In my opinion, the single best bargain in a grocery store is the one pound bag of dried beans. The amount of nutrition and protein that can be had from a pound of dried beans is amazing, plus the flavor of the beans far surpasses the flavor of canned beans. I use beans of various kinds in countless different meals, from scrambled eggs in the morning to grilled beans in the evening, from an ingredient in a tortilla to a side dish with steak.

Where the value really kicks in is that a one pound bag of dried beans can usually be found for less than a dollar, which yields about six cups of cooked beans without preservatives or the loss of flavor you’ll find in canned beans. Plus, they can be prepared whenever you’re at home for a couple of hours, since they don’t require continuous focus for preparation.

Dry beans are much more of a bargain than canned beans. You can buy a sixteen ounce of canned beans for roughly as much as a sixteen ounce bag of dry beans, but the canned beans are already soaked and cooked and also include other liquids for preserving. In essence, you’re getting a lot less beans – beans with the flavor already cooked out, no less – and paying a lot more for what amounts to water.

Preparing the Beans
Start the process in an evening when you’re going to be at home the next day. First, put the dried beans in a colander and rinse them under cool water. Move the beans around with your hand so that all of the beans get thoroughly rinsed, eliminating any dust or dirt that might be on them.

Then, put the beans in a pot and add water until there’s about two inches of water on top of the beans. I usually measure it with my finger, with water up to the second knuckle and with the tip of my index finger touching the beans. Let that pot sit overnight (unless you’re using lentils, which do not need to soak) or, alternately, let them soak all day while you’re at work.

The next morning, drain the beans and toss out the water they soaked in. Add six cups of water, put the pot over high heat, and wait until it’s boiling. Drop the heat down to medium-low so that the water is simmering and use the following guide for how long to let them simmer.

Black beans: 1 1/2 hours
Chickpeas: 2 1/2 hours
Lentils: 30 to 40 minutes
Pinto beans: 2 hours
Red beans: 2 1/4 hours

Generally, use the size of the bean as a rule of thumb for how long to cook them. This is easier to do once you’ve boiled some “standard” beans and are familiar with the sizes and boiling times. Also, use your own taste buds as a guide. When it gets close to the boiling to be finished, try a bean or two and see if you think they’re too hard. Drain off the water when finished.

Storing the Beans
Storing the beans is easy. After allowing them to cool to room temperature, ust put the beans in a covered container in your refrigerator and they’ll keep for up to four days. This works well if you have recipes you intend to use the beans in in the near future.

You can also freeze them, but only for a short period. I usually use quart containers and store them a cup at a time. They keep for about a month – any longer than that and they are very mushy when you thaw them.

Sometimes, I just make a batch of beans and leave them in the fridge even without a specific recipe. They’re so inexpensive and so tasty and so flexible that I’ll just add them to anything I’m preparing, from salads to scrambled eggs to tacos – or even just eat a bowl of them for lunch with some salsa and carrot sticks on the side.

Using the Beans
What can you use them for? I’ve mentioned a few above, but here’s a list of ten ways I like to use cooked beans in my own life.

Beans and rice: cook up some rice, mix with the beans, add almost any other vegetable (and/or meat) you wish, and you’re good to go.
Bean salad: Beans, a bit of olive oil, whatever veggies you have on hand diced up, and a bit of lemon juice and vinegar makes a great cold salad.
Burritos and tacos: beans are a perfect ingredient.
Chili: cooked beans are a fundamental ingredient in any chili.
Dips: puree some beans and add other ingredients to your liking, like salsa or garlic (try pureeing the beans with chopped tomato, avocado, green onion, green pepper, cilantro, lime juice, and cayenne pepper for a great dip).
Salad: toss a few on top of most salads.
Scrambled eggs: just add a handful of beans as you’re scrambling them – perfect for breakfast burritos, too.
Side dishes: Mix beans and salsa, top with some cheese of your choice, and bake until the cheese is melted for a very easy and tasty side for many meals.
Soups: you can add beans to almost any soup to directly add protein to the mix.
Taco pizza: use the ingredients for tacos – including beans – as a pizza topping (with perhaps more cheese than you might otherwise use).

There are so many uses for beans, they’re so cheap, and they’re packed with protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals. A one pound bag of dried beans is simply the best bargain in a grocery store, in my opinion.

Quite a few people have requested an audio version of my recent book, The Simple Dollar: How One Man Wiped Out His Debts and Achieved the Life of His Dreams. You’re in luck. The audio book is now available for download via Amazon or you can sign up for an Audible.com membership and get it at a discounted rate. Alternately, if you’re already an Audible member, you can download it there. Stefan Rudnicki did a great job with the reading (in my opinion) – he’s won 11 Audie awards from the Audio Publishers Association for his excellent work over a broad scope of audiobooks.

