For this week’s roundup, I went to several of my favorite personal finance sites and looked for useful Christmas-related posts to share with you all – and I found quite a few. Enjoy!

Who and How Much to Tip During the Holidays The link to Emily Post’s suggestions in this article is quite useful, but so are the comments. (@ five cent nickel)

The Wealthy Aren’t Who You Think They Are Frugality and tightwaddishness (is that a word?) aren’t the same thing at all. (@ free money finance)

5 Green Gifts of Experience and Time These are gifts that are awesome to receive at Christmastime. (@ bargaineering)

Gifts for the Person who Has Everything It’s always important to remember that no one on Earth has enough time. (@ wisebread)

Start Saving For Next Year’s Christmas Today My Christmas 2010 plans will begin on December 26 at about 10 in the morning. (@ get rich slowly)

100 Ways to a Stress Free Christmas I included this two weeks ago, but I’m including it again today because I’ve read it so many times this Christmas season and a bit of de-stress can really help a lot of us out this time of year. (@ dumb little man)

One of my biggest time management weaknesses is gaming. I love taking breaks to try out a new free computer game. Most of the time, though, the game’s not engrossing enough to hold my interest.

This list is filled with the exceptions.

Here are six free computer games that are so filled with incredibly enjoyable game play that I find myself going back to them time and time again for just one more play.

League of Legends
http://www.leagueoflegends.com/
League of Legends is a fast-paced competitive online game that mixes fast-paced game play and careful planning in an interesting mix. In the game, you play as a champion who battles other champions in online matches. The gameplay is really straightforward – mostly, you’re competing on a large map (that’s extremely reminiscent of Warcraft III) where you move your character around with the mouse and order it into combat against the enemy. As you battle, your character grows stronger, learning new abilities, and it also picks up gold, which you can use to buy better weapons and armor within the match. Usually, you play in groups, where two teams of five players compete against each other. The game also includes a really smart matchmaker which pairs you against people of a similar skill and experience level as you.

What makes this game so interesting is that as you play more matches (win or lose), you slowly earn experience points, which allow you to not only unlock new champions to use in the matches, but also allows you to make your various champions stronger. The addictiveness of the gameplay is immense – you find yourself improving your character a bit, then you want to jump back in and play some more.

If you play League of Legends, you might see me on from time to time. My summoner name is Volarus (a name I sometimes use in online games).

Desktop Tower Defense
http://www.handdrawngames.com
I’ve mentioned Desktop Tower Defense before, but I’ll mention it again here for two reasons. One, after four years, I’m still playing it. Two, they have a new “pro” version with a ton of scenarios and other features to play through.

Desktop Tower Defense is a very simple game in which you place towers within a small rectangle while little critters run across the screen. The towers you place shoot the critters and, with each critter taken out, you earn a bit of gold. However, each wave of critters is a bit stronger than the next, so you have to use your gold to either upgrade your current towers or place new ones.

It’s really addictive and plays quite easily in your web browser.

Line Rider
http://www.official-linerider.com/default.aspx
Line Rider isn’t really so much a game as it is a creative sand box. With your mouse, you draw a line, then you click start. A little guy appears and begins to slide along your line, being pulled downwards by gravity. When he reaches the end, he leaps off into the abyss.

Then you try again, with three or four lines – or whatever you want. Then you click start and see what happens.

And again. And again. And again. Until you make something like this. Well, maybe not, but you’ll almost assuredly make something goofy and elaborate.

Bridgecraft
http://www.candystand.com/play/bridgecraft
Bridgecraft’s name basically says it all – you build bridges so that a person can easily cross it. The first few are easy, then suddenly the difficulty goes way up. You have to step back and think about the problem for a while – thus, it almost becomes a puzzle game of sorts.

Never mind the cartoony graphics, there’s a ton of gameplay to be had here.

The Space Collective
http://www.casualcollective.com/#games/the_space_game
A simple version of Starcraft, playable in a web browser? That’s probably how I would describe this one, as it’s a real time strategy game in which you gather resources, defend your resource-gathering structures, and build structures to attack the resource-gathering structures of others.

The learning curve is a bit steep, but if you play around with it, it’s pretty easy to figure out, particularly if you’ve played games like Warcraft and Starcraft in the past.

Fantastic Contraption
http://www.addictinggames.com/fantasticcontraption.html
This is a very addictive little puzzle game in which you’re simply building contraptions in order to move a ball into a goal. As the game goes on, the required contraptions become more and more elaborate and require more and more forethought to assemble.

Like DTD, above, this is a game I’ve played for years and keep coming back to time and time again.

I actually had an seventh game on this list, but I chose to remove it because it featured a very loud ad for a feminine hygiene product as the game was loading. No matter how good the game is, I’m just going to click away from that. (And, no, this isn’t sexism – I have similar feelings about any male ads along similar lines.)

If you reach the end of this post and haven’t enjoyed yourself for several hours (for free, no less!)… well, you need to go back up there and try out some more links.

Christmas has always been a challenging time of the year for me.

