This is the seventh entry in a fourteen part series discussing the time management classic Getting Things Done by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday afternoons and Friday mornings through July 16.

So far, we’ve talked about two of the five major steps for getting things done: collecting all of the stuff you need to do and processing that stuff down. Today, the focus is on organizing – or where the stuff goes when you’re processing it.

Allen suggests that there are seven specific destinations for stuff when we’re processing it. Although this looks complicated, all you really need for this is a trash can, some folders, and some paper.

Trash
This is pretty straightforward. The stuff you don’t intend to keep goes in the trash can. The notes you’ve written to yourself and then processed go straight in the trash can. Envelopes? Trash can. You’d be surprised how large of a portion of your inbox goes straight into the trash can when you’re processing it.

Maybe/Someday
“Maybe/Someday” refers to a collection of lists. I keep all of these in a single folder on my computer so I can easily find them.

What do I mean by this? I have a list of books I’d like to read someday. I have a list of projects I’d like to take up in the future. I have a list of people I regularly buy Christmas gifts for. I have a list of movies I’d like to view someday.

Each of these lists is just that – a computer document listing all of the items that fall under that specific category. If you prefer, of course, you can use pen and paper and a series of folders.

Whenever I have an item in my inbox that refers to a book to read or a movie to watch or a big project I’m thinking about, I add these to those lists – and I usually date them. Then, during my weekly reviews (I’ll talk about this more in the next entry in this series), I pull out these lists and look them over. I usually study the most recent entries more specifically so I can decide whether I should do something with those items right now, like request them from the library. I sometimes add notes to the items on the list, too.

Reference
Reference materials refers to things that I’m going to want to keep, like tax statements or car titles or other things like that. If I think there’s a solid chance I’m going to want to refer to such an item in the future – or if there’s a slim chance but that slim chance absolutely requires the document, I keep it.

For magazines (which we subscribe to in bulk), I’ll often just tear out the articles I want to keep over the long term and throw away the rest. I have a few file folders jammed with potential articles that I might talk about on The Simple Dollar in the future, for example, and I also have a fat folder full of recipes.

I really don’t worry too much about a filing system. I put things into folders under a name that makes sense to me and organize those folders A-Z and then 0-9. I can always find what I want pretty quickly in that scheme, with only a guess or two needed to find anything at all.

Projects and Project Support Material
Some of the things I work on are ongoing “projects” – meaning big tasks that break down into lots of pieces. For each of these “projects,” I keep a folder in a separate part of my filing cabinet. I actually have a single drawer for “projects,” to tell the truth.

Again, I organize these by A-Z and 0-9 based on the title I decide on. This makes it easy to find them when I need them. I also keep a master “project list” just for my own reference – this makes things much easier when I do my review of projects.

What’s in each folder? Whenever I conceive of a new project, I usually brainstorm big time with a sheet or two of paper in front of me, then I come up with a rough outline of what needs to be done for the project (all of the steps from beginning to end, broken down into the smallest chunks I can), with lots of spaces between the items for additional steps and notes. I usually do the outline on my computer, save it, then print it out. The brainstorming and the outline are saved in the folder.

When I do my weekly “review,” I usually update each folder (if I haven’t already during the week) and then add the next step for each project to my “next actions” list (which I’ll talk about in a bit).

“Waiting”
There are obviously some things that require “waiting” for some unspecified time for someone else to come through for you. For example, if I’m working on a collaborative project with another writer and I send her a draft, I don’t know for sure when I’ll get a response from her.

For most of these things, I just wait for the response, but some of these things do require me to hold onto things. I just keep a “waiting” folder in amongst my projects to handle any such things.

Calendar
If something needs to be done on a specific date and/or time, I add it to my calendar. My calendar is the first thing I look at each day – I maintain it with Google Calendar and it is, in fact, my browser home page.

What should go on a calendar? Allen specifies on page 142:

[There] are two basic kinds of actions: those that must be done on a certain day and/or at a particular time, and those that just need to be done as soon as you can get ot them, around your other calendared items. Calendared action items can be either time-specific (e.g., “4:00-5:00 meet with Jim”) or day-specific (“Call Rachel Tuesday to see if she got the proposal.”)

In other words, all time-specific actions should go on your calendar. Allen goes on to discuss some things that shouldn’t be on your calendar, on page 143:

What many people want to do, however, based on old habits of writing daily to-do lists, is put actions on the calendar that they think they’d really like to get done next Monday, say, but that then actually might not, and that might then have to be taken over to following days. Resist this impulse. You need to trust your calendar as sacred territory, reflecting the exact hard edges of your day’s commitments, which should be niticeable at a glance while you’re on the run.

Here’s a great example. I want to practice piano every single day, but there might be days where I’m simply not able to get around to it. Should I write the piano practice on my calendar every day? No. It should be on my “next actions” list for me to prioritize as I wish. The same is true if I want to clean the house on a given day or something like that – if I can miss it without causing devastation, it shouldn’t be on the calendar. Only the things at specific times that I can’t miss should be on the calendar.

“Next Actions”
What’s left after all of that? Surprisingly, all that’s left is the specific stuff you need to do that takes longer than two minutes (remember, you do all of the two-minutes-or-less tasks when processing it all).

For me, the “next actions” takes the form of a long list. Whenever I’m buckling down to get stuff done, whether it’s professional work or otherwise, I look through the list, pick out something, and just do it.

This is the point when the system really shines. All of the stuff above seems like a lot of overhead, but you make up for all of it and much, much more when you’re actually pushing through your pile of “next actions.” Why? Everything you need to do is right there in front of you. The only thing that matters is your next appointment, and you can set an alarm for that. Until then, the only thing on your mind is your current action. You don’t need to remember anything. If something floats into your mind, just jot it down and move on with your task.

This freedom of mind enables you to get into “the zone” (or flow state or whatever you like to call it) very easily. It turns out – and this is the big advantage of GTD – that the biggest thing that keeps people from getting into that flow state is the number of things they’re trying to keep in their head while working. If you can write it all down and have a trusted system in place where you can just toss that idea – whatever it is – and know it’s handled, then you don’t have to waste so many brain cycles keeping track of all of it.

When the system is running well for me, I can get into “the flow” for a long time every day. Without it, I would never be able to create this much material for The Simple Dollar plus all of the responsibilities of having three young children plus ongoing attempts at other endeavors. It just wouldn’t happen.

