Recently, several readers have written to me bringing up various points about writing about money. Edward writes:

I’ve been a reader of The Simple Dollar for two years. Sometimes it feels like you’re saying the same thing over and over.

Jamie writes:

You really should run more ads. With your audience, you could be making a mint with some well-placed advertisements or paid posts.

Kelly writes:

I used to subscribe to a bunch of finance blogs for a more well rounded perspective, but they got too commercial and too self-promoting, so only a few remain – including yours!

Shane writes:

When I first started reading The Simple Dollar, I found the money articles most useful. Now I find the time management and personal growth stuff more useful.

All of these comments (and several others) speak to a central problem when it comes to blogging about money: the basic principles of money management are surprisingly straightforward once you learn them.

Most of the money chatter out there – CNBC, Money Magazine, blogs, and so forth – is just that: chatter. They usually just cover the issue of the moment – what stock is hot? What investment is hot? – and move on from there.

Why do they do that? To put it simply, repeating the same principles over and over can be incredibly boring. If you just keep saying “spend less than you earn” over and over again, no one will listen or care.

Thus, if you start writing about money, you’ll usually start off covering the basics. You’ll talk about those basic principles – and quite enthusiastically.

But then, there comes a point where those basic ideas simply aren’t there any more – or they don’t come along with nearly as much frequency. At that point, writers have several options.

One, they can try to write about related topics. For me, I write sometimes about time management (because time is money), personal growth, and career matters. I view all of these as being pretty tightly tied to improving your financial life, so they feel like relevant topics to me – and apparently to Shane as well. The drawback here is that you can lose complete track of what you’re writing about – a money blog can turn into a GTD blog, for example. So, the solution here is to tie things back into financial issues.

Two, they can try to find new angles on the principles. For me, this usually comes from writing about my own life experiences, observing how these things continually pop up in my everyday life and in the lives of people around me. The only problem with this route is what Edward points out – for long-time readers, some of these articles can seem somewhat repetitive. So, the solution would be to mix in some of this type of writing, but don’t focus on it.

Three, they can simply chatter about the topic of the moment. This is an incredibly easy trap to fall into – and many writers do just that. They start writing about their preferred stock picks. They start talking about every little bump in the stock markets. They get obsessed with minutiae that really only helps people that are investing a lot of money. And, along the way, they stop talking about things that are of much value to others. I try really hard to avoid this – I focus on writing stuff that’s as timeless as possible, so that people who dig through the archives (and there are a lot of them) can find information that applies to their life.

Four, they can simply turn their writing into a running commercial. This is a big temptation for people who have built up a following and realize they no longer have anything to say. There are many, many groups out there who will happily pay bloggers – even those with limited followings – to write glowing reviews about their products. Similarly, there are many, many companies who will pay good money to have advertisements on a site, particularly one with a following already in place. This pretty much directly describes what Jamie and Kelly are writing about.

I choose to favor the first two and ignore the last two. Yes, it would be easy for me to turn The Simple Dollar into a giant cash cow – but doing that would destroy any credibility I have. Similarly, I could churn out dozens of “topic of the moment” posts – but if I wasn’t writing anything of lasting value, I wouldn’t want to continue writing and the site would inevitably go down hill.

So, what does that mean for the future?

One, I will never sell my content. Read this clearly, advertisers: if you want to pay me to write about your product, I will not do it. If you send me a prewritten post, I won’t post it. I only write about things I use (or have used) myself and find useful or otherwise noteworthy. 99.9% of the things companies email me about or want to pay me to write about are neither useful or noteworthy, in my opinion – so I won’t write about them.

The only exception to this might be if I found out I had a terminal illness, in which case I would try to maximize the immediate income from The Simple Dollar in order to provide more for my family after my passing.

Two, I only write about stuff I care about. If I find a topic boring, I won’t write about it unless I find some way to get engaged in it – usually through reading a question or a story from a reader. I only write about stuff that I care about – why would you ever want to read stuff written by someone who could care less about the topic?

Three, I find the basic principles endlessly interesting. I love nothing more than finding a new angle or twist on a basic money principle – and I will write about them. I use my life as a lab to explore these ideas, and I write about the results. I love to find new ways to break down the big ideas. That’s what I want to write about.

