Whenever there’s a challenge going on in my life, I find it much harder to write. I find my thoughts drifting away from the words and onto other things.

For me, the best solution is to simply spend some time reflecting on that challenge. I put aside feeble attempts to work and focus on that which is bothering me.

If I do that, I tend to find resolution much sooner, and once I find resolution, the words and the focus return.

10 Reasons Your Freelance Career Is Failing I’d advise people who are considering freelance work to read this before making the leap. It’s even more important then because you can shore up these things before you even get started. (@ freelance switch)

Ten Easy to Plan, Cheap, and Fun At-Home Date Ideas When my wife and I have a date night, we usually wind up playing a board game together. It gets us face to face and talking at the table. Board games are a great conversation starter. (@ money help for christians)

Why I Still Read The Tightwad Gazette The Tightwad Gazette was a popular printed newsletter in the 1990s focusing on frugality issues. I actually still leaf through it, too. (@ saving advice)

The economics of Christmas lights Most of the houses in my neighborhood have Christmas lights. It makes for a beautiful sight on a December evening. (@ seth godin)

A few days ago, my wife’s aunt passed away.

She was a wonderful woman. She possessed an incredibly positive spirit, even though her life had brought her unbelievable hardship through no fault of her own. She overcame more challenges in her life than anyone else I’ve ever known, and it was a privilege to have known her.

I only ever had the opportunity to know this woman during her final years when her health was in serious decline. She required a mobile ventilator to breathe and was constantly confined to a wheelchair. She would get worn out from even small events. She took an incredible array of medications just to maintain things.

Yet, through it all, she had an amazing positive spirit. She was one of those people that always brought a smile to the table. She managed to always find a kind thing to say about everyone and about every situation.

My fondest memory of her took place a few summers ago. The two of us were watching a parade together. Without fail, she found something positive to say about each of the floats and bands and other parade elements that went by.

As often happens at a parade, the people in the parade would toss candy and other small treats to the crowd. I helped my son and daughter retrieve a few pieces and ate a piece or two myself.

At one point, a float went by tossing out miniature pieces of string cheese – it was a local dairy that was advertising their wares. As this went by, I felt a tug at my shirt. She asked me if I could pick up a piece of string cheese for her. I checked with her nurse, who gave a small nod, so I grabbed a piece that had been tossed out.

I helped her open a piece of the string cheese and got the peeling of it started for her. She took a small bite of it, closed her eyes, and sighed as she chewed on it. She opened her eyes, looked up at me with a smile, and said, “It’s the little things, Trent.”

It is really easy to get caught up in the business in our lives. We have work to do, household tasks to take care of, Christmas presents to wrap. The list goes on and on – at least it does for me.

It is so easy to lose sight of the simple pleasures in life in all of that hustle and bustle. Simple things, like the feeling of my daughter holding my hand as she watches her big brother sing at a Christmas play, or the feeling of a snowflake or two on your tongue, or the noise of the shared laughter of your mother and your toddler-aged child.

For her, these little pleasures meant so much, and that moment with her reminded me of how wonderful the little things really are. They’re worth savoring, and if you can enjoy them, then you don’t need to spend your time and energy and money on chasing ever-bigger pleasures.

It is the little things. I’ll miss her.

A final note: if you are a parent, please vaccinate your children. The medical issues that caused this wonderful woman to have difficult medical issues throughout her adult life and to eventually pass away were issues that could have been prevented had the appropriate vaccine been available just a year or two earlier. I have borne witness to the incredible challenges that she has had to take on because they didn’t have a vaccine, and my wife’s aunt has been an inspiration to me to make sure that my children have received their vaccinations exactly on schedule.

Whenever I think of something I’d love to do if only I had the time, I write it down in a little notebook I have that I call my “someday notebook.” It’s just a long list of projects that I’d love to take on in the future. Here are a few examples from a random page:

Write a novel from scratch in three weeks
Make the game review video series
Reorganize all of the camping equipment
Completely clean out the pantry
Build a microcontroller setup for the outdoor lighting
Paint my boardgame miniatures
Finish my philosophy reading list
Build a microcontroller for automated garden watering

That notebook goes on and on and on like this. I just take the idle thoughts that I think most people have and I simply write them down.

