The eleventh episode focuses on networking and building professional (and personal) relationships. How can you do this effectively? Total length: 8:30

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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 snippet of a Camper van Beethoven concert on October 25, 1986, shared via their very open taping policy. Listen to the concert in its entirety.
0:24 – If you want a great book on this topic, you should read Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz.
0:32 – Here’s my Twitter feed, if you’re so interested.
0:36 – Here’s the website for #amestweetup. There’s probably a similar gathering in your own area.
0:55 – Yes, I use Twitter for networking and communicating with people. Here are ten fundamental steps for online career networking.
1:12 – Yes, going out for beers (or any other social activity) with friends is a form of networking because you’re building relationships with those people.
2:52 – Some thoughts on the value of networking and friendship.
4:43 – Networking has no value without follow-up.
6:22 – If communicating with people face to face is hard for you, here are nine social skills to practice if you’re not socially skilled.
8:15 – Here’s a preview of next week’s topic, budgeting.

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. Also, if you use Skype, feel free to ask your question that way – my username is trenttsd.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

Susan writes in:

I feel so helpless as a taxpayer, watching the ridiculous directions the senate, house and president are taking my country. Being self-employed, in the medical field and living in NY I feel like I have three strikes against me. As Emma Goldman, the famous communist said, “If voting changed anything, it would be illegal.” I am seriously considering relocating to my home state of Indiana, where Gov. McConnell seems to be making some very fiscally responsible decisions. I am, however, 58, and moving seems to be more of an issue than is was at 20. What sort of feedback do you get from other taxpayers?

Personally, I agree with Susan to a certain extent. However, my interest is mostly in local taxes, to tell the truth. I’m worried about roads. I’m worried about our local fire department. I just tend to focus locally on most of this stuff, without as much concern on the national level.

I’ll be honest: I get next to no feedback at all when it comes to taxes. On the occasions when I do get feedback about taxes, it’s usually in a form described by Susan – they’re angry at the government’s use of their taxpayer dollars.

In truth, taxes are where the rubber meets the road in terms of politics and personal finance. Without tax dollars, the government cannot run.

Few would argue that there aren’t benefits from our tax dollars. Tax dollars pay for roads, bridges, fire departments, and many other services that we simply take for granted every day.

Most would argue that some aspect of their tax dollars’ use doesn’t please them, too. There are endless arguments about public and private funding of various services that people use, and these arguments have been around since nearly the dawn of time.

But when push comes to shove and the tax bill comes due, it’s not looked at as a political issue for most people. Taxes are a bill that need to be paid – and it’s worthwhile to minimize that bill. People seek out tax deductions that are available for them, plan around tax-free holidays, and seek out ways to make purchases that avoid sales tax.

To put it simply, taxes are a personal finance matter for most people, not a political matter. They aren’t worried about where their tax dollars are going as much as they are concerned about minimizing how many dollars they pay out without getting in trouble.

Why is this? I think that for many people, the connection between going to the local polling place to vote and their wallet is too tenuous. Obviously, it exists, but for the most part, the thought processes that go into deciding who to vote for and the thought processes that go into voting are distinct. When they do overlap, it’s usually by people who see it as their goal to minimize taxation at the expense of provided services. That’s why you see tax protests but rarely see people advocating paying more taxes.

Is that a healthy solution? I’m not really qualified to say, but I do think it is a natural solution. It’s much easier to look at things from the perspective of “how does this affect me” than “how does this affect the world” when dealing with the affairs of everyday life, like paying taxes. Given the complexity of modern life, it seems that the political side of taxes is mostly focused on by people who are passionate about politics and largely ignored by people who aren’t similarly passionate.

I look at it much like I do environmentalism. Humanity’s impact on the environment is constantly in our face, from weather changes to trash along the side of the road. For some people, this lights them on fire and they focus intently on reducing their carbon footprint and minimizing their waste. For others? It’s basically a problem that doesn’t fill them with passion and they don’t worry about it too much in their day to day lives. Sure, if there’s something simple to be done, they’ll do it, but they’re not going to start living ultra-green to do it.

I think this is largely driven by the media. A few years ago, being green was “cool” and lots of people were focusing on the environment. Now, frugality seems to be “cool” (at least to some extent) and the media’s giving that attention and thus lots of people are thinking about it. In a few years, it’ll be some other cause that people can take action on with little steps and feel good about themselves for doing something positive. Maybe it’ll be taxes. Or maybe it’ll be something we don’t even foresee, like some sort of local food revolution. It’s very hard to tell.

