Connie writes in:

I just moved in with my husband-to-be and we’re discovering that we have very different lifestyles in some regards. The biggest challenge has been food. My husband is absolutely convinced that it is actually CHEAPER for us to eat out for every meal than prepare food at home. We have everything we need in our kitchen already to make meals, but I can’t convince him this is a huge financial loss for us.

Simply sit down with him and issue him a challenge. For one week, he can make all of the meal choices and you’ll eat out together as you normally do. Then, for one week, you’ll make meals at home. At the end of the week, tally up the receipts and see who’s ahead.

Unless your meals out consist of nothing but food from the dollar menu at a fast food restaurant or your meals at home are lobster and saffron and morels, I’ll virtually guarantee that your meals at home will be less expensive.

Here are ten tactics I would suggest that you try during this week to maximize the value of the meals at home by minimizing the total work, minimizing the cost, and making it clear that making food at home isn’t the hard chore that many people make it out to be.

Start with Grocery Flyers
The best first step to take on this journey is to start with the grocery flyers. Identify some of the lower-cost grocery stores in your area and seek out their weekly specials using their websites. Focus particularly on the fresh produce and meats. Why? These will be the things that you anchor your meals around. Make a list of these items that are on special and start from that.

Make a Meal Plan Together
Sit down with your partner and look at the list of ingredients. Brainstorm some main courses that sound tasty utilizing these vegetables and fruits and meats. Keep it simple – don’t go crazy with it. If you want to browse, visit a recipe website like Epicurious and search based on the ingredients you’re looking at, just to see what pops up. From there, sketch out what meals you’d like to have together (and apart) over the next week.

Stick to Simple Recipes (at First)
Don’t delve into anything that’ll take more than half an hour of prep time or require more than six or seven ingredients – at first (you’ll get there later on). Keep the recipes simple and appealing to both of you.

Make a Grocery List
Once you have a meal plan hashed out, prepare a grocery list from that meal plan. List all of the ingredients for all of the recipes, then start whacking off the things you already have on hand and merge the ingredients that the recipes share (like 2 cups of milk for one recipe and 2 cups of milk for another – just get a large container of milk).

Shop With Sense
Once you have that grocery list, head to the store(s), ideally focusing on just one store that has the best prices in your area. If you’re not sure which one that is, do some Google searching and get some pointers. If you’re still not sure, guess – you can always figure out of there are lower cost options later (just be sure to save your receipt for future comparisons). Again, don’t make this overly complicated for the sake of shaving a few more dollars off of it – don’t shop at four different stores at this point. Make it nice and easy.

Be Logical with Leftovers
You’re far better off preserving raw ingredients for future meals than preparing too much at a given meal and eating leftovers the next day. Raw ingredients – like a cooked chicken breast instead of a chicken-and-broccoli crepe – allow you the freedom to remix it in a lot of ways. That chicken breast can be diced and scrambled with eggs and cheese, sliced onto a sandwich, cubed into soup, and countless other things.

Use the Freezer
If you do make too much of something, freeze it. Give it some time to pass before reintroducing it. Eat it yourself for lunches. Leftovers are a good thing, but if someone is used to simply eating something different at every meal, you should give it some time between the main meal and leftovers. I suggest stocking some of them in clearly marked containers (like freezer Ziplocs) in the freezer. That way, at the end of the week, you can point to how many meals are just sitting waiting to be eaten.

Stock Your Pantry Carefully
It’s tempting when you start cooking at home to stock your pantry with every staple under the sun. Don’t fall into that trap. Buy ingredients as you actually need them and just put the excess of those specific purchases in the pantry for now. As your cooking skills and repertoire and adventurous nature grow, you’ll want more and more spices and ingredients, but if you buy all of it at this point, you’re simply putting the cart before the horse.

Don’t Only Cook at Home
One great way to make your case is to not eat every meal at home if your partner is not used to it. Go out one or two nights during the week. Remember, the key to lasting personal finance success is compromise, and you can make this entire change much more palatable if you do that right off the bat. Eat out a couple of nights and you’ll still be able to show impressive food savings from the week.

There are many, many great frugal tactics for minimizing your home food bill, but they really only work in a context where everyone is committed to doing just that. If you’re trying to simply show that you can save money by eating at home and that it’s pretty easy, make it easy. Compromise. Grow into this with your partner. Don’t make it a big, painful cold turkey switch. You can grow into the more challenging tactics later on.

