Each week, I’ll present a low-cost meal (or a meal that demonstrates a lot of options for cutting costs) that my family eats for dinner and enjoys. Many of the recipes will be vegan or vegetarian, with options to add other ingredients for non-vegetarians.

As I’ve mentioned several times, Sarah and I are making a special effort to spread out our trips to the grocery store – and with some real success. Part of this is simply using things that we’ve had in the refrigerator, the cupboard, and the freezer for a while.

One item that’s been in the fridge for a bit are some rolls of prepackaged pizza dough that we got on sale a few months back. We like to make our own pizza crust, but the price was low enough on the prepackaged pizza dough that we simply bought some.

How do we use it, though? Usually, when we make pizza, I just make a crust from scratch.

The solution was obvious: sandwich pockets. We simply take ingredients that we have on hand, fold pieces of the dough around those ingredients, and bake them in the oven.

What You Need
Last night, we made two large batches of these sandwich pockets. One variety (the one I took lots of pictures of) included broccoli, fresh chives, and cheddar cheese. I also made some pockets using bell peppers and ricotta cheese. Both types included a mix of dried herbs (oregano, basil, and so on).

To make four pockets, you need a roll of refrigerated pizza dough (or a small batch of homemade dough), the ingredients you wish to put in the middle, some salt and pepper to taste, and a single egg.

The Night Before (or Early That Day)
If you’re using any fresh vegetables in these pockets, chop them in advance. This always saves time.

Preparing the Meal
The first thing you’ll want to do is mix together your filling ingredients. For me, this means for four pockets, I’ll mix together a cup and a half of broccoli, a cup and a half of shredded cheddar, a dash of salt, a few dashes of ground pepper, three tablespoons of chopped chives, and a few dashes of mixed dried herbs.

I simply toss all of this stuff together with my hands until it’s reasonably consistent.

After that, I unroll a container of the pizza dough on a surface lightly coated with flour or with canola oil to prevent sticking.

Cut this pizza dough into four equal pieces. In the center of each piece of dough, put roughly a quarter of the mixture.

Simply fold over one side on top of the mix, then fold over the opposite side. After that, fold the remaining two sides over the mixture, forming a pocket. Easy as can be!

Crack an egg into a bowl and beat it with a fork. Then, brush the egg on top of the pockets. This will create a wonderful golden crust on top.

Preheat the oven to 425 F, then place the finished pockets onto a baking sheet that had lightly been coated with canola oil to prevent sticking.

When I had the sandwiches all ready to go into the oven, there was a bit of the mixture left over, so I sprinkled some on top of each of the pockets. Here’s eight of them, ready to go into the oven.

Bake the sandwiches for fifteen to seventeen minutes, until golden brown on top, then serve. We had some sliced apples along with the sandwiches, making for a great lunch or a light dinner!

Optional Ingredients
Obviously, you can put pretty much anything you want into these pockets. One thing I like about these is that you don’t have to stick with what you might think of as pizza toppings. It might seem odd to put broccoli on a pizza, for example, but it works perfectly here. Just use roughly three cups of filling for every four you make and let your imagination run wild – meats, vegetables, cheeses, mushrooms, whatever you want.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Calista writes in: Aside from the environmental benefits, does using vinegar for cleaning and household tasks really save any money? I can find white vinegar at the cheapest for 2.39 per gallon, and it seems to go really fast. E.g. if I were to use 1 cup for fabric softener as is suggested, I would be going through it like candy. Similarly, baking soda is not as expensive, but it does go quickly as well.

While there are a lot of household uses for white vinegar, it’s not always the absolute best bargain out there.

We’ll use the fabric softener example that Calista points out. As she mentions, it’s often recommended that you use one cup of white vinegar instead of fabric softener in a load of laundry. I often use half a cup myself, except on extremely heavy loads, and it seems to do all right in terms of making the clothes soft.

So, what does that cost? If you can purchase a gallon of vinegar for $2.39, and there are 16 cups in a gallon, you can do 16 loads of laundry with vinegar as the fabric softener for $2.39. That gives you a cost of 14.9 cents per load for white vinegar as a fabric softener.