In the end, though, taxes, for most people, are just another bill to pay. Sure, it’d be great to have a smaller bill, but if that means losing some service they rely on or value, they’re not too interested, and the details are something for people in Washington to work out.

What do you think? Are taxes just another bill to pay, or is excessive taxation something you’re interested in fighting with larger steps (like moving to another state, protesting, or getting politically involved)? I don’t think there’s really a right or wrong answer here at all.

Your refrigerator/freezer combo is the biggest energy consumer among all of your appliances – seriously. It gobbles down around $100 in energy each year. Even worse, it’s often home to lots of wasted food – leftovers forgotten and allowed to spoil and so on.

To put it simply, your refrigerator and freezer are money sinks. They’re expensive in the first place, gobble down energy like there’s no tomorrow, and sometimes ruin the food that’s inside. What’s a thrifty person to do?

Here are a few simple techniques to overcome and reduce these costs with surprisingly little effort.

Clean the coils regularly.
The coils on the bottom and the back of your refrigerator tend to gather dust over time. As that dust builds up, your refrigerator doesn’t run as well as it used to. The condenser kicks on more often, it has to work harder, it eats up more energy (costing you), and it wears out quicker (costing you).

So, do a little bit of maintenance once a year or so. Pull out your refrigerator and dust the coils in the back and underneath the device. Use a low-power vacuum to make sure there’s no excess dust floating around in the place where the refrigerator normally sits. Doing this little thing will cause your refrigerator’s condenser to work more efficiently – it won’t kick on as often (trimming your energy bill) and it won’t wear out as quickly (saving on your repair and replacement costs).

Fill your empty milk or juice jugs with water, then stick ‘em in the freezer.
A freezer, whether it’s a deep freezer or a freezer housed in the same appliance as a refrigerator, functions best when it’s really full, as the cold items help keep other items cold and maintain the low temperature.

But how can you keep it full without stocking it with a bunch of food that you may or may not eat? If you’re not into filling your freezer with food, fill it with water.

It’s simple. Take an empty milk jug (or juice jug), rinse it out, then fill it about 75% full with tap water. Stick that jug in the freezer and just leave it there. It’ll freeze, then it will help keep the temperature of your freezer low over the long haul, causing your freezer to kick on a bit less often to keep your items cool.

Even better, you can directly use these jugs when you need a lot of ice. You can either stick the jug entirely in a cooler or smash it open and use the broken ice pieces to your desire. Works like a charm – we do it all the time!

Start a miscellaneous vegetables box.
We cook a side dish of vegetables with almost every meal we make, and we often have just a few spoonfuls of leftovers. Often, these wind up in the compost bin, but that’s not particularly efficient – I’d rather throw actual waste in the compost bin, not food.

Our solution is a clever one. We just stuck a small resealable container in the freezer. Whenever we have any sort of leftover vegetables, we just spoon those veggies into that container. When the container is full, we boil up some water, add some spices, toss in some diced chicken breasts (and some stock if we’ve got it), then add the vegetables and let it all boil together.

Boom – really inexpensive (and delicious) chicken soup that’s different every time you make it. You can thicken the water/broth with a bit of corn starch to make it more like a stew if you want.

This is a killer way to not waste leftover vegetables, add volume to your freezer, and produce a very delicious and simple meal for pennies.

Pull the fridge forward an inch or two.
In many kitchens, refrigerators are pushed back as close to the wall as possible in order to eke out a few more inches of floor space. Those few inches are really expensive.

If your refrigerator is pushed back as far as possible, pulling it forward one inch can reduce the energy usage of the refrigerator by as much as 40%, and you’ll barely notice the difference in your floor usage. Subsequent inches help, but aren’t quite that effective.

Stick a thermometer in your fridge.
Ideally, the temperature in your refrigerator holds pretty steady around 37 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit (3-5 C). We keep ours at almost exactly 38, and it’s almost perfect for us.

If you keep it below 37 degrees, you’re pushing up against the freezing point of water, which can affect food quality and burns a lot of extra energy. If you keep it above 40 degrees, it can affect food quality in a different way, leading towards spoilage. The range between the two is optimal – and it’s also optimal for refrigerator efficiency, since devices are designed to run in this range.

How can you be sure you’re hitting that sweet spot? Get out a thermometer, put it in a glass of water, then put that cup in your refrigerator for 24 hours. Check the temperature afterward – that’s the true temperature of your fridge. Adjust upward and downward as needed – you might be surprised how much your temperature is off.

