Three and a half years ago, I was in a desperate debt situation. My lifestyle was tied desperately to spending far more than I was bringing in – and I was finally paying the consequences.

I had let money become the most important thing in my life. It drove all of my choices and decisions. It chose my career for me. It chose my specific job for me. It chose how I spent my free time – I did expensive things to escape from the debts and the pressure-filled work, usually with a device on my hip that chained me to that job.

I was desperate and unhappy. I was in a prison made of money – and I knew I had to escape it.

Today, I realize something much more compelling. Money is not the most important thing in life. In fact, in a healthy life, money often follows behind many other elements in your life. If you put your energy and time into other things more important than money, money will follow. It will find a way to work.

Here are fifteen things I’ve found that are more important than money.

Experiences Hug someone. Kiss someone. Write someone a letter telling them how you feel. Run (or walk) a marathon. Spend all day making an exquisite meal and eat it by candlelight. Make love to someone. Face the thing you most fear right in the face. The rush you get from experiencing something amazing is one of the best parts of being human, and most of the time the financial cost is minimal.

Wisdom If you think you know the answer, you’re far from wise. Keep learning. Wisdom comes from knowing how little you actually know. Spend some time learning something new, perhaps even becoming skilled at something. You’ll surprise yourself at what you gain, often far beyond the mere knowledge you hoped to attain.

Marriage Accepting another person wholly and intimately into your life is utterly life-changing. Opening up every part of yourself to another person is constantly challenging, but constantly powerful in how it changes you and makes you strive to be a better person.

Friendships The regular companionship and camaraderie of people you care about and share interests with is continually life-affirming. Friendships don’t revolve around the things you have or the activities you can afford – they revolve around people.and shared experiences.

Physical health Health can’t be bought, but it can be helped by the personal choices we make. Exercise. Eating better. Making choices that are less sedentary. Getting involved with activities that get us moving. Practicing proper hygiene. Money pales in comparison to the value of the physical health needed to enjoy life.

Mental health On the flip side of the physical coin is mental health. Expressing our feelings in a healthy way. Finding people to talk to and relate our problems. Addressing the issues that bother us. Seeking professional help when these options don’t change things for the better. Again, money is insignificant compared to the value of mental balance.

Personal passions What activities make you feel truly excited and fulfilled? Those things are the spice of life – every one of us wins by digging into our passions. The best part? Quite often, seeking out and following your passions often means that money will follow in the wake.

Communication The ability to express our thoughts and feelings to a receptive audience is truly invaluable. it enables us to share elements of our inner world with others, something that can’t be achieved by all of the material wealth on this planet.

Self-reliance Money comes, money goes. The ability to survive and even thrive with no money means that money becomes significantly less important. The ability to do things yourself reduces the need you have for money to solve your problems.

Security If we channel our efforts into creating a sefe and secure enviroment where we’re protected from our failures, we create a situation where our fortunes are much less tied to our ability to put money in our pocket. If we put effort into security now, we have true safety later, a type of safety that can’t be broken by ordinary material needs.

Helping others For most people, the action of helping others provides a great deal of personal joy and satisfaction, something that cannot be replaced by any sort of material item. Helping others often requires no financial resources at all and can sometimes generate financial resources – free meals and such – plus goodwill in the community. Good karma has tremendous value.

Personal growth Every single person has countless opportunities to improve as a person – their behavior, their beliefs, and so forth. Working to grow as a person only improves you and rarely costs anything, but it almost always improves your income potential for the future as well as naturally improving your outlook on the world and your self-confidence.

Thankfulness When you move from desiring the things that you do not have to being thankful for the things that you do have, your perspective on the world changes drastically. Your desire for having the latest things goes down while, at the same time, your contentedness with life goes up dramatically.

Hobbies If you can discover personally fulfilling activities to fill your time, you introduce happiness into your life. Many people fall into routines by default, never asking if their choices introduce authentic happiness, then they try to chase a sense of happiness by purchasing things. Step back from this. Try new things, and dig into the things you genuinely enjoy. Often, it’s the simplest things – playing a game with our partner, going on long walks, collecting rocks or leaves – that bring us the greatest personal satisfaction.

Spirituality Does our life have a purpose? Do we have a spirit? Is there something greater than we can comprehend all around us? Digging into these questions through reading, contemplation, meditation, and prayer can bring an incredible sense of calm, peace, and even joy that can be difficult to find in other avenues – and impossible to find with money.

The more of these elements you dig into and discover in your life, the lesser the role of money, materialism, and spending occupies. In the end, you’ll find that you’re no longer chasing money, but that instead money is following you on the path to a much better life.

Margaret writes in:

I have a twenty four year old daughter who is still living at home. She went away to college, but moved back in after college while looking for a job. She’s had a good job now for two years, but has made no move at all to move out. She does give me money for groceries and for bills, but she spends the rest of her money as soon as she gets it on clothes and cell phones and laptops.

I think it’s time for her to move out, but I know that if I kicked her out, she would have nothing to fall back on. What credit she has is pretty poor.