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 27 – July 3, 2009)
Personal Finance 101: Why Do I Need Credit At All? Credit isn’t itself a bad thing – in fact, it has benefits besides getting yourself into debt. Mishandling of credit, though, can be a very, very bad thing.

The Best Money Advice, in Ten Words or Less I asked my 5,000 (at the time) Twitter followers to give me their best advice in ten words or less. This was the cream of the crop.

The Cheap Garbage Bag Dilemma I don’t buy cheap garbage bags. Garbage bags are something that I just don’t skimp on. Here’s why.

Blending Work and Family: How We Do It Given that I work from home and Sarah’s been off of work quite often with maternity leave and summer breaks, the lines between personal and professional are really blurred in our lives. Here’s how we deal with that blurring.

Ten Great Ways to Make Powerful Visual Reminders of Your Personal Finance (and Other) Goals Many of our most challenging goals (like changing our spending or eating habits) require constant, powerful reminders to succeed. Here’s how to make those reminders so that you don’t fall off of the wagon over and over again.

Two Years Ago (June 27 – July 3, 2008)
No Time for Frugality: Cutting Financial Corners with No Time Investment There are many frugal tactics you can execute without investing even a bit of time. Here are a handful of them.

A Clever Trick for Automatically Finding Deals You Want at Amazon I use this trick for Christmas shopping and also for keeping my eye out for very specific items that I’d be willing to pick up at a very low price.

The Minimalist Kitchen: What You Need (and Don’t Need) to Set Up Your First Workable Home Kitchen You really don’t need thousands of dollars worth of stuff to have a killer kitchen. You don’t need much at all, in fact.

Is Time the Difference Between Big Spenders, Frugal Folks, and Cheapskates? I think it’s at least part of the difference. I think how people use their time is also really important.

The Net Worth Mentality: The Road Less Traveled If you want a powerful way to track your personal finance progress, net worth is probably the single best number you can use. I use net worth myself, but I don’t use non-liquid assets in counting that number (no cars, no home).

Three Years Ago (June 27 – July 3, 2007)
SmartMoney Magazine’s “7 Money Mistakes” – And The Simple Dollar’s “7 More Money Mistakes” Trust me, there are way more than fourteen money mistakes out there.

Guilty Money: How Much Do You Have To Spend Frivolously Before You Feel Guilty About It? I really don’t have to spend much at all. I don’t like to spend money frivolously. If I know I’m going to go someplace to spend money freely, I put $X in cash in my pocket and keep my spending in that range. For most purchases, I study them to death before making a move (in contrast to how I used to spend freely).

Musings On Spending $3 On A Candy Bar It’s amazing how something so small can really connect with something so big.

How I Made Brown Bag Lunches Work For Me Now that I work from home, I eat leftovers for most of my lunches. When I don’t eat leftovers, I usually make a sandwich out of whatever’s on hand.

Overspending on Children and How to Fight It My biggest weakness – and my son is learning how to exploit it – is when my children behave really well and do everything I ask, then calmly and quietly ask for a toy or something at the store. Even more painful, if I say “no,” they’re starting to learn to just go “okay” and continue being good and mild-mannered.

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

Ten Ways to Get More out of The Simple DollarUpdated!
This is kind of a FAQ for new readers and is posted each week along with the Time Machine. Here are ten 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. Become a fan of The Simple Dollar on Facebook. I put up questions and other materials about once every week or two on Facebook (so you won’t be flooded with Simple Dollar updates). Join in the conversation with other Simple Dollar fans and occasionally get some interesting freebies, too.

4. Follow me on Twitter. I post 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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!

9. 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”.

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

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen.

Hey, look, homemade crepes!

OK, before we get going, it should be noted that this meal is pretty much as easy to prepare as you want it to be – and at almost every turn, we chose the more difficult route.

Actually, to be more specific, Sarah chose the more difficult route. She did most of the preparation of this recipe and was the one that made most of the difficult choices. I’ll be using the adjective “we” to describe the effort because there was some trade-off here and there, but she did most of the effort for this recipe.

What difficult choices did we make? Rather than buying a package of crepes at the store, Sarah chose to make the crepes from scratch. Rather than buying a package of pre-shredded Swiss cheese, Sarah chose to buy a chunk of Swiss and shred it herself. In both cases, the result was a tastier and healthier and less expensive meal, but it certainly added to the prep time. Those two things alone more than doubled our prep time, turning a meal that could probably be in the oven in fifteen or twenty minutes into something that involved more than an hour of work.

So, let’s dig in and see how we got there.