A freezer has a different optimum temperature – 0 to 5 F (-18 to -15 C). You can get this temperature by putting your thermometer between two frozen items for 24 hours.

Chuck your refrigerated leftovers.
Ah, the refrigerated leftover. Inevitably, some of those items wind up getting pushed to the back and forgotten, left there to slowly decompose, become a potential breeding place for yeasts and molds, and potentially contaminate other foods.

So chuck ‘em. One easy way to do this is to have a handful of washable markers near your fridge. Doodle on any new item with a color for each day – say, purple for Monday, red for Tuesday, etc. Then, when you’re glancing in the fridge on Sunday, you know you can chuck anything with a red or purple mark on it without thinking at all.

Just mark on the Saran wrap, aluminum foil – even on the rim of a plate. Once you get into the routine, it works really well, makes leftover cleanup really easy, and keeps nasty things from growing in your fridge.

Go hardcore – build your own and reduce energy consumption by 90%.
Willing to go way outside the box to trim your home energy consumption? You can build your own chest refrigerator with a few simple modifications to a chest freezer and cut your energy use by about 90% over a typical standup fridge.

With clever rack systems in the chest fridge, they can be pretty convenient. I’m tall, so I actually quite like chest freezers, as I have no problem reaching clear to the bottom, but I can see how this might not be easy for some.

I’ll admit it – I’d love to have such a fridge if I had adequate kitchen space.

Do you have any simple refrigerator or freezer hacks for saving energy or reducing food loss?

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.

Last week, my grandfather gave me an envelope of really old silver and gold certificates. The face value of these certificates is in the thousands of dollars all told.

However, I recognize that these certificates are likely worth more than their face value as collectibles. What exactly should I do with them to maximize their value?
- Thomas

The first thing I’d do is figure out what I have. I’d research silver and gold certificates online and try to get a ballpark of their value.

The next thing I would do is take them to a coin dealer and get them appraised. Obviously, the dealer will make you an offer that’s less than what they expect to be able to get out of them – that’s expected, since dealers are in the business of making a profit in just this situation.

If the offer is close to your own estimate, I’d take it. Why? You have to figure that making up the difference will require a pretty large time investment, and that time has value.

Good luck. My family (my father and grandfather) were/are currency collectors and I enjoy it myself on a secondary level – it would be fun to see such a collection.

Trent, do you at least check the comments left on your facebook statuses? I realize that they are linked with your twitter, but I like the interaction that the facebook comments allows. However, if I know that you don’t read them, I’ll just reply on twitter instead.
- leslie

I read comments and messages on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and other places, too. I tend to not get as involved in conversations on Facebook simply because I don’t visit as often. I probably go there daily or every other day and read through recent conversations, while I tend to read Twitter and FriendFeed more often.

Why? I usually find Facebook to be too noisy. With the other services, it’s pretty easy for me to filter out stuff I don’t want to read. With Facebook, it’s a lot harder – I tend to have to dig around a lot to see interesting things.

I think Facebook and Twitter have different purposes. Facebook is great for keeping in touch with a smaller circle of people you have long, established relationships with. Twitter is better for communicating with a much larger group of people – and meeting new people. Although I value both, I tend to enjoy the latter more.

paperbackswap.com is not the only option, I have had lots of luck with half.com buying books for as cheap as 77 CENTS and than paying the $3.99 shipping fee. This means for $4.76 I can get a book, delievered to my door without having to worry about mailing or listing a book of my own to sell. Although I have sold books on their website, mainly textbooks, for a resonable price.
- Anna

I included this comment because it was an interesting part of a long discussion on various methods of acquiring books for low prices online.

One option that Anna is overlooking is that it’s easy to buy PaperBackSwap.com credits from other users. In the site’s Book Bazaar, you can often find credits for sale for $2.80 a pop. A single credit equals a book mailed to you for no additional cost.

I know about this because when I first started getting into PaperBackSwap, I bought a big pile of credits in just this way to order a bunch of books I wanted. Once I wound up “swapping,” I no longer needed to buy the credits and now I actually have a pretty healthy surplus (meaning I can largely order what I want without mailing books).

Let’s say that I invest in a 529 for my child and they later choose not to go to college at all. What exactly happens to that money?
- Shane

One option is to transfer the balance of that 529 to a sibling or another immediate relative by changing the beneficiary on the account. That means that someone else can use the college savings.

