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. Heating and cooling issues
2. Tax problems
3. Student loan debt juggling
4. Daylight Savings Time switch problems
5. Joint accounts with aging parents
6. Potential book selling scam
7. Multilingual children
8. Roth and 403(b) balancing
9. Salsa deal
10. Splurges

My children have a “dress-up tub” in the basement that contains a wide variety of costume clothes we’ve picked up here and there. Most of it is too big for them, but they can get the items on.

They tend to play with the “dress-up tub” a lot during the winter, but scarcely touch it during the summer because they’re outside so often. This weekend, they dumped it out for the first time in quite a while.

It’s almost as if a big session of the kids playing “dress-up” is an unofficial sign of the changing of the seasons.

Q1: Heating and cooling issues
I am having some problems getting my roommates to understand frugality, especially when it comes to the air conditioning/heating unit in our house. I am trying to research how much money it wastes to constantly have the air on, especially when it is only 75 degrees outside. My roommates believe that it costs more money to turn the air on and have it re-cool the house and insist it run constantly. I think that it is cheaper to turn it off when no one is home. What is cheaper?

Also, we have an upstairs and a downstairs and, therefore, two units. Sometimes when I wake up I find the downstairs has been on cool at 75 degrees all night while the upstairs has been on heat at 75 degrees all night. I feel like this cannot be good, but I can’t find any research to back up just how much money we are wasting or why this is bad. Is this a waste of money? Can you help me find some research on these things, so I can explain to them why I am so frustrated?
- Bill

It’s substantially cheaper to turn off the air conditioning and heating when you’re not at home. Why? If you’re constantly cooling or heating your home, you’re keeping the temperature of your house far away from the outside temperature, and basic thermodynamics says you’re going to lose the heat or the cool in your house faster if the temperature outside is far away from the temperature inside your house. That’s why your A/C runs a lot on a very hot day and not very much on a mildly hot day, and your furnace runs like mad on a very cold day.

However, if you don’t run the A/C or heat all day, the house temperature begins to approach the temperature outside, and the closer it gets to that temperature, the slower the rate of change is in the house. What that means is that at the end of the day when you have to use the furnace or A/C to “catch up,” you’re not going to have to run it nearly as long as the total time it would have to run to keep the temperature steady all day. It’s far better to “catch up” ten degrees at the end of the day than to “catch up” two degrees every single half hour.

As for the heat and air conditioning at the same time, that’s just a waste of energy. You’re far better off accepting that the basement and upper floor are going to be a few degrees different and just use one unit to manage the temperature of the house. My suggestion would be to just use the heat to keep the basement a few degrees cooler than you’d like, then not run anything upstairs. If it gets too warm, crack a window up there for a bit, then close it. Running two units is crazy just so you can have the exact same home temperature in the basement and the upper floor.

Q2: Tax problems
My husband and I got caught up in a dispute with our state’s department of revenue where we kept sending them verification that yes, he had paid his income taxes for 2009 on time, but they kept losing track of our paper work or never updated their records. It finally got settled after a year of going back and forth with them but not before they filed a tax lien against my husband. We did not find out about the lien until two months ago when my husband checked his credit report. It was quite a shock to us, and we immediately set about to get it taken off. The problem is that so far, the best we’ve been able to do is get it marked as paid, where in our eyes it should be removed. We’ve been told that even if it’s paid, a lien is horrible for your credit. We’ve been going round and round with the credit reporting companies and can’t seem to get anywhere with them. I want to try a few more things but am not optimistic they will work. I’m starting to wonder if we should get some legal help. My concern, however, is that I know it won’t come cheap and don’t know if it would be worth it. My husband wants to buy a car next year, so he will need his credit in good shape to do that. How do we figure out if it will be worth it? We don’t know my husband’s credit score right now (the lien is by far the worst thing on the report, so it shouldn’t be that bad but for the lien. His only debt is about $5,000 in student loans). Should we find it out and go from there? Thanks for any help!
- Lisa

My guess is that your credit score is still moderately good, but not great. If you’re really concerned, I’d get your credit score checked through a reputable organization. One approach you might take is to go to your local credit union and simply ask them if they have any credit checking services.