During various years, within a week or two on either side of Christmas, my grandfather (who I cherished) died of cancer, a great uncle that I was very close to also died of cancer, and one of my cousins who was exactly the same age as me committed suicide.

The Christmas season is thus bittersweet for me. There are so many positive feelings and memories I have about this season, but the memories of the final days of loved ones and of funerals and of people I dearly miss also fill the season. There are a few Christmas carols that, when I first hear them during the Christmas season, whack me in the stomach like a two by four.

Because of all of this, I often get really obsessive about trying to ensure that the Christmas season is really great for all of those around me – my parents, my children, my wife. The emotional mix of the Christmas season, for me, often results in me making spending choices that I wouldn’t otherwise make. I’ll choose wonderfully frugal gifts for some people, then I’ll spend far too much on a gift for someone else.

By the time Christmas finally rolls around, I almost feel relieved that it’s all over for another year. I also feel a lot of guilt and shame because I feel as though I spent far too much on gifts for others during the season. By February, I’ve resolved to not do it again this year.

Then November rolls around and the first snow of the year, for some reason, always makes me think of my grandfather. Then I’ll hear Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and the same cycle of feelings always returns.

I think many of us share a lot of conflicting feelings about the holiday season. It’s often an emotionally charged time of the year, with relatives coming together and sometimes exposing very raw nerves. It’s often also connected with a lot of memories of childhood and of people long since past. Add on top of that the fact that December contains the shortest amount of daylight of any month of the year (contributing to a bit of the winter blues in everyone) and it can be a very challenging mix.

For all of us, there are lots of emotional triggers in life (mine just happens to be Christmas). Emotions can flood out from an innocent phrase, the thought of a long lost friend, or any number of other things.

The trick is to remember that when your emotions are running rampant, it is very easy to make very poor choices with your money.

Over the last few years, I’ve really come to recognize how challenging the Christmas season can be for me. The biggest step I’ve taken to keep my finances under control this month is to simply do as much Christmas shopping as I can before the month even begins.

In other words, I do everything I can to separate my wallet from what I know will be an emotional surge for me. I minimize the reasons I might possibly have to go shopping for gifts – and for other things – as the Christmas season approaches, lest I wind up with a pile of poor spending choices brought about by a psychological crest.

What things are hidden in your psychology that cause you to make poor choices? Is it certain people? Is it a certain time of the year? Is it a certain thing? Whatever it is, there are many rewards – financial and otherwise – from stepping back, recognizing that you’re affected strongly by this thing, and doing everything you can to keep your money as far away from the situation as you possibly can.

Yes, it will still be a merry Christmas for me. The light in my children’s eyes helps quite a lot, and it’s a light that I’ve come to learn has little to do with presents or things. It has to do with a dad that lets them pile on in the living room.

Jim writes in with an interesting question:

I’m in the market for a late model used car. I’ve narrowed my desired model down to a handful of choices, each with different gas mileage data. How can you really figure out how much fuel efficiency is worth in terms of dollars and cents? I know how to do the basic math, but it seems artificial. How would you do it?

It’s pretty easy to see how better fuel efficiency saves you money. If gas is $3 a gallon and you have a car that gets 30 miles per gallon and a car that gets 40 miles per gallon, over 100,000 miles, the more fuel-efficient car will save you $2,500. That’s real cash in the pocket.

The only problem with that is the number of variables in the question. How much will gas cost in the future? How long will you drive the car? Does your personal driving habits have anything to do with it?

Let’s look at each factor and see how it affects the importance of fuel efficiency in a car purchase.

How Much Will Gas Cost?
You can usually get a solid estimate of where the price of gas will go over the next year by paying attention to the short term energy forecast from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but anything beyond that is basically tantamount to gambling. Even within that year, unexpected events can disrupt the price of gas – like 9/11.

So what can a person do when it comes to figuring out the future price of gasoline?

My first piece of advice is to estimate high if you’re in doubt. A high estimate of future gas prices simply means that you’re putting a bit of extra value into fuel efficiency. If fuel prices really are high, you’ll be glad you did it – even if they’re not, you’ll still reap some rewards from fuel efficiency. This is a better scenario than estimating low and being stuck with a gas guzzler if prices spike.

Beyond that, I would assume the trend in the one year forecast will continue for several years. Since it’s the only real “future” number you have to go on, just assume that trend will continue for however many years you intend to own your car.

So, let’s say you’re buying a car and you intend to drive it for about seven years. The fuel estimate report says “crude oil prices contribute to an increase in the annual average regular-grade gasoline retail price from $2.35 per gallon in 2009 to $2.83 in 2010.” That means that a one-year increase will be about $0.48 per gallon.

So, if you’re going to own the car from 2010 to 2016, you’d assume $2.83 a gallon for 2010, $3.21 a gallon for 2011, $3.69 a gallon for 2012, $4.17 a gallon for 2013, $4.65 a gallon for 2014, $5.13 a gallon for 2015, and $5.61 a gallon for 2016. This averages out to $4.17 a gallon over the time you’d own that car. That seems like a high-end calculation to me. However, recall that in 2000, gas prices were often below $1 per gallon, for comparison’s sake.

