Lately, there have been lots of stories of people blessed with opportunity using that newfound wealth to help others.

A Minnesota farmer gave most of his estate to his hometown, totaling about $3 million.

A person in Ohio paid off $8,800 in WalMart layway accounts anonymously.

Another “Secret Santa” in North Carolina made a similar move, paying off layway accounts there.

These types of things are great. When someone does this, they take something they have in abundance and use it to give a fresh opportunity to someone else.

As I’m sure most of you do, I’d like to think that many of the people who have been given this opportunity are going to take advantage of it. Instead of struggling to pay off that layaway bill, they can start hammering away at a credit card or maybe put some money away to pay for a future car repair. However, the reality is that some of the recipients of such serendipitous gifts will simply look for another way to get themselves into financial trouble.

This brings us back to the heart of the story.

Let’s say you were the recipient of such a boon. Thinking about it from a distance, you’re probably quite sure you would use that benefit for something worthwhile, like eliminating a little bit of debt or buffing up an emergency fund.

But would you do that? Would you be tempted to use that serendipity for something fun instead? Think about the little boons that life hands you all the time.

If you find a five dollar bill at the gas station (which I actually did a few days ago), what do you do with it? Do you pocket it and use it when you’re buying essential groceries, or do you take it inside and get yourself a Big Gulp and a slice of pizza?

If you find several dollars in change spread across your dirty jeans (which I did several days ago), do you do something fun with it or do you sock it away for something big?

I used to be very bad at this. I would spend “serendipity money” quite easily on whatever trivial thing I wanted at the moment.

Eventually, though, I began to realize that those little trivial things of the moment didn’t really make my life one little bit better.

So, instead, I started a “serendipity jar.” Whenever I find some money like that, whether it’s a quarter on the street, a $5 bill at the gas station, or $3.79 in change in my dirty jeans, it all goes in that jar.

When that jar is full, I take it to the bank and deposit it into my checking account, then go on with life as normal, except that my checking account has a couple hundred more dollars in it.

That extra hundred or two feels pretty good. It feels like freedom, and it often makes some problem in my life go away. It buys a new tire when one blows out or pays for a child’s costume for a dance recital without having to tap my actual emergency fund at all.

That, to me, is what serendipity is all about. Rather than providing a perk that’s forgotten in fifteen minutes, it smooths out what could be a worrisome bump in the road of life.

When serendipity finds you, don’t think of fulfilling whatever immediate desire you have. Instead, think of making your life better. Do something useful with it.

If you’ve been watching the news the past few days, you’ve probably seen the infamous video of the FedEx deliveryman who just tosses a computer monitor delivery over a fence. Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it:

As I write this, FedEx has said that they’ve merely “disciplined” the driver, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he didn’t have a job come January.

So why am I mentioning this on here?

I want you to step back for a moment and put yourself in this guy’s shoes. Right now, it’s Christmas, so his working conditions are pretty miserable at the moment.

He has a ton of packages deliver and a lot of pressure from his boss to make the deliveries as fast as possible – and probably personal reasons to get done quickly, too.

He has a computer monitor, strolls up to a front door of a gated house that looks pretty nice – probably in a nicer neighborhood than he can afford to live in.

He’s likely not allowed to leave the package unoccupied on the front step, so the only option is to put it over this rather tall fence.

He could try climbing up to put it over the top, but that would take him a few minutes – putting him behind schedule and probably facing the wrath of his boss and perhaps his family – and perhaps he’s afraid of heights.

He’s frustrated, he’s tired, and he just doesn’t want to deal with it, so he makes a bad call.

That one bad call has probably cost him his job and has also made him the target of a viral video and a lot of sarcasm.

I’m not justifying the behavior of the guy in the video. He obviously could have handled the situation much better than he did.

Instead, I want you to take a second and imagine one of your worst days at work. Your boss is making tons of demands on you, you’re swamped with work, you’ve got a lot of personal worries, and it looks like you’re never going to leave.

In the stress of the moment, you make a bad call.

Most of us never have that moment broadcast all over the internet. In fact, most of us are never caught when we make that bad call.

Could you have handled that situation better?

I can certainly think of my own situations like this, where I’ve simply thrown away piles of paperwork rather than dealing with them and other boneheaded moves.

