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 (November 14 – November 20, 2009)
The 40/30/30 Rule The idea here is that you spend 40% of your income on basic bills, 30% on saving for the future, and 30% on enjoying life. This split actually works, but it’s very difficult for many people to actually execute.

Personal Finance 101: How Averages Lie There are three types of untruths: lies, big lies, and statistics. The trick is knowing which is which.

My Garage Sale and Thrifting Toolkit I keep a few things on hand whenever I go to thrift stores or yard sales or any situation where I’ll be perusing used stuff at a high discount. Be prepared and you will find value.

Two Years Ago (November 14 – November 20, 2008)
Some Thoughts on Personal Finance Coaching I think coaching can be a good thing, but I think people can often overpay drastically for such coaching.

Personal Finance 101: Deflation and You What happens to your pocketbook when deflation occurs? It’s not really a pretty thing, even if it sounds good on the surface.

Seven Tactics for Turning Short-Term Intensity Into Long-Term Intensity It’s easy to get excited about something in the short term, but how do you transform that into long-term intensity that will really take you places?

Three Years Ago (November 14 – November 20, 2007)
How to Maintain Friendships With Non-Frugal People If you’re very frugal and you have a friend who likes to spend wildly, it can be difficult to maintain a relationship with them. Here are some tactics for doing just that.

Seven Ways To Get Books For Free (Or Close To It) I love to read. Tactics for acquiring free books are always a good thing.

Finding Motivation and Meaning in the Drudgery of Personal Finance It can be very difficult at times to keep moving forward with one’s financial progress. How do you find meaning in all of it?

Four Years Ago (November 14 – November 20, 2006)
A Christmas List: Before and After Financial Armageddon This was one of the first times I realized that my internal desires had really shifted in the wake of our financial meltdown. That felt really good.

The Value of Personal Appearance Our personal appearance is surprisingly important. There are many basic steps people can take to maintain a very good level of personal appearance.

Minimizing the Personal Cost of Business Travel When I used to travel frequently for work, there were often lots of incidental costs as I went along. After a while, I learned how to minimize those incidental costs.

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 130,000 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!

In the coming week, we’re going to be giving a few early small seasonal gifts to people, so with that in mind, we put the final finishing touches on our first gift basket, utilizing some of the items we already made.

One component of many of our baskets this year is going to be cookies. Sarah is a spectacular cookie maker and she delightfully packages them up for people as well. This year, she decided to use a peanut butter-based cookie recipe for her cookie bundles.

In the picture above, Sarah is making cookies using tofu as an egg substitute – these actually turn out really well and were well liked by someone who thinks tofu is disgusting, so it works. Here’s what you need.

6 eggs (or 1 1/2 cups whipped tofu)
2 sticks margarine or butter
3 cups brown sugar
2 cups sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 cups peanut butter
2 teaspoons baking soda
12 oz. chocolate chips (milk or semi-sweet, as per your preference)
3/4 cup chopped nuts (a little more or a little less, as per your preference)
1 1/2 cups M&Ms (a little more or a little less, as per your preference)
9 cups rolled oats

Making cookies is easy.

Mix together the butter/margarine and the sugar. Then, add the eggs/tofu, vanilla, and peanut butter and mix until smooth. Add all remaining ingredients, then mix well. Shape into small balls (about the size of a golf ball) and place them on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 F (175 C) for 8 to 10 minutes. They’re done when they hold together but are still really chewy.

Naturally, we wanted to package these fairly nicely. Sarah’s simple solution was to take a large square of clear Saran Wrap, place three cookies in a stack in the middle, draw the Saran Wrap up around the cookies, twist the top, and tie it with a ribbon.

Quite nice! Of course, you might want to just make big batches of these cookies for any family events and dinners you have coming up, either at Thanksgiving or at Christmas.

We wanted to give some of these cookie bundles away as part of larger gift baskets that incorporate other homemade gifts. Over the last few months, we’ve been searching a wide variety of supply stores looking for small gift baskets, eventually finding a large box of them for about $0.40 a basket.

Here’s the basket we prepared.

This basket contains a cookie bundle, a jar of the wine jelly, and an ornament hand-painted by our daughter (who likes blue and purple). It’s nestled on a piece of blank newspaper from our end roll.