Four, I will branch out. I write about anything and everything that has any sort of connection to a healthy personal finance life. That might mean time management. That might mean entrepreneurship. That might mean anything that I can find that has some connection to a stable, healthy financial life.

Five, I only have enough ads to pay the bills and give us a bit of breathing room. When you visit the site, you only see one ad anywhere near the top of the page – that’s the prime real estate for sales. I could fit four or five ads up there and line my wallet.

I don’t. Why? I’m not writing to sell you products. If I were, you’d see ads all over the place and blatant shilling for various investments and so on. I’m writing because I enjoy writing and sharing ideas – for me, the ads are a way to make it possible for me to devote enough time to this that I can continually write worthwhile stuff.

In fact, that’s a big reason why I write books and have downloadables. Ideally, the site will reach a point where my book sales and downloadables will fund everything I do, enabling me to go ad free.

I am not in this for the money. I’m in this for the writing, the conversation, and the exchange of ideas.

If this sounds like a blog you want to read, stick around. If it doesn’t, I encourage you to find another site that matches your needs. I want nothing more than for every person who reads this site to grow a bit in their money and in their life – if The Simple Dollar isn’t doing that for you, I hope you’ll find something that will.

On that day, I wrote the following entry in my personal journal (edited just a bit):

Sometimes I feel like my life is completely without purpose and I’m just following some invisible pattern that someone else has put into place.

Today was a typical day. But every day is a typical day.

I woke up about 6:30 and said good bye to Sarah as she left. I watched the news for a while, got dressed, and headed off to work. I stopped at Gregory’s and ate a bagel and drank a cup of coffee while I read the paper. I drove to work. I got a few tasks done, surfed the web for a while, did a few more things. I went out to lunch at El Azteca and dropped $12 on a tasteless lunch. I sat at my desk most of the afternoon, thinking about the weekend and wishing I wasn’t a complete failure at writing. I stopped at the bookstore on the way home and bought three books. I went to the music store and got the new Basement Jaxx album that Charlie talked about. I listened to it on the way home and didn’t like it at all. I got home, tried to write a little bit while waiting for Sarah, hated everything. Deleted all of it. We went out to dinner. Now she’s watching a movie and I’m sitting here doing nothing.

I do all of these things almost every single day – but I feel like I’m going nowhere at all.

Five things really jumped out at me as I read this piece.

First, a typical day for me meant wasting a lot of money. On this “typical” day, I bought three books, a CD, and ate all of my meals out, even though I had a fully-functional kitchen at home. That’s easily $70 to $80, just wasted that day.

Second, all of that spending was utterly joyless. In theory, that spending would bring me happiness, one would think. Instead, it was just so routine that I didn’t even really think about it at all, let alone enjoy it.

Third, I had stunning amounts of time that were wasted as well. Out of that eight hour workday, I seemed to have wasted six hours of it (although I was probably exaggerating quite a bit). Still, even if I were just wasting an hour or two, why not use that time to build relationships with other people in my field, investigate new ideas, or sharpen my writing skills?

Fourth, I knew what my dream was, but I wasn’t taking real action to achieve it. I wanted to be a writer – the same dream I’ve had for most of my life – but my “action” towards it was writing for a few minutes, deciding it was “terrible,” then deleting it. I was actually writing every day in my journal, but I didn’t view that as “real” writing in any way – just a way to blow off steam.

Finally, I had a strong sense of not having any real purpose in life. I felt aimless. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing. Mostly, I felt like I was following a pattern that someone else had set in place for me.

The amazing part is this – all of it ties back to the money.

I knew what I wanted to do with my life, but I felt like most of the choices I wanted to make were out of financial reach. I had a pile of debts overshadowing my life and I knew I needed a healthy and very steady income to maintain my lifestyle and keep those debts at bay.

The thing was that I was actually unhappy with my lifestyle. The things I did on a daily basis – for the most part – didn’t bring me much joy at all.

Financial freedom opened the doors for me. By stepping up to the plate and making some fairly simple financial changes in my life, I was able to walk away from all of that. I now work on my own, on my own terms. I don’t bring in as much money as I once did, but I have the freedom to spend the afternoon at the park with my kids. I have the power to choose the things I want to work on instead of having to do whatever the boss says.