Getting something like this removed from your credit report is often more expensive than the benefit you’d get from having it removed.

As I’ve mentioned before, I consider the methods used in the United States to verify credit as completely ludicrous. There are so many situations like this one where one’s credit history does not reflect the reputability of the person, but more accurately reflects the (lack of) credibility of the institution reporting the credit issue.

Q3: Student loan debt juggling
A little background. I am a medical student and my wife is just out of nursing school, making about $80,000 with amazing insurance and a 5% 401k match. Our combined undergraduate debt is about $100,000 as she was solely focused on nursing school which landed her a great job, and I went to an expensive undergraduate school and worked full time as an EMT ($10/hr). No family contributions either way, but they were both well off and thus no aid outside of loans. My tuition now is $44,000 a year and of course I cannot work. There are not many med school scholarships for kids from middle class families, so it is basically all on loans. She is paying off both our undergrad loans and supporting us in every way.

I was recently approached by a company (a legitimate company) that offered to do all our taxes and handle all our repayment, i.e. tell us who to pay when, once residency starts. I don’t know if you are familiar with how it works, but basically I will graduate with $200,000 in medical school debt (plus undergrad that we hope will have a dent after 4 years of her paying it) and work as a resident for 7 years making about $50,000. This is nice because I will be working about 80hr/week and I don’t really have time to focus on the plans and percentages (though it is very significant with those large numbers). The company charges a flat $500/yr, and they help strategize your repayment, specifically focusing on income based repayment (as a resident, married, and wanting kids, that repayment will be close to $0) then after residency, if I took a job with a non-profit hospital, I would have my loans forgiven after 10 total years. They maximize, fill, and file our taxes too. This seems too good to be true, but there is a lot of testimony, and it takes advantage of a system really set up for people who took out $100,000 to get a social work degree and make $30,000 a year and can never repay that debt.

Do you know if there are dangers in taking out the maximal med school loan amount (which I don’t really need, since my wife pays for living expenses) and using that extra money to pay all our private loans (which are not covered by IBR and the 10 year forgiveness). Also, I feel weird saving money in IRA or 401k with all that debt, but this plan seems to encourage taking out the max, saving it, then having it all forgiven. I feel there is a moral dilemma. We currently max out both our IRAs and match the 401k. We also pay 25% of her take home for loan repayment, plus save for a future house. What are your thoughts on these companies that handle repayment strategies and specifically this 10 year forgiveness plan.
- Ron

I’ve heard of a lot of variations on plans like this. What these organizations do is essentially manage all of your money for you and either assign you some living stipend according to their formula or essentially give you a debit card to live off of while the rest of your income goes toward eliminating your debt.

These plans can work well, but you have to remember that they’re in business to make money. They’re not really doing anything that you couldn’t do yourself. You’re basically paying $500 a year for a service that will save you the effort in paying taxes and the effort in running a debt repayment plan.

I’m not clear on whether this forgiveness plan is tied to this company. There are a lot of student loan programs out there that are backed by government at some level that forgive student loans for people who take on high-risk jobs. It seems like this is just a service that is a “front end” to this kind of loan.

Again, it just sounds like you’re paying $5,000 over ten years to simplify your taxes and some of your money management. To me, that’s not worth it. It may be to you, though.

Q4: Daylight Savings Time switch problems
I have a terrible time adjusting to the switches to and from Daylight Savings Time. Do you have any tips that will help me not kill my productivity?
- James

Honestly, I just try to ignore the switch as much as I can. I try to keep my bedtimes and waking times in relation to sunrise and sunset rather than in accordance to the clock. The biggest trick there is just making sure that when the clocks shift, I’m not causing my children to be late for school or anything like that.

For me, it’s the change in day length that really causes difficulty. Day lengths vary about six hours over the course of a year here and during November, December, and January, the short days can get to me.

If you’re really finding the change rough, I suggest starting an exercise routine. Few things are better at improving and maintaining your energy level than regular physical activity.

Q5: Joint accounts with aging parents
I have read mixed reviews on the idea of adult children being added to their parents’ accounts. The issue often mentioned is the gift tax. But, the upside is that it is easier to make payments on behalf of the parent(s) in the event of illness or death.