The key thing, though, is what I do with this list.

Whenever I’m tempted to go out and do something expensive, I go look at this list.

Whenever I find myself slipping into spending my time on something idle, I go look at this list.

Whenever I feel anything approaching boredom, I go look at this list.

When I look at the list, I go through it and look for the thing that seems the most exciting at that moment, because that’s the thing that will get me up and accomplishing something.

I get started and then I work at it until something else needs to be accomplished.

What does this do for me? It keeps me from spending unnecessary money. It allows me to constantly feel like I’m moving forward on the things I’d like to be doing. It causes me to develop new skills, build new knowledge, and produce new things.

The only thing I lose in this process is the time I would have spent on the couch channel-surfing between Jersey Shore and reruns of The Big Bang Theory, sitting on the internet debating someone in a forum over something completely unimportant, or spending money on some item or experience that didn’t really matter to me in the long run.

If you want to start changing your life, start a “someday” list. Right now, take out a piece of paper and list ten things you’d like to do someday. They can be little things or big things, whatever comes to mind. Keep that list with you and whenever something new comes to mind, add it. Then, every time you find yourself about to make a money mistake or about to waste some time, look at it, choose something from it, and do it. Piece by piece, you’ll start building yourself a better life.

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.

Chelsea writes in: I’ve always wondered if it’s cheaper to print photos from home, rather than having them developed at a drugstore. Nowadays, most printers have photo capabilities and the quality is pretty stellar for the average consumer, but the convenience of uploading files and just picking them up when they’re done is tempting.

As always with questions like this, there are a lot of variables to consider. I decided to calculate our home cost of 4″ by 6″ prints just to see how expensive they really were.

The printer itself Our current printer is a Canon Pixma MP480, which is currently discontinued. We were able to pick one up new for $69.99 when it was being discontinued. We have used the printer to print well over 1,000 documents at this point without any difficulties and with an anticipation that we’ll be using it for a long time to come, so the cost per page for the printer is quite low. I think it would be reasonable to estimate that the cost of the printer itself per document printed is $0.02.

This is perhaps the hardest factor to truly quantify. It has a lot to do with the reliability of your printer as well as the price you paid for that printer. A low-end printer with good reviews from a reputable brand, preferably bought during a sale, will get you the best price per document printed.

The ink We can get a new color cartridge for our printer for $19.96. We use Canon 211XL color cartridges. I kept track of our last cartridge use to find out how long they lasted. We were able to print 344 documents that were either full color or largely color before the ink began to fade out with that cartridge. This adds up to a cost of $0.06 per picture printed.

My experience has been that, if you have the option to buy the cartridge with more ink, that’s the one you should choose. They generally give you more printing for the penny.

What about refilling your cartridges? I’ve mostly had good experiences with this, but not always. I have had a few experiences where cartridges have completely clogged and another experience where the ink filling process broke the cartridge in a subtle way, resulting in ink all over the insides of my printer. This can save you money, but you’re also looking at a bit of risk.

The paper I can get 200 sheets of blank 4″ by 6″ photo paper for $20.68. That gives us a cost of $0.10 per picture printed.

I’ve found that if you go really low-end when it comes to photo paper, you end up with very dull-looking snapshots. You don’t have to buy the premium paper, but the cheapest paper usually doesn’t hold ink and doesn’t look good. Research your paper brands before you buy. We usually use Kodak glossy paper.

Adding these all up, I can print a 4″ by 6″ at home for $0.18 per print.

The prices for prints from digital sources at various stores varies quite a lot. The least expensive regular price I could easily find for 4″ by 6″ prints was $0.20 a print from Target. Other stores charged substantially more – WalMart, for example, charged $0.28 per 4″ by 6″ print. There are some online services, like CVS Photo, that offer rates as low as $0.19 per print, but you have to wait to get the prints. There’s also the cost of actually going to these places, which is at least somewhat alleviated if you’re making the stop for multiple purchases.

I actually find it far more convenient to print at home. I usually use Picasa to manage all of the documents.

Is it a big savings to print at home? No. It’s clearly in the “pennies, not dollars” camp. However, I find it to be more convenient and pennies do add up over time.