So I’m stuck. What do you suggest?

I suggest putting the impetus back on your daughter. This is how I would handle the situation.

Here’s what I would do. I’d sit down and have a heart to heart with her. Explain, quite simply, that you’ve been happy to give her a place to live while she gets back on her feet, but now it’s time to move on. Most of the time, children in this situation will do everything they can to delay moving out, so you’ll hear a lot of excuses about how she doesn’t have enough money, she’s not ready, and so forth.

So change the rules a bit. Offer to let her stay there for one more month if she opens up a savings account. At the end of each month, as long as the balance in that account is $500 (or $1,000) higher than it was the month before, she can stay for another month. Otherwise, it’s time for her to go.

This little move achieves both your goals and her goals. Your goal is to have your daughter become responsible for her own money to the point where she can easily move out of your home, a goal accomplished by her having a wad of money in the bank. Her goal is to prolong the situation – and you’ve given her a route to do that.

Eventually, what will happen is that she’ll begin to realize the money she’s saved up can be enough to help her buy nice living quarters of her own without Mom constantly there overseeing things. That’s a big difference from the state she’s in now, where the idea of moving out is far in the nebulous future. When that option becomes tangible and real, she’ll want to move out.

What if she says that this is impossible? Simply tell her you’d be happy to help her figure out how to manage it. Point out that her income significantly exceeds the amount you expect her to save. If it results in a fight, stick to your guns and remember that she’s actively choosing not to progress forward. That’s much different than merely spinning her wheels, which is what was happening before. If that’s the situation, you have to cut her free and let her make mistakes on her own.

What if she’s on board strongly with the idea? Encourage her. Give her a copy of the book Your Money or Your Life as food for thought. Offer to counsel her in any way that she wants, but don’t push – quite often, the path to learning how to manage one’s own resources is a solitary one. You might even end up pointing her towards The Simple Dollar or other such websites for other ideas.

Remember, the end goal here isn’t to merely extract your daughter from your home, but to make sure that she’s self-sufficient enough that this won’t be a continuous problem in the future. Give her all you can to make her self-sufficient – if she chooses not to, you’ve done all you can. That’s what good parenting is, in the end – making sure your children have the tools to succeed on their own and that they know how to use those tools.

Good luck, Margaret.

This is the thirteenth of sixteen parts of a “book club” reading and discussion of Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz’s Never Eat Alone, where this book on building a lifelong community of colleagues, contacts, friends, and mentors is teased apart and looked at in detail. This entry covers the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters – “The Write Stuff” and “Getting Close to Power” – which appear on pages 246 through 258.

When I was in high school, I had dreams of being a writer. I read prodigiously, wrote mediocre short stories, and imagined myself publishing a long line of novels when I was older.

My English teacher was surprisingly supportive of this, even though I never directly told him of my dreams. He constantly reinforced to me that I had some writing ability, but that I really needed to work at it to polish it. He would grade my papers with an extra sharp pen, taking off points for things that other students would have gotten away with.

My dream of being a writer went away for almost a decade, but I never stopped writing. I wrote something almost every day, not because I thought I was good, but because I thought it was fun. Little did I know that I was developing a personal trait that would serve me well throughout my professional life. I found myself writing reports and many other documents (things that I probably shouldn’t have been writing – they should have been the domain of my supervisor) while at my previous job, then my writing opened the door to The Simple Dollar as well.

I have little talent as a writer. Any ability I have comes from a lot of practice. However, that practice has built up a skill that’s marketable enough that I can use it to earn a living.

How to Use Writing to Build Relationships
Ferrazzi carries this idea forward on page 246:

If you have any writing skills at all – and yes, the good news is we all have some level of skill – you can get close to almost anywhere by doing a piece on them, or with them, even if it’s for your local newspaper.

Or even for your blog, provided you’re not trying to interview a mega-superstar.

Here’s how this works. Let’s say you’re trying to get to know someone. Get ahold of your local newspaper (or other media source) and suggest that you’d like to write a freelance article about this person. Explain why they’re interesting. Get permission, then call up the interesting person in question. The fact that you’re calling for a story about them will flatter them – unless, of course, they’re a major star of some sort, in which case more media requests might be annoying.

This gives you a great opportunity for a conversation with them. You can then relate to them the things you’re really working on – and you can even reveal to them that you’re only moonlighting as a journalist and your primary interests are elsewhere (if that’s the case).

Then, just translate what you know and what you learned in that conversation into a short piece and submit it. You’ll likely not get paid for it – or if you do, it’s a pittance – but that’s not the point. The reason to do it is to meet a person in the community you’ve always wanted to meet.

But I Can’t Write!
Many people believe that they can’t write. However, most people can – and they can even write well enough to be quite passable in a small newspaper. All it really takes is practice. On page 247, Ferrazzi offers some great advice on this:

First, get over all the romantic pretensions around writing. In business school, when I was dreaming about publishing an article in the Harvard Business Review, I had a wonderful encounter with a visiting professor who had written a number of high-profile articles and books. I asked her how I, too, could become a writer.