Those are the moments that I do not want myself to be judged on.

I would far rather be judged by my best moments, or at least be seen as someone who can handle a challenging situation. When people judge you in this way, it can only be a benefit for your career, not a job loss.

The challenge is that, for most of us, the camera isn’t running at work.

My suggestion? If you want to establish a career reputation that will win you raises and promotions, act as if the camera is always running.

Now, imagine that FedEx video if it showed the guy carefully climbing the fence, then gently lowering the box on the other side, then ringing the doorbell. It might have never went viral, but it just might have been sent to the people at FedEx and helped out his career a little bit. I know I’ve certainly reported good work on my behalf to companies in the past.

When you’re stressed out at work and thinking about cutting corners, imagine that there’s a camera running, watching what you do next. Do you want to make a video of you looking foolish? Or do you want to make a video you’d be happy to have sent to your boss? Can you overcome the stress of the moment and do things right?

Make the best choice and your career will thank you.

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Credit card limits
2. Pest control option
3. Returning to work
4. Watching football without television
5. Hint of identity theft
6. Daytime heating and cooling
7. Value of a Kindle?
8. First budgeting steps
9. My budget
10. Movie night

It’s mid-December and we’ve had barely a dusting of snow. This is in complete contrast to the last few winters, when I had already run the snowblower several times.

I went back and looked through my journals and it looks like winters are really on a seven year cycle. We happen to be on the “mild” end of that cycle, which should include next winter as well.

My journals noted that the winter of 1997 and 1998 were bad ones, 2003 and 2004 were bad ones, and 2010 and 2011 were bad ones. In between them were mild winters, so we may be in for a pretty mild one.

Q1: Credit card limits
I have three credit cards at the moment. Two with balances that I am paying down as quickly as I can and one without a balance that I use occasionally for things I will pay off immediately. Recently two of my cards’ limits were increased. I am wondering if that affects me negatively at all. Should I call them and ask to have it lowered? (Both went from around $5,000 to $7,000). I know at one point in the past I had a huge limit of $18,000 on a card with no balance and I was almost denied a car refinance because of the potential to go into debt there. At that time I lowered the limit to $5,000. What do you think?
- Emily

This is a prime example of where credit scores and credit reports can be really confusing.

Normally, an increase in your credit limit is good for your credit score. It improves your debt-to-credit ratio, which makes up a big component of how your score is calculated.

However, some lenders do manual underwriting, where they just pull your credit report and do their own analysis of it, not relying on credit scores. In those situations, one thing they often look for is a comparison of your total credit limit to your salary, and if you have a lot of potential room to borrow and a relatively low salary, that will look bad to them.

What’s the solution? I’d probably keep my total credit limit to somewhere between 25% and 50% of my income.

Q2: Pest control options
I am constantly trying to cut back some of the expenses that we have so that we live within our means. We have a Pest control company come and inspect our house once every 3 months for pest and termite. They spray the outside of the house and lawn at each visit(to kill roaches and fire ants). They do spot treatment inside the house if there are any pests. This costs me about $85 every 3 months A few months back they inspected the attic and found some rat poop.They set up traps and caught a couple of rats.. The sealing of the house and setting up the rat traps cost me $500! Now this is one expense I am trying to cut out. Also I am concerned about the health impact of all the spraying they do out of the house and inside the house. Will you be able to suggest how I could prevent pests in my house without employing a pest control company. I am hoping to save some money and also eliminate use of harmful chemicals from our lives.
- Leon

There are lots of home remedies for getting rid of pests. The problem with them is that they generally don’t work as well as the stronger methods that pest removal services use.

If you have consistent problems with pests, you should probably keep hiring an expert to deal with them. However, if you’ve gone a period without any pest problems, you can certainly look into methods for preventing the types of pests you have.

For example, if you’re having a roach problem, boric acid and catnip are common solutions to send them scurrying away. Orange oil is often a good measure against ants. For rats, the best solution is what they did – trapping and sealing holes.

Q3: Returning to work
My husband and I live very frugally, but the cost of living in our area is quite high. It’s a rural area, but rent is $1100/month (cheap for around here), food is expensive (we live in Alaska), and electricity is even more expensive. So all of my pay (just under $2000/month) goes toward living, with maybe a few hundred dollars into savings every couple of months. We rarely drive, and the vehicle we do have (an old truck, in great condition but very fuel inefficient) is on long-term loan from my in-laws so we don’t pay anything other than fuel.