Yes, I gave up those stops at the bookstore. Yes, I stopped eating out. Were those big losses? They stung a little bit at the time – but mostly because it was difficult to find new patterns, not because I was losing anything. I just started cooking more at home and taking leftovers to work, and I learned to enjoy the public library.

To me, the choice to live cheaper was, in the end, an easy one. I didn’t give up the things that actually added value to my life – I just cut away a lot of the fat.

And that fat cutting made all the difference.

If you’re unhappy with the way your life is, start by cutting back on your spending, getting rid of debt, and building up some savings. Having that kind of base gives you the freedom to make the changes that you’re afraid to make now.

One tactic I mention regularly for saving money on your food purchases is to watch the grocery store flyer for sales, then plan your meals (and shopping lists) around those sales. This tactic really works – I’ve saved quite a bit doing this over the years.

However, things aren’t quite that simple – you can’t just trust the store flyer.

Over the last several months, I’ve been keeping track of prices on several key items that we buy all the time. Garbage bags, fresh spinach, toilet paper, grapes, Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers, and so on.

I know what the typical price is on these items – I even have a small price list that has the usual prices for them.

So, a few weeks ago, when I took a long look at the flyers from my grocery stores of choice, I happened to notice that some of the “big sales” listed in the flyer weren’t on sale at all. The price was exactly the same as what I usually paid.

What gives? I did some research – calling and emailing a few people I know in the grocery business – and I came up with a few interesting facts about grocery store flyers.

For starters, a large portion of the spots in a grocery store ad are actually paid placements by the product manufacturers. That “sale” on Coca-Cola? It’s likely that Coca-Cola – or a local distributor – paid your grocery store to have their product inserted into the ad. The price of that “sale” item is often unchanged from the normal price – the only reason it’s in the flyer is to put a few more bucks in the pocket of the grocery store itself.

Why would a company pay for such placements? According to Tod Marks of Consumers Union, a mere mention of a product in a grocery store flyer can send sales of that product up as much as 500%. Thus, in many cases, the small cost of the product mention in the flyer can easily be recouped by a big bump in sales.

Another technique often used in flyers is quantity-based tricks. Let’s say, for example, that you typically buy a quart of cottage cheese for $1.49. In the flyer, you might notice that cottage cheese is on “sale” for $0.99 – but it turns out that this is the pint container, not the quart. Without careful reading, one might head out to the grocery store and grab that $0.99 “bargain” without thinking about it, actually paying more per pint of cottage cheese.

These two factors lead to the real question: how can you trust grocery store flyers at all? Here are some tactics I’ve found that work well for finding the real deals in the flyers.

First, ignore “brand name” products. Quite often, these are placed by the large food companies and don’t actually reflect much of a bargain at all. Just skip right past them. Occasionally, one of these might be a “loss leader,” but you can usually only find them if you’re really good at filtering out all of the noise.

Second, focus on the fresh items. The items that are fresh – fresh produce and fresh meats – are rarely branded at all. These items tend to be the real sales in the flyer (but not always – you should always have a good grasp on what the real prices are).

Third, “quantity” sales are often tricky. Let’s say you see some particular item on sale – 2/$5. That could mean a lot of things – it might mean that the items are actually $2.50 each and you don’t actually need to buy two items to get the discount, or it might mean that just buying one item will cost you $3.29 or so – which isn’t really a deal at all. Read the fine print and don’t just immediately buy more than you need or assume it’s a great deal.

Finally, know your quantities. Sometimes, “sales” loudly proclaimed in a flyer are for very small sizes. Once you’re actually in the store, however, you’ll find that the the larger size is actually the better deal, even though it’s not on “sale.” Sales on small quantity items almost always indicate something that’s not really a bargain (unless you can couple a coupon with it and get it for free).

Flyers have a lot of good deals, but there’s a lot of noise as well. Figure out how to filter through the noise and you’ll save yourself a lot of money on groceries.

Given the very positive (overall) comment, email, and Twitter response to my idea of bringing back the “book club” idea for a handful of books, along with many similar suggestions for it, I’m going to follow the crowd with most of those suggestions. Here’s how I’m going to try it.

First, the book I’m going to read through for the first book club is The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I think it can inspire a lot of strong discussion and matches the theme of The Simple Dollar quite well.

I plan on writing two entries a week on The Total Money Makeover, spread out over about six weeks. They will appear on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The first one will appear on Wednesday, July 1.

