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. Personal loans or credit cards
2. Maximizing savings return
3. Conflicted about parenthood
4. Education or savings
5. Motivating a twentysomething
6. Piano tools
7. Mobile home mortgage problem
8. Netflix and Hulu?
9. DIY oil changes
10. Student loans or down payment?

This past weekend, we celebrated our son’s fifth birthday by having a party with several of his friends. His grandparents and aunt also visited and he received quite a few presents.

I asked him when he woke up this morning what his favorite birthday memory was and he said that it was playing games and having dinner with just the five of us, after the friends and extended family had left.

Funny thing, it was my best memory, too.

Q1: Personal loans or credit cards
I have 2 fairly high interest rate credit cards due to needing emergency car repairs, one through Bridgestone and the other through Goodyear. The Goodyear card has about $1,200 on it, with deferred interest until February 2011. When the promotion expires, the APR will be 24.99%. The Bridgestone card has approximately $560 on it, and currently has an APR of 22.8%.

I am making the monthly payments, paying slightly over the minimum amount required, but I doubt I’ll be able to get the Goodyear card paid off before the promotion ends. Would it make sense to look into taking out a personal loan of $2,000, paying the cards off, and then repaying the loan over 2 or 3 years? And do you have any idea what kind of terms I’d be looking at for the personal loan?
- Daniel

It doesn’t hurt to seek out any method you can to reduce the interest rates on those cards. However, without some sort of collateral, you’re likely not going to be able to reduce the rates by much.

I would suggest looking at two options. First, are there any balance transfer offers available on other cards that give you a period of 0% interest? Second, are there any personal loan offers available at your local credit union? Both of these likely rely on having good credit. The second option may require you to have some form of collateral for the loan.

I would recommend avoiding borrowing money from family (loans between family members have a tendency to turn nasty).

Q2: Maximizing savings return
In addition to my general savings account, I have two other savings accounts in my ING account – an emergency fund and a fund to buy a home with in the future. I’m wondering if my ING account earning 1.1% interest is actually the best place to keep these accounts. The emergency fund is fully funded, so I won’t need to add money from it anytime in the future (and hopefully won’t need to withdraw any time soon, but you never know). I have no plans to be withdrawing from my condo fund in the near future, but will be adding money every month, so I’d like it to be simple to add additional money to. I’m trying to minimize if possible the number of different accounts I have, so I don’t think I’m interested in opening another savings account with a different bank to just get an additional fraction of a percentage point interest. Do you have any suggestions for other places to keep my money to maximize the return on it? If it matters, the emergency fund has $10,000 and the condo fund has about $8,000.
- Andrea

You can absolutely seek out banks that offer a better interest rate. One place to shop around for such rates is Bankrate.

There are two catches to such shopping around, though. First, if you’re with a bank that has good customer service (and ING Direct certainly does), you’re likely to meet a bank that has awful customer service in this process and the interaction can be really difficult. Many banks have long waiting periods, substandard online banking, extremely poor customer service help, and other drawbacks.

The second drawback is that many banks offer “teaser” rates that only work for a short while or have other stipulations attached to achieving them, such as a balance or a transaction requirement. Beyond that, many banks often shuffle their rates, adjusting them up and down all the time in an effort to get new customer attention.

I generally find that unless I’m blowing my previous rates out of the water by at least a percentage point (i.e. 2% instead of 1%), it’s not worth the effort and attention I have to put into rate hopping.

Q3: Conflicted about parenthood
I’ve recently turned 31. I have a stable job that I enjoy and, after moving around for a while, I have finally found a part of the country that I love. I’ve had a few serious relationships in the past and while they have all ended well…well, they have all ended. As I find myself on the market again (so to speak) what limits me time and again is that I don’t want kids. I actually enjoy spending time around kids but every time I think about having them the rational part of my brain turns into overdrive and rehashes a litany of reasons not to. I suppose I just don’t have the paternal instinct that some are born with. For a long time this was fine enough but once again I have met a wonderful woman who is compatible with me in so many ways that matter, but who wants to start a family.

I gather from reading old entries that you’ve long known you wanted to be a parent and I was hoping you could share you experiences with that decision and the positives of parenting. So much of what we seem to read about are the negatives.
- David

People hear about the negatives often because they’re easier to rant about, frankly. It’s a lot harder to talk about the positives of parenting in a way that makes sense to people who are not parents without coming off like a loon.

I like to describe it this way. The negatives of parenting usually appear big – your child has a huge public meltdown or there are discipline issues or something like that. The positives are much smaller – it’s those many, many interactions throughout a day where you see a child learning something new or growing in some fashion or simply exhibiting a positive behavior or expressing something.