On the other hand, one can easily find 120 loads of Downy for $15.99 – 13.3 cents per load.

Of course, with the prices being so similar, you can experiment a lot here to find out the right level of fabric softening for you. You might find – as I do – that half a cup of vinegar is the right amount for most loads of laundry (unless the machine is approaching over-full, which I rarely do). In that case, the price of using vinegar as a fabric softener drops down to about eight cents per load. Of course, there’s nothing saying you can’t use smaller amounts of Downy, either, though I’ve never really experimented with that.

Of course, vinegar has a wide variety of uses. Are the other ones cost effective? I ran the numbers on a few of them.

Window cleaner Typically, you mix one part vinegar with four parts water (and three drops of liquid dish soap at a negligible cost) for an effective window cleaner. You can purchase a 32 ounce bottle of Windex for $2.49. On the other hand, you could use a cup of vinegar, costing $0.15 as calculated above, along with three cups of water and perhaps a cent of dish soap, to make your own effective window cleaner. Winner: vinegar.

Spot-free dishwasher rinse Typically, you can use an equal amount of vinegar in your dishwasher as a replacement for a cleaner like Jet Dry. It works pretty well, based on my own experience. Of course, half a gallon of Jet Dry costs $18.49, while an equal amount of vinegar costs about $1.20. Winner: vinegar.

Plant remover I’ve found that if you pour a significant amount of vinegar on unwanted grass – such as grass in the sidewalk cracks – you can get rid of it. Of course, you’re talking a quart of vinegar to cover sidewalk cracks that are dealt with with just a few sprays of Roundup. You can buy Roundup concentrate for $30 which, when used in a tank sprayer, can get rid of all of the weeds on our sidewalk about fifteen times over (based on other observations – I’ve never used Roundup on our own sidewalk). It would take about a gallon of vinegar to achieve the same effect, which would bring the cost of the vinegar to about $38. Winner: Roundup.

I could go on and on with these comparisons. In some of them, vinegar would win the day in a landslide. In others, vinegar would lose running away. In yet others, it’s close enough that one could argue endlessly about the details of the comparison.

There are two key things to notice here. One, vinegar does a lot of things. The simple fact that you can compare it to so many different products demonstrates that. Two, vinegar is friendlier to the environment than virtually all of the other options. Vinegar is essentially just a product of the fermentation of alcohol, after all, which occurs naturally all the time and is easy to do in a kitchen environment.

Does this save you money? It certainly can save you a bit of money if you’re selective in your uses of the vinegar. The key thing is, though, that it’s flexible. You can have one bottle of vinegar instead of lots of bottles of other stuff that will probably go bad before you ever use all of it. Add on top of that the friendliness to the environment and you’ve got a pretty compelling case for putting a bottle of vinegar under the kitchen sink instead of fifty other products.

One wouldn’t have to have read this website for very long to know that Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple and Pixar, is one of the people in this world I admire (in fact, I even mentioned him in the reader mailbag this morning). Earlier today, when I learned that he had passed away from cancer at age 56, I was hit pretty hard by the news.

I don’t admire him because I think Apple’s products are great (I think they’re well designed, but perhaps overpriced for what you get) or because I think Pixar was a great company, but because he managed to find massive success in multiple areas and he did it in his own way, all while coming from a working class background.

I could go on for a long time writing some boring eulogy to him, but honestly, you wouldn’t get any real value out of it. There’s more than enough eulogies to the man online right now.

Instead, I’d rather just share his words with you. In 2005, Steve gave the commencement address at Stanford University’s graduation ceremony. You can watch the video here:

Here is the text of that speech (found on Stanford’s website). I went through the text of it and highlighted a few key pieces. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to this speech and read the text of it. Every time, I’m inspired to do something. It’s just a wonderful statement of what success in life is all about.

Please, take five minutes or so and read this speech (or listen to it).