Anyway, on with some interesting articles I’ve read recently.

Negativity: A Motivation Killer I’m coming around to the belief that negativity is the absolute biggest opponent people have for individual success. Negativity does nothing but hold you back. (@ pick the brain)

US recession changes spending priorities, doesn’t reduce spending “As a nation, we’re not really cutting back, we’re just giving the outward impression that we are.” In the end, it’s still all about what other people think for an awful lot of people. Success comes from within, not from without. (@ unclutterer)

If You Don’t Ask, The Answer is Always No I agree when it comes to people you’ll never have to socially interact with in the future. The problem is introduced when you’ll have to be around these people in the future, in which case it makes sense (to me) to tread more carefully. (@ man vs. debt)

Stopping Shopping Momentum My solution to this is to focus much more heavily on the “choosing” rather than the actual “buying.” (@ get rich slowly)

What Will Retirement Look Like for Younger Generations? I think the traditional definition of “retire and sit in the Barcalounger at age 65″ is dying, if not already dead. (@ frugal dad)

This past weekend, I attended GenCon 2010, a gaming convention in Indianapolis, IN, with a group of several friends. I had been saving up to attend this convention for a while, and that savings consisted largely of money saved in the way I described this morning: making lots of small choices that saved money and didn’t negatively impact my way of living.

During the convention, I had many opportunities to chat with people and I found that at least a few of them had done the exact same thing. They didn’t have the income or resources to travel to such things regularly, but they chose to cut back in other areas. Some of them didn’t own televisions at home, for example. Some of them ran small side businesses for income. Others simply did frugal things, like eating meals at home and putting the savings away for their trip.

In each case, the rule of thumb is the same: they took money away from something of less importance to them to use the money on something of more importance to them.

Translate this to your own life for a moment. What things in your life would you love to be doing but you can’t because you can’t afford it? What do you sit around daydreaming about but never actually do because you don’t have the money?

Maybe you are deeply passionate about travel, but you can only travel once every few years.

Maybe you dream about having the perfect home entertainment setup, but you balk at the price of the television and other equipment.

Maybe your idle thoughts focus on something like attending a convention related to your hobby, but the trip and the expenses are just too much.

You spend years dreaming about these things, but they just keep being out of reach.

That’s where sensible frugality plays a role. The trick is to cut back – hard – in the areas that don’t matter as much to you and save that money where you’ve cut back. This enables you to live your life without misery. (Of course, there’s nothing saying you can’t also choose to make sacrifices in specific areas important to you, too.) At the end of the year, though, you find yourself with the money for that trip or that television or that convention – and you can just do it.

I’ll give a very specific example.

I’ve seen an absolutely gorgeous 60″ LED HDTV for sale at Sam’s Club for about $2,400. It’s beautiful – I won’t deny that. If someone deeply wanted an absolutely amazing home entertainment setup, they might very well make this television the centerpiece of that room. I could see someone who played a lot of video games and/or watched a lot of television purchasing this flat screen and installing it happily in their living room.

But they can’t afford it! What’s a solution to get there?

The person spends $300 a month on their energy bill. Installing a programmable thermostat will cost about $40 up front, but the reduction in energy costs will be about $50 a month or so if properly programmed. This adds up to a total savings of $560 over the course of a year.

The person does three loads of laundry a week. Making their own detergent saves $0.20 a load. Over the course of a year, that adds up to $31.20.

The person drinks a couple bottles of soda a day. Switching to refillable bottles of water stored in the fridge eliminates about $1 a day in spending, giving you $52 more (and it’ll do wonders for your health).

The person commutes 20 miles to work every day for an 40 mile round trip. Setting up a car pool with just one other person four days a week eliminates 80 miles of driving a week. Using the government reimbursement rates, that simple switch will save you $1,040 a year.

The person eats out three times a week. Eating something inexpensive at home once a week instead of eating out saves the person $10 a week, adding up to another $520 over the year.

The person subscribes to a couple premium movie channels that he barely watches. Eliminating these subscriptions and joining Netflix instead reduces the monthly cost from $25 to $9, a savings of $192 a year.

Those moves saves the person $2,395.20 over the course of a year. If he’s socking that money away faithfully in an account bearing 2% interest, he’ll wind up with $2,420 at the end of the year. Time to go buy that television.

Here’s the thing, though: none of those changes required much time investment and they didn’t affect that person’s quality of day-to-day life much at all. He didn’t give up anything life-affirming, but at the end of the year, he had enough cash in hand to make that daydream come true.

You can just substitute in your own “dream” and your own frugal methods of getting there right into this plan. Browse big lists of frugality tips and free things to do and be selective with them, trying out only the things that work for you. Keep track of what you actually save and sock away those savings.