The inspiration and model for this meal came from this cookbook, Low Cost Cooking, that we came across in a yard sale for $0.25 (the cover has a $0.50 sticker on it, but we came late to the sale). Can you guess when it was published by the cover design and heavy use of earth tones? If you guessed “late seventies or early eighties,” you’re a winner! It was published in 1980 and is apparently long out of print.

Yes, we shop at yard sales and consignment shops for cookbooks. They’re actually great sources for cookbooks. I’d estimate half of our cookbook collection is from such sales.

Anyway, on to the recipe…

Here are the ingredients for everything including the crepes. One of the advantages of making things like crepes on your own is that you can choose what goes into them – organic milk and farm eggs, in this case.

I’m going to mark off the making of the crepes in their own section. If you wish, you can simply buy a package of crepes at the grocery store instead of making your own.

Making Crepes
Here’s what you need just for the crepes.

1 cup all-purpose flour ($0.15 or so)
1 1/2 cups milk ($0.30 or so)
2 eggs ($0.15 or so)
1/4 teaspoon salt ($0.02 or so)
1 tablespoon cooking oil ($0.05 or so)

In other words, you’ll be making about 16 crepes for about $0.65 – or about $0.04 per crepe. If you buy them, they’ll be substantially more than that.

Making crepes is really easy. Just mix all of the ingredients in a bowl until they form a batter, then heat a small skillet over medium heat with just a drop of oil spread all over the surface of it. Put about two tablespoons of the batter in the middle of the skillet, then lift the skillet and tilt it to spread the batter evenly. Let it cook over medium heat for about a minute or so (or until the top face looks solid instead of liquid), then flip the pan over on top of a paper towel and (maybe, depending on how it cooked) scrape the crepe from the pan with a spatula.

Voila.

Now just repeat it about fifteen times or so and you have your crepes. You might ruin one or two along the way as you get used to the right heat setting, but don’t sweat it – you’ll have plenty of crepes.

Now for the filling…

Making Filling
Here’s an ingredient list for the filling. Obviously, specific choices vary a lot in price, so I’m just using the prices we paid for this stuff. If you aren’t hitting a sale or are buying premium items, the price per ingredient might be higher.

1 10 oz. package frozen broccoil ($1.19)
2 tablespoons margarine or butter (about $0.05)
2 tablespoons all purpose flour (about $0.02)
1/4 teaspoon of salt (about $0.02)
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg (about $0.02)
1 1/2 cups milk (about $0.30)
3/4 cup shredded Swiss cheese (about 3 oz.) (about $0.60)
2 cups finely chopped cooked chicken (we used roughly a pound) (about $2.50)
12-16 crepes

So, our cost per crepe – assuming we make 16 of them, which we did – is about $0.34 per stuffed crepe. We’ll talk about that again at the end.

The sauce Melt the margarine/butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat, then add the flour, salt, and nutmeg. Stir it a bit to make a nice roux, then add the milk all at once. Cook and stir this until it’s thick and bubbling a bit. Keep cooking and stirring for about another minute, then add the Swiss cheese and keep stirring it until all of the Swiss cheese is melted. Sit the sauce aside.

We like to grate our own cheese, even though it takes a bit longer than buying a bag of pre-grated cheese. You have much more control over what kind of cheese you buy and what ingredients are in it, plus with freshly grated cheese, it’s actually fresh and much more moist (bagged cheese often has corn starch to prevent it from sticking to itself over a long shelf life). Even better – it’s usually cheaper, too.

The filling First, cook the broccoli according to the directions (you can use fresh if you wish – if you do, just steam it after chopping it into small pieces). You’ll also need to cook the chicken – we cooked up some chicken breasts for this dish, though you may want to use other portions of the chicken.

You can see a bit of spilled crepe batter on the stove top there, as well as one of the finished crepes off to the side. (I think that was the one we sampled as we made the crepes).

Anyway, once you’ve cooked the broccoli and cooked and chopped the chicken, combine the chicken and broccoli and one cup of the cheese sauce in a big bowl and stir it until it’s consistent.

Then just lay out a crepe with the unbrowned side up, spoon about 1/4 of a cup (or a bit less) of filling into the middle of the crepe, and roll up the crepe and put it in a 13″ by 9″ baking dish. Repeat with all of the crepes that you can fit in there (we fit in about 16):

Then, pour the remaining cheese sauce on top of the crepes. Preheat your oven to 375 F (about 190 C), cover the crepes with foil, and bake for 20 minutes or so.

