A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

Charity – in fact, giving of any kind – is often hard to explain in a general sense. Many people fail to see the purpose of giving. “What does it gain for me?” they’ll ask, and it’s difficult to point to how charity brings you a discrete, specific, calculable return.

Instead, giving is a reflection of what truly matters to you in the world. It’s your opportunity to actually make a tangible difference in an area that matters to you. Seeing that your effort has created change in someone’s life – or created slight change in a lot of lives – is incredibly powerful.

This comes back to your central values. What’s important to you with regards to the outside world? Perhaps you’re impassioned about the environment and wish to take action to reduce carbon emissions. Perhaps you want to protect animal habitats. Perhaps you’re fueled by a desire to help people in famine situations – or in natural disasters. Perhaps you’re committed to childhood education. Or maybe you just want to help out disadvantaged people in your own community. There are countless other causes that different people find valuable – yours may or may not be on this list.

Sometimes it can feel overwhelming – there are so many things out there that deserve a gift that it’s easier to fall into “analysis paralysis.” You can’t decide, so you choose to do nothing at all.

Just because a reason to give is worthwhile doesn’t mean that it’s the one you have to give to. Spend some time figuring out what matters the most to you. Is it the environment? Is it education? Is it famine and world food distribution? Is it poverty in your community? It could be any of these – or something else.

Once you’ve figured out what matters most to you, look only at ways to give in that area. For example, if I’m concerned about poverty in my community, I might dig into Habitat for Humanity and the local food pantry. If I’m concerned about education, I can get involved with the local school district.

People often argue that the small amount that they can contribute won’t make a difference. If you’re in that situation, look for ways where you can see that your small gift can make a change.

Give $10 worth of food to the local food pantry, then volunteer there. See for yourself that the food you purchased is going to a family that really needs it. Your gift directly put food on the table for those children.

Take $30 and use it to plant a tree in a park somewhere (obviously, after getting permission). Water it yourself and watch it grow. That tree will help clean the air and will provide shade and natural beauty for the people in the park, and you can see with your own eyes how it benefits others.

Keep a $20 bill in your pocket and wait until you see someone who’s really in a pinch, then just put that $20 in their hand. Watch what happens next – their emotional reaction, the story they tell you. You made a difference.

Give your time, too. Spend an afternoon building a Habitat for Humanity house in your community. Spend two hours volunteering at the food pantry in your community. Spend a Thanksgiving afternoon at a homeless shelter.

Giving has a profound secret: when you give to something that truly matters to you, you feel incredibly good. That good feeling radiates throughout your life. People pick up on your good feelings and they respond better to you.

Your gift also contributes to the happiness of others. Children and families enjoy that tree you planted. A family makes a dinner out of your donation to that food pantry. A family is able to finally have a home of their own thanks to your labor on the Habitat for Humanity project. A family is able to sustainably eat because you gave them chickens via Heifer International.

Someone’s life becomes better. Their outlook moves just a bit higher. They make a few better choices in their life: the family decides that a family afternoon in the park is pretty nice because of the cool shade and decide to do it again. This family bonds a bit more and, later on, their child will make a difficult, positive choice because of that closer bond.

Life is full of these little chaotic effects. Our actions cause many, many things to happen, many of which we don’t see. Giving of ourselves freely in a positive way sends out ripples of good events, and over time, those ripples come back to you and to everyone you care about. You might not see the direct effect, but those indirect effects echo throughout your life.

Give what you can, without regrets. The positive benefits echo throughout your life, the lives of everyone you care about, and lives you’ve never crossed. Walk away knowing that the work of your life has gone to truly make the world a better place.

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

Throughout my life, I’ve found that there are two kinds of people. One group seems to be constantly bored, idling away their days and waiting for life to come to them. The other group does the opposite – they’re constantly busy, feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day, and are out there chasing life.

I’m in that opposite group. I feel annoyed with myself when I see myself wasting time. I don’t avoid relaxing and enjoying life by any means, but if I’m mentally and physically rested, I’d rather be doing something than just twiddling my thumbs. I’d rather be writing or researching something or reading for enrichment or doing something engaging with my wife or doing household chores or doing something engaging with my children.

And when those avenues are full, I look for other ways to improve myself.

Why? Why not just kick back when things are finished up?

It’s simple. The time I spend improving myself now always pays bigger dividends later. Self-improvement is an investment of time and energy instead of an investment of money, but both pay excellent returns. It can improve your health, your emotions, your career, and your financial state.