What about prioritizing? Obviously, some things on the list have a higher priority than others. The way I handle it is pretty simple. I just keep my list in a document on my computer and print it off occasionally. Before I start in with a work session (where I intend to knock several items off the list), I make an effort to roughly prioritize the list. I move the ones that I’d most like to get done up to the top so that they’re found first. That doesn’t mean I won’t change things up as I’m going along, of course; it just gives me some help as I go.

Next time, we’ll go through the fourth piece of the puzzle: a weekly review. I actually find that a weekly review (and patch-up) is perhaps the most essential part of this entire system. Without it, it would eventually fall apart.

Two readers wrote in yesterday with concerns about handling cash they found. First, James:

I was at the grocery store this morning and I found a $20 bill on the floor. I picked it up and pocketed it and went home. My wife told me later on that I basically stole the money and I should have told the store manager about it. If it’s obviously abandoned cash, I think it’s more of a “finders keepers” type of thing. What do you think?

And then Margaret:

I found a $100 bill on the sidewalk yesterday. I was thrilled but then I began to worry about the person who dropped it. They might have really needed it for something important. What should I do?

I’ve found money several times and have often been puzzled about what to do with it.

When I was twelve, I saved up almost $200 (mostly through selling crushed aluminum cans or returning nickel cans in Iowa) with which I intended to buy a video game console. I had ten $20 bills, which I kept in my hip pocket out of fear of losing them. My mother took me to a city about forty minutes away where I was to have a doctor’s appointment, then we were going to go buy the console.

During the doctor’s visit, the money vanished. I had the money in my pocket just before entering the doctor’s office. I didn’t have it during the elevator ride back down to the car.

We returned to the doctor’s office and searched frantically. To this day, I’m suspicious that the receptionist found and pocketed the money, because she just sat there and watched us and told us that we wouldn’t be able to find it and she was sure that it wasn’t there.

If I were on the reverse end of that stick, I couldn’t imagine not giving the money back to the child. That just seems incredibly cruel and unethical.

After more than a bit of reflection, this is how I handle all found money.

If I find money with any form of identification attached to it, I try to return it. Anything that can possibly distinguish the money I’ve found from normal money, such as a money clip or a wallet or anything like that, results in some effort to return it to its rightful owner. It doesn’t matter where I find it – if I find it with something that makes identification directly possible, I try to return it myself.

If there is no identification and I’m in a place of business or government, I inform the manager but retain the item. I usually go to the manager and simply state that I’ve found a small amount of cash and would like to return it to its rightful owner. I offer to leave my contact information there. I don’t turn over the money to the person at the counter because that money is often pocketed. I then wait and see if anyone contacts me and can identify the exact amount lost. If someone does, then I’ll happily return it to them. If I don’t hear from anyone in thirty days, I keep the money.

If there is no identification and I’m in a public place, like a sidewalk or a park, I pocket the money. There is no simple or effective way to return the money in this situation because there is no effective “lost and found” for someone to seek the item. If someone has lost cash in such a situation, I view it as irresponsibility and feel no guilt about pocketing it. Of course, if someone returns while I’m still there and is searching for the money, I’ll ask them what they’re looking for and if they tell me, then I’ll give them the money that I found. If it’s possible for me to leave a note (with sidewalk chalk or something), I’ll do so, simply stating “I found an item of some value here. If you lost it, call me and identify it!”

In other words, if there is a reasonably simple way for me to return the money, I’ll do so. If there is no clear way to make it possible for me to return the money, however, I’ll pocket the money. In the end, it’s all about putting yourself in the shoes of the person that lost it – if they put up a reasonable effort to find it, I’ll do the same.

So, if I roll back to my twelve year old self at that doctor’s office, what would I have done if I had found the money? I would have went to the receptionist, reported to her that I had found a personal item of some value that someone had left behind, and given her my contact information in case anyone showed up to claim it. I would not simply hand it over. If I didn’t hear anything after thirty days, I would have simply kept the money.

In today’s reader mailbag, I answered a question about digging out from under a pile of debt with some comments about a big choice people have to make in their twenties:

The problem you’re having is the problem a lot of people our age have: we want everything but we don’t have the resources to pay for it.

Many people solve that problem by taking on an absurd amount of debt, an amount that they’ll spend most of their life repaying. It’ll cause them to walk a financial tightrope for most of the rest of their lives, making it impossible to do anything but work at whatever job will pay the most, at the complete mercy of their boss.

I prefer the other solution. Put off some of those “needs” until you’re a little older. You don’t need the new car and the new house and the kids immediately. Live cheap when you’re in your twenties and early thirties and channel everything into your career and freeing yourself from your student loan debt.

It’s a decision most of us have to make at some point. I think many people dive into the first choice without reflecting on the consequences – but I think that solution sometimes ends in miserable lives. You have an opportunity right now to figure out which path you want to take.

All throughout the last several days, as we had family visiting and we spent some time with several of our friends, this choice kept popping into my head. I kept looking at the decisions various people had made in their twenties and how it affected their life today.

John, for example, chose to put off his “needs.” After college, he got a very good job right in his career path and he could have easily afforded a shiny car, a nice house, and the like. Instead, he spent his twenties living in a small apartment in a poor neighborhood, driving a beat-up used car, and focusing on succeeding in his career path. Where’s he at today at age thirty two? He owns twenty acres of land – and by “owns” I mean he doesn’t have a mortgage. He has absolutely no debt. He has tens of thousands of dollars in savings. He has a very strong position at his current job. And he’s only thirty two.

I chose a different path, at least at first. I also got a great job in my career path (based on the degree I earned in college), but I got married very quickly. We had an expensive honeymoon. We racked up credit card debt left and right. We had kids very quickly. Eventually, we had lots of stuff, but we had no financial foundation at all. I had a career path that had no flexibility. We didn’t have money for a house down payment. We could barely cover the bills we had.

The truth of the matter is that one path is very easy at first and the other is harder, but not impossible. It’s easier to just say “yes” to all of the credit and live the material high life. The problem, of course, is that a person’s early professional income rarely matches up to all of the stuff that they want, but the tools are available to simply put those payments off to the future.

The problem is that if you follow that easy path, you absolutely shackle your future opportunities. Since you have so many debt payments – the house payment, the student loan payments, the car payments, credit card debt – coming at you in addition to normal monthly bills and living expenses, you become tied to the highest-paying job you can get, with that money all channeled into paying for all of your stuff. That job can be punishing – at such a job, you’re often doing nothing more than working or thinking about work. You can’t change careers. You can’t lose your job. And you’re stuck.