Eventually, you’ll find that you’ve built up some money for whatever it is you’re dreaming of. Even better, you’ll find that this kind of savings is very sustainable and it’ll help you keep building for whatever dream comes next after that.

You can use it to pay off debts. You can use it to build an emergency fund. You can use it to fly to Maui. You can use it to redo your kitchen. Whatever it is you dream of, sensible frugality can do it.

You just need a goal – and you need to start taking the little steps to get there.

Are you ready to start today?

Yesterday, I had a wonderful conversation with an Associated Press reporter who was writing a story about teaching children how to be frugal. The discussion wound around through several topics, eventually coming back to the idea that many people (like, for example, Ramit) do not like frugality because it doesn’t give you the “big win” and that people don’t like giving up things like lattes.

She herself gave an example of this. She lives in a major metropolitan area and lives in a small apartment, which means that, in order to entertain friends, she has to do it outside of the apartment.

My response to her was simple: one of her key values is entertaining friends, so that shouldn’t be an area where she cuts back. Instead, she should cut other areas to the bone, and I mentioned making your own laundry detergent.

Why the “latte factor” has problems
David Bach has long been one of the most well-known personal finance voices out there. He’s written a small truckload of personal finance books and reached a lot of people.

One of his most well-known ideas is that of the “latte factor.” To put it simply, it means that if you simply stop buying a latte each day and save that $5, you’ll begin to build that into a great deal of wealth. $5 every day for a year adds up to about $1,800. Investing it at 8% interest and repeating for two decades gets you just under $83,000. That’s just from avoiding a single latte a day.

The math there is absolutely correct – and the concept works, too. If you cut something small out of your life and consistently save the money from that cut, you’re going to end up with some serious change over time.

The problem is what you’re giving up. The “latte factor” of course refers to coffee – something that’s inessential to basic life, something that’s purely a treat. Yet, for some people, a latte a few times a week is a significant part of their emotional happiness. They rely on that sweet flavor and that little caffeine boost and it fuels them throughout a challenging day.

When you take away that latte – from some people, mind you, not everyone – a very noticeable part of their spice of life goes away. The latte is the big treat in their day that really brings them a shot of happiness and makes the day easier. Taking that away makes their day much drearier.

That’s the inherent problem with the latte factor: when you apply it indiscriminately to everything in your life, you’re going to chop away things that are unimportant – but you’re going to also whack away things that are really important to you.

I prefer the “laundry detergent” factor
Everyone has different little things that make their life happy and bearable. For some people, it is that morning cup of coffee. For me, it’s having books to read and a game to play.

The trick is figuring out which of those little thing really does brighten your life – and which of those things don’t. What you’ll find is that when you really dig into this question, you begin to find that surprisingly few things really make you significantly happy (beyond the initial burst of pleasure at acquiring something). An awful lot of things we buy are part of a routine or done to make others happy or done because we’ve believed that it’ll make us happy when it really doesn’t.

That’s the reason I prefer the “laundry detergent factor” to the “latte factor.” Some people get a great deal of personal pleasure and joy from their morning latte. I’ve yet to meet someone whose life is made substantially better by their decision to buy Tide over another laundry detergent.

Thus, I usually tell people to make their own. You’ll save around twenty cents per load of laundry with a homebrew detergent, and it takes about ten minutes to make a batch that will handle fifty loads. Quick back-of-the-envelope math tells you that making a batch of this stuff earns you about $10 (after tax) in ten minutes.

Once you’ve done that and seen how easy it is to save money while living a little cheaper and not reducing your quality of life, start searching for other methods to do it again. Install a programmable thermostat to whack your monthly energy bill. Properly inflate your car tires to improve your gas mileage. If you don’t read magazines much, cancel your magazine subscriptions. If you rarely watch television, drop your cable. Make a simple price book and figure out the best value grocery store around you (unless, of course, you get deep personal value from shopping specifically at Kroger’s).

If something seems difficult or makes you deeply sad, don’t be afraid to back off. You’re probably hitting on something important to you and, unless you’re in deep financial straits, you’ll find more success by leaving those areas alone.

Good luck!

This is a question I hear all the time from readers who are parents – and it’s a question that comes up in our own household as well. Should our children have life insurance policies?

I’ve done a lot of research and soul-searching on this topic. What follows are the conclusions I’ve come to on the issue. I hope these thoughts will help other parents make up their own minds on this difficult issue. I’m writing the things below with great care, because such concerns can be very, very emotional for parents (myself included).

The obvious and easy answer to the child life insurance question is no. Life insurance is usually purchased as either a salary replacement (so that a spouse or children aren’t left with an inability to maintain their standard of living) and/or a tool to pay for funeral expenses. In the case of a child, there is no salary to replace – and with the absence of a child, living expenses for the family actually drop, meaning it is possible for a family to cover funeral expenses.