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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. Switching jobs and retirement plans
2. Family corporations
3. Student loan question
4. Savings targets for singles
5. Television
6. Job switch
7. Finding speaking gigs
8. Same card, different rates
9. Switching credit cards
10. Pieces of inspiration question

I’m not surprised at all to find that other banks are following Bank of America’s lead in adding fees to bank services that previously didn’t have fees associated with them.

It’s a simple matter of profit. If they think that only a few customers will jump ship because of these fees, then the fees will be a big net gain for them. They may even go back to the well for more fees.

Eventually, “fee free” will be a huge marketing point for checking account services.

Q1: Switching jobs and retirement plans
My company recently announced it will be divesting it’s self of my division. The work load and assets are being transferred to a new company. I am being offered a job at the same pay. I have a 401K which I am fully vested. I have options of either rolling it into the new company plan -XYZ company-, at any time or leaving it where it is -ABC company- at no cost. At this time my thoughts are to leave the plan where it is at no cost. Start investing in the new plan as soon as I’m able. But from there what factors should I use to determine weather or not I should roll my old plan into the new plan? Or is it a better option to keep not only my 401k diversified but the companies holding the plans diversified? And if I don’t trust trust my knowledge would it be beneficial to seek help from a professional financial adviser to create some sort of plan.
- Andy

I would study the two companies that offer the plans, as well as the investments offered within the plans.

If your old 401(k) offers drastically worse investment options from a company with a worse reputation than the company and offerings with your new employer, then you should roll it over.

All things being completely equal, I would probably leave the old one in place just for diversity’s sake, as you mention. Although there’s little risk of losing money in the failure of a reputable firm, there is a risk.

Q2: Family corporations
Can you provide any guidance in regard to purchasing property through a family corporation? We have heard of others getting great tax breaks if they set up a family corporation and use it to purchase property. What are your thoughts?
- Lisa

It depends on the tax breaks you’re looking for.

Essentially, a family corporation is no different than any other corporation. You set it up with a chairman and a board of directors (usually consisting of family members), then you sell shares in the corporation to raise money for the property purchase. The corporation then purchases the property. The corporation is then responsible for the property taxes on the property owned by that corporation.

What about getting the money out of the corporation? Any profit earned is a capital gains. Dividends are taxed as well.

To me, if you’re simply putting together a corporation to buy and sell real estate, you better be comfortable with the relationships you have with your family members because you’re entering into a fairly high-priced business arrangement with them. The board can decide to do things like allow some members to sell back their stock but not allow others and so on, and this can result in busted relationships.

To me, this isn’t worth it unless you’re talking about a lot of money. This is an option if you have several homes or some other significant amount of real estate you’re looking to transfer to the corporation. If this isn’t the case, it’s not really worth it.

Q3: Student loan question
I currently have $17,600 remaining in low interest student loan debt. I have been aggressively paying this down (from a total of nearly $50,000). But now I am worried. I’ve been hearing a lot lately in the media about politicians lobbying for student loan forgiveness as part of a stimulus package. I worry that as soon as I pay off my last loan, the government will decide to forgive it all, and if I had put the money in savings instead I would have had a significant amount of money in the bank rather than being screwed for doing the right thing. What do you think? Should I put all of my debt payment money into savings until this student loan thing plays out, then pay it off in one lump sum? Or keep tossing $500-$600 each paycheck into my loans, as I have been doing? All of my interest rates are in the 3s at this point.
- Alice

I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the potential policy in question (I’ll save that for another mailbag, perhaps the next one, because it’s a fairly long answer on its own and I received multiple questions about these political whisperings).

However, you should never base your financial plan on a “maybe,” particularly when that “maybe” is coming out of the mouth of a politician. If you put all of your money in savings instead of paying off debts because of that “maybe,” you have a very good chance of finding yourself paying a lot of extra interest on those student loans.

Ignore vague statements and promises that come from anyone’s mouth, particularly a politician’s mouth. Yes, it might happen someday, but if we all start making all of our moves based on what politicians hint at in an effort to get votes, we’d be broke in a year. Just ignore it. Take advantage of it when it becomes a law and don’t worry about it until then. In all likelihood, it will never happen anyway.

