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 (October 25 – 31, 2008)
Should an Entrepreneurial High Schooler Go to College? This discussion resulted in a lot of interesting back and forth on the question of whether or not a high schooler who starts a strong business in his spare time should immediately go to college or should focus on building that business that’s already successful.

Brand Preferences and the Two Year Old Child I wrote this as I began to notice the effect that brand recognition was having on my two year old son. Was he being unduly influenced by branding and packaging? What could I do about it?

Eight Things You Should Do Immediately to Save Money When You Buy a Car If you buy a car, there are several things worth doing immediately to maximize fuel efficiency and minimize maintenance costs. These all work no matter what kind of car you buy.

Exploring the Connection Between Time and Money I’m a big believer that time is money, at least in the sense that money is just a representation of invested time. Thus, time is an enormous consideration when choosing which option is actually the cheapest.

Two Years of The Simple Dollar: My 25 Favorite Articles of the Past Year Here’s my celebration of the second full year of The Simple Dollar. I just collected my top twenty five articles from the second year of The Simple Dollar in one place.

Two Years Ago (October 25 – 31, 2007)
Seven Tips For Avoiding Boredom During A Financial Turnaround Isn’t living cheap boring? Not at all. It’s all about just choosing the less expensive things that you enjoy doing. Take a look at the many, many inexpensive things available for you to do. The wider your horizons, the more fun you’ll have.

A Deeper Look At Dave Ramsey’s Seven Baby Steps To Financial Freedom – And How They Apply To Us Dave Ramsey’s debt recovery advice is popular because it’s so straightforward and simple. However, they’re not always a perfect match for everyone. Here, I dig deeper into his “baby steps” and see how they match my own life.

The Eternal Question: Am I Doing The Right Thing? With the complexity of life around us, it’s easy to not be entirely sure if your choice is the right thing. Is it better to spend more now or save this money? Is it better to invest in a 401(k) or a Roth IRA? How can you ever know if you’re doing the right thing?

The Ten Most Important Things I’ve Learned About Money and Life In The Last Year Here, I summarize the ten most important things I learned about money during the first year of The Simple Dollar. This article really does contain the cream of the crop of what I learned during that crucial period of my life.

One Year of The Simple Dollar: My 25 Favorite Articles As with the article above, this is merely a collection of what I consider to be the twenty five best articles I wrote during the first year of The Simple Dollar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shane” writes in:

I’m twenty three years old. I just got a really great job with a 401k that’s matched 100% by my employer up to 10%, which I’ve heard from others is a really great deal that I need to take advantage of. So I started investing 10% of my paycheck so I can get the matching funds.

The only problem I have with this is that I have no idea about retirement. It’s more than forty years away. I just put my money into the investment the person told me to put it into so I have no idea if it’s a good one for my retirement. I don’t even know where to start.

I get emails like this quite often from young professionals who are completely clueless about retirement – and for good reason. When you’re forty years away from retirement age, the thought of retirement seems incredibly distant. It feels more than a lifetime away – that’s because it is more than a lifetime away.

The one piece of knowledge that many young professionals do have, though, is a solid sense of self. They have a good basic understanding of who they are, even if they haven’t pieced through the details yet. And, quite often, this basic understanding is more than enough to make some sound retirement decisions.

Here are three questions I’d encourage any twentysomething to ask themselves.

If money were no object, what would you do with your time?
Some people would choose to be idle with their time, enjoying all of the freedom that comes with it. They’d party. They’d go on trips. They’d goof off. They’d play on their Xbox all day long.

Other people would want to work for something or build something. They’d spend their time with a volunteer project – or maybe even start their own. They need to have a big productive project in their lives in order to feel fulfilled and happy.

Most retirement advice is written for people in the first group. They’re the ones who, when they reach retirement age, will want to travel and spend their later years enjoying themselves with leisure as much as possible.

The other group gets personal enjoyment out of working and being productive. With the many opportunities already available for people to work as late as they’d like in life, such people will probably work at something – whether it’s gainful employment or a big volunteer project or some mix of the two – until they drop dead with a tool in their hand.

If you’re in the first group, you need to be saving as much for retirement as possible. While it’s fine to put money into riskier investments when you’re young, you should start moving into more conservative investments – like bonds or treasuries or cash – pretty early on, even as much as twenty years before retiring.