The entire goal is to move slowly through the book, discussing the ideas in it in more detail than could be done in a single post and trying to hit some good discussion points on specific ideas that might generate some controversy/discussion. It will be more imbued with my own take on the material than the typical book review – I’ll mostly quote a bit from the book, then go off on that specific point.

If this works – and I think it will – I’ll follow it up in September or October with Never Eat Alone, then later with Getting Things Done. Those were the three books that many, many people seemed interested in.

So, on July 1, I’ll post the first entry, which will cover everything up until the Debt Myths chapter on page 17.

Here are some interesting personal finance articles I’ve found recently.

Stacked Costs and Second-Order Foods: A New Way to Think About Rising Food Costs This is a good argument for eating simpler foods and knowing how to cook them. If you’re able to eat from staples, you’re less impacted by rising fuel costs, rising labor costs, etc. (@ casual kitchen)

Getting Started With Canning (aka Home Food Preservation) This brought back a lot of memories of childhood – and helped fuel a lot of plans for later this summer. (@ lifehacker)

Elizabeth Warren and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Utterly Misleading Bankruptcy Study Whenever I read a study that has an outcome that I consider shocking, I usually don’t believe it until I can read the fine print. This is a great example of why. (@ megan mcardle)

The Truth About Vizualization and Goal Achievement Visualization doesn’t matter unless it leads you to action. (@ awake at the wheel)

The Buy Ahead Principle: One of my Biggest Grocery Saving Secrets This is a good tactic if you stick strictly with stuff you’re sure that you’ll use in the future and stuff that won’t go bad. (@ money saving mom)

The Money Diaries: The 20-something Emotional Spender I know a lot of people like this. I wish they read sites like The Simple Dollar. (@ i will teach you to be rich)

What Are You Willing To Consistently Pay More For? Everyone has some things that they’re willing to pay more for. I’ll pay more for good wine, cheese, and produce, for example. (@ man vs debt)

5 Perfectly Respectable Ways To Get A Free Meal Volunteering gets my vote. I’ve volunteered many times and received a free meal in the process. (@ wise bread)

Joining An Investment Club? Watch Out For Groupthink Groupthink is always dangerous. It’s even more dangerous when you have your money on the line. (@ the digerati life)

The third episode of The Simple Dollar Podcast focuses on short-term goals. I talk about several of my own short-term goals and discuss some tactics anyone can apply to make their short term goals and projects a reality. Also discussed: C.S. Lewis, awful corporate motivational posters, Woodward and Bernstein, and which baseball announcer I sound the most like. Total time – 14:20.

Listen In!

Other options for enjoying The Simple Dollar Podcast include:
Listen to this episode on a separate page
Subscribe via iTunes
Download this episode (right click and save)
Subscribe in the media player of your choice

Though I hope you do subscribe using one of the above methods, don’t worry – each episode will be featured in its own post, much like this one, on Tuesday afternoons. The podcast itself may appear earlier than that, however, if you subscribe using one of the above forms, but the notes won’t appear until I post about it here on The Simple Dollar.

Episode Notes
Here are some additional notes that go alongside the comments in the podcast. Approximate times for the corresponding links and notes are listed.

0:00 – The theme song is a public domain recording of a Camper van Beethoven concert on October 25, 1986. Listen to the concert in its entirety.
0:16 – Some background reading on short term goals.
0:42 – Uh-oh, dry mouth setting in!
0:53 – Quick gulp of water!
1:11 – An excellent book on procrastination is The Now Habit by Neil Fiore.
1:21 – I can be an awful procrastinator.
1:57 – Here’s An overview of The Chronicles of Narnia.
2:14 – I thought The Magician’s Nephew was the best one in the series.
3:35 – Here’s that very non-motivational poster.
4:02 – And here’s a much better one, with a Lao Tzu quote.
4:22 – Some notes on Getting Things Done by David Allen.
5:42 – Here’s how to plan ahead for meals like I’m talking about.
9:39 – Here’s my notes on a Roth IRA and other retirement savings tools.
9:43 – … and here’s how to develop your own debt repayment plan.
10:19 – A nice guide for installing a programmable thermostat from Frugal Dad.
10:22 – Here’s the Department of Energy’s guide to air sealing your home.
11:35 – All the President’s Men is a great movie.
11:41 – … and so is The Natural.
11:55 – Do I sound more like Ernie Harwell, Vin Scully, or Harry Caray? Or Chip Caray? Or Bob Uecker?
12:30 – Evernote is great!
13:08 – Action Method is a pretty good way of keeping track of what you need to do next.
14:03 – A preview of next week’s topic, food.