We have a decent emergency fund built up (just under $10,000) and my husband has about $35,000 in student loans. We also have about $35,000 in investments, which are making more in interest than the student loans are so we’ve decided to keep that money invested.

After being unemployed for most of the last year (minus 3 1/2 months during the summer–most of that money went to savings or paying off some medical bills), my husband has decided to go to graduate school and will be taking some classes in the spring. I work for the university so we won’t have to take out more loans. Additionally, he’s also been promised a part-time student job at $10.50/hour.

So here’s my quandary: what should we do with the extra money? We have quite a few goals. I’m investing the maximum amount to my retirement fund (I get a 50% match), but since I’m the only one with retirement savings I feel like it’s not enough for our future goals. (We’re in our mid-to-late 20s.) We would also like to buy a house sometime soon, since we like our area and want to stay here long-term. (After pricing it out, a mortgage would be comparable to our rent, although utilities are included in the rent so we’d have to figure those into the price.) We’d also like to start a family in the next year or two, and we love to travel so we’d like to go to Europe again in the next few years. Finally, I’d like to save up some money and buy a vehicle of our own. I know my in-laws have loaned us this truck in the best spirit and with no hard feelings (when we give it back, it will mostly be sitting in their driveway as a backup vehicle since the selling price wouldn’t be worth their time and effort) but I feel like I’m taking advantage of their generosity. Additionally, when we do drive it costs us a lot to fill up the tank. (We’ve got it down to about one tank each month at about $80-90 to fill it up.)

When we start getting the extra money, would it be best to split up our savings into different goals accounts? After all is said and done, we’d be saving around $800/month, probably a little more during the summer. Should we keep our investments as a sort of backup retirement savings and focus on our other goals? Or would it be best to open a RothIRA and fully fund that during the year, keeping the investments for a down payment on a house? Or should we plan to wait on buying a house until after my husband has completed graduate school? Should we fund our goals in any order, or just put a little bit of money toward each of them all at once? I’m certain that we’ll be making much more money within the next 2-4 years.
- Monica

The one statement that causes me worry is the last one. “I’m certain that we’ll be making much more money within the next 2-4 years.”

It is always a mistake to make personal finance moves based on what you think your future self will be doing. Your future self is incredibly unreliable. Careers change, health changes, personal circumstances change.

What would your life look like if your current income level remained the same for the next ten years? I would plan for that, and then treat any raise in income as a big bonus.

Q4: Watching football without television
I’m on board with your idea of eliminating cable except for one thing: football. I love watching football on Sundays and Mondays (and Thursdays) and I’d hate to lose that. Any ideas?
- Shane

I like watching football, too, but I almost never watch it on television any more.

What I usually do is use something like ESPN.com. I’ll watch the “gamecast” of a game and participate in the messageboard discussions while the game is going on. Plus, I have easy access to statistics for my fantasy football team.

If you’re willing to pay some for it, NFL.com offers some pretty good streaming packages. I have a friend who uses this – the only thing he watches on television is football.

There isn’t a legal way to watch football online for free, though. Yet. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an ad-supported NFL stream in the future online.

Q5: Hints of identity theft
I recently received a bill in the mail for $69 from a scooter store in Dallas, TX. I do not have and have never had a scooter, live in NY, was not in Dallas on the date specified. I have visited TX twice a year for the past 5 years to see my son, although not Dallas.On the bill, my address was slightly off, the street name had an extra e at the end and my PO Box was not listed, but everything else was my info. I called the store and they said they would take my name off the account, but that was the name and address given to them by a customer. I am very careful with all my info, shred all mail, check my one credit card each month ( paid off in full every month) and credit report. Since someone is obviously using my name and address, is there anything else I could be doing? This has kept me awake nights, thank you very much for your input.
- Cindy

My immediate suspicion is that someone connected to your son somehow got your address and tried to use it. I’m not saying that your son did it at all, but that someone your son knows got your address and somehow managed to use it at that store.

If I were you, I’d start keeping a close watch on my credit report. You can do that for free through the federal government at annualcreditreport.com. Just examine everything on it and make sure you know where those statements are coming from.

