This is the thirteenth 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.

All of us have ongoing tasks in our lives – individual things that need to be done but are too large to be accomplished in a single sitting or require various things for various steps along the way.

I know that my own life is littered with such projects. I’d like to rearrange my office, moving my mostly-empty bookshelf over to another wall and replacing it with shelving for my game collection. I’d like to write a third book. The list goes on and on.

I like how Allen describes them, on page 217:

A project is essentially a miniature goal, something that can be finished and marked off as “done.” The reason for the “within a year” parameter is that any commitment you have that can be completed in that time period – even very big ones – should probably be reviewed at least once a week.

In other words, a project is any large task that you can reasonably complete within a year. It’s usually composed of enough work that you can’t get it all done in one session – instead, you have to break it down into smaller chunks, spread out over time. Sometimes, those chunks require something to happen between them – time must pass, someone else must accomplish something, or so on.

A big key to completing your projects is review. In other words, keep track of your ongoing projects, then once a week, review all of those projects and determine what your specific next action for each of those projects is. A “next action” should be something small enough that you can do it in one session.

So, for example, with the projects listed above, I might have a “next action” of looking for an appropriate shelving unit for the games. I might have another “next action” that involves an outline of the book.

It should be noted that projects are tangible things that you can wrap your hands around. They’re not nebulous – they have a clear and definite conclusion, one that can be reached within a year.

Allen offers up some keywords that can help you define the projects in your life. On page 218:

The following verbs point to typical outcomes that I refer to as projects:

Finalize
Implement
Research
Publish
Distribute
Maximize
Learn
Set up
Organize
Create
Design
Install
Repair
Submit
Handle
Resolve

If you’re curious about what and how many projects you actually have, just use the above as a checklist, and include everything that can be linked with one of these words.

I currently have a list of forty-five ongoing projects that almost entirely match up with the words on that list.

Each week, I do a review of this project list and try to look for the “next step” with each of these projects. This keeps them all moving forward or helps me to realize that I need to abandon them.

Allen riffs on the weekly project review idea on page 222:

During a weekly look at all your projects, actions, and schedule provides an “inner coordination” that is fundamentally intuitive because of all the shifitng factors involved in the complexities of your life.

In other words, you’ll find that when you look at your project list at the end of a week, you’ve changed a bit as a person. You no longer find one project to be as vital, but now find this other project to be really important to you.

In many ways, this reflection helps you to connect your ongoing projects to the higher level things going on in life – your areas of focus, your goals, your purpose in life. As these subtly shift over time, you’ll find more radical shifts at the lower levels.

I can make a very clear example of this in my own life. Five years ago, being a parent was barely on my radar screen as a central value in life and my day-to-day activities showed it. Today, that’s completely different – one of my main life goals is to be a great parent to my kids. This shows up not only at the “purpose in life” level, but it begins to have bigger and bigger effects going down. Today, some of my projects involve things like potty training and teaching reading and teaching arithmetic, things that would not be projects in my life if I didn’t value my role as a parent so highly. The broader elements of my life greatly affect the projects I choose, which thus affect the things I choose to do every day.

A final thought: one really compelling idea I found in this chapter comes on page 224:

One of the most inspiring examples of how this elevated look at your commitments can add huge value to your life is the family weekly review. Establishing a context in which life partners (and children) can mutually debrief their past week, share a thorough and concrete overview of their commitments and projects, compare calendars, look ahead to the immediate future, and make decisions and plans together can be a phenomenal way to experience winning at the business of life.

I can’t tell you how much I love this idea nd I can’t wait until my children are a bit older so we can start doing this. Right now, my children are a little young to have ongoing projects of any real kind other than their ongoing epic castle made out of Magna-Tiles and Legos.

What sorts of projects will our family members have and share when we grow older together? It’s really hard to say, but I not only see this as a way to teach my children how to be more organized, but also a way to bond more deeply as a family.

Recently, I had a long email exchange with a reader who asked me not to reprint her story, but gave me permission to discuss it in general terms (I showed her this post and she approved it).

This reader – let’s call her Annie – is 38 years old. For almost all of her adult life, she had been a stay-at-home mom while her husband tried to start several businesses, failing each time. Yet, not only had they survived, they had thrived thanks to a large amount given to them each month by her parents, who were exceptionally well off.

Recently, within a year of each other, her father and her mother passed away, with her father passing on just a few months ago. When the estate was evaluated and the will was read, she found that her parents had almost no money left, as they had lost quite a lot in the housing bubble and the stock market downturn in 2008. What little they had left was used to resolve some remaining debts.

In short, aside from some personal items, she and her family received no cash at all from the estate. Their biggest source of income had vanished from the face of the earth.

Obviously, this family is struggling right now. They had been living an extremely unsustainable lifestyle and, now, they’re being forced to change that lifestyle. What can they do?