How Many Miles Will You Put On The Car?
This is a fairly personal calculation, but we’ll stick with the above premise that you’re intending to drive the late model used car for seven years. This is comparable to how long I’ve driven my truck – and it’s very near the point of needing to be traded away.

How many miles do you put on a car in a year? If you have some mileage data, that calculation becomes much easier. Look at your own records and see if you have some data from a year or two earlier that indicates your mileage on a specific date. Calculate how many years ago that was – for example, you might note that the number came from 1.3 years ago – and then subtract that mileage from your current mileage. Divide the difference in mileage by the years since that number and you have a rough yardstick of your annual driving needs.

For the sake of calculations below, we’ll assume that you’re going to be driving 12,000 miles a year. Over seven years, that’s 84,000 miles on the car. Again, this may change based on your own plans and your own auto usage.

How Is Your Driving?
You can use FuelEconomy.gov to find out the fuel economy of nearly every make and model sold in the United States over the past decade or two – it’s an invaluable resource. However, the government uses certain standards to minimize the variation in fuel efficiency from car to car, and your driving is almost assuredly different than those standards.

Here’s a quick test. Fill up your car as much as you can, write down the mileage, then drive it normally for a while. Fill up again and write down how much gas you put in. Fill up again and write down how much gas you added, plus your current mileage. Add up the two gas totals. Subtract your old mileage from your current one. Divide the difference in mileage by the amount of gas you put in, and you’ll get a good estimate of your real world mileage for your current car. It’s not perfect, because it doesn’t vary across seasons too much, but it at least provides some variance for your use.

Now, go look up your current car on FuelEconomy.gov and see what average fuel efficiency your model should get. Then, subtract your calculated fuel efficiency from the government-estimated efficiency and then divide that difference by the government efficiency. That’ll tell you by what percentage your driving habits – plus the conditions you drive in – vary from the government tests. Subtract that from 1 (or from 100 if you’re using percents).

Then, look up the models you’re considering buying and multiply that by the fuel efficiency percentage you just calculated. That new number should get you pretty close to the fuel efficiency you should actually expect to get from the car on the road.

Why do all this? A person who drives aggressively will simply be less fuel efficient than a person who drives conservatively. Thus, an aggressive driver gets less benefit from buying a fuel efficient car. Doing this just calibrates things based on how you drive – and the conditions in which you drive (as winter driving often has a negative effect on efficiency).

So, let’s say that ol’ lead-footed Jim finds that he only gets about 80% of the government numbers out of his car.

A Calculation Example
Jim is looking at a 2007 Toyota Corolla and a 2006 Ford Focus, for example. He looks them up on FuelEconomy.gov and finds that the government estimates that the Corolla gets 31 miles per gallon and the Focus gets 26 miles per gallon. Jim estimates that he drives at about 80% of that efficiency – he drives on the interstate a lot and is a bit aggressive – so that modifies things to about 25 miles per gallon for the Corolla and about 21 miles per gallon for the Focus.

Jim wants to drive the car for seven years and puts about 12,000 miles on it per year. As above, he calculates that the average gas price will be $4.17 a gallon for those years, and he’ll put 84,000 miles on each car.

So how much will the Corolla save him?

In the Corolla, Jim will total up about 3,360 gallons of gas used. At a cost of $4.17 a gallon, that’s $14,011.20 spent on gas over the period. In the Focus, Jim will total up about 4,000 gallons of gas. At $4.17 a gallon, that’s $16,680.

The Corolla would save Jim $2,668.80 in fuel costs over that period, using the estimates we came up with above.

Wait, I Don’t Agree With That One Assumption, So Your Entire Post Is Bogus
The real challenge in making such prediction-based calculations is that they’re based on assumptions, and almost all assumptions about the future are up for debate. The best anyone can do is rely on the best data available and make reasonable leaps based upon that data – and have a rational reason for explaining those leaps.

If you don’t agree with one of the assumptions – or two of the assumptions, or more – change them. Just be sure that you have a valid, intelligent reason for changing it that’s based on some real data or logic. I’ve done my best to explain the logic behind the calculations and information I’ve shown here so that you can use it in your own calculations, or at least have a good starting point for finding your own assumptions.

Good luck.

Each Monday, The Simple Dollar opens up the reader mailbags and answers ten to twenty simple questions offered up by the readers on personal finance topics and many other things. Got a question? Ask it in the comments. You might also enjoy the archive of earlier reader mailbags.

I’m 24 years old. If you combine all my accounts..checking, savings, investments, etc, I have about $20,000 to my name. $25,000 is about what I make in a year. I have absolutely no debt, not even a car payment. I want to buy a house at some point, but due to some other things that need to fall into place, this will be at least a year off. Other than that, no (expected) large expenses.