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. SmartyPig update
2. Figuring out debt repayment order
3. Buying elderly mom a home
4. NCUSIF insurance
5. Ending naptime
6. Credit card challenges
7. NACA question
8. Splitting regular and Roth 401(k)
9. Paying off student loans quickly
10. Spousal Christmas presents

My mother came to visit recently, so I put aside the time to just spend a day with her. It was really enjoyable to just spend several hours together. We wrapped some Christmas gifts, played a couple of games, went out for a light lunch, and visited a bookstore (neither one of us bought anything, but we browsed for a while).

When I take time out to do things like this, it somehow makes my life seem better even if it makes other aspects of my life that much busier.

Q1: SmartyPig update
My question relates to the interest rate on SmartyPig. I have opened multiple goals with them since seeing your post on them awhile back. But I can’t help but take notice of the several interest rate decreases that have occurred recently. I understand (or I guess) that the economy is driving the interest rates down; I’m just wondering if they’re still the competitive savings resource they once were. Do you still recommend SmartyPig to your readers?
- Jill

Right now, SmartyPig’s interest rate is comparable to a lot of other online savings accounts. Early on, SmartyPig offered a rate that was significantly better than online banks, and that interest rate was a big reason to use SmartyPig.

However, SmartyPig’s appeal isn’t just interest rates. They offer a lot of nice tools for saving for specific goals, like saving for a vacation or for an appliance replacement. Often, they work with the retailer from which you’re buying that item to get you a reduced rate on that item. For example, if you’re saving for a goal that is an item that you can buy on Amazon (say, a MacBook Pro), you can choose to cash out when you reach your goal in the form of an Amazon gift certificate instead of cash, and they’ll add 3% to the face value of that certificate.

I think SmartyPig is a worthwhile tool for saving for specific short-term goals. In fact, I’ve used it myself when saving for a replacement computer.

Q2: Figuring out debt repayment order
I’m a proponent of paying highest interest rate debt first, so as to minimize total amount paid over time. However, lately I’ve been concerned about my three loans. I have one private student loan for ~$47K at a variable 4% (mo. payment: $354) and two fixed federal loans for $2,308 at 5.75% and $2,491 at 6.55% (mo. payment $32.50 each). My snowball is $1,856. With all the negative economy talk, I started getting nervous about a surge in inflation that would cause my variable interest rate to skyrocket, and therefore, really hurt me since the variable but lowest rate has the largest balance. So I was going to ask you if it would make sense to pay off my variable-low-interest-rate-but-high-balance debt first, and then start paying by highest interest rate.I am extremely risk-averse. But after I ran the numbers, this scenario really didn’t pan out. It became quite obvious that only in the event that interest rates soared past my highest rate loan now, would it make sense (of course!) to pay off my biggest balance (which would then be the highest rate) loan first. Does this check out/have I done this right?
- Lauren

The best mathematical way to pay off debts is always to pay debts in the order of interest rate. If the rate of a debt changes so that a new debt is now the highest interest rate debt, then you should switch to the high interest rate debt.

The only alteration I would make to that statement is that if you’re informed in advance of an interest rate change, it makes sense to immediately switch your extra debt payments to whichever debt will have the highest interest rate.

I would not make extra debt payments based on a feeling of what interest rates will look like in the future.

Q3: Buying elderly mom a home
My 75 year old mother is in mediocre health. She’s losing the place she’s living in and needs to move in the new year. She hasn’t one penny of savings, has a beater car and routinely drives to our part of the state twice a month to visit some vulnerable relatives. This is a 2 hour ride each way, but I agree that these relative actually need her.

I will be earning a big chunk of money in the first part of the new year and would like to buy a home for her to live in and as an investment. I’d like to take advantage of the crazy low prices in the suburbs near our home. Here are several questions for you.