Q4: Savings targets for singles
Do you have any guidelines for how much money a single person should be saving?

The background: I am a 26 year old female. I rent an apartment. I have no debt; I paid off my student loans ($30,000) in May 2011. Since May, I have been able to save $4K in an emergency fund. (I had to make $2K worth of car repairs in June 2011 and then I was hit with $1k worth of medical bills in July). I make $60,000/yr (gross). I contribute 5% to a retirement fund (TSP), and my employer matches my contribution by 5%. I have no other assets other than my TSP (which is worth around $15K currently, but I really don’t consider it an asset since it’s a retirement fund).

Right now, I am able to save about 50% of my take home pay, after taxes, retirement contribution, and medical insurance. This savings averages out to about $1750/month. Is this okay? My goals are to (A.) build my e-fund to $5K; (B.) save $7K for a “new” car (my car is 13 years old); (C.) open a ROTH IRA and contribute another 5% of my pay; and (D.) save for a down payment on a home.

Am I on the right track?
- Ellen

You are absolutely on the right track. You’re saving about 50% of your take-home pay, wich is very very good, and you’ve got goals established for yourself, which is also very good.

If I were you, I would settle on an order for those goals (you may have already) and just knock them down like bowling pins. I would absolutely put the emergency fund first, but I’d probably put the Roth IRA second, before the car replacement.

You are doing light years better than many people your age and are absolutely on the right path. Kudos.

Q5: Television
You’ve mentioned that you don’t watch much television, but you’ve mentioned that you do watch Fringe. What shows do you watch? How much television do you watch per month?
- Amy

The only currently-airing shows that my wife and I watch are Fringe and Community. That’s it.

We do watch some documentaries when they air, such as the most recent Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition. We also watch some programs on streaming services without commercial interruption.

I would estimate my weekly television watching to be between three and five hours, on average.

Q6: Job switch
I’m about to make a job change that will affect my lifestyle and my finances. I currently make $210,000/year and would receive about a $20,000 raise each year for the next 4 years. Annual bonus is $30,000+. Great pay, right? Well, work-life balance is difficult. I’m married and have several young children, and I feel like I’ve been missing out on their lives since I started working. My wife and I recently reevaulated our situation and decided to seek out a job with a better work/life balance. I’ve now accepted such a job, but the pay is $125,000/year with an expected bonus of 10-15%. So it’s a $100k+ salary cut for next year, plus a cut in bonus. To make this work, we are moving away from the metropolitan area we live in to a more rural part of the country. I feel good about this decision because of what it means for my family (we’ll get to see each other and enjoy each other much more). Also, we’re moving to a part of the country that we’ve always imagined moving to and, from a career standpoint, my new job will help me develop marketable skills that I wouldn’t otherwise develop. The only thing I’m struggling to find peace with is the financial side of things.

We have $225,000 in student loan and car loan debt, $125,000 in retirement savings, and $10,000 in an emergency fund. We also have a $510,000 mortgage on a house currently worth about $550,000. If I had stayed at my current job, we’d have our car loan paid off by February 2012, and we’d have the student loans paid off by August 2014 as well as have a $55,000 emergency fund. Plus, this was with maxing out our 401k and IRAs during this time. Furthermore, this would have put us in a position where, even if we then changed jobs and moved, we could have easily held on to our house indefinitely as an investment property. (This is all according to a financial plan we had created last year.) Now, instead, we’re not even going to have the car loan paid off by January 2013! I don’t even want to think about when the student loans will be fully paid off. And as for the house, I doubt we’d get approved for another mortgage until we get rid of the current one. (I’m looking ahead several years here… we’re planning on renting for at least the first few years.) In the long term, I have excellent job security and have substantial room for growth at my new job. In the short term, however, I feel that I’ve moved my family’s date of financial independence many years down the road (though, importantly, we will continue to live comfortably in the meantime). I feel like Dave Ramsey would slap me across the face right now. But I ask, what good is financial independence if you’ve sacrificed crucial years with your family? I’m interested in what you have to say.
- Ken

I know exactly how you feel with regard to missing out on the lives of your children because of your job. I felt so strongly that way that I was simply compelled to make a career change in 2008 and start writing for The Simple Dollar full time. I took a huge pay cut. I haven’t regretted it in the least, though I will say that I miss some of the challenges of my old job and many of my old co-workers.