This is a small example of the gift baskets we’ll be giving out this year. Some will be larger and contain other items that we’ve made, and I’ll show you some of these later.

This may be the last entry in the series. We may be making one more item – if we do, we’ll show it to you in two weeks. There will also be a final post showing some of the packaging that we’re using for these gifts.

This is the fourteenth 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.

What, exactly, are areas of focus? I think the best way to spell this out is to give you some examples from my own life.

Areas of focus, as Allen describes them on page 228:

This level functions as an abstraction of your reality, a tightly focused series of ten to fifteen categories in areas that you are particularly responsible for, interested in, or pay special attention to, just to keep your ship afloat and sailing steadily.

I’ve considered what my areas of focus are many times in the past few years and I’d probably list them as follows:
Writing Simple Dollar content
Writing other content
Responding to readers
Maintaining websites
Personal finances
My marriage
Teaching my children
My health
Family activities
Household maintenance
Spirituality
Friendships and family
Gaming
Reading
Community/civic service

I would say that these areas pretty much define all of the things that I focus on with any significance. Every project I take on fits into one or more of these areas of focus, and all of these areas of focus are part of at least one broader goal or mission in life.

So, what use does this have? For me, the real value in knowing these areas of focus is that when I review things once a week, I can look at each of these areas and ask myself, simply, “Are things up to snuff in this area?”

Let me explain what I mean. Within each of these areas, I’ll have a bunch of little one-off tasks and some broader projects that I’m working on during any given week. During a certain week, though, I might be spending a lot of time on the “gaming” and on the “friendships” and not as much on the “family” part of things – for example, when I go to a gaming convention like GenCon. Or, another example: I might spend a week where I’m focused on writing a book – the “writing other content” part of things – and I spend less time focused on household maintenance.

When I reflect on these areas at the end of the week, I can usually identify which areas in my life that I’ve been neglecting recently and make a conscious choice to focus more on that area in the next week. This is a self-correcting mechanism – it ensures that I don’t let some aspect of my life get away from me while I’m too focused on other things.

Allen puts it this way, on page 233:

Often the benefits of visiting the more elevated horizons will be the opportunity to indentify a number of important topics that have had your attention but that have tended, at least initially, to lurk further back in the recesses of your mind.

Now, one interesting thing to note is that this isn’t strictly hierarchical. Most of my projects are tied to one or more areas of focus, but it isn’t a matter of each project strictly being a part of a specific area of focus. If I have a project that involves teaching my son how to multiply, then I know it’s part of my focus of teaching my children things.

But what does a game night on Saturday evening fall into? It’s about friends. It’s about gaming. It’s also about household maintenance – we’ll have to clean up and get everything ready. It touches on other areas, too – parenting, my health, my marriage.

The important question I ask myself at the end of the week is whether or not my efforts in each area of focus were substantial during that week. If they were not, then I know that I need to either focus more heavily on that area of my life in the coming week or, if I’m consistently not putting any effort into that area, rethink that area entirely.

Allen concurs in a simple way on page 234:

Twenty-thousand-feet themes do not lend themselves as such to specific projects, but rather they serve as reminders and affirmations of activities that we simply want to be doing and thinking about more consistently – reading more, exercising more, paying a little more attention to the extended family, being open to more ways to assist in the community, being more conscientious about health, diet, and exercise habits, and so on.

In other words, the big reason for thinking about this level is to make sure our day-to-day activities are in balance and on track. When you keep backing up from here, you start to get into broader areas that focus not only on what you’re doing today, but project ahead into the future.

In my most recent book, The Simple Dollar, I spent some time talking about passive barriers. A passive barrier is a small barrier that you set up that will make a particular bad habit more difficult to continue or, sometimes, make a particular good habit easier to repeat. Putting your cigarettes in a hard-to-reach place (or throwing them away) if you’re trying to quit or putting the television remote on the other side of the house from where the television is if you’re trying to cut down your television viewing are both passive barriers – they make continuation of a bad habit more difficult.

Of course, there are many opportunities to utilize passive barriers in your own financial life. I certainly use them in my own life in order to subtly push myself into good financial habits.

Here are nine passive barriers you can utilize in your own life to encourage better financial results:

Hide your credit cards
Freeze them in ice (actually, I should make a post about doing just that…). Put them in an envelope in the attic. Delete the numbers from your online accounts. Cut them up, even. The entire point is to make it more difficult for you to gain access to your credit cards to use them for impulsive spending. If you don’t have the card with you, it’s pretty hard to buy something you don’t need on credit, isn’t it?

