Whenever I post a recipe or another food post, I usually hear from a reader or two who tout cooking everything from scratch. They’ll tell me about their very low food bill and encourage me to post recipes that start from even more staple-oriented food.

A great example comes from my recent recipe for lemony fettuccine with asparagus:

Commenters on the recipe offered lots of great suggestions for how to improve the recipe: use broccoli instead of asparagus, use olive oil instead of canola, and so on.

One reader emailed me and offered up a further interesting suggestion:

Your lemon fettuccine recipe was pretty low on protein. I make my own pasta and sometimes add ground flaxseed to the dough to increase the protein count. It creates a great taste and keeps my grocery bill low.

Undoubtedly, making my own pasta (something I do from time to time) is a great way to make mind-blowingly delicious pasta and it’s way cheaper than the boxed stuff. You can make a giant pile of pasta with just a couple cups of flour and a few eggs.

Time
There’s a problem, though: from-scratch pasta is time expensive. Making the dough, pressing it, cutting it, and drying it can eat up a good hour of your time. Considering that I’m trimming about a dollar in cost off of a box of pasta for that effort, I’m only saving $1 for that hour of my time.

For a busy person (and who isn’t), saving $1 for an hour’s worth of work is not a good deal.

This is true for many from-scratch dishes: the closer you get to the raw ingredients, the less it costs, but the more involved time it takes. I don’t mean total time – it’s often comparable between from-scratch recipes and others – but the time you have to spend focused on the meal itself.

Time has a cost. Time spent on one activity is time not spent on something else – even if it’s just idle relaxation. That time could be used to increase your earnings or to save money in other ways.

Health
Most of us are biologically wired to enjoy and to crave fattening foods. Our ancestors found such foods so rarely that they were hard-wired to love them and to pack it away when such an opportunity arose.

Today, with the abundance of food around us, that can be a real danger. Without psychological reinforcement that we shouldn’t, we tend to eat everything served to us. Without being careful, we’ll eat an unbalanced diet. Both of these are detrimental to our long term health.

This problem is made worse by the fact that unhealthier options are generally less expensive. Take a look at the cuts at your local butcher or meat counter – the fatty cuts are the cheap cuts. Wander through the aisles and compare the cheap pasta sauce and the organic pasta sauce on the nutrition label. Compare a loaf of bread made from whole grains and a loaf of generic white bread. Time and time again, the unhealthy option is the cheap option.

I look at such food purchases in a very simple way: you save money now to pay more later on. Pay more later? A consistent diet of unhealthy foods will cost you later in life with medical bills and other health-related choices that are foisted upon you.

Personal Values
For some people, food is merely a fuel to help you plow through the day. For others, it’s an art form that speaks directly to your soul. The rest of us are in the middle, alternating back and forth.

Take me, for example. Most days, I’m perfectly content to eat leftovers for lunch and prepare a really simple dinner with my family.

Yet, every once in a while, I’ll devote three hours to making coq au vin from scratch, as I did last Friday. I’ll splurge and make croque-madames for a surprise lunch on a lazy Saturday. I’ll attempt some soul food dish from my own childhood, slaving for hours to recapture some flavor from my youth.

I don’t make these things because they’re quick. I don’t make them because they’re healthy, either, and they’re certainly not cheap. I make them because cooking is a pastime I get a great deal of personal enjoyment from.

Finding Value
In the end, it’s all about value. What’s truly important in your own life? Do you view an occasional afternoon in the kitchen as drudge work or as a soul-nurturing experience? Do you look at breads in the bread aisle by their price tag, by their nutrition facts label, or by their texture and color – or some combination thereof?

For many people, minimizing your food bill is a worthwhile goal. You live an active and very busy life and minimizing the costs in an area where you don’t have much personal added value is a great way to maximize value in your overall life.

For others, personal health is a key value and thus spending money on healthy ingredients is key. It’s worth your extra dollar to get raw organic vegetables for the meals you create and you pride yourself on putting pure, whole foods in your body.