If you’re in the second group, saving for “retirement” basically means saving for the last year or two of life when you’re unable to work and also saving for some supplemental income for the last few decades of your life. You likely don’t need to kick the savings into high gear and can afford risk a little later than the other group, sliding the money into conservative investments five or ten years before you begin to withdraw it.

Are you frugal?
Do you carefully watch your pennies? Do you spend time seeking out the best deal on an item? Are you find with eating beans and rice a few evenings a week because it’s a dirt-cheap meal that’s still pretty healthy? Do you buy – or at least try – generic versions of products?

If such choices come naturally to you, to put it simply, financial life as an adult is going to be easier for you. After all, if you’re careful with your pennies, the dollars will follow. Because of this, you’re likely to have built up significant assets before you reach retirement age – in which case, pushing your retirement savings to the hilt might stand in the way of your other goals in life.

If such choices seem completely alien to you, you’ll have a more challenging road ahead of you. Almost always, you’re better off financially if you minimize the number of financial mistakes you’ll make along the way. In that case, you’re probably better off pushing your savings up a bit.

Are you interested in having children?
When you picture yourself twenty years in the future, does that vision involve children? For some people, it does – I know it certainly always did for me. For others, it does not – some of my closest friends are wonderful around my kids, but they can’t imagine having children of their own.

Parenting is not for everyone. It can be infinitely rewarding to the right person, but infinitely frustrating to others. On top of that, it’s incredibly costly – little people are unquestionably expensive. They rely on you for everything – their food, their clothes, their space, their education. If you don’t relish in this thought, parenting might not be right for you – and that’s fine.

If you do envision children in your future, kick start that retirement. The more you save now means that later on you’ll be substantially ahead of the savings curve and you can pull back on your contributions in order to devote more resources to raising your children. Even if you end up not having children, you can still pull back later on in order to enjoy travel and other adult endeavors. Also important is the fact that a well-funded retirement means that you’ll never wind up being a financial burden to your kids.

On the other hand, if you are doing everything you can to avoid the remote possibility of children, it makes sense to save for retirement at a slower rate now, allowing you extra money to enjoy the more adult-oriented things you want out of life.

Just worry about the saving for now – don’t sweat the details.
Many people get overly wrought about making sure that their money is in the “perfect” investment. To put it simply, your investment choice is secondary – by a long shot – to simply saving your money as soon as possible and as much as possible.

Start saving now. If you don’t know what to invest in, just ask for suggestions from the representative there. Since it’s a tax-deferred retirement account, you can make investment changes later on without any tax issues.

One good default choice is a “Target Retirement” plan, which basically means that the fund manager will put you in aggressive investments when you’re young, then gradually make the investments more conservative as you grow older. This is a great choice if you’re unsure.

Later on, when you’ve gained some experience in the world and perhaps learned more about investing, you can take a more direct hand in your choices.

For now, though, the best decision you can make is to simply start saving.

Good luck.

Over the past three years, I’ve had countless opportunities to reflect not only on my own personal finance and life journey, but that of thousands of readers who have contacted me over the years with questions and stories.

Along the way, quite a few principles for personal and financial success began to appear. These same features pop up again and again in people’s stories and comments – and I find them to be deeply true in my own life as well.

The single most important part of personal finance is truly knowing yourself.
Why do you buy the things that you do? Why are you worried about this situation? Why do you feel this way about this product? Why do you respond to guilt in this way?

The answer to all of these questions lies with introspection. The answer to all of these questions is also a tremendous boost when it comes to personal finance. If you understand fully the internal reasons why you desire something, you can work through those reasons, validate them or throw them aside, and then make a clear, enlightened, and rational decision about whether to acquire it.

The more introspection you do, the more naturally the true answers to those questions become and the easier it becomes to recognize your more dangerous and frivolous impulses for what they are. This leads not only to tremendous financial success, but great personal success as well.

The second most important part of personal finance is setting clear, concrete goals.
This covers everything from daily to-do lists to a lifetime plan – and everything in between.

You can’t go anywhere if you don’t know where you are headed. The more specific and clear your goal, the easier it is to head in that direction. The more concrete your goal – in other words, a goal that has clear and realistic steps to get there and has a clear definition of achievement – the easier it is to achieve it.