Here’s our pan of crepes, freshly pulled from the oven:

… and here’s what my final dinner plate looked like:

The fruit side dish was incredibly simple: we just had some blackberries that we bought in bulk that we washed, put a few in a small dish, and spooned a bit of raspberry yogurt on top. It was a delightful side.

As I mentioned, each crepe cost somewhere around $0.34 to make. Thus, three crepes would cost about $1 in ingredients – I ate two and was perfectly happy with dinner. Add in the fruit and yogurt and even the small glass of wine and the cost of that meal for me was about $1.

Yes, it took some time, but you could greatly reduce the time (and add a bit more cost per meal) by simply buying your own crepes.

Was it tasty? Our usual rule of thumb is that if all four of us – myself, my wife, my four year old son, and my two year old girl – all enjoy the main course, we’ve got a recipe we’ll use again in the future. We all liked it. In fact, the kids each ate two crepes – they requested more crepes instead of more fruit after their plate was empty, a completely unexpected result.

This is the tenth 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.

One of the biggest difficulties in modern life is dealing with projects. We deal with so many projects in our life, from personal ones like getting an exercise routine in place or planning your wife’s surprise fortieth birthday party to professional ones like starting a blog or writing a killer piece of software.

Our biggest challenge is that with so many projects going on and filling our mindspace, we often feel like we don’t have time to concentrate on any one project. I know that at various points in my life, I fell into this exact trap. I’d be sitting at work engaging in a project when I’d suddenly be reminded of my plans to teach my son how to read, so I’d wind up wandering mentally for a bit thinking about that project and when I got back to the work at hand, I’d completely lost my flow.

Obviously, the best way to handle a project you’re working on is just like everything else we’ve talked about in this series. You’ve got to have the pieces of it out of your head, a clear plan for the project in place, and know what the next action step you need to take is so that you can include it on your list of things to do.

That’s basically the idea behind this chapter. How do you take an idea for a big project and develop it in such a way that it fits in with all of the other projects you’re doing, doesn’t mentally distract you when you’re working on something else, and makes the next step that you need to take with the project very self-evident?

Fitting the Project In
For me, the single most effective way to fit a new project into my life is to keep it accessible and make it consistent with the other projects I have going on.

For every project I’m involved with, a few central things are always true. I keep a master list of ongoing projects and each project has an entry on that list. I have a folder for each project that keeps my ideas for it, any information I have for it, and an outline of what needs to be done to bring the project to completion. I review that project each week until it’s completed or it’s abandoned for some reason (the project isn’t working or my goals have changed).

The project master list is really, really important. I use this each week to make sure that I’m actually making progress on each of my projects. I go through the entire list and I usually pull out the folder for each one just to keep things in mind.

Allen touches on this on page 222:

Just as your “Next Actions” lists need to be up-to-date, so, too, does your “Projects” list. That done, give yourself a block of time, ideally between one and three hours, to handle as much of the “vertical” thinking about each project as you can.

At the very least, right now or as soon as possible, take those few of your projects that you have the most attention on or interest in right now and do some thinking and collecting and organizing on them, using whatever tools seem most appropriate.

Focus on each one, one at a time, top to bottom. As you do, ask yourself, “What about this do I want to know, capture, or remember?”

In other words, you should have a list of all of your projects and you should regularly spend some time going through that list, focusing on each project and adding to it or just making sure you’re moving forward on it.

Bringing the Project Together
Whenever I first sit down to think about a project, I set aside at least an hour to get it correct right off the bat.

I get out a folder. I get out a piece of paper (you can also do this on a computer, but paper works better for me). And I simply start throwing down my ideas for the project.

Allen spells the importance of writing tools out on page 216:

Keep good writing tools around all the time so you never have any unconscious resistance to thinking due to not having anything to capture it with.

This is yet another reason why I always keep a pocket notebook and a pen on me at all times. Not only does it help me write down things I need to do (to get them out of my mind), but it’s also an essential aid for brainstorming projects when I’m just sitting there waiting for something.

Here are some of the big pieces for turning a vague idea of a project into something workable.

Have an end goal I usually start with the end goal – what do I want to accomplish with this project? I try to state it in such a way that success for the project is very clear – either this statement is true or it isn’t and the truth of the statement can be very easily identified by looking at data or a final product. This takes some revision.

Make it specific So, for example, a goal like I want to get in better shape doesn’t fly because it’s really impossible to measure. Instead, try something like I want to lose 25 pounds or I want to run a 5K in 30 minutes.

