Preparing for the Call
While you might be tempted to just flip over your credit card and call the card issuer’s number on the back, you’ll have a much greater chance at success if you prepare just a bit in advance.

First, have a copy of your most recent statement with you. Make sure you know what your current interest rate is and also have your account number handy and easy to read. The statement should also provide you with the phone number you need to call.

Next, collect any other offers you might have available to you. See if you have any zero interest or low interest balance transfer offers available to you – in other words, check your recent “junk mail” and/or log on to your online access for your credit card and see what’s available. Get a quote on a personal loan from your local credit union’s website. These will be used as leverage to get your rate reduced.

You should also figure out a target rate to shoot for on the phone. I recommend shooting for 9.9%, but you’ll likely not get a rate that low.

Finally, get in the right mindset. Drink a glass of water. Get yourself calm (because getting worked up on the phone won’t help you), yet motivated to make this work. Then pick up the phone and dial.

Making the Call
The first thing you need to do is get someone on the phone that actually has the authority to change your interest rate. Likely, the first customer service representative that you speak to won’t be able to do that.

So, start off by navigating through their menu until you can speak to a representative. As soon as you can, ask the big question: “Do you have the authority to change my interest rate?” If the answer is no, simply ask, “May I speak to someone who can? Your supervisor, perhaps? Thank you!”

Once you’ve got a person on the phone who has the authority to change your rates, make your case as clearly and succinctly as possible. Here’s a potential script:

“Hello. Lately, I’ve been really having to stretch my finances to make the monthly payments on this credit card, and I need to reduce the interest rate somehow. It would be convenient to keep the balance on this card, but I have some other options that could really save me some money – a zero interest balance transfer offer is sitting right here, for one. Could you reduce the interest rate on my account to, say, 9.9%?”

This puts the ball firmly in their court – and at that point, it’s largely out of your hands. The typical response is a reduction in rate, but not a reduction all the way down to the rate you requested.

Regardless of what you get out of the call, be polite. Say “thank you” for any rate reduction and don’t get enraged if you don’t immediately get a big reduction.

Other Options
Sometimes, you’ll get a rate reduction that makes you happy. At other times, you may not get much of a rate reduction at all – and in that case, you’ll want to do something else. Here are some options.

Seek out balance transfer offers. Moving your balance to another card can help get the finance charge monkey off your back – a useful short term solution.

Seek out another type of debt. Investigate getting a personal loan at your local credit union. A home equity loan is a possibility, but it’s generally a poor idea to change unsecured debt (like your credit card) to secured debt (like a home equity loan).

Lower the offending debt rapidly. Focus all your energies on getting rid of that high interest debt as fast as you can. You might want to work a second job, sell some stuff, or start a side business to generate extra money – and learning how to live cheaper is always a big plus.

For most people with credit card debt, the possibility of success (and the savings that go along with it) with attempting to get your rate reduced is worth the effort involved in picking up the phone and doing it. Good luck!

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.
Summer Camp In The Neighborhood: How To Get A Collective Of Parents Together To Save A Ton Of Money On Daycare During The Summer
The Lawn Care Dilemma: How Much Time And Effort Should You Spend?
On Starting Over

And now for some great reader questions!

I have a credit card that I use infrequently and it never carries a balance. Because of that, I didn’t pay much attention to the APR until I recently got a new Terms and Conditions pamphlet. The APR is 25%. I know that I can call and ask the company to lower your rate, but how should I go about doing it? I’ve only had the card 2 or 3 years, but I’ve never been late and always paid in full. What rate should I ask them to lower it to? I would appreciate some kind of mini-script or guidelines. Thanks!
- Megan

Given your situation, you’re what the credit card companies think of as a bad customer. You don’t earn them anything for their efforts, since you keep your bills paid off. Thus, it’s not likely that they’ll go the extra mile for you.

Still, it can’t hurt to try. When you call the number on the back of your card, the first person you speak to won’t actually be able to authorize any changes to your rate – only their supervisor can do that. So, as quickly as you can, escalate to the supervisor – simply ask the person you are talking to to speak to their supervisor.

Once you’re speaking to the supervisor, make your case. Point out that you’ve been a customer for a long time and have never missed a payment, but don’t mention that you rarely carry a balance. Request a rate reduction – and be specific about what you want.

You likely won’t get what you want out of this negotiation, but you very well might get some degree of rate reduction. Good luck.