For still others, food is their art form, a way to get in touch with their spirit. It’s worth their extra money and extra time to create the perfect meal, combining sublime flavors like an artist at the canvas.

Each of those groups sacrifices something along the way, whether it’s time or flavor or money, in order to get in touch with what really matters to them.

The happiest person is the one who has looked inside themselves, figured out what they really valued, and chased it with gusto. No matter which path you follow, if it’s in line with what your true values are, your dollars are being spent in the right place.

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.

I saw that you’re looking for an assistant. Send me an email, we could seriously chat about it.
- Michael

For a long while, I’ve been thinking of hiring an assistant for The Simple Dollar. Not to write or anything, but to help with the deluge of email and other things I get every day (like comment approval). I’d like to be able to translate a stack of 300 or so emails into 25 or so that need responses and a list of 20 or so other things I should be aware of. These menial tasks eat up probably two or three hours for me each day and, frankly, I’d rather not be doing them.

I tried hiring remote assistants to do this three times, but it just didn’t work out. I found that during the training period, there was so much communication going on that I would have saved substantial time doing it myself without the embarrassing mistakes.

Right now, I’m looking locally for such an assistant, perhaps a stay-at-home mom in my area who could do this for two hours a day while the kids are napping or something. So, please don’t send me your resume.

Considering the amount of free information on the web, I was wondering if you are paying subscriber to any websites (such as consumerreports.org) and if you think those subscriptions return their value.
- Frank

For me, it depends on how often you actually turn to the service for a key use. Do you often turn to Consumer Reports for unbiased rankings of consumer goods? Or, alternately, do you get sufficient answers from digging around the blogosphere, knowing that many people out there are paid corporate shills as well as specific individuals with axes to grind?

For me, CR is useful, so I’m happy to support it with my dollars. Without that support, useful services go away, which is the same logic I used when I chose to become a paid user of Evernote and Flickr, for example. If I use it all the time, the last thing I want to see is that service to go away, and the best way I can do that is to give that service a small amount.

I sincerely wish that there was a simple and functional micropayment system online, because there are several free sites that I rely on and trust that I’d be happy to support with a small donation if it were simple and pervasive.

One of my closest friends is a film buff. She and her husband are about to have their first child and instead of asking for normal baby items for their baby shower, they wanted everyone to bring a copy of their favorite children’s movie so that these could be shared later on in life with the child. This one has me stumped. What would you choose?
- Ciana

Hands down, Spirited Away. Not even a second’s worth of hesitation.

Why? I think it hits that sweet spot of entertainment and empowerment of children better than any movie I’ve ever seen. Chihiro exhibits completely normal childhood fear and reluctance, but she manages to push herself beyond them to accomplish great things through her hard work.

The imaginative nature of the film, the fantastic art, and the realism of the main character (meaning that her emotional responses come off as completely genuine, something that’s rare in any kind of film) makes this one something I already watch with my son and look forward to enjoying with my daughter when she’s a bit older.

So last week, our washer broke. It gets stuck on the fill cycle and won’t move; it just keeps on filling. We have someone coming out to look at it this week to tell us how much it’ll cost to fix.

I’m also looking at this from a green perspective too. Is it best to continue using an out-of-date energy consuming product rather than consume a new product, or is it better to save the energy and water consumption by buying a new product and having to throw out the old one?
- FemmeKnitzi

The first thing I would do is dig through some do-it-yourself websites and make a sincere effort at repairing it yourself. Digging around based on the information you gave, I found this guide, which is something I’d be willing to try in your situation.

If you can’t get it to work on your own, I’d call a repairman and get an estimate. Find out what it would cost to fix the problem. If the cost is too high, just replace the washer.

What’s “too high”? I’d investigate what a new washing machine would cost, including the energy savings. If it essentially saves you money to buy new compared to just fixing the washer, go new; otherwise, stay with what you have.

One big reason for this is environmental: dropping a washer in a landfill and eating up the resources it took to make a new one eats up the gains you get from greater energy efficiency, even over many years.

I’m a recovering methamphetamine addict. I’ve been clean for five months and it’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but every day is easier than the one before it.

