Recently, several readers have asked me whether these books have stayed around and remained the same over the past four years, so I spent some time looking through my career, personal finance, and personal growth books to figure out which ones I actually referred to over and over again.

This was actually a very useful process, because I wound up collecting a box of books and donating them to the local library. The books that stayed on my bookshelf numbered six, and there was only partial overlap with the books from the 2009 list.

Here they are. These are the six most powerful books I’ve read on careers, personal finance, and personal growth. These books changed my life and they continue to be powerful references for me.

That’s not to say that there aren’t other great books out there. There are many, many worthwhile books on personal finance, careers, and personal growth out there. Many of those books have taught me powerful lessons. The books listed here are merely the ones I find myself referring to over and over and over again.

Getting Things Done remains on my list because it’s just such a powerful book for teaching you how to manage the multitude of tasks that a person has to deal with.

Time management has become even more important for me now that we have a third child and that our two oldest children have reached the age where they’re involved in a multitude of activities. I have dance classes, taekwondo practices, and soccer practices to remember on top of all of the thousands of other things that I’m responsible for both professionally and personally on a daily basis.

Without a clear system to keep track of the tasks, I would get overwhelmed. Sometimes, I still get overwhelmed. There is no better book I’ve found than Getting Things Done for keeping all of those day-to-day tasks straight.

Your Money or Your Life had a life-changing impact on me in 2006 when I was rebooting my financial situation. More than any other book, it really showed me the power and the financial value of divorcing myself from the things that were less important in my life.

I find almost every page in this book to be deeply inspirational. I can just flip it open to a random page and start reading and I’ll find something that reminds me clearly of why I’m on the financial path that I’m on. Sometimes, I’ll find direct, useful advice as well.

This book is a constant reminder and motivator for my frugal financial path. That path has led me from the brink of bankruptcy to debt freedom and some degree of financial security, and it’s only getting brighter from here. Your Money or Your Life was (and is) my fundamental guidebook.

Raising Financially Fit Kids is a powerful handbook for teaching your children how to interact in a sensible and responsible way with money. It’s been right on pace with every step in the growth of my children.

Right now, I’m actually using advice from three separate chapters in this book, as the advice targets specific ages very well and my children have noticeable maturity gaps between each of them. My oldest is starting to see the benefits of basic investing, my middle child is challenged by the prospect of saving her money for later, and my youngest is just beginning the first steps of understanding what money is all about.

So far, this book has been perfectly on pace with all of those changes, offering sound and intelligent advice for each twist and turn. Just like there are many more chapters of life for my children to go through before they leave home, there are many more chapters of this book waiting to help me guide them to a better understanding of their finances.

The Complete Tightwad Gazette is getting dated, but I’ve yet to find a more thorough single guide to frugality than this one. It’s basically a thousand pages of a frugality blog.

Whenever I feel ready to try on a new frugal idea, I don’t usually turn to the internet first. Instead, I pick up this book and open it to a random page. If I do that five times or so, I almost always have discovered a new idea or two that will click perfectly with my own life or my family’s life.

I have yet to see a more useful compendium of frugal ideas in print – nothing even comes close to the thoroughness of The Complete Tightwad Gazette. That’s why, even though some of the ideas are showing their age, I still happily keep this book on my shelf and refer to it quite regularly.

The Investor’s Manfesto has quietly become my “go-to” guide for thoughts on investing, replacing other books that I’ve looked at over the years. The author, William Bernstein, just has a brilliant touch for explaining how investments work and the logic behind them, culminating in very sensible advice for almost every financial situation.

Thanks to the Reader Mailbag, and thanks to a wide range of friends who now view me as some kind of “financial expert,” I find myself constantly facing a wide variety of financial situations and investment needs, and I rarely have the answer for them right off the tip of my tongue. Even when I do, I want to make sure that the core ideas behind it are accurate.

Lately, my first response to these kinds of investment questions is to just turn to The Investor’s Manfesto and look for an answer. Bernstein lays it all out quite clearly, from the core principles to how it actually applies to one’s life. Almost always, I come away feeling confident that there’s a solid and clear solution to any investment conundrum.

Making It All Work takes the day-to-day task management brilliance and expands the scale, tying those day-to-day tasks to the larger scale of your life. Sure, you’re doing countless things each day, but what do those things build toward? What do they mean? How are they in line with what you really value in life?

Over the last few years, my thinking has really evolved in this direction. How do the things I do each day connect to the big things I want out of life? How am I moving, each and every day, toward the big things that I dream about?

Making It All Work is an absolute home run when it comes to these topics. I find myself picking this book up at least once a week and digging deep into the ideas presented here. Every time, I walk away with some powerful food for thought in terms of building the life that I want, connecting the daily things to the big dreams.

The post Revising My “Essential Bookshelf” appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Each of these ten books contains some powerful ideas that made me rethink some aspect of my finances, my career path, or my other personal choices that impacted these things. Each one of these is a powerful and useful read, and I highly recommend that everyone read most of the books on this list. They’re presented in no particular order after the first one.

Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
This is the personal finance book that turned my life around. It’s as simple as that.

I picked up this book at the library when I was struggling with figuring out what to do next. I had come to the realization that I was in real financial trouble, but as for coming up with a plan and really understanding how money fit into my life, I was lost.

This book isn’t really about how to invest your money or what specifically to do with your dollars. It’s much more about figuring out why you earn money and why you make the choices you make with it. It forces you to think about your finances in a completely different way.

I read this book in mid-2006. Since then, I have paid off almost $300,000 in debt and am currently debt free. It took a massive mental shift for that to happen, and I attribute much of it to this book.

The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey
If there’s one single book I’d suggest for dealing with the challenges of debt, it would be The Total Money Makeover, without a doubt.