Before the rates fell, most of my savings was in CDs. Now that 5% CDs are a thing of the past, I’ve been investing a lot of my savings in Vanguard mutual funds. Here’s the question: right now, literally half my money is in mutual funds. They’re some of the lowest-risk funds they had, but still, is that…insane? How much scratch should I put in a regular ol’ savings account and how much should I invest? I just hate my money sitting there not making interest.
- JGF

It seems that your primary goal for this saving is for a home purchase that is more than a year off at the bare minimum. If that’s the case, I see no problem having some of your money in mutual funds.

If I were you, I would probably treat about three months’ worth of that money as an emergency fund and keep it in cash in a savings account somewhere where I could easily reach it. After that, I would view the rest as savings toward that house goal.

Given that the goal is nebulous and at least a year off – and it sounds like much more than that – I’d probably have some significant portion of it in some investment that had more risk than cash, because cash isn’t earning much right now. What you’re doing right now sounds completely reasonable.

Of course, when your plans begin to become clear, I’d get that money into cash pretty quickly so that you have a strong sense of where you’re at and you’re not at risk due to a big unexpected event (like another 9/11) which could devastate your savings and plans.

Recently, I’ve decided to start a video blog about personal finance, but I don’t know what I would need to start. Any ideas?
- Jim

The most basic tool would be a simple webcam that you could attach to the top of your computer monitor. I would start with a very inexpensive model, like the Microsoft LiveCam, or a solid Logitech web cam that you find at an after-Christmas sale. This shouldn’t set you back more than $25 or so.

Use that to figure out if you really have what it takes to do such videos. It’s really not easy, to tell the truth – it takes a ton of practice and careful development to make videos people want to see.

If you find that it’s working for you and want to make videos on the go, look at a Flip UltraHD or something similar. That’s what I have for such uses.

My brother has finally turned his life around after several years “in the wilderness.” I really want to help him out, but my brother won’t accept any form of charity. Do you have any suggestions on what I can do?
- Callie

Sit your brother down. Tell him straight to his face that you’re really proud of him. Give him a big hug. Then tell him that you know he does not want any charitable help, but that you truly do want to help him out as he turns his life around. Offer up a few suggestions of how you could help. Make it very clear that this is a pure gift and that you want nothing in return – you’re doing it because you’re so happy to have him back after his “wilderness years.”

If he turns this down, so be it. My guess is that he’ll probably think it over some and has at least some chance of accepting it. Even if he does not, though, remember that you have already given him a huge boost simply by telling him how proud you are of him and how glad you are to have him in your life. That can mean a lot to a person.

Don’t force a gift on him. He may have a lot to prove to himself yet, let alone to anyone else. Let him do it, but be there for him if he needs it. Some life crises are very hard to recover from.

It is not racist to observe that a particular community has a particular ethnic makeup. Nor is it racist to observe that that community has certain cultural characteristics that you’re looking for. Where you’re edging toward racism is in asserting that the one is the cause of the other.

For example, if people of Scandinavian descent are inherently less inclined to crime and violence, that implies that people of certain other ethnicities are inherently more inclined to crime and violence. Which ethnicities are those? Actually, don’t answer that.
- Johanna

Saying that one ethnic group has a positive trait is not an implication that another ethnic group has a negative trait. If you have twenty ethnic groups and one of them has a propensity towards low incidences of violent crime, that doesn’t mean another group has a much higher propensity towards violent crime. If you remove that low propensity group, the average crime rate goes up a little, but that has nothing to do with any specific ethnic group at all. It just means a positive has been eliminated.

Some ethnic groups do have a propensity towards lower crime rates. If a particular culture puts a strong value on courtesy to others, law and order, and so on, the people in that culture are going to be ingrained all throughout their lives to be more anti-crime than people in another culture who receive different cultural messages. Another culture may have different messages that they value that promote different things as a primary focus – perhaps they promote entrepreneurship, stewardship of resources, artistic endeavors, tight community bonds, or pursuit of pleasure as central cultural ideas. An ethnic group that promotes stewardship of resources won’t necessarily promote resistance to crime as strongly as another group – does that make one group better than another? I don’t think so. In fact, I think there’s a lot of value in people from each of those ethnicities spending time together and bouncing ideas off of each other. And that’s why diversity is awesome.

Obviously, there will still be individuals who commit crime on an individual basis – we’re looking at an aggregate of a large number of people. There are many factors at work when it comes to social behaviors – socioeconomic conditions, to name just one. However, ethnicity and culture are another factor, too.

Racism comes from the idea that one set of ethnic elements is so inherently superior to the other that people from one ethnic group are inherently superior to people from another ethnic group. Simply stating that one ethnic group has a propensity towards low crime doesn’t make any sort of judgment call against any other ethnic group and doesn’t imply any sort of general superiority.

I prefer to live in an area with a low crime rate. If there is an ethnic group with a low propensity towards crime, I’ll bet that you’ll find a higher proportion of that ethnic group in the area with low crime. I prefer to live in the Midwest – preferably in Iowa – so my children can have access to their grandparents and there’s a diversity in the seasonal weather, which I really enjoy. There are some ethnic groups that have higher proportions in the Midwest and others that have lower proportions. If there are ethnic groups that have a tendency towards lower crime and a tendency to inhabit the upper Midwest, I’m likely to wind up living near them.