First, you both need to find stable income-producing work. I know from their story that their children are now school-aged, so it is acceptable for them to either come home after school and be watched by the oldest one or perhaps find child care for them for that after school period. The parents need to replace that income and the first step in that path is to get income streams coming into the home immediately. The easiest way to do that is to find a job.

Yes, I’m aware that the husband is a budding entrepreneur, but entrepreneurial income streams are neither quick nor are they guaranteed, two factors you need right now. I absolutely encourage him to continue to follow his entrepreneurial dreams in his spare time, but this should not be relied on as an income-producing stream right now.

What jobs should you get? Honestly, it depends on your education and what you can actually apply for. I would suggest, though, that you focus on getting any job rather than “holding out” for the “right” position. You need income streams. You don’t have them.

As with the entrepreneurship, you can always keep searching for the “right” job in your spare time, but for now, you need to be establishing an income stream as well as a work history.

Next, cut the fat – big time. I usually encourage people to eliminate all the excess, figure out which ones you actually miss, then restore them slowly. You’ll find that, surprisingly, you don’t miss a lot of the things very much at all. Ditch your cable/satellite. Ditch your cell phones. Ditch your other services. Clean out your closets and sell the stuff you don’t regularly use, then use that cash as an emergency fund. Then, spend your time doing more family-oriented stuff. Have a family board game night. Watch a movie together. Go to a state park together.

It’s worth nothing that many families are in this situation to some extent. They rely on regular gifts from their parents or grandparents to make ends meet and, because of that, they can afford to live well beyond their means.

If this is you, it’s vital to recognize that at some point, the gravy train will end and that a little less material stuff right now will mean that your life won’t abruptly end when the time comes. Start living on what you actually bring in right now and do your best to save what you’re being given. Put it away somewhere so that it’s not easy to access. Then, just sit on it. Wait until the tides of your life change and you actually need that money, not just want it for something fun.

You will be glad you did, both now and also later on when you actually need the money.

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. A scary future
2. Effects of Kindle giveaway
3. Hiding savings from spouse
4. College accounts for grandchildren
5. Too much retirement, too young?
6. Snowblower?
7. Helping a financially distressed friend
8. Improving my wife’s credit
9. Reducing family stress
10. Winter exercise

Just a quick note about the week of Thanksgiving (next week). I’ll be running a lighter schedule that week, with just one post per day on Wednesday through Sunday (with the Thursday one being particularly short), and I’ll be skipping next Thursday’s Reader Mailbag. The same will be true during Christmas week next month. These are two holidays during which I spend a lot of time with my family and my wife’s family and I know many of you do as well – quite a lot of you will be taking those five days off of work and traveling to be with family for at least some of it.

Enjoy the holidays!

Q1: A scary future
There have been a few articles on [various websites] regarding inflation, astronomical food prices, and projected food shortages. What do you think about these? I find them scary and reactionary, but I trust your take on the subject. Any information you would share might help ease my mind
- William

There has never been a point at any time in history where you couldn’t have made some extremely negative projections about the future. Projections about the future are just that – guesses based on only some of what we know now that attempts to state exactly what the future will be like. Remember, in the 1890s, they wanted to close down the US Patent Office because everything that can be invented had already been invented. Since then – the airplane, the computer, plastics, and a nearly infinite flood of other such things.

I don’t put stock into global projections like this. Nearly every day, something happens that will alter it. A catastrophe. Political upheaval. An invention. A discovery of new resources. An idea.

Projections don’t include such things because they cannot include such things. We simply don’t know what the future holds, good or bad.

There are very few things I’m certain of with regards to the future. One of them is human ingenuity. There are more people living now than ever before, which means more ideas are being generated now than ever before, and it’s easier to communicate and share them than ever before.

I think I’ll bet on that.

Q2: Effects of Kindle giveaway
I bought a hard copy of your book and enjoyed that as well. Thanks so much for releasing it for free on the Kindle which is my preferred method of reading. I would be interested to hear how that affected your book sales. It seems like a good idea to do what you did for the sake of promotion. Has the giveaway had a positive effect as a whole? Any thoughts?
- Matt

It certainly had a positive effect – one only needed to watch the Amazon sales rank for the print version of the book in the days during and after the Kindle giveaway to see that. Not only that, now the “free” Kindle version is floating around out there. More people are reading it than ever before and some of them are probably thinking, “Hey, this book would make a good Christmas gift for person X.”

I will say that as more and more book companies try doing this, it will get diminishing returns. If every book had a free week on the Kindle, then it would be very hard for a single book to get any sort of sales spike from it. The more books doing this, the less effective it will be.

For me, I’m just glad more people read it. That’s enough for me, since that’s the real reason I wrote a book and sold it to a major publisher in the first place.