On the other hand, if you take the road less traveled right off the bat, you give yourself tons of opportunities down the road. John, for example, has enough cash in the bank that if he chose to go back to school and change careers right now, he could without skipping a beat. If he loses his job, it’s not panic time – instead, it’s time to sit back and just think about what comes next in his life, calmly and rationally. If an emergency happens, he can deal with it without skipping a beat. If he decides that he actually wants something, he can buy it – but the first few years of his professional life helped him to learn a lot of personal restraint, so he only buys stuff he truly wants and will get value from.

From my perspective, the real truth of the matter is we all have a choice to make in life. Do we want freedom or do we want stuff? I’ve tried both paths and freedom is a lot more enjoyable.

What’s inside? Here are five word summaries of the questions dealt with in today’s Reader Mailbag. Click on the number to hop down to the question.
1. Blogging as steady income?
2. Selling rental for debt repayment
3. Drowning in student loan debt
4. Fed up with overreaching charity
5. Should I join the Army?
6. Save money or prepay mortgage?
7. Paying for law school
8. Earning more from my savings
9. Time limits on debt repayment
10. Which health care plan?
11. Should I replace my car?
12. Renting versus selling a house

Father’s Day was a rainy day, but my kids got me two things that enabled us to hang out inside all day and have fun – the card game Dominion: Alchemy and the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum. We spent most of the day playing games and doing art projects and playing “pile on Dad” in the living room. In other words, it was pretty much a great Father’s Day.

I own a printing / desktop publishing and work from home. I earn just enough to “get by” when I combine the income from the business with my Social Security benefits. I still have a mortgage on my home and want to payit off soon. I have no other debts other than the regular household costs.

My question to you is this: Could this type of informational writing connected with some encouragement make a good blog that would net me a good income? I value your feedback and would like you to be very honest in your answer.
- Alice

You have the most important thing in place for blogging success – a backlog of good content.

However, there are several things that have to come together to make it work. First and foremost is that good content, meaning that it either has to be new information or it has to be known information presented from an interesting angle. You also have to be able to consistently produce it on a regular schedule, like clockwork. If you suddenly find that you can’t come up with anything and don’t post for a while, your audience will evaporate.

You also have to be able to put forth some significant effort in marketing your writing. You can write the greatest stuff in the world, but if no one knows about it, no one will visit it.

Even if you manage to pull off all of that, there’s still some luck to it. Will the editor of a popular blog even see your stuff? If they do, will they happen to like it enough to link to it? It’s never a guarantee.

I think it’s a mistake to go into blogging with an expectation of earning an income. Almost all blogs never get to that point and it takes a ton of work and more than a little luck to get to that point. If you do reach that point, it can be a very flexible type of work, but it has its own demands, too.

If you want to write and it seems enjoyable, go for it anyway. If you’re just doing it as an effort to try to make cash, you’ll probably find disappointment.

I am just entering my final semester of graduate school where I will end up with an MFA in creative writing. I paid for my first year of school with proceeds I had saved from the sale of a business a couple of years ago…but this second year has been financed with financial aid student loans. I will be $21,000 in debt with 75% of it in subsidized loans and 25% non-subsidized when I graduate. My income is relatively low although I’ve been bumping it up recently and working my buns off to do so.

Could you please offer your advice?
- Susan

Given your entire picture, I’d sell the house and use it to repay your mortgage, your student loan debts and put the rest away for retirement. The fact that your cash flow situation sounds pretty tight strongly encourages this advice.

Many people would point at the positive cash flow of the home, but what I actually see is that it makes your cash flow really unstable on a month-over-month basis. If you didn’t have the cash to pay for that repair, you don’t have the savings or the monthly cash flow to make it work.

You’re in a precarious financial position and the rental house is adding more risk to an already unstable structure. Your best bet is to sell and stabilize, especially given you don’t have any retirement savings.

I am 27, recently married (about 30 days now!), and live in the Northwest. My wife graduated from law school almost 2 years ago with $160,000 in student loan debt (some fixed, some variable), entered in to a bad local job market for lawyers, and wasn’t able to find a lawyer position. To get some experience, she did some pro bono work related to helping people/families/children with domestic violence, drugs, or prostitution problems (she is a do-gooder, and never would have made corporate lawyer moolah anyway!). Long story made short, she has become disillusioned with our law system and she no longer wants to be a lawyer.

I’m just at a loss for a good strategy on how to tackle this mountain of debt and balance with goals of still having a life with children, a house, and other things we want to achieve. I’m afraid I’ll be going gray stressing over this each single day. I know it will take hard work and sacrificing. Generally, I am pretty positive guy but I just shake my head in disbelief and I’m incredibly overwhelmed! I think part of me feels that already, at 27, we may have junked up the ability to achieve a lot of our hopes and dreams.
- Jeremy

The problem you’re having is the problem a lot of people our age have: we want everything but we don’t have the resources to pay for it.

Many people solve that problem by taking on an absurd amount of debt, an amount that they’ll spend most of their life repaying. It’ll cause them to walk a financial tightrope for most of the rest of their lives, making it impossible to do anything but work at whatever job will pay the most, at the complete mercy of their boss.

I prefer the other solution. Put off some of those “needs” until you’re a little older. You don’t need the new car and the new house and the kids immediately. Live cheap when you’re in your twenties and early thirties and channel everything into your career and freeing yourself from your student loan debt.

It’s a decision most of us have to make at some point. I think many people dive into the first choice without reflecting on the consequences – but I think that solution sometimes ends in miserable lives. You have an opportunity right now to figure out which path you want to take.

I feel vicious.

I sacrificed for 25 years and now I’m the [bad guy] because I will not contribute? Yeah, med ins rates [are terrible], unless you get a high deductible and a HSA like I did. Sorry, but $2 million could do a load of good. Or just save you and you alone. And forgive me, but for that kind of money, could we please see some PROOF of your alleged condition? Maybe this just falls under the general category of charity, but when some friend wants me to go to “a concert” that is actually a local fundraiser to bail out minor local celeb [insert name here], I feel taken aback. This is no longer an entertainment expense, it’s a charity expense. But if I take pause, I’m the [bad guy].
- Jan

I agree with you. I guess that makes me a bad guy, too.