1. Would you pay all cash for a house? Pros and Cons (My spouse makes more than enough money to support us, so our life would not be affected by this)
2. Would you make her pay a small portion of her social security toward rent? She currently has to pay half her social security for rent and is barely making it. I’ve always heard it’s a good idea to make people pay a small amount toward what they need. I was thinking 1/4 of her SS.
3. I want to spend about $200K and these homes might not be well insulated, etc. What things would you do to a house to make it as frugal as possible for her. She currently lives in a very old drafty house and her heating bill is killing her.
4. She is know for her very poor decisions. Is it practical to set a list of rules for her? She has completely disregarded the rules her current landlord imposed (a relative) and this is part of why she has to find a new place. I’d like to make her promise she won’t let deadbeat relatives move in. That she can’t have too many animals, etc. Is this too parental?
5. We use a property management company for one other rental we have. Should we do this with her? It costs us 10%, but then she would have them to call for maintenance. It would cost me money, but it may be a great buffer. I’m wary of putting a handyman at her disposal since she might possibly have them put on a new deck or build a turret rather than just have them unclog a drain or fix a sticky door. She has very qualms about doing what she thinks is “necessary” with other people’s money. “But I needed a greenhouse, my plants were dying”. If I do use a management company I might not tell her I bought the house since she might try to do less “quirky” things if she doesn’t think a relative will let her get away with it.
- Sheila

I would be really hesitant to enter into this type of “landlord” situation with a parent for much of the same reasons that I encourage people not to lend money to family and friends. It just adds an element to a valuable relationship that you really don’t want.

When there is something wrong with the house, you will be the person called. Because you’re family as well as the owner of the house, you’ll be expected to fix the problem very quickly and efficiently. Unless you have an exceptional person for a mother, this will hold true whether you have a management company or not.

There’s also the concern that the house that might make for a good investment might not be the same house you’d wnat your mother to live in given her current health situation.

If I were you, I would rent an apartment for her. If her health is slipping, it’s likely that the period of time you would rent would be limited. It would also put the burden of the “landlord” role onto someone else, and it would also allow you to purchase a house solely as an investment.

Q4: NCUSIF insurance
I have a couple questions: I am interested in a local credit union, with a checking account that has 2.51% interest if you have an automatic depost/withdrawal and minimum 12 debit transactions which I already do. What do you think about going with a credit union who is NCUSIF insured, which they claim is equivalent to being FDIC insured.
- Ron

NCUSIF insurance is extremely similar to FDIC insurance. Both are insurance programs on savings and checking/draft accounts backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government. In terms of the end user, they’re pretty much identical, as they both offer $250,000 in insurance against the failure of the financial institution that manages your account.

So, why the difference? Credit unions, in terms of the law, are different entities than banks, with different restrictions and requirements. One could go into a long list of these differences – for example, credit unions are not-for-profit while banks are inherently for-profit, to name just one. Because they work differently, it makes sense that the same insurance policy wouldn’t work for both entities.

From my perspective, your money is going to be just as safe in an NCUSIF-insured credit union as it would be in an FDIC-insured bank.

Q5: Ending naptime
I’m a stay-at-home mom who also runs a small online business. I usually do work needed for this while my daughter (3) is napping. However, lately, she’s been really restless at naptime and requiring lots of attention. My business is suffering. Any suggestions?
- Tessa

If you want to prolong the magic of naptime, the best way to do that is to utterly wear out your child in the morning. Engage in activities that require a lot of energy prior to lunch so that your child feels a strong energy lull after lunch.

Eventually, though, your child is simply going to grow out of naptime – and it sounds like this is happening right now. This is simply going to mean that your daily schedule is going to change. You can no longer bank on naptime as a time to get things done.

For us, our approach was “quiet time.” We continued the same routine as nap time, except that we simply mandated that they lay down and be quiet for a certain period of time. If they were still awake at the end of that period, they were free to get up and usually engage in a solo activity that would allow me to finish whatever task I was working on.

Q6: Credit card challenges
My husband and I live very frugally due to having student loan debt along with other debts (auto, home repair, mortgage) and my husband is getting his undergrad degree while I work full-time. Since we do not have much money left over to save for vacations and the like we tend to put a lot of purchases (including bills) on our Discover Miles credit card and then timely pay the statement balance each month and cash in our Miles for travel expenses. This has worked very well for us and we are hoping to have enough miles for a family trip to Florida next summer (or enough to pay for our gas if we choose to drive). My question is this: would we benefit from a different kind of card, maybe one that gives us a better percentage back on our purchases? Right now we get about 1 mile for $1 spent on most purchases but I always sign up for their special bonus miles when they’re available. We get 3 miles on every $1 spent on travel expenses but we don’t really travel except for maybe 1 or 2 small trips a year. I did notice that now Discover offers us the option to use our Miles toward just about anything, including cash back or paying the balance on the card but if we could benefit from a card where we get a better percentage on every day things like groceries, I would rather have that. I don’t really care about the APR on the card since I always pay the balance but I don’t want to pay a monthly or yearly fee. Any suggestions? Also, it doesn’t need to be Discover, that’s just what we have now; we also have a Visa Amazon card but hardly ever use it since we don’t buy many things on Amazon anymore. Thank you!
- Shannon