Q3: Hiding savings from spouse
My husband and I have always had joint accounts for everything. After squeaking by with a child for the past 5 years, we’ve been aggressively paying off debt (specifically student loan debt) for the past 18 months and also aggressively setting aside for retirement (for us this means about 12% of income). Whenever we get a little push of money (a raise, etc), it seems to fall in the bill abyss. Our budget is very tight. We set aside $200/month for savings but this seems to evaporate every few months from some emergency. For this reason, when we stopped paying for preschool when my daughter started kindergarten, I decided to open a new savings account through work that is deductible from my paycheck ($50/biweekly paycheck)….the rest of that money has already fallen into the bill abyss. I plan to increase this to $150 per paycheck after my payraise and once my child care FSA is reduced in the new year. I’m hoping to use this for much needed house repairs once it accumulates and as emergency savings.

The catch is, I haven’t told my spouse about the account, as I feel as though it could become part of the bill abyss if he knew. While we don’t dine out and are fairly frugally, my husband insists on a fancy phone plan and fancy satellite (which I feel is acceptable given our other sacrifices—about $100 more than I would like to spend. How do you feel about keeping funds secret from your spouse (which I feel will be mutually benefical)?
- Heidi

First thing: hiding anything beyond a present from your spouse is a bad idea that will pay some sort of negative consequence in the long run. Hiding things erodes trust, which is what relationships are built on. You need to have this conversation with him now rather than later.

Having said that, if I were you, I would explain it just as you did above: you are taking the money from your raise and directly putting it aside for emergencies. I think that’s completely reasonable, and if you’re calm about it and explain it in that way, he likely will, too.

If he doesn’t, then you’ll need to sit down together and have a long talk about what your financial goals are together and how you’ll get there. It sounds like you’re already doing this, but if you’re not, it might be a good idea to do this anyway.

Q4: College accounts for grandchildren
My mother, who is not rich by any stretch of the imagination, wants to put away some money for each of her four grandchildren to help with their college expenses. (The grandchildren are 18, 16, 9 and 9 respectively.) My sisters are both financially irresponsible married to men who are even more so. What kind of account do you suggest that my mother open for the grandchildren? The 18-year-old is currently going to community college. My mother’s biggest fear is that the other children will want to go to college (the 16-year-old is very bright and does well in school) but will not be able to afford to because their parents will not have the money.
- Sharon

I would suggest she open a 529 for each child. They can immediately use the money in that count for educational purposes, as well as any financial gains made by the account. If they end up not ever having educational expenses in their life, they can withdraw the balance without penalty, but will have to pay an extra 10% tax on the gains.

There are lots of 529 plans available – most states offer one. Search “529″ and your state in Google to see what you get. You’re going to want a 529 plan that allows you to choose any school – some 529s lock you into certain schools by prepaying tuition there, and that’s usually a bad idea.

If your state doesn’t offer such a plan, you can use the one here in Iowa – College Savings Iowa. I use it for my own children.

Q5: Too much retirement, too young?
I am a 23 year old recent graduate making $67k in my second year as a software designer in California. I have no debts at all (yay for scholarships/grants and a 15 year old car). I have funded both my Roth IRA and 401k (no match) fully for this year and am just shy of 10k in my emergency fund. I feel like I could be saving too much for retirement (possible?) and not putting enough priority on a down payment for a house, or car, or just a higher emergency cushion. Right now I pay ~$1200 for rent. I feel that a decent mortgage payment isn’t that far away from my current rent and could possibly be a better choice. My net worth goes up every month, due to retirement savings, but the numbers in my savings accounts doesn’t really increase. I don’t feel like I’m “penny pinching” too much, but of course it’d be nice to get a new car sometime soon or have a house sooner than later. What do you think some possible routes I can take? Lower retirement savings and redirect that money into a down payment? Not change my retirement savings plan and slowly build that down payment?
- Joseph

Given your great start financially, I think your best move would be to simply shoot for 10% of your annual income in retirement savings for the next few years and channel the rest into saving for a down payment.

Since you’ve hit the limit on the Roth and the 401(k), that means you’ve contributed $21,500 to retirement this year – about 30% of your income. That’s plenty. Slow down a bit.

If you contribute just $6,700 next year – $5,000 to your Roth and $1,700 to your 401(k) – you’ll have $14,800 to save for your down payment. That’s an excellent start.

Q6: Snowblower?
This is our first winter in a home of our own. We live in an area with significant snow many times during the winter. Do you suggest buying a snowblower? If so, which one do you recommend?
- Kevin

It depends on how much area you have to clear. Does your home have a double-width driveway or a single-width driveway? Is it very long? Are you responsible for clearing any sidewalk? What exactly does “significant snow” mean?

If you don’t have much to clear and you get 6″ of snow over the course of a winter, then use the shovel. If you have a long double-wide driveway with some sidewalks and you have storms that get 15″ of snow, like we do… get a snowblower.