Another option is simply using it as a mutual fund. If you’re not using the account for educational purposes, it can be used just like a taxable investing account, but with a 10% penalty on any gains. However, in most states, those gains are actually offset by the tax breaks you get by putting money into the account.

A third option is to simply wait. If the person decides to go to school later, that money is ready and waiting. If they become disabled, the money can be withdrawn without penalty. If the person passes away, that money goes into their estate, again without that extra penalty.

In virtually every case, there’s some option that will work well.

Do you still do some canning at home? If so, can you do a photo tutorial post on how you go about it or describe your canning process in more detail?
- candylover

We don’t do much canning at all at home. Instead, we tend to freeze vegetables and use them in the winter after freezing.

Why freeze? For one, it’s much, much simpler. Just put your vegetables in a airtight reusable container, label it well, and pop it in the freezer. If you use it in six months or so, it’ll be fine. For another, if you already have a freezer, keeping it full actually saves money – it causes the freezer to run less often and reduces the speed of spoiling if you lose power.

Having said that, we are considering canning a small amount of salsa this year for gifts. Salsa is relatively easy to can because it’s acidic – you only need to do a hot water bath instead of using pressure.

My husband and I are considering getting a vacuum sealer so we can freeze more of the bulk groceries that we buy. In your experience, is it worthwhile to buy a vacuum sealer and the special bags for them, or is it better to stick with the ziploc bags we’ve been using? I’m wondering what other people have experienced with the vacuum sealed bags and whether they actually prevent freezer burn more than a ziploc freezer bag.
- candylover

Vacuum sealers allow frozen items to last for longer in your freezer than other sealing options – that’s really their only advantage. On the other hand, the cost of sealing is fairly expensive.

I think a vacuum sealer comes in handy if you do things where you freeze a year’s worth of food (or more) all at once. For example, if you tend to grow an enormous abundance of a particular vegetable, a vacuum sealer can help you preserve it for a full year, much better than what you’d get out of a Ziploc. Similarly, if you’re a hunter, a vacuum sealer can help you preserve the meat over the long haul.

So, start by looking at your uses. Are you going to be preserving food for a year or more? Or are you just saving summer foods for the following winter?

I have a question for you. I’m just graduated and I’m going to be starting my first job soon, yay! My question has to do with savings. I know there’s a multitude of things to save for, down payment on a house, vacations, appliances, down payment for a car, emergency fund, and the list goes on! I have one savings account, so I’ll be looking at my total savings. How would you recommend keeping track of the different categories?
- ed

I use ING Direct as my primary bank and it has a handy feature – you can set up as many savings accounts as you like.

So, one option might be to simply open up an account there and set up automatic transfers for all of these savings accounts – with each account assigned to a particular goal.

Another option would be to simply track each “segment” in a spreadsheet and simply assign the monthly interest to whichever savings “segment” most needed replenishing (like your emergency fund or a goal you’re really pushing for).

I noticed on Twitter that you listed all of the podcasts you listen to – and it’s a huge list! How do you keep up with all of those podcasts?
- El

When I’m writing, I listen to podcasts almost all day long. I don’t give them my full attention – instead, they serve as background noise for the most part.

But something neat happens – quite often, an idea will slip its way into my head. I’ll have an idea pop out of seemingly nowhere, so I’ll jot it down and get back to work. Quite often, the podcasts are the source of those ideas.

I’ll also sometimes pause to close my eyes, relax a bit, and just listen to the podcasts throughout the day.

What I usually do is just list all of the unlistened podcasts in one playlist, order them by length (from shortest to longest), and start listening at the start of the day. At the end of the day, I stop at the end of one of the long podcasts. The next day, I start all over again. What this does is that it enables me to listen to all of the shorter daily ones every day – like the Writer’s Almanac – and puts off some of the long-winded weekly ones – like This Week in Tech.

My husband and I are shopping for 2 used cars. (We had only 1 car which is being totaled and the insurance is going to give us the retail value of that car).

Which will be cheaper? As I also read that loan rate also depends on the amount of downpayment.
- Vana

It’s impossible to say which way will be cheaper because it depends entirely on the offers individual dealers and banks give you.

Your best bet is to simply do the footwork and get the best car deals you possibly can. Identify your needs – not your wants – and focus on maximizing your deal on each car. This requires research and legwork – you’ll have to investigate the data and you’ll also have to go to multiple dealers to find the best value.