I owe so much to him that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to repay him for all he’s done for me. Where do I even start?
- “Mel”

First of all, huge props for turning your life around. Breaking an addiction and getting away from all of the relationships that support that addiction can be extremely hard. You’re on a much better path in life now and the effort it took to get there deserves commendation.

How can you repay your brother? Simply put, you can’t, unless fortunes change.

Instead, what you can do is tell him sincerely how you feel. That in itself can be hard, but sincerity can’t be faked – and sincerity means a lot.

Also, never forget how he’s helped you and be there for him when he inevitably needs help in the future. Something will happen in his life where a helping hand will be invaluable. When it happens, remember how much your brother helped you when you needed it the most and do whatever it takes to help.

Another way you can likely help is to pay it forward. When you see people in trouble, help them out when you can. This seems trite, but it’s probably the best possible way to repay this kind of generosity.

Trent, I am shopping for a gas bbq grill. Do you recommend any? And what is the best time I can find lower prices on the grill?
- Vanaja

Late summer is usually the best time, as gas grills are usually considered summer seasonal items and late summer is the time when stores rotate into fall and winter seasonal items. August and September are the months to shop for one.

As for what one to buy, I’d recommend not getting one with wood trim. Get a stainless steel one, as they require much less maintenance work to stay in good shape.

You’ll get different recommendations from different people when it comes to items like this. I’d focus mostly on what you need. Research grills on your own, figure out what exactly you actually need, and know this before you actually go shopping.

I was laid off in March, and I am currently collecting unemployment. 30% of my unemployment income goes to my rent (I am on a month to month lease and live in a 1 bedroom alone). My boyfriend is losing his roommates and will also need a place to stay (he too was laid off from the same company, at the same time). We would like to take that next step and move in together, which would cut my rent down to 17% of my unemployment income. Here’s the problem: we are having trouble finding someone who will lease to two college educated, albeit unemployed, upstanding tenants. Our unemployment will not run out until March 2010, and together, we make 3.5 times the rent. Do you know of anything that may improve our chances of signing a new lease?
- Brittany

A big deposit helps. The bigger the deposit, the better – cash always talks.

Another option is to get away from the large management houses – who mostly view you as a number – and seek out apartments owned by individuals, like a family renting out a floor of their home, for example. They’re much more likely to actually take your story into account instead of just discarding you.

Alternately, is there a way to use your current apartment over the short term It’d be tight, but if you’re both unemployed, the savings could be worthwhile.

It looks like everybody is coming back for the final season of Lost. The promotional poster for the season features pretty much every cast member that has ever appeared on the show and several actors have confirmed they’re coming back. How’s that going to work?
- Jeff

The poster that Jeff refers to is here, and it does depict pretty much everyone who’s ever been on the show, including lots of killed-off people.

I think the last season is going to start off with Oceanic 815 landing in Los Angeles in 2004 without crashing on the island. That means that no one who died on the island is actually dead. Afterwards, though, they’ll all start having dreams about the island and will eventually find their way there in some way or another. The final one to return will be Jack and the final scene of the final episode will be identical to the first scene of the first episode.

Or maybe I’m just crazy. Lost might be my favorite show of all time.

Presently I find myself doing well in my career, earning comfortably and seriously I kinda of enjoy it as well. On the other hand, I might not know when the ‘enjoyment’ will die on me.

What will you do if you are in my shoes? Stick to the present job? Or to leave the present job and head for the unknown terrain?
- yfloo

Life is all about chasing your dreams and passions. Go for it.

You know what your dream is. All you have to do is start putting the pieces in place to make it happen. Look into what you have to do to be an airline pilot. Start living really lean, building up your emergency fund and any savings you’d need to make it work. Then start taking little steps towards that dream. Take classes in your spare time.

Eventually, you’ll reach a point where you don’t need that income from your job and you can take that leap. But the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step.

What are you reading lately?
- Neal

Many, many people ask me about what I’m reading – I guess somehow that The Simple Dollar attracts at least some bookish people.

I used to mention them on Twitter, but I decided that I was usually giving short shrift to books by mentioning them there.

