“Not everyone will like the caramel apple jam,” Sarah commented to me after we made it. As much as I liked it, I knew she was right: it was very sweet and lacked the tartness that I often crave in my jellies and jams.

So we decided to make another jelly/jam, this time doing something decidedly different: wine jelly.

What’s “wine jelly”? It’s much like grape jelly, but instead of using grape juice, you use a bottle of wine of your choosing for the primary liquid in the jelly.

In this case, we chose to use a bottle of Celebrate, a 2007 wine from a local winery, White Oak Vineyards. It’s a ruby red semi-sweet wine made from a blend of grapes that has a tartness to it that’s almost like cranberries. We quite like it.

Thus, one fun way to make this jelly is to choose a bottle of wine from a local winery that you particularly like and use it as the backbone for your jelly. This enables the wine to have a bit of additional local flavor to it. You can, of course, use any wine of your choosing – for example, a bottle of Charles Shaw from Trader Joe’s will work quite well and only set you back $3 for the wine.

What ingredients will you need? Our recipe simply follows a very standard grape jelly recipe:

3 1/2 cups wine
1/2 cup lemon juice
1 package dry pectin (1.75 oz. or 2 oz. depending on the brand)
4 1/2 cups sugar

You’ll also, of course, need the usual stuff for canning: six jars with lids and rings, a pot to boil the stuff in, and some sort of mechanism for pulling the jars in and out of boiling water. In the pictures below, we’re using a plastic “bucket” we found for fifty cents at a sale recently.

A note on the wine: you’ll often need a bit more liquid than what a bottle of wine contains, as a bottle will often only give you three cups or a bit more. Feel free to add the remnants of a second wine or even a bit of grape juice to get yourself up to the total amount.

The first step, of course, is to boil the jars, lids, and rings and make sure they’re as clean as possible. This way, you minimize the chance of unwanted bacteria inside of the jars, which would render the jelly unusable.

After that, just mix the wine, lemon juice, and pectin in a large sauce pot (one that can easily hold 12 cups of liquid. Bring it to a boil while stirring it rapidly.

Once it’s boiling, add the sugar, then keep stirring rapidly to dissolve all of the sugar in the liquid. Bring it back to a rolling boil while stirring, then boil it for at least one minute while stirring (you can boil it a bit longer – if you do, the jelly will be just a bit thicker).

Once the hot jelly is finished, ladle the jelly into the jars, leaving 1/2″ inch (1.3 cm) at the tops of the jars for breathing room. Put the lids on them, then put the jars into a boiling water bath for five minutes (you can do this in shifts, of course).

You’ll find that you have enough jelly for six jars, with a bit left over. We used that “bit left over” on our morning toast for a few days – delicious!

When you’re done, put the jars out on a towel and leave them untouched for 24 hours. Leave at least an inch of space between each of the jars.

After the 24 hours are up, check the lids and make sure none of them have popped up. If you’re unsure, press down a bit on the middle of a lid – if it “clicks” or “pops,” that’s a bad jar. Most likely, they’ll all be fine, but don’t keep a bad jar of anything that you can.

As you can see, our jelly turned out with a reddish-purple color. It’s a bit tart and, in my opinion, is almost perfect on toast in the morning.

Later, we’re going to make a second batch of this jelly, using one of our favorite white wines. This will result in a yellowish or nearly clear jelly.

This is the fourth entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

Time management. Money management. Health management. Management of your stuff. Relationship management.

All of those things (and a lot more) boil down to is self-management. What is your capacity for determining what needs to be done in your life and actually executing those things that need to be done?

Can you see what needs to be done?

Do you have the ability to do the things that need to be done?

Allen boils this all down, on page 61:

The two key ingredients for making it all work are:

Control
Perspective

The more control you have, the better. The more perspective you have, the better.

Allen subdivides levels of control and perspective into four distinct areas. Of course, it’s worth noting that we all find ourselves in each of these areas sometimes, but typically one of these areas dominates our lives and life choices.

Victim / Responder
Low Control, Low Perspective
Allen sums up what life is like for a “victim/responder” on page 63:

In a self-management context, this means that you are simply dealing with only the latest and the loudest. You are likely doing “emergency scanning” of voice mails and e-mails, letting the not-yet-critical stuff mount up in heaps, dealing exclusively with the tasks you have to do at the moment.

When I read this description, I couldn’t help but think of how every task in a person’s life has two key characteristics: urgency and importance. A victim/responder simply does all of the urgent tasks without worrying much at all about their actual importance.

To put it simply, if this description sounds like your life, then serious changes are in order. There are times when we all find ourselves here – dealing with crises, handling minor things, and so on. However, without the ability to step back from this state (preferably, the ability to step back quite often), we become numb to the bigger issues and simply just focus on whatever happens to be on our plate, whether it’s important or not. That’s not a route to any kind of success.