Set up automatic savings transfers
It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’re going to start saving, but the actual process of doing that can be challenging. You have to regularly make that transfer into your savings account and it’s easy to just forget about it, whether consciously or not. Instead, set up an automatic savings transfer that pulls a little bit out of your checking account each week and moves it into your savings. Boom – you’re saving money without the effort.

Set up automatic investing plans
You can do the same thing with most investing accounts. Set it up so that a certain amount is withdrawn from your checking account monthly and transferred to your investment account. Essentially, you’re doing dollar cost averaging without even thinking about it and building up your investment in whatever you choose to invest in without the opportunity to overthink.

Change your driving routes
When I commuted to work, I used to drive by a bookstore each day, both ways. I also drove by a coffee shop that had some killer bagels. Unsurprisingly, these two things would cause a lot of impulse buying on my part. The best solution I found was to simply start utilizing a different driving route to work, one that was basically the same length but took me through a residential neighborhood and near a football stadium instead of the commercial district. The impulsive temptation to stop more or less went away – a passive barrier.

Put your savings in a remote bank
Many people find success saving, but when that savings has built up to a good number, they give into temptation and spend it on a big splurge instead of holding onto it for emergencies. Often, this is made easy by having the money in a local bank, where you can easily access it via a quick stop at the bank. If you put your savings in a more remote bank, it becomes harder to just withdraw it on a whim and, often, you have to think about that withdrawal, talking yourself out of it.

Put your retirement savings in a retirement account
If you’re saving for retirement, don’t put it in a savings account or an ordinary investing account. Put it in a Roth IRA, where you get some tax benefits from saving for retirement and can face some stiff penalties if you withdraw it early or use it for other things. These penalties create a real passive barrier against misuse of retirement savings.

Put your education savings in an education account
You can do the same thing with education savings. Instead of just saving money in an ordinary savings account, put that money in a 529 and let the money build there. As with the Roth IRA, there are extra benefits if you use it the right way and penalties if you use it in another way, thus encouraging you to leave it alone and use it for education.

Leave your wallet in the glove box
If you’re stopping at a store where you often give into temptations, just put your wallet in the glove compartment before you go in. This way, you don’t have cash or credit handy when an impulse comes up – you have to go to all the effort of going out to your car, getting yoru wallet, and going back into the store. That’s a lot of effort, especially for an impulse buy, and it can be just enough to convince you not to do it.

Eliminate consumption habits
A final tactic was alluded to in the introduction: if you have consumption habits, like drugs or alcohol or smoking, putting those consumptives in a hard-to-access place makes it a bit more difficult to actually use them. The less you use them, the less money goes down the tubes into buying the materials for your consumption. So, put the alcohol in the attic. Put the cigarettes in the rafters. Flush the drugs down the toilet. Make it hard for you to use them again.

Passive barriers have another benefit, too: they eventually create a new “channel” for your normal behavior. Soon, you’ll find that things like not giving into impulses when you’re in a store or not consuming expensive drinks becomes the normal in your life – and your wallet will thank you.

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. Basic credit questions
2. How to make money blogging?
3. Favorite podcasts
4. Television compromise
5. Connecting with teens cheaply
6. Overly long “to-do” list
7. Maximizing credit card promos
8. Refinance or not?
9. Quibids?
10. Plant-based snacks

This year, I’ve found myself in two different Secret Santa exchanges.

When I was younger, I used to worry way too much about what I was receiving. I didn’t want to participate in such exchanges because I didn’t want to receive something awful while putting effort into giving something nice.

Now, I barely care what I receive. It’s all about making sure the recipient gets something worthwhile and enjoyable that puts a smile on their face.

Oh, how perspectives change.

Q1: Basic credit questions
I’m a 23 year old University student. I’ve had a credit card since I was 18 (which I just recently – and finally – paid off), and I have a student line of credit with at $12000+ balance. Furthermore, two years ago I took out a loan from my credit union to buy a car which is also paid off. My question is, how do I know what my credit score is and if it’s good or bad? Also, what’s the best way to actually build a good credit score? I was always told I could but something with my credit card (perhaps a CD or something, nothing more than $50), then pay it off right away rather than make minimum payments which just costs more interest. Is this true?
- Tyler

You can’t know your exact credit score without buying it from one of the credit agencies. They all offer programs where you can pay them some small fee to peek at your calculated credit score.

