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

Several months ago, I wandered upon Pamela Slim’s excellent blog, Escape from Cubicle Nation. In a nutshell, the blog covers the transition from working in a cubicle (i.e., a traditional job) to self-employment – and all of the issues in between.

Slim packaged up many of the best ideas into a guide to this transition, also titled Escape from Cubicle Nation. And, since I enjoyed the blog so much, I picked up the book, looking forward to reading what Slim had to say, especially since this is a journey I’ve gone through over the last couple of years.

Here’s the entire thing in a nutshell: if you’re thinking of quitting your office job and doing something on your own, this is your handbook. It’s thorough, detailed, and heavy on the applicable ideas. Let’s dig in.

I Have a Fancy Title, Steady Paycheck, and Good Benefits. Why Am I So Miserable?
Many jobs involve sacrificing one’s core values – you might not necessarily be doing work that you dislike or object to, but the work isn’t in line with what you want out of life. Many jobs are also filled with trifling details that are simply not fulfilling. Work also often involves jumping through hoops for a boss – a process that isn’t clear on how it helps you (or helps anyone). Adding these factors together, it’s not entirely surprising that people are unhappy with their work, even if it’s a “good” job.

If It Is So Bad, Then Why Am I Afraid to Leave?
Slim points toward status, routine, and recognition as big factors, but I think an even bigger factor is a fear of the financial unknown. Many, many people are out there living paycheck to paycheck, deeply fearing the idea that the job might go away. I know that this was my biggest roadblock against taking the leap into being a self-employed writer – I was afraid that the steady money would go away. Security was my biggest fear and it held me in place for a long time.

Detox from Corporate Life
Slim offers six steps that can help a person “detox” from corporate life – in other words, the steps a person should take to reduce and eliminate some of the mental holds that their job puts on their mind. Clear your plate of as many tasks as you can (leaving you some breathing space in your day). Start writing down and tracking your ideas. Get creative and expose yourself to new ideas.

What’s Really Involved in Moving from Employee to Entrepreneur?
This chapter outlines a step-by-step process for making that leap. It’s not a be-all end-all guide, but instead it just outlines a framework that the rest of the book fills in in detail. I think her framework might be too specific – what I’ve found is that often people try out lots of different things, something takes off, and they hop onto the rocket ship. Thus, it’s often useful to look at some of the prep as generally useful – like getting your finances in order – but some of the others are a bit more specific than might be necessary. Instead, just try to seek out your own rocket ship – and the way to do that is to follow your passions.

What Are All the Ways to Be Self-Employed?
It’s really impossible to make such a list, so what Slim does instead is to break it down into a big handful of different factors worth considering. What will you do? Why will you do it? Who will consume it? How will they pay? Who will you do it with? Those factors are very different in different self-employment and entrepreneurship positions.

How Do I Choose a Good Business Idea?
After that chapter, a person’s mind might be loaded down with ideas. How do you choose the right one? Slim argues that a person benefits from figuring out their sweet spot – the point where your talents (what you’re genetically encoded to do), your passions (what you love to do), and what’s marketable (what people will pay you to do) intersect. You can even do it by making a list for each of these three categories and figure out where they overlap. Once you start getting a vague sense of where you’re going, start doing research. What’s possible in that area?

Recruit Your Tribe
The next step to success is to surround yourself with the right people – peers who are doing similar things and mentors who have already found success. Slim addresses how to do this in detail, encouraging you largely to just go where the conversation is, join in, and listen. People are already out there talking about your area and it’s worth your while to start participating, building relationships, and growing.

Rethink Your Life: Options for Scaling Back, Downsizing, and Relocating
What? Frugality? Minimizing your stuff? That’s for losers, right? Actually, frugality is for winners. It’s much, much easier to take a challenging leap if you’ve got a healthy bank account and don’t have a pile of bills coming in every week. If you want to give self-employment a try, minimize. Save some money. Get rid of as many bills as you can. Learn how to live a little leaner. It’s really a choice: do what makes you happy all the time or have stuff that makes you happy during the hours you’re not working.

Do I Really Have to Do a Business Plan?
Many people look at a business plan as some sort of dry, formal step – a pointless document that doesn’t really help anyone and is best avoided. In truth, a business plan’s purpose is simply to guide you through the thought process of making sure all of your bases are covered. Have you thought about your customers? Have you thought about likely what-ifs? A business plan is just a way to push you to think about these vital questions. So, don’t worry about the formality of your document at the end – but think a lot about the questions involved.

Define the Spirit of Your Brand
What are you going to do to stand out from the pack? What’s different about your business, particularly in a field full of competitors? That’s a difficult question for a lot of people. You cannot find success by just copying something that’s already successful. At most, you’ll be mediocre. What did I do different to build The Simple Dollar? I decided not to be snarky or wholly fact-based, but instead to be earnest, something that wasn’t really done in a blog form too much at that point.

Test Often and Fail Fast: The Art of Prototypes and Samples
Once you have your idea in place, try it. Don’t spend lots of time making it perfect before trying it. Instead, throw it out there, share it, get some feedback, and use it to improve. That’s what I’m doing with my podcast. The first few episodes weren’t all that good, but if I hadn’t shared them anyway, the later episodes wouldn’t have improved at all. I wouldn’t have had a good idea of what was wrong.