Figure out big steps Let’s say you decide on the 5K goal. What do you need to do to get there? Training. Possibly a better diet. Before that training, you may want to visit a doctor. You’ll probably want to do some “dry run” 5Ks, too.

Break them down until they’re small steps that you could add to your “next action” list So, what does “training” mean? What does that mean in terms of a weekly schedule? Do the research. Figure out what action you need to take. Print off a 5K training plan that meets your needs, like this couch to 5K plan. Each of those training sessions is an individual action you can add to your list. Make a doctor’s appointment and add that appointment to your calendar.

Make a list of those “next actions.” Now that the brainstorming and collection is over, turn that material into a coherent list of actions you would need to follow in order to reach your goal. That way, as you achieve them, you can cross them off your project list. These don’t have to specifically be next actions, but they need to be close enough that they can be quickly broken down into next actions. So, for example, you might have “week one training” and “week two training” and so on on your project list if you also have materials explaining what “week one training” is.

Maximizing the Next Step
The final piece of the equation is to keep translating the next step in each of your projects into something on your “next action” list.

For me, the key to doing this is a weekly review of all of my projects. Not only do I make sure that there’s an action from each of them on my “next action” list, I also spend a bit of time thinking about each project again. Is it going well? Is it going poorly? Why? Am I still invested in this project? What are the rewards of success? What are the consequences of failure?

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve completely thrown out my project plans and done something completely different. Some people might think that the first plans were a waste of time, but almost every time it’s happened, I would have never found a much better plan without coming up with that initial plan and reviewing it regularly and rethinking it over time.

In the end, this all saves a lot of time. A lot of it. You find yourself moving forward on stuff instead of idling on it. You have more efficient plans because of the time you spent focusing on the project and you’re able to do each step more efficiently because you’re not trying to keep the plan in your head.

Projects that literally would take me forty hours in the past now takes ten or fifteen total. I’m not exaggerating a bit. All of that extra time enables me to add a lot of other things to my life that I would never possibly have had time for in the past. Quite simply, it was because of this type of planning and thought that I was able to launch and grow The Simple Dollar while also working a full time job (that required some overtime work, too) and being a good father and husband.

You can’t jump into your dreams if you don’t have things organized.

Next week, we’ll talk about the power of the collection habit.

For those of you unaware of the news, Wesabe, an online personal finance information manager that I quite liked because of their strict security methods, is shutting down on July 31 – at least in terms of their personal finance management tools, as their discussion forums will remain open.

In the past, I’ve recommended Wesabe as an alternative to Mint for those (like me) who are very concerned about privacy issues and are hesitant to share their account information and personal data with yet another resource.

So, what alternatives are there to Wesabe? In building this list of personal finance data aggregation tools, I’ve kept three principles in mind.

First, the tool does not require any personal information from you whatsoever. I’m only interested in tools that maintain strict privacy.

Second, the tool makes it possible to see all of your personal finance information in one place. This is really the point of this exercise, after all.

Third, the tool is well-supported enough that you can find assistance for your problems online. In other words, if you’re trying to do something with the program and run into trouble, you can seek help fairly easily.

Here are the five best tools I’ve found that do this.

Microsoft Excel is what I use to manage my personal finance data. It’s simply an incredibly powerful spreadsheet program, capable of generating all kinds of views of my data and whatever charts and graphs I can invent. It makes importing the data pretty easy via copying and pasting or importing CSV files.

There are two big drawbacks to Excel, though. One, to really get the best parts of the software, you have to climb a fairly steep learning curve. Two, it’s costly. There’s no way around it – Excel is expensive. However, there is a ton of support for Excel online – virtually any question you come up with has an answer that can easily be found. Find out more about Excel at http://www.microsoft.com/office/excel.

Quicken‘s inclusion here might surprise people, since it’s usually known for automatic retrieval of account data. However, if you choose to manually enter the data yourself – or import it from downloaded CSV files from your financial institutions – Quicken can operate quite well without having any of your account information.

Quicken is easily the most full-featured option when considering just personal finance data, but it’s also costly, as retail versions of Quicken sell for a variety of prices depending on your exact needs. You can find out more at http://www.quicken.com/.

OpenOffice is very similar to Excel in many ways – it’s a full featured spreadsheet program. Even better, it’s absolutely free, as it’s open source software. Of course, that’s not to say it’s an absolutely perfect alternative to Excel, either. There are some bugs in the software that crop up just often enough to drive me crazy and the interface isn’t as slick.