Perhaps you prefer to live in an area with a strong artistic community. I’d love to visit it to see some of the art festivals and the street art going on there. Maybe you’d like to come to where I live, sit on the front porch, and strike up ten conversations in an hour with people walking by, and perhaps get up and stroll down the street to someone else’s house without worrying about dead-bolting your door.

They’re both cool. And I think they’re both needed in a healthy, vibrant world.

Ethnic demographics can say a lot about a community without being racist in the least. It’ll just tell you what kind of interesting stuff you might find there and what kinds of social norms you might expect. Racism only comes into the picture when you start using such definitions as a way of stating that one group is superior to another group.

I prefer to live in a small community in northern Iowa with a low crime rate. Those two factors likely mean I’ll be living in a community with a lot of people of Scandanavian heritage – just look at the demographics of small towns in northern Iowa with a low crime rate. Will I find vibrant artistic communities, intense religious and spiritual diversity, or passionate political debates? I very well might, but probably not nearly as much as I would if I lived elsewhere (say, the south Bronx). That’s a tradeoff that I choose, for better or worse. You might choose differently, and that’s cool by me.

The sad part about talking about real issues like this – issues that affect all of our lives – is that some people will always find something that makes them believe that it’s all racist, and they accuse people of being racist. False attacks of racism are just as pernicious as real racism – they both seek to bring good, well-meaning people down.

When is a good age to teach children the idea of helping those children that are less fortunate? I was thinking of taking my four year old daughter with me to buy toys for “Toys for Tots” or “Angel Tree Ministries”, but then I thought she might question why.
- Cindy

Shouldn’t you want her to question why? Just let her know that there are a lot of people out there who are less fortunate than her and that you can spend some of your good fortune to make their day a bit better.

We gave our son a Money Savvy Pig for his fourth birthday. It includes a slot for money that is intended to be donated and now, at the two month mark, the slot has about seven or eight dollars in it. He’s intending to save it until next Christmas, then give all of the money at once to Jump for Joel.

We’ve talked quite often about how there are children in the world who don’t have money for toys and, in fact, often don’t have money for food or water. I don’t know how much he understands of it, but it’s something that we’re already talking about.

Because of the increasing volatility of most careers, I’ve been encouraging my son to think seriously about taking up a trade after high school, like becoming an electrician or a plumber. He’d be able to go to trade school and get quickly into the workforce with a set of skills that will always be in demand and he’d also have a lot of potential of becoming his own boss down the road.

A lot of my family has been telling me – in front of my son, even – how horrible this advice is. What do you think?
- Elliott

I actually think it’s very good advice, particularly if your son is not a student from the top 5% or so of the academic heap.

I know many people in such trades who are doing quite well for themselves. My wife’s first cousin is a very successful electrician, for one, and I have a cousin who has built a very good business from his carpentry skills. Both of them make quite a lot of money each year and have never faced a student loan bill or a skill set that’s out of date in their lives.

Don’t let the prevailing wisdom that your child has to go to college guide you. Yes, it can be a great experience. Yes, a lot of people cherish their college memories. Yes, many careers basically require a B.A. or a B.S.

Those things don’t mean that it’s a path for everyone, though. It doesn’t have to be a path for your son. The trades are a perfectly viable path for anyone.

Is there a good rule of thumb for how big your emergency fund should be? What do you use?
- Sal

My general rule of thumb for emergency funds is pretty simple. I usually tell people to have three months’ worth of living expenses on hand in cash, plus an additional month for each dependent they have. So, if you’re married, you should have four months of living expenses for the household. If you have two kids, shoot for six months.

In truth, though, human psychology plays a big role in how big your emergency fund should be. If you’re a person who finds yourself worrying a lot about bad scenarios, you should have more than that, because it will help you sleep better at night.

Don’t get caught up in the idea that money sitting in a savings account or in CDs is somehow a bad investment. It’s not. It’s a very stable investment that earns a steady but small return, which is exactly what you need for money you might need to completely rely on. Other investments might earn more, but they also have the risk of losing a lot – and the time when you might most need your emergency fund is when the economy is down, and that’s often when many investments are down as well.

Linking and referring between personal finance blogs seems to be very common. Obviously, when you link from your site to another, there is an implicit endorsement of the other blog and its contents. Recently a very successful PF blogger I read suggesting owning a gun as a “cheap home security option”. That advice really horrified me for a number of reasons and I will now not return to read again.

I’m interested to see you take on this.
- Marcella

For starters, I only link to blogs that are currently in my Google Reader – in other words, the blogs I’m currently reading. There’s usually about 60 blogs in there, with probably five rotating in and five rotating out in a given week. I tend to discover new blogs through links from the blogs I currently read and respect.

What makes me stop reading a blog? I stop reading if the blog stops making me think over a long period of time. So, for example, the blog you mention above probably wouldn’t leave my reader any time soon, even though I don’t agree with the statement. Such a statement would make me step back and think a little, and that’s what a good blog should do.