Micromanager / Implementer
High Control, Low Perspective
So, what about the “micromanager”? From page 65:

This is the natural domain of the proverbial bean-counter, the financial guy who, if he wields too much power, strangles a company by cutting off investment in innovation, design, and research. [...] Another typical example of this sort of thinking is the person who, instead of having nothing well organized, has nothing, well organized.

We’ve all come across this in our lives: people who have built their own little empires and rule over them with an iron fist. They’re completely in control of some very minor situation and you have to follow their arcane rules to gain access to what they’re controlling.

Perhaps this is your boss or an administrative assistant you have to regularly deal with. Perhaps it’s you.

In either case, the key to growing beyond this paradigm is to step back and ask yourself what sort of role your area of control plays in the lives of others. Are you sacrificing successful interaction with others to keep more control over your own situation? Are you making life difficult for the people who need your help simply so you can maintain control over one or two minor things?

Could you be more productive and more helpful to the people around you if you focused on the bigger picture of what’s going on in the organization rather than the narrow focus of the area you control?

I keep thinking of the mind-numbing amounts of paperwork I had to do at my previous job. There were many, many instances where a smoother framework could have been introduced, but to do so would mean loss of a bit of control for a short period during the transition, so such improvements were constantly shot down – to the detriment of all.

“Crazy Maker” / Visionary
Low Control, High Perspective
The opposite of the micromanager is discussed on page 67: the “visionary”:

[T]hey have too many ideas in proportion to the amount getting done, they take on too many commitments vis-a-vis available resources, and they make everyone around them nuts by random and uncontrolled directives. Their systems and behaviors are not functioning to capture and contain all of their creative output.

I find myself in this area quite a lot of the time. I have more ideas than I know what to do with or possibly have time to follow up on. Quite often, I don’t filter them enough and begin engaging in too many projects.

In other words, I have the perspective I need to set long-term ideas and carry through with them, but sometimes I fail to have the control needed to pick and choose amoing those long-term ideas.

Think of the person you know who always has some sort of great idea but seems to have difficulty following through on them – you’re looking at a visionary. Perhaps it’s you.

I think that in many cases, visionaries and micromanagers can make a great team if they trust each other and listen to each other and give into each other on occasion.

“Captain & Commander”
High Control, High Perspective
However, it’s this final status that is the most valuable for almost everyone to have. On page 69:

The ideal of the model I’m proposing here incorporates an appropriate mix of perspective and structure, with your energies and focus directed by an internal rather than an external source. This is the state of flow, of being in the zone, of being “on.”

The success factor here isn’t what you’re doing or how much of it you’re doing, but how you’re engaged with what you’re doing. Why are you doing it? How are you doing it? What’s the end goal? How will you get there? When you have all of that inside of you and you’re able to simply throw yourself into the task at hand to the point of losing track of time and simply getting things done, you’re there.

How do you get there? Allen points back at what I consider to be the fundamental principle of the Getting Things Done model: simply get all of those spare ideas and thoughts and plans for other things out of your head and into some trusted system. Write them down and put them in a place that you’ll review later.

The more I do that, the easier I find it to simply slip into the flow, where all that matters is getting stuff done in a sensible way.

I thoroughly enjoyed this recent WIRED article entitled 7 Essential Skills You Didn’t Learn in College. Among them:

Statistical literacy – the ability to critically interpret presented statistics and sniff out the actual useful information to separate it from the nonsense.
Applied cognition – the ability to evaluate your methods of thinking and processing information and seek out and apply improved methods.
Writing for new forms – the ability to communicate nuanced thought in fewer words (think Twitter’s 140 character limit, for example).
Domestic tech – the ability to make things and repair things at home, from cooking to home repair.

(I particularly liked that last one.)

This article was yet another reminder to me that most of the skills that a person uses in a financially, professionally, and personally successful life are developed outside of a classroom.

In the past, I’ve written about the value of transferable skills, but I thought I’d expand on that by offering up ten more essential skills that aren’t typically taught in college and how you can learn them in your own life.

Money Management 101
How to keep out of debt and spend less than you earn
If more Americans had these simple lessons as part of their life, there would never have been a housing crisis and the economic downturn of 2008 would have been far softer. The fundamental key to money management is to simply spend less than you earn every single month. Part of that involves not overcommitting yourself to future bills – in other words, get sensible mortgages and avoid other debts. It also means learning how to resist the temptation to have all of the material stuff that other people have.

Idea Organization 101
How to organize many ideas to tell a single coherent story
I receive many emails that consist of just a long glob of text with lots of facts and ideas spread throughout. Unfortunately, without a lot of work, those emails are incomprehensible. Using basic strategies for organizing your ideas can make a huge difference in terms of the recipient understanding you and effectively handling your wishes. Key strategies include sticking to only one fact per paragraph, listing all of the facts you want to convey before you start writing, and putting yourself in the shoes of the person receiving the message.