However, it’s free. This takes away one of the big drawbacks of Excel – the price – and replaces it with a number of smaller ones – a less intuitive interface and some software bugs. I used this for a long time, but eventually migrated back to Excel when bugs frustrated me one time too many. However, one can’t argue with the price and recent reviews have indicated that it’s more stable than in the past. You can find out more at http://www.openoffice.org/.

PearBudget captures many of the features of Quicken in an online service that doesn’t grab your account information, either. In fact, if there’s a successor to the functionality of Wesabe, it’s probably PearBudget.

It’s important to remember, though, that PearBudget pretty much does what it says. It helps you create a budget and track your spending within that budget. It does not help you track investments or income growth. However, if budget management is what you need, PearBudget is probably the best tool for you. You can use the paid online version at http://www.pearbudget.com or try out a free spreadsheet version at http://www.pearbudget.com/spreadsheet.

An old fashioned ledger seems archaic, but it works. I have a lot of readers that simply use a printed ledger to record every dollar coming in and every dollar going out of their home.

A paper ledger is really straightforward to use – just write in the expense or source of income, the amount of that expense or income, and carry forward your new balance. It simply works and it maintains as much privacy as you wish. Frugal Dad has a great article on starting a paper household ledger – it really does work.

What solutions do you use for keeping track of your finances without sharing your account information? (Yes, yes, I know there are a lot of great tools that require account data, but that’s not the focus today.)

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Planning for future relocation
2. Growing a blog
3. First time homebuyer advice
4. How to grill foiled potatoes
5. Refinancing a vehicle
6. Predicting Social Security’s future
7. Teaching the value of money
8. HELOC or not?
9. Just starting out with credit
10. Pre-tax or after-tax 401(k)?

As many of you know, I’m a voracious reader who typically reads three books or so a week. Every once in a while, though, I’ll start a book and it’ll just turn into a painful slog. I’m stubborn, so I’ll keep trying to read it, but it’ll just completely turn me off so that I actually avoid reading for a couple of weeks.

Eventually, I just give up on the book, close the cover, and put it in the “never again” pile. I’m currently just about there with the book I’m currently reading, The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt. So much potential in the characters and setting. So many, many, many pages of virtually nothing happening.

Knowing that we plan to relocate — to the burbs — in the next 3 years, mostly for better public schools, how would you go about planning to do it? Would you make the move sooner or later? Would you sell now, pay off debt and rent a place, or, buy something lower priced right away? And, given our debt load, what makes the most sense to tackle first?
- Karin

The first thing I would do is take a look at my credit report, which you can get from the federal government for free at AnnualCreditReport.com. Do you have any negative entries on your report? One or two is okay, a lot is problematic.

If your bad entries are small in number, I would shop around for a mortgage right now because of the ludicrously low interest rates. The traditional advice is to wait until you have a full down payment, but if you do wait that long, there’s a very good chance that interest rates will have risen enough to take away any advantage they might offer. Since I’m unsure where exactly you live, I’m going to guess that you don’t live in one of the overpriced metro areas and that you can find something relatively cost-effective in the suburbs. I usually tell people to not get a mortgage more than double their family’s combined annual income, because anything more than that puts their household income in the hurt locker.

If you have some credit irregularities, spend some time getting your own financial house in order. Make your payments on time for at least a year – preferably two or three. Focus on paying down your debts, starting with the highest interest one.

I read on Monday’s q & a section that you have 700,000 visitors a month. I know your blog is just a few years old, so I was wondering if you could share with your newer readers what you did to grow your blog (besides writing good posts frequently). How did people find your blog? I would love to know more.
- Melissa

The number one most important thing a new blog can do is write a lot of good content. If you can’t consistently turn out worthwhile articles that people actually want to read, then nothing else is really going to matter.

The next step is to make sure there are a lot of links out there to your site. One way to do that, especially at first, is to participate in blog carnivals. Start searching for them at BlogCarnival.com and also use Google to seek them out, because many ongoing carnivals do not participate on BlogCarnival. These are easy ways to get links back to your site and to your articles, and also to get your articles read by bloggers who share a common interest and focus with you.

You should also target blogs that are somewhat more popular than your own by either writing guest posts there (if they accept them) or by writing posts that directly match the topic of that site (which would encourage them to link to you). When you do write such an article – and make sure it’s a good one – contact that site owner. This may or may not get you a link depending on a number of factors (how busy the site operator is, for one), but if nothing else, you’ve written a good article.