Of course, your credit score is based on your credit report, which you can view for free at annualcreditreport – it’s a site run by the Federal Trade Commission to allow people to view their credit report annually for no cost. Although you don’t get to see your actual credit score, you will be able to verify if there are any incorrect reports on your credit history and see what positive reports are there.

You can also use a number of credit score estimators, like the one at MyFICO, to use the information on your report to get a rough estimate of your credit score. From what I’ve seen, such estimates are usually accurate to within ten points or so.

As for improving your credit, you’re right in that making small purchases and paying them off is the best way to build credit because it demonstrates a positive payment history. I would suggest that you use the card to handle some routine purchase, like gas or groceries, then pay the bill in full as soon as it arrives.

Q2: How to make money blogging?
I have been wanting to find out exactly HOW to accumulate a few dollars of income through click-ads. You had mentioned in your Simple Dollar Rule #11 that we should all try to generate a few dollars from our blog. I know that without an appropriate amount of traffic, one may not generate enough each month to fill a pocket. But that’s not really my concern right now. I just want to know the ‘how-to” so I may feel more motivated about my (not-so-skillful) writings. You see, I love to write and I love to snap (photos). My dream is to one day quit my corporate cell, I mean, cube, and to be able to hold down a lower-paying job closer to home so that I can finally spend more time to write, photograph and jog, my three biggest passions.
- Rachel

Blogging is certainly one way to earn some pocket money, but there are many ways to do that. Earning money from a blog is very interesting because at first, you don’t earn much of anything at all, which weeds out people who won’t stick with it.

You earn money in the long run by having an archive of good posts that others have linked to. As a result, these older posts show up in Google searches, bringing people to your site. The more good older posts you have, the more people you’ll bring to your site without any additional effort.

What you need to do is to ask yourself if you’re writing anything anyone would care about. Can you envision a reasonable scenario where someone would Google a term, find your page, and be pleased with what they find, enough to stick around and read more? If you’re not writing that kind of stuff – either useful or entertaining or, ideally, both – then you’re going to have a very hard time succeeding at blogging.

Once you’ve done this, though, then earning money is fairly easy – just put some ads on the site and be patient.

The key is content. If it’s good stuff, all you have to do is get the word out a little bit (join some blog carnivals associated with your topic, for one) and then put some ads on your site. Then wait (and keep making good content, of course).

Q3: Favorite podcasts
As a fellow avid podcast listener, I’m always interested to hear what podcasts people regularly listen to. What are your favorites?
- Matt

Aside from a few NPR shows that I listen to in podcast form because it’s more convenient (Planet Money, Fresh Air, Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me, etc.), I listen to these podcasts regularly.

Radiolab, which is a science podcast that’s probably one of the best things on the internet
Pardon the Interruption, a sports podcast that keeps me at least up to date on the “watercooler” talk in the sports world
This American Life, a collection of audio essays on a seemingly infinite array of topics
The B.S. Report, a podcast ostensibly about sports but tends to branch out into all sorts of topics
The Dice Tower, which focuses on board and card games
Grammar Girl, which is a very short entertaining podcast on grammar issues

There are a lot of great podcasts up there. This batch is pretty much all I can keep up with during a given week, since I usually listen to them in the background and play them twice or three times each so I can absorb more of them as I’m working.

Q4: Television compromise
My wife and I have strongly contrasting views on our television. To put it simply, I barely watch it. My wife watches about 10 hours of television a week. I watch roughly 3 hours and those are usually sporting events outside of our home. Our satellite bill is about $100 a month because of all the premium channels we get. Now, I don’t begrudge that money being spent, but each of us gets a certain “allowance” each month of money to spend freely. I think that money should come out of her allowance, but she says it’s just a shared bill. What do you think?
- Ronald

I think that you both have a point, to some extent. I also think this is an issue you need to resolve ASAP before it dissolves into something poisonous in your marriage, because I can sense some angst in your email.

Your wife’s point is that this is a service that you can use any time you wish and if you choose not to, that’s your choice, but it shouldn’t be eliminated because it’s a service that is actually used in your home. Your point is that it’s a service that I’m paying for and not using.