What do you suggest? Are there any ground rules you would suggest like keeping the account below $13,000 to avoid gift tax issues? Does it need to be listed as an asset for a will since there are other siblings?
- Michelle

Money in that account would be considered part of the parental estate since the parent never relinquished control of it (because they kept their name on the account). Of course, any money you take from that account for your own use is considered a gift for tax purposes.

As long as anything that comes out of that account is clearly for your parents, there’s no issue at all with you being on the account. This is the type of thing that can be dug up in the case of an audit, so I’d take care with this regard.

When your parent passes on, don’t touch the account unless it’s explicitly for any remaining parental expenses. The rest of the money should be handled by the executor of the will.

Q6: Potential book selling scam
I need to buy some fairly expensive graduate school exam prep books online and the seller wants me to pay through PayPal. After we negotiated on the price a little bit, he asked if I could pay through personal check, money order or by direct deposit into his bank account to avoid the 3% PayPal fee. Is there a potential for scamming through giving an unknown seller a personal check/direct deposit/money order?
- Kelly

Well, if you pay using that method, there’s no reason for him to send you the books if he’s going to scam you. Your only way to force him to send anything would be via small claims court.

The reason that services like Amazon Marketplace and eBay work well is that they offer protection against these kinds of scams. Paypal does as well, though it can sometimes have its own issues.

I would never pay someone I didn’t know without using some kind of buyer protection.

Q7: Multilingual children
Do you think there is any benefit to raising your children in a multilingual household? My mother-in-law speaks Punjabi and insists that our children speak it as well. Will this really help our children in any tangible way?
- Andrew

There are some studies that indicate that there are advantages in overall communication skills for children who learn multiple languages during their first few years of life. Not only that, a truly bilingual person tends to have great potential in job markets. I would think that someone who can freely speak both Punjabi and English would have many job opportunities, particularly if packaged with other skills.

That being said, how exactly would you go about teaching your child both languages? Are both you and your spouse bilingual? Do you communicate at home in both languages? If you’re not doing this – or, even worse, if you can’t do this – teaching your child two languages is going to be an extra challenge.

I think if you have the ability to easily teach your child multiple languages during their formative years, by all means do it. However, if doing so is going to add significant stress to your home situation, I’m not sure the benefits overshadow that.

Q8: Roth and 403(b) balancing
I’m 40 years old and finally got around to thinking about retirement savings a few years ago. Better late than never. I have a 403(b) plan to which my employer contributes 5% of my 70K salary. The plan lets me contribute essentially as much of my pre-tax income as I want to–all the way up to 75%. I was contributing 15% for a while but recently dialed it back to 5% so I can more quickly put together the emergency savings fund I’ve decided to create.

My question is about adding a Roth IRA to the mix and how to invest those funds. I have the 403(b) invested in a moderate growth fund through Vanguard but am thinking of changing that to a target retirement date fund. Should I invest the Roth IRA the same way, or is there a reason to invest one instrument more conservatively than the other? I have to admit that I’m pretty skeptical about the stock market and fairly pessimistic about our economy, but I’m willing to tolerate some risk and hope for the best over the long term.

Also, would you suggest that I try to max out my annual IRA contribution if possible, or should I focus instead on the 403(b) and just contribute to the IRA as my cash flow allows? Or somewhere in between?
- Ron

I think target retirement funds are a great way to plan for retirement. If you’re feeling more conservative, there’s no reason not to invest in a target retirement fund that targets a date earlier than your retirement date.

I see no reason why you couldn’t put both your IRA and your 403(b) into a target retirement fund. You could have one target an earlier date and another target a later date.

As for balancing the two, I would make sure I got every drop of matching money from my employer in that 403(b) before looking at a Roth. If you have all of the matching money already and are looking to save more, I’d put everything into a Roth until I maxed it out, and if I had still more, I’d go back to the 403(b).

Q9: Salsa deal
My wife laughed at me when I mentioned the article on salsa. She found a coupon deal and got 10 bottles of Chi-Chi’s brand salsa for free. She is the queen of the deal.
- Joe

Such deals can be found, but how much effort are you putting into deal seeking? Also, how many of those jars will actually be used before their expiration date?