One thing I’d like to do in a future episode is have an audio reader’s mailbag. If you have a microphone on your computer and can record an MP3 of a simple, short question you might have on personal finance, careers, pop culture, or anything else you’d like me to answer, record it as an MP3 and send it to me. Keep the total recording under 15 seconds, please.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Over the past week, my wife, my children, my parents and I all went on vacation to the Dallas/Fort Worth area (we had planned a longer road trip, but we made an on-the-fly decision to just stick around DFW). While there, we visited family and saw a large number of sights and events in the area.

Before the trip, I collected suggestions for free things to do in the area from both readers of the site and on Twitter. The response was pretty surprising, with lots of great suggestions thrown our way. I collected all of the ones suggested by multiple people, selected the handful that I was sure would be a hit with my family, and we tried out several of them.

So, here are the great free things to do in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Free Things We Enjoyed
Here are the four free things we really enjoyed on our trip. We tried several things, but these stood out from the pack.

Pioneer Plaza

Pioneer Plaza is a beautiful park in the middle of Dallas that features a life-size bronzed cattle drive – three cowboys herding a lot of cattle across a stream. The setting is beautiful and the sculptures are fantastic.

We wound up spending almost two hours here, even on a hot summer day. We admired all of the bronze statues, walked across the stream a few times, and my children petted a horse ridden by a Dallas police officer. It would have been a perfect place to have a picnic had we been more prepared.

You can find out more about Pioneer Plaza from the Texas Trees Foundation.

Dallas Farmer’s Market

What can I say? I love farmer’s markets. There are tons of fresh food samples, opportunities to buy delicious produce at a very low price, and almost always a surprise or two. The Dallas Farmers Market, on the quiet Wednesday morning that we were there, was sparsely crowded but had a lot of vendors happy to talk and offer samples of all kinds.

In the picture above, my daughter was discovering that she loves watermelon – she was trying a (free) piece of yellow watermelon. We wound up buying quite a few fruits at the market, which provided afternoon snacks for the family and some breakfast food as well.

You can find out more about the Dallas Farmers Market at their website.

Dealey Plaza
This is the area where President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963. You can stand outside the School Book Depository and observe the route that Kennedy took. There’s also a lot of public works projects in the area, built in the 1930s.

Although there is actually a very nice museum nearby in the School Book Depository, I found that the actual setting outside the Depository had much more of an impact. I walked along the route that Kennedy took, absorbed the area, and thought about that tragic moment.

Wikipedia has an excellent entry on Dealey Plaza.

Fort Worth Stockyards

Over in Fort Worth, we visited the Stockyards. While there are a lot of shops in that area, there’s also a ton of free things to see and do – walking around the stockyards themselves, for starters. There are several free special events each day as well.

The highlight, though, was seeing the longhorn steers being leisurely driven down the street by three or four cowboys (pictured above). My son loved this part and kept talking about it for days afterward.

This is a great way to spend most of a day in Fort Worth. You can find out more at the Stockyards website.

Things Recommended By Two or More Readers
Here are five free activities recommended by multiple readers that we simply didn’t have time to make it to on our trip. All of these sounded like quite a bit of fun – and we would have likely done all of them had our trip been a few days longer.

Jazz Under the Stars
Each summer, the Dallas Museum of Art has a free concert series – in 2009, this series is called “Jazz Under the Stars.” Each Thursday at 8 PM, people gather at Ross Avenue Plaza, spread out blankets and picnic baskets, and enjoy a free outdoor concert by some very good jazz ensembles. More information is available at the Dallas Museum of Art website.

Crow Collection of Asian Art
The Crow Collection of Asian Art is a beautiful art museum located in the Dallas Art District that several readers raved about. It’s right in the heart of the city and features a stunning collection of Asian art, both historical and modern. Outside, there’s an extensive sculpture garden, which includes 20 statues from the French masters. Find out more at CrowCollection.org.