Those positives are usually tiny and often hard to explain, but they add up quickly because a day in which you’re paying attention to your child is loaded with them.

A big part of the reason I wanted to be a parent is because when I look back on many of the good memories of my life, a lot of them are just simple moments I spent with my own parents, where I felt genuinely safe and happy and, often, I felt like I could do anything. As I reached adulthood, I simply wanted to be on the other end of those moments.

Q4: Education or savings
I am single, and am thirty years old. My money management up to now hasn’t been great and I have few savings.

If I decide to go ahead and study it is unlikely that I will be able to save any money for the three to four years that it will take to finish everything. My question is – Would it be better to save the money first and wait a while before beginning to study, or to pay as I go and worry about savings later?
- Douglas

For me, the key to this whole decision comes down to the fact that you’re single and unencumbered with the requirements of a life partner or children. Because of that, I think you should go for the education sooner rather than later.

Why’s that? The best time in your life to get an education is when you’re single and you’re also seeing why that education is valuable. You’re not tied down with domestic responsibilities, but you also have a good grip on the importance of nailing that education. People younger than you often fall into not knowing how valuable the education is, while others are encumbered with a spouse or a child that makes such choices that much harder.

Now is your time to chase it. Go for it, before other life commitments tie you down.

Q5: Motivating a twentysomething
I have a 26 year-old nephew who has his AA degree, has kind of been drifting for the last 6 years or so, living at home with his mom and stepdad, no job other than helping out with family work/home remodeling, etc. He just can’t seem to figure out what he wants to do with his life, and living at home is not helping him–no reason to move on. He has recently thought about joining the military but is not sure it is for him. I’ve tried to steer him toward job counseling, possibly finishing school to get his bachelor’s degree, but am not sure what else I can do to help. Do you have any advice or resources that you recommend? I want to help him, but not enable him to stay with the status quo.
- Amy

At this point, after six years of trying to lead a horse to water, you can’t help. He has to help himself. The only help you can provide is to push him out the door.

My suggestion would be to set a very clear deadline where you expect him to be independent – and stick to it. Make it clear that he needs to move on to some degree of independence within, say, a year, and set a firm date for it. He’ll have to have a job and an apartment by then or he’s going to be homeless.

If the idea of that kind of ultimatum scares you and makes you not want to do it, then congratulations – you’ve got yourself a houseguest for the rest of your life!

Q6: Piano tools
What resources and methods are you using to learn the piano.
- Scott

Since February, I’ve been taking weekly private lessons with a local piano teacher with very reasonable rates. I’ve been practicing at home with a used keyboard, though I’ve been on the lookout for a good electronic piano for a while now.

Most of my material was either given to me by my teacher or gifted by friends or Simple Dollar readers. The primary book for instruction I’ve used to this point has been Alfred’s Self-Teaching Adult Piano Course.

I’ve also been downloading easy arrangements of songs from sites like EasyByte, which have been very helpful at my beginner level in teaching me how to read music while playing.

Q7: Mobile home mortgage problem
In March 2001, I moved into a 1979 single-wide mobile home, which was owned by my brother. It had been remodeled inside and out so you could not tell it was that old. He sold it to me for $23,000 which I’ve been paying on since then. Currently, I still owe approximately $11,000…and still 5 years on the mortgage.

My question is – how do I get out of this mortgage? Is foreclosure the only way? People have told me to sell it, but there is no way I can get $11,000 out of it and I also don’t want to have the responsibility of selling it to someone when it most likely could go up in flames at any moment. I’m afraid to really live there any longer, so I’m in the process of packing to move into an apt.
- Dee

If you want completely out of the mortgage quickly, foreclosure is your only option, but it will wreck your credit for several years.

I’m going to guess that you didn’t have the trailer inspected before you purchased it. Did you have any sort of written statement regarding the condition of the trailer before you purchased it? Without this kind of evidence, it would be hard to get any sort of legal action against your brother and you may be outside of the statutes of limitation in your state anyway.

My back-of-the-envelope math tells me that you’re making monthly payments somewhere on the order of $300 a month for the mortgage, and it sounds like that continuing to make those payments to preserve your credit would be extremely financially difficult for you. The honest thing to do is to just finish off the payments. However, my suggestion would be that if you’re considering walking away from the trailer, sign an apartment lease before you do so that you can get your credit checked and get into the apartment before your credit is destroyed.