So, I joined GoodReads on July 27 of this year. GoodReads is a site that allows a person to keep track of the books they’ve read. I considered going back and filling in earlier books I’ve read, but I simply wasn’t sure of the dates or the titles, so I decided to just record them as of July 27.

If you’d like to see what I’ve read recently – or what I’m currently reading – tune into my bookshelf on GoodReads. I’ve added a link to it on the sidebar in the “More Social” section, so you can check it any time you wish.

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

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

Perhaps it’s just my perspective, but there seem to be a lot of books out there right now that seem to encourage people to make a radical change in their careers. I think these books all come from a general sense of dissatisfaction with the old style of career path, where you give your loyalty to an organization in exchange for some degree of safety. Today, obviously, the “safety” part of the bargain is gone, so where does the loyalty go? I think people begin to feel loyalty to themselves – a healthy response – but it can also easily foster a general unhappiness with the sacrifices expected of them by the old career model. You’re expected to be loyal to the organization, but you’re given nothing in return but a paycheck and a lot of stress about what tomorrow brings.

The solutions seem to go in a bunch of different directions. Perhaps adopting different attitudes and mores in the workplace is a way to go. Maybe hands-off entrepreneurship is the right thing to do. Maybe it’s hands-on entrepreneurship… or perhaps self-employment/microentrepreneurship.

It’s impossible to say what direction is right or wrong for a given person. Different paths suit different people well.

One avenue that I think is quite strong, though, is the path espoused in Jonathan Fields’ Career Renegade: make yourself into a personal brand that has a lot of inherent value. His argument is that by putting a lot of effort into making your name well-known to people in your field and associating it with a lot of usefulness and positive value, you’ll get your foot in the door in countless places and your career choices, whatever they might be, can be much easier.

Obviously, this takes a lot of work. Career Renegade focuses on how to make this possible. Let’s dig in.

What Makes You Come Alive?
Every career has people that somehow rise above the fray, creating some sort of niche for themselves where they can earn a healthy income no matter what their field is. This is fueled by passion, but it’s fueled by something else, too: they simply stand out from the crowd. How? Fields points out three key factors: experience, flow, and people.

Experience simply means that you’ve put in the hours to learn your craft. Diligent and deliberate practice have made you good at what you do, and a wide variety of situations have shown you countless ways to apply that practice.

Flow means that you can get yourself into a mindset where your full concentration is devoted to that work. You’re able to shut out external inputs in your life and can simply bury yourself deep in the area of your expertise. The maximum amount of your mind and your soul are engaged in it, opening the door to creating great things.

People means that others are aware of the work that you do. You’re not hidden from the world – in fact, you’re open to it. You make an effort to make it as easy as possible for them to discover the good things you do. You surround yourself by people that bring out the best in you, and you allow that “best in you” to shine as brightly as possible so that many can see it.

What Kind of Renegade Will You Be?
All of us have a pool of passions and skills and knowledge to draw upon in our lives. We’re passionate about some things and have well-practiced skills in other areas, as well as information worth sharing to others. The way to stand out is to find a unique or rarely-used combination of these skills, knowledge, and passions that others might find value in.

Fields shares examples of a passionate artist who was raised in a family of bakers. She took a skill she thought she’d never use again (baking), combined it with her passion for art, and began selling artistically-designed cupcakes. Another story involves a woman who was passionate about wines and had a natural skill for painting landscapes, so she combined the two, painting vineyards for display in wineries.

I combined passions for personal finance and writing, a skill for turning out decent writing at a high volume, and tossed in some experience with designing websites. The end result? The Simple Dollar.

There is no pre-set formula for this. You just need to start throwing things together.

How to Master Your Passion and Build a Worldwide Following
You’ve found this perfect unexplored niche and you’re seeing a bit of small success. Now what? Now’s the time to get the world’s attention.

The best way to do this is to go online and start talking up what you do. Make videos of your work, take pictures of your work, and share them. Make useful instructional videos. Start a blog. Join Twitter and talk about your passion. Share all of this material with your already-existing customers/fanbase and encourage them to talk, too.