Here are five big areas (and there are many more) anyone can work on in their spare time – and notes on exactly how to make it happen.

Improve your health. Just walking thirty minutes a day for twelve years adds, on average, 1.3 healthy years to your life. That’s 49 days of walking in exchange for 1.3 years of additional life – a brilliant trade. Doing more vigorous exercise can add even more – 3.7 years of life on average.

If you want to break it down, on average, a thirty minute walk will add almost five hours to your life. Go on a thirty minute walk each night after work and a single week’s worth, on average, will add a day to your life. That’s a profound argument for improving your health, even by taking simple steps.

This doesn’t mean that you have to abandon more leisurely pursuits. One of my closest friends does sit-ups while watching television. Another friend has a treadmill that he walks on while reading magazines. They’re not abandoning the things they like to do to mentally unwind, but they realize that mental unwinding doesn’t mean you have to physically unwind, either. I like to jog while listening to podcasts or audiobooks. While out there running, my mind is engaged – but that doesn’t mean that I can’t improve my body as well.

Improve your knowledge. Ideas are incredibly valuable and grow more valuable every day as society moves in a direction where creativity is rewarded. Knowledge is the base upon which creativity is built. Exposure to new ideas and new angles in a mix with the unique set of ideas and life experiences you already have make it more and more likely that you’ll be able to produce unique ideas – and those unique ideas can be incredibly valuable.

One powerful way to do this is to read (which, I suppose, is what you’re doing if you’re here). Take on a book that challenges you and pushes the way you think. I like to read books that advocate positions I don’t agree with – books that advocate neoconservative thought and books that discuss atheism, for example. These books force me to understand other perspectives and, at the same time, re-evaluate and strengthen and perhaps change my own.

Another effective way to get there is through conversation with a person willing to engage ideas. Share your thoughts, listen to what they share, and debate their relative merits. Accept that criticism of an idea that you presented is not criticism of you, but of the idea itself.

Improve your transferable skills. I’ve written about transferable skills before, but the core of the matter is still true: transferable skills – the types of skills that fit well in almost any career path – are always worthwhile to build. Communication skills. Time management skills. Creativity. Leadership.

How can you do these things? Well, you might try implementing a new time management system in your life. Invest some time in figuring out GTD. Or you might volunteer to take a leadership position in a community group. Play a brainstorming game with friends, like Apples to Apples, or a strategic game like Ticket to Ride (they help you with communication skills, creativity, and logical thought).

Look at the things you choose to do in your “down time” and ask yourself if they’re also helping you build transferable skills in a subtle way. Then, choose activities that you really enjoy that do build these skills. You’ll grow a lot more playing Apples to Apples with creative people than you will watching a sitcom by yourself.

Improve your personal nature. Knowing who you are – your strengths, your weaknesses, your joys, your sadnesses – makes it a lot easier to navigate the minefield of life. It’s well worth your time to figure out who you are and what you truly value.

Spend some time being introspective. Ask yourself how you honestly feel about the elements in your life. Are these things bringing you joy or sadness? Why? What elements, you ask? Look at everything: your health, your relationships, your activities, your possessions, and so on.

This type of introspection can be very difficult. Often, we want to feel certain ways about certain things and, on some level, we convince ourselves that we do. Digging through that, figuring out our true feelings, and acting on them results in nothing but life improvement.

Improve your relationships. Most relationships need some amount of care and feeding, but in the busy nature of modern life, it’s easy to overlook the care and feeding that some of our most important relationships require.

Take some time and just talk to your spouse about how life is going. Give your mother a long phone call. Get in touch with your siblings. Look up some of your close friends that you’ve drifted away from over time. Listen to what they’re saying – don’t just look at it as an excuse to list what you’re up to.

Those relationships are invaluable, and any time spent maintaining them will pay off in surprising ways over time.

Here’s the real message: the difference between the successful and the non-successful appears in how they “waste” their time. People who succeed spend almost all of their time doing something that in some way improves themselves, their relationships, or their career situation. That’s not accomplished by idling.

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

Many people argue that the fundamental unit of value in the modern world is the dollar. I disagree – I think the fundamental unit of value in the modern world is the relationship, and income derives from those relationships.

Think about it for a moment. What happens if your relationship with your boss and your coworkers sours? You lose your job – your income goes down. What happens if you build stronger relationships with your boss and your coworkers? Your income goes up – you get raises and promotions and bigger projects.