Have you played Fallout 3? I know you love video games that you get some bang for your buck and this is one of those games that you can play for over a hundred hours.
- Tony

I actually don’t currently own a software platform that Fallout 3 – I don’t own a Playstation 3 or an Xbox 360 or a Windows machine with the necessary hardware.

Having said that, Fallout 3 is definitely a game that I’d like to play. In my early college years, I played through both Fallout and Fallout 2 and thoroughly enjoyed those games.

In some ways, I’m glad I don’t have access to a system where I could play this game, because I have a feeling it would be a giant time suck for me.

Trent, you should write a tip-off post about Nouveau Riche.
- Michael

I’ve been contacted by a lot of readers who wanted me to get involved with Nouveau Riche University. In essence, it’s a very clever marketing scheme disguised as an educational opportunity.

Nouveau Riche markets itself with free seminars all over the country. At these seminars, you’re encouraged to sign up for a larger educational program and also to get involved with their real estate selling programs. These programs encourage you to take the equity out of your home and invest it in the investments that they have identified for you.

If you want to learn about investing in real estate, throwing $16,000 into tuition at an unaccredited institution is not the way to go, nor is throwing $3,500 away on books, nor is picking up the bread crumbs of investing that another group is leaving behind for you. You’re far better off hitting the library, getting involved with real estate auctions locally, and learning from the people who are actually doing it successfully in your area.

Are you still planning on having a third child?
- Emily

For the time being, a third child is on the back burner. We were quite interested in a third child earlier on when our children were younger, but as we’ve watched them develop, we’ve decided that, for now, the two kids we have deserve as much of our attention as we can give them.

So, for now, we’ve decided to not have any more children. We intend to look at the question again in a few years, perhaps when these two are approaching school age.

Personally, I wished you’d stop advising people to base their emergency fund on whether or not they have kids. EVERYONE should be able to support themselves (or their family) for more than a month, even if they don’t have to worry about little ones. Yes, you need more cash if you have more to support, but you don’t need more months of security. You need security even if it is just you.
- SP

Everyone needs an emergency fund. Families with kids need a larger fund. Why is that? An adult has the ability to go out into the world and earn a living. A child simply cannot do that.

There are a lot of factors that dictate the size of an emergency fund one should have, but the presence of dependents in the home is one of the biggest. The more dependents you have, the bigger your emergency fund should be.

Other factors include how many monthly bills you have (a person with a mortgage, for example, needs a larger emergency fund than the same person without a mortgage), the stability of one’s current job, and the ease of which a person could find a similar paying job.

How do you convince your kids to eat vegetables? I have a two year old that refuses to eat anything green.
- Jay

The biggest key is to repeatedly show your children that you’re eating and enjoying vegetables. If you want your children to eat vegetables, establish a strong regular meal time, make sure that meal includes vegetables, and take a giant helping of vegetables yourself. Put some on the child’s plate and merely request that the child try a bite of the vegetables.

That’s the routine that works well for our own kids. Because of that, both of our kids love broccoli, the older one is passionate about olives, and the younger one adores carrots. They simply see me and my wife enjoying these things and, on some level, seek to emulate us while also listening to their own taste buds.

I have a question: I have a 12-month CD ladder at ING direct, and right now CDs are earning less than just the savings account. A 12 month CD returns 2.00% while savings earns 2.4%. I know it’s not going to be a huge difference because the CD is less than $1,000, but, when the next rollover comes should I just keep the money in savings earning higher interest? Or should I take this as a sign the savings rate may be lowered soon and I should consider myself “lucky” to lock in a measly 2%?
- vguy

If you can earn more in a savings account than you can in a CD, put that money in the savings account. The purpose of buying a CD instead of having money in a savings account is to earn a higher interest rate. If you’re not earning that higher rate, there is absolutely no reason to own a CD.

CD ladders can be a great way to hold onto your cash, but only use them if you’re earning more than you would in a cash savings account.

What are you reading lately?
- Niles

My current read is The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer. It tells the true story of Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 was the first person executed in the United States after the reinstitution of the death penalty. It’s a long and incredibly detailed book.

I decided to pick it up because, frankly, the death penalty is an issue that I’m really undecided on from a moral perspective. I’ve heard from several people that this book provides some good insight into the issue, but so far I haven’t come to feel one way or another.

Aside from that, I’ve been reading a lot of short stories, mostly as “training,” I suppose, for my dream of being a writer.