That’s far and away your best defense against some kind of fraud.

Q6: Daytime heating and cooling
We’re first-time homeowners and i also work for a major water heater/HVAC company. Daily, customers ask me for tips on reducing their hydro/gas bill with respect to the water heater which, according to industry estimates, makes up about 60% of the hydro bill (electric water heaters, I mean; I don’t know about natural gas) until the winter when heating costs factor in.

Our hydro bill can easily hit 3-400 in the winter if we had to heat with electricity.

Right now, we have a dual electric/wood furnace which is *highly* efficient. we’ve been burning wood and 4 to 6 pieces a day is enough to keep our house nice and toasty but the hydro bill is still around 200 which is far too much for a couple with 1 child (4-1/2yrs old).

Hydro has a program called “peaksaver” which sends a signal to major appliances such as the AC to turn things down by x% (i think it’s 15) but i’m wondering if it would be worth it to shut the WH off completely during the day – i’m on the phone working all day and there’s only my husband who is off doing his own thing. wouldn’t be difficult to reschedule showers, baths, etc to bef 7am or after 7pm and we already do all our laundry in cold water and wait until after 7pm to dry if we have to use the dryer.

Currently, the rates are as follow:
Mon-Fri 7am-11am and 5pm-7pm = 10.8c/KWh, 11am – 5pm = 9.2c/KWh
Mon-Fri 7pm-7am and all wkend = 6.2c/KWh

The water heater is 3000KW, takes roughly an hour to an hour and a half to fully heat.
- Reg

If you have an opportunity to shut such things off, it’s almost always worth it.

Think about it: doesn’t it make sense that it takes a lot less energy to heat up water once than to keep it hot during the day? Instead of having your heater kick on for, say, ten minutes every hour, it would just run for twenty minutes or so at the end of a much longer period.

Unless the temperature is extreme, for example, I turn off both the heating and cooling in our house during the daytime and just flip it back on for a comfortable evening for our family.

Q7: Value of a Kindle?
I’ve been considering getting one of the $79 Kindles. I read quite a lot and I’m trying to figure out if it would save me money over the long run.
- Shannon

It depends on what you read. If you’re very picky about your books and will only read one or two specific books when choosing a new one to read, you probably won’t save a whole lot of money.

However, if you’re willing to mix it up a lot and try out new authors and patiently wait for and then pounce on sales, you can get a lot of great reading in for not much money.

For example, I keep a close eye on the Kindle Daily Deal and check out books from my library all the time using my Kindle. I don’t always get the book I want to read, but I always have something worthwhile to read.

Q8: First budgeting steps
I’m 25 years old and just started my first job. I’m married and was wondering what do you reccomend i do to start budgeting? Alot of people i talk to have no clue what to do and where to start, are there programs that are better then others. My parents never worried about budgeting and now im stuck. PLEASE HELP!!!!!
- Bill

The first step is to simply keep track of every dime you spend for a while. Every cent that leaves your pocket, whether it’s a bill or a soda at the gas station, needs to be recorded for a whole month.

Once you’ve got enough information, sort all of that spending into groups that make sense to you. Rent, utilities, entertainment, food, and impulse expenses are all good categories, but use what you like.

Total up each of those categories, then figure out which ones you could control a little better (like your entertainment spending or your impulse spending). Then, at the start of the month, just withdraw the cash for those categories you’re trying to cut back on and use only that cash for those expenses until the end of the month.

That’s budgeting in a nutshell.

Q9: My budget
I would love to know what other people’s budgets are, for those with certain lifestyles. For example, my husband and I do not have children but our food budget is still higher than the FDA charts because we eat organic, free-range meats and local. And as a reformed bookworm, I’ve tried hard to curb my spending at Amazon but what do average people spend on books and magazines? I find this information educational and fascinating.
- Camille

Here is a great infographic that depicts the budget of the average American family, both in raw dollars and percentages.

Of course, that’s the average. You’ll probably never find anyone that perfectly matches it.

Having said that, I don’t think our family’s budget is too terribly different than that one.