You should also look at other options. Do you need two cars? What about just in the short term? Could one of you bicycle to work, or carpool, or walk? Going to one car for a while saves on insurance and gives you a window to save until you can afford that second car.

Last week, I spent five days at a professional conference. It was a great experience and I met a lot of people, but now I only have contact information for about five of them. There are a lot of people I’d like to follow up with, but I don’t know how to contact them!

How do you keep track of meeting a lot of people at a conference?
- Larry

In my eyes, a conference’s success can be judged by the number of people you touch base with after the conference.

One thing I do is I try to get a business card from anyone I find interesting. I’ll even ask for it (and, of course, I’ll trade my own for it). If they don’t have one, I’ll pull out my notepad and get their email address and name.

Later, I’ll try to jot down anything interesting I can recall about them. What do we have in common? What’s interesting about them?

Then, after the conference, I move through all of these connections I’ve made. I look up the people, find out more about them, then get in touch with them about our overlapping areas of interest.

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

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book.

Lately, there have been a ton of good books targeting people in their twenties with a burgeoning interest in personal finance, from Dara Duguay’s revised Please Send Money (targeting college students) to Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich (targeting young professional males) to Farnoosh Torabi’s You’re So Money (targeting young professional females) and Michael Masterson’s Automatic Wealth for Grads (targeting young adults with entrepreneurial bents), among many others (check those links – they go straight to my detailed reviews of each book).

So what niche could Beth Kobliner’s Get a Financial Life target? After all, the cover broadcasts the clear subtitle Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties.

The answer’s pretty straightforward: Get a Financial Life focuses pretty directly on the more analytical folks in that age group, the ones who want the facts and want to draw their own conclusions from them. There’s not a lot of attitude or fluff, just a lot of good information compressed into a tight package. If that appeals to you (and you’re in the target age range – twenties and thirties), Get a Financial Life is probably right up your alley.

Let’s dig in.

Get a Grip on Your Financial Life
It all starts with goals. We all have them, but many of us leave our goals in a very unspecific state – at which point they’re more dreams than goals. Make them specific. Kobliner’s recommendation is to assign them numbers – what will they really cost? Once you have those numbers, they move from being dreams to being savings targets.

Next, figure out where your money is going. Keep track of your spending for at least a month (two or three is better) and figure out how much you’re really spending each month. The big focus is figuring out how much you really spend in an unnecessary fashion and cutting it (not eliminating it). You want to leave the non-essential spending that’s really valuable to you and get rid of the ho-hum stuff, directing that cash towards your goals.

Dealing with Debt
Kobliner outlines some of the issues of dealing with debt, but doesn’t really get into a debt repayment plan, probably under the assumption that readers won’t be in too much debt. I’m not sure if I agree with that, but most of the other advice is useful, particularly the details on student loans.

Kobliner does devote several pages to car leases, which is pretty interesting. Car leases are mostly there for people who are willing to pay to essentially rent a new car. The only problem with that is if you compare the costs of that to driving a car up to a healthy mileage (say, 150,000 miles), leases almost always lose out. The cost of actually buying a car may be more, but the many years you can go without a car payment if you drive a car to the problematic stage more than make up for it. If you’re addicted to a shiny new car and have a trust fund, a lease might be a good choice – otherwise, it’s probably not worth the effort.

Basic Banking
The big message here is that it’s well worth your time to shop around for a bank that treats you well. A good bank should have no fees – no maintenance fees, a huge ATM network without fees, no fees for online banking, or anything else – and great customer service. The time investment you put into finding a bank with these attributes will be recouped over the long run.

So how do you find such a bank? Start Googling for bank recommendations. Use Bankrate.com. Ask people you know and trust what banks they use and whether they like them. I use ING Direct for everything and I’m quite happy with them.

All You Really Need to Know About Investing
What do you do when your debt is under control and you’re bringing in a surplus? First step: build up a cash emergency fund equal to a bare minimum of three months’ worth of living expenses, and keep it in a high-interest savings account or a money market account. Second step: begin investing in stocks and bonds.

Kobliner points towards using mutual funds to balance out your risks. That’s fine, but if you’re doing that, seek out index funds – they’re extremely low cost and provide tons of diversification.

The Brave New World of 401(k)s
What about saving for retirement? The big key is to get started now – don’t put it off. The money you put away now is much more valuable than the money you might put away later because you have more years for the power of compound interest to work for you. A stock bought today has more years to pay you dividends than a stock bought in ten years.