Thus, from a straightforward analysis like this, life insurance for a child isn’t a strong financial choice.

But that’s not all there is to it.

The biggest issue is the possibility of illnesses developing late in childhood or in adulthood could prevent your child from being eligible for life insurance. I look at myself as an example of this. I was born with a highly underactive thyroid. My parents were able to get me a small life insurance policy as a child because they were very concerned with other illnesses springing up – and that policy still exists today.

There is also the smaller concern of the ability to pay for a child’s funeral and end-of-life expenses if that happens. For some families (ours included), there is adequate money in the emergency fund to pay such costs. For other familes, however, such funds aren’t easily available, for various reasons. That usually means debt.

There’s also the very small benefit that some policies function in a way that helps pay for college, but these are usually sub-par compared to a strong 529 college savings account. This is more of an “icing on the cake” type of thing rather than a primary feature.

What’s my conclusion? In the end, it comes down to your family’s financial state. If you’re in a good situation with a strong income, life insurance for your child can be a solid choice. However, it’s more important that your child receive other things first, such as steady nutrition, good health care, shelter, clean clothing, and perhaps other savings options for their future (like a well-funded 529).

In our case, we have small policies for each of our children, mostly for the “potential future illness” concerns stated above. My own concern about this may be somewhat inflated because of my own history, but it’s something Sarah and I both take seriously. It’s something we can easily afford and it’s something we know will have value for them no matter what happens in life. The insurance is not a strong bargain, but the monthly cost is very low.

If we were put into a choice between the insurance policy and other essential tools for caring for our children, the other areas would come first.

If you do decide to go the child insurance route, I strongly encourage you to shop around and take your time with the decision. Not all insurance houses are the same – there are big differences in price and coverage out there. I wouldn’t get a large policy, either – one that covers funeral expenses should be an adequate one. If you’re thinking about college, I’d suggest putting the rest of the money you might have spent on a policy into a 529 college savings account like the one we use at College Savings Iowa. That’s exactly what we’re doing.

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. Netflix for family bonding
2. Guilt over income
3. Dishwasher versus hand washing
4. Cancelling a new card
5. Pushy parents and hotel rooms
6. Trust money for college
7. Getting “wants” under control
8. Used deep freezers
9. Apply now or later?
10. Blogging and personal information

A couple people asked me recently about my posting habits. When do I actually write my mailbags?

I usually try to keep a few mailbags ahead, simply because they consume a ton of time to produce and if something is happening in my life, I don’t want to miss a posting.

I usually write two or three of them a week, all roughly at the same time. I go through my reader mailbag email folder, pull out thirty or so questions, and make up columns out of them.

stop me if you have heard this–netflix–but wait. I pay for my 85 year old grandmothers subscription. Giving netflix is not unsual but I think a group that could actual benefit from it most are left out of the loop–the elderly or non-internet friendly. I rejected the idea several times thinking “she isn’t really comfortable with the actual internet”. She uses a dial up AOL account for some limited email but the internet as a whole is just a little too much. But then I had a revelation. Why can’t I just mange her account. It works wonderfully. She writes down whenever she gets a recommend from a friend or sees a preview on tv and then every couple of weeks via phone we update her queue (I live far away thus the phone). Now she gets to avoid doing things she doesn’t like (driving, wandering around the blockbuster, using the internet) and replaces them with things she does (watching movies, talking to her granddaughter, getting the mail like she does anyway, watching old movies or series that are hard to come by in the local store). It does cost me the regular subscription fee but I get use of the on-demand (which enabled me to get rid of my own subscription) and she gets all the movies and shows she wants without any hassle.Her house has become the place to be on Saturday night “for movies that katie sent me from the internet” with all her friends. It also has opened a new area of discussion with us about old movies and how she saw them the first time. It has become one of my crowning gift achievements because I know how much she likes it because she knows if she ever doesn’t want it anymore I can cancel the subscription anytime (also she tells me every time we talk about how much she loved the movie she got yesterday/ last week).
- Katie

Given that Netflix costs $9 a month for this service, this is an absolutely great way to bond with a family member, particularly one with limited mobility.

Think of it this way. She’s giving her grandmother a yearlong Netflix subscription for Christmas – $100. Or, alternately, six months for Christmas and six months for her grandmother’s birthday – $50 a pop. That gift, because of its nature, keeps a relationship going between Katie and her grandmother.

This gift isn’t about Netflix. It’s about maintaining a very valuable relationship – and building on it. That’s well worth the price of the gift, in my opinion.

I am a 23 years old and my salary is $70k. My boyfriend and I live in a condo I purchased last year, and he makes $50k a year (he’s 23 as well). To get the basic money stats out of the way I have a $12,000 car loan, $15,000 student loan and mortgage of $160,000. Weirdly, all these loans have the exact same interest rate at 5%. I have no other consumer debt and my bf has no debt at all. I contribute 10% to a Roth and my employer contributes 10% to my 401k. My bf saves 3/4 of his income.