Persuasion 101
How to convince others of your ideas – and understand how others convince you
You don’t persuade others by merely being right on your own terms. You persuade others by making your case clear on their terms. One big part of this is to simply use honey rather than vinegar. Be kind and understanding and leave being judgmental by the wayside.

Personal Growth 101
How to consistently evaluate and improve yourself in every dimension of life
We all succeed in some areas and fail in others. Almost every situation in our lives offers some room for improvement, if only we’re willing to see it and take it. Personal growth requires a willingness to look at our own faults and mistakes and ask ourselves constantly what we can do to improve on those faults in every area of life. It requires that we accept that we’re not perfect and that we can always improve. It also requires us to take action to improve those faults.

Time Management 101
How to organize your time – without over-organizing it
At one extreme, we have people who do no time management at all and seem to just stumble onto whatever task comes next. At the other extreme, some people have every element of their day scheduled down to the five minute mark. There’s a happy, healthy medium that allows freedom while still giving enough structure to make sure we get done the things we need to do. The first step is to keep a calendar. Another step is to constantly keep a “to-do” list going – and constantly add to it as ideas come into our head, writing them down instead of just trying to remember them.

Goal Setting 101
How to set reachable, manageable goals
Goals enable us to work towards something instead of just struggling in a random direction without any real forward motion. A good goal not only specifies where we’re going, but makes it very clear when we’ve reached our goal as well as providing milestones for getting there. Try setting a goal that involves a number so that you can clearly track your progress along the way and can see the impact of your daily choices as you go.

Focus 101
How to eliminate distractions and put your attention on a single matter
How many of you have another web browser or another tab open right now? Is your cell phone on? How about a Twitter client or Facebook? All of these things are distractions that can easily pull you away from whatever task you happen to be working on at the moment.

Public Discourse 101
How to discuss issues without resorting to name-calling
The public arena is filled with incredible viciousness, with people on both sides hurling such hateful terminology at people who merely disagree with them on an issue or two. Discussion and public policy can’t move forward in that state. If more people adopted a more sensible form of public discourse, we could find middle grounds that allow society to move forward. Share the positives of your ideas, not the negatives of other ideas. Don’t resort to name-calling. When criticized, don’t respond with more criticism. Listen (and by that, I don’t mean just wait until your turn to talk).

Marketing Interpretation 101
How to understand how marketing manipulates you in every avenue of life
From politics to what gadgets you want, from the shows you choose to watch to the food you buy at the supermarket, marketing plays a role. The simple ability to figure out what ideas in your head and what ideas spoken by others are actually based on facts or are based on marketing and promotion makes it much easier to cut down to the reality of things, as well as get a grip on your own personal choices and ideas.

Impulse Control 101
How to get a grip on your personal decision-making
All of us are impulsive at times, but impulsiveness can have huge personal and financial costs. The more control you have over your own impulsiveness (including the ability to know when to allow yourself to be impulsive), the more control you have over your finances and your ability to interact positively with the world around you. The easiest tactic is to simply apply a five second rule to each significant decision you make in a day – each item you buy, each thing you agree to, and so on. Just think quickly about the pros and cons of each choice and see how that reshapes your initial impulse.

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. Extra mortgage while underwater
2. Homemade pet food
3. How does a mortgage work?
4. Thoughts on franchising
5. The future of Berkshire Hathaway
6. Writing about an employer
7. Switching careers and emergency savings
8. Parents and debt
9. Roth IRA and education savings
10. Career grinding

Recently, several readers have written to me suggesting minor format changes to the mailbag.

Starting with this issue, I pretty much incorporated all of them.

I think this will make the mailbag a bit easier to read.

Q1: Extra mortgage while underwater
Is it worth it to pay extra on your mortgage when you are considerably underwater in your house?
- Leslie

Unless you are planning on walking away from the mortgage and the house, it makes just as much sense to pay ahead on an underwater mortgage as it does on an above-water mortgage.

In either case, you owe a certain amount of money to a lender. Each day (that’s how it’s often calculated), you’re charged some small amount of interest on that loan. So, if you have a 5% loan, each day you’re charged (5/365)% interest in your remaining balance – about 0.014%. If you have a $200,000 balance, that’s $27.40 a day, which adds up to $821.92 over a month. If you make an extra payment of, say, $5,000, you drop the daily interest down to $26.71 and the monthly amount down to $801.37. How does that help you? Your next house payment (and every one thereafter) will have $20 more go towards the balance of your home and $20 less go into the bank’s pocket in the form of interest. You’ll pay off the house quicker because eventually that extra $20 a month will add up to eliminating payments at the end of your mortgage.

Now, why would it not be a good choice to pay ahead? There’s always a small amount of risk when you pay extra on collateralized debt without paying it off, whether you’re paying ahead or not. You weren’t required to pay that money, and if things fall apart later on and the house is foreclosed upon, you’ve simply lost those extra payments. Of course, this is only a significant concern if you’re in a house where you’re struggling to make the basic payments – if you’re financially secure enough to handle the payments and an extra monthly payment, then this isn’t much of a risk.