Here’s my honest suggestion: take note of how much television you both watch for a few months. See whether or not the disparity is really as big as you’re thinking. You might be surprised to find that your wife doesn’t watch as much as you think or that you watch more than you think.

If you have hard numbers that shows that you do spend a lot less time watching than her, then consider a proportional share of the billing. Take the cable bill, divide it in half, and then add that much to your respective “mad money” for the month. Then, you each pay a portion of the bill out of your “mad money” that lines up with how much you’re using it.

The important thing is to not let this fester, as it can grow into a much bigger problem over time.

Q5: Connecting with teens cheaply
Lately, I’ve felt like there’s a big gulf between me and my two daughters (age sixteen and fourteen) that didn’t used to be there. They’re not the partying type – in fact, they don’t leave the house all that much. It doesn’t feel like we have the same connection we used to have, though, and I’m trying to find inexpensive ways to rebuild that connection. Any ideas?
- Charlie

My usual suggestion is to tell parents of teens to institute a family night or two a week, but that doesn’t really seem to be needed in your case if your kids are already homebodies. What you need is simply some activities that you all do together.

If you want to make a formal thing out of it, start a family game night where, once a week, you all play games together. It gets you all around the same table for an hour or two, at least.

If you want something less formal, just ask your children what they’d like to do this evening together, your treat. You might be surprised as to what they come up with.

Q6: Overly long “to-do” list
I love the system and it’s helped me a lot. One problem I have though is that my “Next Action Steps” list is INCREDIBLY long. With everything personal plus work related (and a lot of work projects going on at any one time), it’s just a huge, huge list. David Allen suggests organizing by location where it needs to be done (i.e. “Phone”, “Computer”), but even that doesn’t help, as it’s still a very, very long list. (Many people must have this problem, as I’m not the only one with a lot on my plate.) I find the mix of important and un-important things on the list makes it difficult for me to get the most important things done, as the important next action steps get lost in the huge number of things on the list. Do you prioritize? Or organize it some other way? I find every morning I’m going through the list again and re-prioritizing, which takes a good bit of time and is not very productive (or in the spirit of the list, which is supposed to simplify). Do you have thoughts on this? (or could you share some old version of your “next action steps” list as it looks to you?)
- Valerie

My biggest trick is to simply recognize that a lot of this stuff is realistically never going to happen. If my list gets beyond about 25 or 30 items, I make a conscious effort to whack some items from the list, either by rapid-firing the very short ones or by other means.

Other means? I’ll just admit to myself that the closet isn’t getting cleaned out any time soon. Then, I’ll remove that item from the list and put it on a “someday/maybe” list. Or, I’ll recognize that returning some minor call isn’t really important and I’ll just completely purge the thing.

If you have a list that’s that long, then you’ve got a sure sign that you are stuffing too much into your life. That means it’s time to whack the unimportant stuff.

Q7: Maximizing credit card promos
you see saving is also a top priority for me, i do save, as much as my income is variable (i run a business) i can forecast my future earnings but I still set fixed savings.

learning from the simple dollar self discipline and clear goals makes me hesitant to touch my savings,if i do this, the possible time that i could return the said amount to my savings would be in february next year. because the goods that i will purchase with the card would be sold at terms and will be paid by my clients in 60 days,this means i will get the amount by the end of january,that’s why i said i would have surely placed it back in my savings account by february. should i do this?should i touch my savings so i can get advantage with the promo? if it helps,i would still have my emergency fund even if i do this,i just feel a little uncomfortable doing it and parting with my savings for almost 3 months,just to have some sort of free shopping spree. I just want to hear your opinion on touching savings for things like this.
- Leon

This is a very bad idea, in my opinion. You are putting cash savings at risk in order to cash in on a fairly small credit card reward while also leaving yourself in a very precarious position where your entire emergency fund is held by the credit card company. I would never, ever put my family at that kind of risk for a few Christmas presents.

If you want a much better solution, take the $250 from your savings account and use that to buy the gifts. Then, over the next few months, replenish that money so that you’re right back where you started.

Credit card rewards are a nice perk, but you should never put your own money at risk in an effort to try to squeeze out more of them, especially when it requires you to hand over your savings and charge the card like crazy.