I spend some time every week defining and re-defining my own goals. Doing this helps me keep in mind where I want to go and what I need to be doing today to get to that point. Over the last few years, this process really has served me very well.

The most valuable resource in the world isn’t money, it’s time.
Money is an infinite resource – you can always acquire more money. Time is a finite resource – you can never acquire more time.

We earn money through how we use our time. The more money we can earn in a given amount of time, the better off we are. Of course, the contrary is true – we spend our money making the remaining time we have more pleasurable.

The question that often entangles people is defining what exactly pleasurable time is. The definition is different for everyone, but I can say for certain that one thing is true: there are many people and marketers out there attempting to muddy the water for you. Advertising tries to make it seem as though using their product will make the time you have more pleasurable, even when it often won’t.

Again, it comes back to knowing yourself. What is your idea of pleasurable time? For me, my time isn’t made more enjoyable by having a name-brand household product. My time is made more enjoyable by having a product that gets the job done well at the lowest possible cost, freeing up my money to create more pleasure in other areas that matter to me.

Money is just a mechanism to improve the quality of our time. The question is whether or not we understand ourselves well enough to do that.

The more supportive people you have in your life, the better off you are.
Supportive people in your life make countless good things possible. They provide connections. They open doors. They provide advice. They provide help for your challenges. They support you in whatever you choose to do. They help build your self-esteem. They’re not necessarily just yes-men, though – a good supportive person can provide fierce criticism when it’s warranted.

The more you migrate towards supportive people in your life, the better you’ll feel about yourself and the more capable you will be to handle the challenges that life throws at you.

The fewer unsupportive people you have in your life, the better off you are.
On the flip side of that coin, removing unsupportive people from your life also improves the quality of your life.

Unsupportive people criticize you and damage your self-esteem. They take from you without replenishing. They aren’t there for you when you need them, but they expect you to be there for them when they need you.

These relationships devour the energy and passion and resources from your life without providing anything of value in return. Ending such relationships – and, ideally, replacing them with more positive ones – is a net positive in your life.

Blaming others for your problems is a dead-end road.
It’s incredibly easy to blame others when something goes wrong. It’s someone else’s fault that you lost your job. It’s the fault of the marketers that you’re in debt. It’s the fault of the lender that you can’t make your mortgage payment.

In each case, though, the blame often falls much closer to home. The willingness to accept that you’re often at fault when things go wrong is a major step towards being in control of your finances and your life. Analyzing those faults and figuring out what you can do differently so you’re not susceptible to such problems is vital.

Yes, sometimes it really isn’t your fault. Yet you did put yourself in the position so that you could be damaged by the ineptitude of others. Was there not actions you could have taken to prevent such things from happening? What can you learn from that the next time you try?

The more time you spend improving and educating yourself, the better your personal and financial life will be.
Virtually every successful person I know has a hobby that improves them in some way. They’re either passionate about reading and learning or some other area of specific interest. Quite often, they have a variety of interests, each of which leads to some degree of personal improvement.

What do you do in your spare time that also improves you? Are you exercising your body? Are you exercising your mind? Are you exercising your soul? Are you exercising your skills and talents?

Time spent engaged in activities that don’t push us to grow leads to one thing: atrophy. Falling behind.

Karma always comes around.
People who act in negative ways have negative things happen to them. People who act in positive ways have positive things happen to them.

It happens over and over again. Why? I think it’s because humans are better at reading each other than many people think. On a very basic level, people can sense what kind of person you are. Are you the kind of person who is constructive and seeks to help and support others? Or are you destructive – one who seeks to attack and bring down others? Which side of the coin do you enjoy – the success story or the failure story?

Your actions define you, even the ones that you think are hidden from everyone around you. Those choices affect your personality – they alter who you are. Choose good acts and you become a better person, one others are more likely to help. Choose negative acts and you become a worse person, one that drives others away. It’s up to you, with every little action you take.

There are very few aspects of your life that cannot be changed.
Most aspects of who you are – your financial situation, your skill set, your appearance, your social circle, even your personality – can change and improve with focused work in those areas. Don’t accept the things about yourself that you don’t like – work to change them.