I consider that risk small enough for almost everyone that the financial gains of paying ahead blow it out of the water. So, unless you’re going to walk away, I’d pay ahead when I could (unless you have other debt that has a higher interest rate, of course).

Q2: Homemade pet food
Have you ever made your own cat food or done research on whether pets can thrive on homemade food and whether it’s actually cheaper?
- Delores

The problem with feeding your pet homemade foods is that you don’t have clear signals to determine if you’re feeding your pet foods that will contribute to their long-term health or not. The dietary needs of both dogs and cats are different from humans and different from each other as well. Each finds different things to be toxic, different things to be healthy, and different things to be unhealthy.

I compare feeding pets to feeding my children. I have thirty years of knowing what a human diet is like and can use that as a guideline for feeding my own children a balanced diet – plenty of fruits and vegetables, some protein, etc. I do not have that kind of experience with a cat or dog diet, nor does anyone outside of a veterinary research clinic. Beyond that, I can gain additional feedback from my children through conversation – at best, I can rely only on the responses from my pet, which may be caused by the food – or an unrelated ailment, or a particular ingredient, and so on.

In short, I don’t think I’m trustworthy for making pet food. There are too many variables and too little feedback on those variables to make sure that I’m giving my pet a healthy diet. Even if it were less expensive, I wouldn’t trust it.

Here’s a simple example: cats need some amount of taurine in their diet because their pancreas cannot synthesize it. If they don’t get taurine, they go blind at a very early age. If you feed your cat a homemade diet rich enough in taurine to meet their needs, you run other risks due to an imbalanced diet.

If I had a pet, I’d probably ask my vet for a recommendation and follow that recommendation.

Q3: How does a mortgage work?
I want to buy a house. I just got my credit report in the mail through my bank, and my scores are pretty bad, but salvageable. I have almost no real “debt” so to speak – I have one personal loan that I owe about $700 on, and the rest is all defaulted bills and such, totaling just under $4,000. Not too shabby, in the grand scheme of things, I think.

A 30 year fixed-interest loan at the appallingly horrible rate of 9%, for, say, $60,000. Could you break that down for me in simple terms? I have to say, this “magic math” has got me totally stumped.
- Natasha

The first thing I would suggest that you do is start playing around with a simple mortgage calculator, like the calculator at Bankrate.com. It can easily take the terms you provide ($60,000, 30 year mortgage, 9%) and give you your monthly payment ($482.77) and a chart showing you how much of each payment is going to interest and how much is going towards the balance of your mortgage.

In more general terms, here’s how it works:

When you take out a mortgage from a bank to buy a house, the amount you borrow from the bank is called the principal.

The bank will charge you some interest rate on that principal.

So, in your example, you have a loan with a balance of $60,000 and a 9% interest rate. Over the course of a year, the bank would expect you to pay in (approximately) $5,400 in interest – that’s 9% of $60,000. You do that by converting the percentage to a decimal – 9% becomes 0.09, 4% becomes 0.04 and so on – and multiplying the two numbers together – $60,000 times 0.09 is $5,400.

(Why did I say “approximately”? Banks usually use a more complicated form of this calculation that usually results in a slightly higher amount of interest – it would be somewhere around $5,480 for a year, but that’s not important right now.)

Now, you’ll be making about $5,400 in interest payments over that first year. Just divide that interest by 12 (for the number of months) and you have $450.

So, your first payment would consist of $450 in interest plus some amount from the principal. As we calculated above, the payment would be $482.77, so your principal amount would be $32.77. After that payment, you now owe $59,967.23 on the house ($60,000 minus $32.77).

Now, you essentially do the math all over again, except you have a new loan balance of $59,967.23. $59,967.23 times 0.09 is $5,397.05. Dividing that by 12, you get $449.75. Thus, on your next payment, you would be paying $482.77, of which $449.75 goes to pay the bank the interest you owe them and $33.02 would go towards your principal.

With each payment, a little bit more goes towards the amount you owe and a little less goes towards the interest, until the home is paid off.

I hope that makes things more clear for you.

Q4: Thoughts on franchising
I’ve been a lifelong employee, and I’m considering the idea of buying a franchise. I’m 42 years old and and mostly debt-free (I have an auto lease and I rent an apartment) with a reasonable amount saved.

What are your general thoughts about this versus starting one’s own business?
- Michelle

The biggest drawbacks to becoming a franchisee usually come from how the business is run internally. How controlling is the franchisor? How expensive is the franchise fee? How much support do they offer you as a new franchisee?

Since you actually work for such a franchise, you should be privy to at least some of this information. Are there a lot of “corporate” procedures you have to follow or do you define them all locally? Is the manager and owner in regular contact with the larger company or do you seem to be pretty much on your own?

Since you work there, you probably have a pretty good grasp on these issues, as well as the legitimacy of the business.