How do I reign in my spending when I can’t find a reason to save even more? How do I find satisfaction? How do I stop feeling guilty about the things I do choose to buy? How do I formulate a 5 year plan without feeling like I’m tempting fate to come spite me? I track my net worth and budget, but what are better tools I can use to project my total debt repayment/ future earnings? How do I know if I am in a good place financially? I know it could be better, but I also know it could be way worse. Some blogs will tell me I’m diving too far into the consumer culture and I should pinch my pennies and run as fast as I can the other direction, while some blogs (and friends and family) seem to say I’m being too conservative and need to live a little. Help!
- Amy

If you feel guilty about what you’re making, give that money to someone or something else. If you feel guilty about what you’re spending your money on, spend it on something else.

There are no rules about what you have to do with the money you earn. Channel it towards charities. Channel it towards a 529 for your nieces and nephews. Channel it towards making sure you have enough to live on for the rest of your life so you can quit your job when you’re 40 and do volunteer work for the rest of your life.

It’s your life. You make the rules. If something makes you feel guilty, do it differently.

I’d love to see a comparison between handwashing dishes and using a dishwasher. I know some of it depends on your brand/model but it would be an interesting read.
- Mavis

This is another comparison that’s very difficult to do because there is no consistent standard for handwashing dishes. We all do it differently. In general, methods of handwashing that conserve resources tend to eat more time.

That’s generally the case with comparing handwashing to dishwashers. Handwashing is significantly less expensive per load, but has a significantly higher time investment per load. In short, when you buy a dishwasher, what you’re paying for is time.

Based on the Consumer Reports articles I’ve read about dishwashers, you’re better off in terms of total cost over the life of the dishwasher to buy a high-end one rather than a cheap one. The high-end ones last longer than two or three low-end ones, plus they use less resources per load and often get the dishes cleaner as well, reducing the need for re-washing.

Today my wife informed me that she applied for a store credit card in a panic for the immediate $20 discount. She was buying something for her mother at a store that we’ve never been to before and we don’t have any plans to return. She just got freaked out when she saw the total balance. We have a few CCs already between us, but the only one I’ve ever applied for in the past is the one I have from my bank, which I asked for while in a Wells Fargo branch. So my question is this, Is there another step beyond the initial application before we find ourselves with a new credit card we will never use? And if we do end up with it, what should we do with it? I’m a university student and my wife teaches at a high school so we’re still pretty young in our financial life and aren’t making much. How will affect our credit (which is currently good) if we have to cancel it? The card doesn’t carry any annual fees, so what would happen if we just cut it up?
- Mike

I wouldn’t worry at all about cancelling the new card since you already have a few credit cards. Cancelling the card will only have a minor and very short-term impact on your credit rating, one that I would deem to be of less concern than having an unused credit card just sitting there.

It’s important to remember what actually makes up your credit score. From an earlier article:

Components of the FICO score
Payment history – 35%
Amounts owed – 30%
Length of credit history – 15%
New credit – 10%
Types of credit used – 10%

You’re not altering your credit history length, your payment history, or your amounts owed by cancelling the card, and the effect on the “new credit” part will likely be positive. I simply wouldn’t worry about it.

My parents recently called up and told me they would like to take a weekend trip to visit me. They have not visited me since I moved to this new city. I am living with my wife in a cramped 1 bedroom apartment, so they agreed it would be better for them to stay at a hotel. But then they said that they expect for me to pay for the hotel. I was appalled and declined, but they kept pressing the issue so I just reluctantly agreed. So…

(2) I am a bit confused as to what kind of hotel I should book for them. It is just one night, so I could technically “afford” to have them stay anywhere from the Bates Motel to the Four Seasons. But I do not know what would be appropriate in this situation.
- Bruce

You’re seeing a culture clash more than anything else here.

Your parents likely think it’s completely reasonable that their child would put them up when they come to visit. Since you don’t have adequate living space, a hotel is the next reasonable option. I think that’s reasonable logic, with one exception: it sounds like they’ve invited themselves. If that’s the case, you shouldn’t feel required to host them.

You’re going to have to sit down and talk this whole thing through with them. You’re in an area where hard feelings are obviously at work on both sides of the coin and if you don’t deal with it now, it’ll just fester and put poison in the relationship. Settle this together in a reasonable way. I can’t tell you what that reasonable way is because I don’t know the ins and outs of your relationship with your parents. I can say that I can see situations where very different options are appropriate.