Look Your Finances in the Eye
What about the money? It’s all about the money, in the end. You need to get a real grip on your financial state – and that means real numbers. Know what you owe. Know what your bills are. Know what you bring in now. Then plan ahead – get rid of those debts as soon as you can, minimize your bills, improve your credit rating, and build a big fat emergency fund. This is all personal finance 101, but it’s worthwhile stuff.

How to Shop for Benefits
The biggest fear when it comes to self-employment for many folks is health insurance. What will I do without employer health insurance? Slim covers options for people in the United States here, but in the end, this area changes so much that you should do your own research. I think the real solution over the long run will probably be a national health care plan – if this is easily accessible and actually decent, people will sign up in droves and take the leap, I think.

Dealing with Your Friends and Family
Many people find a lot of resistance in their lives if they suggest making a major change in their career. Why? In the end, most people resist change in their lives, and your major career change is often a change in the lives of people around you – a change they’ll resist. I was lucky when I made my change that I had a lot of supportive people around me who knew I’d dreamed of spending more time with my kids and writing for a living for a long time, but this isn’t always true of everyone. What can you do? Listen to their concerns, but realize that many of the doubts expressed are actually their own doubts, not yours. Accompany those doubts with a well-thought-out business plan that analyzes those doubts and ensures that you’ll survive them.

Line Your Ducks in a Row
For Slim, this means getting appropriate support around you. A lawyer you trust. An accountant. Possibly a virtual assistant to help with the flood of emails and contacts you’ll get. You’ll face a lot of problems, and having support around you for the less important things lets you focus on the most important things – like how to overcome the problems that are set out in front of you.

When Is It Time to Leave?
Escape from Cubicle Nation winds down by asking the big question: when is it time to make the leap? Sure, there are logistical issues – do you have the money? Do you have the connections in place? Is the business plan ready to go? Have you already started (and is it successful)? But a big part of it comes from inside as well. It’s a major leap – are you mentally ready for it?

Is Escape from Cubicle Nation Worth Reading?
If you’re working in a typical job (employed by someone else) and have ever thought of going it alone or starting a small business, Escape from Cubicle Nation is an essential read. Slim goes through the factors worth considering in great detail, outlining the things that need to be considered and the things that need to be put in place.

My only complaint – and this is a minor one – is that the topics felt a little bit out of order. This is something I’ve been struggling with while writing my own book lately – are the topics really in the best order? I even sat down and tried to figure out how I would change it, but without blowing most of the chapters to bits and reconstructing them out of pieces, I don’t know what I would change. I think the problem is that Slim tackles so many ideas in the book – but is that really a problem?

Look at your own life. If this book matches the journey you’re on, it’s a must read.

As I’ve discussed many times before, eating at home is a huge money saver. Even if you use expensive ingredients all the time (like saffron or morel mushrooms), it’s still cheaper to cook at home than it is to consistently eat out (assuming you’re eating better than the McDonalds Dollar Menu). Similarly, it’s cheaper to make a meal out of basic ingredients than it is to use prepared and processed ingredients – the closer to the raw ingredients you are, the cheaper the meal is (usually).

Along the same lines, I’ve come to realize that I tend to snack on and eat whatever’s convenient. For lunch, I’ll usually eat leftovers because it’s easy – it’s sitting in the fridge and usually only requires a bit of pepper and a trip to the microwave. At snack time, I’ll look at the fruit bowl and flip open the refrigerator door and grab whatever’s quick and at hand.

So why not combine the two and really crunch your food budget?

I was inspired to try some of these things by Mark Bittman’s interesting Food Matters. He suggests a similar phenomenon, that if you make good, healthy food as convenient as possible, you won’t be as tempted to eat processed, unhealthy foods.

By a lucky coincidence, many of the healthiest foods are also quite cheap in their raw form.

So what I decided to do is start cooking some healthy and very inexpensive staple foods once a week in bulk, store them in containers in the fridge, and utilize them all throughout the week in various dishes.

Here’s the game plan.

First, cook a big batch of beans/wild rice/whole grains once a week. You can get these ingredients at the store incredibly cheaply and they’re very easy to cook up in bulk. Just cook a whole bag of beans, a small bag of wild or brown rice, and some amount of a whole grain that you like.

When you’re done, just put the material you cooked into a large container in the fridge. A large Rubbermaid container or Gladware works really well because you can see what’s inside at a glance.

Throughout the week, just eat simple stuff that uses these for ingredients. Here are five examples.

Burritos Put some beans and some rice on a tortilla, heat it up, pour some salsa on it, enjoy.

Omelets Stir up two eggs, toss ‘em in a pan with some beans, spice with lots of pepper, enjoy.

Stir fry Toss whatever vegetables and meats you have on hand in a pan with a bit of vegetable oil over medium heat until cooked, put them on the rice, enjoy.

Swiss breakfast Mix the cooked whole grains with some milk and whatever fruit you have on hand, enjoy.

Bean burgers If you have black beans, this works great. Just mash ‘em together, add a bit of flour, garlic powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce to the beans, make some patties, and cook them with some oil, enjoy.