We purchased a Troy-Bilt that was on an end-of-season sale a while ago. It has been very much worth it, as we’ve been able to turn four hours of shoveling into fifteen minutes of snowblowing several times a winter. Last winter, we had a very rough winter with lots of snow and the snowblower saved us approximately 40 hours of hard labor last winter. If it lasts for ten winters, that’s 400 hours of hard labor saved, making it worth it for us.

Q7: Helping a financially distressed friend
My close friend is currently in (since May 2010) chapter 13 bankruptcy in order to keep her home from being foreclosed. She has unpaid medical bills dating back several years from a stroke at age 40. She has a neck injury that has kept her from working since June 2010. It looks like she will have to convert to a chapter 7 in January 2011 and lose her home. How would you help someone in this situation? What do you say to them?

Some things we’ve done so far: gone over her budget with an eye to cutting expenses – got rid of cable, etc; sold some collectibles at garage sale and online – brought in about $400; gifted money solely to pay insurance premium and medical copays (about $100 for 6 months)…
- Vicki

That person needs you to be positive and helpful, and that person needs strongly to focus on getting themselves into a position to recover financially from this. That means healing up, building whatever skills she can during her recovery, and being as ready as she can to return to the workforce when this all finishes up.

It sounds also like your friend has a powerful story to tell. She should spend some of her energy getting her story out there, as it may make a strong case for why we need a better healthcare system. Contact politicians in her area that are involved with healthcare legislation. Doing this may be incredibly empowering to her.

Most of all, she needs you to be a constant and loyal friend right now. She might be moody and upset and depressed – but can you blame her? Cut her some slack and be there for her. People always remember who stood by them when the chips were down.

Q8: Improving my wife’s credit
Im 26 years old, I just got married, (my wife is 25). Im wondering how to build her credit so in the future if we want to buy a house we will get a better rate. She just finished paying off her car, so her credit score is good, however not better because she does not have that much history. She has a checking account she opened 3 years ago and a car loan which she opened in 2009 and we just paid it off. Other than that no credit cards or anything. I opened up an american express blue cash credit card and added her on and got her a card, however the account is still in my name. Will her having a card (even under my account) increase her credit? Should she apply for her own credit card? Also we have a joint checking account now, so i guess i was wondering now that we are married, if something increases my credit, will it also increase hers since we are married?
- Tip

Even though you’re married, your credit histories are still distinct and your credit score is calculated individually. Marriage means that you’re more likely to have co-ownership of debt, but it doesn’t combine your credit histories.

As for whether the card in her name will help her credit, it depends on how that specific contract is set up. Your first step is to get a copy of her credit report using the federal government’s website and see what’s on there.

If she needs to build a credit history, the easiest way is to get a credit card, pay off the balance each and every month, and just sit on it. Use it for only ordinary charges, like gas, and pay the balance in full each month. This will slowly build up her credit.

Q9: Reducing family stress
I read one of your articles (Low cost methods for Stress Relief) about choosing who you spend your time with and got me thinking. You said the following:

What if the people who cause stress due to their unhappiness is your Mother in Law ? It brings constant stress into our lives to the point where I don’t want to be around her but have to because of my husband. Also, it is very likely that once she gets her permanent residency she might stay with us during her old age and I do not want to put my children through an unhealthy environment at home. Though she is healthy she refuses to do anything at home or even watch my daughter when she is sick if we cannot take time off from work. I am almost sure that if I choose to keep away from the husband’s family and do not do what’s expected of me that we could end up in divorce. How do you reduce this kind of stress ? Currently I feel suffocated, confused and angry with a lot of situations that I have faced in the couple years of marriage.
- Sunny

Your first step is to sit down and express these feelings clearly to your husband. If you won’t or can’t do that, then you don’t have any recourse here. Your husband has to know exactly how you feel.

You also do need to understand that your husband will feel torn by this. He’s being put between two women he likely cares very deeply about – his wife and his mother. Making him “choose” is deeply unfair to him and is likely to cause resentment.

You mention “permanent residency.” This sounds as though there’s a cultural barrier here – your mother-in-law is from some distinctly different culture than you’re from. Try to understand that culture as much as you can. Is your mother-in-law’s behavior normal for that culture? Or is there something else at work here?

In the end, all three of you are going to have to recognize that your mutual presence is irritating each other (you’re likely irritating her as much as she’s irritating you). Your husband will have to be an integral part in this solution, so the discussions start with him. The next step is up to you.

Q10: Winter exercise
I know you walk a lot for exercise. What do you do during the winter months when it’s too cold out there to walk? I started walking daily this summer, but I live in Minnesota and it’s getting awful cold out there!
- Eli

I do a lot of different things to keep up my walking during the winter. I often volunteer to do the grocery shopping and make an effort to maximize my walking doing it. I’ll focus on home exercise and do things like pushups and situps and light weight training. I’ve even mallwalked.