My experience with such deal-hunting has been that there’s a lot of serendipity involved. If you spend a lot of time digging, sometimes you’ll find nothing at all. Other times, you’ll find a great deal like this salsa one.

For me, it’s not worth it to trawl coupon resources for an hour to save $5 on my grocery bill. I’ll do a quick pass to find coupons that match my grocery list, but finding great deals for the sake of finding great deals never pans out for me over the long haul.

Q10: Splurges
What do YOU splurge on?
- Emma

My biggest two splurges are board/card games and books. Those are pretty much the only things I splurge on at this point. I guess I do splurge on very nice gifts for my wife and my parents at appropriate occasions. I used to splurge on video games, but I’ve only bought one game for myself this year, so I think that’s not really a splurge at this point.

Once a year, I go to a gaming convention with a few friends. I usually save up for this over a period of months. I consider that to be something of a splurge.

I really don’t do any impulse buys that I can think of, though. I’m the type of person who will sometimes put “breath freshening gum” on my grocery list, but without an item like that on the list, I won’t buy gum in the checkout aisle.

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.

Every Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance or other book of interest. Also available is a complete list of the hundreds of book reviews that have appeared on The Simple Dollar over the years.

Every once in a while, I’ll stumble upon a book that’s basically already covered the ground I had planned on using for a post series in the future. This is one of those books.

Yes, starting in February, I was planning a “how to garden on a tight budget” series. The problem is, after reading this wonderful book by Maureen Gilmer, that post series is pretty much redundant. This book covers all of the ground I intended to cover in that series.

I guess this would lead to the question of why I would write a series about budget gardening. Simply put, a garden is a great way to produce vegetables and fruits and herbs inexpensively for your kitchen, plus it gives you a great outdoors activity to fill the months of spring, summer, and fall. The one catch is that gardening tends to have a large startup budget, one that you might be repaying for quite a while out of the savings on your garden’s produce.

So, how can one reduce the startup costs? At the same time, are there any tricks for reducing the ongoing costs of gardening in the form of things like seeds, fertilizer, and so forth? That’s pretty much exactly what this book covers and it provides a lot of great answers.

Stretch Every Dollar
The book opens with a focus on the absolute essential equipment you need to get a garden up and running. One key section of this chapter that I particularly enjoyed listed about fifteen key garden tools (like a hand trowel, a pointed shovel, a hoe, a small leaf rake, and so on) and identified specifically what you should look for when buying that item. What features does it need to do its job well over a long period of time? The chapter also includes some homebrew recipes for insect repellent (mix four tablespoons liquid dish soap into a gallon of water, then spray on plants), fertilizer (a crazy mix of common household ingredients that I’m going to try soon), and other such items.

From there, the book moves onto how to shop for the initial plants you need, incorporating some great standard frugality tactics into garden supplying. One good suggestion is to just buddy up with other gardeners, so that when you buy a multi-pack of plants (saving money by buying in bulk) you can split them up among the people involved. Another good tactic is to save seeds and cuttings from previous years, but this requires that you start off with non-hybridized seeds (from a Seed Savers catalog, for example).

From here, Gilmer moves onto making good soil. Soil can be expensive if you’re buying bags of topsoil or potting soil, so she suggests making your own. Hunt around for a source of manure (if you know a livestock farmer, cattle manure is fantastic for this). Use alfalfa as a mulch. Better yet, make your own compost (which is something we do) out of your leftover plant scraps. It’s not hard to make really rich soil for your garden at a pittance.

Environmental Cents
The focus of this section is mostly on how to reduce your utility bills using your plants, making them serve double duty (or perhaps triple duty). The first example is the advantage of planting shade trees around your home, effectively keeping the hot sun out in the summer and insulating a bit in the winter. Fast-growing shade trees are plentiful and will let you start reaping that advantage in just a handful of years.

Another method is to choose ornamental plants that are drought-resistant so that you don’t have to actively water them very often. Instead, you can rely on the rainwater in your area to provide plenty of water for them, enabling you to cut down on your water use.

This section also focuses on the value of reusing the things you have on hand. Use large twigs to build lattices and other structures for your vines to grow on (we do this every year for our cucumbers). Use grass clippings and leaves as a resource for the composter or for direct mulching on your garden. Instead of buying large rocks or cement blocks, keep your eye out for flat rocks that would make for beautiful garden decorations.