I also stop reading if the amount of posting of the blog drastically goes up – from a post a day to ten posts a day or something – or if the topic in general drastically changes. I stop reading if a blogger is obviously becoming a paid spokesperson for something that’s not their own work (I relish the success of bloggers who write about their book they just invested time in or their new video series or something like that). I stop reading if I see blatant hate speech or obvious disrespect for others or blatant trolling for traffic or something like that.

I don’t care about grammatical errors or other such things. Blogs are places for thought-provoking first drafts and sincere thoughts from the heart, and so I’m not looking for published polish. I don’t care about occasional errors, either, for the same reason. If you want finished perfection, go read The New Yorker (which I do also read, but I get something very different out of it than I do out of blogs).

What about linking? I usually only link to an article that makes me particularly think. I don’t really worry that much about a “track record” because everyone has a few good ideas inside of them. If I’m made to think or reconsider what I’m doing, it’s probably linkworthy.

I don’t believe my link to a blog is an implicit endorsement of the entire archives of another blog. I’m willing to bet that I would find something I disagreed with strongly in the archive of any blog out there. I just link out because I found something interesting and want to share it.

Recently I ordered a book on how to make money at home with Google. The cost was only $1.99. so I thought I had nothing to lose. Suffice it to say, I never received a book and almost immediately had money taken from my Visa card until i finally had to cancel my card. I think this was a shameful attempt to take advantage of those of us needing work. Are there any ways to make money on the internet that are not scams like this, or should I just forget it and remain poor?
- Kathy

Here’s a very simple rule of thumb for buying online: never give your credit card info or any other personal info to to any company that you’ve never heard of before. Just don’t do it, period. It’s not worth the risk.

As for whether it’s possible to make money online, there are lots of ways to do it, but there are no easy ways to do it. The ways that require little time investment are ways that don’t earn you a great deal per hour, like Mechanical Turk. The ways that can earn you a lot per hour take a ton of start-up time, like creating your own blog, before you earn much at all.

If anyone is promising to show you an easy way to make a lot of money online quickly, they’re selling you something that I would stay far, far away from.

Trent, I have been a reader for over 2 years. I liked when you posted frugal tips and not your opinions about the number of children one should have and about why Nordics make better neighbors. I will no longer be reading your blog and will not be referring people to it anymore.
- maria

I hope you find a blog that suits what you’re looking for. Money Saving Mom might be right up your alley, as she posts plenty of “deal” lists and other such things. I sincerely hope that any reader who stops finding value in The Simple Dollar finds another site that meets whatever needs they have in life.

Maria’s complaints come solely from the reader mailbag, which I started because people wanted a forum in which other things besides strictly money issues were discussed and people could ask me things of any nature. Often, these questions are spawned from an exchange in the comments of a post or from a simple reference to some other aspect of life. It has proved time and time again to be one of the most popular parts of The Simple Dollar.

My judge of whether The Simple Dollar works is whether or not I’d enjoy it as a reader, and if I just posted nothing but frugal tips, I’d probably unsubscribe. I stick with the blogs that I read on personal finance – and many other topics – because the people who write them are real, interesting people who I’ve come to disagree with, be entertained by, and respect over a long period of time. That’s what I keep in my feed reader, and that’s what I want to keep The Simple Dollar being. Part of the cost of that is that I sometimes lose readers and I certainly hear a lot of insults, both from people with genuine concerns and from trolls. That’s a cost that I’ve learned to live with.

If that type of stance means I lose all my readers, I’m fine with that. I’d rather speak from the heart to an empty room than read a list to thousands.

Got any questions of your own? Ask them in the comments and I’ll get to them in a future mailbag.

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a book of interest not directly connected to personal finance.

I’m a big believer in following your passions, wherever they might take you. Part of doing that is preparation – saving money, making choices that pave the way – but another part is simply stepping up to the plate and hitting that fat fasball down the middle of the plate when it comes your way.

Gary Vaynerchuk is passionate about wine. He’s one of the best known wine evangelists in the world because he wears it and shares it. He built a $60 million business in the wine industry mostly on the back of sharing his enthusiasm about wine online. Crush It! tells the story about Gary’s experience in translating his passion into a real business.

Gary’s story and advice rings really true to me because, in many places, it’s a journey I took myself. I did wind up in an area without the mainstream appeal of Gary’s area (sorry, folks, but there aren’t as many frugal people as there are wine fanatics) but most of the elements are strikingly similar.

His conclusions are spot-on, too – but we’ll get to that later.

1 – Passion Is Everything
It’s incredibly hard to be successful at something without being passionate at it. Why? Success takes time – a lot of it – and that early time is often filled with a ton of failure. If you don’t have that true seed of passion that will help you get through those early trials and tribulations, you’ll never make it through. Passion keeps you going even in the face of repeated failure, and it’s only through repeated failure that you build the skillset necessary for success. I agree from experience – I failed as a writer for at least ten years before finding any sort of success with the written word. Without passion for writing, I would have given up and started playing World of Warcraft.