Farmer’s Branch Historical Park
This is a large collection of historical buildings from the 19th and early 20th century, maintained in a state as close to the original as possible. For people into folk history, this is apparently an exquisite place to visit. You can find out more about the Farmer’s Branch Historical Park here.

Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center
The Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center is a spectacular concert hall with extremely impressive architecture and acoustics. Built by I. M. Pei, the Center also features one of the best pipe organs in the United States. Check it out at MeyersonSymphonyCenter.com.

Thanks-Giving Square
This is an open area in the center of downtown Dallas dedicated to the idea of giving thanks as a universal human value. The location features an interfaith chapel, a stunning courtyard, and an impressive array of nature and art. Find out more about it at ThanksGiving.org.

Believe it or not, our summer vacations for the next five summers are penciled in right now. For each of those trips, I intend to do the same thing: ask around for free things to do, try out as many as I can, and report on the ones we didn’t make it to.

One aspect of buy-and-hold investing in low-cost index funds that has always attracted me is that there is an extremely low time cost. Once you have the initial investments in place, there is virtually no time cost at all. All you have to do is invest maybe half an hour a year rebalancing the investments – and that’s it.

That strategy pretty much matches the stock market. In fact, if you choose to just invest in the Vanguard 500, it almost exactly matches the ups and downs of the S&P 500 stock index.

Let’s look at the other side of the coin. Let’s say you’re following normal stock picking advice. You have a portfolio of 20 individual stocks (so that no piece of your portfolio is more than 5% of your total investment – diversification, after all). You devote an hour a week to studying each stock in detail, so you know what’s going on with that company. You also devote five hours a week to finding new, worthwhile companies to invest in, potentially replacing the slots in your portfolio.

You’re able to invest $10,000 a year – and we’re not worried about brokerage fees at all. What’s your earnings per hour doing all that research?

Let’s say all that work manages to beat the Vanguard 500 by 1% per year. Historically, VFINX has returned 9.56% per year since its inception (remember, that number includes dividends and stock price increases and decreases, and it does include 2008), so we’ll use that number as an annual return baseline.

Over a ten year period, VFINX would turn your $10,000 a year into a sum total of $170,968.66. Meanwhile, that portfolio that beats the S&P 500 by 1% would turn $10,000 a year into a sum total of $181,005.77. Your extra effort of 25 hours a week for ten years has earned you $10,037.11 during that period – an hourly wage of $0.77. Ouch.

“Come on!” you say. “Stocks are a long term investment!” So let’s look at the thirty year mark. Over a thirty year period, VFINX would turn your $10,000 a year into a sum total of $1,061,590.42. Similarly, your 1% better investment portfolio, with 25 hours a week over ten years invested in it, will turn that annual $10,000 into $1,347,885.59. Your extra effort of 25 hours a week for thirty years has earned you $286,295.18 – an hourly wage of $7.34. Congratulations, your investing expertise has earned you minimum wage.

“Come on!” you say. “I can do better than 1% over the S&P 500 every year for thirty years!” (Of course, if you actually believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.) So let’s make it 2% – you beat the S&P 500 by 2% every year for thirty years. Your extra effort for 25 hours a week for thirty years earns you an hourly wage of $16.60.

If you have the intellectual ability to do enough rigorous analysis to beat the market by 2% year in and year out, you can most certainly be earning more than $16.60 an hour with your time.

But what if you can invest more than $10,000 a year? If you’re in that group, where you’re able to invest significantly more than $10,000 a year in whatever you want and you’re sure you can beat the market consistently over the long haul, by all means, choose the route that’s right for you. However, I argue the statement above still holds – with those kinds of resources and intellectual acumen, you likely have better ways to earn money.

Here’s the take-home message: individual stock investing, done with adequate research, is a lot of work. Unless you have a very large amount to invest, the extra work is simply not worth it in terms of the extra income per hour.

Now, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t dabble in individual stock investing. I see nothing wrong with taking a sliver of your investments and playing the market, so to speak. However, recognize that such investments are largely a gamble unless you do adequate research. And, if you do adequate research, you have to blow away the overall market to make it worth your time.

My conclusion is simple. If you’re an individual investor without a ton of money to invest, it’s simply not worth your time to chase individual stocks. The time that’s required to adequately study individual stocks and build a truly diverse portfolio will make the gains small enough per hour of your work that you might as well do something else with your time, like build your skill set for your career, improve your health, or start your own side business.