There probably is a better card out there for your specific situation. I’m just not sure what that is.

My suggestion to you would be to sit down and really look at where you spend money, then use that as the basis for finding a new card. What retailer sees the largest amount of your transactions? That would be one sure place to start.

The key thing to remember is that rewards are rewards. If you receive “cash back” rewards or discounts, bank those rewards for your travel goals. Don’t just limit yourself to airline miles.

Q7: NACA question
Got a question for you. Have you heard of NACA? https://www.nacalynx.com/nacaWeb/index_main.aspx

My father in law mentioned it to me the other day. He said a friend of his used it, but he didn’t know much about it. Since my wife and I are looking into buying a house in a few years I checked it out. It seems a little fishy to me though. From what I can gather, if you get a mortgage through them, there is a $50 a month membership fee, plus you have to volunteer your time 5 times a year. I don’t have a problem volunteering, its the fee I am worried about. If you do get a mortgage through them, there are no closing costs and things like that.

What do you think? Have you heard anything about this at all? Seems risky to me.
- Deval

Your description of the program from the perspective of a potential borrower sounds pretty accurate based on my experiences.

NACA is a non-profit homeowner advocacy group. They work to get strong mortgage deals for members from large banks and often engage in political activism and protests to get the job done.

They seem to do a solid job of working with homeowners to get them a better interest rate, but through the rules of membership that you suggest above, they tend to at least try to draw people into their political activism. If that’s of interest to you, I’d follow up.

Q8: Splitting regular and Roth 401(k)
The company I work for has just recently added a ROTH 401k option to the existing 401k plan. I can’t contributed to ROTH IRA as I have real income plus “income” that exceeds the ceiling set by the IRS (the fake income is received via a family real estate owning LLC, we’re divesting of excess land and that carries forward to my 1040).

The only debt we have is our house, I put down way more than 20% and its value has held steady. We have a well stocked rainy day fund, plus other non-company investments (mostly mutual funds). We make solid contributions to charity, etc.

Is there a good rule of thumb, or do you have a suggestion, on what allocation I should make between the 401k and ROTH 401k? When I do planning and make financial decisions (like to potentially refi to a 15 year mortgage) I always assume my income won’t grow. But for this scenario I can see it increasing. My assumption is that taxes will rise in the US later, which makes the ROTH 401k a smart place to put a lot of money. However I’m also not totally convinced that ROTH plans won’t have a new tax levied on them in the future. But I also have to assume that if I ever get to retire that I’ll be in a much lower tax bracket than I’m in now.

To keep it simple I was going to split it 50/50, but I am wondering if you see it differently?
- Lenny

There is no “perfect” solution when it comes to splitting money between a regular 401(k) and a Roth 401(k). If your tax rate in retirement is lower than it is now, then a regular 401(k) is better. If the opposite is true, then a Roth 401(k) is better.

No one has any idea what their earnings will be over the years between now and their retirement, nor can they be certain what income tax rates will be in twenty years.

Because of that uncertainty, I think hedging your bets is a great approach. While you’ll probably not stumble upon the “perfect” balance, a 50/50 split will give you a pretty good balance.