2 – Success Is in Your DNA
Every single person is unique and brings a unique perspective and set of talents to the table. That unique mix is something that is valued by others if you go through the process of mining it and isolating exactly what you have that’s valuable. It’s a long process, one that’s going to include a lot of failure along the way.

3 – Build Your Personal Brand
What do people think of when they think of you? The stronger you can make that theme, the better off you are. Why? Because if you’re able to conjure up something when people think of you, they’ll already have a strong preconceived notion when they see your name pop up in other places. You’ll be familiar – and if you’ve built a positive (or at least an interesting) brand, you’ll turn something ho-hum into something people want to engage with. This might mean books, products you make, speaking engagements, and countless other things.

4 – A Whole New World
As the costs for starting your own business get lower and lower, it becomes less and less of a sensible proposition for talented and intelligent people to work for other people when they could be using that talent and intelligence to build a business for themselves and collect the rewards from their efforts. The Simple Dollar was started on a shoestring with little more than my spare time invested in it, for example. I could have just signed on to write or produce content for another site – but if I had done that, I would have made much less and had much less control over what happened with my stuff. If you’re passionate, don’t sell that passion to others – ride it yourself.

5 – Create Great Content
If you’re not making things that other people want to read or listen to or watch or interact with, no one will pay any attention to you. The keys are straightforward: know what you’re talking about, be excited and passionate about it, and tell a story as you go. Those things work in any medium about any topic that you might be covering.

6 – Choose Your Platform
“If you build it, they will come” isn’t true. You have to make sure people know you’re there and are aware of what you’re talking about. Thus, to get started, you have to go where the people are – places like Twitter and Facebook. Go there before you even have a product and join in the conversation. Follow others who are interested in the things you are and converse with them. Ask questions. Say astute things. Get involved in topics of conversation. Eventually, you’ll start accruing followers yourself – and you can start building from there in whatever direction you want. The key thing is that your followers – the people interested in what you have to say – are your platform.

7 – Keep It Real … Very Real
Don’t put on an act or else that act will inevitably fall apart. Be as real as you can. Be who you are. If you have boundaries, decide what they are right off the bat and make them as clear and concrete as possible – and never cross them. Aside from that, be completely yourself, because your authenticity will defeat any sort of faux image you attempt to develop.

8 – Create Community: Digging Your Internet Trench
Community building largely revolves around interacting with people, engaging in discussions, answering questions, asking questions, and being involved. You create community when you listen to what people say, focus on topics that people want to hear about, involve yourself in conversations, and so on. Each time you connect with a person, that person becomes part of your internet community. The larger that community is, the more powerful of a support platform it becomes for whatever you choose to do.

9 – The Best Marketing Strategy Ever
I will quote this entire chapter: “Care.”

10 – Make the World Listen
Many people start a site and focus immediately on how to turn a buck on it. Don’t worry about it at all. Instead, focus 100% on coming up with interesting content. Content brings eyeballs and eyeballs begats regular readers. It’s much harder to get that ball rolling if you’re focusing some of your energy on monetizing what you’re doing, so don’t. Wait on it.

11 – Start Monetizing
Once you do decide to start making money (after you have a nice audience, of course), there’s a lot of potential avenues for income – advertisements, affiliate programs, speaking engagements, consulting, freelance work, writing a book, and on and on and on. All of that (except for perhaps the direct ads) builds on top of establishing a community of followers who are interested in what you have to say.

12 – Roll with It
Things will change over time. You might find yourself going in a different direction than you initially expected. If that happens, roll with it. Live with the changes and find ways to capitalize on them instead of letting them wear on you. For example, The Simple Dollar has changed drastically since I started in terms of how I split my time and, if it continues, I may actually hire an assistant to help me take care of tasks.

13 – Legacy Is Greater than Currency
In the end, remember that a lasting legacy is much more valuable than money in hand right now. Don’t sell yourself out for something that you don’t believe in. If you do that and maintain honesty with the people who follow you, they’ll respect and value you far more than if you’re into every money-making opportunity that comes along.

Is Crush It! Worth Reading?
If you’ve ever thought you could do what I do, Crush It! is pretty much an essential read. It outlines quite a lot of the process involved in translating a personal passion into an online-led endeavor that can be your primary source of income. It matches up very well with my own experience in doing much the same thing.

The real key behind it, though, is passion. You need to have a passion before you even start or else the book won’t ever take off for you. If you have a passion and want to share it with others and grow it into something that can financially sustain you, that’s where this book takes over.

As Christmas approaches, my wife and I will be doing quite a bit of driving to visit various people for the holiday season. With winter conditions and three young children in the car with us, we’re going to be quite cautious about our trips.

The first step in that journey is to make sure that we have everything we need in the car in case of an emergency of some kind. These supplies are the ultimate form of insurance – they help ensure that we’ll get through a real emergency safe and sound. Here are fifteen things that go into our automobiles in November and stay in there until April.

Blankets are the most important thing you can possibly have with you. If you bury your car in a snowdrift and it won’t start, the ability to keep yourself warm is going to be absolutely vital. Blankets are the best way to do this. I also keep a few hand warmers, too.