You should note, though, that becoming a franchisee for a well-known business is often very expensive and they’re often very picky about allowing people to become franchisees if they don’t have a fat wallet.

Q5: The future of Berkshire Hathaway
Given Warren Buffett’s age, would you suggest buying shares of BRK-B for the long haul?
- Lacey

My belief is that you buy individual stocks for a specific reason and, if that reason no longer exists, you sell the stock. That’s actually pretty standard investment advice.

What’s your reason for buying BRK-B stock? For most people, it’s probably Buffett and Munger as a team – I know that would be my reason. I would be buying, in essence, to invest in those two guys. If one (or both) of them went away, my reason for investing would be gone, so I would sell.

All I can tell you to do in this case is understand why you would buy BRK-B and whether that reason is changing or not.

Q6: Writing about an employer
I work at a company which is headquartered in another company. The foreign management conducts business differently than an American company would in many ways. Unfortunately, that has caused a lot of problems over the years, and has partly let to the potential of the whole company being lost within the next 2 years.

I’ve never written a book before, but didn’t want to pursue this one if it will cost me millions in fines and net me a prison term! Thanks in advance for any advice you may have!
- Luke

Libel is a false statement of fact about an employee or organization. Opinions are not libelous – false facts are.

Keep that strongly in your mind as you move forward. If you’re going to be stating something as a fact, document it as thoroughly as you can right now. Get evidence of this fact and make sure you’re not extending your “factual” claim any further than you can based on the actual information.

People get into trouble with libel when they make negative claims about a person or organization without facts to back it up – even if they change names.

Here’s an example. If I write I dislike Robert Kiyosaki’s work, that’s an opinion – I’m fine. If I write Robert Kiyosaki has written hateful things about people who earn a living wage, I’d better have a fact to back it up – and I do, by simply pointing to any copy of Rich Dad, Poor Dad and the passage where he calls employees “hamsters.”

Any respectable publisher will help you carefully check such a book for libel. If you’re even considering self-publishing something like this, hire a libel lawyer to help you avoid any pitfalls – it’ll be expensive, but it’ll keep you out of much worse trouble later on.

Q7: Switching careers and emergency savings
I am 27, single with no kids, and a homeowner. About 5 months ago I changed jobs after being with the same company for over 4 years. It was time to move on, but I hate my new employer and my position at my new employer. It is to the point that I hate getting out of bed every morning and the stress and overall distaste for the company is impacting my life and health outside of work. With that said I have a mortgage and other expenses just like other people. I have saved my money well through the years and have an emergency fund of 13 months of living expenses and have no debt outside of the mortgage. Part of me just wants to quit my current job and start looking for a new job full time, but I know that this could take months. The other part of me would hate to tap into my savings that I have worked REALLY hard to develop. What are your thoughts on my situation? What would you do?
- Ted

I’d keep my current job, but recognize it for what it really is – a job. You go there, put in some hours, get some money. It’s not a career builder for you. Don’t let the overarching issues going on there bother you in the least. Just do whatever work is on your desk.

Use that energy (and time) you’re saving to apply for another job. Don’t be too picky about it, particularly in the current job market and your current situation. When you get up in the morning, don’t think about your current job. Think about your next one. That’s where your heart and energy should be.

Your suffering is coming about because you’re putting too much emphasis on your current unpleasant job (a short-term concern) and too little on what’s down the road from there (the long-term concern). Look long and hard at that long term and start taking actions today to get there.

Q8: Parents and debt
My father was venting to me the other day about my mother and her spending habits. She is going to be 55 in November, has a lot of credit card debt (my father did not give me an exact figure, but it is high), and wants to retire at some point in her life. By no means am I a financial expert, and by no means am I in the greatest financial position myself. My wife and I are currently using Consolidated Credit Counseling Services to help ourselves get back on track with our debt. My father also hinted around he may want me to suggest CCCS to her. Do I give my father the information about CCCS and he can forward it to my mother, or should I just do it myself?
- Joe

This is an issue that depends heavily on the relationship dynamics involved. How close are you to your mother? Do you talk to her regularly? Do you talk about most issues in your life or is your relationship more distant? Do you think you are a very valuable influence in her life? More importantly, are you personally concerned about this debt situation or is it more that you’re concerned because your father is?

The deeper your connection to the issue and the deeper your connection to your mother, the more you should consider bringing this issue up yourself with her. If there is more distance, let your father do it.

Why is this important? Sharing such information is likely to trigger a pretty difficult situation that functions best if there is a lot of trust and rapport flowing both ways. If there isn’t, there can easily be a lot of resentment and denial just from sharing the information – something you don’t need to be dealing with if you don’t have a very close relationship.