Kobliner strongly encourages people to sign up for a 401(k)/403(b) at their place of employment and get any matching funds that their employer provides. Doing that today means you not only get the advantage of compound interest, but you also get 50% or 100% more for free right off the bat, regardless of what the market does.

Once you’re past the level of matching and still want to save more, Kobliner points towards opening a Roth IRA. Beyond that, she offers a long list of additional things you can do if you want to save more.

Oh, Give Me a Home
Rent or buy? It’s a question that many potential homeowners ask themselves (in fact, I’ve finally come to my own conclusion on this … but that can wait for another day). Kobliner suggests some simple rules: if you can’t envision yourself in the same place in several years, rent. If you don’t have a steady income, rent. Don’t assume you get a tax break from buying (the standard deduction can often be more).

If you do decide to buy, you’re again better off waiting. Get a healthy down payment in the bank – 20%, at least. Get your credit into thorough shape. Have a steady, stable job and a tax return that demonstrates this solid income.

Insurance: What You Need and What You Don’t
On the insurance issue, Get a Financial Life covers the basics: life insurance, disability insurance, health insurance, homeowners and renters insurance, and auto insurance. In each case, shop around and investigate all of your options.

Kobliner’s style is to explain all of the options available in a readable style and more or less allow the reader to draw their own conclusions. While this is really helpful, many people often turn to such books to largely be told what to do. The answer isn’t always cut and dried, so Kobliner takes the analytical route – if you spell out clearly the pros and cons of a lot of options, a thoughtful person will clearly be pointed to the right answer for them. That’s why I think Get a Financial Life is a great option for a young, analytical, and thoughtful person – it doesn’t just cram a conclusion down your throat, but explains options in a clear and reasonable way.

How to Make Your Life Less Taxing
The book wraps up (aside from some appendices) with discussions on how to minimize taxes. She offers up a huge list of ways to trim your tax burden via tax writeoffs and deductions.

Surprisingly, Kobliner doesn’t really discuss tax preparation software. We’ve used TurboTax to prepare ours for years and it’s been quite worthwhile, especially with the challenges of filing if you’re self-employed.

Is Get a Financial Life Worth Reading?
Get a Financial Life is short on motivation and long on facts. That makes it the perfect book for some (simply because it stacks so much information together in one place) and useless for others. Unfortunately, it also means that it covers a lot of the same ground as other personal finance books – there’s more detail, but there’s less motivation.

Get a Financial Life works for someone who already is heading in a stable financial direction and has an analytical mind that thrives on facts. Kobliner does a great job of breaking down the pile of information out there.

Get a Financial Life won’t change your life, but it can provide all the meat you need to head in the right direction. For some, that’s perfect. It’s a well-written example of an information-heavy personal finance book.

Jim writes in:

You write all the time about just helping people and that it will somehow help you. I don’t see it. I understand how it’s beneficial to help someone who can obviously help you, but what benefit is there for helping others beyond the idea that it’s the right thing to do?

Before I get started, I will say that I believe the biggest reason to help out others when you can is because it’s, in essence, the right thing to do. I’m a huge believer in the “golden rule” – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If I have the ability to easily help someone, I pretty much always will.

Recently, I’ve been rereading pieces of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and a particular quote stood out to me: “[B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it.”

In other words, if you can do something that produces a great deal for the time invested, you should do it, even if it’s not directly beneficial to you.

Here’s an example of what I mean. I live next door to a single mother who has two young daughters living at home. Quite often in the evenings – as you can imagine – she’s got a lot on her plate. She needs to get a good meal on the table for her daughters, clean the house, get bills paid, and so on.

A lot of evenings, that means that her daughters are out in the backyard playing while she’s in the house finishing things up.

Since my wife and I are often out there, it takes little to no effort on our part to keep an eye on what those girls are doing and offer a helping hand if they need it. My wife helped one of them remove a splinter. We’ve invited them into our yard countless times to play in the sprinkler.

Now, if I’m looking strictly at my own self-interest, I wouldn’t do this. It’s an insurance risk to deal with that splinter or to have those kids in our yard. I could just not acknowledge them at all and there’d likely be no problem whatsoever.

However, by paying attention – when it really doesn’t take a whole lot of effort on our part – we’ve built a very good relationship with our neighbors. I’ve borrowed items from her regularly and we’ve helped each other with all sorts of other little tasks, no questions asked. This has saved me from buying tools and other items many times.

I invest very little time in an evening keeping an eye out for those two girls – I’m out in the yard anyway with my own kids. But by doing so – taking that little sliver of time here and there – I’ve built a very nice neighborly relationship, one that’s produced measurable financial value.