A spare charged cell phone will allow you to call 9-1-1 in a pinch. Keep this wrapped up in the blankets so that it’ll be likely to survive a crash without suffering irrepairable damage.

Flares will help rescuers see you. If they’re searching and all they can see is white, a flare will make all the difference in your discovery.

A wind-up radio lets you keep tab with the weather regardless of whether or not you have electricity in your car. A simple winding will do the trick and let you know when conditions have improved and what the state of roads are.

A first aid kit will be vital if someone is hurt in an accident. Perhaps just as important is knowledge of how to use it, because knowing how to apply a leg splint can be very, very important in such a moment.

Extra winter clothes will help you keep warm, especially if you need to leave the vehicle. Layers are key – the more layers of clothes you can put on, the warmer you’ll be down at the surface of your skin.

Jumper cables come in extraordinarily handy on cold mornings when your car doesn’t start. Quite often, it’s the result of a battery that became overly cold overnight and can be started with the help of another vehicle and some jumper cables.

A bag of sand not only adds weight to your car (improving traction) but can be spread to help you get traction if you get stuck in a bad position.

An ice scraper – preferably one with a brush to help remove snow – comes in constant handy throughout the winter. Without it, it will be very difficult to keep your windows cleared.

Dried foods like beef jerky and granola bars are perfect for this type of situation, as they’re energy dense. Don’t keep water or other liquids in your car – they’ll explode if stored below freezing for a long period and you can likely get plenty of liquid in a blizzard – just look outside.

Emergency tire sealant can enable you to get to the next twon in a pinch rather than being stuck beside the road with a flat tire.

Flashlights allow you to see what’s going on and also aid in signaling help. Although flashlights operated by human action exist, they’re not very bright – get one with a very bright bulb and make sure it’s charged.

A shovel will help you to dig out in a pinch. I used to keep one in my truck when I commuted – there simply isn’t room in the car, however (I wish we did have room).

A small tool kit can allow you to fix minor problems yourself on your car. Make sure you have everything you need to (at least) change a tire and loosen or tighten some bolts.

Extra batteries for the flashlight and the radio (assuning you don’t have a wind-up one) are vital. The last thing you want to do is to get stuck, pull out the radio or the flashlight, flip ‘em on, and find that they don’t work.

These tools will help you survive almost any winter weather accident, no matter how bad the storm. By keeping warm and safe and making sure that you can signal to help, you’re doing everything you can to ensure your future.

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, two years ago this week, and three years ago this week. I call it … the Time Machine.

One Year Ago (December 13-19, 2008)
The Two-Career Assumption Here are some deep reflections on the fact that it’s often assumed that both partners in a couple must have a career. In a nutshell, I think it’s completely nonsensical.

Synergizing Hobbies and Career for Greater Personal Success The best hobby is one that teaches you skills that you can use in a professional context. Finding one can be tricky, though.

Planning Ahead for Next Year’s Garden December and January are often the months where most of our garden planning for the coming year occurs. Here are some tactics to use for planning future gardens.

My Take on Christian Themes in Personal Finance Books I don’t mind them, but I think personal finance books are stronger if they don’t use scripture as the evidence for the ideas being presented.

Are You Insuring the Irreplaceable? Don’t spend your money insuring items that you would never replace if your house burnt down. If you’re paying good money to insure things you would never replace… the question is why.

Two Years Ago (December 13-19, 2007)
Maximizing That Hourly Rate: Figuring Out How to Best Utilize My Working Time Jobs work best when they provide you with a lot of income for your time invested. Here, I use three examples from my own life to show how to maximize this rate.

Frugality and Socializing: Finding Potential Friends Who Are Not Consumerism-Oriented Luckily, most of the friends I have now are not consumer-oriented at all. They’re mostly people who enjoy things like getting together for “game nights” or just hanging out.

Christmas, Money, Family, and Love The most valuable Christmas gift of all isn’t a material item that can be bought at the store. It’s something else entirely.

A Talk with My Niece How do you introduce good money ideas to teenagers? It isn’t easy. Here’s how I tackled one attempt at it.

A Frugal Man’s Christmas Wish List (With Ideas for Frugal Ladies, Too!) Here’s a nice list of Christmas gift ideas that appeal to the more practical side of me.

Three Years Ago (December 13-19, 2006)
Review: Your Money or Your Life This is a detailed review of the book that inspired me more than any other to turn my financial life around.

Rewriting Money’s 25 Rules: A Summary Money Magazine had a list of twenty five money rules, several of which I disagreed with. So I rewrote the whole list in a series of articles – this is the summary of the series.

What Exactly Is A Certified Financial Planner, And Why Should I Care? Does the phrase “certified financial planner” really mean anything of value to the average person? Yes — and no. Click through and see what I mean.

25 Gadgets That Actually Save Money Most of these truly do save money – a couple were thrown in to stir up some conversation about whether they really save money or not.

The Talk: Tips For Difficult Financial Discussions Most of these tips hold true for almost any financial discussion you’ll have with the people you care about.

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!