Gratis – As It Should Be
The final section of this book focuses on how to get free things for your garden, from plant and seed samples to wonderful ideas. One great suggestion is to simply start following good gardening blogs (a couple of my favorites are A Way to Garden and Garden Rant).

However, the real focus of this section is on saving your own seeds and cuttings for the future. In the case of seeds, this requires that you start from non-hybridized plants or seeds of your own, which you can get from a group like Seed Savers. The book provides a great guide on techniques for saving seeds and cuttings. Once you’ve established this as a routine, you can begin trading your excess seeds for new ones, enabling you to try new plants without spending a dime.

Is The Small Budget Gardener Worth Reading?
If you’ve ever liked gardening and would like a few frugal tips, pick up this book. Furthermore, if you’ve ever thought about gardening but been daunted by the startup costs, you must read this book.

It’s colorful, fun, easy to read, and full of wonderful frugal gardening tips. That adds up to a great book to me. Ours is already accumulating dog-eared pages.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Small Budget Gardener on Amazon.com.

One of my basic rules of personal finance is never loan money to friends or family. It creates a lender-borrower situation that you just don’t want to mix with friendships and family relationships.

Think about it this way: do you like your mortgage holder? Do you feel warm, friendly feelings about them? That’s the result of a lender-borrower relationship and when you lend money to friends or family, that’s what you add to the equation.

Yet, time after time, I get messages from readers who seem completely convinced that lending money to their friends and family is the right way to go. They’re going to do it, no matter what I suggest, because there is some social reason why they believe it’s the right thing to do.

I absolutely believe loaning money to someone is a horrible idea, but if you’re going to do it, here’s how I would go about that process.

First, assume you’re not going to be paid back. From your eyes, think of the money you’re lending as a gift. A very high portion of personal loans are never repaid and if you expect to be repaid, you’re going to be disappointed and you’re going to start injecting negativity into that relationship. Be aware of that right off the bat and don’t expect to be repaid.

Hand in hand with that assumption is the realization that you should never loan money that you’re going to need in the future. If you’re going to need that money to survive, don’t lend it, period. Only lend money that you could live without – money that would ordinarily go to non-essential items.

When you loan the money, make it clear to the person that you’re not worried about when you’ll be paid back. Make it clear that they can repay you on their own terms, because when you start setting terms, you’re creating a relationship-damaging lender-borrower situation. Let them pay you back when they can.

At the same time, make it clear that you won’t loan to them again until this is paid back. You do not want to become a well of support. A loan is just that – a single shot of money intended to help them right their ship again. You are not a means for them to get by. You are not a method by which they don’t have to start taking responsibility for their actions.

Once you’ve loaned the money, don’t bring it up. In fact, the best thing you can possibly do is just to completely forget that you’ve loaned any money at all. Since you’ve not set any terms on having them pay you back, simply allow them to figure out their situation and come up with a repayment plan. If they don’t, well, you didn’t expect to get the money back anyway.

If they ask for another loan, say “no” unless you’re really willing to give up more money. If you do say “no,” simply point out that you previously told them that you would not loan them more money until the earlier loan was paid back. This is an easy and very clear response, as it puts the onus of trust onto them, not onto you.

As I said at the start of this article, this advice only matters if you’ve decided to loan money anyway, even though I generally consider it to be a really bad idea. If you’re considering loaning money to a friend or family member, please think it over carefully before doing so.

I have made the mistake of lending money to family and friends in the past. Eventually, I had to accept that this money was simply gone. If I had accepted that idea from the start, I wouldn’t have damaged any relationships in the process. Instead, I could have continued to be a part of their process of fixing their life.

Don’t let money get in the way of your friendships or family. Avoid lending money if you can, and if you must, make it as unintrusive as possible.

Earlier today, I was thumbing through the excellent book The Millionaire Next Door, when I came across an interesting discussion about a person’s net worth. The authors, William Stanley and Thomas Danko, offer up a rule of thumb for a person’s net worth:

Multiply your age times your realized pretax annual household income from all sources except inheritances. Divide by ten. This, less any inherited wealth, is what your net worth should be.