“Write,” she told me.

Brows furrowed, I nodded. When no more advice came from her esteemed mouth, I asked: “Anything else.”

“Write, then write some more. When you’re done – and here’s the kicker – keep writing.

“Look,” she said, “there is no secret. Writing is tough. But people of all talents, at all levels, do it. The onlything necessary to become a writer is a pen, some paper, and the will to express yourself.”

I have no writing talent at all. What skill I do have is built from a lot of practice. I can’t turn out much truly great prose, but I can turn out a lot of good prose fairly quickly. That’s how I can post two lengthy, meaty articles a day at The Simple Dollar.

Here’s the thing, though. Anyone can do this if they practice – perhaps not at the same volume, but anyone can write a good short article if they practice at it regularly. And the ability to write a good, short piece is endlessly useful in life, not only in the “getting to know you” method described here, but in any environment that relies on communication.

The better communicator you are – and written communication is a big part of this – the better your skill set is, no matter what you do. It doesn’t require talent. It just requires practice.

Field Mice and Antelope
Ferrazzi offers a good anecdote on page 249:

Newt Gingrich, the famous Republican politician and all-about-Washington gadfly, is known to tell a story about a lion and a field mouse. A lion, he says, can use his prodigious hunting skills to capture a field mouse with relative ease anytime he wants, but at the end of the day, no matter how many mice he’s ensnared, he’ll still be starving.

The moral of the story: Sometimes, despite the risk and work involved, it’s worth our time to go for the antelope.

It’s easy to make friends and connections with your peers and particularly with people at a level below you, but the real rewards come in building relationships with people who are above you in status at work and in society in general.

Yes, it’s difficult. Yes, it takes us out of our comfort zone. But connections to the people who have found success in their life often buoy us into success as well, both directly and indirectly.

They can help with success directly by giving advice that actually works. You bear witness to their success – you identify that success with them.

They also help indirectly through association. People recognize who you’re associating with and their opinion of you goes up and down depending on who that associate is.

Isn’t That Disingenuous?
Isn’t striving to meet well-known people just for the sake of connecting with well-known people disingenuous? On page 251, Ferrazzi addresses that very point:

There are no easy answers. But if you pursue these people in a sincere manner, with good intentions, you’re not being manipulative. And if you are emboldened by a mission and you’ve put in the time and hard work to establish a web of people that count on you, then the time will come when your growing influence will put you in a place where you’ll be face-to-face with someone who can convey a lot of sparkle.

In other words, if you take the initiative to become a leader among your peers, eventually you’ll be recognized as such and the more influential people around you will be perfectly happy to meet you.

As he says, it’s not easy. It takes a lot of consistent, hard work. You need to do your work well, produce great results, and build trust with the people around you.

Over time, doing that will slowly open doors for you. And then you’ll find yourself in the same room as a legend, and it’s up to you to go over there and introduce yourself. If you don’t, you’re choosing to slam the door in your own face.

Trust
There’s one big element here that presides over everything else. From page 252:

I’ve found that trust is the essential element of mixing with powerful and famous people – trust that you’ll be discreet; trust that you have no ulterior motives behind your approach; trust that you’ll deal with them as people and not as stars; and basically trust that you feel like a peer who deserves to be engaged as such. The first few moments of an encounter is the litmus test for such a person to size up whether or not he or she can trust you in these ways or not.

To put it simply, when you approach someone purely as a fan, they don’t recognize you as a peer. Going up to someone and gushing about how incredible they are won’t make them impressed with you. It’ll make them see you as someone far down the ladder, someone to appease and then move on.

If you actually wish to know someone as a potential peer, the worst thing you can do is accost them as a fan. Instead, act as if they’re an equal, even if you’re thoroughly impressed. Offer them whatever advice and suggestions you can to improve what they do. Bounce ideas off of them.

A compliment for good work is fine. Raw adulation is rarely a good move.

What Do You Do Instead?
How do you converse instead if you’re starstruck? Ferrazzi offers up some ideas on page 253:

To assure them that you’re interested in them for themselves, rather than what the public perceives them to be, stay away from their fame and focus, instead, on their interests. You can certainly let them know that you respect their work, but don’t dwell. Take them away from what they are normally barraged with.

Once upon a time, I was lucky enough to have a very casual breakfast with a Nobel Prize winner. I could have been completely starstruck by spending time with this individual, but instead we spent most of our conversation talking about chicken farming.

Seriously.

Why did we talk about chicken farming? He was raised on a farm and was very particular about his eggs. He didn’t particularly like the eggs that had been served – they were prepared fine, but he thought the eggs themselves were really awful. I spoke up for the first time and simply said that when I grew up, we fed the chicken table scraps and pieces of grit and they produced wonderful eggs. This got him going down a very nostalgic path about chicken farming in his childhood.

At the end of the meal, he slapped me on the back and suggested I tag along with him, something I would have loved to have done had I not had other responsibilities that day.