Is there a directory or guide to blogs on finance and personal financial life that you can suggest?
- Robin

My favorite guide to personal finance blogs is the Wise Bread Top 10 Personal Finance Blogs list. It orders blogs based on a lot of different criteria.

Another good resource for finding lower traffic personal finance blogs is pfblogs.org. It’s basically a listing of the most recent posts on a few hundred different personal finance blogs that have opted in.

It’s hard to judge which blogs will click with you from just a listing of blogs, though. I suggest using these tools, visiting a lot of them, and finding ones that really speak to you.

How do you deal with junk that builds up in your wallet, like receipts, business cards, and so on?
- Andy

I have this same problem. I seem to just accumulate receipts, notes, and other miscellaneous material in my wallet almost automatically. After a few weeks, it can get ridiculous.

My solution for the problem is pretty simple. I have a handful of tasks that I take care of on the first of every month – paying certain bills, doing certain household tasks, and so on. A thorough wallet cleaning is one of the tasks on this list. I simply pull everything out of my wallet and evaluate all of the stuff, asking myself if it’s worth keeping or not.

Typically, my wallet loses fifty percent of its size during one of these sessions, believe it or not.

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 finance book.

I’m a big believer in the idea that personal finance and personal health have a lot in common. They both involve simple principles that are often harder to follow than they seem. They both require some changes in your regular behavior to maximize success. They both really only require a bit of time each day to improve your situation, but they also require some mindfulness.

The Net Worth Workout (by Susan Feitelberg) takes that analogy and runs with it. Feitelberg extracts the basic principles from getting yourself into shape and applies them to personal finance. Along the way, though, it’s not hard to notice how these basic principles apply to any positive change you might want to make in your life.

Does the analogy hold up and provide useful personal finance insights? Or is The Net Worth Workout just another personal finance book? Let’s dig in.

The Net Worth Workout Explained
Feitelberg lays out the basics of the analogy right off the bat.

She compares earning to metabolism. The faster your metabolism runs, the more effectively you use the food that’s put inside of you. Similarly, personal finance success is heavily tied to how effectively you utilize your income.

Spending analogizes with calorie intake. Just as junk food is loaded with cheap calories and moves you away from your optimum weight, frivolous spending does the same thing – taking you away from financial success.

Saving analogizes with strength training. Weights help you build physical muscle so that you can easily handle more diverse tasks, while smart saving strategies add to your financial muscle, enabling you to be more flexible with your lifestyle choices.

Investing analogizes with cardio fitness. Just like a great cardio workout helps your heart and lungs (and brain) work better, good investing increases the capacity of other components of your life.

Attitude
Many people view personal finance as complete drudgery, a task to be avoided in favor of … pretty much anything else in life. If you keep that negative attitude, personal finance success will be very difficult.

Instead, you should view it as a personal challenge, one that makes you feel great after you do it … just like a workout. Feitelberg recommends actually having a weekly personal finance session that’s an hour long (and, eventually, it could/should be stretched to two hours). What do you do with that time? Keep your bills paid. Learn about investments. Develop a debt repayment plan. Contact your lenders and look into debt reduction opportunities. Look for new ways to earn money.

This is really an excellent idea. I’ve actually been doing this for a while, as I usually spend my children’s Sunday naptime doing just that (which lasts for approximately an hour and a half). It makes all the difference.

Your Shape, Goals, and Plans
Before you can get going with your financial fitness routine, you need a checkup. Where are you at? What are your goals? How do you intend to reach those goals? Feitelberg argues that these pieces provide the bedrock for any personal finance success you might enjoy.

The first step is to get a firm grip on where you’re at financially, and the best way to do that is to do a detailed calculation of your net worth each month. She advocates making a monthly “Net Worth Statement” – the idea of a monthly personal finance statement is a brilliant one that I strongly agree with.

After that, you need to focus on setting some goals for yourself, short term and long term. Where do you want to go in a month? In a year? In a decade? At retirement age? Now, what do you actually need to do to get there? Break it down to little manageable steps that you can actually accomplish in reasonable time and track during your weekly personal finance “workouts.”

Earning: Which Gear Are You In?
People earn three kinds of income: active income (what we earn from our work), passive income (what we earn from work done in the past, like book income or a rental home), and portfolio income (what we earn from our investments). The harder you work on your active income, the more you can put into passive income and portfolio income (which you don’t have to actively work for).