The question you have to ask yourself is what’s more important to you: quality time with your family or a shorter period to financial independence. There is no right or wrong answer here. It’s all about what really matters to you.

I don’t think Dave Ramsey would slap you across the face at all, and neither would I. You chose the thing that really matters to you. So what if it moves your debt payoff date down the road a bit?

Q7: Finding speaking gigs
I work for an association in California as trainer. I essentially write, facilitate and deliver in-person training programs for groups of various sizes. After reading your blog (found it last year after researching financial matters for a program I wrote) I’ve decided it’s time to pull the trigger on developing a side business. I have a passion for motivating and inspiring groups of people through public speaking. In addition, I am a decent trainer….I’ve found that you can be a great speaker, but deficient trainer, the 2 don’t always go hand-in-hand.

I was curious to hear from you some thoughts on how you think I could get started in this pursuit. To be upfront, I’m motivated by 1) increasing my revenue stream 2) I miss “taking the stage” and motivating people (I use to work in the church).
- Ed

The first thing I would do is seek out speaking groups in your local community. Is there a branch of Toastmasters International in your town? Many groups that are seeking local speakers will contact groups like these to find good speakers. It’s also a great way to practice your skills.

Another thing I’d point out is that you shouldn’t turn down chances to speak for free, especially at first. It gives you practice and it builds your reputation. Any time you have a chance to speak, take it. If you’re good, you’ll build a reputation. If you’re not, at least you got practice.

Another element is having something useful to say. What are you going to talk about? Have you written a book or done anything compelling that can be a calling card for you?

Q8: Same card, different rates
I was looking at a credit card comparison site and saw the Chase Freedom Card…with two different offers. I was originally looking for a gas card for limited purchases, but took a quick look at Chase since they were garanteeing the Gas Station card. The card requriing “excellent credit” has a higher cashback reward ($200 after $500/3months) and a higher interest rate, $15.99%. The other card required “good credit” and offered $100 cashback after $500/3months and a lower interest rate, 11.99%. Seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? I guess I should go for the higher cashback since I plan to use it only for gas purchases and pay it off every month. Your opinion?
- Carl

If you’re planning on paying it off every month, then the higher cashback offer is probably better for you.

As for the multiple offers for the same card, this is completely normal. Credit card companies often have many different offers for the same type of card. They’ll vary in the teaser offer, the interest rate, the maximum credit line, and countless other factors.

From my perspective, it’s good business for them. The more offers they have, the more likely they are to have one that will hook a new customer.

Q9: Switching credit cards
I feel like I am the opposite of many of the people that write in to you. I have hardly any savings, have never maxed out a 401K (although I always contribute at least something), and have a ton of credit card debt. I’m working on it, and am lucky to live in an affordable rent controlled apartment in Manhattan, where I don’t need to worry about paying for a car & insurance.

Right now I have an Amex Blue, Continental Airlines Visa from Chase and a no-frills Mastercard from CapitalOne. I have balances on all three, but have been paying at least double the minimum payment to try and get the balances down. Cumulative total around $13K.

After some fraud on my bank debit card, I am thinking about changing the Amex & the CapitalOne cards into Cash Back cards. But I am wary about doing both at the same time and what that will do to my credit score, which is currently around 730. Amex will let me transfer balances, CapitalOne will not, so I would have to close the no-frills account after I get the cash back account.

Do you think it is worth the cash back benefits? And as someone who is not going to buy a home or a car anytime soon, should I be overly concerned about the ding to my credit score and just work on getting some cash back?
- Melanie

The actual credit score impact of this shift will be pretty small and will disappear after several months, particularly if you get new cards with comparable credit limits.