That one event got me over my fear of meeting famous people. People in that situation have already heard a lifetime’s worth of adulation and simply wish to have a normal conversation with people interested in the same things they are. If you do that, you can make friends at any strata of life.

On Saturday, we’ll tackle the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth chapters – “Build It and They Will Come” and “Never Give in to Hubris.”

Can a meal really get any easier than that? Cook up some rice, add some red beans, frozen okra, and cooked sausage (andouille, polska, whatever you like). Sprinkle in a lot of spices (sage, cayenne, garlic, thyme, paprika, even a bay leaf if you have one) as you’re cooking it all together. Yum – supper is prepared. Put a bottle of hot sauce on the table and you’re good to go. Make plenty and you can easily eat it for leftovers for a day or two.

Meals like this are common suppers at our house. Things that are easy to prepare and inexpensive yet quite tasty are always huge hits and wind up in our regular meal rotation. This meal is one of the common ones – we all like it.

The 5 Stages of Investing Enlightenment Investing is just like any other complex area that we study in life. We grow in our knowledge and understanding of it. Quite often, it seems, the more you know about something, the less it feels like you know about something because you’re aware of how deep the rabbit hole really goes. (@ free money finance)

Your Take: What Are Your Rules of Thumb? If I have a rule of thumb, it’s “there’s a better way of doing this.” I constantly try to figure out better and more cost-effective ways of doing the regular things in my life. (@ bargaineering)

Don’t Let the Children Dictate Your Finances! It’s very easy for people to allow children to dictate areas of your life. They’re demanding without understanding the ramifications and that often results in conflict – and sometimes, to avoid that conflict, parents try to find other ways to do things. That’s not a good idea when it comes to your money. (@ frugal dad)

No Costco Membership? Shopping At Costco Still Saves Money This is a calculation I’ve wanted to do for a long time: are warehouse clubs still cheaper even without the membership? Most warehouse clubs let you shop without a membership but you have to pay a 10% markup on what you buy. This article concludes that, for a lot of purchases, warehouse clubs are still cheaper per item. The question then becomes whether a membership is cost-effective. (@ the digerati life)

Apparent Risk and Actual Risk People’s perception of risk is often skewed and incorrect, but we generally behave according to the perceived risk, not the actual risk. It’s always beneficial to stop and figure out the actual risk of our situation. (@ seth godin)

Who Has the Time (or Money) for Deals? I agree – for the most part, sites that post tons of “deals” are usually a waste of time and money. My solution is simple – I filter them automatically using services like feedfilter.com. I just make up a list of the things I’m actually looking for, then use feedfilter.com to filter bargain sites for only those things. In the end, all I see are bargains for the specific items I care about. (@ wise bread)

Crush It! and The Best Books on Boosting Your Income Pretty good list, except for the Loral Langemeier book. I’ve read two books by her and they feel a lot like books by Robert Kiyosaki – cheerleading and anecdotes that lead to dangerous real-world conclusions. (@ get rich slowly)

Whenever I mention that I’m self-employed and work from home while my wife works outside of the home, I usually receive a question or two from readers who are thinking about a similar arrangement. They want to know about how we balance things. How do you balance household chores? How do you balance parenting chores? Does it change how you socialize?

Here are seven things we’ve found to be true about our marriage once one of us became self-employed.

“Keeping score” is dangerous. When one person shifts to a completely different lifestyle, the various dynamics of the marriage will shift. This is true of any major change – stay-at-home parenting, a major career shift, even a significant change in the hours worked.

Dynamics change (and I’m going to talk about some specifics below). Don’t “keep score” based on what the previously-established norms were. Instead, focus on figuring out the new norm and forget about the old ones, and talk about it carefully along the way.

The balance of household chores subtly shifts towards more chores for the self-employed spouse. Here’s an example from our own life. I’m about to start my day, so just before I begin, I’ll toss a load of laundry into the washing machine. Then, at lunchtime, I’ll go downstairs and toss the clothes in the dryer. During my afternoon break, I’ll fold those clothes and put them into the kids’ drawers. Still, after work is over, the remaining work is split 50-50.

It’s easy to say that such an arrangement is completely reasonable – after all, the self-employed partner has the time to do this, right? Well, on the other side of the coin, the partner working outside of the home is also taking breaks but not filling them with housework.

It’s unsurprising that, over a long period of time, the self-employed partner may feel some sense of … unbalance, while the partner working outside the home still feels the arrangement is 50-50. This can easily create hard feelings. The best way to handle it is to talk it out.

The social needs of both partners change. When both of us worked outside the home in fairly social environments, we had similar feelings about how much to socialize with others on evenings and weekends.

Then, when I began to work solo, my ideas in that area changed. During my work day, I interacted with others much less than I did before and thus, after work, my desire to socialize went up quite a lot. At the same time, Sarah’s desires remained unchanged.

Our solution has largely been that we invite people over a bit more often than we used to. On top of that, I’ve started to become more involved in community groups and organizations of all kinds, even taking on significant responsibility in one of them. This balance works out well for both of us.