So, the first step that most of us need to take is maximizing our active income. The author’s advice was written in a time of economic optimism and mostly involves shopping around for jobs and asking for raises, which can be difficult right now. My recommendation for earning more money right now is to start a side business.

Spending: What Kind of Fuel Are You Burning?
Much like how some calories are healthy and others are empty (and unhealthy), some types of spending are vital and others are wasteful. Obviously, there are some expenditures that are required – we need to spend money for food, water, clothing, and a roof over our heads, of course. These areas are much like green vegetables – essential to your diet. Beyond that, things start to get a bit grayer until you reach the wastefulness of rampant discretionary spending.

The key to success here is much like how one succeeds like a diet. You won’t succeed by switching to eating nothing but vegetables – if you do, you’ll rebound pretty quickly and be back to where you started. Instead, just find a few areas you can easily trim without reducing your quality of life, get used to those changes (say, after a month or two), then find a few more pieces to trim. Much like a healthy diet.

Saving: How Much Do You Save in a Year?
So, you’re earning more and you’ve got your spending under control, but then you’re left with another problem: you’ve got that leftover money sitting in your checking account. It’s incredibly tempting to just spend it – it’s just sitting there, after all.

Here comes the need to do your strength training. Take that money and start saving it for the future. An emergency fund in a savings account is a great start – follow that with retirement savings and college savings, too.

The key here is to make it into a bill – something you pay as a matter of course. You can make it even easier by simply automating the transfers – have a certain amount scraped out of each paycheck into another account, or have an automatic transfer occur each week. Then you don’t even have to think about it.

Investing: What Shape Are Your Investments In?
What’s next, once you’ve started good savings plans, have your financial life in order, and know where you want to go? You have to start putting your money in places that maximizes your earnings while only facing an amount of risk you can tolerate.

This chapter provides a nice basic guide to investments, but once you reach this part of the equation, I think it’s a great idea to turn to a strong resource on investing. My preferred book on investing is The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing, which is the most thorough guide to sensible modern investing that I’ve yet read.

Getting It All Together
What comes next? Getting started, of course. Personal finance (much like getting yourself into shape) is all about establishing a healthy routine and sticking with it. There’s no better time to do that than now.

Feitelberg suggests starting by basing your routine around your monthly Net Worth Statement, a sentiment I agree with. Just spend an hour a week getting in touch with your money, then once a month assemble a net worth statement. You’ll find that it pushes you to achieve more.

Is The Net Worth Workout Worth Reading?
Feitelberg really nails one particular aspect of personal finance: the aspect that success in personal finance really is tied to a healthy routine, just like physical fitness is. Setting up a weekly routine of personal finance tasks and devoting an hour or two to learning more about the money options available to you is a brilliant way to start getting in touch with your money and pushing yourself to improve your financial state.

Of course, built onto the structure of that one good idea is a lot of personal finance advice that you’ve heard elsewhere. While it all fits together into something of a system that’s really sensible, The Net Worth Workout might not be the best book to read if you’re in control of your finances.

However, if you’re struggling with getting a grip on your money and find a routine-oriented lifestyle to be comforting, The Net Worth Workout really is an excellent book, well worth reading.

Lately, my lust for gadgets has been going utterly crazy. I want one of those nifty netbooks. For those unaware, a netbook is a very small laptop (think a nine inch screen or so) that focuses on efficient energy use rather than power. For the most part, these devices are mostly just designed to run a web browser and an email program very well – they’re intended to be small enough to fit in a purse or even in a pocket, but enable you to do email and/or browse the web anywhere you can get a Wi-Fi signal (or, in the event you have mobile broadband, pretty much anywhere).

Since I have a nice desktop machine in my office and I can do quick web browsing and reading of email on my iPod Touch (a wonderful Christmas gift, I must say), a netbook isn’t really a need at all. It would just be convenient, enabling to do some things out of the house that I couldn’t otherwise do.

At the same time, I had an old laptop in my closet. It’s several years old and it really struggles running Windows Vista – I had thought about downgrading it to Windows XP, but I never really bothered because of another problem. The laptop’s battery was completely shot. It would last roughly thirty seconds on battery before simply powering down abruptly.

What I would like to have is a device with a few hours of battery life that starts up quickly and allows me to check my email and a few key sites on the road. Most of all, I’d like to find the cheapest route to get from what I have to where I want to be.