You can easily carry this over into your personal life, too. Let’s say you’re about to move. If you have a lot of real friends, a few phone calls will get you all the help you need. If you don’t have these relationships, you’ll be shelling out cash for a moving service (a big cost) or doing it yourself (a huge time sink).

This phenomenon pops up in pretty much every aspect of our lives. Food? If you have lots of relationships, you get a lot of dinner invites. Household supplies? If you have a lot of friends, at least one will have a warehouse club membership and will likely split some bulk purchases with you. A leaky roof? If you have a good friend that’s a carpenter and several other friends willing to hammer nails, you can likely get that roof fixed on the cheap. Entertainment? Swap piles of DVDs with your friends.

The list goes on and on.

From this, it’s easy to see that building up a lot of real relationships with people is valuable. What do I mean by a real relationship? I’m referring to one where something of positive value is exchanged on a regular basis – useful advice, a helping hand, loaning of items, an ear to truly listen, and so on. Any relationship worth its salt has a healthy dose of positive exchanges of value with a minimum of negative exchanges (insults, backstabbing, gossip, incorrect advice, being an obstacle).

I confess that for a long time, I didn’t know how to do this well at all. It wasn’t that I thought other people should give me value in exchange for nothing – I just simply didn’t understand the value of such exchanges. I was naturally quiet and it felt to me as though the effort expended in making myself reach out was much more than any value there was in what I might have to offer. In other words, introversion and a lack of self-confidence left me in a state where I didn’t build many relationships.

So how do you build a lot of value-based relationships? Most of the ideas I found on this topic came from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (see my notes on it) and Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz’s Never Eat Alone (see my notes on it). The former helped me with the mechanics of actually communicating with people and helped me to build the courage to talk. The latter helped me figure out how to use those mechanics to build lots of value-based relationships.

Here are seven things to do.

1. Open up a little. If you’re an introvert and prefer to be quiet, the best thing you can do for your life is to work on overcoming that nature. Talk to people. If you find this hard, bone up on techniques for basic conversation. Work on tactics that make you appear more confident, even if you aren’t.

2. Surround yourself with people. Go to where people are and open up. Attend conferences and conventions and meetings. If you hear someone talk who seems interesting, follow up directly with that person. Volunteer to present – it’ll give lots of others a chance to hear you.

3. Host parties. Start having dinner parties and backyard barbecues on a regular basis. Don’t just invite the same old people, either – rotate the people you invite. Try to mix it up, too – don’t just invite the same circles. Mix the circles. This gives you the powerful opportunity to introduce people who may not know each other but may actually have a lot in common. If you don’t know where to start, start with your neighbors and your current friends.

4. Keep in touch. Make a regular habit of keeping in direct contact with people. My technique is simple: I keep a big list of people I want to maintain relationships with and I strive to contact people on that list on a regular basis. I let them know what I’m up to directly and ask what they’re doing.

5. Give of yourself freely. If someone needs help, help. Don’t worry about “payback.” Don’t worry about what you might get out of it. Just help them. If you contact someone and find out they’re stuck on a project, need a job, or need a helping hand in some other way, either provide that help yourself (if you can) or find someone who can provide that help and make the connection.

6. Ask for advice – and share what you get. One thing I’ve found very useful is to treat my circle of friends like something of a help group. When I’m stuck on a big purchase or something like that, I ask a large group of friends for help and suggestions. I then compile all of that, figure out what’s best for me, then take the best of the information and send it back to all of my friends, letting them know what I found out. This is almost universally valuable – people love participating to help a friend, they love getting that info back, and when I mention them, they sometimes make new connections themselves.

7. Show appreciation for help that you get. At some point, you’ll need some direct help from the people you’ve built relationships with (you’d be surprised how often they provide indirect help). When you do ask for that help, be thankful. Thank them for showing up, thank them for whatever help they provide, and do what you can to make their contribution easier – plenty of beverages, food, or anything else you can provide.

Doing these things over and over again will cause you to build a lot of stable, value-based relationships over time. Time and time again, those relationships will come through for you when you need them in your career and in your personal life.

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

I’ve watched it over and over again: the people that succeed in a particular career path are the people who are able to tap into their natural passions and aim that fire hose into their professional life. They know what they love and they find ways to translate that into a way to make a living. Sometimes they make a nice income – and that’s awesome. At other times, they earn just enough to get by – and that’s awesome, too.

What matters is that, in both cases, it’s a joy to get out of bed in the morning and get started on your day. Your work itself fills you with joy and excitement. When you reach that point, the line between work and play disappears – you’re happy doing whatever your day throws at you. That has a value that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. It transforms your life.