Q8: Netflix and Hulu?
I read the response to the person agonizing over dropping cable for Netflix on your Nov 4 post. My suggestion – add Hulu.com (free) to the entertainment mix, and you get the best of both worlds. Next-day satisfaction for popular shows with Hulu, and the deep variety and reliability of Netflix. If they can’t stand the small screen format, Hulu Plus ($9.99/month) can stream to Xbox Live or a web-ready Blu-Ray player. And Netflix streams to both for free as well, if you already have a membership.
- Andrew

There are several options for people considering abandoning cable or satellite for Netflix.

Hulu is certainly one option, as it offers current episodes of a lot of different popular television series. Beyond that, the websites of many television networks also offer the capacity to watch episodes of current series on demand shortly after airing, though they usually don’t have full archives of the series up for viewing.

As for sports programming, many sports leagues and conferences are beginning to offer streaming video online as well. For the 2010 season, I used MLB TV to follow my beloved Cubs for a pretty cheap price. Check the website of your favorite sports league or conference to see what they offer.

Q9: DIY oil changes
Would you recommend learning how to do oil changes yourself? I’ve been told by someone that does this, that it doesn’t really save money. Are there any other basic maintenance procedures that you would recommend learning to do on your own instead of taking the car to a mechanic? I know how to top up the fluids and pump my gas, that’s about it!
- Christine

It is cheaper to do your own oil changes (all you have to do is buy the oil) and it’s very easy, but there’s a time commitment involved in doing it. It will take you half an hour or so, plus you’ll have to wait in the middle for your oil to fully drain.

It’s really easy to do and the full instructions you need are in your car’s manual, which is likely in your glove box. You can also watch a YouTube video if you’re more of a visual learner.

Most oil change shops will dispose of old oil for you at no cost, so the only equipment you need is a pan to collect the dirty oil in, the right type of oil for your car (found in the manual), a few rags, and a funnel.

Q10: Student loans or down payment?
My wife and I accumulated quite a student loan debt load in each earning a bachelor’s degree plus a master’s for myself– about $140,000 or so. While this is quite alot, this is our only debt, and our monthly payments are within our means and we pay extra where we can– we’re at about $110,000 left 3 years out of school. However, my main question involves the approximately $15,000 we currently have in savings as an emergency-fund/beginning-of-down-payment. We add about $200-300 to this pot every month while still paying at least a little extra towards the student loans. We have a 2-year old daughter, and we have long wanted a house and would like to buy within the next 1-3 years, if we can. What would you suggest we do with windfalls or any other extra money we get? So far, for example, if we’ve come upon, say, a $1,000 windfall, we’d put about $500-600 to our debts, then throw a few hundred to our savings as well. A loose goal would be to continue paying as much as we reasonably can towards the loans, while continuing to pad our savings until we get to something like $25,000– at which point we could use $15-20k as down payment on a reasonable mortgage for us (about $200,000 would give us monthly payments in the range of what we currently pay on rent). This would still leave us surplus in our budget to then hopefully kick our debt repayment into high gear. Thoughts?
- Nick

First of all, good work on getting your finances going in the right direction. You’re certainly making positive moves here.

However, your desire to get into a house sooner rather than later will cost you a lot more over the long haul than waiting until all of your finances are in order.

The big issue is that if you don’t have a 20% down payment, you’re either going to be taking out a higher interest loan to make up your shortfall on the down payment or you’re going to have to take out mortgage insurance – the lender will require it.

My suggestion would be that if your only debt is student loans that you’ve consolidated and locked in at a low rate (and if you haven’t done that, do it – now), I would move to minimum payments on those debts and instead sock away for that down payment. Put any and all windfalls into your down payment savings and shoot for getting to that 20% mark as soon as possible. This will have a huge impact on your total debt, interest rate, and monthly payments when you take out a mortgage.

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.

A couple years ago, Farnoosh Torabi wrote You’re So Money, I book I succinctly described by saying “this book pitches personal finance advice for consumerism addicts.” Nevertheless, I concluded that the book did offer some very solid advice to the crowd that would not allow their Gucci handbags to be pried from their cold, dead hands.

Torabi’s follow-up book takes a decidedly different tack on the arena of personal finance, moving on to the idea that your personal mindset has a good deal to do with whether or not you find money success.

For me, this is the area where personal growth ties deeply into personal finance. Personal growth is all about becoming aware of your actions and choices and considering how you can improve those actions and choices. When you put that spotlight on your money, you can often reveal quite a lot about improving your personal finances, and that’s the sweet spot this book swings for.

Personalize Rich
What does “rich” mean to you? Once you sit down and start answering that question for yourself, you begin to realize that “rich” doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. You need to figure out what you define as “rich,” which is, in essence, simply setting, in a very vague way, your long term goals. For me, rich is often defined in security – is my family safe from whatever may come? Others may define it very differently.