I’m all for charitable giving, but I want to know where my charity is going. If someone has a huge goal and is requesting money, I won’t give any money until I can see the books or have someone I trust see the books. If you don’t, you’re begging to get scammed. I have no idea whether the situation you describe is a scam or not, but the signs you mention are identical to many scams.

I don’t see any problem with supporting this artist if you’re a patron of the arts, but not everyone has to be a patron of the arts. Be a patron of what you value most. It might be education. It might be children’s health. It might be any number of things. Don’t let social pressure ever dictate what you should do with your charitable giving.

I’m 22 years old and living at home. I’ve been reading your blog for about a year now and I’m almost out of credit card debt. I don’t have a lot of money to my name right now, but most of my current income (two part time jobs that add up to about 30 hours a week) is being saved for different goals, including an emergency fund.

I guess I’m just writing to ask what your thoughts are of this plan or just of the army in general. Is there something you know about it that I might be overlooking that would make this not such a great idea?
- Janna

I think it’s a reasonable plan. I assume you know more about the specifics of your field than I do, but it sounds as though you’d get equivalent training in the army as you would in your field of choice.

Obviously, you have to outweigh the pluses and the minuses in your case. Being in the armed forces as an enlsted soldier eats up a number of years of your life – and that life can be very difficult mentally and physically.

If you’re prepared for that, I think you should go for it.

I found myself reading through some old posts regarding extra mortgage payments vs. other investments. The specific article I’m referring to is “Should I Prepay On My Home Loan Or Put It Into Savings?” June 2, 2007. Interest rates then for online savings were in the 4-5% range and now they seem to be no more than 2%. I wonder if this advice is still sound. Also it is unclear if the interest earned had already been taxed or not. Another interesting consideration would be if one was paying PMI would it be in their best interest to at least make extra payments until they own 20% of the home and the PMI can be taken off of the mortgage payment (I think I put down around 10% last year).
- Rob

My basic philosophy is that you should simply compare the interest rate you can get in a savings account to the interest rate you’re paying on your mortgage. If you have a healthy emergency fund and you want a very stable investment, you should simply choose which of those two has a higher interest rate and channel your money there.

Right now, interest rates on savings accounts are really, really low, so you should probably just channel your money into your mortgage if you want a stable return on your money (compared to paying the full thirty years of your mortgage).

If you have PMI, you should use your effective interest rate on your mortgage (with the PMI included) in this calculation. When the PMI is gone, that might change your situation.

About me: I am 24 and am a second-year AmeriCorps volunteer. After taxes I earn about $795 per month. I have an education award from my first term of $4725 to use to pay off my student loans ($5000) and will be receiving a second ed-award of $5225 when I finish my current term in November. I have an additional $1400 in credit card debt (paid down about $2000 over the past year) and I own a ’93 Honda Civic that is paid off. I currently automatically deposit $50 every two weeks into savings and I pay about $200 per month to my credit card.

Where do we even begin?
- Nicole

Well, if he can’t pay for law school and can’t get loans to cover it, then he’s probably not going to law school. He can try for scholarships and grants, but if he doesn’t have the cash, law school isn’t going to happen.

The first thing I would do is look up my credit report from the federal government. See what’s on there. If you have a pile of bad things – defaults, late payments, and so on – you really don’t have much of a credit score to damage. If that’s the case, try negotiating with your creditors right away. Point out that you have very little income and very poor credit when you negotiate. To put it simply, you’re a giant risk to them and any amount they can recover from you will be a boon – they may be very happy to negotiate.

Your goal is to do everything you can to minimize and consolidate your debt down to manageable numbers. This way, you’ll actually be in a position where you can pay it off, because it doesn’t sound like you can do that right now.

I am a 27 year old in the US Army, deployed, and married with a 3 year old daughter. I come from a family that has NO sense of finances. I was raised on food stamps and unemployment which I guess led me to want to learn how to balance a budget to prevent the situation from ever becoming my own. I’ve helped my parents pay their mortgage on more than one occasion and often buy school clothes, supplies, etc for my 3 younger siblings. Enough with the bio, I have some questions (I fully understand if you do not have the time to reply, I know you get a lot of mail).

We currently bank with USAA, ING, and our local credit union back home in Oregon. ING currently offers CDs with a lower rate than their savings or checking accounts (why would someone choose a CD from them right now?) I guess I’m curious if the best I can expect right now is to earn $11 a year on a $1,000 investment (ING savings, %1.10 APY). I know that every dollar counts and can make a difference in the long run but now that I’m in a situation to save it seems like there has to be a more high interest solution.
- Chris

There isn’t a more high interest solution unless you’re willing to take on some risk. The banks have low interest rates right now because they can borrow money from the federal reserve risk free for just a little more than what they pay out to you. It makes no business sense for them to offer much more than 1.5 to 2% right now.

If you find that you want a higer return than what those investments offer, you have to take on some risk by buying things like bonds or stocks or real estate. You can balance that risk by putting half of the money in a savings account and the other half into something more risky – half is at a stable +1% and the other half varies depending on how much risk you take, so even if it’s down 20%, you’re only losing 10%, but if it’s up 20%, you’re gaining 11%.

That might be your best route. That’s more or less what we do.

My husband and I have been together for four years. When he was in the Air Force around eight years ago, he wasn’t very responsible with his money. We’ve already paid off a car that was re-po’ed, and we occasionally get calls from collectors stating that he owes them money. The most recent collection call is from a phone company bill from April, 2002. This is the first time I’ve heard of this debt (I have been managing his credit/financial stuff for most of our relationship). The statute of limitations for NE is 6 years, as well as CO (where we live now). We are currently waiting for documentation of validation for the debt. It does not show up on his credit report right now, either. The collector could not assure us that if we paid it, that it would not show up on his report, and thus damaging his credit. So my question to you is, if we pay this collection account (in full), what are the chances that it would show up on his credit report? And if it does, would it be a negative item? Is it even worth it to pay it ($100)?
- Jenny

What you have is a debt collector swinging for the fences, hoping to cash in on an ancient debt that they bought for a penny on the dollar. For them, they figure that the small amount of time and effort they’re investing in you, there’s a small chance you might pay off some or all of the debt, netting them a huge return.

Should you ignore it? In terms of legal impact, they can’t do much. What they can do is harass you to an extent – mostly, they’ll be annoying.

My suggestion is to just let it ride and see what happens. If they start harassing you a lot, contact a lawyer and get good representation if it’s a large debt, or judge for yourself whether paying it off is worth eliminating the harassment.