With the huge amount of variations in these recipes – and the many, many more simple things you can toss together – it’s easy to make tons of very simple snacks and meals from these cooked staples in your fridge.

You can take this idea even further by doing the same thing with whatever fruits and vegetables are on sale at the store. Just pick up that vegetable, chop it up, and cook it in some appropriate fashion (or just leave it raw). Just get it to the point where it’s really convenient for you to just grab it and eat it or add it to a simple dish.

The benefits here are tremendous. Suddenly, your snacks and many of your meals become really simple to prepare, really cheap, and pretty healthy, too (regardless of what you add, if most of the meal consists of beans and wild rice and vegetables, it’ll be good for you on the whole). Plus, since you can add whatever you want to those ingredients that are already on hand, it’s versatile and will be quite tasty to pretty much any palate.

Give it a shot and see how it works for you!

Many newer readers of The Simple Dollar haven’t been exposed to the hundreds of great articles in the archives of the site, so this is a weekly series that highlights the five best posts from one year ago this week, as well as the five best posts from two years ago this week. I call it … the Time Machine.

One Year Ago (August 16-22, 2008)
Review: Financial Infidelity This is the perfect book to read if you find that your spouse is lying to you – or you’re lying to your spouse – about money.

Fourteen Techniques for Improving Your Work-Life Balance One of the biggest challenges of the modern workplace is figuring out a clear dividing line between personal life and professional work. Here are fourteen tactics that work for creating that line in your own life.

What Features Are Most Important For Your Primary Bank? My Thoughts and Recommendations Your primary bank should live up to certain minimum standards or else you’re getting ripped off. Here are the features that I see as essential for your primary bank.

Cheap Supper Night: Hacking One Meal a Week to Save Money One night a week, shoot for the absolute minimum cost you can swing on your dinner meal. You’ll find, time and time again, that this saves you a surprising amount of cash. Enjoy those beans, folks!

This Is the Right Personal Finance Book for You! There are lots of personal finance books that are perfect for very specific audiences. Here’s a list of those books and those audiences, which can help you find the right book for you. (I should re-do this post, actually, with some newer choices…).

Two Years Ago (August 16-22, 2007)
Two Commenters Disagree: Why Risk Is Interesting I really liked this debate about personal risk between two commenters, so I turned it into a post that itself drew a lot of discussion.

Tackling Breakfast: Healthy, Inexpensive, And Easy Meals To Get Me Started In The Morning Breakfast is perhaps the most important meal of the day. It helps to set your sleep cycle, gives you an energy boost to start the day, and raises your metabolism after sleep. Here’s how to get your motor running in a healthy way on a budget.

Six Maintenance Lessons I’ve Learned During My First Month As A Homeowner For me, home maintenance was perhaps the biggest surprise as a new homeowner. Here are six lessons I learned very quickly after getting a house of my own.

A Frugal Dilemma: Inheriting Stuff You Wouldn’t Normally Use What do you do when you inherit a bunch of stuff that you wouldn’t normally use? My suggestion, in a nutshell: try out stuff, but don’t be afraid to sell off all of it (unless it has some deep sentimental value, of course).

Five Money Lessons For Preschoolers – And Applying Them To My Own Child I have two young children, so teaching simple lessons that they can understand is something near and dear to my heart.

Should You Follow An Investment Strategy If It Makes You Uncomfortable? I Say Never Some people got quite angry with this one, but I still stand by it: if you’re not comfortable with an investment and it’s outside your risk tolerance, dump it. No investment is worth staying up at night, sweating the fluctuations of the market.

If you’d like to browse through more of the archives, visit the chronology, where all posts are listed in chronological order.

Nine Ways to Get More out of The Simple Dollar
This is kind of a FAQ for new readers and is posted each week along with the Time Machine. Here are nine great ways for new readers to dig deeper into The Simple Dollar.

1. Subscribe by email or RSS. Visiting The Simple Dollar’s website is great, but for many people, it’s more convenient to receive the articles in another form. It’s easy to join 60,000 other subscribers and get The Simple Dollar’s content by email or in your RSS feeder (if you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check out Google Reader.

2. Comment. Each article on The Simple Dollar has lively discussion. Just click on the green square in the upper right of each article on the website and join in!

3. Read my story of financial meltdown and recovery. The Simple Dollar isn’t based on what I’ve read in books or learned in school. I’ve made a lifetime of financial mistakes – The Simple Dollar is a record of what works for me during the process of getting my life on a better track.

4. Download my free 49 page e-book. Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page is completely free. It summarizes all of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way about personal finance in one tidy package – in fact, all of the main principles can be found right on the cover.

5. Follow me on Twitter – or other social networks. I post tons of interesting articles, quotes, follow-up material, commentary, and other material on Twitter. Follow me! If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s essentially an open discussion forum for people to share ideas and thoughts with other like-minded folks – you just choose the people you want to listen to and their ideas and thoughts are all delivered to you on a single page.

I also participate on several other social networks. Feel free to check me out on del.icio.us (it’s where I collect links, from which I select the ones that appear in my weekly roundups), wakoopa (what software I use), GoodReads (what books I’m reading), Facebook, and FriendFeed (which aggregates everything). I also have an irregularly-updated personal site, TrentHamm.com.