Really, in the end, good content and lots of links are the key to people finding you. To get people to stay and recommend you, you have to consistently write good stuff and make it easy for them to stay in touch by making your site available by RSS feed and by email. If you want lots of readers, you have to make it as easy as you can for them to keep reading.

I’m a 23 year old guy finishing up my Master’s degree in engineering. I already have a job lined up in the Washington, DC area, and it’s a government job, so my job security is great, and I’ll be making decent money. I’m still considering condos or townhouses, but I really want to buy a house. My financial situation is fairly secure; I’ll be making around 60K a year with my Master’s degree, I have about 10K in savings, and between my parent’s and grandparent’s investments for me, I have around another 40K-50K for the downpayment. Do you have any tips for a first-time homebuyer, like questions I should ask, additional costs I should factor in, or any other general tips?
- Andy

Well, you’re going to be buying in the D.C. area, which is notoriously expensive. I usually don’t recommend that anyone get a mortgage for more than two times their annual income because of the crunch that a higher mortgage can put on their monthly cash flow.

My recommendation would be to sit tight and let your career develop a bit before buying. Work hard and seek to move up in the pay scale and your GS level. Keep saving your money. Keep thinking about what you actually want.

Eventually, your life will settle and it’ll become clear to you what the best long term choice is – and you’ll be in the right financial position to make it happen. Good luck.

I read your menu and am interested in how long and at what temperature you cooked the potatoes on the grill wrapped in foil.
- Kelly

I usually don’t worry too much about the “perfect” temperature.

My technique is just to make sure that the potatoes are in small pieces – meaning either baby potatoes or quartered/eighthed whole potatoes – and that they’re most – using ice cubes – before I wrap them in foil and toss them on the grill. Temperature doesn’t matter so much as making sure they’re the right tenderness for you.

I usually put the wrapped package on the grill right as I begin to preheat it to cook something that takes longer than a minute or two (burgers, vegetables, pork chops, chicken breasts) and the potatoes are ready to go when the main course is finished.

I have a question regarding refinancing my current truck, a 2006 Chevy Colorado with 85,000 miles in good condition.

My question is, should I look around to refinance this loan? If so, where is the best place to look? What are the downfalls to refinancing? If I refinance at a lower APR for a 36 month loan, will my payments be lower? How about for a 24 month loan? I know it depends on the APR rate I can get, but maybe a break even analysis is in order to determine if its worth it to refinance? I would do it myself but I barely passed my finance classes in college, thus the reason I stuck with a marketing degree!
- Kirk

Your payments will probably be lower if you refinance to a lower interest rate, but refinancing itself will often have additional costs – loan application fees, points, origination fees, and early termination penalties. You’ll also have to pay a lien transfer fee which varies in amount from state to state. If your credit isn’t good, you won’t be able to refinance at all, either.

In other words, you’ll have to be careful and take your time with this to find a lender who will actually get you a lower rate without any fees tacked on.

You’ll also want to do this soon before further depreciation sets in, because if the car goes below $7,500 in value, most lenders won’t refinance because it’s not worth the risk.

My suggestion? Start at your local credit union. See what they have available.

I finally visited some retirement calculator sites to see what my ideal contributions would look like. I’m 28, currently working at a nonprofit but hoping to go to nursing school in the next year. I’m not worried about having enough for retirement, but do wonder how you feel about the probable end of Social Security as a means for increased retirement income. How do you keep from feeling frustrated that significant amounts of each paycheck are being withheld and likely will never be seen again?
- Joanna

In my opinion (merely as someone who reads the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and BusinessWeek), I do not think that Social Security in its current form will exist when we reach retirement age. The numbers simply aren’t sustainable. As Boomers retire, go on Social Security, and live for another twenty five years, the system is going to empty out because there are fewer people in Generation X and Generation Y to fill the coffers.

Social Security was not designed to handle people living into their eighties with any regularity. When the system was invented, 65 was older than the average age at which people died.

One of several things will eventually happen. Either they’ll cut off all people under a certain age from the system, they’ll severely delay the “retirement age,” or they’ll drastically increase the amount of money people have to pay for Social Security. All of those are political nightmares, of course, but when the system approaches bankruptcy in about twenty years (when I’m around 50 and you’re around 48 or so), one of them will have to happen.

My bet is on the severe delay of “retirement age.” My guess is that Social Security won’t kick in until you’re 80 or 85 by the time we get around to seeing the benefits.