If you’re actually putting some value out there, people will start to look. They’ll join in the conversation. They’ll see what you have to offer and they’ll become customers/clients/fans/job offers.

This takes a lot of work and a lot of dedicated patience, but it works.

Let the Revolution Begin
It’s a long, hard road to get to the point that Fields describes. How do you get from where you’re at now to that point?

Fields offers a ton of tactics to help with the transition. Three I liked:

Imagine the consequences of not trying. You stay where you are, stuck in place, in a job you hate, for the rest of your years. Your ship is not coming in. Why not seek something better?

Visualize your dream outcome very day. Keep the big dream in mind at all times. It’ll make all the little steps, stumbles, and challenges quite a bit easier.

Don’t do it alone. Find others that are attempting to transform their lives, too, and share experiences and ideas and leads. Doing it alone makes it very difficult in every dimension.

Is Career Renegade Worth Reading?
Career Renegade is a solid read if you’re willing to spend your spare hours building upon what you already have. To follow what Jonathan suggests, you’ll have to go through some painful years of a lot of work without much reward, but when you come out the other side, you’ll have built so much intrinsic value in yourself that doors will open for you.

In some ways, this is what I did, just without a guidebook. For years, I burnt every minute of my spare time writing and communicating with readers and communicating with other writers. Over time, I got my name out there and people kept coming to me. Eventually, I was able to make a shift and live life on my own terms – but the path to get there was hard.

If you want a new path but are afraid to just walk away from your career as it is now, give the ideas in Career Renegade a try. You might find the path you’re looking for.

While doing research for my book, I’ve been spending some time digging into building friendships and relationships with people around you. How valuable are they, really? How can you make them more valuable? Are online relationships valuable at all, or just a distraction?

In the process of researching these topics, I dug into a famous sociology paper, “The Strength of Weak Ties” by Mark Granovetter. In it, Granovetter argues that the stronger a relationship is, the more likely you are to have an overlapping set of relationships with that person.

Take your mother, for example: if you’re close to her, you likely have relationships with a huge number of people in common – relatives, hometown friends, and so on. Compare that to a guy you met at a conference a while back who works in a related field to yours – you might know two or three people in common, but your weak connection isn’t supported by much of an overlapping social network.

Granovetter’s argument seems obvious when you stop and think about it, but what’s even more interesting is that you can use your knowledge of it to build better relationships with people that you want to know better.

Why would you want to do this? Let’s say, for example, that you’re new in a particular field and you’re seeking a mentor to help guide you to success. Or, let’s say you’re tired of your current career and you’re thinking about switching to a new one, but you don’t know for sure what you might do next. Alternately, you might be thinking of moving and you’d like to find a community where you’ll already know some people when you arrive. Or it could be as simple as wanting to find new and interesting people to invite to your weekly backyard barbecue.

In each case, the more relationships you have in place, the more likely you are to be able to get your foot in the door where you want. You’re more likely to get value from those relationships, and you’re more likely to make their lives more valuable as well.

So what can you do about it? In a nutshell, build lots of weak connections and then strengthen the ones that are valuable to you. Let’s break it down.

Build Lots of Weak Connections
Many people immediately assume that to do this you must be the person at the meeting who shakes everyone’s hand and says nothing. I think that’s the worst way to do this.

Instead, the best way to build weak connections with lots of people is to go where there are a lot of interesting people and provide as much value as you can. Conventions and meetings related to your field of interest are great ways to start, as are community events and festivals.

Here’s what you do. Go to such meetings and get involved. Get over your stage fright and offer to present. Attend talks and presentations that are in your wheelhouse, pay attention, and ask questions that are interesting and potentially useful to others in the room.

During the downtimes, follow up on this by entering into conversations with the presenters and with others who are expressing interest in your particular areas. Swap ideas with them – then swap contact information with them. Schedule dinners with several people at once – group meals are always a great way to improve relationships.

What you’ll find when you’ve left is that you’ve swapped a lot of valuable information and ideas with a lot of people – and you have contact information for these people.