The only thing I would watch out for is if you’re considering another major loan in the next several months. The short term dip in your credit could happen at a very inopportune time.

Aside from that, I’d make this change if it’s something you want to do.

Q10: Pieces of inspiration question
How do you use your “ten pieces of inspiration” to keep you moving throughout the week? Are there any that you keep going back to?
- Donna

Readers send me a lot of links along these lines, plus I’ll randomly stumble upon them throughout the week. If one resonates with me a bit, I store it in my “Inspiration” bookmarks folder and I share it the next week.

There are a lot of them that I see over and over again. I’m quite sure that at some point I’m going to repeat them (if I haven’t already).

There are a few that I look at time and time again. One that immediately comes to mind is Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement speech.

Got any questions? Email them to me or leave them in the comments and I’ll attempt to answer them in a future mailbag (which, by way of full disclosure, may also get re-posted on other websites that pick up my blog). However, I do receive hundreds of questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Calista writes in: Does reusing plastic (Ziploc) bags save pennies or dollars?

Clearly, any time you reuse something, you’re going to be saving money. The question is how much money and whether that time invested is really worth the money you saved.

Right off the bat, I would probably argue that the biggest reason for reusing sandwich and freezer bags is the environmental impact they have. These bags really aren’t biodegradable and when you toss them in the trash, they go into a landfill somewhere and sit there for a very long time. Think hundreds of years. That’s not something I like to do if I can avoid it.

Another “right off the bat” point: I should point out that in an earlier post, I ran the numbers on rewashing and reusing Ziploc sandwich bags. I found that, for all of the effort of rewashing them using the dishwasher and reusing them, you only saved $1.42 per hour washing sandwich baggies. For me, this falls clearly into the “not worth it” camp from a purely financial standpoint.

Here’s the thing, though: we do wash some of the Ziplocs that come through our house. Which ones? The quart and gallon-sized freezer bags.

The numbers At my local warehouse club, I can get a box containing four sets of 38 gallon freezer Ziploc bags for $10.74. This results in a price of $0.07 per bag.

I can also get a box containing four sets of 54 quart freezer Ziploc bags for $9.53. This results in a price of $0.05 per bag.

I can rewash and reuse a freezer Ziploc bag about sixteen times until the seams around the edge begin to give. This includes relatively short stints in the freezer.

According to my calculations, the cost to run a full load is 15.6 cents worth of detergent and water. A typical dishwasher load also uses 1.5 kilowatts of energy, adding an additional 17 cents to a load, bringing the total cost to approximately 32 cents per load.

I can fit twelve quart Ziploc bags (turned inside out and spread as widely as possible across the tines) and eight gallon Ziploc bags into a single dishwasher load. This inversion and insertion takes me about fifteen seconds per bag, which means I could in theory do 240 bags per hour.

This means that the cost of cleaning a quart freezer Ziploc bag is about 2.7 cents, and the cost of cleaning a gallon freezer Ziploc bag is about 4 cents.

Running the numbers You could either buy 256 gallon Ziploc freezer bags at a total cost of $18.09, or you could buy sixteen bags at a cost of $1.13 and wash them fifteen times each (which would require an investment of an hour of time) at a cost of $9.60, giving you a total cost of $10.73. Your savings for an hour spent washing the gallon Ziploc freezer bags in a dishwasher is $7.36.

What about the quart ones? You could either buy 256 quart Ziploc freezer bags at a total cost of $12.80, or you could buy sixteen bags at a cost of $0.80 and wash them fifteen times each (which would require an investment of an hour of time) at a cost of $6.48, giving you a total cost of $7.28. Your savings for an hour spent washing the quart Ziploc freezer bags in a dishwasher is $5.52.

Now, that’s not a terrible savings, but it’s not a home run, either. For a lot of people, the reason for rewashing such Ziploc bags isn’t the financial savings, but the environmental benefit. However, it’s good to know that you do save some money by rewashing them, and the faster you are at running them through the dishwasher (and I’ll be the first to admit that my fifteen seconds per bag isn’t particularly dextrous), the better your savings rate is.