6. Dig through “31 Days to Fix Your Finances.” 31 Days to Fix Your Finances is an article series that outlines how you can get a grip on your finances over the course of a month.

7. Send me your questions and suggestions. Send me an email and let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to see, and any questions you might have. I try to respond to as many emails as possible and I read them all. I may even use your question in a future article!

8. Become a “Friend of The Simple Dollar.” If you find the stuff on The Simple Dollar valuable and are willing to spend five minutes or so a month to help me out with small things, please consider signing up to be a “Friend of The Simple Dollar”.

9. Email a great article you find to a friend. Find an article that you think your friend would love? At the bottom of each article, you’ll find a link that says “Email this” – just click on that, type in your friend’s address, and send it right along to them!

A reader once told me that he identifies better with other blogs because they write about the “city” and I write about “rural life.” I was informed, quite clearly, that he couldn’t possibly learn anything from a blog that spoke from a “rural” perspective.

This is actually a pretty common thing. I hear all the time from city dwellers who don’t see any value in conversations about gardening because they live in an apartment. I also hear from people who live in rural areas who don’t want to hear me mention using buses and subways for transportation because it’s just not available in most areas.

Yes, let’s take a look at those cultural divides, shall we?

I can’t possibly know what it’s like to live New York or San Francisco’s enormous rent and property costs. I’m also completely clueless about sustainable living in a truly rural environment.

I don’t know what it’s like to be truly poor, living paycheck to paycheck (although that’s how I grew up). I know nothing about the challenges of managing a large income while living in a high-priced area.

I can’t conceive of what it’s like to live in an area where I’m a cultural outsider. Being a white male, I know nothing about prejudice and how it can hold you down.

Here’s the truth, though. There’s always someone with more advantages than you. There’s always someone with fewer advantages than you.

One thing’s for certain, though: you can find success no matter what your situation.

Sure, your success might be different than another person’s success.

Your success might be building up a $1,000 emergency fund from your low-income job, while someone else’s success might be paying off a $500,000 mortgage.

Your success might be finding the perfect small apartment exactly where you want it, while someone else’s success might be a big farmhouse in the country.

Your success might be an engineering career, while someone else’s success might be enough financial stability to be a stay-at-home parent.

The interesting thing is that we all use more or less the same tools to achieve that success.

A few days ago, I talked about the idea of the “financial toolbox,” that there are a handful of tools that we can use to solve any financial situation. Frugality. Increasing your income. Steady behavior. An emergency fund. Targeted savings. Automated savings. The “ten second” rule. The “thirty day” rule.

No matter where we are in life, we apply these tools for financial success. The basic principles cross every cultural, personal, and philosophical divide. I can learn how to improve my frugality from a person living on Park Avenue, from a homeless person, and from a person in a farmhouse in the country.

Sure, I can’t use every tactic thrown at me. But I’ve found time and time again that the best tactics are the ones that come from unexpected places. I actually have less to learn from my neighbor than I do from a person living a very different life.

Why? Different people see the world differently. Their lives are filled with a different perspective than your own. They grew up differently. They see the world differently.

For example, I know very few people who grew up in the financial situation that my family had when I was young. It shaped me in a lot of ways, giving me angles on life that others may not have had. However, I really have no idea what it would be like to grow up in a privileged household and what lessons those people might have learned.

Another example: for several years, I worked next to an individual who grew up in a city in South Korea and had limited ability to speak English. Over the years, we shared a lot of stories about our lives and I learned many, many things from him – new ways of looking at the world, new tactics to use in my own life, and new perspectives on spirituality (just for starters).

The best thing we can always do is share our tools and our ideas freely. It costs us nothing to share our best financial tactics, but by sharing, we encourage others to share. And if the person sharing is coming from a very different perspective, we’re bound to learn something new.

A cultural divide isn’t something to turn away from, it’s something to seek out. Sure, it’s useful to read the words of someone familiar to you, but don’t turn away from new angles that seem at first to not have anything in common with you. You might be surprised to find that there are life-changing answers there.

Over the past eight Fridays, I’ve posted a series of recipes based on NPR’s “How Low Can You Go” series, highlighting meals that can serve a family of four for under $10. Here’s the list of recipes, for those interested:
Vegetarian Burrito Bowls
Potato-Peanut Curry
Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach
Lemony Fettuccine with Asparagus
Cheesy Corkscrews with Crunchy Bacon Topping
Dal, Chilean Style
Coriander Meatballs with Yogurt-Mint Sauce
Moorish-Style Chickpea And Spinach Stew

Lots of good food and ideas there.

However, during the process of preparing those dishes and posts, I realized that there were actually a lot of useful general lessons for cooking at home that could be extracted from the experiences. Let’s walk through some of them (along with some tasty pictures of the meals I prepared).

Moorish-Style Chickpea And Spinach Stew

Let the ingredients lead
Recipes are useful because they list ingredients and explain how they can be combined into something tasty. Often, when selecting a meal, people think first of that tasty result. “Mmm, chicken carbonara sounds really good right now,” for example.

That’s usually the wrong approach to food, though.