Q9: Paying off student loans quickly
I have a question on what you think about living in a cheaper/less ideal situation if it means you can pay off student loans faster, but be less psychologically at ease. Right now the place I’m living is in a great location with reasonable rent, but my housemate isn’t so into cleanliness and it’s not that comfortable, and long story short, I’d like to move somewhere else. But I know the next place I move into will likely be more expensive – I live in a city with a high cost of living, where you’d be hard-pressed to find a studio apartment in good location for less than $1800/month, or a 2 bedroom, 1 housemate situation for less than $800-$1000 (both numbers excluding utilities). I’ve lived in places really far from public transportation, a hostel with with tons of housemates (8 people in a room), places with cheap rent but roaches everywhere…and to me, a good combination of location, considerate housemates, comfort/cleanliness, and piece of mind are important. I think home should be a place to relax and feel at ease, not be on edge or stressed. (The reason location is really important to me is because I ride buses or the subway everywhere.) How much do you think one’s monthly salary should go to rent, is it worth spending an extra $100-$200 per month for a nicer living situation (at the opportunity cost of less money going to student loans)?
- Linda

It’s all about balance, and no one has the same exact balance. If you spend more on having a nicer home now, reducing stress, you’re taking away money from extra debt payments, which means that you’ll have the debt hanging over your head for longer, adding stress.

The mistake that a lot of people make is that they regularly skew that balance toward the present, sacrificing the future. They’d rather have a little more now in exchange for something less later on, believing that something will come up to take care of that future shortfall.

Doing that for something deeply important to you is okay. Doing that regularly is a mistake. The key? Self-analysis. The more time you think about all of your decisions, the more likely you are to make good ones.

I can’t tell you which way to go because I don’t know your values. All I can tell you is to spend some time carefully thinking about this and whether you’re willing to add a lot of time back onto your debt due to the extra payments you won’t be able to make.

Q10: Spousal Christmas presents
My wife and I are working through the issue of whether to get each other Christmas gifts. How do you and your spouse do it?
- Carl

Generally, what we do is set a spending cap for each other. We talk it over beforehand, look at our budget, and set something reasonable.

Then, when we’re figuring out what exactly to get each other, we get the children involved. We allow them to help us select these gifts, which enables the children to feel as though they have a part in this process even though they don’t have a source of income.

This does enable us all to be able to open at least a few gifts on Christmas morning, allowing us to take turns and enjoy not only receiving gifts, but enjoying watching each other open gifts.

This process works well for us. I’d suggest just setting a reasonably low spending limit with your spouse and then sticking to it.

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.

The vast majority of retirement books I’ve read focus on maximizing every dollar to actually arrive at retirement. They don’t look at the period of retirement itself.

The relative freedom from time constraints that retirement offers opens the door to a lot of things that would otherwise be impossible, and this is where How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free by Ernie Zelinski comes in. Rather than looking strictly at retirement savings as part of one’s plan for retirement, Zelinski looks deeply at the personal choices made in retirement as part of that plan.

It’s an interesting and fresh perspective on retirement, and Zelinski’s breezy and friendly tone certainly helps push it along.

Thank Heaven for Retirement!
If you do not plan for an active retirement, you’re setting yourself up for a difficult and expensive retirement. If you work until late in life under the pretense that you’re setting yourself up on easy street due to your big pile of savings, you’re going to find that you don’t have a lot of years to enjoy it. Instead, a much better path is to live relatively lean, work toward an early retirement, and plan for a retirement life that’s active and full of adventure.

Retirement: A Time to Become Much More Than You Have Ever Been
A good retirement doesn’t involve sitting around and doing nothing all day. It means applying yourself to something that you’ve always wanted to apply yourself towards but never felt that you could due to the need to have an income-producing job. If this new activity produces income, great! If it doesn’t, it’s still filling your hours with lots of contentment and enjoyment of life, and not filling those hours with idleness or expensive activities.

So Many Worlds, So Much to Do!
Zelinski makes a challenging suggestion for anyone who’s retired. On the first day of retirement, unplug your television set and unsubscribe from cable. This will force you to be more active, which will improve your health. It will also push you to actually take on the big dreams you have rather than putting them off until tomorrow because there’s something good on television.

Take Special Care of Yourself – Because No One Else Will
Some degree of physical activity is an essential part of a healthy retirement. Zelinski recommends a daily walk at a minimum – and preferably more than that. Long walks, bicycle rides, and other activity should be part of your life every single day. This will not only improve your quality of life, but the length of your life as well. If you allow yourself to be sedentary, you’ll gain weight and lose the energy you need to live an active and vibrant life. A walk through your neighborhood or through nature is also a free form of entertainment, something that can’t be said for many other forms of entertainment.