I graduated from college a month ago, and a week later I married my high-school sweetheart (we dated for six years, but waited until after college to marry). I was able to secure an excellent full-time, temporary job in my former college’s IT Department; my wife got a part-time, temporary job. I have received several offers, and accepted a permanent position which pays extremely well and has full benefits. The job starts on July 1, and I need to determine what health insurance package to accept. We can choose either an HMO or a POS, and there are pros/cons to each. My wife is extremely risk-averse, and would prefer the package with the highest premiums, while I have a much higher risk tolerance. On average, she and I both need to go to the doctor for prescription drugs once or twice a year. We are not anticipating children any time soon (although surprises happen, I hear). She has a disease/condition called PCOS which is treatable but not curable, and does require certain prescription drugs. What criteria should I be using to evaluate the two plans? The HMO has higher premiums but lower copays/deductibles, and requires you to stay in-network. The POS has higher copays, but has lower premiums and allows for some out-of-network coverage. I want to pick what’s best for our family, but am unsure how to assess my options. Any guidance you could provide would be appreciated. Thanks!
- Zach

The thing I usually tell people to look at for their health insurance is how they handle truly severe situations.

Compare the two plans for a situation where one of you is hospitalized for a few months recovering from a serious ailment. Which one comes through for you in that situation?

My general belief is that if you can afford it at all, you should always get the best health care plan available to you, and the best way to judge that is in terms of when you’ll need it most.

The transmission on our 2001 Honda Odyssey (120,000 miles) just went yesterday. I estimate it will cost about $4-5,000 to get it replaced. The minivan is only worth around $7-8,000. We have four children under 6, so need a minivan, and have been discussing upgrading to a full-size van in case we have any more. I think that we could probably get what we are looking for for around $12-14,000. We currently have about that much in our emergency fund. I think (hope!) that my job is fairly stable. What do you think? Spend the money on repairing our current car or wipe out our emergency fund and use that money to upgrade now, which we were anticipating having to do in the next couple of years anyway.
- Trevor

I wouldn’t wipe your emergency fund for it. That puts you too much at risk for other emergencies, which would go on credit at a much, much higher interest rate than any car loans.

If I were you, I’d get a lower-cost car, something in the $6,000 to $8,000 range. Pay for it in cash, then start saving for what you really want while driving that into the ground over the next few years.

If you insist on getting that $12,000 car, pay only about $7,000 or so in cash as a down payment and get a loan for the rest, then pay off that loan quickly.

I recently got engaged this past May and we plan a small wedding this coming September. We both own houses. I purchased my house in January of 2006 and she purchased her house in August of 2009. (If only I’d been a year sooner!!!) She qualified for the $8,000 tax credit and after receiving it applied it to some of her high interest debt. (paid off her car and a chunk of her student loans with the highest interest). She has very little equity in her house. No more than 6-7k. It’s a small house and in a great area that we could rent the house fairly easily. My house is much larger and we’d have plenty of space. However, if we rent her house, the $8,000 tax credit will need to be paid back. We’d pay the 8k and move on with our lives in hopes that we find good renters, deal with the upkeep etc. Because we convert it to a business we could write off the expenses so that would certainly help with some of the rental house costs. I on the other hand have $33,000 in equity. The housing market in Indianapolis is fairly flat. My house is one of the more expensive houses in the neighborhood and is one of the few houses with a finished basement so it could either sell quickly or people might think it’s overpriced. I paid $169,900 and could probably sell it for $175,000 but it might be months before I could sell it and we’d pay commissions to sell it. We basically have $8,000 that we know we would pay back/lose (however you want to look at it). It would be nice to only have one house but we are both responsible people and if we had to rent a house, we could. We’d maintain it and keep it up as if we lived in it. Obviously, we don’t want to make any rash decisions because if we decide to try to sell my house, we’ll need to basically leave her house unrented in order to not pay back the $8,000. My question is, should I try to sell my house and set a firm date and if it doesn’t sell, just rent her house. Or just keep them both, pay back the 8k and turn one into a rental? Selling her house to me is out of the question because we’d have to pay back the 8k, and pay all the commissions.
- Ryan

You need to do a little market research. Could you actually rent the house in the area? Is there a lot of demand for rentals? What sort of income could you expect? How much work would the house need to be a good rental? Would you directly handle maintenance or hire a property manager – and how much would that cost? Would you do the advertising for the rental yourself – and how much would that cost? What about generating a legally binding lease for the renter? What is the tax impact of holding onto both homes versus selling one of them? How much extra property tax will you have to pay?

You also have to think about the human element. What do you two want to be doing? Where do you want to be living?

There is no answer to the bigger question until you have a firm grip on those smaller questions, because they will make or break any plans that you have.

Got any questions? Email them to me or leave them in the comments and I’ll attempt to answer them in a future mailbag. However, I do receive hundreds of questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.

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

A while back, I wrote an article describing an utterly painful meeting my wife and I had with a financial advisor. That meeting was painful. It simply accelerated my souring on financial advisors, based on a long run of experiences where I was essentially treated as a “mark” for commissions and sales.

Yet, there are times when a trustable financial advisor can be really useful: when we stumble into a windfall, for example. With so many salesmen out there (and a few purely incompetent folk, too), how can we find people that we can actually trust with our money?

That’s the topic of this book by Bonnie Kirchner. Kirchner is a CFP (Certified Financial Planner), so I was admittedly wary about this book, but I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the first two-thirds of the book consists of reasons why you don’t need a planner, a very long collection of warning signs of poor financial planning, and techniques for grilling potential financial planners. Who Can You Trust With Your Money? really hammers away at some of the more shark-like elements of the financial planning world.

Let’s dig in and see what the book has to say.

1 | Recent Investment Scams
Yes, we all know about the Bernie Madoff scam. Why did it happen? Well, in the end, you’re simply trusting someone with your money. Madoff put off tons of warning signs to the people who were giving him money, but they weren’t really paying attention to them. A really interesting choice to open the book with a cautionary tale like this.

2 | What Is Financial Planning?
Why do you even need a planner to begin with? Kirchner lays out some of the reasons you might need a planner in this chapter: dealing with a windfall, retirement planning, and so on. My general feeling is that most people are better off if they genuinely try to manage their money on their own and should rely on a financial planner if and only if their own efforts somehow fail. For most issues, financial planning isn’t very difficult at all, just a bit intimidating.