Here’s another example, perhaps one that’s more tangible. About three years ago, I did some free web consultation for a small nonprofit organization I believe in. I set them up with a custom installation of WordPress and several other tools so they could add and manage content really easily. In all, it took me about twenty hours of work, spread out over about a month.

What did I get directly out of it? Not much. I did learn a lot about designing a blog, which I later applied to The Simple Dollar, but that was about all.

So why bother? Well, that nonprofit survived – and thrived. A few members of the original team left to form a small startup company. After a while, they decided that they wanted to create a site that was well-designed and easy to update, but this time they could pay nicely for it.

Want to guess who they contacted?

I didn’t take the arrangement. However, they agreed to hire a person that I recommended. I was able to pass on several thousand dollars’ worth of work to another person, who now, in his words, “owes me more than [he] can ever say.”

So, for that web design I did three years ago, I now have a web designer friend who owes me a huge favor someday, a nonprofit with which I have a great relationship, a small army of individuals that I have a good relationship with, and a web startup that is still interested in hiring me as a consultant.

All of that came from just wanting to help out and offering the skills I had to something I believed in that needed those skills – in my spare time, of course.

In both of these cases, I could have focused my energy on something relatively trivial that was purely in my own interest. I could just play with my own kids in the backyard and ignore the neighbors. I could have decided not to help that nonprofit group and instead spent that time doing … something else (who actually knows what).

In each case, though, I just gave a bit of time and energy and talent without thinking at all about returns. Over the long run, though, that time and energy and talent has been paid back to me many times over.

Sure, you’ll always find yourself in situations where you’re never “paid back” for what you give. But even in those cases, I find a surprising result – there’s usually a positive payback, but it’s really indirect.

An example: several years ago, I found myself helping a number of researchers with what amounted to technical support. We were starting to roll out a new interface for a large data set and many researchers had a lot of questions about the interface. I devoted a lot of time to helping out many of these researchers – and many of them didn’t even give me a thank you.

What happened next was surprising. I attended a conference with some of those people where I figured I would more or less be hiding in the woodwork, but many, many people didn’t let that happen. I had interacted positively with enough people that my name had spread to many of the attendees as someone worth interacting with. For the entire three day conference, I was constantly talking to someone, meeting with someone, dining with someone, or sharing a drink with someone. By the end of it, I had more connections and job offers than I could possibly deal with (and even a surprising committee assignment or two).

All I had done was spend a little bit of time helping these people without anything in return. It was a gesture that I didn’t have to do – I could have just sent out some stock answers and called it good enough. But little five minute bursts of effort – spread out across a long period – paid enormous dividends.

Here’s the simple rule: if you can help someone out without disadvantaging yourself, do it. That means sharing ideas, making connections, and doing little tasks that don’t eat up tons of your time and energy. Don’t worry about the return – if you do it often enough and with enough quality and value, the return will take care of itself.

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 2-8, 2008)
The Status Quo Bias and Switching Jobs or Careers If the grass is always greener on the other side, why do people often shy away from crossing the fence? The status quo bias rears its ugly head again and keeps us in our place, that’s how.

Is College Really Necessary For All High School Graduates? This generated a brilliant discussion. In a nutshell, I don’t feel that an immediate jump from high school to college is a good choice for a lot of students – even most students.

The Frugal Introvert: Fifty Ways to Have Fun By Yourself on the Cheap I’m an introvert, and I’ve done many of the things on this list. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to have fun by yourself.

My Material Weakness – And My Battle to Overcome It My material weakness is books, and it’s a constant battle to avoid spending money on new books. Most of the time, I’m successful, thanks to these tactics.

Dollars and Sense When Life Hits You Hard Sometimes, we’re just gobsmacked by crises in our lives: a loss of a parent, a spouse, or a child, or perhaps the loss of something we’ve worked on for years. Here’s how to deal with it without losing everything we have.

Two Years Ago (August 2-8, 2007)
Freshly Graduated And About To Get A New Job? Here Are Seven Things To Do To Get Started On The Right Financial Path You’ve just graduated. You’re about to start a new job. Right now is a very key moment for getting yourself on a great financial path right out of the chute.

Rebooting My Net Worth Calculator: Food For Thought On Starting – Or Restarting – Your Own A net worth calculator can be a great way to track your long-term financial progress, but there are times when it’s not as easy as you might think. Here’s how to get started – or restarted – on your own.