Q10: Movie night
You’ve mentioned before that your family regularly has a “movie night.” How on earth do you pull that off with three young kids? Doesn’t it just turn into chaos?
- Kim

Our six year old often sits through a full movie, and our four year old will if it’s a movie that really draws her in (like The Princess and the Frog). It’s really our one year old that makes for challenges.

If the one year old is nowhere close to a nap time, we’ll often just choose a shorter program for our “movie night.” We’ll watch an episode of Sesame Street or something like that. If he is napping, we’ll try to get him to nap during a lot of the movie.

Mostly, it’s just an excuse for all of us to cuddle together in the basement.

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.

As many of you know, I sometimes buy shirts and other items of clothing at Goodwill, thrift stores, and consignment shops. I don’t have too much luck finding tall things (I’m six and a half feet tall), but I do find a lot of clothes for my children and my wife sometimes finds items for her as well.

The reaction that many people ask when they hear this is aren’t you just wearing shabby, worn out clothing? The general perception is that most of the clothes that you find at such places are well worn and won’t look good on a person.

To an extent, that perception is correct. There are a lot of clothes at such stores that I wouldn’t want to wear and that I wouldn’t want my children or wife to wear.

I shop there for two reasons.

One, sometimes I find a gem in the rough. I found the single most beautiful dress my daughter has ever had at a consignment shop for less than $3. I found a pretty-much-new sportjacket for myself at a Goodwill that fits almost like a glove for $5.

Two, these are the perfect places to get “weekend” clothes. These are clothes that you’re happy to wear when you’re out in the garden, mowing the yard, doing housework, or spending a lazy day around the house reading. Old t-shirts, old jeans, whatever – as long as it fits, it works.

These two scenarios make up most of the clothes in my wardrobe. I do, of course, have a selection of nice clothes that I wear outside the home.

Of course, this brings up a second question: why bother at all with nice clothes?

I don’t ever try to be the best-dressed person in the room. That’s a rat race that you never win, and there’s negligible reward for winning that race even some of the time.

On the other hand, I think there’s significant value in not being the worst-dressed person in the room. I won’t wear my old torn-up Chicago Cubs t-shirt when I’m meeting a professional acquaintance, for example.

I usually strive to hit the average – or just below the average – of the level of dress of people I’m with. This is a level that achieves every goal I want in a social situation: it makes the other person feel comfortable, but doesn’t make them feel uncomfortable because I’m way overdressed or underdressed compared to them. If I achieve that, I’m happy.

The thing is, that’s pretty easy to achieve on a low clothing budget. I don’t need very many items of “nice” clothing to pull this off, and most of my other clothes are just comfortable ones for workdays at home. Even when I worked in an office environment, it wasn’t particularly expensive to maintain a level of appropriate dress. I just needed a small number of nice shirts and a variety of pants that worked well with all of the shirts, and mixed and matched them.

So, would I rather spend a certain amount of money on a bunch of cheap shirts or one good one? I don’t think either answer is correct. The cheap shirts are perfect for wearing around the house or doing dirty work in. The one good one won’t be worn very often, but it will last for a very long time.

As with everything, it’s all about maximizing value. You get a lot of value out of an old well-worn shirt at home, but you get more value out of dressing appropriately when in public. Careful shopping can minimize your costs in both regards and not leave you wearing an expensive shirt in the garden or wearing beat-up clothing when you’re out and about.

My family and I often load up the few days before and the week after Christmas with a lot of visits with extended family, either at our home or theirs. This often means some careful choreography.

Part of the challenge is that we like to celebrate a full Christmas day with just the five of us, but actually doing that on Christmas Day doesn’t always work out.

Our solution is that our immediate family celebrates Christmas on a day that’s convenient in relation to the travel. We exchange all of our gifts for each other, play games, and often watch a Christmas movie (or a new movie received as a gift).

This way, if we need to travel on Christmas Day or have a bunch of family over, we still get to enjoy that family Christmas morning, with the children running into our rooms at five in the morning waking us up and so on, at our own house.

For us, that day is tomorrow.

(And, yes, Santa finds our children wherever they’re at on Christmas Day and fills their stockings with goodies.)