When children are sick, the self-employed parent ends up being the nurturing one most of the time. As I write this, my son is currently watching a program on PBS (Caillou). He’s home sick for the day and I’m busy trying to get some work in.

While this means I’m rushed a little bit, I am the partner with the more flexible schedule, so when the children are sick, I’m almost always the one that steps in to take care of them. This, of course, means that my wife is less interrupted by such things at her work.

Again, this can sometimes feel unbalanced and, if left undiscussed, feel unfair. The instant one partner begins to feel things are out of balance, it should be discussed openly. Such things can easily fester.

The work of the self-employed partner can often bleed into time that used to be shared doing other things. Today, I’m spending much of my time with my son. I’ll make him snacks, make him lunch, put him down for a nap, and if he feels better this afternoon, I’ll play some games with him and work on writing the alphabet with him.

That means that, unexpectedly, I’ve lost most of a day’s worth of work at a time when I can’t really afford such leakage. So, this evening, I’ll need to make up for it. As a result, Sarah will find herself doing solo things. Thankfully, she doesn’t mind this – she’s an avid reader – but it does mean that we won’t be able to do something together, like play a board game.

It can become harder to discuss work. A few times a day, I’ll go do something completely unrelated to my work, simply because I need the mental break. I’ll read the rules for a board game. I’ll wash dishes. I’ll read a book for personal enjoyment. I’ll visit messageboards.

At first, when I told Sarah about this, she was fairly annoyed. “Why are you wasting time?” was her immediate response.

Here’s the thing, though. Most workplaces do offer breaks – and quite often, other break times are squeezed into work times. We gather around the water cooler and chat. We stop in another worker’s office or cubicle and see what’s going on. We go to meetings. In other words, most “real” workplaces have tons of time for mental breaks.

Since I’m self-employed, I don’t have nearly as many opportunities for those kinds of breaks, so I have to make my own. This usually involves things that would be seen as a time-waster in other environments. Again, this is something that’s worth discussing openly.

Here’s the most important thing to remember if you make this change. It offers a lot of benefits, but it changes countless dynamics within your relationship. The best way to deal with this is to talk about it. If one of you is bothered by how a dynamic is changing, say so. Don’t let it fester and grow and become something seriously problematic.

Good luck!

I’ve written many, many times about how relevatory keeping a “thought notebook” in my pocket has been for me. Whenever I have a stray thought that might be useful at all to remember later, I jot it down in the notebook and then review it later, usually a couple of reviews a day.

Figuring this out has truly been world-changing to me. It’s helped me to retain good ideas, remember to do certain things, and record data that I’ll need later on (like addresses and phone numbers and such).

One of the big reasons this has been such a step forward for me is that, by default, I have a forgetful mind in terms of short-term things that I need to do. I’m great at remembering long-term things, like the date in 1989 when I had my appendix removed, but short-term things slip my mind all the time if I’m not careful.

Most of the time, such slippage is no big deal, but when it comes to things like remembering to, say, pay the electric bill, it can be a big deal. I have been late on bills before simply because I forgot to pay them – not because I didn’t want to pay them or couldn’t afford to pay them. The same phenomenon holds true for other personal finance tasks, like remembering to rebalance an account or to check on my children’s 529.

Luckily, such incidences are becoming much less frequent as I figure out more and more techniques to keep me from forgetting such things.

Automatic transfers and bill payments have perhaps been the most useful tool for me in this regard. Every payment I have that has a static payment amount – meaning it’s the same every single month – is automated. I also have a number of automatic transfers into multiple savings accounts that are geared for specific goals.

An “inbox” is always in place on my desk. Whenever a new bill or other item to deal with comes in, I put it in that inbox and it stays there until it’s dealt with. I just go through the items in it two or three times a week and deal with what I find there.

A daily “to-do” list posted in several places reminds me of the things I need to do every day – in other words, defining my normal daily routine. I even include such mundane things as my hygiene routine on this list, but it also includes things like daily work tasks. I also have an instance of “check your idea notebook” and other such things on it.

Google Calendar helps me keep my schedule straight. I have monthly reminders of several different bills and other personal finance tasks on there. These calendar entries automatically send me reminder emails as the day gets closer. Beyond that, I also have every birthday and other event that I can possibly need to remember on it – and these also send reminders to me.

A strong mail-handling routine also helps things from falling through the cracks. All mail is collected in a central place in our home (the entryway table) and is processed in a batch once or twice a week, with all junk mail getting tossed and all bills going in my personal inbox. Doing a batch processing of the mail and having a prescribed way to handle all of the pieces keeps individual pieces from falling through the cracks.

The end result of all of this is that I rarely forget important little things. I don’t rely on my brain to keep all of this stuff straight – instead, there’s a “net” of safeguards and systems that help me to not lose anything through the cracks.

Isn’t it all kind of redundant? Yes, in several places in the system, I’ll see multiple reminders of the same thing. It can be kind of annoying to see mentions of my parents’ anniversary in three different areas.