These aren’t perfect solutions for everyone, though. Quite often, keeping in great all-around shape in a cold winter environment requires use of a gym, simply because the ability to exercise outdoors is so limited.

It all depends on what your needs are. If you’re an intense trainer and live in a very cold winter environment, a gym may be your best option.

Got any questions? Email them to me or leave them in the comments and I’ll attempt to answer them in a future mailbag. However, I do receive hundreds of questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book or other book of interest.

Commodity investing is one of those areas of personal finance that I simply don’t know much about. When I think about commodity investing, I think of listening to an AM station where a dry-voiced announcer is saying, “February soybeans two thirty two and a quarter up two and a quarter…” with small variations for half an hour.

Still, the idea of investing in something tangible holds some interest for me. Commodities are tangible, material things, often used in the manufacture or production of other things. Instead of owning a share in a corporation that exists on paper only, you own a thousand bushels of soybeans. That has direct appeal, even if it’s not something I deeply understand.

This week, I decided to correct that lack of understanding by reading The Little Book of Commodity Investing by John Stephenson, the latest book in the wonderful Little Books, Big Profits series. I like the series because it offers gentle introductions to specific investing topics from individuals who are actually involved in that field. John Stephenson is a very experienced portfolio manager who has been in commodity investing for a very long time – he knows his stuff.

This book largely boils down to a sequence of short chapters each dealing with a particular flavor of commodity investing – oil, foodstuffs, natural gas, precious metals, and so on – with a chapter on each end to bookend these pieces.

One | Calling on Commodities: Why Commodity Investing Is a Savvy Bet
The big argument in this opening chapter is that the coming years are going to be a boom for commodity investors as the tendrils of globalization dig deeper into nations like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and so on. These nations are going to be building infrastructure like mad and the ingredients to build that infrastructure, such as steel, oil, and natural gas, are going to be in high demand. This will also give rise to a huge global middle class which will result in consumer goods being produced and purchased at a huge rate, and those goods will be made from – you guessed it – commodities.

Two | Gettin’ Goin’: Companies or Commodities?
Unfortunately, directly owning commodities really isn’t a convenient option for most people. Do you have a place for 1,000 bushels of soybeans or 500 50 gallon drums of oil? For most people, the answer is a resounding “no.” The solution is to invest via a futures contract, in which a producer agrees to sell you some amount of a commodity at a certain price on a certain future date. So, for example, you might agree to a contract for 100 barrels of oil today for $30 a barrel, with the oil to be produced in six months. In six months, you then have 100 barrels of oil which you can sell to someone who will actually use it for the going market rate for that oil – it might be $35 or it might be $25. The chapter describes this market in detail with a tone that makes it quite understandable.

Three | Gusher: Investing in Oil
This chapter and the seven that follow it each give an outline of a particular commodity market, discussing in detail why it works as well as reasons why you might want to (and might not want to) invest in it. I felt that Stephenson’s most compelling case was with oil. He discusses at length how economies around the world are rapidly building infrastructure and moving to automobile transportation at the same time that world oil supplies seem to have peaked. If demand is going up and supply is going down, then prices are probably going to go up. The risk? Nations begin moving to energy sources besides oil for transportation.

Four | Drilling for Dollars: Profiting from Natural Gas
Stephenson doesn’t seem nearly as bullish on natural gas, however. Due to a lot of technological innovations, huge deposits of natural gas can now be accessed that were inaccessible before. While the demand for natural gas seems to be level, the supply has gone up, which means that prices have gone down. This does mean that prices are low at the moment, so an individual who carefully followed federal reports on natural gas reserves could turn a profit, but the general direction here is much weaker than with oil.

Five | Going for Gold: Prospering with Gold and Precious Metals
Gold. It seems to have been the buzzword over the past few years. As with most investing guides, Stephenson points out that gold seems to do best when the United States is having economic struggles – like right now, for example. However, he’s far from a gold bug – he suggests that, rather than hoarding gold and putting all of your money into it, you’re better off just buying a gold ETF (basically, this amounts to buying a stock in gold) as a small part of your investments. He gives short discussions of other precious metals here as well, such as platinum and palladium.

Six | Digging It: Making Metals and Mines Work for You
Here, Stephenson talks about “construction material” metals – steel, copper, aluminum, zinc, and so on. These items fluctuate in line with the global economy, meaning when construction picks up, these items pick up and vice versa. The London Metals Exchange drives almost all of this trading, and traders often keep tabs on supplies of various metals. When the supply drops, the prices will go up.

Seven | Betting the Farm: Bingeing on Food Inflation
I didn’t get a sense of the author’s advice on investing in foods overall. In the chapter, he discussed several trends in foods that point in opposing directions – some pointed towards greater demand, others pointed toward greater supply. I don’t think he was fully bullish on crops.