Yes, some aspects cannot be changed. Some people have medical conditions that are difficult to overcome. Others may struggle with psychological issues. However, these are often burdens to fight through that can make you stronger as you overcome them, like ankle weights on a figure skater.

You don’t have to be content with your lot in life. Recognize that the place you’re at can merely be a stepping stone, and strive to step above it.

Reliability and functionality worth a premium.
Whenever I choose to make a purchase, I expect that the item I buy will be able to do the job I want it to do with minimum effort and fuss. I purchase items with a particular task in mind – chopping vegetables, keeping my food cold, keeping track of my exercise routine. When I use the item, I expect that it will accomplish that task as easily as possible – or else I wasted my hard-earned money on it.

Thus, I tend to gravitate towards spending more on well-made items that are reliable and do the job I want them to do. I want a trash bag that I can fill to the brim without worrying about breakage, so I don’t buy the cheap ones – I buy the ones recommended in Consumer Reports. I want a knife that will stay sharp through all of the chopping needed for vegetarian chili, so I invest in a high-quality chef’s knife that will last forever.

Time is the one truly finite resource we have and I don’t want to waste it trying to make do with a poorly-made product. I’m far better off owning fewer things, but being sure that the things I do own work well and do what they’re supposed to do.

Three years ago today, I officially launched The Simple Dollar. It’s been a crazy ride.

Each year, on the anniversary of the launch, I’ve highlighted my 25 favorite articles from the previous twelve months of entries. These aren’t necessarily the best articles, just the ones I enjoyed writing the most. Here’s the list from the first year and the list from the second year.

Without further ado, here are my twenty five favorite articles from the third year of The Simple Dollar. (I also have some extra thoughts that will be appearing later today.)

Christmas Inspiration from a Stick and a Cardboard Box When writing this, I couldn’t help but reminisce about the many wonderful Christmases I had when I was a child. Christmas isn’t about things at all – it’s about experiences and people.

Seven Tactics for Turning Short-Term Intensity Into Long-Term Intensity You can’t start a fire without a spark, but unless you tend to that fire carefully, it can burn itself out and you’re left with nothing at all.

Fifteen Tactics for Maximizing Your Investment in Reading for Personal Growth Reading is one of the best ways to make yourself grow as a person, but often that growth isn’t found in speed-reading the latest Stephen King novel. Here are some tactics to make an enjoyable, lazy afternoon curled up with a book into something that can genuinely help you to grow as a person. I think my love of reading really comes through here.

The Limits of Frugality: What’s Next When You Can’t Cut Any More? I usually find that people haven’t cut very much at all when they believe they’ve cut to the bone, but sometimes people really have trimmed away all the fat they can. When you’re living off ramen, beans, and rice and still need a boost, here are some things to try.

When Your Financial State Improves, Do Your Frugal Standards Change? I think they do. What actually seems to happen is that the value of your time goes up. Instead of filling your spare time with something that earns a return of $5 an hour, you’re more likely to want to spend that time with family, doing something fulfilling like a family game night.

How I Look at Economic News: Beyond the Talking Heads I felt that the apocalyptic economic paranoia of late 2008 and early 2009 was completely overblown and I took the entire idea to task several times. This was perhaps my favorite article about the situation because of how it ties to the real world so directly.

The Bills Your Parents Didn’t Have When you compare the financial situation of a recent college graduate today to one from thirty years ago, things look vastly different. That new graduate is often buried in debt and is facing a big pile of monthly bills, neither of which were faced by a college graduate thirty years ago. I riff on that idea here.

The Giving Pocket Quite often, while stumbling through life, we’ll find a situation where immediate charity can really make a difference. I have a giving pocket for just those situations. The story I tell here, about the poor boy and the dumpster and the food, really tears me up.

Some Thoughts on Building a Successful Marriage A successful marriage requires a few key ingredients. Without them, marital success will be incredibly difficult. I find that I often rely on my wife almost as though she were a part of me. Without a lot of trust and a well-built relationship, that would be impossible.

Personal Finance and 1,000 True Fans I went down an interesting philosophical road here, one that has been on my mind a lot as of late. What does it really mean to give of yourself to others? What do we really have of value to give? What can we fairly and reasonably expect in return – or should we expect anything at all?