Q9: Roth IRA and education savings
I am 24, and have been working full-time for two years. I plan to go to law school next fall. I save 7.5% through my work’s 401k (they don’t match), and I currently have ~$13,000 in a Vanguard Mutual Fund, and $10,000 in a Money Market fund. I am considering moving $5,000 of that into a Roth IRA. Does it make sense to do this, even if I will very likely have to take out school loans for law school next year? And if so, where would it make the most sense to pull the money from? I am able to save ~$200/month from my take-home pay, which is currently going to the Mutual Fund.
- Julia

Unless the 401(k) program at work is stellar, I would reduce the 401(k) contributions and use those to open a Roth IRA. The Roth will result in better long-term returns for your money.

If you’d prefer to fully fund the Roth out of what you already have and not touch the 401(k), I’d sell $5,000 of the mutual fund and get it into the Roth.

In either case, I’m not sure I would keep the mutual fund. You’re apparently saving for a goal that’s just a year down the road, and the one year volatility in the stock market can be tremendous. You could be up 10% in a year – or down 30%. You’re better off guaranteeing that you’ll be up 1-2% in that money market instead.

Q10: Career grinding
I am a poker professional who has averaged mid six-figure incomes last 2 years. This year I’ve had problems motivating myself and just simply grinding mindless hours that I used to do with ease.

This year I’ve been sucessful in motivating myself into other challenges relating to fitness and nutrition, but how can I get back on track and start working hard again? I know I will be very angry at my self at an older age if I continue this way.
- Mike

This sounds to me like you’ve lost touch with your passion for poker, the thing that once drove you to play a lot. Something once made you love it and that something is gone now.

What was it that first made you fall in love with the game? Was it watching the World Series of Poker on ESPN? Was it playing with friends? Was it those first early online wins? Was it the mathematical challenges?

If I were you, I’d return to those things that made it fun in the beginning for a while. Watch the “dumb hands” they show on television and just be entertained. Play with some friends for nickels. Learn a completely different type of poker, like Omaha, or even a completely different game for a while.

Or just take a complete break from the game for a couple months. Take the rest of the year off from poker and catch up on other things in your life. Then start from the point where you can fall in love with the game again.

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.

Melinda writes in:

My twelve year old daughter and I are having a money war of sorts. At the start of the school year last month we went shopping for clothes together. I said she could spend $250 any way she chose as long as she got a certain number of items – some underwear, some socks, some jeans, some shirts, and so on. I told her that she could spend more, but it would come out of her allowance. She proceeded to buy only the minimum amount of socks and underwear so she could buy another shirt that she liked. Now she’s having to do laundry twice a week and is complaining all the time about it. I told her to use her allowance to buy the underwear and she says that’s completely unfair. What do you think?

I think this is an experiment that had great intentions that went badly, but there are a lot of interesting pieces worth discussing in here.

First, I really like the idea of using this situation to teach your child about budgeting. In the end, that’s what’s going on here – good old fashioned budgeting. This experiment takes the concepts of budgeting and puts them into something concrete that the twelve year old can really understand and take part in. The idea of using additional money for budgeting

Second, I think you should buy her the necessary underwear and socks. This might surprise some of you because it’s obvious that the child made the mistake of spending that money on a shirt instead of the undergarments. The key thing to remember is that an obvious mistake to an adult isn’t an obvious mistake to a pre-teen, and forcing the child to get by on three or four undergarments is not exactly a great choice from a hygenic angle.

Instead, chalk this one up to a bit of a lesson learned for both of you. The idea is good, but the undergarment requirement from you as a parent should have been higher. If someone is required to do laundry twice a week because their undergarment count isn’t high enough, they should consider more undergarments. Not only will they last longer, but they’ll save on water and energy use by not requiring the user to run laundry loads with only a few items in it.

However, this question leads into a much broader one: what items should a child pay for out of their allowance – and what should their parents pay for?

While it may seem like a black-and-white rule for some, the line between the two can be extremely different from household to household. For example, in Melinda’s household, the child is being encouraged to spend their allowance on undergarments, whereas in my own household, this would never even be a question – we would buy such items for our children.

Where is that line?

For us, the rule of thumb is simple: the parents take care of basic needs, period. Basic needs means food, water, clothing, housing, school and field trip fees, and so forth. While our children remain at home before college, we will provide these things for them without any impact on their allowance.

However, we will often provide for just the basic needs. My children will always have clean clothes, but the shirts might just be generic t-shirts and denim jeans. My children will always have food, but that might come in the form of a sack lunch instead of $10 to spend at McDonalds.

Expenses for “wants” either come out of their allowance or are earned in some fashion. We give our children a small allowance each week that’s not tied to chores, but our oldest child now has the occasional opportunity to do more things to earn money. For example, if I’m out in the yard raking leaves and he spends an hour and a half filling trash bags with those leaves, I may give him a few dollars for his extra effort.

What about those “unexpected” situations? If something unexpected comes up, they may get a very small allowance advance to cover the minimum cost, but that’s all – and by minimum, I mean $3 if they’re going to stop at a fast food restaurant with some friends or something similar to that.