Instead of looking at recipes in terms of the result you want, consider recipes in terms of the ingredients first. What do you have on hand? What fresh ingredients are on sale this week? What fresh ingredients are in season in your area (meaning they can usually be had at farmers markets on the cheap)?

That doesn’t mean you have to corner yourself. Use search engines like Foodie View or SuperCook to find tons and tons of recipes that match up with what you have available (or can get for cheap).

There are nearly infinite possibilities for tasty meals out there. Don’t limit yourself by starting your search based on the result. Instead, start with the ingredients – the inexpensive, healthy ingredients you have easy access to – and go from there. Plan ahead a bit, making plans for meals throughout the coming week.

Coriander Meatballs with Yogurt-Mint Sauce

Practice makes all the difference
Recently, a friend of mine tweeted “I used to think I could cook I just chose not to… turns out I just can’t cook.” Many, many people seem to fall into this category. They head into the kitchen, immediately try something complex (without having practiced at all), and think cooking is impossible because they fail at it.

Guess what? I’ve made tons of disasters in my kitchen. I’ve burnt countless things under the broiler. I’ve made dishes that are nearly inedible because of an awful ingredient mix. I’ve had bread turn into bricks.

You know what, though? With each failure, I learned something. I learned to keep a careful eye on anything under the broiler. I learned that it’s better to under-season something at first than to over-season it. I learned that it’s usually better to give dough more time than necessary to rise than to rush it.

And, gradually, I got better at it. Now, I can toss together bread without a second thought. I can make all kinds of crazy things in the kitchen. I now tackle complex things out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking which would have basically been impossible for me a few years ago.

It takes practice to make tasty stuff at home, and you should expect some giant mistakes and failures along the way. Start simple. Learn how to make great scrambled eggs. Learn how to pan-fry a chicken breast. Learn how to make a simple soup from scratch.

Then start trying more complicated stuff. Make baguettes from scratch. Bust out some scary recipes. You’ll find that if you’re good at the simple stuff, the complicated stuff is easier.

Soon, you’ll be confident enough to tackle pretty much anything without too much worry (although, I’ll admit, there are still some dishes that scare me – I have yet to not completely wreck a bearnaise sauce).

Dal, Chilean Style

Never be afraid to substitute
For many, recipes are gospel. They must be followed down to the letter – to not do this will result in disaster.

That’s rarely the case. Almost every ingredient has some sort of substitute. Sure, you’re likely to change the end result of the recipe, but that’s fine – you might discover something new and delicious.

This works best, again, with practice. The more you cook, the easier it is to know what can be substituted without much worry. If you’re unsure, there are tons of online ideas for what can be substituted and what can’t (but most things can be substituted).

Even better, sometimes you discover better solutions through substitution. Onions and shallots, for example – quite often, they can be substituted for each other and make the recipes better (since shallots taste like mild onions).

Never be afraid to substitute. It’s the first step to really mastering the kitchen.

Cheesy Corkscrews with Crunchy Bacon Topping

Make sure your key tools are efficient
If your tools in the kitchen stand in your way, it will make your kitchen experience much more difficult.

That does not mean that you should go out there and buy a kitchen full of expensive equipment before you try making a grilled cheese sandwich. Instead, I usually suggest that people get one really good knife and one really good pan and a very inexpensive large pot (since that’ll be usually used just for liquids), cooking sheet, spatula, and a Pyrex 13″ by 9″ casserole/cake pan. Everything else is secondary, things you don’t need unless you’re cooking at home every day.

However, going for a cheap pan will be frustrating – stuff won’t cook evenly, everything will stick, and if you get one with a coating, the coating will come off sooner than you think. Instead, I suggest getting a large cast iron skillet. Seriously. They’re easy to wash (you just use water and a brush, no soap) and once they’re seasoned (meaning you’ve cooked bacon or something similarly fatty a few times), you can cook anything in them. You can get a Lodge one for $30 or so. As for a knife, get a single Global 8″ chef’s knife and learn how to care for it. It’ll do almost everything you need very quickly and efficiently.

That’s really all you need to make almost everything. Don’t dump money into a lot of low-end equipment. Instead, get one good knife, a small handful of low-end additional items, and go from there. Spend your money on ingredients, not stuff.

Lemony Fettuccine with Asparagus

Keep yourself well-stocked with staples
People always ask for big lists of kitchen staples. “What should I have in my cupboards?” they ask.

The problem with such lists is that they vary widely from person to person. What foods do you enjoy eating the most? What spices do you like? What do you gravitate towards?

Some people like pasta, for example, and thus it makes sense to have a few pastas always on hand. Perhaps you like rice or beans. Maybe you particularly like some spices and herbs – I love garlic, for example – and don’t like others.

Here’s what to do if you want to have a well-stocked pantry. Instead of going out and stocking your pantry, instead empty out your pantry/cupboards and put them in boxes. Yes, everything. Then start making the meals you would normally make. Put things back in the cupboards as you use them (or replace them ASAP if you use them up and put the replacement in the cupboard).

After two months or so, look at everything that’s in the cupboard. Those are your staples – the things you actually use consistently. Keep plenty of all of it on hand – don’t be afraid to buy it in bulk. Everything else that’s still in boxes is stuff you rarely use. In fact, most of that stuff will probably be old enough that it should be used immediately or tossed.