So I put on my frugal thinking cap and got to work.

Fixing the Power Problem
The first step was to solve the power issue – and the way to solve that was to find a new battery for the laptop. A replacement battery from Dell costs $140 – ouch.

Luckily, laptop batteries are a perfect item to shop around for online, as many different vendors sell laptop batteries at widely varying prices. A minute worth of Google searching found a compatible battery for $56.88 and talking to a few parts vendors on eBay by email found another one for $50 including shipping. When you need parts, ask around.

Replacing the battery is trivial – simply unlock the old one, pop it out, and pop in the new one. Most reasonably new laptops follow the same procedure – incredibly easy.

Fixing the Software Problem
This leaves me with the second problem – how can I make this old laptop do the things I want with any degree of speediness? I started up the laptop and it took six and a half minutes from hitting the power button until I was ready to actually do anything.

The easiest option would be to just downgrade the laptop to an earlier version of Windows, but this requires me to have a copy of an earlier version of Windows easily available. Also, older versions of Windows eventually stop being supported with updates, making them a security risk.

Instead, I went in a different direction for a solution.

I simply wiped the entire hard drive on the old laptop and installed Ubuntu on it. Ubuntu is a very user-friendly flavor of Linux that is arguably easier to install than Windows and runs very well on older hardware (not ancient hardware, just older hardware). All I had to do was burn an Ubuntu CD on my desktop machine, install it on the laptop, plug in my network cable on the laptop, and have Ubuntu update itself to all of the latest software and drivers. Boom – everything works like a charm, from the sound to the wireless. It took me about two hours, all told, and most of that time was simply waiting, meaning I walked away and did other things while things got set up.

Best of all, every single significant feature I wanted for my netbook is present here: quick to start up, simple web browsing and email access, the ability to do some writing and a bit of number crunching in a pinch – it’s all right there.

My total cost for all of this was about $60.

How Can I Use This Information?
You’re probably wondering how this is useful to you at all. It’s simple – you can basically do the same exact thing if you just want a simple laptop for checking email and surfing the web. For those tasks, you can easily get away with an older laptop.

So how do you get an older laptop? The easiest way is to simply ask around in your community. If you have a local computer store, stop in and see what they have that’s older (by older, I would recommend a laptop that’s not more than five or six years old and has wireless capability). You can also do some shopping online, but shopping for used computer hardware online is definitely a caveat emptor process.

My recommended method, though, would be to ask around your social network and see if anyone has an older laptop that they’re not using that they’d be willing to sell for cheap or trade. Start with anyone you know who has used a laptop over the last few years. You’ll be surprised how many people have old computer equipment that they’re happy to offload for a pittance.

You’ll probably need to find a new battery for that laptop, so before you invest much money, find out the model number and make sure you can get a battery online for it.

Once you have those pieces, though, it’s usually quite easy to replace the battery and install Ubuntu on it, and once you have that, you have a wonderfully functional laptop that’s perfect for checking email and surfing the web – and it won’t cost you too much at all.

One of the most cherished children’s books at our house for years has been Eric Carle’s classic Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Both my son and my daughter fell in love with the book around eighteen months of age – now, my son (who is a bit over three) is actually able to read Brown Bear to his little sister.

Over time, the book evolved into something of a game that I’ll play sometimes with my son. We’ll be looking at something together and I’ll point out a feature that I notice, then ask him “What do you see?” Then, he’ll point out some feature. It’s a simple little thing we do together.

What’s interesting, though, is that he’ll often point out something that I don’t even notice or recognize. Sometimes, he’ll just misidentify something – at other times, he’ll notice a detail I don’t notice. Even more interesting, sometimes he’ll recognize or see something that I’ve simply missed or that he sees completely differently than I do.

Over the last several months, as people have become more and more concerned about the downturn in our economy, many people are seeing doom and gloom in the economy. For example, many of my readers have sent me clips and commentary in which Peter Schiff predicts what amounts to the end of the United States and ask for my reaction to it.

At the same time, I look out there and I actually see a lot of positive economic news. I don’t believe the United States is headed for apocalypse at all – I just see a pretty strong recession that’s in the process of resolving itself.

It’s a difference in perspective. Schiff lives in a world of high finance – the very area where there is a lot of uncertainty about what’s to come in the future in the aftermath of their bubble popping. My perspective is quite a bit different – I tend to look at what ordinary people are doing and thinking about. I see people that are worried and acting more conservatively with their money, but their optimism is still there. Almost all of them still get up and go to work and stop at the grocery store on the way home.