Now, follow up. Don’t let those weak connections die. Research these people online. Follow them on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook. Drop them a line regularly just to see what they’re up to.

Even more important, whenever you hear of a need that you can easily fill, fill it. If someone’s looking for a job, send them any job leads you have. If someone needs some information, give it if you have it (and can do so without getting yourself into trouble).

Strengthen Valuable Connections
Eventually, you’ll begin to find that some of these relationships have more value than others – they’re closer to your own interests, provide lots of good ideas, and so forth. Focus on strengthening these relationships.

Invite such people to a barbecue at your own house – and invite several such people from different areas that you’ve built connections with over time. Doing this enables you to introduce lots of people to each other, helping them out, and further cementing your own relationships, while also learning a lot of new things due to the fresh mix of people.

What you’ll eventually find is that if you need help, having lots of “weak” connections that are fairly strong will come in handy. Remember above, where Granovetter argues that “weak” connections are simply ones where you don’t have many people in common? If you have a lot of those, you’re suddenly indirectly connected to a ton of people – and if you have a strong relationship with the person in common, you’re more likely to get the help you need, when you need it.

The more I investigate the power of social networks and how the internet makes it easier to maintain them, the more I’m beginning to believe that the relationship is the key source of value in the modern world.

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 (July 26-August 1, 2008)
How to Deal with a Partner That Hides Money Problems If a partner is hiding serious financial issues from the other, there’s likely a deeper problem in the relationship. Here are some tips for digging into this problem – and how to come out clean on the other side.

Class Warfare and The Simple Dollar The rich blame the poor. The poor blame the rich. But that’s not what The Simple Dollar is all about. Ignore the blame, change the game, and find your own path.

Overcoming a Habit of Lying to Yourself About Money Many people lie to themselves about money, disguising the truth so that they don’t have to face the challenge of making major changes to their behavior. Such choices stand directly in the way of financial progress. Here are some ideas for getting past that obstacle.

Some Thoughts on Being Broke and Being Poor I don’t talk about poverty on The Simple Dollar – true poverty is an issue that is far beyond the scope of a blog like this. Instead, I talk about being broke – when people have resources available to them to make a change if they’re willing to step up to the plate.

The Things That Make You Feel Good – And What That Has To Do With Your Money Most of the things that truly make you feel good don’t involve spending money. So why do we keep spending money in an effort to make ourselves feel good?

Two Years Ago (July 26-August 1, 2007)
Applying Jerry Seinfeld’s “Chain” Concept To Personal Finance Jerry Seinfeld dropped one of the best personal productivity tips I’ve ever heard: simply try to build “chains” of consecutive days where you work at your craft. This works well for many avenues of life – and personal finance is no different.

Healthy, Cheap, Tasty, and Quick: The Grocery Store Grand Slam and Eight Tips on How To Achieve It Those are the four factors that we use at the grocery store, and it’s rare when we can hit all four at once (usually, three out of four is good enough). Eight ways to find that “grand slam” are included here.

A Guide To Setting And Reaching A Net Worth Goal I find that net worth is the best metric for charting your personal finance success, and setting goals is a great way to achieve the big things you want in life. So why not combine the two?

10 More Ways To Entertain Young Children For $1 Or Less (Without The TV) Entertaining young children is a persistent issue around our house. Here are some tips that worked really well with our son when he was almost two.

Personal Finance In A Family Crisis Whenever a major family crisis happens, people get together and help each other. That can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be with just a bit of advance planning that can be done any time.

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 tenth 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 eleventh chapter, finishing on page 202. The next entry, covering the twelfth chapter, will appear on Wednesday.

This is a stage that I see us approaching as time goes on. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re close. Right now, I’m trying to knock out my final student loan (it’s a doozy), and then start focusing on my home mortgage.

Our home mortgage payment is just shy of $1,100 – that doesn’t include homeowners’ insurance and taxes, so when we get the house paid off, we now have $1,100 more a month to spend on whatever we choose.