(A quick refresher: a person’s net worth is the total sum of their assets – their home, their car, their bank accounts – minus their debts.)

So, let’s say you’re thirty years old and you make $35,000 per year. According to this formula, your net worth should be $105,000.

That seems on the surface like it might be a good calculation, but it is loaded with flaws that simply don’t add up.

Take me at age 23. I made $43,000 that year pre-tax. It was my first year out of college, so I was saddled with student loan debts and I hadn’t been earning very much up to that point. According to their formula, my net worth should have been just a hair shy of $100,000. Unsurprisingly, it was negative.

It also creates some unrealistic numbers for people later in life. Let’s say someone is 65 and has been working for minimum wage all of their life, causing them to live paycheck to paycheck all the way through. It’s been a struggle for them, but they’ve been banking on Social Security for retirement and they’ve managed to survive. This year, the person makes $20,000. Stanley and Danko believe that this person’s net worth should be $130,000. That’s just not realistic.

What are some good solutions for this?

First, I’d subtract a minimum living wage out of the equation. If you’re only making minimum wage, it’s not realistic to expect you to start building up a big net worth. All of your money is going to keep your head above water. So, I’d subtract $20,000 a year (at least) off of the salary and probably an additional $5,000 per additional dependent. So, for a family of five, I’d subtract $40,000 off of that salary number.

Second, I’d use an average of the person’s last ten years of income. So, if you look at me at age 23, my average earnings for the previous three or four years was about $8,000, and for the years before that it was essentially $0. This would give me an average of $6,700.

This works very well with the “subtract out the minimum wage” rule for people freshly out of college. My net worth at age 23 would have been -$30,590, which actually wasn’t too far off. With each subsequent year, that net worth starts inching upwards, which is realistic because I would have been paying off that debt.

There’s a third problem, though, once you start making those changes. If you’re looking at someone making a good wage over a long period of time, these revisions undercut how much they should have built up for their net worth. The original rule of thumb works well for people with a healthy income over a consistent period of time.

The solution that I see is to reduce the number that you divide your average income by. This doesn’t have much impact on people who don’t stray too terribly far from the minimum wage as an average income, but it has a pretty big impact on people who consistently earn a healthy wage. I tried fitting various numbers to my own historical financial progress and found that reducing the number from ten to eight seemed to have a very reasonable impact.

So, what does this turn the “rule of thumb” into?

“Take the average of your last ten years of pretax income. Subtract a living wage from that average, meaning $15,000 plus $5,000 more for each dependent (including you) on your taxes. Multiply that by your age, then divide by eight. This will give you a good estimate of what your net worth should be.”

This, of course, isn’t a perfect calculation. No such “rule of thumb” ever is. However, I think it creates a more realistic view of people’s lives. It matches up much more realistically for the situation I found myself in immediately after college, as well as the situation I find myself in now. It also matches up well with the situation my parents are in.

Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.

This past week, my oldest two children and I spent some time looking at public domain photos of different points in American history for an art project. Some of them really inspired me, so this week’s entry has quite a few of them.

1. Soldier’s Goodbye and Bobby the Cat (ca. 1939-1945) by Sam Horn
A friend of our family was recently deployed to Afghanistan, and at the same time, our son’s school is engaging in a “thank you” letter writing campaign to veterans of past wars. Because of that, the issue of people going off to war has been on our minds lately. This picture just grabbed us.

A beautiful image of love in a time of war.

2. P. T. Barnum on money’s value
What good is money if you don’t have anything that you otherwise value?

“Money is good for nothing unless you know the value of it by experience.” – P. T. Barnum

All money does is let you align your life with the things that you value. If you’re not doing that, then what value does it have?

3. Child in a swimsuit holding a basket of clams (ca. 1929-1932) by Vern Gorst
When we came across this picture, we started a long discussion about why this young child was working, carrying what looks to be a reasonably heavy basket of clams. This led us to a long conversation about how in some societies young children have to work to help out the family.

We spent some time wondering about this child, particularly whether this child was working or was playing some sort of game with clam shells. What is this child’s world like? One can’t help but wonder.