Schiff’s perspective is that it’s like the Great Depression if the financial world goes topsy turvy. My perspective is that it’s like the Great Depression if half the people in my town are in line at a soup kitchen.

What do you see?

One of the big complaints I get about The Simple Dollar is that I sap all of the fun out of life by being too cheap. I get emails where people call me a big cheapskate and a loser that has no fun in life. On the other hand, I see myself as simply having interests and hobbies that are substantially different than the person who wrote to me. For example, I consider it a gratuitous waste of time to send insulting emails to people whose blog writings I disagree with – not a hobby I see value in.

I get other, rational emails where people argue that it’s not time effective for them to change to more efficient light bulbs because they will only save $3 over the next year with that bulb.

I tend to not see myself as cheap at all, just analytic. I tend to be willing to try lots of things, but the things that stick with me and become a part of my normal behavior are the things that obviously pay off over the long haul. I’m willing to invest hours of work right now if I can see that I’ll make a good hourly rate for that work over the next few years. I also prescribe a lot of value to doing things that I enjoy – cooking, brewing beer, playing games, gardening, and so on.

What do you see?

Personal finance, like so many other things, is a matter of perspective. We all bring different life experiences to the table – and we all wind up better if we share those ideas in a rational and useful fashion. The more ideas you understand, the stronger your own views and ideas become.

I enjoy preparing complex dishes, but many evenings, the focus around our house is getting a tasty and healthy (and inexpensive) meal on the table quickly. We have a three year old and a one year old at our house, so our goal is to established a fixed meal time, put something on the table that will meet all their nutritional needs and still be pleasing to their (and our) palate, do it quickly, and do it inexpensively. This fills all of our bellies with some good fuel, keeps money in our pocket, and also gives us plenty of family time in the evenings.

So, how do we pull this off night after night without regularly resorting to prepackaged food bought with coupons? Over the years, we’ve developed several tactics for making this work – and it works so well that we often prepare the same things for guests when they come to visit.

Here are nine tactics we turn to time and time again.

1. Make your main dish as simple as possible.
A chicken breast. A fish fillet. A basic hamburger. Eggs. A very simple stir fry. A pot roast. Pasta with tomato sauce. These are the things that make up our main course most nights. Nothing complicated at all – just a very basic food.

There are some big advantages here, though:

There are a wide variety of such basic items. Our meals are far more varied than you might think. We rarely repeat out foods for weeks at a time.

These items are stunningly simple in their basic preparation. Once you’ve grilled a chicken breast a few times, it becomes incredibly routine. You don’t have to focus on it any more. Instead, you can focus on the little details (below) that transform it from boring to amazing.

These items are inexpensive when bought in bulk and frozen. We look for versions of these items that meet our quality standards on sale, and when we find them, we stock up big time. Then we just unthaw them by setting the items in the refrigerator the night before – they’re ready to go at meal time the next day.

2. Use simple tactics to add variety and flavor to the main dish.
In other words, be creative and liberal in your seasoning of the food and do it well in advance so it can soak into the food. Most of the time, we’ll actually season the food in the morning (see the next tip) so that it’s ready to go when we walk in the door in the evening.

Even better, because the main entrees are often such a blank slate, we can create a huge variety of very different flavored dishes starting with the same simple main course.

Here are a few ideas for the most common items.

Chicken breasts We just put chicken breasts in a Rubbermaid container in the morning along with whatever seasonings sound interesting. Want lemon chicken? Dump in some lemon juice, some pepper, and a few lemon slices. Italian? Put in half a cup of red wine vinegar, a third of a cup of olive oil, and a lot of seasoning (a bit of lemon juice, garlic powder, oregano, red pepper, black pepper, parsley flakes, and anything else you like). There are infinite possibilities here – just play around.

Hamburger Just mash up hamburger meat with whatever flavorings you like: barbecue sauce, blue cheese salad dressing, ranch salad dressing, Italian salad dressing, black pepper, red pepper, paprika, salt, celery seed, brown sugar, ketchup, onion, dill, caraway, turmeric, scallions, ginger, dill, cumin, coriander, bay leaves – just try different things and find out what you like. I like to let the hamburger soak in this for several hours in the refrigerator before making the patties, though.