Eight | Ordering the Breakfast Special: Finding Profits in Foodstuffs
On the other hand, foodstuffs, like fruits, coffee, sugar, cocoa, and so on, are items that he seems to be strongly bullish on. Such crops are simply too exposed to the weather (giving them shaky production bases) and in such high demand that the prices will continue to stagger upwards into the foreseeable future, at least as far as Stephenson sees it. If you’re going to do this, he recommends buying ETFs.

Nine | Gaining in Grains: Investing in Grains
Grains are such a fundamental part of worldwide diets that the demand for such items is pretty strong and pretty steady in terms of growth. The issues come in with supply, wich is affected by lots of things from the weather to crop diseases. Another factor to look at is whether long term changes in diets globally will have any impact, though it hasn’t shown a significant impact to this point.

Ten | Bulk Up: Benefitting from Bulk Commodities
Here, Stephenson discusses iron ore and coal, which are used in huge quantities in industrial production. As with oil in the third chapter, Stephenson seems to be very bullish on these things, believing that the future points to more and more industrial production and infrastructure building as nations like China and India build a more sturdy infrastructure than they have.

Eleven | Capitalizing on Commodities: Why Commodities are Happening
Stephenson concludes the book with a short chapter that argues strongly on behalf of the idea that India, China, Russia, and other Asian nations are growing very rapidly in terms of their economy and will do so for quite a while. Since this idea underpins an awful lot of this book, it’s a key one, and Stephenson makes the case very well.

Is The Little Book of Commodity Investing Worth Reading?
If you want a book that will teach you some of the concepts behind commodity investing, The Little Book of Commodity Investing is probably going to be a very enjoyable read for you. It explains why investors would invest in certain commodities and gives some very general suggestions on how to do it.

On the other hand, if you want a step-by-step guide on what to buy, The Little Book of Commodity Investing will not really work for you. The book focuses on passing along ideas, not instructions.

For me, The Little Book of Commodity Investing gave me quite a lot of food for thought. Will it turn into actual investing? Probably not. Did it give me insight into areas I didn’t understand very well and put enough information in place that I now can understand and incorporate new things? Absolutely.

A few weeks ago, I made an offhand mention that I had switched to a plant-based diet due to medical concerns. Over the next week, I received a lot of questions about it. Why? What was it like? How was it working? Was it saving us money? Was it having positive health effects?

I considered using some of them in a mailbag, but instead I decided to write a full post about it after I had a month or so to reflect on it and see how it was going.

Why?
This past summer, I signed up for an additional term life insurance policy because I didn’t feel like I had enough life insurance to cover the future of three children – the arrival of a third child and the calculations I made afterwards convinced me that if something happened to me, Sarah and our three children would have problems with just my currently-existing policies.

In the process, I had thorough blood work done and it was almost entirely fine. I only had two numbers that were outside the normal range and only one was significantly outside the normal range, so I was easily approved.

However, I personally wanted to know more about those outlying numbers, so I got an appointment with my doctor, who ran a bunch of additional blood tests and a few other tests as well.

After looking at a lot of my numbers, I met with my doctor and a dietician, who basically said that I had several options with regards to my health. If I kept doing everything as I was doing, I would probably have some health concerns later in life. On the other hand, if I made some changes – and they laid out a bunch of options – I would significantly improve my chance of strong health until late in my life.

As I thought about the options, I asked myself whether it was really important to me to eat certain foods. “How many years of good health is it worth for me to give up food X?” I realized that, when I thought of it in that context and in relation to watching my kids grow up and do whatever life has in store for them, I didn’t really have to add too much good health to my life to make it worth some significant dietary changes.

So, for now (I’m doing a six month trial), I’ve chosen to eat a mostly plant-based diet.

What’s the diet like?
Basically, with regards to any food I eat, I ask myself if it contains animals or animal products. If it does, I pass. If it doesn’t, I eat it to my heart’s content.

The one exception to this is that I occasionally eat fish or, rarely, seafood, for the particular fatty acids that come from them.

I’m not paranoid about it. If I accidentally ingest something that has a bit of animal protein in it, I don’t freak out or anything.

In essence, what I’m doing is identical to what Bill Clinton is doing. See this interview:

I also take vitamin supplements and I drink protein shakes for breakfast most days.

It’s actually pretty easy to follow that rule of thumb. I can eat out at most places. There’s a ton of food to prepare at home. There are even some convenience foods that work well with this.

Are you doing this for social/ethical/environmental reasons?
No. I’m doing it for my health.

Such issues are so clouded by people’s perspectives, corporate profits, and so on that I have a hard time believing absolutely in the ethics or environmental benefits of any diet outside of simply growing your own vegetables.

Can you possibly be enjoying it?
Yes, actually.

Because of this, I’ve been forced to try a lot of different foods simply to add variety in my diet and, along the way, I’ve found a lot of things that I enjoy eating.

The biggest trick is to just liberally use spices. Amp up the spices and herbs in things and they become wonderfully tasty and rich.