A Step-By-Step Guide to Building a Big, Healthy Emergency Fund For many people, the idea of having several months’ worth of cash in a savings account seems like an impossible and unrealistic goal. It doesn’t have to be. Here, I walk through how to build one, focusing more on the psychology than offering just another how-to list.

A Guide to Making Inexpensive and Delicious Homemade Pizza This is one of my favorite food posts. Pizza night is a tradition at our house (often on Friday nights, but not always) and it’s something we all enjoy and treasure.

Is Suze Right? Do Emergency Funds Now Trump Debt Repayment? Suze Orman made a seemingly sensible argument that people should focus on their emergency funds during a down economy. However, I felt the opposite case needed addressing – that by the time we recognize that the economy is down, it’s too late to build any sort of large emergency fund.

A Tour of My Messenger Bag My messenger bag is my mobile office (in fact, I’m using the laptop I carry in that bag to compose this very post). Here’s a guided tour through it, exposing every little nook and cranny. I think such things are a very intimate way to look at a person’s life.

A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating a Deal-Finding Homepage I don’t like deals for the sake of deals. Instead, I prefer to quickly sift them, looking only at offers that will directly be useful to me. To do this, I’ve set up a deal-finding homepage that enables me to automatically find just the deals I want from all over the ‘net by just loading a single web page.

The Reliability Bell Curve: What Does “More Reliability” Actually Mean? Buying something that’s more reliable than something else isn’t a guarantee that it will last longer. Instead, you’re merely playing the odds – the more reliable item has better odds of living a long life. Thus, when you hear of cases of typically-reliable items not lasting long or of typically-unreliable items lasting forever, they’re usually just the outliers.

12 Ways My Wife Quietly Makes Our Life Work Without Sarah, The Simple Dollar simply wouldn’t be sustainable. She might not contribute directly, but her indirect contributions are constant and bountiful.

Personal Finance 101: Why Do I Need Credit At All? Dave Ramsey often preaches a credit-free lifestyle. What he leaves out is that one’s credit report is often automatically scanned by all kinds of places to get a quick thumbnail sketch of your reliability. If you don’t have that, it can result in higher insurance rates, among other things.

Ten Great Ways to Make Powerful Visual Reminders of Your Personal Finance (and Other) Goals Writing down and specifying your goals is a powerful way to get started on a better path, but how do you prolong the magic? Here are ten really good ways to keep those goals in mind all the time as you work towards something better.

Can You Actually Earn Reasonable Money from Mechanical Turk? This was just a very fun post to write, from beginning to end. Playing around with Mechanical Turk and then trying to determine if it was actually worthwhile was a great exercise.

Are You a Money Victim? Victimhood is an incredibly dangerous trap to fall into. When you blame others for your problems, you’re avoiding looking within to find solutions.

How Low Can You Go? Vegetarian Burrito Bowls This was my favorite entry in the summer “How Low Can You Go?” food series, mostly because I thought it provided the most intimate view of how we live our life.

Helicopter Parenting, Baby Boomers, and Financial Dependence Here, I make the case for why “helicopter parenting” puts both parent and child on an extremely dangerous personal finance track. I would rather my child be independent and need nothing from me than friendship and occasional advice when they reach adulthood. And maybe a helping hand with the grandchildren, of course.

The Essential Bookshelf 2009: The Eleven Books That Rise Above the Rest These are the books that influence my personal finance thinking more than any others. In other words, if you are looking for some books to read, this is probably a great list to start with.

Mirror Neurons: Why Watching Others Succeed Won’t Help You Succeed I find areas where other fields of science and human knowledge border on personal finance and personal behavior to be endlessly fascinating. Plus, this is as good an argument as any to turn off the television and do something.

Three recent emails from readers have made me focus lately on how much preparation for disasters we should be doing. First, from “Adam”:

Do you think it’s reasonable to take some of the money I use to invest each month and buy gold bullion coins to keep in my safe? I’m worried about the dollar collapsing.

And from “Eve”:

My husband and I have always used a spare room in our basement for storage of extra bulk supplies we’ve purchased, like toilet paper and the like. Recently, my husband has started talking about using that room for dehydrated meals and water storage in case of a major disaster. Do you think this is a good idea?

And from “Noah”:

Do you think non-hybrid seeds are a good investment?