But I don’t want my child going without! Going “without” on small things is a valuable teaching tool. It teaches them that they can go without things that their friends have. It also teaches them the value of not spending their allowance all at once. (Of course, these lessons have to be coupled with involved parenting and discussion. That’s an assumed part of the equation.)

Remember, your job as a parent is not to be your child’s “pal.” It’s to take care of their basic needs while teaching them the skills they’ll need to survive outside of the relative safety of your home. One big part of that is personal finance, and lessons like these build that groundwork.

If you’d like to read an electronic version of my latest book (and you’re in the United States), you can download it for free for the next few days in Amazon Kindle form. Just visit my book’s Kindle page and download!

You don’t actually have to have a Kindle to read it. There are Kindle clients available for the iPad, the iPhone/iPod Touch, for Android and Blackberry phones, and perhaps most relevant to you, for PCs and Macs.

Download it now, though, because it’s only available for free for a short time.

Why am I giving my book away for free? It gives a lot more people the opportunity to read it. The more people that read it, the more value it has. If you download it now and read it, you might decide that a print version would be a perfect gift for a friend this Christmas or that you’d like a paper version to mark up and dog ear for your own use, too.

Doing One Thing and Doing it Well The value of deep focus is incredible. If you can do one single thing better than the rest, you’ll be known for your quality output. I had fun writing this one. (@ open forum)

Save Money On Lawn Care I particularly liked the “get your kids a pair of work gloves” idea. Our yard doesn’t have many leaves in the fall (thankfully – the wind almost constantly blows them out of our yard and there aren’t many trees available to provide leaves anyway), but there are lots of other things to do. (@ no credit needed)

Dangers of Using a HELOC as Short Term Savings Solution Far too many people write to me suggesting that their HELOC is a great emergency fund. It’s not. (@ good financial cents)

Five Daily Activities to Improve Your Finances Most big changes in life come down to little daily activities and choices. (@ frugal dad)

With Free Television & Low Cost Internet Access, Save $100 A Month This is one of the biggest ways that people can cut costs when they’re in debt elimination mode. (@ the digerati life)

Every time I go shopping for a food item or a household item, I’m always bombarded with all sorts of nonsensical and largely meaningless terms plastered all over products. The words are often tied to products that, frankly, I view as overpriced for various reasons.

I decided to catalogue a few of these wonderful meaningless words that people pay for.

New The “cult of the new” is an expensive one that has a lot of adherents. New products are usually priced quite highly – and usually attract buyers who are simply looking for a “new” experience. At the same time, of course, “new” products are ones that have not stood the test of time. They might be good – they might be awful. For my dollar, I think I’ll stick with a Consumer Reports recommendation and pick up a product that I know works that doesn’t have that “new” premium price.

Now 28% better! Whenever you see a comparison like this, ask yourself two things: in what way is it better and how is that “better” actually measured? If you read this type of statement and think for a moment, you realize that it could mean anything at all – better blue color in the liquid laundry detergent and so on. Unless the product is precisely stating what the improvement is, such a statement doesn’t have any meaning – or value – at all.

Hypoallergenic It’s a nice-sounding term that doesn’t mean a thing. Why? There is no official standard for what the word means. There isn’t even a voluntary standard that defines the term. It does not mean that the product won’t cause an allergic reaction. It might, at best, mean that the marketers think that the stuff in the product probably won’t cause an allergic reaction – which really doesn’t mean much at all, does it?

Fragrance-free Wouldn’t it be nice if “fragrance free” actually meant that the product doesn’t contain any fragrance? In truth, the product is usually “smell-free” or some attempt at it. Instead of not including a fragrance, what often happens is that a finished product with a fragrance in it has something added to eliminate or mask the smell. If it’s done well enough, marketers will slap this label on it – but if you’re allergic to fragrances, it really doesn’t mean much at all.

All natural The word “natural” can basically mean anything. There are no standards at all for what this word means. Try this: compare a “natural” product to a similar one that doesn’t have “natural” written on the label and see what exactly is different in the ingredients list. I’ll go ahead and tell you: not much is different.

Never tested on animals This one actually is true on the shallow surface: the product hasn’t been tested on animals. However, that statement is saying nothing at all about the ingredients that make up the product – most of those were likely tested on animals before they were approved for wide use. There are almost no ingredients in cosmetics and medicines for human use that weren’t already tested on animals.

Best-of-breed Such statements usually imply that the product is the best among its competitors. However, when you’re allowing the company to define who the competition is, they usually define that competition as narrowly as possible: “dog foods that use these 25 ingredients and these 6 coloring agents” or something to that effect. It’s easy to be best-of-breed when you’re the only one in the group.

Organic A caveat: when you actually see the USDA Organic label on food products, that label has specific meaning: the item comes from (or the ingredients come from) a farm that lives up to the USDA Organic standards for plant and animal treatment, which encompasses quite a few things – no hormones, no pesticides, and so on. However, the word “organic” is often used in contexts that have nothing to do with farms or the USDA Organic certification – it’s just used as a buzzword for a product that’s trying to sell itself as being “all natural,” as mentioned above.