For example, I found a wonderful barley soup recipe that we’ve had three times in the last month. I absolutely love it – each time, I experiment with it and each time, it’s delicious. It’s filling and savory and fills the house with great aromas.

Another example: I usually have a mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack in order to quell my appetite and keep me from being really hungry at lunch or supper. These snacks have become two things – either fruit or a Larabar. What’s a Larabar? Delicious. I would have never found them if I wasn’t exploring new foods.

Are there health benefits? Are you losing weight?
It’s really hard to know what the impact has been on my blood numbers this early. However, I have seen two things.

First, I seem to have a ton of energy at times. I’m sleeping about an hour less and I find myself doing things like cleaning house at 11 PM – something you would have almost never seen me doing that late.

Second, I’ve lost ten pounds in about five weeks without a significant change in exercise level.

Is it saving money?
So far, it seems to be.

First of all, our whole family is eating a lot more vegetables and fruits. The other members of my family aren’t going the whole nine yards, but our amount of meat intake has gone down.

Thus, our diet often centers around whatever vegetables happen to be on deep discount at the grocery store that week. We check the flyers for a few stores, identify the vegetables and fruits on sale, and make meals utilizing them.

One week, we had ginger in a lot of things. Another week, it was zucchini. Whatever is on sale is what we use.

As a result, our average grocery bill per week has gone down about $20, which is certainly worth noting.

In short, I’m happy with it. The first week was the hard part – now that it’s passed, I’m not strongly craving the foods I can’t have.

This pre-Thanksgiving year is the time in which the internet seems to be abuzz with what various retailers are going to have on steep discount on “Black Friday” in order to get people in the door.

For those not from the United States, Thanksgiving is a national holiday that occurs on the fourth Thursday in November, roughly one month before Christmas. “Black Friday” is the nickname given to the day after Thanksgiving, which many people take off of work in order to travel and enjoy time with family. Because so many people are off of work and the holiday season is approaching, that day is often seen as the “kickoff” for Christmas shopping and many retailers offer steep discounts to get their holiday season sales numbers off in the right direction.

Several times a day, I have an email from a PR firm telling me all about the latest Black Friday deals. As I browse across the web, I see countless articles telling me all about the things on sale on Black Friday.

And, frankly, I don’t care all that much.

Yes, I utilize Black Friday for part of my holiday shopping, but I do it in a way that’s essentially the “reverse” of all of this.

My first step in the process actually started long before now. I drew up my Christmas list several months ago and put some thought into what each person would like for a Christmas gift. What sorts of things would this person actually like? I actually wound up making a small item list for each person on my list.

At that point, I started watching for sales, making homemade gifts, and slowly eliminating (or partially eliminating) people from my list. If I had a complete gift for them, I crossed them off. If I had a partial gift for them, I eliminated some of the items on their list.

At this point in the year, I only have a handful of potential things that I might actually buy, which is where Black Friday comes in.

Starting with my list, I scan the Black Friday ads using online services like BlackFriday.com.

An example: someone on my Christmas list has a very high likelihood of receiving the Toy Story 3 DVD/Blu-ray combo as a gift this year. Knowing that, I start searching the Black Friday ads for Toy Story 3 until I find that some retailers are selling it for as low as $9 on that day.

Another example: I’m helping someone look for an Amazon Kindle as a Christmas gift, an item I might be contributing a small amount to. Thus, I can use Black Friday ads in advance to find which store is going to have the best bargain on a Kindle, saving $40 or maybe even more.

This doesn’t work for everything, of course, but it works for enough items that I’ll likely save a significant amount of money on Black Friday, either out in the stores or on the ‘net.

Why do it this way? There are several reasons.

First, by starting with the list, I’m thinking of the person first. If I look at a Black Friday ad without any goal in mind, I’m quite prone to convincing myself that someone on my list will want “sale item X,” which they may or may not want at all. By doing it the other way around, I’m ensuring my list contains items that will actually bring joy to the recipient, not just ways to make Black Friday fun for me.

Second, since I have a list of items already, using the Black Friday flyers in this way is basically the same thrifty technique I use for weekly grocery shopping. I have a list, I hit the flyers, I develop a plan, and then I shop – with a shopping list in hand, of course. This process works because it makes you do all of the decision making (or almost all of it) outside the store before you even go inside and be tempted by the sales and displays and marketing.

Here’s a tip for you all: make your Christmas list before you even look at a Black Friday ad. Come up with gift ideas you think people will really like – or even several ideas per person. Then, hit the ads and see if you can find any matches which will enable you to save some cash this holiday season.

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 7 – November 13, 2009)
Giving Experiences, Not Things, This Holiday Season For most people, the experience of Christmas is the best part, not the stuff that they receive. Keep that in mind this holiday season.