My grandfather is fairly wealthy, with an approximate net worth now of about $12 million at age 92. (He still works at the financial corporation he started in the ’70s, so he hasn’t touched his retirement accounts at all, and lives on his income.) The way his estate is set up, his Roth IRA will be split between his 4 grandchildren (including myself) in such a way that when he dies, we will each be required to withdraw a certain percentage of the IRA each year based on our ages. He has business partnerships in various high-end agricultural commodities, and my mother and uncle, and then my cousin and siblings and I, will inherit the partnerships. All of this, to me, is highly speculative, since none of this money has ever equaled cash flow to me. It’s just hypothetical to me right now, and I have no real sense of what this will mean in future dollar amounts to me.

So what should I do? Should I take out student loans at 6% interest rate? Or does it make more sense to try to convince my grandpa that it’s not wise to borrow money when I can pay cash?
- Eva

When you can pay cash?

This is your grandfather’s money, not your money. He worked to earn it and he has the full right to choose how to spend it. If he wants to give it to you with stipulations, that’s his choice, and it’s your choice whether to accept it. After all, many people survive without a millionaire grandfather as a benefactor.

Most people go into debt for their education. How did your parents pay for it? Unless they were very lucky with scholarships, they either took out loans or someone wrote a check for them.

The biggest financial mistake people make is counting their chickens before they’ve hatched, and that’s exactly what you’re doing. Plan as if there is no money coming from your grandfather at all. When it does arrive, use it as best you can.

I am deep in credit card debt & digging my way out. However, I have been doing a lot of thinking & reading about WHY people get into debt. I will stay on track for approx 3 mos with paying down debt. Then, I will get something in my head that I want to do or buy. I cannot stop thinking about. I think about getting the cards out and using them, or how can I scrounge up enough to buy that shirt, movie, etc. How can I figure out WHY I get that way? Often, I don’t act on it but it does consume my brain for a few days.

I am worried that if I pay off my cards, I will get myself right back into debt because of this mentality of wanting things. How do I address this & find the root of the problem so that I can start to work on a solution? Its exhausting to always be thinking about this. I wish I could get everything on an automatic path & forget it about it, while my debt is paid down.
- Becky

You have a choice: do I buy or do I not buy? If you make the right choice on that question, it doesn’t matter how much you want something. You’ll always end up in the right place.

I can name a lot of things I want to have. Do I own them? No. Will I own them? For the most part, no, and the ones I do own were likely saved and planned for.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting things, nor is there anything wrong with buying them sometimes. The key things to remember is that you need to make sure you can fully afford it and you also need to make sure that when you buy something, you aren’t just going to want something else tomorrow. Be patient with wht you do buy.

What make and model is an efficient and economical deep freezer? Or do you recommend purchasing a used one in good condition?
- Missy

Whenever you’re asking a question like that, the best place to go is to your local library. Visit the magazine room and start leafing through recent issues of Consumer Reports until you find their most recent freezer roundup. You’ll rarely go wrong with their “best buy” option.

I never recommend buying a used freezer unless you’re getting an incredibly steep discount or getting it for free. The cost of a repair bill on a freezer often adds up to a large chunk of the cost of the unit itself and a used unit is much closer to needing a repair than a new unit is. It’s just not worth the risk to all of the contents you’re going to have in the freezer.

That being said, a deep freezer will save you money because it allows so much more economy with one’s food purchases.

I am currently working on a masters degree where I will finish in December 2011, and be finished with course work and any research obligations in August of the same year. My wife recently got accepted to Duke to work on her masters starting in August of 2011. Therefore, we will be moving to the area at that time and I need a job. If there is a job posted now that is perfect for me should I apply for it now knowing I will not be able to start for a year?
- Jacob

Absolutely.

Most academic jobs – and if you’re headed to the Research Triangle with a degree, you’re probably looking at them – will stay open for a while if the right candidate comes along. In my previous work, I saw it happen many, many times.

Even more important, interviewing now allows you to start meeting and connecting with and building positive impressions with people in that area who might not hire you now, but might hire you down the road. These relationships are invaluable.

I’ve become a recent follower of quite a few PF blogs, including yours, and they inspire me to want to create my own. Not just on personal finance, but the topics that interest me, of course.

2. What kind of website/software would you recommend starting out with and/or would be useful in blogging? I’m not looking to host my own site, or have my site with an independent domain (sitehere.com). I have some experience with WordPress, having had to use it for a school assigned blog project, but if there’s something else I don’t know about that you would recommend, that’d be great.
- Huan

There’s no exact art on how much information to put out there. It’s more about your own comfort level than anything else. I usually solve this dilemma by altering enough little details about personal information that people who might try to use it maliciously will end up with a big pile of confusion. Almost always, the personal specifics don’t make the story, so changing those specifics only serves to protect you and doesn’t alter what you’re saying.

If you’re just starting out, you have to make sure that you’re going to be able to produce the content. Content is king – everything else is secondary. I would suggest starting with a free host, like Blogger, and making sure that you can actually write enough stuff consistently to build any sort of audience.

If you can, there are a lot of options out there. I would probably move to a shared hosting service from there and host things yourself with WordPress, but then you start introducing monthly costs to the equation – which is why I usually tell people to figure out if you can blog before investing money.

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.

Over the last several years, I’ve begun to appreciate how much easier life is if you have less stuff. You spend less time and effort on maintenance. You spend less time and effort moving. You spend less time and effort organizing your stuff and cleaning. What you’re left with is more time and energy and financial resources to actually enjoy the experiences and things that matter to you. It’s much easier to find an hour to practice on the piano if I’m not spending all my time cleaning and putting things away and finding room for just one more thing in that closet. It’s much easier to save for the future if I’m not in a non-stop race to see who has the most stuff.

Francine Joy, author of the blog miss minimalist, expands at length on that philosophy in her book The Joy of Less. The basic premise behind the book is that many people are often overwhelmed by their possessions rather than overjoyed by them. They have homes with every nook and cranny filled with stuff and, on the whole, it brings unhappiness rather than pleasure. How can you turn that around?

The book is broken down into four main sections, each composed of a big handful of chapters. Rather than endlessly discussing all of the chapters, let’s dig into the four main sections of the book.

Part One – Philosophy
Joy opens the book by arguing that our possessions fall into one of three categories: beautiful stuff, useful stuff, and emotional stuff. It’s pretty easy to realize which category most of our things fall into, but when you start looking seriously at the items within each category and asking yourself why you want items in that category, you find yourself paring down very quickly.

For example, too much stuff kept around for aesthetics usually just clashes with each other – sensory overload. Too many “useful” things result in items not being used at all. Emotional stuff often winds up gathering dust because it merely reflects a past time in our lives and can often be compressed sensibly (digitizing old photos, for example).

One of the key steps for keeping each of these categories under control is simply being a good gatekeeper. Don’t add new things unless you’re sure you have space for that new thing in your life. If you need to, make space for that new thing before it arrives by getting rid of the least-used or least important item in that category (of the three above).

Part Two – Streamline
Here, Joy focuses on specific tactics for actually enacting the philosophies from part one (of which I just scratched the surface). She advises starting from scratch and evaluating everything you own by asking yourself the three Ts about that item: trash, treasure, or transfer? Each item you keep should have an explicit reason and a good one. If you can’t come up with a good reason to keep something, you shouldn’t be keeping it.

She’s also a big proponent (as alluded to above) of the “if one comes in, one comes out” strategy of keeping your things under control. After all, the more things you have, the more time you spend in upkeep, maintenance, finding the specific item you need, and so on. It also encourages you to focus on utility – for example, you really only need two or three knives in the kitchen, not a butcher block full of them.

She advocates an “all surfaces clear” approach for helping people to minimize clutter. I agree, to an extent. For me, however, a surface with an item on it means that I need to focus in on that item, so I’m constantly doing things like leaving to-do lists out in the middle of my desk.

Part Three – Room by Room
Joy moves on to specific clutter-reduction strategies for specific areas of a person’s home. This section of the book felt a bit light compared to the previous two portions, mostly because these sections are just specific adaptations of the plethora of ideas from the first 100 pages or so of the book.

It works, though, because of the sledgehammer-like focus of each chapter in terms of hammering home the points of the previous sections. Each chapter on a specific area is actually broken down into sections, each one focused on a specific tactic from part two of the book, applied specifically to that area of the home.

For me, then, the specific ideas for each home area weren’t as useful here as the huge number of examples of how the principles and ideas from earlier in the book actually work. With some analysis, the ideas work for any area you might want to declutter and organize. It just takes some time and initiative.

Part Four – Lifestyle
Joy winds the book down with a look at how these same principles apply to time management (de-clutter your time!) and to working towards the greater causes that matter to us (de-clutter the world!).

For me, the most valuable piece of time management I’ve ever learned is repeated here: reduce expectations. You can’t do it all, nor should you want to. When you take on so much that your schedule is bursting at the seams, you’re not doing any of the tasks well – or you’re choosing to do some of them reasonably well and some of them very poorly. I think of the mother I used to see at my son’s soccer games who never stopped talking on her cell phone or twiddling with her Blackberry during the entire game. She was physically there, but mentally, she was as far away from that field as she could be. Rather than thinking she was a bad parent, I actually thought she was a good one in that she was making an effort, but her connection to her child would be so much greater with a less overstuffed schedule.

As for the social/environmental part of the book, I would agree that decluttering is great for the environment. More than that, though, I find there’s social value in passing on my unwanted items to people who can use them. Yard sales and Freecycle and Craigslist and the barter system are all fantastic ways not only to find a second use for something, but to pass along value to others, making the world a better place.

Is The Joy of Less Worth Reading?
If you ever get the sense that “stuff” takes up too much time or too much energy in your life, you’ll probably find quite a bit of value in The Joy of Less.

On the other hand, if you feel your life is in balance already, The Joy of Less probably won’t speak to you at all. It really provides answers for paring down, and if you’ve already done that – or never reached a point where you felt any need to pare down – this book really won’t add any value to your life.

I enjoyed it. Clutter is something we’re constantly battling at the Hamm household (mostly, to tell the truth, it’s kid-related clutter), and Joy offers a plethora of philosophical ideas and concrete suggestions for waging that war. For us, that made The Joy of Less a worthwhile read.

About a year and a half ago, I reviewed Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book Outliers. In that review, I talked about one of Gladwell’s key points in the book, that a great deal of practice will make a person good at anything:

The more important (and interesting) part of the chapter, though, discusses the huge role that nearly-obsessive practice plays in making people great. Gladwell uses The Beatles and Bill Gates as examples here, showing how they both were able to take advantage of stupendous amounts of practice time to become very, very good at what they did. In each case, Gladwell estimated that it took 10,000 hours of practice for those individuals to hone their natural raw talents and become world class – roughly ten years of multiple hours of practice (3 or so on average) every single day. Gladwell offers many other examples of how this practice pays off, but that magic number of 10,000 hours pops up again and again.

10,000 hours of practice? That seems like an incredible amount of time invested in something. I tried to think of the people in my life who have ever put 10,000 hours of practice into anything in their life.

I have probably spent 10,000 hours writing over the past twenty years – and currently I’m making a living as a writer. The skill I’ve cultivated isn’t that of writing some sort of great work of fiction or nonfiction, but the ability to express ideas and produce a lot of solid writing very quickly. I can usually sit down with an idea and crank out something workable almost as fast as I can type – in fact, the vast majority of my work is coming up with ideas and filtering the ideas I do come up with.

I know two musicians who have likely invested 10,000 hours in practicing their instrument over their lifetime. One of them earns a solid side income from her piano playing – the other one makes a full living from offering lessons.

My father has spent 10,000 hours (at least) fishing in his life. He is just unbelievably capable of catching fish and has forgotten more solid techniques and tips than I’ll ever remember. He’s similarly spent that kind of time in his garden and manages to make (literally) acres of bountiful vegetable gardens look practically effortless.

What’s the point of all of this?

The point is that the only real cost for these people to gain the kind of skill that they can use to make a living was time. The actual cost per hour that they spent doing these things that they love was really, really low.

Take the second musician I mention above, a piano teacher. She got her start playing piano by banging on a neighbor’s piano as a young girl and began to discover that she really enjoyed playing. It became her primary hobby. She got an old piano as a gift when she was in middle school and purchased a $400 used piano herself as an adult. She guesses she’s spent $200 on sheet music over her life and maybe $250 on piano repairs. Add that up and you get $1,000. In other words, she’s invested only ten cents per hour in her life playing piano, doing something she loved, and she wound up with a skill that she’s earning a living from.

Every person I mention above has a similar story. Once they found the thing they loved doing, they just stuck with doing it, investing hours each day into the hobby, and the end result was a cost per hour measured in the pennies. What did they get out of it? Many, many hours spent doing what they love and a skill so refined that they could earn a living from it if they so chose.

Many people are highly eclectic in their hobbies, but there’s a huge cost associated with that. For starters, most hobbies you undertake have a startup cost and a maintenance cost. If you have ten hobbies, then there are ten startup costs and ten maintenance costs.

A much better approach is to dabble until you find a hobby or two that deeply resonates with you. Not only are you reducing your hobby costs, you’re focusing in on a smaller set of hobbies and are likely to become more skilled at those hobbies.

This is something I’m really starting to discover in my own life, mostly due to the piano lessons I’ve started taking. I’ve slowly been stripping away hobbies in my life over the past few years, leaving me with just a small handful. What I’ve found isn’t boredom – in fact, it’s the opposite.

I now feel like I have the ability to really dig deep into the hobbies I have remaining. The more time I spend playing the piano, for example, the more I enjoy it. The keys feel more natural to my fingers. My fingers aren’t stumbling over themselves (as much). My ability to sight-read music is getting stronger and stronger. I can play a couple simple songs from memory and can tackle quite a bit of simple music that’s in front of me. I’m getting better and I’m enjoying every second of it.

Spend some time asking yourself what hobbies you have – and which hobbies you could afford to trim from your routine. You have a garden, but are you really passionate about it? Pare some of the things you’re less passionate about out of your life to make room for things that you’re more passionate about.

What happens then? You spend less on your hobbies. You get to dig deeper into the ones you care about. Best of all, you open yourself up to the possibility of building a skill set that you can base a second career on, one deeply in line with what you care about the most.