Superfood This is yet another term without any sort of legal definition. Thus, it’s ofen applied to all kinds of things to encourage sales – particularly high-priced fruits, vegetables, juices, and vitamins. Guess what? A well-balanced diet with lots of fruits and vegetables of all kinds will take care of your nutrition needs without spending extra money on the exotic semi-bogus “superfood” of the week.

Nontoxic Again, this is a term that has no standard definition and no verification process to ensure that the product meets that non-existent definition. If a manufacturer thinks the product probably won’t kill you if you eat it and doesn’t contain anything that’s blatantly known as a toxic chemical, they can put a “nontoxic” label on it. But if it’s not food, why are you eating it anyway?

This is the third entry in a twenty part series discussing the wonderful time and priority management book Making It All Work by David Allen. New entries in this series will appear on Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings through December 10.

Making It All Work opens with what I would call three “introductory” chapters that precede what I would call the main section of the book. This third “introductory” chapter is quite short and mostly just sets up a few key concepts for the rest of the book. I identified five of these concepts that really stuck out at me.

Losing Control and Direction
On page 49:

From time to time you will experience yourself either feeling out of control or lacking direction – or both. If you didn’t you’d probably be stale.

This could be true on a larger life scale, such as how you are experiencing your career, or, at a more mundane level, such as being disorganized in preparing a dinner for friends. This can (and will) happen in and with your project in the garage, your family, your team, your job, your company, your school committee, your life.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are times where I feel like my life is humming along wonderfully and everything seems to be in sync. I know what I’m doing. I know why I’m doing it. I’m really productive and full of energy.

Eventually, though, something happens that knocks this off of the rails. An emotional event. A crisis that eats a lot of time and energy. A slow change in my goals and directions.

I start to feel out of control. Sometimes, I start to wonder what exactly I’m working for.

The Two Keys
On page 51:

In the simplest terms, there are only two things you or your team or company needs to do to achieve positive and productive engagement with the commitments you face and to achieve all of the desired results [...]: get organized and get focused.

Again, that seems simple. Yet virtually every common problem a person or team boils down to one of those two problems: a lack of organization or a lack of focus.

Organization problems come from not having the right resources available for the task. People problems. Information management problems. Communication problems. They’re all signs of some form of disorganization.

On the other hand, focus problems include things like simply having too much to do or being bored without enough to do or not being engaged with what’s going on.

How do we solve them? The solution really comes from putting aside time to evaluate what you’re doing and why you’re doing it on a regular basis. So often, people and groups view that evaluation as “wasted time,” but I’ve found it to be the most valuable time that I spend.

The Price of Creativity and Productivity
On page 55:

Loss of control and perspective is the natural price you will pay for being creative and productive. The trick is not how to prevent this happening, but how to shorten the time you stay in an unsettled state.

Why are we worried about these things? Simply put, time spent out of control and without perspective is time lost.

I know that there are sometimes days when I just sit here spinning my wheels, trying to decide what to do next or not even being sure what I should be doing. I don’t have ideas. I don’t have direction. I just idle a bit.

That is pure wasted time. When I find myself in that situation, it’s time to back off and take a larger look at what I’m doing.

What Exactly Is Work?
On page 56:

The definition of work I will use in this book is quite universal: anything you want to get done that’s not done yet.

Allen’s material is interesting because it doesn’t make any distinction between the different types of things that a person needs to get done. A task to accomplish is a task to accomplish – you treat them all in the same way.

This is a really difficult bridge for many people to walk across. For many people, a work task stays at work and a home task stays at home.

The problem is that you often find yourself thinking about work at home and thinking about home at work during downtimes at each place. In those downtimes, you should be productive in those areas. If you have a great work idea at home, write it down. If you have a great home idea at work, write it down.

No “Personal” Versus “Work” Dichotomy
On page 58:

[...] there is an inherent fallacy in affirming that “life” and “work” are mutually exclusive spheres. The truth is, when you are “in your zone” – when time has disappeared and you’re simply “on” with whatever you’re doing – there is no distinction in your psyche at that moment between “work” and “personal.”

Allen goes so far with this as to suggest that there really is no difference between “work” and “personal” when you are “in the zone.” Regardless of whether you’re at home or at work, you should strive to get into that zone – and when you’re in that zone, the line between work and personal disappears. You just get stuff done.

For me, this line has completely vanished, but that’s partially because I work at home on projects that have a flexible time schedule. I find that when I do get really “productive” over a stretch of time, I intermingle “work” tasks and “personal” tasks without skipping a beat.

My enemy is idle downtime. I don’t mind taking a break or anything like that, but when I’m just sitting there doing nothing for the sake of doing nothing, I know there’s a problem, whether I’m active in my personal life or in my work.