Q8: Refinance or not?
Should we refinance our mortgage into a 15-year fixed mortgage from our 30-year fixed?

I’m calling the mortgage broker tomorrow, but do you think we’re making the right move? I just hate the fact that we’re paying 6.5% interest on our mortgage. (When we bought the house, we accepted a higher interest rate to avoid PMI.) We also really, really want to have the house paid off in 15 years or sooner, so it’s not really about the lower monthly payment for us.
- Michelle

From my perspective, it depends on how much you would have left in your savings to cover emergencies if you did this. If this move would devour all of your savings and leave you at risk in the case of an emergency, then I absolutely would not do it.

What should you do if you can’t swing it right now? Wait, and save. There’s no real emergency rush to do this, as mortgage rates aren’t going to climb rapidly in the near future.

What’s an adequate emergency fund? I would make sure I could cover two months’ worth of living expenses for each dependent in the house. So, if there are three of you there, you should have six months’ worth of living expenses on hand.

Q9: Quibids?
What are your thoughts on quibids.com or xbids.com? Websites that claim to allow consumers to win auctions on items at ridiculously cheap prices. Seems like a scam to me requiring entirely too much time.
- Darren

I view sites like this as a combination of a game and a pretty ordinary retail site.

Take the example that Quibids uses. You have to buy bids from them – say, 300 bids for $180. Then, you use those bids in an auction – each time someone bids, the value of the auction goes up one or two or five cents.

I tried out Quibids and most auctions seem to keep getting bids up to about 25-30% of the retail value of the item. Let’s say you’re bidding on a Wii – that means it goes up to $40 or so. To get to that value, literally thousands of bids had to be tossed out there, meaning the site just made about $300 or so from that auction.

Remember, when you see the price paid for an auction, that’s not including the value of the dozens or hundreds of bids the person had to spend to get the item (at a cost of $0.30 to $0.60 per bid) and the hours they had to sit there bidding until they won the item.

However, they do give you the ability to buy an item for the retail price minus the number of bids you placed.

If you were strictly bidding on items that you would buy anyway and don’t care about paying retail price on them, then it’s fine, but I’d rather shop around and get the item below retail. If you’re not doing that, then it’s just a very expensive game.

Q10: Plant-based snacks
My biggest problem whenever I try diets is cravings. I’ll do fine at meals, but in the middle of the day, I’ll start craving foods and without thinking, I’ll snarf something. How do you deal with that with a plant-based diet?
- Mel

There are lots of good vegan snacks, and I keep quite a few around at arm’s length.

Fruits. Pumpkin seeds. Larabars. Nuts. Things like these are my snacks, and they’re very important because they keep me from overeating at meal times. Instead, I just eat a reasonable amount at meals because I’m already at least somewhat full.

I find that having such foods at arm’s length ensures that I’ll eat those snacks instead of being ravenous at meal times or eating something less healthy.

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.

Kevin writes in:

I have a small collection of vintage baseball cards from the 1930s that have a list value of about $30,000. I started collecting when I was a kid and my grandpa gave me some to start with, but over the years I’ve bought many more, almost completing a Goudey Heads Up set. I have had them all graded. What I’m wondering is whether I should continue holding on to these or not. I know you’re not a baseball card dealer or trader, but I do know you know something about baseball cards and you’ll give me your honest take on the situation.

I’ve received so many emails from people writing to me wondering why their giant pile of 1988 Topps cards are worthless, so this baseball card related email was actually a breath of fresh air. It also has given me a good reason to spell out my perspective on collectible investing.

First of all, I would never rely on the long term future value of a collectible. The problem with such items is that they rely entirely on supply and demand, and with collectibles, there’s no real need for the item. Demand rests on the cultural interests of other people, which can shift over time. Fifty years ago, sports besides baseball were barely a blip on the national radar. Twenty five years ago, Garbage Pail Kids were in such hot demand you couldn’t find them on store shelves. How things change.

Similarly, I would never invest in any collectible where there is a large supply. Any time there is a “collectible” out there in large supply, the only reason that “collectible” has any value at all is due to a huge demand in that moment, and the public is fickle. Instead, focus on seeking out the truly rare items and don’t spend your time on the rest if you’re “collecting” for profit.