Instead, just invest in a very broad index fund and ride the market at a low price with little time investment of your own. Better yet, do it with a balanced portfolio – don’t put it all into stocks, so that you can ride through the down markets with less worry and smaller losses.

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.

What is the thought process you go through when organizing an article to write? Do you outline your thoughts first? Often when I try to write something, it ends up fairly chaotic.
- Crystal Groves

I usually start off by writing down a bunch of ideas in a very stream-of-consciousness fashion. Facts, ideas, and other bits all just get thrown down on paper. I don’t worry about the order or anything else – I just try to dump the ideas out of my mind.

After that, I usually try to make up my mind about the order of the article. I usually just move the pieces I jotted down around until they make some logical sense.

From there, I just write the post. I literally go through the points and transform each one into a paragraph or two, outlining what I’m thinking. Sometimes, I just polish the rambling into a sentence. Other times, I add a lot more flesh.

At that point, the article’s almost done. I scan it again for any major errors, check anything that still needs checking, then I consider it done. If it were a print piece or a portion of a book or something, I’d let it rest, edit it, let it rest again, and so forth, but that’s not a realistic process for a blog where the key is the fresh flow of ideas.

I was wondering what you would do if you were recently laid off like I am and had some credit card debt? I was going to pay it off with my tax refund, but then I unexpectedly lost my job. Some experts like Suze Orman and a few friends have recommended just making minimum payments on this debt and stashing the refund in my emergency savings because credit companies will close your line of credit, and you can no longer rely on it for the worst-case scenario.
- Writergirl

For one, you should never rely on credit cards for your worst-case scenario. That’s what a big, healthy emergency fund is for.

Having said that, I largely agree with Orman. If you’re in a situation with no income, your best bet is to minimize every possible monthly bill and conserve cash so that you can survive longer without an income – since you don’t necessarily know when your next employment opportunity will arrive. Thus, cutting down to minimum payments on debts is a strong step in that direction, even though it does mean a larger debt over the long run.

If you’re so worried about Mint’s security, see http://www.mint.com/privacy/security-tech/. Check out their security. if you can hack into and know several ethical hackers.
- Frugal Cubicle

I’m not worried about that aspect of security. My concern is with human failure and human failings. Every time you choose to share your account information with another company, you open up another hole for potential identity theft – someone on the inside skimming account numbers is just the start.

Thus, my logic is pretty simple: is the benefit of the service more than the cost of sharing your information with them? In Mint’s case, it might be, but does it offer a compelling advantage over other services that do much the same thing without requiring you to share your data, like a desktop Quicken install or Wesabe?

I’m not saying Mint is a bad service at all, and I have no doubt that their security is strong. However, every time you share your account information with yet another source, you increase your chances of identity theft and other chicanery. It’s not a trade I’m willing to make.

How’s your fantasy baseball team doing?
- Mel

Mel is actually a member of the very competitive fantasy baseball league I’ve participated in for the last two summers – this is my third year in the league. Mel is winning the league – I’m 7th out of 12. This is more or less Mel’s way of getting me to talk about my failings as a fantasy baseball player.

Here’s the scoop – my pitching is stellar. I have Roy Halladay and Zack Greinke. ‘Nuff said.

The problem is with everything else. One of my earliest draft picks was used on David Ortiz. Yes, the same one who decided 2009 was the year to watch his power disappear and his batting average drop to .190. He’s now on the bench. Several of my other picks are underperforming, too.

So, there I am – stuck in the middle.

My husband and I plan on taking a two week road trip this summer to VA, DC, PA, and OH. We signed up for AAA and saved so much on our DC hotel that it paid for the entire membership… Qustion: What will your family do to keep costs down on the road?
- Jessica

There are several tactics that can easily shave money from your spending. First, figure out which states have the lowest gas prices. For example, we found it was very worthwhile for us to gas up just before we crossed from Missouri to Kansas, then just barely make it into Oklahoma to gas up again – saved us several dollars by just planning a bit better. Second, air up your tires before you go. Third, take along picnic foods and eat at rest stops – this allows everyone to run around and stretch and keeps food costs down. Fourth, minimize stops (because gas stations are loaded with impulse buys) – and when you do stop, have everyone use the bathroom. EVERYONE.