These three readers all have something in common. They all are at least somewhat under the belief that a major calamity of some sort is on the verge of occurring – either a natural disaster, the fall of the government, the extreme devaluation of the dollar, or some other event that will radically alter our day-to-day way of life.

My general answer to all three of these people is the same. None of the ways of utilizing their extra money is an inherently bad way of using extra money. These items won’t necessarily earn a great return on the investment, but they aren’t worthless, either. Instead, I would encourage them to find ways to make these choices compatible with the way they live their lives today.

To Adam, who wants to buy gold coins: by all means, add gold coins as a small part of your overall investment strategy. I would not invest in nothing but gold. If I were you, I’d simply buy them at a slow rate – perhaps saving $100-200 a month (or more, if you’re able) and buying a coin whenever I could afford one. Then, I’d just sit on those coins, using them only as a last resort. This is particularly true if you have heirs to which you can pass those coins onto.

To Eve, who wants to begin storing food and water: instead of storing a bunch of dehydrated food packets that you may or may not ever utilize, I’d start a garden and teach myself how to can vegetables. Then, over time, eat some of the vegetables you can to maintain a steady supply in storage. For example, you might can a summer’s worth of vegetables the first summer, leave them alone that winter, can a second summer’s worth of vegetables, then eat the first summer’s worth the following winter. My parents used exactly this strategy growing up and it worked just fine.

To Noah, who wants to start buying seeds: I’d invest in a greenhouse setup (grow lights in your basement, if nothing else) so that the seeds don’t go to waste. After all, in most home storage situations, seeds will eventually go bad. Within that greenhouse, I’d replenish the seeds each year and also grow myself plenty of food. A greenhouse makes it much easier to actually protect non-hybridized seeds and plants from diseases and predators, since the advantage of hybridization is that the final plant is much more sturdy than many non-hybridized plants. One good way to get involved in this is to get in touch with the Seed Savers Exchange, a group dedicated to preserving and passing on heirloom plant varieties.

While investing like this will likely not produce a great financial return, it does offer another kind of return. For many people, such preparedness offers peace of mind – a sense of protection against the unknown. That has real value, particularly if you find the state of the world to be a stressor in your life. If having some gold in your safe or food supplies in your basement causes you to feel more at peace, then it’s providing a non-financial return that has significant value in your life.

What sort of preparation do we do along these lines? At home, we have about a month’s worth of food on hand along with about twenty gallons of potable water. A good portion of the potable water is actually in gallon jugs in the freezer, helping to fill the freezer and thus reduce the maintenance energy needed to keep the contents of the freezer cold. We do not own any gold bullion, though I’ve considered buying a coin or two at a very slow rate.

Investing is more than just pure dollars and cents. Investment provides psychological security and peace of mind as well, which can be tremendously important for some people. If you’re in a position where you’re worried about the state of the world, I see no reason not to invest some of your time and energy into securing your position as best you can. After all, that’s what investment really is, at its core.

FMF pointed me to this article from the Washington Post on the sad end of Bud Post, a lottery winner from Pennsylvania:

William “Bud” Post III, 66, whose $16.2 million in lottery winnings brought him debt, despair and heartache, causing the kind of trouble often recounted in country-western songs, died of respiratory failure Jan. 15 at a Pittsburgh area hospital.

“Everybody dreams of winning money, but nobody realizes the nightmares that come out of the woodwork, or the problems,” he said in 1993, five years after winning the Pennsylvania lottery.

His problems included a brother who tried to hire a contract murderer to kill him and his sixth wife; a landlady who forced him to give her one-third of the jackpot; and a conviction on an assault charge, after Mr. Post fired a shotgun at a man trying to collect a debt at his deteriorating dream house in northwestern Pennsylvania. He went bankrupt, came out of it with $1 million free and clear and spent most of that windfall, too.

Obviously, Mr. Post made a number of poor decisions along the way – divorcing at least five times and associating with criminals, for two.

However, there’s a deeper thread here. Mr. Post’s “deteriorating dream home” is mentioned, as is “bankruptcy” and spending most of a second windfall. It’s fairly easy to conclude from this story that Mr. Post spent his money buying stuff that was beyond him to maintain.

Money buys you three things: it buys fun, it buys security, and it buys time. The only problem is that if you neglect one of these three things at the expense of the others, you lose them all.