As I write this, I’m in a quiet room with all the lights off. I’ve been rocking my youngest child for more than an hour to get him to take a much-needed nap. He’s had an intestinal bug for the last three days and hasn’t slept comfortably during any of it.

The room is so quiet that my fingers sound like drums on the keyboard. I can hear the hum of the fan on my laptop.

Best of all, I can hear him gently breathing in his crib just a few feet away from me.

Sleep well, little guy. Daddy has some writing to do.

Expanding the circle of “missed” If you suddenly picked up and moved to the other side of the world without telling anyone, how many people would miss you? I’d argue that the larger the number of people that would miss you, the greater your chances of success both here and there. It’s all about the relationships. (@ seth godin)

Six Reasons Why You Should Panic and One Reason Why You Should Keep Investing Would you really be shocked to learn that the one reason trumps the other six? (@ the dividend guy)

The Real Secret to Achieving Financial Freedom on a Modest Income The real secret is simple. It’s all about really understanding the difference between your wants and your needs and acting in a mature way based on that knowledge. (@ len penzo)

How to Deal with a Job You Hate The biggest suggestion I can offer is to simply remember that you’re swapping time and energy for money. That’s really the equation of a job – nothing more, nothing less. (@ dumb little man)

I have, right here at my side, a list of several big projects that I’d love to take on. It’s all stored in a document on my computer. I have a video series that I’m collaborating on with a few people. I have a few standalone websites I’d like to design. I have two different books I’d like to write. The list just goes on and on.

Day after day, though, it feels as though I don’t have the time to actually do any of these things.

I’m fully aware that I have a lot of things on my plate already: running The Simple Dollar (and all of the things that involves) along with being a good husband, being a good parent, and keeping up with household tasks eat up a lot of time.

Sadly, I know where a lot of that time goes. It goes into time sinks like Facebook, Twitter, messageboards, and bookmarking sites like Popurls. It goes into reading some pageturning novel that reads quickly but doesn’t leave me thinking differently about anything at all.

The real trick is figuring out how to overcome these time wasters so I can be more productive with my time. Here’s how I’m doing just that – and you can do the same.

Recognize that you have a problem with a particular time waster. If you find yourself browsing a site out of a lack of “anything better to do,” you likely have a problem. If you find yourself doing something aimless without really even thinking about it, you likely have a problem.

The real question is whether you can admit to yourself that you actually have a problem. Can you stand up to yourself and admit that, yes, this activity or this website is draining away time that I could be using on something worthwhile?

See how much time you actually spend on that time waster. There are a lot of approaches to doing this.

The easiest one – if you spend too much time on the computer wasting time – is a tool like RescueTime, which keeps track of the time you spend on various websites. It runs in the background on your computer, simply tallying the time you spend on the websites you visit and the applications you use. You can easily download reports on this time use – and it can often be shocking.

If you are challenged by an offline distraction, the easiest way to figure out your time lost to that distraction is to keep a careful time diary. Simply make a note of what you’re doing (or what you did) every fifteen minutes or so for a few days. Then, total up the various activities to get a picture of how you’re spending your time.

Often, the time you dump into your time waster of choice is shocking.

Make a list of the things you used to do before the time wasters came along. Since you now know how much time you’re dumping into that time waster, think about the things you used to fill your time with before you started dumping your time into that time waster.

Simply think about your life in the past. What activities did you once enjoy that you don’t seem to have time for any more? Did reading books get bumped out of the picture? What about gardening? Maybe you used to play basketball or go to the gym.

Whatever it was, it’s likely that the time waster you’re now thinking about has replaced that once-good thing in your life. Is that really a net gain?

Also, make a list of the things you could get done without the time waster in your life. This goes hand-in-hand with the above suggestion and, honestly, it pertains much more to me than the above suggestion does. Right now, I’m not bothered by the things I’m used to do. I’m bothered by not having enough time to take care of the ideas I have.