Fish fillets Much like the chicken breasts, just toss the fillets in a Rubbermaid container along with some seasonings. Italian dressing is one place to start, as are citrus fruits and pepper. I like using Parmesan cheese and olive oil, for one, with a healthy dose of pepper. The key is to just try different things and let these things sit together for a long time to meld their flavors.

3. Do as much as you can in the morning before you leave.
One big advantage of preparing the entrees in the above fashion is that much of the work can be done in the morning before you leave. For similar reasons, we also enjoy using our slow cooker – we can just toss things together in the morning and be ready to go when we get home.

I find that doing as much of the meal preparation as I can in the mornings while the kids are eating breakfast at the kitchen counter is a great way for me to get going with something productive in the morning while carrying on conversation with them and making sure they’re eating their breakfast.

Here are a few tactics for getting things done in advance in the morning (and the night before):

Main entrees Marinate and/or spice them and put them in a Rubbermaid container in the refrigerator for the day.

Homemade pizza This is one of our family’s favorite foods. One great way to make it easier at night is to make the dough the night before, let it rise in the refrigerator overnight, then spread it out on the pan the next morning. Preheat the oven to 425 in the morning, then bake the crust for seven minutes or so. After that, you can go ahead and put any toppings on you want (like the sauce) or you can just stick the crust in the oven. Doing this “pre-bake” makes for a superb crust … actually, a “homemade pizza” guide might make for a great post.

Crock pot meals If you can possibly make a meal in the crock pot, do so – it’s such a huge time saver on busy evenings and the meals turn out quite well if you use quality ingredients to begin with. For us, it’s very simple – we have a lot of great five ingredient crock pot meals that we love making.

4. Use flash frozen vegetables (but not fruit) as a side dish.
For a long time, I was very insistent on eating fresh vegetables as a side dish. This is a good tactic to use during the summer months when you can get ultra-fresh produce from the farmer’s market or from your own garden, but during the winter, “fresh” produce often isn’t very fresh.

The solution I’ve discovered – for vegetables at least – is frozen vegetables. While not quite as good as truly fresh vegetables, they’re quite often tastier than the vegetables you find in the fresh food aisle during the winter months.

Frozen vegetables are easy to prepare – they can very easily be steamed and this can be done in the microwave if you want (some even come with the capacity to steam in the bag). Flash frozen vegetables are also pretty inexpensive, especially if you wait for a sale and stock up – we often get bags for $0.75 or less, which provide a large portion of vegetables for all four of us. Even better, they’re easy to spice up a bit – just add a bit of pepper (or a bit of another appropriate spice or two) as soon as they’re done steaming (or even during steaming) and you’ll wind up with a tasty result.

A big tip: check the ingredients before you buy. If you see any ingredients besides just the vegetables in the bag (or perhaps a few basic spices), don’t buy it. Avoid any that have high fructose corn syrup – there’s no reason to have that in your vegetables. In fact, this is why I avoid most frozen fruits – they seem to often have sugar or corn syrup added for no real reason other than to add a cloying sweetness.

5. Utilize the simple main dish in a second dish later in the week.
Let’s say we’re making chicken breasts for the family. We unthaw twice as many as we would eat and season half of them as we desire. Then, we bake all of them in the oven (not adding any cooking time at all), then put aside the cooked breast for a couple of days to use in another dish, like chicken stir fry or a chicken pot pie.

Let’s say we’re having hamburgers. We cook up a batch that’s seasoned and an unseasoned batch, then we crumble up the unseasoned burgers and use the meat as pizza topping a few days later, allowing us to have homemade pizza with a hamburger topping without using a skillet to brown the meat.

Using these kinds of techniques adds virtually no time to the meal preparation at hand, but it certainly saves time with a meal later in the week.

6. Drink water, but make it lively!
Water is the default beverage at our dinner table. It’s essentially free and provides necessary hydration. Yet, for many, it’s boring – it doesn’t provide the flavor of other beverages you might consume with dinner.

There are several subtle things you can do to make water more interesting, though. The biggest one is citrus – a slice of a citrus fruit (lemon, lime, orange, etc.) and/or a dash of a citrus juice into your water can make a big difference. This pairs very well with white meats of all kinds.

A simple herbal tea is another great beverage to accompany a meal. Simply heat up the water, steep it with the tea, and you’ve transformed the water into something compelling.

Even the simple touch of adding ice to water can make it seem a lot more refreshing and enjoyable as a partner drink to your dinner.