However, such redundancy pretty much ensures that something important won’t slip by unhandled. I’d rather have three notices of my parents’ anniversary and remember it than just one notice and forget it.

If you have as strong a tendency towards short-term forgetfulness as I can have at times, it’s really useful to get a system in place that’s redundant and really easy to maintain. This system works well for me.

A few days ago, an article about minimalist money appeared at Get Rich Slowly, in which the guest author (Leo) advocated going strongly minimal with your spending – opting out of consumerism as much as humanly possible, cutting every optional service, and essentially starting again from a blank slate.

Some of the readers unsurprisingly reacted negatively to this idea. One commenter, Stephen, sums it up pretty well: “I don’t know if it’s possible to give up both cable and not going out to bars, restaurants etc.”

Stephen, like most of modern society, operates under the assumption that certain categories of non-essential spending is impossible to cut. In other words, if you cut some of the luxuries in life, life no longer becomes enjoyable, so these luxuries become viewed as essential.

Unlike a lot of other personal finance writers, I don’t advocate cutting out the elements of your life that make your life enjoyable. Instead, I take a different approach. I argue that a lot of the routines we consider essential in our lives aren’t bringing us joy on the whole.

Take eating out, for example. Many people do it because they see it as quicer and more convenient than eating at home. They can just drive to a restaurant, sit down, place an order, chat with their dining companion, get the meal, pay, then go home. Easy enough.

But when you start adding up the time invested there, it becomes less of a joy (trust me, I’ve done this a lot). For us, it takes fifteen minutes to drive to a decent restaurant. Five minutes to park and get seated – assuming no wait. Another five to ten minutes to place our order. Twenty minutes or so before we get our food. Another fifteen minutes to eat. Ten minutes to get the waitstaff to bring the bill, pay the bill, and leave. Another fifteen minutes to drive home. That’s an hour and a half just to eat out.

At home, I can have a meal from scratch on the table in fifteen minutes. It then takes fifteen minutes to eat and ten minutes to clean the table. That’s forty minutes – and you can, of course, tack on more time if you want to prepare something exquisite. Even then, though, you’re still not competing with the time investment of eating out.

Considering the much higher cost of eating out at a quality level comparable to what I can prepare at home, it was often the case that I found I was basically spending $15 to sit somewhere outside the home for half an hour.

So I cut it. Instead of eating out several times a week, we eat out perhaps once or twice a month now – and it’s only done as part of a family day out and about when we don’t expect to get home until very late (with the kids falling asleep in the back seat).

Do I miss it? No, not at all. I didn’t give up the part I loved, which was eating a delicious meal with my family. Once I gave the idea of not eating out all the time a chance, I started cooking quick meals at home a lot more – and I got better at them. Now, I can produce some pretty good food very quickly, so the food quality isn’t a question. We’re also often finished with all aspects of dinner an hour faster than if we eat out, so we have more time to do things like play a game together or watch a movie together.

What’s my point? Our lives are like a river. They flow through the channel of assumptions and priorities that we set for them. If we begin to alter those assumptions and priorities a little, sometimes the river will fight that change in flow, but most of the time, it’ll happily shift course and find that this new path is even more serene than the old one.

Here’s another example: bookstores. I used to be utterly addicted to bookstores. Twice a week (at least), I’d stop at a particular local bookstore not far from where I worked, browse for a while, and usually walk out with a book or two.

At the time, this seemed normal and quite enjoyable. I couldn’t imagine life without lots of fresh, new books to read. When we had our financial low point, I couldn’t even imagine cutting out this “habit.”

Several of the frugality tip lists I read strongly encouraged substituting the bookstore for the library, but my mind was already made up. Libraries were boring places that smelled like mice and I wouldn’t enjoy it. I basically pushed myself into going, simply because I was willing to try anything.

Lo and behold, I walked out the door with two books I really wanted to read under my arm (along with a big pile of personal finance ones). For free.

And the path of my river changed. I started using the library all the time. I discovered PaperBackSwap. And I gradually slowed my bookstore stops to a crawl. Now, I visit a bookstore once every couple of months at most.

The net result of that? I didn’t give up what I loved – reading books. I still had a big pile of fresh new ones to read. What I gave up was spending a lot of money on them – a big relief, indeed.

For me, the advantage of going minimal is not to give up the things you love. It’s to figure out what about them you truly do love. When people say, “I can’t possibly give up cable,” why is that? Are they afraid of losing a specific program? Or are they afraid to lose those lovely evenings that they enjoy in their comfortable chair or on the couch snuggled with their partner watching a show they both like?

If it’s the latter, why not ditch cable, hook your computer up to your television, and watch some shows off of Hulu? Or get a Netflix streaming subscription for just a few dollars and do the same? That way, you keep the experience you love – watching television from your comfortable chair – without the inconvenience of a hefty cable bill each month.

Alternately, you might find that you’re throwing money towards things that you think you should care about (likely because others around you do), but internally, you don’t really care about them at all. Cut these behaviors out of your life. Engaging in things you don’t really like because you think others will like you because of it is a sure path to unhappiness – and a sure path to an empty wallet.