Five Ways to Save Money in Your First Job This is a great collection of tactics for any new graduate. (@ humble savers)

25 Ways to Make This the Best Christmas Season Ever We already incorporate a lot of these into our family traditions. (@ pick the brain)

Recovering from Divorce A divorce can be a real mess. Marriage is something to enter into with care, because if you do it without really knowing who you’re marrying, you’ve got a good chance of entering into an unhappy arrangement. (@ get rich slowly)

Are You Celebrating Christmas with Your Kids in January? This reminds me of my mother-in-law’s extended family. They celebrated their extended family Christmas in mid-November, which meant that it was out of the way before Christmas madness. (@ money ning)

The Economics of Christmas Lights I posted this last year, but few articles have made me re-think where I live more than this one. (@ seth godin)

Every once in a while, something just appears out of nowhere and strikes the perfect chord in your life.

Yesterday, a friend of mine sent me a link to a short YouTube film, Change for a Dollar. Here’s the video. Please, take the time to watch this.

For me and for a lot of us, December is filled with spending money on things for others. We try so hard to make a wonderful holiday for those we care about.

The thing is, after all of the money is spent and the gifts are opened, the things you’ll remember will be the little things that have almost nothing to do with the gifts.

When I think back to every one of my favorite memories of my life, none of them have anything to do with gifts. They have to do with little things.

I remember the last Christmas I spent with my great grandmother. She was still living independently, but she wasn’t doing so well, so we brought her a whole bunch of easy-to-prepare foods and cooked a meal for her.

I remember sitting around a table a few days after Christmas playing Risk with my dad and some of his friends, the first time I played an “adult” game with the adults.

I remember when my father was unemployed during the winter when I was about six. My mother found a $20 bill in a parking lot at a grocery store, mostly buried in the snow.

The little things matter. They matter more than the big gifts or anything else.

Spend this season – and perhaps 2012 as well – making the little things right. It might alter the big things more than you think.

When I was a child, my father used to grow plants in our basement all year long. I remember going down there in the middle of the winter with several inches of snow outside, only to find tons of tomato and pepper plants thriving under an array of grow lights. I remember how the basement smelled like fresh spring while the rest of the house smelled like… well, a winter home. I remember the deep green color of the vines and how the tomatoes seemed vibrantly red in contrast to the white and grey of winter outside.

Eventually, my father stopped doing this. Part of the reason was that the ceiling in our basement was pretty low and he had to stoop constantly when he was down there working and I think it began to bother his back.

The other reason, though, is that he began to really wonder if it was worth doing it compared to just buying vegetables at the store in the winter.

Lately (particularly as winter has descended upon Iowa), I’ve found myself thinking about those grow lights in the basement and wondering if I couldn’t clear out a spot in our basement for a small winter garden.

The question, of course, is whether this would be worth it. Would I actually be saving money growing my own vegetables in this way?

Grow lights This is where the real cost of the system comes in. Let’s say I decide to grow about 80-100 square feet of vegetables in my basement. This could be covered by an array of small grow lights or a single large grow light. After looking at a lot of options, it seems that the best choice is a single industrial-strength grow light like this one. The problem is that such a light costs around $300 depending on where you buy it. There are lower-cost alternatives, of course, but those have their own problems.

This single light would allow me to convert an 80 square foot room in our basement into a greenhouse, more or less.

Energy use of grow lights The grow light described above uses 1,000 watts of energy. If you ran the grow light 12 hours a day for three months, that’s 1,080 hours of use. The energy cost of this would be about $120 for a season of vegetables.

Pots We’d also need a collection of pots to grow the vegetables in. Thankfully, these can be found pretty cheaply and would be a one-time investment of about $100 or so.

Soil I’m lucky to have access to adequate soil and compost, so the cost here is negligible for me. However, if you’re made to use potting soil, the cost would be rather high for 80 square feet of vegetables.

Seeds The seeds for this project would be relatively inexpensive on the whole, totaling perhaps $3 per growing session (assuming that you’re not using heirlooms, in which case this would be a one-time cost of $4 or $5).

Water The cost of the water would be negligible. We’ll figure a dollar’s worth of water per season.

So, let’s figure up the costs here for ten “seasons” of growing.

One grow light, costing $300.
Ten seasons of electricity, costing $1,200.
Pots, costing $100.
Seeds, costing $30.
Water, costing $10.
(You’ll also need soil if you don’t have access to it.)

The total cost of all of these elements is $1,640, or $164 per season.