Second, even if you’ve covered the rarity issue, the future value of any such items relies on a continual interest in the phenomenon being collected. If that phenomenon decreases significantly or goes away, your collectible value drops dramatically. I once had a set of fairly valuable Star Wars trading cards whose value dropped precipitously over the past decade because that trading card game was on longer supported.

Having said those things, the best reason to be this kind of a collector is that the items you’re collecting have some personal value to you.

I can think of two distinct examples of this from my own life.

First, I, too, have a small collection of vintage baseball cards that have largely held their value over the last decade. They’re PSA graded, like yours are. For me, though, they have more value than what I could get for them on eBay because of the memories and stories associated with them. They make me remember family members and times watching baseball with them when I was young. They remind me of the first time I went to Wrigley Field. They’re aesthetically appealing to me and scratch that itch I have for vintage baseball every time I look at them.

That has value. I get value from those cards every time I look at them. Even if I sell the cards for a dollar loss at some point – and I don’t think they’ll ever be worth less than the pittance (or the gifting) that I originally paid for them – it’s still not really a loss because of the many instances of joy they’ve brought into my life.

Another example is with a small handful of original Magic: the Gathering cards that I own. These cards come from the very first set of this game, a game that’s selling more and attracting more players now than it ever has.

I enjoy these in a much different way. Rather than keeping these items in a PSA-graded case, I just keep them in protective sleeves and … gasp … actually play with them. These cards still come up on my kitchen table when I play with my wife or my friends and thus they still bring me quite a bit of enjoyment.

Are they losing value because of the play? They’re sleeved. I’ve played with them many times in sleeves and their condition seems identical to when I first sleeved them.

On the other hand, I am getting consistent enjoyment out of the use of these cards. It’s an item with collectible value that I also get to directly enjoy on a regular basis.

To me, regular enjoyment of a collectible item that retains at least some of its value makes the collectible item worth it. I’m reminded of a friend of mine who has an uncut sheet of pre-1970 Topps cards on his wall – I think they were 1965 Topps, but don’t quote me on that. They’re framed and hanging in his office. That sheet has some significant collector value and he could re-sell it for some cash any time he wanted to. Instead, it hangs in his office and gives him value almost every day.

So, here’s what it comes down to. Invest in – and keep – collectibles if they provide some additional value to you personally. Do they make you feel happy when you see them? Do you get to actually use them in some fashion? Do they serve as a home decoration? Those are great additional values that a collectible can provide.

Of course, without that additional value, I would suggest flipping the item as soon as possible unless you know the market for that collectible cold – and anyone outside of collectibles dealers doesn’t know it cold. Why? Collectibles are notoriously unsteady items to invest in, so if you have one that you’re not getting personal value from, I’d move those invested dollars into something at least a little more stable.

What about as a pure investment? I’d frown on it unless you are sure you can turn a quick profit or you’re picking it up with spare money for the personal value it’ll give you. Do not rely on a collectible as an investment that will support you in the future. Instead, do rely on it as something that has a good chance of retaining value while bringing regular joy into your life.

A few weeks ago, thanks to a Simple Dollar reader, Sarah and I discovered the television series Fringe. We’ve started slowly catching up on it, using Netflix and getting a disc at a time. It’s The X-Files without the incoherence of the last few seasons of that series, and that’s a good thing.

Now, for some links.

Announcing the “One Page” Contest Winners I found out (too late) that this site was running a contest based on my “one page” personal finance guide, where people were challenged to summarize their personal finance philosophy in just one page. Here are the winners of that contest, many of which I quite like. (@ 7 million 7 years)

9 Ways to Winterize Your Car We do quite a bit of winter traveling and a properly-prepared vehicle can really make all the difference. If you don’t have blankets in the back, you’re risking quite a lot. (@ art of manliness)

Six Ways to Trick Yourself into Working Harder I find that “microgoals” – specific things that I want to accomplish in the next hour or two – really help. They convince me to focus intensely for a while on a specific outcome and I’m then often able to achieve it. (@ dumb little man)

Penny Foolish: How 6 Tiny Money Leaks Cost Me $1702 Annually It really is amazing how those little things really add up over the course of a year. Sure, $5 here seems like no big deal and $5 there isn’t a crisis, but over a year, that’s thousands of dollars. (@ len penzo)

The Cost of Your Health This goes far beyond what you pay for insurance. It affects your food bill, your personal care expenses, and the tendrils reach out into every part of your life – even your entertainment spending. (@ pennywise2pennyworth)

It’s Time for a “Virtual” Reality Check Given a choice between doing something on the computer or doing something with my family outside, I’ll take the outside every time. (@ frugal dad)

As I’ve mentioned on here several times, I have a weekly piano lesson, something I enjoy very much. On my way to my lesson, I drive by a bookstore and a game shop. On my way home from my lesson, I drive by that same bookstore and same game shop.