7. Use a simple formula for casseroles of all kinds.
We picked up this useful tactic from Amy Dacyczyn’s excellent Complete Tightwad Gazette. She offers a framework recipe for a basic casserole:

1 cup main ingredient
1 cup second ingredient
1-2 cups starchy ingredient
1 1/2 cups binder
1/4 cup “goodie”
seasoning
topping

Main ingredient: tuna, cubed chicken, turkey, ham, seafood, etc.
Second ingredient: thinly sliced celery, mushrooms, peas, chopped hard-boiled eggs, etc.
Starchy ingredient: thinly sliced potatoes, cooked noodles, cooked rice, etc.
Binder: cream sauce, sour cream, can of soup, etc.
“Goodie”: pimiento, olives, almonds, water chestnuts, etc.
Topping: cheese, bread crumbs, etc.

This formula works really easy for turning almost anything you have on hand into a very tasty casserole. You simply just mix together these items in a casserole dish, toss it in the oven, and bake it until it’s done. One tip – one good binder is leftover chicken stock with a bit of corn starch in it.

8. Clean out your cupboards and/or pantry.
Another great way to line up some inexpensive and simple meal ideas is to simply clean out your cupboards and pantry. This is a great weekend project, actually – it helps you discover lots of items that you have on hand that you may have forgotten about and also helps you organize things in a way that makes it easier to find the things you need.

When you’re discovering these useful items that have disappeared in the back of the cupboard, plan around them, right then. Jot down ideas for meals that revolve around these items, then when you put things back, keep those items near the front so you can find them quickly.

The end result? You’ll be making interesting meals without the need for a grocery store run and the items will be easy to grab quickly as they’ll be at the front of the cupboard.

9. Do a dinner exchange with your neighbors.
Even after all this, there are some nights where you’d just like a home-cooked meal on your table with no fuss at all. One very creative way to do this is to do a dinner exchange with a neighbor.

It’s pretty easy. Find a neighbor that has a similar-sized family to you. Then arrange it so that once a week or once a month, you make a double portion of your evening meal, place half of it into containers, then take it to that neighbor’s house. All they have to do is meet you at the door, take the containers, and serve – it’s like free delivery.

Then, that family does the same for you, perhaps even with the same containers. They make a double batch of their dinner meal, then bring you containers with enough of that meal to feed your family. Easy as pie.

While this doesn’t particularly save you any money, it does save you quite a bit of time.

Good luck preparing a tasty, healthy, and inexpensive meal tonight for you and your family!

This past weekend, my wife and I were watching Clark Howard’s show on Headline News. During the program, Clark stated a canard that I’ve heard several times from personal finance “gurus” over the past couple years: instead of saving for a child’s college education, parents are better off saving for their own retirement.

Clark’s main reason was pretty simple: people can’t receive scholarships or student loans for retirement. Obviously, that’s true: my children will be able to get all kinds of assistance for their college education, while I won’t be able to get any sort of aid for retirement. Not only that, if your child does have to get into debt for college, they’ll have many, many years to earn their way out of it, whereas when the children go off to college, you won’t have too many years to keep saving for retirement.

On paper, the argument does make a lot of sense. On paper.

This equation leaves out an enormous human element. For many people – myself included – retirement isn’t the big ultimate goal. I might like to think about retiring a bit early, but my big motivation in life isn’t related to retirement at all.

My big plans right now involve guiding my children into adulthood with enough life skills and opportunities that they can basically choose to do anything they want – and run with it. In most ways, my financial choices revolve around that motivation. I started 529 accounts for my children before they were even born (starting them with myself as beneficiary, then changing it). I’m already investing in educational opportunities for them.

Yes, I’m saving for retirement. However, I could be saving substantially more for retirement if I were not directing significant money to my children’s future – and I don’t just mean college savings, either. Other opportunities, such as camps that revolve around their interests, international trips, equipment and instruments they might need, and so on are also important – and by planning for them and saving for them now, I reduce the chance that changes in my career will affect the opportunities that my children have.

Clark’s advice is correct on paper, but it leaves out one of the biggest aspects of personal finance: setting your own goals. Most of my goals revolve around my children – thus, my savings and investment choices revolve around what paints the best future for them.

The lesson here is not every “rule” of personal finance applies to every situation. Instead, you should figure out what your own goals are and then seek out advice on how to make those goals actually happen.

Good luck!