I hear from many people who claim this is impossible. It’s not. Every single day, I get out of bed, excited to write. If anything, I write more each day than I did when my passion for writing was still new. I know others who feel the same way about what they do. It makes them want to get out of bed in the morning and get started. When you feel that passion surging through you, it makes a lot of the little difficulties of life not matter too much.

If this seems completely alien to you, you simply haven’t discovered your passion yet. I discussed this a while ago, but here are seven ways to figure out your passions:

1. Maximize your health. Eat well. Get some exercise. Get away from any and all situations that are emotionally holding you back. Get plenty of sleep. Without these pieces in place, it will be hard for you to open up to new opportunities and directions.

2. Ask lots of questions. If you come across something of interest to you, ask. Follow up with more questions until you’re satisfied – at least for the moment. Research interesting topics online. Do things like a “Wikipedia stumble” – start at a general topic you’re thinking about, then click on whatever article in Wikipedia that’s most interesting to you – and keep reading and following links.

3. Ignore what’s “cool.” Remember the idea that you should stop trying to impress other people? It comes through big time here. If you enjoy it, it doesn’t matter what others think. Don’t be afraid to dive into something that seems exciting to you over a fear that others might find it “dorky.” Their label says more about them than it does about the activity.

4. Dabble in everything. If something seems interesting, try it. You might not find it enjoyable or you might find it fascinating. It’s often hard to tell the difference until you dive in. For example, having a garden might seem interesting, but until you try it, it’s hard to tell whether it’s just conceptually interesting to you (but not necessarily in practice) or something that you truly enjoy.

5. When something piques your interest, dig in. You try it. You like it. So try it again. And again. There are many things that seem quite fun on the first shot, but grow boring quickly as you hit “the dip” (where the newness wears off but you’re not very good at it). If you’re passionate about something, you won’t mind that dip.

6. Associate with others that share this growing passion of yours. Look for events in your area where people might be involved with this interest. Look for groups online where people are talking about this activity. Join in, share your thoughts, and ask questions. Nothing’s better for fostering a growing interest than a group of like-minded people.

7. If it dries up, don’t push it. True passions are sustaining – you’ll keep coming back to them because you want to. If you no longer want to engage in it, don’t make yourself. Just back away and find another path. You may find yourself returning in the future, or you may find yourself on a completely different path.

You’ll know your passion when you find it. It’ll ring inside of you like a hammer hitting a church bell. It’ll consume your thoughts and your activities, even if you’re not very good at it yet. You’ll get up each morning excited to do more. This is how I feel about writing, for one.

What do you do if you discover your passion, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to translate that into income? After all, you have to pay the bills, and even though you’ve found something you love so much you’d be happy to do it every day, it doesn’t put food on the table.

There are countless avenues for channeling that passion into income. However, almost all of these paths require you to start doing it on a part-time basis. Give up the frivolous things you were spending your evenings on and devote some of that time to a new path. Here are ten suggestions for transforming that passion into cash.

Blog Start a blog on the topic you’re passionate about. Share something new every day on there. Put a few ads on the site to earn a bit of revenue.

Teach / tutor If you have patience, hang out your shingle and volunteer to teach your passion to others. This is a great avenue for a passionate musician.

Provide services Maybe you’ve found that you’re passionate about a particular task that others find to be drudgery – scooping snow or repairing computers. Sell these services directly to others.

Create videos If you want to teach how to do the things you love, consider making videos and sharing them online. Put them on YouTube and make a simple blog to share the videos. If you start gathering followers, sign up for their rewards program and you can translate this into solid income.

Sell at farmers markets If you make things, from soap to bread to wicker baskets, you can likely do well selling the items at farmers markets. It’s a great way to make some sales and meet people interested in what you’re doing.

Write freelance articles / books If you simply enjoy writing, practice and attempt to sell some of your best work as a freelancer. Expect plenty of rejections, but also expect feedback and suggestions, especially as you improve.

Develop projects through work Take what you’re passionate about and see how it can connect to your workplace. If you’re into catering, volunteer to spend some work time getting catering set up for a work event. If you’re into art, look for ways to incorporate your art into work projects.

Take classes Work towards a degree in the area of your passion. It’s a great way to get yourself into the marketplace and to connect with lots of like-minded folks.

Volunteer / apprentice Don’t be afraid to spend your spare time volunteering to share your passion with others. Time and time again, people who share their talents freely and build their skills find themselves in other opportunities to earn an income from it.