3 | The Meaning Behind Advisor Designations and Licenses
This chapter is a solid reference of the acronym soup that financial advisors use to identify their qualifications. There are literally dozens of acronyms that advisors throw behind their names, and Kirchner defines them all here. It’s useful in a dual sense – not only can you look up acronyms here, but you can also read the definitions to help you determine which qualifications would be important to you if you were seeking a planner.

4 | Advisor Compensation
How do they make money? Commissions and fees are the two main avenues used. While Kirchner doesn’t specifically say it (she seems to try to stick to being neutral here), the case in favor of fee-based advisors and against commission-based ones is fairly self-evident. The commission based ones make their money by selling you a product, while the fee based ones make their money by giving you advice. Who do you want as an advisor?

5 | Deciphering Fee Structures
Kirchner’s key advice here is to make sure that your advisor’s compensation and fee structure are absolutely clear and specified up front in writing. Ask for this from your advisor – and if they won’t give it to you, there’s something amiss. When you do have that document, make sure you understand every item in it. The fees charged to you directly take away from your investments, after all.

6 | Finding Additional Fees
Of course, almost all advisors will try to insert “additional” fees into your account for such things as transactions or annual maintenance or for a special kind of account. This chapter lists what’s typical and what isn’t for such fees. This was the only chapter that raised vague alarm bells for me, but I cross-referenced the information here with other sources and not only was Kirchner pretty spot-on, she was actually a bit below some of the other estimates I found.

7 | Financial Products and Advisor Compensation
Ever wondered exactly how much compensation commission-based planners earn for various activities and services “sold” to you? Kirchner provides a rough list of the approximate earnings planners receive from various items. It’s something of an eye-opener and it also explains why such individuals will work for a long time to make one sale – that one sale can make ‘em a mint!

8 | Statements, Communications, and the “Dreaded” Prospectus
Yes, you’re going to get statements, communications, and prospectuses in the mail. Kirchner encourages people to, at minimum, read the statements they receive and any other communications as well, and ask their advisor for summaries of the prospectuses. The best tip was the suggestion that you should shred anything with your account information on it or other personal data instead of just throwing it away, because that type of material is ripe for identity theft.

9 | The Roles of Various Financial Institutions
Whenever you enter into some sort of financial arrangement with an advisor, you’re not just entering into an arrangement with that advisor, you’re also entering into arrangements with whatever companies and investments houses and other organizations the advisor is pointing you towards. Thus, you should also invest the time and effort to research those organizations as well and make sure they’re up to your standards.

10 | Understanding What You Need
Now that you’ve been given fifty reasons to be wary and careful about a financial advisor, Kirchner moves on to the next step: why do you actually even need one at all? What you should do is sit down, spend some time truly assessing your needs and doing some homework on your own, and come up with a plan. What parts can you execute on your own? Dig deep and see if you can fulfill and master your own needs. If there are parts you can’t do, that’s the time to turn to a planner.

11 | Choosing Advisors to Consider
How do you choose an advisor? Kirchner recommends hitting your social network, including your lawyer and any other professionals you work with, like tax preparers. You should also ask anyone you interview what their opinions are of other specific financial planners, as that’ll give you insight into both the person being asked and the person being asked about.

12 | Choosing Candidates to Interview
Using your social network (and internet searching) will probably turn up a long list of potential candidates. Do your homework online about them and see what you can learn. Strive to tear the list down to just three candidates so that the interview process isn’t overwhelming.

13 | Interviewing Candidates
You have three promising candidates. The next step is to interview each of them. Set up a meeting with each one and come prepared to ask a set of questions of each of the candidates (so you can compare their answers later on). Kirchner provides a long list of potential questions here, along with suggestions on what materials you should bring to the initial interview.

14 | Spotting Red Flags: Advisors to Avoid
What’s a bad sign? Lack of organization. A temper. A tendency towards negativity. Pressure tactics. Avoiding providing you with the information you request. Kirchner has a long list of additional red flags that point toward a pretty poor planner.

15 | The Rules of Engagement
How much control over your accounts and other information do you want the advisor to have? Kirchner goes through lots of options here. My tendency is to give them minimal control – in the absolute worst case, I’d want to have final approval over anything that happened with an account that had my name on it.

16 | Maintenance of the Advisor-Client Relationship
You should also be clear on what your respective roles are. Do you want your advisor actively involved in watching all of your accounts and alerting you to any changes (potentially expensive) or do you want to do such direct management yourself, calling on your advisor when you need help (less expensive)? Different people have different needs in this area. I’m a hands-on kind of guy, so I’d lean towards the latter option.

17 | Activity
One big thing to watch out for is excessive activity in your account, especially activity you didn’t directly approve of. Lots of activity in an account is often a sign that an advisor is racking up commissions (at your expense, usually) and this might have serious tax and earnings implications for you.

18 | Accessibility
Can you get ahold of your advisor when you need them? Make sure you know clearly what the advisor’s communication policy is. Can they be reached during office hours, period, and you’re out of luck if they’re traveling? Or do they have a much more open policy? Obviously, the more open the policy, the better.

19 | The Dysfunctional Relationship
What do you do when the relationship starts to sour? Your best bet is to quickly move on to another advisor, but sometimes you may observe unethical or illegal activities. If that’s the case, Kirchner has suggestions on how to properly report such activities.

20 | Criminal Versus Non-Criminal Behavior
What exactly constitutes criminal behavior? Kirchner has a long list of red flags here, but the most common thread between them is that your advisor is trying to encourage you to use an investment scheme that isn’t clearly explained and documented. Such situations usually merit immediate, serious attention, because they’re often warning signs of something gone deeply awry, perhaps illegal.

21 | Filing a Complaint
If you do find something that you suspect of being unethical, you shouldn’t go to the police. Instead, go to the professional governing bodies for assistance. Quite often, activities that are cloudy are merely unethical or ill-advised but not illegal. Still, if you believe your financial advisor is engaged in such activities, I’d move on ASAP.

Is Who Can You Trust With Your Money? Worth Reading?
I really didn’t expect this book to have any hard advice on financial planners – after all, Bonnie Kirchner IS a CFP. Yet most of this book hammers the financial planning industry. I was impressed with the thorough nature that Kirchner applies to prospective financial planners. She clearly has no tolerance for skullduggery.

And you shouldn’t either. It’s your money, after all.