I, for one, would roll that extra amount directly into savings. I’d simply change the automatic payment to be an automatic transfer into a savings account of some sort – perhaps an index fund. Then I just keep living life as normal until one day that account is full of cash for something great. For us, that “something great” is our long-dreamed-of house in the country, with a small barn out back, a big garden, and a chicken coop.

Is It A Crazy Goal?
My parents recently finished off their home mortgage after paying on it for thirty years. They’re pretty much debt free at this point for the first time in their marriage. So, for me, I have a great example in front of me that you can get rid of all of your debt. However, many people don’t have that example and it seems like an impossible goal. On page 186:

Anytime I speak about paying off mortgages, people give me that special look. They think I’m crazy for two reasons. One, most people have lost their hope, and they don’t really believe there is any chance for them. Two, most people believe all the mortgage myths that have been spread.

The “hope” factor is something I see popping up over and over again whenever I talk to people about money. Many people I talk to view their mortgage as simply a fact of life. If they were ever in a position that their mortgage became really easy to pay, it wouldn’t be time to double-up on the payments – no, no, it would be time to upgrade their homes.

I think this points to a prevalent mindset out there when it comes to debt. Many people simply view debt as a way to leverage the lifestyle they want now. It comes from a lack of patience – people don’t want to live in a small apartment watching their savings grow slowly when they could just get this loan and be in that house now – even if it costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I think patience is one of the biggest tools a young professional can have when it comes to his/her money. Just wait for a while – you’ll be way better off over the long run.

The Tax Deduction Myth
Owning a mortgage just to get a tax deduction is something of a fool’s game, as outlined on page 187:

If you have a home with a payment of around $900, and the interest portion is $830 per month, you have paid around $10,000 in interest that year, which creates a tax deduction. If, instead, you have a debt-free home, you would, in fact, lose the tax deduction, so they myth says to keep your home mortgaged because of tax advantages. [...] If you do not have a $10,000 tax deduction and you are in a 30 percent tax bracket, you will have to pay $3,000 in taxes [...] According to the myth, we should send $10,000 in interest to the bank so that we don’t have to send $3,000 in taxes to the IRS.

All the tax deduction does is lower the effective interest rate you’re paying on your home loan a little bit.

In fact, Dave doesn’t even make the case as well as he could. If you’re using your mortgage interest on your tax return, that means you’re foregoing your standard deductions because you have other things to deduct. So, take our situation – we have two adults in our home. Our standard deduction in 2009 is $11,400. If we choose to itemize our taxes (which we’d have to do to deduct our home interest), we have to have more than $11,400 in interest on our home mortgage (or other deductible expenses) to beat what we would already get.

So, if your only significant deductible expense is your home mortgage – and your mortgage isn’t gigantic – you’re not actually gaining much of anything at all in terms of taxes.

The Risk of Having a Mortgage
Another disadvantage of holding on to a mortgage is the risk – if something goes wrong in your life, it’s a lot better to not have a mortgage payment than it is to have one. On page 189:

If I own the home next to you and have no debt, and you (because of your investment adviser guy) borrowed $100,000 on your home, who has taken more risk? When the economy moves south, when there is war or rumors of war, when you get sick or have a car wreck or are downsized, you will run into major problems with a $100,000 mortgage that I will never have. So debt causes risk to increase.

I think this is a vital, overlooked point. Having a mortgage – or any debt – is a type of risk. You’re gambling that your future will be stable, no different than putting cash down at the roulette wheel. With a mortgage, your life is simply more at risk than it was before.

I have two young children at home. Risk stares me in the face every day. I encourage our children to push their limits a little, but I still stand very close by when my three year old grabs onto playground gymnastics rings and hangs there. Having a mortgage is something like telling my three year old to grab the rings for the first time while I stand far away. Sure, he might hold the rings for a while and then drop without a problem, but my distance increases the chance of a hurt elbow or a broken arm.

The risk of owning a fat mortgage is much like the risk of putting your child on a bike for the first time and shoving them down the sidewalk. Sure, they might ride like the wind, but they might also fall flat on the pavement. Instead, it’s better to do a bit of planning (like saving for a home) and then let go when they’re ready (like when you have enough saved up for a house). No broken bones, no broken lives.