Sell by consignment If you have a product to sell, talk to local sellers and see if they sell by consignment. They provide the space and the sales work for a cut of the revenue, while you get to focus on what you love.

Finding your passion is a life-changing event. It pushes you in new directions that fulfill you in ways you’d never expect. If you’ve never found your passion, you’re missing out on life by not seeking it out.

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

Whenever some people see statements like the one above, they roll their eyes. “Your life must be borrring if you have to plan ahead every time you spend” is a typical refrain.

The big problem with that thinking is that it makes an incredibly false substitution. Planning ahead does not mean the elimination of spontaneity in life; in fact, once you get into the routine, it can often feel more spontaneous because unplanned chaotic spontaneity is no longer the norm.

And it’s that unplanned chaotic spontaneity that gets people in deep spending trouble.

It’s easy to apply the principle of planning ahead every time you spend for the big purchases. For most of us, saving and planning for houses and cars and vacations is completely normal and reasonable behavior. We don’t want to go on a vacation that costs thousands of dollars without some planning, after all, and we certainly see the logic in planning for such purchases.

Where this begins to break down for many people is when the purchases get smaller. A cell phone plan might get some research from some, or it might be completely impulsive, even though fifteen minutes of online research can save you hundreds a year. Christmas gifts are often bought in minimal time, even though you can often find better gifts for the same price or better deals on the gifts you bought with just a bit of footwork and planning. These things add up – the ten minutes spent planning for such a purchase might net you $50 in savings, which is well worth it for many people.

For purchases more than $100 or so (over their lifetime), just spend five minutes making sure you’re getting a good deal and that you can adequately and easily afford the item. If you’re convinced, use the thirty day rule. Put that purchase on hold for thirty days. If you still want it after thirty days and you can afford it, go for it.

Where the idea of planning ahead really breaks down, though, is with the small impulse buys. Dinner at a local restaurant. A movie. A new DVD at the store. A new shirt. A new pair of pants. A ticket to a baseball game.

Quite often, these items are bought quickly with almost no forethought. Sure, it can be fun to do something spontaneously, but that spontaneity can drown you.

Let’s say you go shopping with a friend. On a whim, you buy a new dress, then the two of you go out to dinner together and head out to a movie. For many people, this is a nice, fun evening.

The worrisome side of it comes later. You go home, look through your credit card statements, and realize that the $50 you spent tonight – previously unaccounted for – has now completely tapped you out. You haven’t got enough money to cover the electric bill. So you pay it late – and there’s a late fee on next month’s bill. But by then you’ve moved on to another completely unplanned expense.

Wariety and spontaneity are two of the spices of life, but it’s foolish to let those spices cost you more than they should.

Instead, plan ahead a little for those spontaneous moments. Each month, put $100 in cash in your wallet and let that be your “spontaneous” money for the month. You can do whatever you want with it and it’s fine because you planned for that amount. An impromptu moment doesn’t mean that you’re going to be late on a bill at all.

When that $100 is gone, it’s gone. But it’s no big deal – just wait until the calendar turns and you can refuel.

Obviously, you can adjust that amount to whatever you’d like – more in some situations, less in others. The reason for doing it is simple: it allows you to be spontaneous without being destructively chaotic with your finances.

Some people might wisely see this as the rudiments of a budget – and they’re right. This is simple budgeting at its finest. By putting that cash in your wallet, you’re assigning an amount to your spontaneous spending. The amount that remains in your checking account is handled differently – you pay your bills and your savings with it.

One big danger when people follow this idea: they put their $100 in their wallet and then find it’s gone by the ninth of the month. Then they spend twenty one days miserable, thinking that this plan is stupid or talking themselves into getting more out of their checking account.

Don’t. Live out the month. Then, sit down at the end of the month and take a serious look at the month as a whole. Did you give up anything vital during those twenty one days? Did you do anything during those nine days that didn’t really add any value to your life?

You might find that by taking a real look at your spontaneous spending that you’re doing things that you don’t really find valuable. The next month, that money might hold out until the twenty seventh of the month, simply because you’re a bit more selective in what you do with your mad money – and there’s no adverse effect on your happiness at all.

After a few months, you might find an adjustment is in order – either up or down. Such an adjustment is fine as long as you’re paying all your bills and either actively reducing your debt or increasing your personal savings.

The real key is this: every action you take is worthy of a bit of thought, either beforehand, in the moment, or afterwards. A bit of reflection often tells you whether that choice was right or wrong for you – whether it actually adds value to your life.