Establish Goals
From there, Torabi takes the ideas of what makes a person “rich” and transforms them into specific, tangible goals that a person can use. What does it mean for my family to be “safe from whatever may come”? When I’m able to transform that into a specific goal, like a big emergency fund, then I have something to work towards that’s real, as opposed to the vague notion of something that I might just be dreaming about.

Craft Your Money Philosophy
What you’ll find as you move through the process of figuring out what “rich” means to you and establishing goals based on it is that some particular values are going to be important to you. For me, family is a really, really key value, for example, and thus for me, my money philosophy centers deeply around providing for that family. I value having an emergency cash reserve and I’m less interested in chasing big financial growth.

Embrace Your Relationship with Money
The idea here is that many people are detached from their money in many ways. They don’t connect their hard work to the money they have, and they also don’t connect their checking account balance to all of the things they spend their money on. This leads to a deep sense of “where did all the money go?” and often to a sense that there’s something deeply wrong without really understanding what that is. The solution, of course, is to spend time focusing on this type of connection. Keep careful track of how you’re spending money. Talk about money with your loved ones, even if it’s uncomfortable. Keep it in your mind and embrace it.

Organize, Don’t Agonize
Another issue many people have with their money is that it’s difficult for people to figure out what they have and what they don’t have. Their records are disorganized and the information they need isn’t available when they need it, which makes it all the more difficult to really embrace your relationship with your money. The solution is an efficient filing system, where you keep the relevant information you may need in the future in a known place that can easily be retrieved when you need it.

Be Your Biggest Advocate
Another key step is becoming your own advocate – in other words, having a backbone when it comes to talking to people who have an impact on your finances. Don’t be afraid of the customer service representatives. Your approach should be to know what to expect from them before you even talk to them and when they don’t provide it, be insistent and keep going for what you expect (provided your expectations are reasonable, of course). Companies aren’t your advocate – you are.

Make Your Money Count
When you do start to get ahead financially (meaning your net worth – the total of your assets minus your debts – is going upwards), make sure you’re putting your money in places where it really counts. The more return you can consistently earn on your money, the better. If you’re putting it into savings, look for savings options that provide a better return. When you’re considering which debt to pay off, look hardest at the debt with the highest interest rate.

Think Five Years Ahead
Almost always, your best financial choices are made if you ask yourself, with every dollar you spend or invest, what will have the biggest positive impact five years from now. Sometimes, it’s a tricky question, but that question will point you (almost always) in several positive directions: towards frugality, towards repaying debts, and towards good choices with regards to making your money count.

Break from the Norm
For many people, these types of personal changes are very difficult because they’re different, not only from what they’ve been doing before, but it’s different than what the people around them are doing, too. You’ve got to recognize that you’re breaking from the norm in doing this, and this is often the best time to break from the norm in other regards, too. Revise your social circle. Look for new people to associate with. Break other bad habits in your life. Keep the changes simple and straightforward.

Embrace the Entrepreneurial Spirit
One final step is to embrace the idea that you are an entrepreneur. Everyone who exchanges work for money is essentially a small businessperson on some level, and every single small businessperson owes it to themselves to always seek out the best exchanges of money for their time and effort that they can find. This means not only looking for side businesses to start, but also it means focusing on improving yourself, including your abilities and skill set.

Is Psych Yourself Rich Worth Reading?
Psych Yourself Rich does a very good job of taking the broad ideas of the connection between psychology, personal finance, and self-motivation and transforming them into specific tactics that anyone can apply in their life.

From my perspective, psychology and understanding yourself are absolutely key elements for personal finance success. This book makes those ideas tangible and actionable.

The only weak spot, to me, is that Torabi doesn’t dig too deep into these issues at times. This book begs for some follow-up reads, from books like Your Money or Your Life or Mindset.

You’ve just finished prepping a meal. You have a bunch of leftover vegetable scraps – onion pieces, a bit of chopped tomato, some extra pepper, the end of a zucchini, a single garlic clove, whatever. Or, maybe you had a whole rotisserie chicken or a roast and find yourself with some leftover bones with a few bits of meat attached to them. Maybe you even have a leftover turkey carcass after Thanksgiving dinner.

For most families, almost all of this would hit the trash can. A few families might be able to toss the vegetable scraps into a compost bin at least. In the end, though, they’re simply trash for most people.

Over the last year or two, we’ve started doing something very different.

Whenever we have scraps like this, we throw them into a bag in the freezer. We have a “misc. vegetables” bag and whenever we have some bones or meat scraps, we put them into a freezer container that’s appropriately labeled with the contents.

Then, when we’re starting to build up a few quarts’ worth of material in the freezer, we bust out the crock pot and make ourselves some stock.