Learning Is for Life
Much like physical activity keeps your body healthy, mental activity keeps your mind healthy. Zelinski recommends a commitment to lifelong learning in which you strive to learn something significant each day. One way to do this is to take a college course in a topic that’s interested you at your local community or public college. As an aside, I had a friend whose grandfather was in college at the same time as him. The grandfather actually wound up being in an assigned project group that I was in and my interactions with him were some of the best experiences of my college years. Going back to college does not mean you’ll be out of place.

Your Wealth Is Where Your Friends Are
A good, reliable friend is something invaluable to have, but you can’t build friendships by sitting at home alone. Seek out community activities related to things you’re interested in, or just get involved with a volunteer activity. Doing these things will essentially force you to meet like-minded people, and there are few better situations from which to build a friendship. A friend is a person who will be there for you when you need them and bring joy into your life when you don’t need them as much, and that’s an invaluable thing to have.

Travel for Fun, Adventure, and More
Retirement travel can actually be really inexpensive since you’re not tied to the traditional idea of the “tourist season.” You can travel to locations on your own schedule, not those of school calendars or professional guidelines. You can also travel like a migrant, meaning you can move slowly, scoop up deals as you go, and do things at your own schedule. This makes it easy to travel almost anywhere surprisingly cheap.

Relocate to Where Retirement Living Is Best
In my opinion, Zelinski’s best single piece of advice comes in this chapter: move to a college town. A large college offers tons of cultural opportunities, speeches, performances, groups, and countless other things to get involved in, most of them for free. The college town that I once lived in was a vibrant place with a lot of older people involved in the college community. You couldn’t go to an event without a lot of older people there, which made it interesting both for me and for them.

Happiness Doesn’t Care How You Get There
Don’t leave this world with songs unsung that you wished you had time to sing. The last thing you want to have in your final years are regrets of things that you could have easily done. Your retirement years are often the time to do those things. Most of the things that people wished they could have done are things that require time, and time is what you have in spades in retirement. Use it.

Is How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free Worth Reading?
Rather than approaching retirement as merely a savings goal, How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free looks at retirement as a period to capitalize not so much on the money you’ve saved, but the asset of time.

In other words, saving for retirement isn’t about saving money. It’s really about saving time. The more you put away for retirement, the more time you give yourself to accomplish all of the things you dream about accomplishing, whether it’s writing a novel or learning a musical instrument or camping in every national park.

It’s a great perspective and a useful one, and Zelinski writes about it with an irreverent and breezy tone that makes this a fun book to read, too. This one’s highly recommended to anyone within ten years or so of their retirement, on either side.

Check out additional reviews and notes of How to Retire Happy, Wild, and Free on Amazon.com.

I got a great email recently from Marjorie:

My husband’s father just gave him a huge speech about how he doesn’t dress appropriately for work and how he will never get promoted or “become a manager” dressing the way he does. My husband is a computer programmer who works with a bunch of engineers. He wears dress slacks and polos or button-up shirts everyday to work, while most of his co-workers wear jeans and t-shirts. This confused me, but my husband exaplined to me that what his father is saying that since he doesn’t wear designer clothes and because he doesn’t wear a tie everyday that he will never be promoted. We buy his clothes at JC Penney, but the cheaper brands. I can’t tell the difference between them and the nicer dept. store brands, other than the price. Do you agree with my father-in-laws assessment? What about if my husband wants to advance his career, but has no interest in managing people? I realize he would make more money if he eventually became a manager, but he enjoys his computer programming work, and probably wouldn’t enjoy managing people, and I would never want him to work a job he didn’t enjoy if he didn’t have to.

I think what’s happening here is that your father-in-law is substituting his own goals for his son’s goals and he’s trying to guide his son towards those goals.

Your husband seems to have his own set of career goals. He’d like to advance his career as a programmer, but he has no interest in being in management. Your husband also has familiarity with the culture of the career path that he’s chosen.

I think it’s absolutely vital that people have a set of career goals. They need to have a sense of where they want to go and what they need to do to get there. For those reading this, ask yourself those questions. Where do you want to be with your career in five years? In ten years? In twenty? What do you need to be doing to get there?