Thirty Years Versus Fifteen Years
Many people advised me to get a thirty year mortgage instead of a fifteen year mortgage, arguing that I could make an extra payment each month and get the same speed benefit of a fifteen year without the risk of the larger minimum payments. That’s a bad idea because something will often come up, as is spelled out on page 190:

A big part of being strong financially is that you know where you are weak and take action to make sure you don’t fall prey to the weakness. And we ALL are weak. Sick children, bad transmissions, prom dresses, high heat bills, and dog vaccinations come up, and you won’t make the extra payment. Then we extend the lie by saying, “Oh, I will next month.”

A higher minimum payment is actually a good idea, because it forces us to work with what we have left over. A lower minimum payment means that we just have more to work with – if that extra payment isn’t required, it’s easier to argue that something else is more important for the moment.

With expenses like prom dresses, heat bills, bad transmissions, and dog vaccinations, you can always find ways to make it work. If you have a decent emergency fund, it shouldn’t be too tough at all.

What do you get in exchange for these little sacrifices? Your mortgage goes away in half the time. You find yourself free of that load much, much faster. Plus, the interest rate on a fifteen year loan is lower, meaning your payments won’t actually be anywhere close to double what they would be for a thirty year mortgage.

Home Equity Loans Make Poor Emergency Funds
One common question I get from readers is whether or not they should take out a home equity loan to deal with some problem in their lives. My feeling is that if you’re in that situation, you need to rethink about your emergency fund. Sure, the home equity loan might be the right solution for right now, but if you’re living your life in such a way that it has to be used, you might want to rethink how you’re managing your money.

On page 197, Dave dips his toes into this idea:

Even a conservative person who doesn’t have credit card debt and pays cash for vacations can make the mistake of the HEL by setting up a loan or a “line of credit” just for emergencies. That seems reasonable until you have walked through an emergency or two, and you realize very plainly that an emergency is the last time you need to be borrowing money. If you have a car wreck or lose your job and then borrow $30,000 against your home to live in while you make a comeback, you will likely lose your home. Most HELs are renewable annually, meaning they requalify you for the loan once a year.

Think of it this way. You’re using your home equity loan as an emergency fund. You lose your job, so you take out $30,000 to live on – it’s fine, since you have tons of equity in your home, right? Well, the end of the year comes and you still don’t have a job. The bank says, “Sorry, we’re not renewing your loan,” and they call in the $30,000. You don’t have it. They repossess your house. Any equity you built up is gone.

An emergency fund needs to be cash, period. If it’s not liquid or it puts you at risk to get it, then it’s not an emergency fund.

Our local credit union has hinted to us that we should have a home equity line of credit. I have torn up every single offer they have sent to us. I’m not interested in that kind of risk.

Paying Cash for a Home Is Impossible
I agree with Dave that it is indeed possible to pay for your home with cash. So why don’t people ever do it? It’s not easy. It’s a lot harder to go this way than it is to just go get a mortgage. On page 198:

Paying cash for a home is possible, very possible. What’s hard to find is people willing to pay the price in sacrificed lifestyle.

I think the problem is that many people view their home as more than just living quarters. They view it as a status symbol – they need a house they can show off to family and friends. It’s more impressive to live in a house than an apartment, isn’t it? So, if you back up and think about it, you pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest, home maintenance, and other costs – not to mention time – in order to impress others.

Again, the only people impressed with such things are people that you never speak to, who don’t matter in your life. They look at you and admire your home, but they don’t build a relationship with you. The people you build lasting relationships with like you, not your house.

We chose to buy a home with a mortgage. I don’t regret it, but if I had to do it all over again, I would have looked intensely for a great rental situation instead (since we originally lived in an apartment too small for two toddlers and two adults – we had to move) and kept saving.

Do you have any other thoughts on this chapter of The Total Money Makeover? 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!

On Wednesday, we’ll tackle the twelfth chapter – Build Wealth Like Crazy.