Vegetarian Burrito Bowls

Base your meals on vegetables, not meat
Meals based on vegetables are not only healthier, but they’re usually cheaper than meals based on meat.

I’m not suggesting that you go vegetarian or anything like that. What I am suggesting is that instead of having your main dishes oriented around meat and your vegetables on the side, try regularly having your main dish centered around vegetables and a side dish oriented around meat.

So, for example, instead of having a big ol’ steak with a potato on the side, why not have a large salad with some chopped-up steak on top of it as your main course? Instead of eating chicken parmesan as a main dish, why not eat half of a chicken breast with a large selection of Italian-seasoned vegetables taking up most of your plate? Instead of having a giant pork chop, slice up that pork and make some rice and bean heavy burritos with a few pieces of that pork in it. When you grill up burgers, by all means have one, but instead of chasing it with another one, grill up some veggie kebabs along with the burgers and knock back a kebab before the burger and after it.

It’s unquestionably healthier. It’s also way cheaper. But, surprisingly, it’s tastier.

Think about it this way. When you get a steak or a burger, which bite do you remember the most? Unless something weird is going on, it’s the first bite – the first awesome taste of that meat. The second bite is almost as good.

After that, though, it becomes somewhat repetitive. The pleasure isn’t nearly as high with subsequent bites. So why not make those subsequent bites healthier?

What I’ve started to do is to really enjoy that first bite of a burger, but instead of just knocking back the rest of that burger, I put it down and eat four bites of something else – whatever vegetable I’ve prepped along with the meal. Maybe it’s corn on the cob. Maybe it’s fresh broccoli. Whatever it is, it’s a side dish that’s cheaper and healthier than that burger. Then I take another bite of that burger – delicious, nearly as good as that first bite.

The amazing part? Every bite of that burger is now tremendous. Every time is almost as good as that first bite. I really savor it.

Making the main part of your meal vegetables instead of meat makes your meals cheaper, healthier, and tastier. It’s awesome.

Potato-Peanut Curry

Overcome your food fears
Pictured above is easily the most controversial recipe I posted in this series. Potato-peanut curry was met with comments from lots of people about how they would never, ever eat anything like that. A main dish with peanut butter in it? Unthinkable!

Whenever I read comments like that, I immediately think of my three year old, who exhibits the same behavior sometimes. I’m not eating that! At our house, we have a simple policy: you can eat as little or as much of anything served for the meal as you want as long as you take one bite of each thing.

This is a well-understood rule, so our son usually just tries everything on his plate with one bite. Sometimes, I can predict what he will and won’t like. Interestingly, though, sometimes he’ll completely surprise me. He’ll try something I expect him to hate and, before I know it, he’s eaten all of it.

What have I learned from that? A person’s initial idea of whether or not they’ll like something is often wrong. It’s reached the point with me where I no longer even bother thinking about whether I’ll like an unfamiliar dish or not in advance – if it’s considered a remotely standard part of a cuisine somewhere in the world, I’ll try it and make up my own mind about it. This leads me to discovering new, tasty things all the time. Sure, sometimes I don’t like the new things I try, but more often than not, I do.

Doing this really opens your horizons and possibilities. You suddenly begin looking at things like peanut butter as a cooking ingredient in savory dishes. I look at a box of Sun-Maid raisins and I think of stir-fried dishes. For most Americans, that’s pretty out in left field.

Try it. Have some courage. Step outside the box. It’ll make your food preparation much more resourceful as you’ll be using inexpensive ingredients you never expected.

Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach

Go beyond the recipe
This is something of a final step – you no longer follow recipes much at all.

I’ve reached a point where I tend to read recipes for ideas, but I only rarely actually follow them step-by-step. Instead, I use ratios and known pairings that work well. Ham tastes good with gruyere cheese. A cup of any flour, a cup of water, and an egg, mixed with whatever random ingredients I have on hand, makes for a good fritter. Citrus and black pepper often pair really well. Three eggs and whatever items I have around makes an omelet.

I have tons of these little ideas floating around in my head, and I just pull them together when I look at what vegetables are on sale this week or what meats I can get from the local butcher at a good price. I have tomatoes coming in from the garden and we have lots of garlic and some basil on hand – and there’s some pasta – and we have some sourdough starter in the fridge, so let’s make some pasta with a loaf of sourdough on the side.

Recipes aren’t laws or strict procedures you have to follow – they’re just ideas and suggestions you can pull together however you want. Combining that with the other ideas here on how to save money on cooking, you can constantly come up with interesting meals for just pennies at home. How low can you go, indeed.

Good luck.

(And if you think this is, at least in part, a dry run for some ideas for my future food blog… you’d be right.)

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

Whenever some people see statements like the one above, they roll their eyes. “Your life must be borrring if you have to plan ahead every time you spend” is a typical refrain.

The big problem with that thinking is that it makes an incredibly false substitution. Planning ahead does not mean the elimination of spontaneity in life; in fact, once you get into the routine, it can often feel more spontaneous because unplanned chaotic spontaneity is no longer the norm.

And it’s that unplanned chaotic spontaneity that gets people in deep spending trouble.