Starting A Savings Account For Your Newborn This is a brilliant idea for helping your child out later in life. If you have a child, consider this in addition to their college savings.

How I Build And Use A Price Book After building this and using it for a while, I found that Fareway was constantly winning the battles, so I wound up simply shopping there and saving money with each trip. This is really a great way to figure out what the best value store for grocery shopping is for you.

Ten Ways That I Save Money Golfing Golfing is very expensive, but there are a lot of little things you can do to soften the blow. Trust me, my golf bag has lots of used balls in it.

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. 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.

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!

This is the twelfth of twelve parts of a “book club” reading and discussion of Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover, where this book on debt reduction is teased apart and looked at in detail. This entry covers the thirteenth chapter, finishing on page 218.

The Total Money Makeover ends with a very brief chapter that includes a few thoughts about what comes next once your finances are rolling along. Since this chapter is just a very brief coda, I’m also tying in my thoughts as a whole on the book, as well as links back to the older entries in the series.

Wealth As a Prison
On page 219, Dave hits upon the idea that it’s not a good idea to let wealth control your life:

The wealthy person who is ruled by his stuff is no more free than the debt-ridden consumer we have picked on throughout the book. Antoine Rivaroli said, “There are men who gain from their wealth only the fear of losing it.”

I think that anything in your life that fills you with more negative feelings than positive ones is a prison. It might be debt. It might be your job. It might be your wealth. It might be anything.

Whatever those things are, you need to eliminate them. If it’s your wealth, you need to give some of it away. Seriously. If it’s your debt, you need to get hard core about repaying it. If it’s your job, you need to focus intensely on a career change. If it’s your marriage, you need to face it and work hard on it.

If you don’t, it’s just another prison. People wonder how I can feel sympathy for famous people – I often do – when they have all of this wealth and stuff. What they don’t have is the freedom to go on a walk in the park. Is it their choice? Sometimes it is, but sometimes they’re trapped by their own fame and their only choice is to completely drop out of their career – and for some, that isn’t even enough (a la Britney Spears, circa 2007, when she was obviously trying to take a time out but kept getting hounded nonstop).

If it’s causing you more hurt than happiness, you need to do something to change it.

A Few Thoughts on the Book in General
Here are a few general thoughts I had on The Total Money Makeover from reading through it again in detail.

First, there’s more than a little “marketing flavor” in this book. Dave makes a lot of references to his other media properties – other books, his DVDs, his radio show, and so on. While I don’t mind it when those other resources are free (like the radio show), it seems a bit disingenuous to talk a lot about saving money while pitching other books and DVDs. I didn’t like this part at all.

Second, some pieces of the book have surprising depth. It’s easy to come away from this book just remembering the big points, like the “baby steps,” and Dave’s folksy tone often disguises things. However, if you peel away that stuff, you find lots of interesting things under the surface, ideas that, if you let them, guide you to reflect deeply on your life in ways you may not expect.

Third, the Christian overtones aren’t as strong as I remembered. On my original reading of the book, I had a perception that it was very full of Christian overtones. Reading it again, I realize the Christian themes are actually pretty sparse. He hits upon a Biblical idea perhaps once a chapter and spends maybe two sentences on it.

Of course, it’s not hard to see the connection between many of the other ideas and general Christian teachings, but if you study religions, you’ll find that many moral teachings are common from religion to religion. Why? I think they’re part of a moral code that exists in most humans, religious or otherwise. Dave’s book calls to the good side of our morals.

Finally, the central theme of this book is obviously “intensity.” If you’re going to do something big in your life, you have to hit it hard. You can’t do it half way. I find this really true in my own life: the things I’ve been successful with (getting my money in order, getting a writing career launched) were things I did with a deep passion and focus.

Do You Want to Know More?
Here are the previous eleven entries in this “book club” series on The Total Money Makeover. Please, dig back into the earlier entries – there are tons of good ideas and comments there.
1. The Challenge … and Denial
2. Debt Myths
3. Money Myths
4. Two More Hurdles
5. Save $1,000 Fast
6. The Debt Snowball
7. Finish the Emergency Fund
8. Maximize Retirement Investing
9. College Funding
10. Pay Off the Home Mortgage
11. Build Wealth Like Crazy

Do you have any other thoughts on this chapter of The Total Money Makeover, the book as a whole, or on how this book club went? Please share them in the comments – and feel free to respond to any of my impressions as well. After all, a good book club is all about discussion!