Every week, especially on the way home, I’m tempted to stop. I see the game shop coming up on the right and I get an impulse to stop there. I see the bookstore a little bit later on the left and I get an impulse to stop there.

Yet, almost always, I resist.

Five years ago, I would have stopped, almost every time. I would have went into the game shop, thought about my friends, and picked up a new game to play with them (even though I have quite a few already). I would have stopped at the bookstore and picked up a few new books to read (even though I have a book backlog right now).

Today, at most, I’ll stop once every two months at one or the other of the shops, and even then, rarely do I walk out of the store with an item. If I do buy at such stores, I usually walk in the door knowing exactly what I’m looking for and walk out the door with just that item.

What caused this (hugely financially beneficial) change? Aside from the trite answer of “I just changed my perspective on life,” I found that a handful of tactics really facilitated this change.

Avoid impulsive moments
For me, the best immediate move to make was to simply get myself away from impulsive moments. I started driving a different route to work. I avoided social activities that revolved around buying stuff. I started even re-evaluating my hobbies in order to seek out ones that didn’t encourage impulsive buying (like walking in the woods, for example). The biggest reason for doing this was to simply break the cycle of impulsive buying.

Reflect (at length) on the times when you give into your impulses
If you do discover that you’ve given into an impulse, spend some time thinking about that event and why it happened. Why did you spend that money? Are you really happy with that purchase? What can you do to make sure it doesn’t happen again? You don’t need to beat yourself up over it, but you will find great reward in thinking about the “why” of the matter, as it will lead you towards not repeating the mistake.

Minimize your stress
When you’re stressed, you’re more impulsive. I certainly observe this in my own life – when I feel a lot of pressure and stress, I usually just seek immediate ways to relieve it, even if it’s not a good long-term choice. A new game or book feels good, so I’ll sometimes fall right into that. Thus, it’s useful to seek out ways to reduce the amount of stress in your life. I meditate, pray, play games, read, and play with my children – all of these help me de-stress.

Be accountable to someone else
This is particularly easy if you’re married. The way we do it is by having completely open bills – credit card statements, bank statements, and other such things are reviewed by both of us. Because of this, it’s impossible to “hide” things – we have to be fully honest with each other. If you have a spouse, I highly recommend this. Of course, if you don’t have such a partner, you may have more difficulty doing this – a trusted friend, perhaps.

Allow yourself some impulsiveness – but keep boundaries on it from the start
My wife and I each have some leniency when it comes to impulsive buys. We essentially each have an “allowance” with which we can each buy whatever we’d like. Often, I’ll buy a game or a book – my wife usually buys a book. This “allowance” often gives us just the freedom we need to not have a sense of being deprived while also keeping very good control over our personal finances.

Use the ten second rule and the thirty day rule
The “ten second rule” basically means that you should spend ten seconds thinking about any purchase you’re about to make before making it. This helps you to reflect on potential impulse purchases and often put them directly back on the shelf. The “thirty day rule” means that you should spend thirty days before buying any item that costs more than a certain threshold – say, $25. This prevents you from drowning yourself on an expensive impulse buy.

What’s your impulse?
Most of us have impulses that work in opposition to our financial goals. We buy gum or a bottle of soda at the checkout. We pick up a DVD. We buy some new clothes. We purchase a new gadget or a new book. Most of the time, these decisions are heavily impulsive – done on the spur of the moment – and we often feel bad about them later, particularly when we find we’re not using them much and now we’re facing a bill that we can’t easily handle.

Breaking free of such impulses can have a very large and dramatic effect on your finances. It becomes easier to budget and plan ahead. You suddenly have more resources each month with which you can save, pay off debts, or invest for the future. Best of all, you find that you value the things that you do buy a lot more than you used to.

Impulse control is an essential tool for personal finance success.