In the picture above, all we did was take about two or three quarts worth of leftover vegetables stored up over a month or so, toss them all in the crock pot, add enough water to cover the vegetables with about two inches more (and, yes, some of the vegetables will float), and then add a bunch of pepper and a bit of salt.

Then we just turn the crock pot on high and let it sit for a long while – four hours or so.

At the end of the time, we just get out a strainer, pour the liquid through the strainer, and collect the liquid on the other end. That liquid is, in this case, vegetable stock.

What do you do with vegetable stock? Whenever you’re making almost any dish at home that uses water as a component, we substitute the stock for incredible flavor effect. Soups. Stews. Shepherd’s pie. Stir fry. Anything.

How do you store it? Usually, we use the stock within two or three days of making it, so we just store it in a jar in the refrigerator. If you’re going to keep it for longer, it can easily be frozen, but when you thaw it, you’ll need to stir it thoroughly.

What about chicken/beef/turkey stock? If you have bones and cooked scraps left over from any meat dinner (yep, fish works, too, if you want to make fish stock), just use them as a component in the stock. If you want to call it chicken stock (or beef stock, or fish stock, or turkey stock…), I would use 50% meat and 50% vegetables.

The procedure is still the same: add water to the pot until you have two inches or so over the top of the items in the pot, then boil it for a few hours with a lid on it so you don’t lose liquid to the steam. Then, when you’re done, strain it to get out the big pieces and keep the liquid. Cooking gold.

The next time you have vegetable scraps or leftover bones that you’re going to throw out, consider keeping them instead. Use them to make stock on a lazy day, then make yourself some mind-blowingly delicious meals with that liquid. It’s incredibly cheap, gets more use out of an item you would have thrown away, and makes your homemade meals that much more tasty.

As I’ve mentioned before, I consider Netflix to be an excellent low-cost alternative to cable. Having Netflix gives you access not only to almost every DVD known to man (sent to you in the mail), but you also have access to their extensive streaming library. In other words, if you have high speed internet at home, you can watch a lot of movies and TV series (without commercial interruption) at no additional cost with just a button click. Not bad for $9 a month.

So, what do we use it for? In the evenings, we certainly do use it for a bit of entertainment to unwind a couple nights a week (we’re watching Doctor Who seasons right now), but my wife and I often dig deep into the documentaries in order to learn about a new topic and give us some food for thought on a particular subject.

Two big caveats. First, documentaries can definitely be as biased as anything else. I watch a documentary not because I believe it’s hard fact, but because it can often be a very compelling way of introducing an idea or making a case for another idea. A good documentary shouldn’t leave you thinking you now have all the answers, but should encourage you to follow up by finding more facts and different viewpoints.

Second, a good documentary should do just two things: it should make a particular idea or perspective clear to you and it should entertain you along the way. If it fails at either, it’s not a good documentary.

Over the past decade, I’ve watched a lot of documentaries. Some of them have been awful and failed on both the entertaining and clear perspective counts. Some of them have succeeded on one side or the other – they entertain but don’t have a point, or they have a point but are dreadfully boring.

Below are fifteen that succeed on both sides of the matter – and every one of them is available on Netflix streaming. If you have such an account (and I’m basically encouraging people to ditch their cable bill in exchange for it), then you’ll be able to just click any of the links below and either start watching immediately or add it to your instant queue to watch later.

Consider this an encouragement to cancel your expensive cable or satellite bill.

Cosmos
This is, hands down, the best documentary I’ve ever seen. It’s far and away the best science-related documentary I’ve ever seen, but for me, the take-away message was the fragile nature of human life. We are not invincible and the universe around us is very, very large, indeed. There are scenes from this that have stuck in my mind for many years.

Maxed Out
Maxed Out covers the nature of overspending in America during the buildup to the 2008 financial crisis incredibly well, digging into the specifics of why it happened and the roles both individual choice and companies played into it. If you want more on this topic, In Debt We Trust is solid but nowhere near as good.

Food Inc.
If you’ve ever wondered what the process of moving food from the fields to your local grocery store and onto your dinner plate looks like, this is the show for you. I came out of this with two notable ideas: first, I wanted desperately to change my dietary habits, and second, my opinion of Wal-Mart went up significantly.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
For the flip side on Wal-Mart, this makes the case that Wal-Mart’s business practices in bringing low-priced goods to many towns is often harmful in multiple dimensions. It reduces the quality of work and customer service available in the towns and also forces larger companies into some very shady practices in order to provide the goods at the very low prices that Wal-Mart demands.