There’s also the housing cost of having 80 square feet to devote to such a project, plus the cost of heating and cooling the room (I’d just keep it at our house temperature plus the grow light), which would add some additional cost to the equation.

Using this as a guide for vegetable square footage, I could plant a lot of vegetables in 80 square feet.

Without getting into the complexities of a diverse collection of vegetables, let’s just say I could plant a single tomato plant per square foot and that tomato plant would provide ten pounds of tomatoes. This would mean I would get 800 pounds of tomatoes out of this room every growing season, assuming that because it is indoors, I’ll minimize or eliminate pest or disease problems.

This would give me a cost per pound of tomatoes of about $0.20. Compared to the cost of tomatoes at the store this time of year (about $2.99 a pound), that’s quite a deal.

The problem is that pulling this off is a tremendous amount of work and planning. I would be installing grow lights, hauling tubs of dirt into my basement, planting lots and lots of seeds, and performing all sorts of regular maintenance. I would easily estimate that I would spend 100 hours per growing season cultivating these plants.

There’s also the issue of dealing with that much fresh food coming in at once. Much of it would have to be canned or frozen, adding to the cost and time, or given away to friends, increasing the cost per pound of production but also providing a gift to friends, or perhaps even sold in small amounts if an arrangement could be found.

In the end, this type of gardening can save you some money, but it’s going to be a labor of love along the way. If gardening is something you’re passionate about, you will save money with this effort. I would estimate that you could even approach minimum wage with it for the time invested if you canned all of the excess vegetables along the way.

Still, the question really is whether you find personal value in doing this. If you do, this can certainly be a great project for an extra room in your home.

A few weeks ago, I was exchanging emails with a reader (who asked not to be quoted, but said I could paraphrase the conversation). She told me that she makes most of her decisions entirely on instinct and intuition and feels that this is why she often gets into financial trouble.

Frankly, I agree with her conclusion. You can most certainly get into a lot of financial trouble if you operate entirely on intuition, instinct, and impulse.

When you’re shopping, if you make a purchase based on instinct without running the numbers, you’re probably wasting significant money.

When you’re investing, if you rely on a gut feeling for your investment choices, you’re probably going to lose money on that investment compared to what you could have made.

When you’re planning for the future, relying on intuition often means that you find it really difficult to set a goal and follow a plan to get there.

I speak from experience in each of these cases. I’ve found that, time and time again, your gut reaction can lead you down a very dangerous money path. Yes, sometimes it can result in good things, but the number of mediocre and poor things that can result from intuition overshadows this.

What can you do about it, though? It is often too tall of an order to simply tell someone to stop relying on their gut when they make decisions. You can’t completely alter how people think and how they make decisions.

Instead, what you can do is alter the basis upon which they make those decisions.

If you spend some time researching the products you buy in advance until you know about them and know how to evaluate their prices and relative quality, you’ll naturally incorporate that into your shopping decision.

If you spend some time researching various investments and understanding what the various risks and benefits are of different options, you’ll naturally incorporate that information into your investment decisions.

If you spend some time carefully planning for goals and setting up a very clear plan to get there that is obvious and clear to follow along the way, you’ll use that when making all kinds of time and money decisions along the way.

The key is preparation. If there is one real key to success in almost any area, it’s the preparation you put into it. The more you understand the options before you, the more likely it is that you’ll make a good decision when you’re faced with a choice. That decision will probably still be based on intuition, but that intuition is a flower grown from a rich topsoil of knowledge.

When you’re not pressed for a decision, spend some time investigating the decisions you make every day – or the big ones you know you’re going to be making soon.

Look up the products you regularly buy on the internet. Figure out where the least expensive place is to buy them, and compare the products to competitors. That way, you can make a better decision about not only which specific product to buy, but where to buy it.

Read a well-rounded book or two on investing topics, and take the time to actually understand what is being said in them. Take it slow, and look up terms you don’t know on the internet.

Plan out what you want from your future, then think about what you’ll specifically need to do to get there. What can you be doing each and every day to make that future come true?

For me, I find that the more I think about such things and the more I learn, the better my intuition and instinct becomes. They draw on the foundation of knowledge that I have and the time that I’ve invested thinking about these issues.

Simply put, learning and thinking helps your finances.