Then, taking the conscious steps to reduce those things that don’t add much value becomes easy – you just eliminate the negative and by default the positive in your life is accentuated.

Yes, for some people, a simple budget can be incredibly useful. But for many others, just a bit of planning ahead can make the big difference that they need.

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

A couple times this spring, I watched a TruGreen van park at the house next to mine. The person inside got out, loaded up a push cart with lawn fertilizer, and pushed it around the lawn. He then loaded up the cart and drove away. It took maybe twenty minutes each time.

I do basically the same thing, except on my own. I’ll get some quality seed and feed from the local gardening store, load up my little cart, and push it around the yard during the spring. Again, it takes me about twenty minutes and costs me maybe $15 in supplies.

I was intrigued that my neighbor used this service, so I asked him how much it costs. He quoted a price of about $80 for a “spring treatment” – which was apparently the two sessions I observed.

I kept it in mind and watched our lawns throughout the spring. For a while, there was a difference, but it was mostly due to shade differences in the spring and different times of application. Now, in mid summer, I can’t tell the difference between the two yards.

By spending twenty minutes doing it myself, I saved $60. That sounds like a deal to me.

One big caveat, right off the bat: I’m not claiming that you should do everything yourself. There are certainly situations where paying others to do things for you is beneficial, and those opportunities become more prevalent as your income rises.

However, the more things you do for yourself, the less money you spend on overpriced services.

This spreads across more avenues of life than you might initially think. “I don’t pay for a lawn service,” you might think, “and I’ll never hire a maid or a cook.” It goes far beyond that.

When you go out to eat, you pay for someone to serve you. Much of your cost of the meal isn’t in the food – it’s in the cost of the cook to prepare it and the waiter to bring it to your table. Instead, cook the same meal at home. Almost always, it will be significantly less expensive – and often healthier. Even more surprising, it often won’t take you as long as your trip to the restaurant took.

When you buy produce at the grocery store, you pay for people to serve you. Most of your cost comes from people picking the vegetables and people transporting them to you. Instead, why not have a small vegetable garden in the back? It can be a bit of a time sink (but less than you might think if you don’t garden), but the costs can be extremely low, particularly for the quantity of vegetables you can get from a good garden.

When you shell out for snow removal, you’re backing away from a great opportunity for winter exercise – and losing some cash along the way as well.

When you go get an oil change, you’re paying for someone to unscrew a couple caps and dump liquid out of a jug. Why not buy your own oil, get a pan, and do it yourself? It doesn’t take long and you won’t be given a sales pitch along the way.

When you call up the plumber or the electrician, you’re likely paying someone to handle something that could be figured out from a YouTube video. If nothing else, it’s worth a few minutes to check YouTube for a how-to video to see if your problem can be easily fixed.

In each case, the same theme is clear: you pay a high price for someone else to do something for you.

One common counterargument to this is the idea that a person’s time is more valuable than that. “My time is worth more than the cost of just paying someone else to do it.”

Here’s the catch, though – what are you replacing that time with? Are you doing something really productive with it? Or are you recouping that time with an extra episode of a sitcom?

Often, the argument that one’s time is more valuable is a front for laziness. It’s simply easier to throw cash at a problem. While that may be true on one level, step back for a minute and look at it from a distance. Do the people who succeed in life succeed by taking the lazy route? Rarely.

That’s not to say that there isn’t value in relaxation time. Unquestionably, there is. However, there is an enormous gulf between relaxation and laziness. Relaxation refreshes you and makes you ready to succeed in other aspects of life. Laziness passes time and merely reinforces laziness. Sitting down to relax and enjoy a television program that really fulfills you is relaxation. Flipping on the cable box to see what’s on? Not so much.

If you’re truly replacing a drudgery task with something that fulfills you deeply or earns a much better income than the cost of the service, then by all means, consider it. Just keep the bigger picture in mind and make sure you’re not paying a lot of money so that you can idle away the time.

It goes further. Doing things for yourself has a big psychological benefit. It shows you that you actually can do these things for yourself and improves your self-worth. It increases your skill set. It often gets you moving and applying your mind and your body together in a task. These are all enormous benefits that aren’t derived from simply throwing cash at a problem.

In the end, the personal and financial benefits of doing things yourself add up to an enormous benefit for the time you invest in it. The next time you have something that you could do yourself that you’re about to pay someone else to take care of, step back and ask yourself if this is really the best move for you.