Those tips will go quite far towards cutting your costs while you’re on the road.

We are upside-down on my husband’s car loan and are trying to get rid of it. what steps do you take to do this when the car is worth less than the loan?
- nw

When you sell an upside-down car, you’re still responsible for the difference in cost – there’s no magic way around that. If you don’t have the cash to immediately make up that gap, you either need to keep paying down the loan or find another way to leverage something else you own to get yourself out from being under water.

For selling it, your best bet is to simply do the leg work yourself. This MSN MoneyCentral article on selling your own car should help quite a bit.

If money were no object, would you hire a nanny for your children?
- Kali

I would, but it wouldn’t be a typical nanny hire. I would hire my sister-in-law at a rate to make her plenty comfortable. She’s been providing care for preschool-aged children for almost a decade now and I trust her deeply with our own children.

Would I hire a nanny if we were making enough that we could easily afford one? More likely, I would hire someone very competent to handle much of the drudge work of The Simple Dollar – approving comments, filtering email for the ones that are relevant, researching specific points, setting up interviews, etc. – to someone else, trim my work time quite a bit, and do it myself. We simply don’t earn enough to do this – I’ve tried hiring people at a level I can afford, but their competence hasn’t been there.

My biggest concern, though, is my children’s social development. Where we live, there’s not a ton of stay-at-home parents or other such individuals to give my child any sort of normal social interaction at a preschool age. That worries me – I was very ill-equipped to handle the social aspects of school when I started and it took me literally ten years to figure out how to start coming out of my shell. Believe me, I’ve looked for opportunities, and short of driving my children forty minutes one way to stay-at-home dad meetups in Des Moines, there aren’t many options.

You talk a lot about researching before a large purchase. What do you use to research?
- Jessica

My first stop is almost always Consumer Reports. They’ve almost never led me wrong when I stick with their “Best Buys.” I’ve used their advice in car purchases, appliance purchases, and countless other smaller purchases.

If the purchase is a big one, I usually hit the magazine room at the local library and dig through five years or so of Consumer Reports back issues to get a big picture of what’s going on.

I’ll often Google for web reviews as well, but I tend to not trust them as much unless they come from a source I’ve long viewed as reliable. I tend to believe more in trusted sources than I do in sheer quantity of reviews. This is probably borne from my experience as a blogger, where I’m almost constantly inundated with all kinds of offers to do positive reviews of various things.

I was wondering about how to best position yourself for getting a mortgage. I am 20 and have only had one credit card and no debt. should i get a CC and make some smart moves to build credit so I can get the full amount on a mortgage (with a proper down payment also)? and what are smart credit moves?
- Erik

I think you’re already doing fine. Just avoid being late on any bills and use your credit card regularly but keep the balance paid off, and you’ll be in good shape.

One big thing you should do, though, is check your credit report at http://www.annualcreditreport.com/, which is the website the federal government set up for people to get free copies of their credit report. Don’t use other services – they try to trick you into paying for something that the government has ensured you can get for free.

Make sure there are no errors on it. Check up on anything you see on there that you don’t recognize. Doing so will ensure that your report is accurate and, with your good history, will provide great support for getting a mortgage in the future.

What religion do you practice specifically? I’ve gathered you’re a Christian, but what denomination?
- Mark

I’m an ELCA Lutheran. If you want to know more, you can bone up on our beliefs.

Why am I a member? Several reasons. First, the ELCA is not a group of Biblical literalists. They encourage discussion of what the religion means, what the Bible actually means, and so on. Second, they practice open communion and encourage discussion with people of all faiths. Third, we don’t believe one can “earn” their way into heaven – it’s not up to us at all – and we generally don’t believe faith to be a conscious choice.

What about the “E” in ELCA, which stands for evangelism? I don’t believe that quoting scripture does any good at all in the modern world. Actions speak louder than words, and actions of love, respect for others, and fulfilling one’s commitments speak awfully loud. If someone asks what I believe, like Mark does, I’ll tell them – until then, I’ll let my choices in life speak for themselves. I can do a lot more good in the world by actually focusing on being a better person and doing good deeds than by wasting my time judging anyone else for their choices.

Got a question of your own? Ask it in the comments, and I may address it in a future mailbag!