Mr. Post, as many people who win the lottery, focused on buying the fun. He bought his dream house and tons of other material items – the article mentions a twin-engine plane (even though he didn’t have a pilot’s license), two additional homes, another truck, three cars, two Harley-Davidson motorcycles, two 62-inch Sony televisions, a luxury camper, computers and a $260,000 sailboat, among other items.

The only problem is that when you focus entirely on the fun, you miss out on both security and time. If you load your life with fun things, you no longer have the time to actually enjoy each fun thing – instead, they go to waste, falling apart and neglected. Similarly, if you avoid proper spending on securing your future, you wind up right back where you started – in Mr. Post’s case, on a $475 a month disability check.

This idea is true for any income we bring in. After all, earning $50,000 a year for 30 years amounts to a $1.5 million windfall.

Instead of spending all of your money on every little thing you imagine you might enjoy, you’re far better off putting some of your money into a small handful of things you truly care about and will enjoy over a long period of time and putting the rest into ensuring that your situation will be provided for over the long haul.

In other words, when you bring in money, it’s fine to spend some of it on something fun. However, you’re usually better off buying or experiencing one or two high quality things – things that really mean something deeply to you or will provide many, many hours of enjoyment – than lots of things, because if you own lots of things, the time you spend on each one is lessened and the time you spend maintaining your things goes up, reducing your overall enjoyment by quite a bit. The rest of the money is usually best spent securing the things that you do have, so that you don’t wind up without any resources when luck eventually turns against you.

Fun, time, and security – keeping them in balance is the best way to maximize the money you bring in, whether it’s a big windfall or an ordinary paycheck.

“One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdowns is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.”
- Bertrand Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

When I worked at my previous job, I always felt like the things I was doing were vitally important to the success of the project. In one way, this was good – it kept me focused on making sure that things wouldn’t fail. Yet it created several additional problems.

For one, I was often really stressed out. I felt hugely responsible for everything that went on, even for things that I couldn’t actually control. Eventually, I became quite proficient at solving the technical crises that others were responsible for, often because they were completely oblivious to the disasters.

At the same time, I became afraid to push myself to try new things. Since I felt so strongly responsible for everything, I became deeply afraid of change. I already felt the stress of managing all of the things that were already in place – the idea of changing things or adding new things stressed me even more. As a result, I would often subtly resist such changes.

On top of that, the birth of my children caused my priorities to change, adding further stress. A big part of my job involved traveling to meetings and conferences and other such things. After my children were born, the travel responsibilities gradually went from an enjoyable part of the job to a burden. Instead of going out on the town with colleagues, I’d spend the evening calling home to see what my kids were up to and would often feel as though I was missing them grow up.

The real message underlining all of this? I was so caught up in how important my job was that it was stressing me out, affecting my personal life, and keeping me from innovating and taking chances at work. That’s a terrible mix for success.

Looking back, a much more appropriate perspective would have been to realize what my role was – to develop data interfaces – and do that to the best of my ability, ignoring the other things that were going on. If the database went down… well, I shouldn’t have seen it as my responsibility. Instead, my responsibility should have been to simply push the envelope and find new and clever ways to get people the data they needed. It wasn’t “important” work – it was creative work, work that should have been purely fun.

What did I learn from this experience? The moment you begin to think of your job as “important,” you become more stressed and less innovative in your career. Your health and energy fail you due to the stress. Your job becomes less enjoyable because you’re focused on maintaining the status quo instead of doing the best job you can. In the end, you simply become less vital than you were before you began to see your job – and yourself – as “important.”

This is an issue I see popping up even now with my writing career. When I begin to view what I do as “important,” I begin to be less effective. I write less interesting pieces that essentially just reiterate core points. It becomes dull – and I can feel that just as much as you, the reader, can.

Instead, I try to remind myself that what I do really isn’t all that important at all. When I feel that way, I tend to write more from the heart, no matter the consequences. I often get attacked when I do things this way because I’ll express things that are different than what’s “expected” of me, but it’s more enjoyable.