It does the things that people seriously in debt most need better than any other book. It provides an incredibly straightforward plan for escaping from the pit of debt and it provides forceful cheerleading to go right alongside that message.

Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz
Never Eat Alone addresses the challenges of building a social network, but it adds two ingredients to the mix that Dale Carnegie and the like are missing.

First, Keith is pretty obviously an introvert, and the book is written from that perspective. There are many elements of this book that may seem obvious to a strong extrovert that aren’t as clear-cut for introverts. This made the book click for me.

Second, a big part of the book is service oriented. If you want to achieve something in life, help others. It’s as simple as that. This is the way I tend to view the world, and it’s a perspective that’s been reinforced over time.

Born to Buy by Juliet Schor
This book, more than any other, really opened my eyes to the impact that marketing has on all of us, starting even before birth and really picking up during infancy. Our brains are just inundated with marketing messages all through life.

If you doubt the power that such messages have, this book is an essential read. I would encourage anyone with a child – or anyone even considering having a child – to pick this one up, read it thoughtfully, and reflect on it deeply, not just in terms of your child but in terms of the impact on your own life.

Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun
I consider public speaking to be one of the two most valuable career skills a person can have. If you can present your ideas clearly to others, you’re going to do well.

This is, far and away, the best book I’ve ever read on the art of public speaking. It includes every tactic I’ve ever used successfully in getting myself up there on a stage and includes countless more useful ideas and anecdotes for making that challenging process work.

The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing by Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, and Michael LeBoeuf
This is the single volume I’d recommend for anyone who wants to know more about investing. It tackles investing from the basics (getting your personal finances under control, because the less you spend, the more you can invest) through to almost every investment topic an ordinary individual investor would want to know about.

What sets this book apart is the consistent ideas and tone. The key idea, really, is inexpensive and simple diversification. You want to be invested in a lot of things so that if one thing collapses, you’re not completely bankrupt, while at the same time you don’t want it to be overly complicated so that you can’t really understand what’s going on.

The “Bogleheads” lay it all out clearly in this book. It can be a challenging read at times, but it’s a consistently worthwhile read and one that will really help you solve your investing problems.

Getting Things Done by David Allen
What’s the other valuable skill, the second career skill I alluded to above? It’s time and information management. You need to be able to utilize your time effectively and know how to tackle the genuinely important things (and toss the rest).

That’s exactly what this book does. It offers up a number of incredibly powerful principles for getting the multitude of things you need to get done in your life finished. It goes beyond that and offers a complete system for using those principles, but honestly, it’s the principles that really make this book.

This book changed how I organized my time in such a drastic fashion that I was able to launch and build The Simple Dollar while working full time at a demanding job and spend a ton of time with my family to boot.

EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey
For many people, entrepreneurship is the most powerful route there is to financial success and personal fulfillment in life. I’ve read many books on entrepreneurship, from the “idea in your head” stage to the thriving business stage, and none of them work nearly as well as a single guide as this one.

EntreLeadership does just what I describe above. It takes a person from an idea for a business to the point where the business is large enough that delegation needs to happen. It offers tons of ideas and food for thought during that entire process, and does it in a readable and comprehensible manner.

Raising Financially Fit Kids by Joline Godfrey
This is the single best handbook I’ve yet found for taking on the challenge of teaching children about money. It’s also one of the most well-worn books on my shelf, simply because I’m raising three children of different ages.

This book offers real parenting tips for children in each age group, offering up countless ideas for introducing kids to money and giving great suggestions to the common struggles that parents have with their children and money at each age level, from very young children to young adults. I anticipate I’ll be using this book for many years to come.

The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley and William Danko
The final book on this list works well for one reason alone: it completely debunks the ideas most people have about what it means to be rich.

The guy in the Armani suit with the sportscar is probably broke. The ordinary looking guy in the reliable automobile is probably the millionaire. Why? People who have spending habits that lead them to buy the flashy things rarely are on a path to financial success.

The book backs up insights like these with extensive interviews and research, creating a fascinating and eye-opening study of what wealth actually looks like.

If you read these ten books, you’ll have a much deeper view of your money, your career, and the financial world around you.

The post Ten Personal Finance and Career Books You Should Read appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

I’ve had the blog Money Saving Mom bookmarked for years. In fact, it’s been a permanent mainstay on the list of 25 blogs I recommend that appears on every page of The Simple Dollar. The blog has a nice mix of couponing content paired with other articles on frugal living.

Unsurprisingly, I was glad when I heard that Crystal Paine (the woman behind Money Saving Mom) had written a personal finance book. Her tone is incredibly friendly and down-to-earth, an approach that appeals to many people and is really welcome among the personal finance books you’d find at the library and at the bookstore.

I knew the book was off to the right start as soon as I flipped past the table of contents. Immediately following that is a feature that should appear in most advice-oriented books: a single page summary of the advice within. Here, it’s a series of seven short paragraphs outlining “Money Saving Mom’s 7 Rules for Financial Success”:

1. Set big goals and break them down into bite-sized pieces
2. Streamline your life and cut the clutter
3. Set up a realistic, workable budget
4. Take the cash-only challenge
5. Use coupons
6. Never pay retail
7. Choose contentment

Each one of those is followed by a paragraph discussing that particular tactic, making it a great way to start the book.

If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Any Train Will Get You There
There are a lot of paths we can follow from where we’re at right now. We can spend like crazy. We can put all of our money into Zynga stock. We can invest very conservatively. We can pay off debt, or we can accumulate it. We can work hard to build a career, or we can count the minutes until “Schlitz o’clock” every day. The real question is where we want to be down the road. A few paths lead to that destination. