Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
and that has made all the difference
- Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Every single day of our lives, we make choices that open some doors and close other ones.

We spend $40 on an evening out. It opens a social door, but it closes a door to a game of golf this weekend.

We focus on debt freedom. It opens a door to better monthly cash flow, but it closes the door to a lot of short term opportunities.

We have children. It opens the door to parenthood, but it closes the door on a lot of paths in life.

Many of the biggest choices we make in our lives close a lot of them. The choice to get married (or not). The choice to have children (or not). The choice to chase a certain career path. The choice to leave college. Yes, sometimes those choices open a lot of other doors for us, but often, our regret is mired in the doors that we’ve closed.

I believe in frugality because I believe it’s a door opener. The less you spend, the more free you are to choose the career path you want or to choose the lifestyle you want. It frees you from the constraints of indebtedness and teaches you life skills that you can apply no matter what you’re doing.

I’m frugal because I want fewer bills. I’m frugal because I want the ability to change my career path without having to worry as much about paying for everything. I’m frugal because I don’t want to be chained to a desk all day.

It might be that others find my goals and aspirations boring. My goal is to eventually move to the country and be as self-sufficient as possible so I can spend my later years doing volunteer work. I’d like to spend my later years helping severely disadvantaged children, a la charities like Jump for Joel, in whatever form that may take, whether it’s actually in Africa or other places helping the children or helping with fundraising here. Along that path, I want to be present for my children when they need me, and that doesn’t involve a job that ties me to my cell phone or requires me to constantly travel.

My ability to get there is paved with frugality. Every dime less that I spend is a dime closer to that goal. It’s closer to a paid-off mortgage. It’s closer to buying that country house, where I can raise chickens and goats and have a giant vegetable garden and a cellar to winterize what we save. It’s closer to being able to spend a lot of my time helping out such charitable groups.

I think everyone has a dream or two deep down inside of them that they’d love to take on. I’m sure your dream is an awesome one, one that makes you excited whenever you think about it, and it’s something that makes other life options seem really boring. That’s what you should be shooting for, regardless of what exactly that goal is. It’s a big giant life-affirming goal, and you should be chasing it with all your might.

Almost every dream is served by being frugal.

Why not just earn more? That’s certainly a big part of the equation as well. However, “earning more” is not something you can just turn on and off like a light switch. Earning more is often inherently tied to the individual talents and skill sets of the person involved, and paths to great earning success are as different as the snowflakes on a winter night.

Frugality, on the other hand, is universal. We all eat. We all need a roof over our heads. We all need clothes. There are ways to spend less in each of those areas, things that almost everyone can do. Plus, regardless of what happens to my income, I know that spending less will always help me out.

The goal is not to be cheap. The goal is to take where we’re at now and put us on a path that leads us to where we want to be, wherever that is.

Whatever you dream of, you inch closer to that every time you make the frugal choice.

That choice is up to you. Are you going to take the road less travelled?

So often, people assume that charity and philanthropy mean stretching an already-tight budget even further. “If I donated $100 to the food kitchen, I’d have to start using the food kitchen!” goes the common train of thought. (That’s not to say that donating money isn’t useful – it certainly is.)

Money can often be a very tight resource, but it’s far from the only resource you have. We all have so many things available to us to share with others that it only takes a moment of thought or effort to make a real difference in someone else’s life.

Here are twenty things anyone can donate to make the world a better place – and put a little bit of extra spring in their step – without blowing up their budget. Even better, many of these ideas will help you clean out your closets and declutter your home a bit. If you’re in need, this list might even help you find a charitable cause that can help you.

Donate your hair Locks of Love (http://www.locksoflove.org/) is a non-profit that provides hairpieces to disadvantaged children suffering from long term medical hair loss. It’s easy to donate – just grow your hair out to ten or more inches in length, cut it off, stick it in an envelope, and help out a kid that could really use a boost.

Donate your blood and/or plasma The Red Cross (http://www.redcrossblood.org/) runs blood drives in your community quite regularly, and many large communities have places where you can always donate. Keep an eye on your community calendar, then stop by and donate. It’s just a little prick on your arm, then you get a cookie and a drink and you’re on your way, while your blood is used to save someone’s life.

Similarly, donate your bone marrow Another renewable body resource you can donate is your bone marrow. The National Marrow Donor Program has a very detailed FAQ that discusses in detail the process of marrow donation.

Donate your vacation time Many workplaces make it possible to donate unused vacation time to people in dire need. Spend a day less at the beach next year and give that day to someone who is fighting a serious medical situation.

Donate your body space It’s all about the awareness for many charitable causes. Simply by having a band on your wrist or a ribbon on your lapel, you remind the people who see it of a charity and also let them know that there are people out there that passionately support the charity. Here’s a list of different charity awareness bracelets available.

Similarly, donate your bumper Get a big old bumper sticker describing your favorite charity and slap it right on the back bumper of your car. The next time you’re stuck in traffic, your car is increasing the mindshare of the charity you care about.

Donate your wedding dress Making Memories (http://www.makingmemories.org/) is an awesome charity that helps women with metastatic breast cancer live out their dreams. Many of the wishes granted by Making Memories involve weddings, so the charity makes great use of the wedding dress you’ve got hanging in your closet. Unused gowns are auctioned to earn more money for this charity’s work, so even if your dress doesn’t get used by a needful bride, it still can help them.

Donate your unused home repair supplies Did you buy too many shingles and now have a big pile of them just sitting in your garage? Got a few gallons of leftover paint from a job where the paint didn’t match or you overestimated your needs? Habitat for Humanity (http://www.habitat.org/) can put those resources to good use building homes for the needy instead of those supplies going to waste sitting in your garage.

Donate your flowers Got extra flowers after a wedding or other event? Donate them. Contact your local florist or local hospital and ask about giving the leftover flower arrangements to people who need them for other events or who could really use them to brighten their day. You can do the same if you have flowers that grow around your home.

Donate your nasty old shoes Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe program (http://nikereuseashoe.com/) (check that site out – it has a great video explaining what they do in great detail) takes old, nasty running shoes and turns them into materials for public playgrounds and basketball courts. All you have to do is send ‘em in!

Donate your voice LibriVox (http://librivox.org/) creates free audiobooks for the public domain, which enables everyone to have access to great free listening materials. Such books are used as educational materials for the visually impaired, radio material for public stations, and countless other good uses. You can participate by volunteering to read and record a public domain book. You’ll learn something and make the world a better place.

Donate your old carpet Many animal shelters will accept donations of old, clean carpet for bedding for the sheltered pets. Contact your local shelter the next time you update your carpeting and see if they can put that old carpet to use.

Donate your cupboard excess or your extra garden vegetables If you’re anything like me, the next time you clean out your cupboards, you’ll find a bunch of items way in the back that will make you wonder if you can ever possibly use them before they expire. These are perfect items to donate to your local food pantry, where someone in need will have those items on their dinner table this week.

Donate your old computer Many charities would love to have that old computer of yours. It might not be up to snuff for watching downloaded high definition movies, but it’s perfectly good enough for a church to install Linux on and use for accounting purposes. Ask around at the local charities you support and, if you can’t find a home for it, ask TechSoup (http://home.techsoup.org/), which facilitates technology donations for nonprofit groups.

Donate your aluminum cans Our local high school has several groups that go through the neighborhoods once a year and ask for aluminum can and bottle donations. We simply store our used cans and bottles in a bin under the sink and when these groups come around, we gladly hand our cans and bottles over. If you don’t have such “to your door” service, many national groups facilitate the collection of cans and bottles – almost every Habitat for Humanity office will accept can and/or bottle donations.

Donate your used books Better World Books (http://www.betterworldbooks.com/) accepts donations of used books, which they then sell and give some of the proceeds in support of global literacy. If you have a bunch of books sitting around (and PaperBackSwap doesn’t excite you), this is a great way to turn a big box of used space into children who can read.

Donate the old stuff in your medicine cabinet Got medications you no longer need (especially sealed items that you never got around to using)? Got items to help you treat a condition that you’ve overcome? World Medical Relief (http://www.worldmedicalrelief.org/) will happily take those items and distribute them in a non-discriminatory fashion to people in real medical need.

Donate unwanted suits and business clothes Everyone has a suit or two in their closet that they rarely wear. Yet, at the same time, there are people out there beating the pavement, looking for work, and they can’t afford to dress for success and impress their potential employers. Two great charities, Dress for Success (http://www.dressforsuccess.org/) and Career Gear (http://careergear.org/), do exactly that, transforming the suit taking up space in your closet into opportunities for life-changing success for people who are reaching hard for that brass ring.

Donate your eyeglasses One of the best things (in my opinion) that the Lion’s Club (http://www.lionsclubs.org) does is run their eyeglasses donation program (http://donateglasses.org/). When your prescription changes, you’ll get new glasses and your old ones no longer have any use. Give them to your local Lion’s Club and they’ll help someone out there in need with vision impairment.

Donate your old magazines Once you’ve read that copy of The New Yorker, check and see if there isn’t a place in your area that could put the item to use. Senior citizen’s centers are almost always happy to receive magazine donations. If that doesn’t fit the bill, try hospitals and libraries in your area.

One final thought: donate your body When you pass on, your life has ended, but you have the ability to give the gift of life to others because of the life you left behind. Donate your organs and tissues to people who can use them. OrganDonor.gov (http://www.organdonor.gov/) provides everything you need to know about the need for organs and tissues and about how easy it is to be an organ donor.

The biggest lesson from this list is that we all have a lot of resources within us and around us that are of value and use to others. Sharing them, especially when it’s “no skin off our backs,” does nothing but make the world a better place. It makes you feel better, too.

I’ve collected these ideas from many different sources over the years. There are many great sources for ideas similar to (and overlapping with) these, including How to Be an Everyday Philanthropist by Nicole Bouchard Boles, The Generosity Plan by Kathy LeMay, and Give a Little by Wendy Smith. If these ideas excite you, dive into these books for more ideas than I could possibly share.

I’ll start off with what everyone will probably want to use this post for in the future – an index of all of the “Summer Meal Series” posts, as well as last summer’s “How Low Can You Go” meal series and a few other meal posts before that.

The Recipe Collection
Here are all of the “visual” recipes I’ve posted on The Simple Dollar over the years.

Summer Meal Series
1. Honey Mustard Chicken Strips
2. Grilled Vegetable Kabobs, Barbecued Beans, and Rice
3. Skillet Cilantro-Lime Chicken Fajitas and “Poor Man’s” Spanish Rice
4. Grilled Apple Pork Chops, Garlic Baby Potatoes, and Steamed Broccoli
5. Chicken-Broccoli Crepes
6. Simple Homemade Pasta and Pizza Sauce
7. Tuna, Vegetable, and Cheese Stuffed Manicotti
8. Chicken, Broccoli, and Mozzarella Calzones
9. Tuna Melts
10. Grilled Chicken-Salsa Burritos and Fresh Tomatoes
11. Turkey Quesadillas
12. Spinach, Pesto, and Cheese Lasagna
13. Ratatouille
14. Chicken Pie
15. Butternut Squash and Carrots with Coconut Milk and Curry

How Low Can You Go?
1. Vegetarian Burrito Bowls
2. Potato-Peanut Curry
3. Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach
4. Lemony Fettuccine with Asparagus
5. Cheesy Corkscrews with Crunchy Bacon Topping
6. Dal, Chilean Style
7. Coriander Meatballs with Yogurt-Mint Sauce
8. Moorish-Style Chickpea And Spinach Stew

Other Meal Posts
1. Homemade Pizza
2. Homemade Bread

So what did I learn from all this (beyond the eight powerful lessons I learned from last summer’s “How Low Can You Go” series)? Here are six new lessons I picked up from this summer’s food experimentation.

Ratatouille

Capitalize what’s in season
Whenever you’re preparing a meal at home, you can almost always save a lot of money by simply banking on whatever vegetables and fruits are in season at the moment.

Often, these items are on sale at the grocery store, but you can often find even better deals by hitting roadside stands and farmers’ markets during peak seasonal conditions. Getting pounds of vegetables for $1 a pound or less creates the foundation of many of our summer and fall meals.

Right now, for example, apples are starting to be heavily discounted – it’s late summer/early fall and picking has begun. Sarah and I bought 8 1/2 pounds of apples for $8 over this past weekend. Can we possibly use eight pounds of apples? We’ll certainly try – and this will be the foundation of a lot of meals (and other things) over the next few weeks.

Chicken pie

Focus on nutrition – but not all at one meal
It’s really easy to get caught up in the idea that you have to have some of everything at every meal – some protein, some vegetables, some calcium, and so on.

The problem with that philosophy is that it really restricts what you can prepare for meals. If every meal has to have A, B, C, and D in it, you’ve suddenly locked yourself into a pretty tight set of meals.

Our philosophy is different. We usually look at a whole day – or sometimes two or three days – for our nutritional balance. If we have a protein heavy meal that’s light on vegetables, we’ll follow it with something like ratatouille. If we eat a lot of cheese at one meal, we cut down on the dairy for other meals in the day.

The end result is that our meals are much more flexible without denying ourselves our nutritional needs. If you look at the list above, some of the meals are vegan and others are loaded with protein. Some have tons of dairy and others have none.

Mix and match them and you’ll find a great balance.

Manage your appetite cycle, too
One thing that several people noticed is that my portion sizes are sometimes small and sometimes purely vegetable-and-fruit for our evening meals. As one person commented, “If that were my dinner, I would be hungry an hour later.”

I agree – if I ate that for lunch, I’d be really hungry by two or three in the afternoon. However, this is my evening meal. In three hours (ideally), I’ll be in bed.

My largest meal of the day is usually breakfast (which is usually made inexpensive by eating a healthy dose of whatever fruit is in season), followed by two or three small meals throughout the day before dinner. If I come to the dinner table really, really hungry and devour a lot, I usually feel miserable in the evening and don’t sleep well.

Plus, since I’m (in theory) active all day, I’m burning the food from breakfast for energy during the day instead of digesting and storing a bunch of energy when I sleep.

It also makes dinner costs much lower – and since dinner is usually the most “prepared” meal (meaning most expensive), doing this reduces the food cost of the day as a whole.

Give it a shot sometime. Instead of eating a huge dinner, eat a bigger breakfast and a small dinner instead. Don’t go to bed stuffed and wake up with a healthy appetite.

Butternut squash and carrots with coconut milk and curry

Make meal creation social
One big element of making this series has been the teamwork between Sarah and myself.

On many of these meals, one of us is taking care of chopping while the other one is sauteeing (or taking pictures – or chasing children). It gives us an opportunity to talk about our day and just reaffirm our bond with each other, plus it gets dinner on the table much quicker.

Yes, this isn’t always possible. There are many days when I’m writing until right before dinner time. There are other days when Sarah is working and I prepare meals by myself.

Still, we both get much more value out of meals we prepare together than out of meals we prepare apart.

Use a tasting spoon
What kind of advice is that?

Over the last year, I’ve started the habit of tasting the food I’m making over and over again as I’m cooking and trying to figure out if it tastes good or if it needs something else. A bit of salt. A bit of pepper. A bit of oregano.

Consider that the recipe you read in a book doesn’t necessarily match your palate, one that has been developed over the experiences you’ve had in your own life. You’re going to be intrigued by different flavors than the chef, or you may need stronger (or softer) flavors.

Learning how to adjust a meal a bit with additional seasonings constantly helps me turn a bland meal into something tasty and a tasty meal into something sublime. It lifts the enjoyment of preparing food at home greatly.

However, there are sanitary reasons to be careful with it. Use a new spoon with each tasting (unless you’re preparing for yourself). We’ll sometimes go through five or six spoons for a meal.

Tuna, vegetable, and cheese stuffed manicotti

Hit yard sales
Most of the really interesting and useful food ideas I’ve found in the last few years have come from old cookbooks.

Most of the interesting old cookbooks I’ve found in the last few years have been found at yard sales with a sticker on the cover – $0.25 or so.

Food is simply prepared differently today than it was fifty years ago. The ideas contained in older cookbooks come from a different time with different levels of home convenience. Add into that the changing palate of America and an older cookbook is a peek into another world.

A tasty world.

Explore that world. Pick up a few old cookbooks and dig through them. You don’t even have to duplicate a thing – just try some of the ideas out.

Good luck in the kitchen!

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. Stuck between goals
2. Dealing with partner’s student loans
3. Preparing for involuntary job loss
4. Replacing a vehicle
5. Jack of all trades
6. Using sleep as “mental downtime”
7. Buy house or attack debt?
8. Using Amazon gift credit
9. Earmarked “baby” money
10. Emergency savings or credit payoff

I’ve started working on the Making It All Work post series that I mentioned a few weeks back (and many readers clamored for). I’m currently reading the book and taking notes, and the post series will start on the first Tuesday in October.

It should be fun. There are some very intriguing pieces in this book, ones that stretch far beyond time and task management and into big overall life choices.

Here’s my monthly financial situation (Single, no kids, age 32):

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
- Eric

The biggest thing that seems to be missing in this picture is motivation. What is your reason for wanting to spend less? What are you aiming for in life?

Sit down and set some concrete goals for the future. What do you want to be doing or have done in five years? Maybe it’s just as simple as travelling to a certain list of places. Maybe you want something else.

It is much harder to hold onto a difficult set of tasks (like changing one’s spending behavior) when you don’t have an overarching reason to do so. You seem to be very much in a “live for the moment” mode, which isn’t a bad thing, but it usually runs contrary to longer-term financial planning and financial success.

My wife and I have been married almost a year now and we celebrate our first anniversary this labor day. We are 26, live in Upstate NY and we both have very stable jobs. I feel that we are at a strange point financially right now (strange in a good way). We are very comfortable but we both know that we could be doing more with saving and paying down debt. We bring in around $130K total a year. We both paid off our cars in the past six months and with that extra cash flow coming in we are in a happy lull stage. We have a $10K emergency savings account and anywhere from $3K to $5K in savings in our normal savings account. Our debts are primarily school loans and the situation surrounding the debt is not simple. Here are our debts:

If we do plan to tackle our school loans we have come up with the following scenarios: live off my salary and push 100% of her salary to her loans, live off my salary and keep her salary in a savings account if her parent’s decide to help with the loans, or get over our school loan stigma and treat all the debt as “our debt.” We also really want to get into a “SUPER SAVER” mode and living off my salary seems to be a good solution. We have a bounced around the idea of using the flexible/fixed checking accounts or setting up a “my money” “our money” “your money” type of situation where chunks of my salary go into each pot. We both like the my, our, your money approach because we’ll each still have a pot of money that we can individually decide what to do with. Your thoughts and advice would be great.
- Kevin

Here’s the thing: when you’re married, the debts of either partner affect both of you. It doesn’t matter who brought those debts in the door. The fact is that money is going out the door to those debts, and that exiting money affects both of you because it changes how money is spent in your household.

My advice to any married couple is to treat any debts brought into the marriage as “our” debts rather than “your” debts or “my” debts. Pay them off together, then talk before incurring any more debts.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with each partner having a small pool of “my” money to spend on whatever he or she wishes. However, that money needs to be balanced among the two partners and how it is used shouldn’t affect the other partner at all. If you want to use your little pool of money towards debt repayment, that’s your choice.

My wife and I are young DINK’s (23 and 22) and plan to stay child-free for life. Her salary is roughly 50% of mine, but the benefits are outstanding – primarily, in addition to good matching contributions, she receives $475 in free cash per month straight to her 401(k) since my benefits cover the health insurance.

Two questions – 1) What are your thoughts on my spouse potentially leaving a decent-paying but high stress job, especially in this uncertain economy? 2) What additional steps can we take to prepare for this transition?
- Ben

I don’t think it’s ever a good idea to bank financial choices on a brighter future (with the lone exception of student loans). Every time you tell yourself that your “future self” will deal with this, you’re telling yourself a dangerous story. I spent most of my twenties telling myself that my “future self” would take care of it. One day, I learned the hard way that my “future self” won’t take care of it – because, frankly, your future self will likely be facing most of the same problems you’re facing now plus whatever burdens you’re trying to stack on him or her.

In other words, I’d prepare very, very carefully for this move. She should make an effort to determine what exactly she would be doing post-job before she leaves. I’m guessing that she’s banking on some sort of art career. Make your emergency fund nice and fat so that any transition costs (or short periods without income) are handled easily. Save more than you possibly think you’d ever need.

She should also leave as delicately as possible, because that’s a bridge that doesn’t need to be burned. She may someday need to return to that field or even to that specific job. You should also discuss the possibility of a counteroffer before she receives it – often, jobs with overworked and underpaid employees will see a big raise offered if someone suggests quitting.

Our family is looking to purchase a van. We have family that lives four hours away and need the room to transport all of our stuff, our two children and our dog. We currently have a small compact car and a four door truck. My question is this. Since we do not have the cash to pay for the vehicle and would have to get a loan, would we be smarter buying a cheaper vehicle and getting it paid off as soon as possible and then saving for the next vehicle or should we just bite the bullet and buy the more expensive van (Toyota or Honda) to start off with? We currently pay $465/month towards our truck (which is more than we are required to pay but we want to pay it off sooner) and we are not going to purchase the next vehicle until the truck is paid off and anticipate that we will just use the $465 a month towards the new vehicle.
- Sarah

In terms of the family, this sounds quite a bit like our own situation. Because we take so many three to four hour road trips to visit family, vehicle reliability and gas mileage are big premiums for us and have both fed our vehicle choices in the past.

If you don’t have enough sitting around to pay for the new vehicle, get one that you can afford now and save for the optimal choice later on. I wouldn’t recommend walking onto a car dealership unless you either absolutely need a vehicle or you have the cash to pay for it. If you’re in a “need” situation, buy low end and start saving for the next purchase after that one.

I would focus on minimizing the monthly payment for your next purchase and then bank the difference between the $465 number you quoted and the actual payment you’d be making. Pay off that vehicle and drive it until it’s starting to become unreliable, then trade it and use the cash you’ve saved to upgrade. Keep doing that until you can continually purchase late model used or even new vehicles without taking out any financing.

Sometimes I get the feeling I am trying to do too much. How you do you feel about the old saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none”?
- Ryan

I think there’s value and utility both ways. A well-rounded skill set is always useful, as is an expert in a particular field.

I tend to apply this general philosophy: be a “jack of all trades” when it comes to what you personally need and be a “master” at whatever trades you need to use to make your money.

The reason? Being a “jack of all trades” in your day-to-day life is a constant money saver and a resource. Knowing how to saute vegetables, fix a toilet, change the oil on a car, find information on the internet, and so on are all “jack of all trades” skills – but they’re constantly useful and can save you money in your day-to-day life. Making gourmet meals for 300, laying pipe for an industrial building, rebuilding a truck engine, writing 100,000 lines of computer code and so on are all “master” skills – ones that have less application in day-to-day life but are ones people will pay for.

Focus on mastering one or two skills and use those to make money. With the rest of your time, don’t be afraid to be a “jack of all trades.”

One thing to consider is that “downtime” is also useful. I consider that I wrote a significant portion of my PhD thesis when I was asleep (I would review material mentally before I went to bed and plan to write the next day having “processed” it in my sleep) or alternatively spend “processing time” doing some mundane household chore. Now I write complex psychological reports for a living and like to work at home where I can so when I get “stuck” on what to say or how to say it. I can do a load of washing or some other small task while I
am thinking about the problem. I try to schedule adequate “downtime” for that reason, particularly if I have very complex material to deal with.
- Carol

I actually often do the same thing. Many of my best ideas come to me when I’m in the shower or meditating or asleep or doing household chores. It’s almost as if the back of my brain is processing information while I do something else that doesn’t require a ton of active thought.

As you mentioned, a good technique for this is to review a bunch of notes before going to sleep or doing some sort of mindless work. For example, with my Making It All Work series, I’ll read a chapter and note the things that I think are key points, then go do something else for a while – take a shower, take a walk, meditate, or something like that. When I come back, I usually know which key points are going to stick, have some ideas of what to say about them, and have an example or two from my own life. The post just pours itself out from there.

Try it – it really works. Before you go to bed or take a shower or something, review whatever it is you’re wanting to think about or trying to learn. You’ll be surprised how much your brain processes while you’re doing something else.

I am 25 and my husband is 27. We just got married in June, and currently have about $25,000 in savings. We both recently got our Master’s degrees, and our debt is made up of student loans and one car loan. We currently have $48,000 of federal student loans at 6.8%, $9,000 of federal student loans at 2.5%, and a $10,000 car loan at 2.9%.

So we are basically wondering what you would do in this situation? To us it seems to make the most sense to just keep renting for a few more years until we have no debt and feel more ready for a house, but its tough when everyone around us including parents and peers are telling us that is a bad idea!
- Lindsay

One baseline thing: don’t buy until you have a down payment big enough to avoid PMI. That’s just an extra cost that no one needs, and you’re far better off waiting another year than being saddled with a couple years’ worth of PMI payments. In a nutshell, that means save until you have 20% down (usually).

So, should you stay in the apartment and pay off other debts or start saving for a house? I really wouldn’t worry too much about how great the housing market is right at this moment. Guessing that prices will suddenly skyrocket up is akin to real estate speculation – and remember, just four years ago, people thought house prices would keep going on up to infinity. 2007 to 2009 alleviated some of those dreams.

If you’re content living in the apartment for now, your best move is probably to pay off the debts you have at the moment first. This will greatly increase your monthly cash flow and only delay your actual home purchase by a year or so.

The lone exception to this would be if you see the economy doing a major rebound and start hearing that the Federal Reserve is going to start raising interest rates. That’ll almost always correlate to rising home loan rates, which means you should switch gears and try to get a home loan sooner rather than later – not because of a thriving house market, but because the loans are so cheap right now. If waiting a year causes your 4% loan to go to 6%, you’re better off jumping in now and taking the PMI than waiting.

In the end, I think your best option is to sit tight if you and your husband are happy where you’re at right now. Get rid of your debts, which will improve your cash flow, then focus on the house.

I’ve been saving my Swagbucks to buy one of several things that I need. Since I’m really only able to use them on Amazon (as a gift card) shipping costs become a concern. So – for example, if what I want costs $10 and if I’ve got $15. to spend (which is “free” money) do I buy it on Amazon spending the extra $5. on shipping and the $10. item will really cost $15. or do I buy it in a store for $10. (but that is $10. out of my pocket?)
- Susan

I’m going to assume that this is normal gift credit on Amazon and that you’re not buying anything too exotic with the credit – books, DVDs, kitchen stuff, magazines, video games, etc.

If that’s the case, I would just wait until I have $25 in credit saved up from this program – or perhaps even a bit more than that – and then order from Amazon, using their “Super Saver Shipping” to get the item or items shipped for free.

That $25 threshold can be a dangerous one, though, if you’re just using money out of your pocket. It can be encouragement to buy more stuff – and that more stuff is often stuff that you don’t need. My solution is that whenever I see something on there I want, I just add it to my wish list instead of buying it. My family members and friends often trawl that list for ideas (and I’ve usually forgotten what I’ve added).

We have about $1000 cash we want to start our “baby jar” with. (My mother loves to tell the story of how my grandfather paid the doctor with a bag of dimes for her delivery,… $40 in dimes saved over 9 months in a jar on top of the fridge….but that was 1950.) What should we do with our money earmarked ‘baby’?

My husband thought we should buy a CD, but I thought that would be a mistake with the rates as low as they are right now. We plan to add to the fund every month, which also makes a CD a poor choice. We would like it to be something fairly “inaccessible” which was an advantage to the CD. What I was hoping you might know is if there is any kind of savings fund for “child expenses” like the education plans you can get where money must be withdrawn for tuition etc., except in this case the money is save for infant expenses. There’s probably nothing like that though, so what would you recommend we do with our $1000+.
- Kara

Unless you’re looking further down the road to educational expenses, the answer is, sadly, no.

What I would do in your case is spend some time right now figuring out what you expect for baby expenses. What will you need at the start? What about monthly costs? I can’t tell you what those will be because of the enormous number of variables there, but you can come up with some estimates on your own.

I would take enough of that cash to cover the startup costs and the first three months and put it in a six month CD. It does earn a little better than straight-up savings (usually) and has the advantage of being untouchable.

What about the rest of it? I’d open up a 529 for your child. You can’t do this directly yet, but what you can do is open an account for yourself and then change the beneficiary to your child once he or she is born. This way, the child will have money for future educational expenses, like college or (possibly) private schooling.

I’ve paid down most of my debt and now have about $500 on one credit card and about $6,000 on another. I have a $500 emergency fund and regularly put at least $500 extra toward debt each month. I also set aside about 15 percent of my salary toward retirement.

While lots of things are going well, unexpected expenses — like a big bill for dental work or a costly car repair — continue to trip me up. I have been thinking about setting up targeted savings accounts for home maintenance, car repair and medical expenses so I’m ready when these pop up. But should I wait to do this until I have paid off both credit cards?
- Pam

My suggestion would be to bump up the size of your emergency fund. $500 is a little low even for a single person. I would shoot for at least $1,000 – and preferably, I’d shoot for two months of living expenses (assuming you’re single).

Another step would be to not be afraid to use that emergency fund if you have to. If you can’t swing an unexpected bill – like a car repair – that’s the exact time you should be tapping your emergency fund. Then, over the next few months, replenish that fund and pull back on other things you’re doing with your money to make that happen.

So, for now, I’d pull back on extra debt payments and channel it into an emergency fund until it’s nice and fat. Then, I’d turn the extra debt payments back on until you actually have an emergency. Use your emergency fund, then channel the extra cash each month into the emergency fund until it’s replenished. Keep going and soon you’ll have no debt.

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.

Reviewing a book like this is a difficult challenge.

The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau is one of those books that’s intentionally narrowed its audience. It hones in deeply on a group of people that share a handful of characteristics: they’re single (or married to a like-minded person), they don’t have significant community attachments (“strong ties” as opposed to the “weak ties” in the book, which I’ll mention later), they’re dissatisfied with their life, and they’ve got a personal skill set that tends towards openmindedness, self-motivation, and self-improvement.

The more of those criteria you meet, the more powerful this book will be for you, plain and simple. The fewer of these criteria you meet, the more you’ll think of this book as merely interesting with a few bits and pieces of specific applicable stuff to pull out.

Where do I fall in that? This book spoke deeply to where I would have been in 2002 or 2003, before I got married, had children, developed a lot of “strong” attachments in my area (as opposed to the “weak ties” that Chris mentions), and got on track with the career I wanted. Some of the things in this book are hard to do if you’ve got a family to feed and other groups relying on you for various things.

Knowing that, I focused on reading the book through those earlier eyes – and through those eyes, this book is empowering and (very) potentially life-changing.

1 – Sleepwalkers and the Living World
Guillebeau makes the point that, in many avenues of life, mediocrity is the standard by which people are judged and accepted. His comments reminded me of Jack Welch’s 70-20-10 philosophy, where Welch suggests that people be separated into three performance categories – the top 20%, the middle 70%, and the bottom 10%, and that the bottom 10% should be fired. In essence, though, Welch is saying that the middle 70% is mediocre but completely acceptable, which falls right in line with Guillebeau’s point – most people are mediocre but are accepted for it. The centerpiece of Guillebeau’s point here, though, is that “you don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to,” but it has an implicit requirement that you not be mediocre and that you be in Welch’s top 20%.

2 – Setting the Terms of Your Unconventional Life
There were two big messages I found in this chapter. The first is that goal setting is incredibly powerful, something I’ve found over and over again in my own life. If you set a big scary goal, then break it down into things you can do each day to move towards that goal, you can accomplish things you would have never believed you could accomplish. It works because so many people don’t do it. The second point that stood out to me was the value of what Guillebeau calls “serendipity” and I simply call “luck.” Luck can play a huge role in a person’s life, both positive luck and negative luck. One of the strongest things you can do is to simply put yourself in a position where more luck finds you.

3 – Smashing Through the Brick Wall of Fear
For a person to change what they’re doing now and shake them out of their current routine, that person must either increase the pain of their current situation or decrease the fear of the desired situation. Increasing the pain is more familiar – losing a job, getting sick, and so on. The less familiar part is decreasing the fear of the desired outcome. How do you do that? Guillebeau offers several ideas – the ones that have really clicked with me in my own life are simply dipping your toes in the pool by doing as much as you can in your spare time and building a safety net around yourself so you can make that leap without falling to your doom.

4 – How to Fight Authority and Win
Most of the time, when you try to do something different, you’re going to meet with disapproval from various people in your personal and professional life. Guillebeau calls such people “gatekeepers” and discusses how they use a lot of different tactics to keep you from doing what you want. They often use psychological techniques and circular reasoning to keep you doing the set of things that they want you to be doing, using guilt and statements like “Everyone else does it this way so why aren’t you?” You don’t ever have to justify yourself to anyone – after all, you’re the person that has to sleep at night.

5 – Competence Is Your Security
The more skills you have to offer (and the more follow-through you provide), the more value you will always have to others and the more value you’ll always have in the marketplace. Nothing trumps ability and follow-through (though communication skills definitely help). In other words, the more competent you are at the work you’re trying to do, the more security you’ll always have, either in your current job or in terms of future employment. That kind of security enables you to get away with having less security and stability in other areas of life, which is where living unconventionally comes in.

6 – Graduate School vs. the Blogosphere
The entire point of this chapter can really be summed up in one simple statement: don’t use additional schooling as a form of life avoidance. If you simply want “life experiences,” you can get them all over the place and at a lot less cost than at a university. You should only walk in the door of an institution of learning if you have a plan and a purpose for being there and you’re focusing on executing that plan as intensely as possible. Why? Because college is a really expensive way to just spin your wheels.

7 – The Power of Your Own Small Army
This chapter focuses on what Guillebeau calls a small army and what I called “weak ties” in an earlier post. The concept is simple: the strength of a “weak” relationship with a lot of people is at least as strong as a strong relationship with just a few people. The best way to explain this is with an example. If I were to go on Twitter and ask my Twitter followers where the best place to shop online for an electric piano is, I’ll get a lot of useful responses (I’m now aware of the very awesome Musician’s Friend). Each of those responses has some value, and that value, added up over a lot of interactions, really adds up. Maybe such a tie will result in an ad being viewed or clicked or a downloadable file being purchased or a book being bought on Amazon. It can add up to a career – after all, that’s what The Simple Dollar is based on.

8 – The Personal Finance Journey
Debt holds you back. Required expenses hold you back. The idea of a “comfortable retirement” and other vague personal finance goals holds you back. Guillebeau argues that money and happiness are only correlated to a certain degree (I’d argue up to about $40,000 a year, which is what Daniel Gilbert claims) and that investing in yourself and spending money on unique experiences often has more value than accumulating stuff. Most of the ideas in this chapter are spot-on, but again are sometimes restricted by other life choices (children, strong ties, etc.).

9 – Radical Exclusion and the Quest for Abundance
You can have anything you want. You can’t have everything you want, and if you try for everything, you probably won’t get anything. The trick is going through “everything” and deciding what the one or two “anythings” you actually want are. An example: one big “anything” I’ve focused on in my own life is being a good parent. That means giving up on a lot of other things: being a good community builder, being a good game player, and on and on and on. It’s hard to give up on some of the things in that “everything” basket that you want, but the more of them you let go of, the more likely you are to really nail the ones that are left.

10 – Contrarian Adventures
Where do you want to go one day? If you start saving $2 a day starting right now, you can probably go there in late 2012. Seriously. Check airline prices and the cost of actually being there (after shopping around). It’s that kind of thinking that makes adventures happen in people’s lives. You have to let go of the big imposing wall and look at the little steps. Chris focuses heavily on travel here, but I think the idea expands to any big thing you want to do in your life.

11 – Your Legacy Starts Now
Get started today. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Today.

Is The Art of Non-Conformity Worth Reading?
On page 7 of the book, Guillebeau lays out four strict requirements for readers of the book to get something useful out of it:

You must be open to new ideas.
You must be dissatisfied with the status quo.
You must be willing to take personal responsibility.
You must be willing to work hard.

I’d add to that some of the requirements I mentioned above: a core family that supports radical life shifts (i.e., you’re single or have a partner that’s equally on board) and a lack of current community attachments or obligations.

If you’re in this boat, The Art of Non-Conformity is a home-run read. If you’re not, I’d call the book interesting with some applicable pieces, but it won’t have the full power that it will have for someone who can fully jump on board with all of the ideas.

A book is what you make of it. The more ideas you pull from it and apply positively in your own life, the better off you are. There are a lot of elements in this book that can be pulled out that can provide a lot of life value – more elements for some than for others.

Once or twice a day, I go into my bedroom, turn down the lights, lay on the bed, and look up at the ceiling. I start off by reflecting on a small handful of things that have really brought me significant joy in the past few days. After a few minutes of that, I focus entirely on emptying my mind for a while, and once that’s done, I just drift without anything in my mind. Sometimes thoughts drift in and out of my head – sometimes they don’t. Sometimes I doze off for a bit – other times, I don’t.

After about twenty minutes of concentrated mental relaxation, I almost always feel refreshed and much more able to tackle whatever is on the table in front of me, whether it’s a household task, some work to be done, some bills to be paid, or anything else. I get that stuff done faster and better than I ever would have done before the meditation.

Call it meditation or prayer or whatever you wish – it flat-out works.

When I first started doing this, I seemed like it would be an utter waste of a good twenty minutes. I started trying it at the urging of my pastor at the time, who told me to try to take some time every day to pray and to let God speak to me. I didn’t really have any idea what that even meant, so I tried mostly just spending some time reflecting on what was going on in my life in a positive way. I tried to spend fifteen minutes a day just reflecting on the good in my life.

It didn’t really work.

Instead, I started reading books on prayer and meditation to see what others had discovered. What I seemed to find, time and time again, is that people found success in just letting their mind drift and seeing what answers were revealed to them. This pops up over and over again in all sorts of religious and other writings.

What I’ve found is that an empty mind is a real clarifier. Those twenty minutes spent letting my mind be as empty as I can make it do more for my day than anything else I do.

That time seems to fill my mind with a great deal of motivation and, often, with solutions to the problems I’m immediately facing.

I could attribute it to God speaking to me subtly. I could attribute it to my subconsciousness. I could attribute it to the simple benefit of rest. I’m not going to claim that I have any sort of proof as to why it works, and I’m not going to enter into a metaphysical discussion about it.

I can only say that it really does work.

I’m going to challenge you to try this, just once, and see if it actually works for you even half as well as it works for me. If it does, you’ll find that it’s really a useful addition to your life, whether you attribute it to a religious or spiritual cause or to a psychological or physical cause.

Sometime in the next few days, when you’re feeling really stressed out, go into a room that doesn’t have a lot of distracting elements. If it’s at work, you can even use a bathroom stall if you want.

Sit down and get as comfortable as you can. Then spend a couple of minutes thinking about the good things in your life. What in your life makes you happy? Whatever that is, think about it for a bit – say, two or three minutes.

Then try to clear your mind. Try to think about nothing at all. Close your eyes and make an effort to clear your mind of all of the noisy jumble in it. When a stray thought comes in, avoid thinking about it. Try thinking about nothing at all.

Close your eyes and just let your mind drift for a while. If a bit of sleep comes, that’s okay.

How do you know when to end it? For me, the best way I can describe it is that reality catches up to me with a start. I almost always startle myself out of it, and usually, about twenty minutes have passed.

What I notice more than anything is that I feel really, really refreshed and that my mind is usually racing with good ideas. I often find myself jotting down post ideas for The Simple Dollar right after doing this, and I’m usually very productive for the next hour or two. I also usually don’t feel tired, even if I felt tired before doing this.

I’m sharing this simply because this has really worked well for me and has gone a long way toward improving the quality of my personal, professional, and financial life. You might try it and get nothing out of it – or you might try it and find that it’s a game changer for you. I sincerely hope that it’s the latter.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a guy who had a large scar on his neck that looked like a swastika. The man had it partially covered with a turtleneck on a hot day. I could have easily assumed that he was a “scary” member of a fringe group, but I was sitting next to him and said hello anyway. The man seemed thrilled that someone was speaking to him, and soon I found out that he had actually been branded while serving a prison term for a car accident he had been in when he was nineteen. He was having a great deal of difficulty saving up the money to get the scar fixed. Rather than hating the man, I wound up having a lot of sympathy for his situation. He made one stupid move as a teenager and is now suffering for life because of it.

That incident has left me thinking a great deal about all of the things I assume in my own life. So often, I make assumptions about others, usually out of a need to make faster decisions. Sometimes, those assumptions are flat-out wrong, and those assumptions cost me in a lot of ways. They cost me money. They cost me time. They cost me pride and self-confidence, too. They cost me respect as well.

I’ll make assumptions about reader emails because I have 250 of them to read and only a couple of hours in which to do it (do the math there). I’ll make assumptions about what the real intent of people marketing their product to me actually is – are they shills? Do they actually have a product that’s worthwhile that they genuinely believe in? I make assumptions when I write – I assume often that the audience already knows certain things and to reiterate them would just be a waste.

Each of these assumptions seem like a good idea on the surface. However, if I make the wrong assumption, I pay for it. I lose readers. I lose respect. I lose opportunities. I lose time. I lose motivation.

Yet, without at least some assumptions, I would be utterly stuck in analysis paralysis. I would not be able to move forward with any speed with anything in my life.

You likely make assumptions in your own life as well. We all do it. Most of the time, assumptions are time-savers that enable us to deal with a lot more of our lives. We assume that certain stores have lower prices. We assume that the people in the cars around us will make sensible traffic moves. We assume that the scary person on the bus is actually pretty scary and should be avoided. We look at people, decide who they are quickly, and make snap decisions on whether to avoid them. We pull one sentence out of someone’s long speech or document and assume that one sentence defines everything.

All of these assumptions are mistakes that can cost us money and time and energy. I’ve been thinking long and hard about how I can improve my own issues with assumptions, and here are some of the things I’ve come up with.

Don’t react with emotion. If you see something that makes you uncomfortable, rather than just reacting with pure emotion, ask yourself why you’re reacting that way. Did you see what you thought you saw? Is that really the whole picture? Look again and quell your initial emotional response.

Restate what you think the case is. If you’re going to disagree, state why you’re disagreeing with someone. Often, you’ll find that you’ve misunderstood what you’re disagreeing with, either due to poor communication skills on the other side’s part or due to poor listening skills on your own part.

Strive to be very clear with your own words. Try to eliminate any vagueness from your own statements. The more clear you are with what you’re trying to say or represent, the more clear it will be for the people who are listening to you.

Listen instead of merely waiting for an opportunity to respond. When you hear something you don’t like, it’s very easy to shut your ears or eyes and just look for an opportunity to respond without hearing the whole statement. When you see an aspect of a person you don’t like, it’s easier to run away or practice avoidance than it is to see the whole picture. You’re better off getting the full picture before responding.

If someone makes a statement that doesn’t seem to fit, ask for clarification. Often, it’s just a mis-statement or a misunderstanding. This is especially true if the person you’re talking to has a long history of sensible and positive remarks.

Listen to clarifications and accept them. Again, many a misstatement and assumption have damaged relationships, jobs, and countless other things without need. When someone tries to clarify their statement, let them clarify and accept their clarification.

Realize that no one is perfect. I’m not. You’re not. No one else is. Everyone makes misstatements and everyone makes false assumptions. Look for times when other people do this and let it go. Forgive them for it.

Realize that you don’t have to do everything and that slower is often better. Yes, quite often in modern life, it’s impossible to slow down and take more time with assumptions. However, the more time you put into the important things, the more benefit you’ll get out of it every time. You’ll see the assumptions more clearly and find the right way to work through them. Everyone benefits from that – especially you.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my own life based on assuming too much or assuming incorrectly. All I can do about it is strive to do better in the future. I hope you’ll join me in that.

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 (September 5 – September 11, 2009)
Five Ways I Disagree With Dave Ramsey I agree with him in many, many other ways, so I thought it would be fun to find areas where I disagree with Dave.

Helicopter Parenting, Baby Boomers, and Financial Dependence I absolutely do not want to be a helicopter parent. I want my children to love me, but I want them to be their own persons, independent and strong and capable of dealing with the problems that life throws at them.

You Can’t Take It With You This argument, often used for wanton spending, has always seemed very strange to me. There are many, many good uses for one’s money.

The Path of Least Resistance Is the Path Without Opportunities The easiest path is the path that might get you to your destination the fastest, but it causes you to miss out on countless opportunities along the way. Every challenge life puts in front of us is an opportunity to grow.

Synergy The Simple Dollar is a great source of synergy. It encourages me to constantly think about my finances, much more than I might have done otherwise. As a result, I’m led to more financial success and opportunity – and thus the source for more posts.

Two Years Ago (September 5 – September 11, 2008)
Fifteen Ways to Have Cheap Fun With Your Kids Using a $1 End Roll of Paper We’re still frequently using a giant roll of paper purchased for $5 a year or so ago. It’s been a tool for countless art projects, paper hats, boats, and other such things.

The Aldi Question: Does One Bad Experience Spoil the Soup? It did for me. It’s amazing the associations that people build up in their heads.

Please, Recommend a Personal Finance Product to Me! This is the stuff I use and why I use it. I don’t usually talk about stuff that I won’t use.

Why One-Budget-Fits-All Doesn’t Work – And Why It’s Difficult to Compare Spending Between People and Families You can’t base your spending choices on what other people do.

Creation versus Consumption There’s always more money to be made in creation than in consumption. The work is a lot harder, though.

Three Years Ago (September 5 – September 11, 2007)
Personal Finance And Nostalgia One of the best tricks that marketers use in convincing us to spend money is to tap nostalgia – our positive feelings about the past.

Eight Simple Ways To Reduce Food Costs Food eats up a major part of most budgets. Thankfully, there are many ways to reduce one’s food costs, and here are eight simple ones.

Fifteen Ideas For A Deeply Fulfilling Money Free Weekend There are so many wonderful ways to enjoy life without busting out the wallet.

Is A Roommate Worth The Financial Benefit? There are a lot of factors here. I think the biggest one is your own personality – if you can see yourself easily with a roommate, you’ll probably make money doing this.

Financially Savvy Gifts For New Parents It’s often tempting to give gifts to new parents (especially when there’s a baby shower). Why not get them a gift that makes good financial sense instead of yet another cute baby outfit?

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!