Babies
This documentary compares how babies are raised in four distinctly different cultures and economic levels. What can be concluded from this is that you don’t really need to give your baby everything – all it really takes to raise a happy and healthy baby is care from the parents. No mountain of stuff will really make a difference if the parents are involved to begin with.

Hoop Dreams
My feelings on college sports changed significantly after watching this film (and, in similar ways, after reading The Blind Side). Individuals from very broken backgrounds are trying very hard to take advantage of the germ of basketball talent that they have so that they can make a new life for themselves, because their background assures them that many other opportunities in life are going to be closed to them. This is why collegiate athletics are important, in my opinion.

Super Size Me
This is a good one to pair with Food Inc. It documents the effects of eating nothing but fast food for a month on a human body, and the results are fairly ugly. Again, it’ll make you question what you eat, which is a powerful question to ask both for your health and for your finances.

Jesus Camp
This one has provoked more discussion with other people that have watched it than anything else I’ve ever seen, hands down, so it certainly fits here. That being said, it’s going to cause a reaction in you, but that reaction is going to be different depending on who you are and your beliefs. It’s a surprisingly unbiased look at a very conservative Christian youth camp – it almost feels like they turn on the cameras and just let them roll. From my eyes, there are good things and bad things about what’s shown regarding the camp, but some people are going to be much more strongly inclined to see the “good” and others are going to be strongly inclined to see the “bad.” Be prepared for some… discussions if you watch it with others.

Man on Wire
This one stands out to me not just because of a compelling story, but because it shows what can happen if you bring enough passion and repeated effort to the table. It tells the story of a man who walked a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in the 1970s without a rope, and how lots and lots of training and planning made such a seemingly impossible stunt possible.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
In many ways, this is similar to Man on Wire in that it documents the result of sustained effort and hard work, as two men compete and train to achieve the highest score in the world at the video game Donkey Kong. I genuinely watched this for a laugh, but it turned out to be incredibly compelling and rather thought-provoking. What drives people to be the best in the world at something? Can I harness that myself?

One last note: the Seven Up! series of documentaries is one of the best things I’ve ever seen, but the series isn’t wholly available on streaming, particularly the first one. However, you can get the disc if you so choose.

Now cut your cable and save yourself some money!

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 (October 31 – November 6, 2009)
The Stumble What do you do when you “stumble” on your financial journey? Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, reflect, and recognize that you’ve just taken a couple steps backward on a journey of a thousand miles and you’ve not undone all of your progress.

Teaching Money Management Through Self-Responsibility We’re utilizing self-responsibility as we teach our children money lessons. Here’s a big taste of how we’re doing it.

A Reflection of Your Closest Friends Much of who you are is a reflection of your five closest friends. What does that mean for your career and finances?

Two Years Ago (October 31 – November 6, 2008)
Dealing with Personal Disappointment and Tragedy Life isn’t always a wonderful path filled with roses and happiness. How do you deal with the unwelcome moments in a financially sensible fashion?

Reading This Article Won’t Make You Rich There’s no article that, just by reading it, will make you rich. No book will make you rich. Only your actions will do that.

Excuses, Excuses There’s always a reason not to do the hard thing.

Three Years Ago (October 31 – November 6, 2007)
Seven Tips For Avoiding Boredom During A Financial Turnaround Cutting back on living the big life can be “boring” for some. Here are some ways to deal with it.

How to Create A Nifty Visual Savings Goal Reminder These can really help when you’re saving towards a big goal. It turns the goal into something visual that you can constantly connect with.

Homemade Bread: Cheap, Delicious, Healthy, and Easier Than You Think I love love love making homemade bread.

Four Years Ago (October 31 – November 6, 2006)
The Road To Financial Armageddon #1: The Earliest Mistakes This is the first entry in a ten part series that will give you a very clear picture into my financial background. I hope to someday write #11.

Turning Off The Financially Irresponsible Mindset For me, it was akin to finding a light switch in a dark room. I stumbled around a lot to find it, but once I did, it was much like flipping a switch.

How Your Local “Alternative” Newspapers Can Save You Money I am a big fan of CityView, a free alternative newspaper that you can grab in the grocery stores in our area. I read it each week. Toons is another excellent one – a collection of political cartoons of the past week.

If you’d like to browse through more of the archives, visit the chronology, where all posts are listed in chronological order.

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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.

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A few years ago, Rachel gave my wife Sarah a wonderful Christmas gift: some beautifully-constructed stationery with photos of her own choosing placed on the front of note cards, along with envelopes to mail them in. Here are three examples that Sarah has kept:

As you can see, there’s some variety in the cards – the border colors changed, some of the photos are in color and some are grayscale, some depict nature and others depict family. The full set, numbering about 25 or so, included a wide variety of pictures and colors.