My list of ideas is a huge motivator for figuring out a better approach for managing my time and getting rid of my time wasters.

Give yourself a set time of the day to use the time waster. Often, time wasters do serve a useful purpose when used in moderation. They can help you stay in touch with family and friends or provide a bit of entertainment and education. The challenge appears when they’re not used in moderation.

One effective way of ensuring moderate use of a time waster is to set up a specific time of day to use that time waster. For example, simply make an agreement with yourself to avoid Facebook until after 7 PM or agree to only read a silly novel or watch a sitcom after 8 PM. Suddenly, you have much more available time during the day.

Turn off email and cell phone notifications. Notifications of these kinds simply serve to alert you to relatively unimportant events and suck you right back into the time waster. Turn them off and instead simply keep your use of that time waster to the set time of day you established earlier. (Really, do you need an email telling you that someone you knew in high school just updated their Facebook profile?)

In the end, you’ll find that by eliminating a big time waster in your life, you actually have time to pursue the things that you really value in life.

Given that an article entitled “Improving Your Score” appears on The Simple Dollar, most readers might assume that the tips that follow are going to deal with improving their credit score.

They would be right – at least in part.

However, most of the principles one would use in dealing with a credit score are pretty much the same as dealing with any life score that one wants to alter. A cholesterol score. A test score. A final time in a 5K run. One’s weight.

Whenever you have a tangible way of keeping “score” on something, there are some fundamental techniques that you can use to improve that “score,” no matter what that score is. They work over and over again in life, from matters of personal finance to personal health, from leisurely pursuits to professional objectives.

Got a score that you want to improve? Here’s the game plan.

Read. Why exactly are your numbers not where you want them to be? What kinds of techniques are commonly employed to improve that score? The answers to these questions usually involve a significant amount of reading and knowledge acquisition, so the first step to improving your score is to hit the library.

The key thing is to remember the two key questions you want to answer: why (is my score bad) and how (can I improve it). All of your reading should be geared toward coming up with lots of answers to both of these questions. The more answers you have, the better.

Develop a plan. Once you have your lists of whys – and the respective list of how to solve those whys – you have the materials you need to develop a plan. Go through that list of hows and choose a subset of them that’s challenging yet feasible within your life. Don’t choose activities that are simply outside your abilities or aren’t ones that you’re going to realistically follow through on.

A good plan sets forth clear steps for you to follow and offers up milestones for success along the way. A good plan makes the “right” behavior as clear as the “wrong” behavior. A good plan pushes you toward better behavior, but doesn’t make things impossible, either.

Check that plan. Once you’ve developed a plan for improving your score, have someone else with fresh eyes check that plan. It’s useful if that person is an expert, but it’s also useful if that plan checker is simply someone who cares for you. Close friends are great plan checkers, as are spouses.

What are they looking for? They’re basically there to be your reality check. Are the elements of your plan truly realistic? Or are you missing some sort of crucial detail that you overlooked along the way? You have to take their criticism of your plan for what it is, which is simply their best attempt to help you succeed.

Stick with that plan day in and day out. When you have a plan in place, it’s up to you to stick with it. From my own experience, I can tell you that it’s vital to never give yourself permission to violate a plan, because once you give yourself that permission, it’s very easy to permit yourself to do it again … and again … and again until the plan is useless.

That’s not to say your plan shouldn’t have any breathing room in it. Every good plan makes some room for the unexpected. A great financial plan makes room for unexpected expenses. A great exercise plan makes room for acts of God. A great diet plan makes room for splurges.

Take a revised score (but not too often). Since this entire process was started by a score that you didn’t like, you know that you have the ability to check that score again in the future, whether it be your credit score or your weight or your debt total or anything else. I recommend checking that score from time to time, but I suggest doing it monthly at most.

Checking your score every day is actually somewhat counterproductive, because it’ll often give you a sense that you’re not making progress when you actually are. For example, if you start checking your weight every day after starting an improvement in your diet and exercise trends, you’re going to be disappointed, and disappointment is a direct route to failure.

Good luck! Let’s improve those scores!