It’s easy to apply the principle of planning ahead every time you spend for the big purchases. For most of us, saving and planning for houses and cars and vacations is completely normal and reasonable behavior. We don’t want to go on a vacation that costs thousands of dollars without some planning, after all, and we certainly see the logic in planning for such purchases.

Where this begins to break down for many people is when the purchases get smaller. A cell phone plan might get some research from some, or it might be completely impulsive, even though fifteen minutes of online research can save you hundreds a year. Christmas gifts are often bought in minimal time, even though you can often find better gifts for the same price or better deals on the gifts you bought with just a bit of footwork and planning. These things add up – the ten minutes spent planning for such a purchase might net you $50 in savings, which is well worth it for many people.

For purchases more than $100 or so (over their lifetime), just spend five minutes making sure you’re getting a good deal and that you can adequately and easily afford the item. If you’re convinced, use the thirty day rule. Put that purchase on hold for thirty days. If you still want it after thirty days and you can afford it, go for it.

Where the idea of planning ahead really breaks down, though, is with the small impulse buys. Dinner at a local restaurant. A movie. A new DVD at the store. A new shirt. A new pair of pants. A ticket to a baseball game.

Quite often, these items are bought quickly with almost no forethought. Sure, it can be fun to do something spontaneously, but that spontaneity can drown you.

Let’s say you go shopping with a friend. On a whim, you buy a new dress, then the two of you go out to dinner together and head out to a movie. For many people, this is a nice, fun evening.

The worrisome side of it comes later. You go home, look through your credit card statements, and realize that the $50 you spent tonight – previously unaccounted for – has now completely tapped you out. You haven’t got enough money to cover the electric bill. So you pay it late – and there’s a late fee on next month’s bill. But by then you’ve moved on to another completely unplanned expense.

Wariety and spontaneity are two of the spices of life, but it’s foolish to let those spices cost you more than they should.

Instead, plan ahead a little for those spontaneous moments. Each month, put $100 in cash in your wallet and let that be your “spontaneous” money for the month. You can do whatever you want with it and it’s fine because you planned for that amount. An impromptu moment doesn’t mean that you’re going to be late on a bill at all.

When that $100 is gone, it’s gone. But it’s no big deal – just wait until the calendar turns and you can refuel.

Obviously, you can adjust that amount to whatever you’d like – more in some situations, less in others. The reason for doing it is simple: it allows you to be spontaneous without being destructively chaotic with your finances.

Some people might wisely see this as the rudiments of a budget – and they’re right. This is simple budgeting at its finest. By putting that cash in your wallet, you’re assigning an amount to your spontaneous spending. The amount that remains in your checking account is handled differently – you pay your bills and your savings with it.

One big danger when people follow this idea: they put their $100 in their wallet and then find it’s gone by the ninth of the month. Then they spend twenty one days miserable, thinking that this plan is stupid or talking themselves into getting more out of their checking account.

Don’t. Live out the month. Then, sit down at the end of the month and take a serious look at the month as a whole. Did you give up anything vital during those twenty one days? Did you do anything during those nine days that didn’t really add any value to your life?

You might find that by taking a real look at your spontaneous spending that you’re doing things that you don’t really find valuable. The next month, that money might hold out until the twenty seventh of the month, simply because you’re a bit more selective in what you do with your mad money – and there’s no adverse effect on your happiness at all.

After a few months, you might find an adjustment is in order – either up or down. Such an adjustment is fine as long as you’re paying all your bills and either actively reducing your debt or increasing your personal savings.

The real key is this: every action you take is worthy of a bit of thought, either beforehand, in the moment, or afterwards. A bit of reflection often tells you whether that choice was right or wrong for you – whether it actually adds value to your life.

Then, taking the conscious steps to reduce those things that don’t add much value becomes easy – you just eliminate the negative and by default the positive in your life is accentuated.

Yes, for some people, a simple budget can be incredibly useful. But for many others, just a bit of planning ahead can make the big difference that they need.

I like to think of one’s personal finance state as something like a toolbox. In order to accomplish a major task, one must use more than one tool from their toolbox to make it happen. Let me explain with a bit more detail.

The Tools
There are many, many different personal finance tools in one’s toolbox. Here are a few examples that I find in my own toolbox.

Frugality If you look at a specific area of spending, how can you reduce it and still get a reasonable amount of personal value out of it? In areas you don’t value, cut that spending to the bone; if you do value it, find ways to get the best bang for the buck.

Increasing Income Work on your career. Get a second job. Start a side business. Whatever it takes to increase your cash flow.

Steady Behavior “Celebrating” by spending wads of cash can undo all of your good work in other areas. Being steady and consistent in your behavior reaps big rewards.

The “Ten Second Rule” If you’re about to buy something, pause and ask yourself if you really need it. If you can’t think of a really compelling reason, put it back.

An Emergency Fund If something goes wrong, an emergency fund is the perfect tool to pull out and fix the problem.

Targeted Savings If you’re tackling a big goal, some size of targeted savings is what you want to utilize.

Investment Accounts Investing introduces some risk into the equation, but can help you finish things more quickly. It’s something like using a power tool – potentially quite dangerous, but also potentially able to help you get the job done quite fast.