The Five Whys and the Power of Analyzing Your Life I find that the more often you use the “five whys” in your life, the more often you find yourself reaching conclusions, spending money, and doing things that are more in line with what’s really important to you.

Is the Dollar Store Really a Bargain? I’ve come to find that there is no store on Earth that has the cheapest prices on everything. Because of that, I usually end up suggesting that people focus on the store that offers the overall best prices on the specific things they regularly buy.

Two Years Ago (November 7 – November 13, 2008)
Walking Away to be a Stay-At-Home Parent This is an incredibly tough decision, and I think it’s one that every professional who has a child considers, at least a bit.

Taking Dramatic Change One Day at a Time Rather than focusing on the huge impact a major change you choose to make will have on your life, try focusing on just achieving that change one day at a time. What will you do today to achieve that goal?

On Good Debt and Bad Debt I don’t think there is a strict line between good and bad debt. I think all debt is bad, but some types of debt (like your first home’s mortgage) can be justified to an extent.

Three Years Ago (November 7 – November 13, 2007)
Lying to Yourself About Money (and Anything Else) When you fall into the habit of lying to yourself about your life, you reach a point where you can no longer trust yourself and rely on external forces to guide you, forces that you can’t really trust, either. You’re like a boat without sail or anchor, wandering the seas aimlessly.

Parental Enthusiasm and Childhood Branding It is utterly amazing to see how much impact the little actions of a parent can have on a child. If you’re excited about something they can comprehend, they often get excited about it, too.

Six Things I Look For At Yard Sales – And How I Get Them Even Cheaper There are certain things I always look for at yard sales, simply because I know they’ll always be a bargain.

Four Years Ago (November 7 – November 13, 2006)
Money Magazine’s 25 Rules to Grow Rich By – Reevaluated Money Magazine does a great job of promoting basic personal finance, but sometimes they promote specific things that are a bit sketchy, like the mutual fund du jour.

Remembering A Painful Childhood Experience – And Trying To Apply What It Means This still shakes me every time I think about it. It caused me to distrust a lot of things in life.

The Inspiration For The Simple Dollar This is still the inspiration for The Simple Dollar, though it’s grown over the years.

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!

This year, we decided to make a big batch of handmade Christmas tree ornaments for our home, just to make some “homey” Christmas items to decorate with. We decided to make them in the style of Christmas sugar cookies, with dough that would harden and look roughly like such cookies.

As we were making them, though, Sarah had the brilliant idea of making extras and giving them away as “add-ons” on some of the gifts we’d already made. “We could just put a ribbon through them and tie that ribbon around a jelly jar,” she suggested, referring to the jellies and jams we had already made for gifts.

Sounds like a good idea to me!

The ingredients for the dough are simple enough. One cup salt, two cups flour, five teaspoons of cinnamon, and 3/4 cup water (with maybe a bit more).

Mix the dry ingredients together, then add the water slowly. Mix it together until it forms a ball, like so.

If you find the ball to be crumbly, add a bit more water, a teaspoon at a time, and knead it between teaspoons. If you find it to be sticky, add a bit more flour, a teaspoon at a time, and knead it between teaspoons. Eventually, you’ll find a happy medium – not too sticky, not too crumbly. That’s just what you want.

A note on the cinnamon: it’s added mostly to give the “cookie” ornaments a cinnamon smell. I felt that the five teaspoons didn’t give a very strong smell and if we were to make another batch of cookies, I would use at least ten teaspoons of cinnamon.

Once the dough is ready, wrap it up and put it in the refrigerator for thirty minutes to stiffen the dough. Then, roll the dough out to roughly 1/2″ thick (about 1.25 cm) – you can be approximate on this – on a lightly floured surface.

Use cookie cutters to cut the dough into shapes, then use a straw (or another device) to make a small hole on the top of the ornament shape. Then, bake until dry at 325 F – this usually takes about an hour. I recommend using parchment paper on top of a baking sheet to bake the ornaments.

We turned the leftover dough – the pieces between shapes that didn’t quite amount to enough to roll out again – into candy cane shapes for our own use.

Most of our ornaments were snowflakes, which we chose (for the time being) not to paint. We could have painted them white, of course.

The kids painted several of the ornaments, which turned this into a bit of a family art project. They went pretty over the top with the colors, though, which means these will make good additions to our tree and perhaps the trees of their grandparents, but maybe not the trees of others…

After the ornaments were painted, we sprayed them with a matte finish sprayable varnish so they would keep for a long time. We then slipped ribbons through some of the holes to look at our finished ornaments.

One important thing to note – these ornaments are actually surprisingly sturdy. One was dropped from a height of six feet onto a hardwood floor and as it fell, we fully expected it to break into bits. It seemed almost completely unharmed by the drop, perhaps losing a tiny crumb.

We look forward to tying these onto some of the handmade gifts we give out this year – and we also look forward to putting some of the ornaments on our own Christmas tree.