Strip back your life. If you get rid of something you truly, deeply miss and can’t find a way to replace it, bring it back. The whole purpose is to figure out what you really do value (which are things that are perfectly fine to spend money on) and the things that you really don’t value. Often, there’s a ton of grey area in our lives between these groups – and that grey area is lost money that brings us nothing in return except heartache and missed opportunities.

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.

How do you minimize distractions while you’re working? I also work from home and find that many people are not respectful of this. Even if I choose not to answer the phone, sometimes the ringing proves to be enough to cause a break in concentration, which results in lost time. Is it rude to leave an outgoing message on our answering machine, to the effect of “…we can’t answer the phone right now as we are unavailable or working….”? Even then I don’t think it would get the message across.
- Kristine

I usually just turn the ringers off on my telephones and allow messages to go straight to voicemail or an answering machine. I also shut down my email and log off of any messaging services I’m on.

My feeling on this is simple. The real meat of my work is best done in focused chunks. When I have a two hour period of time where I can just sit down and block out the world, I’m ridiculously productive in my writing.

On the other hand, if I allow myself to be interrupted, my writing slows to an absolute crawl and, in the end, there’s little benefit from the things I was able to immediately handle.

There’s almost nothing on this earth that’s worth interrupting those focused sessions. Without them, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do.

So when you are bad at budgeting, and the money is going willy nilly do you think it is wise to sit down with an accountant to help come up with a plan? I find that people like Dave Ramsey just want you to make a budget and use cash only but if you could do that you would not be in the problem you are already are in! I am meeting with an accountant to help me set up a plan because obviously I can’t do it right. What are your thoughts on this? The accountant also said every time he spends money he thinks how many hours will I need to work to get this, he told me he is a tight wad!
- Tamara

If you’re having difficulty with the structure and numbers of a budget, an accountant can help, but that’s usually not the problem.

A budget is a piece of paper that does nothing more than represent a promise to yourself to get your spending under control. For the most part, we can’t make choices about how much we spend in many required areas, like our rent or our sewer bill. Our choices come in areas like food, entertainment, our automobile, and the like.

The key to controlling spending in those areas is mindfulness and impulse control, not having a piece of paper.

A budget is useful – particularly at first – because it lets you see what you’re really spending in those various areas. It says, “Hey, you’re spending a ridiculous amount on entertainment and it’s hurting you. Cut back.”

In the end, though, you have to make the behavior changes. A budget can’t do it for you.

So, yes, if you’re having difficulty with the structure and the numbers, have an accountant help you. But don’t expect the presence of a budget on paper to magically change your situation.

$350,000, divided out by 18 years, is only $53/day or so.

Counting up food, clothes, field trips, housing, etc. that you pay for your children, would $53 a day sound like an unreasonable number?
- A.J.

A.J.’s comment refers to some estimates that the average cost of raising a child born today into adulthood is $350,000 by some calculations.

First of all, it’s worth noting that such a number is an average. You’re including kids with full-time nannies. You’re including kids that go to private school. You’re including kids whose parents write checks to their Ivy League institutions. You’re including the kid whose parents bought him or her a brand new Lexus for their sixteenth birthday.

In short, most of us will actually spend less than that total raising our children. What is that less number? It depends a lot on the choices you make.

Are you going to buy them a car when they’re sixteen? Are you going to pay for college? Are you going to hire tutors? Are you going to get them into a better school? Are you going to buy them a top-of-the-line instrument for band? Are you going to dress them in new trendy clothes or go shopping first at thrift stores? Are you feeding them organics from day one? Are you going to travel extensively with them as they grow up? Are you going to move into a larger house to accommodate them?

All of these choices will make a radical shift in your total expenditures for your child, either up or down. Parents that make all of the low-cost choices will spend significantly less than that $350,000 total – perhaps half, or even less. Other parents who make different choices will spend more.

It really depends on your parenting style and what you value. For me, I’m more willing to invest on what’s in the inside – educational opportunities, food – than what’s on the outside – clothes, a new car.

I am becoming increasingly aware of the inhumane treatment to livestock in the food industry. Do you have any recommendations for websites or books to learn more on where to buy organic food and what resteraunts offer it?
- Mol

I tend to think that the best solution, if you’re worried about big agri-producers, is not to buy organic, but to buy local. Buying local means you can actually visit the farms where the items are produced and see for yourself how they’re treated.

In our case, for example, we buy milk and other dairy products from Picket Fence Creamery in Woodward. We can drive by the farm any time we like and they have very regular open houses and tours. I don’t care if it has an organic label on it or not, that’s a level of trust you just can’t get from buying an anonymous product in the store.

One great place to start with this approach is http://www.localharvest.org/, which has tons of information on eating from local sources.

Obviously, you can’t get all of your food this way, especially if you live in a colder climate, but it’s a big step in the right direction.

Due to reasons too complicated to explain, we have a mortgage where the only ones really keeping track of the balance are ourselves. (In other words, when we make an extra payment, it doesn’t necessarily get recorded unless we keep track of it.)