Yes, attire can be a part of those goals. The usual advice is to dress in the attire of the position you want to eventually attain. If you want to be in management, dress like management. If you want to be just part of the senior staff, dress like part of the senior staff. I consider that to be pretty good advice.

It sounds like your husband is dressing for the position he wants to attain eventually, which is a senior programmer. He should note what people in his desired position wear and emulate it.

Your father-in-law has his own goals and he probably envisions certain outcomes for his son, for various reasons. For those goals and outcomes, the advice your father-in-law is giving his son is probably good advice. He likely envisions his son eventually moving into management and wants to prepare him to do so.

The challenge here, as it often is, is communication. For this type of disagreement to occur, both people aren’t articulating what their goals are and the paths they see toward those goals.

Your husband can fulfill his part by simply making it clear that his goals do not involve moving into management. He needs to make it clear that he’s dressing for the role he aspires to, and that something he values deeply is a job that he enjoys doing and he’s willing to accept non-executive pay for that position.

If your husband can’t clearly articulate his career goals and his plans for achieving them, he should spend some time thinking about his plan for the future. Can he clearly state where he wants to be in five or ten years? What exactly is he going to do to make sure that happens? The more thought he’s given to this and the more detail he can give, the better.

Your father-in-law should be able to accept that. If he’s not, then your next move is to simply disregard his advice with regards to a career path. If he’s still giving advice that seems to be guiding your husband toward a management role, your husband needs to just nod his head and then follow his own path.

I actually sympathize with your husband. I have little interest or desire to be involved with personnel management, and knowing that about myself has driven many of my choices, both in the past and even today. I don’t want to manage people and it sounds like your husband doesn’t either.

However, it’s important to remember that (likely) your father-in-law cares deeply and desires a successful life without want for his son. Keep that in mind as you address this situation and handle everything with care and without anger or aggression.

Self Portrait (1887) by Vincent van Gogh, image courtesy David Flam

Vincent van Gogh spent most of his life destitute. The one woman he loved rejected him. Almost everyone who saw his paintings found very little value in them. He would often trade those very paintings to sympathetic familes in Holland and in France in exchange for a night or two sleeping in their barn and a meal or two (yes, paintings worth tens of millions of dollars today).

In fact, the only reason he had the materials with which to paint at all was due to his brother Theo, who wasn’t exactly well off himself but who always found a way to send his brother a bit of money for more paint supplies.

The letters that Vincent van Gogh shared with his brother make for some stunning reading. They depict a person struggling deeply with self doubt. They depict a man struggling with physical and mental ailments. They also depict a person with passion and drive and a sense that he was doing the right thing, even if the people around him didn’t believe in him.

Why am I mentioning his life story here? I think there are several vital lessons that anyone can take away from it.

Don’t make choices just to please other people. Don’t buy stuff just because other people want you to buy stuff. Don’t spend money just because other people want you to spend money. Let them spend their own money if they want.

Make your own decisions and don’t feel bad about making a different choice than the crowd around you. If you find that your values are deviating from that crowd, don’t be afraid to start seeking new people to spend your time with, or accept that you’re not going to be in sync with your existing crowd on everything and just maximize what you do have in common.

Life is a long haul. The people that succeed are the people that keep going and going and going towards their goal or towards whatever drives them. If you want to find financial success, you need to be willing to accept that it won’t happen tomorrow or the day after that.

For most people’s financial situations, it will take years to find real success. The same is true for career situations, entrepreneurial situations, and even relationship situations. A Band-Aid quick fix solution is rarely the one that will build long term success.

Doubting yourself is normal. Everyone doubts themselves. Even people who seem extremely confident are often just wearing a public face. There will be times where you feel as though you’re not doing the right thing.

When you feel that way, return to the things that caused you to choose this path in the first place. For me, it’s a small handful of personal finance books. For you, it could be anything. Go back to the basics and you’ll begin to feel the confidence and motivation again.

You don’t need lots of material stuff to have a successful life. Yes, van Gogh’s example is an extreme one, but there’s still something to be learned there. He didn’t live a life filled with possessions, yet he lived a life that changed the world. Why do you need a lot of possessions?

Challenge yourself to live with fewer possessions rather than more possessions. Owning things not only drains your money, but it drains your time and spreads out your focus.