Success Measurers It’s like a tape measure, one you use to measure the growth of your pumpkin for the fair. In this case, though, it’s simply all about measuring your financial success and growth: tracking your net worth, for example.

The “Thirty Day Rule” If you’re considering a major purchase, put it aside for thirty days and let it breathe. After thirty days, if it’s still on your mind, it’s probably a good sign that you should pull the trigger.

Obviously, there are many, many more financial tools that people have in their toolboxes. What tools do you have in yours? Which are your most well-worn tools?

Examples of the Toolbox at Work
Obviously, forward progress in financial matters is usually a matter of using multiple tools. Here are a couple examples.

Refrigerator Dies
Your refrigerator suddenly dies. So, you tap into your emergency fund and buy a replacement and then you perhaps use a bit of frugality and automatic savings to replenish that emergency fund.

But what if you don’t have a refrigerator? You might find yourself forced into using credit – and then perhaps having to find a new source of income to pay off that credit. Again, you’re using multiple tools.

A New Home
You’re newly married and are thinking about having children in the future, but you know your apartment is too small for another child. You’ll have to move at some point in the future.

You might want to get a second job to increase your income, but that extra income goes to waste if you don’t also set up a savings plan for that money. You might also want to start rocking that frugality horse a bit harder than before, looking through your life to areas unimportant to you to cut spending.

The Big Key
What’s the big key here? Very rarely is one tool enough to do anything of significance. Frugality alone isn’t enough if you’re not saving the money. The thirty day rule isn’t enough if you don’t do a bit of research during that thirty days to find the best value for your purchase. An emergency fund isn’t enough if you don’t replenish it with a savings plan after you use it.

Mastering frugality alone isn’t enough. Nor is simply setting up automated savings, or focusing solely on your career. Financial success comes from learning how to use a wide variety of tools until they’re so comfortable in your hand that you almost forget they’re there – they become a part of you.

Tom left a great comment on the recent article about taking care of your things:

How can you fight off “I’ll do it tomorrow”-ness? My lack of motivation makes me lazy, even though I see the benefits of not being like this.

Procrastination is a big enemy of financial progress. It’s easy to say “I’ll do it tomorrow” about countless maintenance, frugality, and money management tasks. I do it all the time myself, and I’m one of the more proactive people I know.

How do you get around it? How can you make yourself do all of the “important but not urgent” things you need to get done in your life, when it’s so easy to put them off and just kick back?

Here are the tactics I personally use to make it happen.

I don’t overwhelm myself with a to-do list. If you sat down and made a list of all of the little “important but not urgent” things that you need to do in your life, you’d have a monstrous list.

Give it a try right now in your head for the next minute. Just go through your life and think of all of the stuff that you’d like to get done – that’s important to get done – but it’s not urgent. The books and articles you’d like to read. The home and auto maintenance you’d like to get done. The financial tasks you ought to take care of. The people you should get in touch with.

The list will be painfully huge, and it’ll probably seem overwhelming.

Instead, I make a short list each day. Instead of deciding that list is overwhelming, I break it down. I tackle two or three or four of the items on that list every day.

Which ones? If they’re all important and not urgent, it doesn’t matter – I just tackle whatever’s at the top of the list. Sometimes, though, one item or another does take precedence – it’s something that needs to be done regularly.

In that case…

I use Google Calendar to plan the daily list in advance. I just add an all day event for a task that needs to be done and drag it around to whatever day I want to do it. If I have a thing I’d like to do, I just scroll ahead several days and stick it in on the first day that doesn’t have much going on.

The big advantage here is that it allows me to set up recurring events, for things like regular auto or home maintenance or health tasks like setting up a dentist appointment. These automatically appear in place on the day I ought to do them, so I can easily just shuffle stuff around it.

When that daily list is finished, I can kick back without guilt. So, each day I have three or four “important but not urgent” tasks that I should get done – an amount that isn’t overwhelming. I can get through them in a half an hour or an hour or so.

Once they’re done, I’m done. Sure, I have other “important but not urgent” tasks I should get to, but that’s what future days are for. I’ve taken care of what I’ve assigned myself today (which isn’t overwhelming), so I can kick back and play with my kids without feeling I’m letting something down. I know it’s all in place.

If it’s a big task, I break it down into little pieces. Big tasks are easy to postpone, so I break them down. I don’t have a task like “clean the house” or even “clean the office.” It’ll be something simple like “go through the bookshelf in my office.” I don’t do things like “fix my relationship with person X,” I instead do something like “write person X an email” or “give person X a phone call.”

Usually, at the end of such a task that’s just one part of a bigger puzzle, I immediately record the next step that needs to be done as another task. I fire up Google Calendar and jot it down immediately, putting it in place.

I keep a notepad and pen with me so I don’t forget those “important but not urgent” tasks when they come to me. “Important but not urgent” tasks pop into my head all the time. I just keep a notepad with me to jot them down as they come to mind. Once a day or so, I go through the things in my notepad and make sure they’re handled.

Sometimes, I’ll just do those things immediately. Other times, I’ll just toss it up on my calendar, adding another thing that needs to get done.

Always remember that procrastination is the mortal enemy of all of the “important but not urgent” things in your life, and often it’s those things that separate the people who get things done and succeed from those who fall behind.