We have been adding roughly $165 a month to the payment with the goal of paying the loan off early. In the future that amount may go up. But we paid on the loan for a year + before adding additional money. I haven’t found a mortgage calculator that works for us. It is very important to keep track of this (it would be for anyone, but even more so for us). Have you any suggestions for something workable to track these payments?
- Kathryn

It sounds extremely shaky to me that you’re making payments to the bank and they’re not registering. If my lender had this kind of policy, I would make every effort to refinance, because the whole thing sounds really questionable.

In terms of personal financial records, the best thing a person can do is learn how to use a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is so free-form that you can basically track your information in whatever way is most convenient for you. Spend the time to know how to use one.

Beyond that, your best step is probably to find a way through the complicated situation to ensure that your payments are being recorded correctly. There’s little reason for a company to have such sloppy records.

Trent, do you ever enjoy a good cigar?
- Mike

No, I do not. I have had several relatives have a miserable end to their lives due to emphysema (let alone lung cancer) and I’m beginning to watch a few more begin to head down that road. It’s a very painful thing to watch and experience.

This experience has put me firmly in the “not going to smoke” camp. I’m not an anti-smoking zealot by any means, but I do avoid businesses and private clubs that allow smoking and I’m extremely hesitant to visit the home of a smoker.

Many people respond with comments along the lines of “an occasional cigar is no big deal.” Maybe that’s true, but watching my grandmother spend the last few years of her life struggling for every single breath puts me firmly on the side of prudence in this case.

Trent, you mention that you keep your computer on because it automatically collects data at certain times. I was wondering if you are trolling for news articles or something similar to keep up to date on specific topics. I’m interested in doing that myself and was hoping you could suggest the easiest way to “troll” for news or blogger posts using keywords or something. Not sure if this is what you do, but if you have any pointers, it would be much appreciated.
- Victoria Vargas

I collect articles in an offline RSS reader that automatically checks hourly for updates. I save them locally so that, in the event that a blog disappears from the face of the earth, I still have a personal archive of the writings. It also enables me to read such writings when the internet is unavailable, which happens every few months or so here for a day or so.

Beyond that, I also run Folding@Home, which utilizes unused processing power of our home’s computers to analyze proteins, the results of which can be used in biomedical research to cure diseases. I have these programs set to automatically return results as soon as they’re finished and retrieve new ones, which means that Folding@Home sometimes runs in the middle of the night or on weekend afternoons.

Beyond that, my local computer also stores automatic backups of The Simple Dollar.

Between all of these automated things, I’m better off just leaving the computer running. It performs several important tasks, even when I’m not there to manage it.

I’ve been following you on Goodreads and you read a lot! Are you going to make a “best of 2009″ list for books so people might have some interesting Christmas gift ideas?
- Kelly

I will probably have a “best of 2009″ article or two on my irregularly-updated personal blog (right now, with my book crunch, I don’t have time for such updates, sadly). But I know that a lot of my readers are avid book readers who also often gift books to friends and relatives, so for you all, here’s my current “top ten books of 2009″ list. I’m including only books published in the last 24 months that I read for the first time in 2009.

1. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
2. Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
3. Supermarket: A Novel by Satoshi Azuchi (new in English)
4. This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
5. Anathem by Neal Stephenson
6. Satchel by Larry Tye
7. Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad
8. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
9. Sunnyside by Glenn David Gold
… and, honestly, I don’t have a tenth that fits into this group quite yet.

What do you do with the personal finance books you review but don’t keep?
- Millie

Many of the books I review come straight from the library, and that’s where I return them. By now, I must be one of the best customers of the Ames Public Library in Ames, Iowa.

Aside from that, though, I do pick up a few books for my own use. When I have one of those, I either give it away to a reader randomly (I just pick a commenter that tickles my fancy) or I ship it away via PaperBackSwap for something I’ll find more worthwhile.

On a rare occasion, I’ll keep it because it seems like a good reference or has potential for inspiration in the future.

If you had sufficient money, would you choose to send your children to a private school?
- Charles

No. Instead, I’d choose to live in an area that put a high value on public education, a town where the citizens were willing to pay local taxes to have an incredibly strong local school district. There, I’d send them to the public school.

To me, private school is a good solution for affluent parents who are focused on education but required to live in an area with really poor public education. Since parents often don’t have the choice to simply raise taxes and improve the district with a wave of their hand, private school is a logical solution for them.

What about homeschooling? For one, I don’t believe in my own skills as an educator enough to follow this path. I suppose I would consider an appropriate tutor if money were no object and I was strongly opposed to the public school and I couldn’t move for some reason, but that seems like a pretty narrow situation.

I also often feel as though children are homeschooled to protect those children from certain kinds of knowledge or strongly reinforce particular ideas. However, the purpose of an education is to gain exposure to all kinds of knowledge and build up the tools to interpret and make sense of that knowledge. I want my children to face challenging decisions and ideas, and part of that means being exposed to children and families with different ideas and perspectives and values.

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