If you’re even considering getting a financial planner for any reason, Who Can You Trust With Your Money? is worth a serious read. Kirchner does a great job of digging through the grey areas of the financial planning industry and pours a lot of sunshine on the subject, which is incredibly useful for people trying to make up their minds about financial planners. Lots of advice and a no-nonsese attitude is perfect for this topic, and that’s just what Kirchner provides.

Yes, it’s almost always painful to receive that first energy bill of the summer months. That first month where the outdoor heat kicks into overdrive usually results in a friendly notice from the electric company with a number that sometimes has an extra digit that we didn’t expect or a “3″ in place of the “1″ we’re used to.

Yes, it’s the air conditioner. Go outside and watch your energy meter for a while and observe the difference between the times that your air conditioning is running and the times when it is not running. When it’s on, your energy meter starts spinning like a 78 RPM record or a CD still rotating in place – when it’s not spinning, it looks like a lazy carousel.

That’s money down the drain, folks. Thankfully, there are several things that people can do to significantly reduce the energy use of their vacuum.

Get some maintenance
Building Operations and Management Magazine notes that “[f]acilities in which proper HVAC maintenance is completed will use at least 15 to 20 percent less energy than those where systems are allowed to deteriorate.” My own experience has matched this statistic – we saw a 10% drop in our overall energy bill year over year when accounting for every other change we could conceive of.

How do you “get some maintenance,” though? You can do some of it yourself by simply changing the filter, as a clean filter cuts down on the resistance against air flow passing through the filter (and improves filtration, of course). More importantly, the drain on your air conditioning unit needs to be cleaned out regularly as well – annually is best. Dirt builds up in there and with the moisture present, it can also mold and clog, drastically reducing the efficiency of your unit. I encourage you to hire a maintenance person to take a look at your external air conditioning unit annually and perform maintenance on it. The energy savings will allow you to break even (at the very worst) on the cost and it’ll also greatly extend the life of your unit.

Draw the blinds
Yes, we all like to have plenty of brightness in our home, but when direct sunlight is pouring in a window, the one thing you’re also guaranteeing is that the house is heating up.

The solution? Draw the blinds (or curtains) unless you’re in the room. Leaving the blinds open when you leave the room for a while does nothing more than allow a lot of extra heat into the room and that has but one guarantee – it slowly heats up the room.

By all means, if you like a bright room and you happen to be in there, throw open the blinds and curtains! Just don’t leave them open when no one is there to enjoy the brightness and sunlight.

Run your ceiling fans the correct way
Most people don’t realize this, but ceiling fans should run in different directions during the summer and winter. During the summer, most ceiling fans should be run on high and the blades should be moving in a counterclockwise direction.

Here’s how to make sure your fan is spinning correctly. Stand right under the fan and turn it on high. You should immediately feel a breeze. If you don’t, turn off the fan, then adjust the fan to have the blades run in the opposite direction.

Air flow is vital for improving the sense of coolness in your home, much like a breeze cools you off on a hot summer day. This leads to the next tip for reducing your cooling costs…

Raise your thermostat a bit
Most of us have a temperature that feels the most comfortable for us and that’s what we leave our thermostat at. The problem with just sticking to a default temperature, though, is that the “perfection” of that temperature has a lot to do with the humidity in your home, the direct sunlight flooding in, and the air flow as well.

Many of which you just altered with the previous two steps.

Now that you’ve made the other changes, try raising your “default” temperature a degree. This will likely not change your sense of comfort in the home, but it will reduce your energy bill because your air conditioning won’t have to kick on nearly as often. Don’t be afraid to try another degree, too. Find your new normal temperature

Turn it off at night
At night, you’re asleep. The air outside is cooler. Many people sleep directly under a ceiling fan, which keeps the air circulating. In other words, it’s the perfect time to shut off the air conditioning entirely.

This tactic (and the next one) is most easily achieved with the installation of a programmable thermostat, which makes overnight temperature adjustment automatic. At our house, the air conditioning turns off at 10 PM and turns on again at about 10 AM or so as the day is really warming up.

Turn it off during the workday, too
Similarly, don’t run your air conditioner when no one is home. For many families, this happens every weekday when both parents are out of the house and in their workplace. Just turn the A/C off when you leave, then flip it on again when you come home. If it’s really warm, run a fan near the cool air vent to help the cool air circulate.

This tactic (and the previous one) is most easily achieved with the installation of a programmable thermostat, which makes weekday temperature adjustment automatic. For us, however, this tactic doesn’t work too well since I work at home, though I do uusually turn the temperature up several degrees when I’m the only one in the house.

Add some simple shade
This can either be a short term solution – like placing an umbrella on your deck so that it blocks some sunshine from going into the house – or a long term solution, like planting a tree that will eventually shade your roof. Any effort you can make to increase the shade of the exterior of your house helps because it reduces the direct sunlight that reaches your home, which is a big factor in raising internal temperatures.

Good luck!

One of my favorite writers is Ian Rogers, who blogs about his health at Fistfulayen. In one of his best posts, he writes about his use of the L.L. Cool J workout, which eventually turns into an astute point that virtually every “healthy diet” book focuses on the same handful of seemingly simple principles. He identifies six:

1. Eat five or six times a day
2. Limit your consumption of sugars and processed foods
3. Eat fruits and vegetables throughout the day
4. Drink more water and cut out calorie-containing beverages (beer, soda, and so forth)
5. Focus on consuming more lean proteins throughout the day
6. Save starch-containing foods until after a workout or for breakfast

… but then he notes they’re not as simple as they seem:

Pretty straight-forward, no magic, no surprises, but I had to completely change my diet around to get there.

The steps seem easy enough, but in order to achieve those simple steps, he had to alter his entire pattern of food and beverage consumption – and the cultural and social patterns that went with it.

In other words, a simple change that can be described in one simple phrase often has a huge amount of change underlying it. In order to, say, cut out calorie-containing beverages, a person may have to break a caffeine addiction, break an alcohol addiction, change their social lives in order to break free from such addictions, and significantly alter their daily routine so as to not fall back on such addictions.

That’s a challenge, any way you paint it. The intensity of that challenge, which ends up actually being a large handful of changes all at once, can easily overwhelm someone, even if their intent is wholly in the right place.

Let’s use a personal finance example. Cindy, a reader who emails me fairly regularly, recently wrote in to me lamenting her difficulty in implementing what seemed like a simple personal finance goal.

I will limit entertainment spending to $100 a month.