Simply put, this was one of Sarah’s favorite gifts she’s ever received. Some of the cards are nice enough that they could easily be framed for home decorations. Others are so aesthetically pleasing to Sarah that she simply can’t bear to part with them.

When we first started thinking about doing homemade gifts for people this year, these cards were the first thing that Sarah mentioned. We should make a batch of them for a great gift for someone.

Our first step was finding the elements that we needed to pull this off. The things we needed most were the material for the cards themselves, some additional craft paper for the borders, and the photos we wanted to use.

For the card material and the craft paper, we simply checked flyers and waited patiently for a sale. We watched craft stores like Michael’s and Hobby Lobby, as well as art supply stores and paper stores. Eventually, we found some huge discounts on just the items we wanted, picking up big piles of both craft paper and cards for a pittance. However, even if you do buy them at face value, the cost for 20-30 cards’ worth of material is $10-15 if you shop around.

What about the pictures? This is something I’ve been dealing with lately and deserves a full post on its own. However, my rules of thumb are this:

If you need just a picture or two, home printing is probably worth it.
If you’re printing ten or fifteen, the local department store is probably the best place.
If you’re ordering a lot of pictures (enough to get free shipping – say, 100+), there are online sources that take the cake.

Now, what about assembling a card?

Here, I just chose a black and white snapshot of my youngest son (actually taken by my niece). The simplest thing to do, of course, would be to simply paste it to the front of a card without any border at all. It’s quite simple and works, but I want to add a bit more panache to it.

My next attempt was to add a brown frame to the picture, using craft paper and scissors. Since the card is 5″ by 7″ and the picture is 4″ by 6″, I cut the paper at 4 2/3″ by 6 2/3″, making a thick brown border and a thin white border around it.

Do you like that one? I did, but I wanted to keep going.

I then cut out a tan craft paper rectangle measuring 4 1/3″ by 6 1/3″, then placed that between the dark brown rectangle and the photo, creating a “multi”-border effect that I quite liked.

As you can see, there are infinite options here and you can make whatever you like – different colored cards, different colored borders made out of craft paper, different photographs. They all result in different effects.

What pictures should you choose? I would suggest using prints that would have some personal meaning for the recipient: family members they care about, locations that have meaning to them, and things like that. You can also choose some of your best natural shots as well to give the card recipients some variety in the pictures.

Another note: I think the cards look better if the edges on your own work aren’t absolutely perfect, so don’t obsess on straight perfection. A little tiny bit of skewing adds a wonderful handmade flavor to the cards that can’t be duplicated.

One final thought: if you send out holiday cards to your family and friends, consider making some of these instead. They will really stand out from the pack.

This is the tenth 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.

Allen takes an interesting detour in this chapter. Here, Allen uses the example of Ron Taylor and a business that fell into his lap, Gracie’s Gardens, as an example of the ideas presented in the previous several chapters.

It’s a pretty straightforward story, something that could happen to many of us. Ron’s great aunt passes away and leaves him her small gardening business, the aforementioned Gracie’s Garden. Unfortunately, she hasn’t done a thing with the business in several months, so the greenhouse is like a jungle, the bills are unpaid, there’s a mountain of mail sitting there, and so on.

What does Ron do? Basically, he follows the steps of the previous chapters in moving from staring at the disaster to taking charge of the business.

Capture
On page 194, Allen spells out the first step in Ron’s journey:

The very first thing Ron does is to take a quick site walkthrough, just to identify the property lines and to notice what the obvious things are within them. Next, he clears off the top of the old oak desk in the small office, sets up an in-basket, gets a legal pad and a pen, and does another site walkthrough, this time making notes about anything that grabs his attention and gathering any paper-based or physical items that look as if they might have meaning.

In other words, the first step is to simply gather all relevant information and things that need to be done together in one place.

This is a far superior approach than just diving in to one specific task, like clearing out the greenhouse. For one, it allows Ron to sit back and make realistic decisions about all the tasks (clarifying, the next step). For another, it allows Ron to get a grasp on how big the overall task in front of him really is.

Clarify
Ron then goes on to give some clarity to the big pile of stuff in front of him. On page 195:

Now Ron has to start making some “businesslike” decisions. What assets are worth keeping? What of the viable inventory is worth keeping? What files need to be saved? What supplies are still useful?

Each of those questions involve making decisions and breaking down that specific thought into manageable and clear tasks that don’t have a person asking more questions when they see the item on their to-do list.

Take the greenhouse, for example. Is there anything in there worth saving? If not, it needs to just be cleared out. Is that a good use of Ron’s time, or should he just hire a high schooler to clear it all out for some pocket money? If he chooses to hire a high schooler, there’s the start of a project that has multiple steps. Call a few potential people that might be willing to do it. Negotiate a wage and a time with them. Be on hand to explain the job when they’re about to do it.