Thus, for most people who want some semblance of retirement when they’re in their sixties or seventies, I usually encourage them to think of Social Security as a complete non-factor in their planning.

I’ve read over all your archives about a child’s allowance but can’t find just the right mix for our kid. It’s a unique situation for our “family”. We are each divorced, planning to be married and living together for the most part. Danny was adopted at 8 and is behind in some teachings parents take for granted. He’s 13 now and his mom and I have tried several ways to introduce money but he has no interest in managing it. If he gets money, he asks to go shopping with no clue what he wants. We’ve required savings, giving, spending amounts. That didn’t work. We’ve tried providing allowance and deducting when chores weren’t done. We’ve tried $0 allowance with money tied to each chore and that didn’t work.

Any suggestions? I value your advice and wonder which direction you’d go on something like this.
- Tom

The problem seems to be that Danny doesn’t equate work with money in any way, shape, or form. The only way to create this connection is to simply stop giving him money for any purpose.

Put food on his plate and a roof over his head and perhaps minimal clothing, that’s all you should provide. When he wants something, don’t give it to him, no matter how much you’d like to. As long as you keep doing that – and that means everyone involved in his care – he has no reason at all to see the value in working for money. Why work for something when you can just ask for it and have it?

Yes, he probably won’t like it when he finally puts the pieces together. Yes, it might make home life rough for a while. But if he doesn’t start learning how the world works now, you’re going to have a permanent resident on your hands.

What do you think, should a person take out a HELOC even if they don’t need it? The lowest interest rate would be 2 percent more then we are paying for our mortgage and it will fluctuate with the prime and with savings interest where it stands even with money markets it would be a loss. Yes our money is in money market funds, CD’s are at a terrible rate and we are waiting for them to improve and I want our savings liquid.

We had a couple of unexpected major house repairs this last year which we were able to pay for in cash because we had ample savings. Our savings is now about half which is still more then the 6 months of expenses everyone says you need and I will be able to build it back over time, but my other half wants to get a line of credit. We have no other debt other then the house which I am paying enough extra to have it paid off in a little over 6 years, baring any unforeseen issues that might come up. I personally don’t want any credit that is tied to the house, I want the house free and clear ASAP. I also plan on a couple of improvements that we will be able to get a tax credit for that ends this year that will make our house worth more and more energy efficient.
- Mary Ann

I don’t know why you would do this. It seems to work against your goal of wanting to own the house free and clear “ASAP.” If you want that, don’t put more debt on your house.

Yes, it’s tempting to use a HELOC as an emergency fund, but the costs of it are disastrous if you actually have an emergency. By sitting on cash, you’re earning 1-2% on your savings and paying 6% on your mortgage – a difference of about 4%. If you actually have an emergency, you’ll be paying 8% on that HELOC.

In essence, the only reason you’d empty your emergency fund and have a HELOC is because you’re betting that there won’t be an emergency. It’s that exact moment when Murphy’s Law usually kicks in.

I’m 18, fresh out of high school, and have a job that pays me far more than my friends make. College is on the way, as soon as I’m made a full-time employee as opposed to a temp.

I’m confused as to what to do here. I’ve been told to avoid monthly/yearly fees, but it seem’s that these are the only things that will be able to get me started.
- Matt

The first thing you need to do is make sure your credit history is clear, because this sounds like it’s not. Take a look at my credit report, which you can get from the federal government for free at AnnualCreditReport.com. Do you see anything that shouldn’t be there? If you do, get rid of it.

If you’re still having trouble getting a card, there are several options available to you. See if your parents will help you cosign for a credit card. If that’s a nonstarter, consider getting a secured card. A secured card with a $500 limit, for example, means you send them $500 when you open the card, then you use the card as normal. When you cancel the card (assuming you’ve used it normally), you get your deposit back. It’s one way for people with no credit to start building it.

The credit system in America is deeply flawed, unfortunately, but it can be gamed.

What’s your opinion of contributing to an after-tax 401k versus a pre-tax 401k? My company offers both options and I’m trying to decide if I should switch to the after-tax option. P.S. I’m 24 so I do have quite some time before I’ll be withdrawing.
- Sean

I generally encourage people to save for retirement in after-tax retirement savings vehicles unless their income greatly exceeds what they think they’ll be making in retirement.

The reason for this is simple: tax rates have nowhere to go but up. Thus, it’s a lot better to pay income tax now than it is to pay income tax later on.

So, unless you’re making well into the six figures, you’re probably better off with the after-tax account.

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.