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

Whenever I’m in a financially destitute area, I start seeing many of the same things.

I see homes that are creaky, often with paint falling off. I see front yards and back yards full of items left out in the rain to fall apart. I see cars in poor shape, a mixture of rust and lots of hard miles on them. I see overgrown and patchy lawns. I see air conditioning units that sound like they’re about ready to explode, covered in dust and cobwebs.

In short, I see a lot of items that people own that simply have no care given to them at all. Unsurprisingly, these items will have to be replaced sooner than they would with even a little bit of TLC – or else they’re items that were bought completely frivolously, were barely used, and will never be replaced.

A poorly-maintained air conditioner? It sucks down more energy than one that’s well maintained – adding to your energy bill – and it fails quicker – adding to your repair and replacement bills.

A house with paint falling off? It needs repainted and treated or else you open yourself up to additional weathering from the environment, reducing the lifespan and resale value of the house itself.

Items left out in the yard? The sun bleaches them, the rain wears away at them, and they live a very short life. You’ll be buying a new basketball before you know it.

I’m not picking on people who make these lifestyle choices. Instead, I’m drawing a connection between their financial state and the way they treat their stuff. With every item that sits out there and dilapidates, some of their financial resources are simply blowing away. Taken together, those resources provide the opportunity to have the things you dream of.

Take the air conditioner, as just an obvious example. An average air conditioner has a lifespan of fifteen years. If you maintain it well, you can likely stretch that a few more years – let’s say eighteen years. If you do nothing with it, the lifespan will be shorter – say, twelve years.

An average central air unit uses 161 kilowatt hours during an average summer month. A well maintained conditioner, with clear vents, might shave 5% off of that, while an unmaintained unit might add 5% more to that.

Replacing such a unit will cost about $4,000.

So, what’s the total cost over a thirty year period? If you maintain your unit well, you will have replaced it once and be two-thirds of the way towards replacing a second unit – a total unit cost of $6,667. Over thirty summers, you will have used 13,765 kilowatt-hours of energy – at a price of ten cents per kilowatt hour, that’s $1,376.50. Your total cost? $8,043.50.

What about a poorly-maintained unit? You will have replaced your unit twice and be halfway towards a third replacement – a unit cost of $10,000. Over thirty summers, you will have used 15,215 kilowatt-hours of energy – at a price of ten cents per kilowatt hour, that’s $1,512.50. Your total cost $11,512.50.

Spending a few minutes each spring and a few minutes each fall making sure the air conditioning unit is clean and in proper working order saves a family $3,469 over a period of thirty years.

Start carrying that across other expenditures. Your house – the wood, roof, and foundation. Your equipment. Your clothing and shoes. Your vehicles. All of these things have significant savings that come around when you put even a small amount of care into maintenance. Over a decade, you can easily save tens of thousands of dollars by properly maintaining your belongings.

All earned by spending a minute or two here or there taking care of your stuff.

It’s pretty easy to do, actually. You can get started by using a home and auto maintenance checklist and running through it on a regular basis. Most of the home maintenance tasks you do are pretty simple ones – they’re just somewhat numerous and are easy to forget at times.

What you’ll find when you do this is that things run just a bit better. Your air conditioner doesn’t kick on quite as often. Your dryer runs efficiently. Your appliances rarely seem to have problems. Your refrigerator doesn’t run constantly.

All of those little things add up to a bit of energy savings now – and a lot of savings later, when you’re not replacing these expensive items.

You can carry this through to more items in your home as well. Take your shoes, for example. Making sure they’re clean, treating expensive shoes well, and storing them in places where they won’t continually take bumps is a good step towards extending their life. Or your lawnmower – taking the time to occasionally sharpen the blades and check the oil reduces the wear and tear on the engine greatly, saving you money on gas and also on replacing your mower. Or your roof – keep those gutters clean and your roof will take less wear and tear.

It doesn’t take much time to do these things, either. Compare the two minutes here or there spent doing maintenance to the time you’d have to invest buying a new unit early – research, shopping around, and so on – and the time begins to balance out, too.

You can easily expand this philosophy beyond the material. Take care of your relationships. Take care of your work contacts. Take care of your career. Take care of your body.

There are other positive effects, as well. Take the environment, for example. The fewer items you replace, the fewer things that wind up in landfills. The less energy you use, the fewer fossil fuels you burn.

There’s also the positive psychological benefits of taking care of your things. In many ways, it’s akin to taking care of yourself psychologically. You’re doing positive things with your time which fills you with positive feelings all around. You’re improving your things that you value, which by extension improves you.