Within entertainment, she included her cable bill, the costs of going out with friends, and money spent on purely fun things. It seems like a very straightforward goal, but in Cindy’s own words, it’s harder than it seems.

In order to make that goal, I cancelled my cable and used some of the money from my first month to buy one of those digital converter boxes for my old TV. This disrupted three of my weeknights, as I’m now missing out on shows I watched faithfully. I’ve started skipping every other “girl’s night out,” which has been really hard. I don’t go clothes shopping any more either. I now spend a lot more time online than I used to and I feel a lot more moody and kind of sad, too. I keep finding myself cheating on that $100 limit too by buying stuff online.

Cindy’s not just trying one new routine in her life. She’s breaking a big pile of them and trying to establish some new ones at the same time.

She’s breaking the “girl’s night out” pattern. She’s breaking her television watching pattern, which is a several-night-a-week pattern. She’s breaking her clothes shopping pattern. She seems to be flailing with this free time and is somewhat settling on a new pattern of more online usage. She’s also seemingly adopting a new social pattern with her circle of friends, one that she’s not quite as happy with.

That’s a lot of change, any way you slice it.

I’ve found that, time and time again, when you take on a ton of changes in your life all at once, it’s very hard and there’s a huge tendency to backslide. Yes, some stubborn people can make it through a lot of changes at once, but most of us can’t – it’s very, very difficult.

So, what’s the solution?

The solution is to take stock of all of the real changes going on in your life and choose just one or two of them to focus on. Instead of sticking so fiercely to the simple “$100 a month” strategy, Cindy might want to simply live without cable for a while without altering her other routines in life. Yes, I’m advocating that she go back to “girl’s night out” every week.

Why do this? Her one change – cutting the cable – will save her money. But it’s a pretty significant alteration to her routine, one that she has to get used to and one where she’s going to need to find replacement activities that she’s comfortable with. That alone is a major change to deal with and she should give it time until that change is routine and normal.

Give it a month, Cindy, until coming home to a house without cable television feels normal. Find other things to do on those evenings where you might have watched some cable program. Try out a new community group. Visit the library and pick up a book or two. Invite the ladies over for a “girl’s poker night.” Find things that you really enjoy that don’t cost money to replace the gaps that cable has left in your life.

Once it’s all established and you’ve found a new normal, you’re sitting on a new normal with $50 less spent each month. Now, move onto another piece of the puzzle. Maybe the next thing to try is giving up clothes shopping – or at least altering it by hitting consignment shops and secondhand shops instead. Dive into that change – this one will probably be easier.

Sometimes, you’ll find a smaller change that is really hard to break because the activity you’re modifying brings you a lot of personal joy. Guess what? You shouldn’t break it. Likely, that thing is something that’s a big part of one of your true core values in life, and those are the things we work to preserve in life. Instead, move on and look for other ways to save and to change.

The moral of the story is simple: if a change is just too big for you to swallow all at once, break it down into smaller changes and work through those changes one at a time.

If you’re finding it difficult to meet a spending goal, look at all of the different things you’re spending money on and focus on the areas you can cut, one at a time.

If you’re finding it difficult to meet a diet goal, focus on one specific dietary change until it seems normal, then move on to another one.

If you’re finding it difficult to meet a personal growth goal, tackle a specific element of that growth (or focus on finding the space you need to tackle it).

It’s just like my two year old daughter with a bowl full of grapes. If you try to stuff too many things in your mouth at once, it becomes difficult to chew them and digest them. You’re far better off with one grape at a time.

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 (June 13 – June 19, 2009)
A Deal-Collecting Email Address I sign up for all of my shopping programs at various stores with a separate email address, and I give it permission to get all sorts of ads. Then, when I’m about to shop, I log into that email account and do some searching to see whether or not there are any discounts just waiting to be plucked.

The Time Cost of Investing: Does Obliviousness Pay Off? If you spend twenty hours a week to eke out another 1% of your investment, there are probably better ways to spend your time unless you have millions of dollars invested. That’s why index funds make a ton of sense.

Frugal Vacation Notes: Great Free Things to Do in the Dallas/Fort Worth Area I’m hoping to do a “free” travelogue like this for the Chicago area later this summer, but it largely depends on cooperation from the kids.

September 23, 2005 This is the day when I first started to get an inkling that I was in a bad place with my money and my career. It wasn’t the key moment that started the turnaround, but it was the day I started to grow up.

The Truth About Grocery Store Flyers They don’t always reveal bargains. Instead, you have to have some degree of sense about what an item actually costs in order to be able to really use flyers.

Two Years Ago (June 13 – June 19, 2008)
How We Organize Our Coupons and Execute Our Coupon Strategy This really is the easiest way to use coupons. Over time, we’ve clipped fewer and fewer coupons as we’ve come to find that bulk buying at warehouse stores usually beats coupons.

The Guardianship Question We found a solution to this question that works for us, but it didn’t come about without a lot of soul searching and thinking.

How To Write an Effective Thank You Note for Any Occasion A handwritten thank you note is always a very nice touch that goes a long way towards cementing a relationship. Such notes are almost always well worth the effort put into them.

Seven Ideas for Preparing Food at Home Cheaply with Minimal Space and Resources You don’t need a perfect kitchen to make great food. Heck, all you really need is a hot plate and a pan sitting on a table somewhere.

Are the Things You Buy Investments? It’s worth thinking of the things we buy through the lens of an investment. Is it increasing in value or decreasing? Are we getting more value out of it than we put in?

Three Years Ago (June 13 – June 19, 2007)
How To Get Off The Treadmill: A Detailed Guide To Becoming Self-Employed This is more or less the path I used myself on the way to self-employment. If you approach it with seriousness, passion, and desire, you can do it, too.

I’ve Loaned My Friend Money And Now It’s Eating Me Up Inside The best solution to this problem is to simply avoid loaning money to your friends. Friendships aren’t worth dying over thanks to lending money.

Financial Planning For A Life Of Volunteerism And Social Work Several people in my life who are very important to me have chosen a life oriented towards social work. Financially, it can be a very challenging path.

Prepaying On Your Home Loan Is Just A Conservative Investment An early payment on your home loan is the same as investing that much money at a rate of return equal to the interest rate on your mortgage. Most of the time, that’s a pretty good deal.

The Bulk Buying Debate Is it really worthwhile to buy stuff in bulk? It is – if you’re careful and thoughtful about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Follow me on Twitter – 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!