4. Henry Ford on financial independence
Financial independence is the result of something else.

“If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.” – Henry Ford

If you work hard to build your knowledge, your experience, and your ability, you’re also building your independence.

5. Schoolchildren line up for free issue of soup and a slice of bread in the Depression (1934) by Sam Hood
Whenever I hear someone complaining about the sorry state of the economy, I think of pictures like this one, depicting people lining up in soup kitchen lines in the 1930s because there was simply no way for them to get food at home. Banks where people had their life savings vanished with all of their money. Unemployment reached 30% – and much higher in some areas. This picture inspired a long conversation with my oldest son about poverty.

This picture inspires me because it reminds me that things can always be far worse than they are. We are all really pretty well off.

6. LooseCubes
There are times when it’s not convenient for me to work at home. When that happens, I try to work at the library, but that doesn’t always work out, either. Coffee shops can work, but if they’ve got a lot of people, those sometimes fail. A few times a year, I just need a cubicle somewhere for the day to just get some stuff done.

That’s exactly what LooseCubes helps with. It can tell you where you can find a desk somewhere to work without interruption. This site really helped during our Seattle trip when I had an emergency to deal with and needed a distraction-free place to work for a while. I left it bookmarked and recently found it again, realizing how useful it can really be for people who are self-employed.

7. Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936) by Dorothea Lange
This picture is famous for a reason. The look on this woman’s face and the situation she found herself in as a post-Dust Bowl migrant with children is a painful one.

My daughter looked at this for a long time and called the woman a “sad mommy” and wanted to know why the children weren’t trying to make her laugh. I gave her a hug and said, “I think they’re just hugging each other.” She put her arms around me and didn’t say anything for a while.

8. Andre Maurois on happiness and the past
Whenever I think about the past too much, I tend to feel melancholy. Similarly, whenever I feel melancholy, I tend to dwell on the past.

“The first recipe of happiness – avoid too lengthy meditations on the past.” – Andre Maurois

Today is a much brighter place than yesterday.

9. Thomas [in car] (ca. 1910 – 1915)
This last picture is a bit lighter in tone than the earlier ones. This led us to talk a lot about how much things change over a hundred years, from the car the man was driving to how he was dressed.

There are so many details that are so different today, yet the situation is also familiar. He’s a person enjoying a bit of freedom.

10. Jessi Arrington on the virtues of thrift stores
This is wonderfully spot on.

Dinner with My Family is taking a one week hiatus this week.

On the shelf in my office sits a well-worn copy of the board game Settlers of Catan. By well-worn, I mean well-worn. Fraying edges. Ink starting to wear off of the cards. A few home-brewed replacement pieces. A bit of moisture damage causing some warped pieces.

The game has moved with me at least four times. It’s went to the homes of countless friends. It’s been taken on countless camping trips, including quite a few where we pulled all of the pieces out of the box and put them into bags for easier travel.

In 1998, I paid somewhere around $30 for this game. I would estimate that Sarah and I have each had several hundred hours worth of fun from this game and it’s not completely worn out yet. It still has some miles left to go before it needs replacing.

I’ve gotten much more value out of this well-worn game than from most of the nearly-new items in our home.

When I think about the items I’ve used until they’ve literally worn out, my mind is flooded with memories.

I actually wore out an iPod Touch until the battery only held charge for about fifteen minutes and the screen was so scratched up that it was unusable.

I’ve read about five books so many times that pages were falling apart. That’s why I now own second copies of Your Money or Your Life and Getting Things Done.

We kept using an old crock pot until the heating element stopped functioning in it. Earlier wear included several chips in the ceramic, a broken lid, and a broken leg.

I wore out several CDs during my college years, simply from small scratches accumulated over many, many, many listens and trips in my backpack.

I had a backpack that finally fell to shreds. I’ve done the same with several pairs of shoes and more than a few pairs of socks.

Every time I actually use an item until I’ve worn it out, I feel as though I’ve received incredible value from that item. That item not only saved me a lot of money over the years (or provided so many hours of value for such a little price), but it also became imbued with a lot of memories along the way. My memories and associations with that copy of Settlers are much deeper than the vast majority of other items in my home, for example.

So, what can this tell me about the way I spend money now?