Adding together all of these benefits, I find it to be essential to take the time to maintain the things you have.

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

One of the first things I did when I started turning my financial situation around is to start keeping track of my net worth over time. Each week (and later each month), I calculated the value of all of my assets, all of my debts, and the difference between the two (my net worth).

Later, when I began to try to improve my physical shape, I started keeping careful track of several metrics: my weight, my resting heartbeat, and the number of miles I was walking and jogging. Even more powerful, I started sharing my walking and running data via the Nike+ website, allowing me to compare my progress with others.

I like to call it the “keeping score” effect. Almost always, it becomes more fun to work towards a difficult goal if you have some sort of method of comparing your progress to the progress of others, or comparing your current state with your state in the past. You can see the improvement clearly – when you look and see that your net worth is up $10,000 compared to last year or you see your average mile is more than a minute faster than it was a couple months ago, it feels enormous. It’s a giant rush.

The entire point here is to keep yourself motivated towards your goals. Keeping score keeps your big goals front and center in your mind. Combining that with a visual reminder of your goal can be particularly powerful, as it keeps your goal front and center in your mind and also demonstrate your progress clearly.

There are countless tools out there to help you keep track of your personal finance progress. I tend to lean towards tools like Wesabe or Open Office or Quicken, which allow you to preserve the security of your account information but require a bit more work. On the other hand, you have tools like Mint, which gathers the information for you but requires you to share all of your account information with one site (which really concerns me from a personal security standpoint, regardless of what Mint’s privacy policy says).

I find it worthwhile to carefully track my progress in four areas:

Track your assets. For me, I only include the assessed value of my home plus the balances of any investment accounts and savings accounts I have. In a normal month, I expect this amount to move up slowly over the previous month, meaning I’m actually saving money. Some months see a precipitous drop, though – for example, if I buy a car, that’s usually a pretty big money hit, since I don’t include my car as part of my assets since they depreciate so much.

Track your debts. This is key if you’re trying to plow your way through a a debt repayment plan. Each month, you record the balance of each debt, then add them up. If you’re actually pushing well on that debt repayment plan, the total balance of your debts should significantly drop each month. If you don’t see your debt dropping, you need to take a serious look at what’s going on.

Track your net worth. This one’s simple – just add up your assets and subtract all of your debts from the total. Obviously, each month, you want your net worth to be higher than the previous month. I like to make a note of the difference from month to month and I strive to increase this difference each month.

Track your spending. Whenever you spend, jot it down. Keep track of all of it and, at the end of the month, add it up. Even more important, divide that spending into categories – utilities, necessary food, eating out, entertainment, books – and total up each category. This technique is powerful because it shows you the areas where your spending is out of control and you need to tighten up.

As I mentioned earlier, when you keep track of your progress in this way, it becomes a huge aid for setting goals. Here are three ways I have used the above data to set short term goals for myself, pushing me to new heights:

I want my net worth growth to be better this month than last. Let’s say my net worth goes up $1,000 from June to July. I then want my net worth growth from July to August to be $1,001 or more. Obviously, I can’t control the growth of the stock market, but I can control my spending impulses.

I want to cut my spending in this specific category by 50% next month. If I notice that I spent more than I thought in a certain area last month – like books, for example, or on eating out – I set a goal for the next month to reduce my spending in that category by a decisive amount without jacking up my spending elsewhere.

I want my debt to drop more this month than last month. Doing this works hand in hand with my net worth goal, but in a slightly more specific way. I’ll push hard to find a few extra dollars that month to roll into a debt payment.

I’ve also found that the social aspect of such tracking and goal setting is powerful. If you like to do this online, Wesabe is an incredibly interesting and powerful tool for sharing your information and comparing it to the progress of others. You can offer encouragement to others, let them encourage you, and push towards goals together.

I’m highly partial to doing this offline, though. Find a personal finance buddy and meet together regularly to encourage each other, share your progress and your challenges, and offer useful tips to each other. For me, the reality of meeting someone face to face makes such progress tracking more real – and it also adds a stronger edge of competitiveness to the mix.

In the end, keeping track of your personal finance progress is key. It shows you quite clearly where you’ve been, how far you’ve come, and where you need to go. It helps you see the areas where you’re successful – and points out the areas where you need more work. It constantly pushes you forward to bigger and better things.

In the end, watching your steps helps you follow that trail straight to your dreams, whether it’s a financial dream or a dream in any aspect of your life.