Organize / Reflect / Engage
The other steps follow clearly from the clarification. Organize the material on hand into a filing system, into project plans, and into other useful structures of information. Reflect regularly upon all of this that you’ve done. Then, actually take on that to-do list that should consist of specific items that you don’t have to think about, just execute.

It all flows together. In my experience, it all flows together quite well.

The Greater Context of Life
The most interesting part of the chapter, though, is the concluding bit, where Allen writes about how these processes connect back to the greater scope of Ron’s life. Obviously, Gracie’s Gardens isn’t going to be the sole focus of Ron’s life right now, just one piece of it (and perhaps a temporary piece).

On page 196, Allen lays it out:

The unexpected inheritance of a small business you know nothing about is a good example of the kinds of input most of us receive from time to time – a novel event that could be either good or bad, or both. But no matter what the ultimate evaluation of how positive or negative this experience might be, it’s certainly new, different, and demanding of our attention in the moment. And, since Ron already has far more to do than he can keep up with in the rest of his life, one more demanding project can certainly jangle his system to the point of knocking him off balance.

So now that Ron has been able to stabilize Gracie’s Gardens to some degree, he knows he needs to do the same thing for himself, given the unexpected complication this has brought to his world.

In other words, Ron will basically apply the capture/clarify/organize/reflect/engage process over every context of his life, not just that of the business he’s inherited.

What’s the point of mentioning this? These processes work very well in every context of your life, from planning household chores and your Christmas list to convincing you to start a microbusiness and keeping your professional obligations straight.

I’ve been using them for years in a borderless fashion between my personal and professional efforts. The only difference between them is the context, really.

Right off the bat, let’s take a peek at this “wonderful” new commercial by Toyota:

I was pointed to this ad by longtime reader Beth and the AutoAdOpolis blog.

If you’ve been reading The Simple Dollar for long, you’ll know that this ad takes a swing directly at a lot of different ideas I’ve shared over the years about parenting, money, materialism, and other things. I thought I’d run through them again in light of this ad.

First of all, if you’re a parent, your kids shouldn’t have any influence over your buying decisions. This commercial only really works if you believe that your kids should have any significant input over what automobile you purchase. If you’re letting your child have that much power, particularly in an effort to not seem “lame” to them, you’re abandoning your ability to actually be a parent to them.

Buying a car really can be a teachable moment. You should absolutely discuss why you’re buying a car and what your buying criteria are. However, what a child thinks of as a great criteria for a car (it’s shiny! it’s got a DVD player!) should have little or no direct bearing on that purchase.

At the same time, why is the father washing the car all alone out in the driveway while the kid is sitting inside alone? My kids – even my three year old – would have been out there washing the car with me. Why? That type of thing is the perfect opportunity to build a positive relationship with your child, the kind that fosters long-term trust and rapport.

I can understand parents and children both needing some solitary time. A child sitting alone inside while a parent is outside washing a car, though, is a perfect family time.

This, of course, might point to why the kid thinks his parents are “lame” – he doesn’t have a deep relationship with them.

The child also has no idea why their family has an older minivan or why that has value. Obviously, the family is saving money on a vehicle here – no payments, low insurance cost, and so on. That vehicle is obviously going to last for a long while because it’s being maintained.

That has value. That’s $500 a month that isn’t going towards payments on an expensive new car, let alone the insurance.

There’s no reason not to spell that out for your kids. The inherent value in buying and owning used things is because, quite often, their purchase price and maintenance costs are lower. That means you have money for other things, like a family vacation or the house you’re living in.

Yes, children won’t be able to fully understand that, but they should at least be aware of it so that such ideas are like an oversized glove that they will eventually grow into.

One last thought: if my child had a routine habit of calling the things we did “dorkiness,” referring to us as the “Geek family,” or directly calling his parents names, that child wouldn’t be headed out for a fun afternoon with his friends.

There are a lot of things you can’t control in life: your income level, the bad things that befall you, the financial largesse of the people around you, and so on. However, you can control your day-to-day choices, and among them is how involved you want to be as a parent and how involved you want to be in parenting your child (and parenting doesn’t mean “being their pal”).

Good parenting means teaching them not only how to behave, but how to be responsible and sensible with their money and time.

Some might say that I’m thinking too much about this commercial. However, the commercial is just loaded with things that would point a family away from good financial planning and parenting and towards some pretty awful choices. When such things are considered par for the course on television, there’s no wonder that some people consider it to simply be the way things are.