Here’s the truth: your job is likely nowhere near as important as you think it is. Sometimes, employers will try to convince you that you’re more important than you actually are because it’ll scare you into being a good worker – but it will, at the same time, prevent you from being a great one. In the end, most managers – who also think of themselves as more important than they actually are – prefer a workplace full of good workers who are afraid to step outside the box than an office full of a mix of great workers and bad ones who are constantly trying to innovate. After all, that same sense of inflated importance guides them, too.

Here are three things I often do to keep my sense of importance at appropriately low levels.

First, I imagine worst case scenarios in terms of the greater world. For me, that would probably be a lack of ability to continue updating The Simple Dollar. What would happen to the greater world? For the most part, very little. The Simple Dollar often adds a little “positive” to people’s lives on a regular basis, but if it went away, their lives would continue. They might find another web site that provides a similar boost – or they might not. Either way, it’s not a major crisis for the world if the worst case scenario happens.

Most jobs, if you peel them back to their true impact on the world, have very little real impact. Yes, there are a few captains of industry and top political leaders who really can affect a lot of lives. Outside of them, though, the worst case scenario of most jobs has little impact.

Second, I imagine the positive impact of just not worrying about it. That type of scenario frees me to try new things. If I realize that the worst case scenario really isn’t that bad, it becomes a lot easier to imagine best case scenarios for taking pretty significant risks. What if I write articles that are seriously outside the box on The Simple Dollar? I might chase away a reader or two, sure. But I also have the potential to grab the imagination and attention of a lot of people by doing that.

Again, the same holds true for most jobs. When you consider the absolute worst case result of a certain choice, then compare that to the potential positive results of making that same choice, you’ll often find you’re better off just letting go of the status quo and trying new things. Completely re-do your filing system. Do a presentation that completely bucks the rules of what typically goes on in your workplace. Write some interesting utility code that helps everyone by making some common tasks faster.

Finally, I try things that are way outside the norm. Sometimes I’ll end up using these things that I create. Other times I won’t. In either case, I usually find something worthwhile.

What really makes this stand out, though, is that it’s fun. Trying something completely new and different adds an element of fun to my work that simply isn’t there if I’m overly careful and just follow the status quo. That sense of fun keeps my work in the area of things in my life that make me happy instead of things in my life that drain me.

In the end, my advice is simple: let go of the sense of importance you have about your work. It’ll be the best career move you’ll ever make.

One final note: if you have your financial ducks in a row, it’s even easier. Paying off your debts helps your career because it reduces the importance of your job. Your need for a salary is much less if you have your ducks in a row, which in turn opens the door to greater success because you’re no longer tied to such a sense of importance.

I’m pleased to announce that we’re expecting our third child. The baby is due in late April. And, of course, when the child is born, you can expect pictures.

This is the “news” I alluded to on Monday that was affecting my wife’s health – she’s had a big case of the first trimester “tiredness” which has made our home even more hectic lately.

Here are some personal finance articles of interest to keep you busy.

Even Good Debt Can Be Bad All debt can be bad. I don’t necessarily believe in the “good debt versus bad debt” dichotomy, which is basically the argument of this article. (@ moolanomy)

Be Your Own Part-Time Boss: The Pros & Cons This is one of the best guides I’ve read on starting your own small side business. My favorite point: start now and work out the kinks along the way. (@ man vs. debt)

Paradox Of Financial Choices: Maximizing vs. Satisficing Some people seek to maximize – to squeeze every nickel out of a situation that they can. Other people seek satisfaction – a level of completeness that balances their time and happiness. I think I’m more of the latter. (@ my money blog)

What is Simple Living and Why Should I Care? I think the real value of living simple is that it gives you the time to explore the things you’re interested in and passionate about. (@ wise bread)

Which Comes First: The House or the Nest Egg? The nest egg, in my opinion. Given that renting is often the better financial position as compared to home ownership, I think many people over-fetishize owning a home (myself included) and push themselves into a financially sub-optimal situation. (@ get rich slowly)

Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law Dunbar’s Number – 150 – is the number of meaningful friendships/relationships that a person can actually sustain. Although some argue that that number is growing due to internet technologies, I argue that it’s just allowing us to keep tabs on a larger group of people more easily, not to build meaningful relationships with them. (@ seth godin)

Separation This is a fascinating story of a divorce. It does seem like a better outcome than the typical “I’m calling a lawyer” breakdown in marriage, though. (@ steve pavlina)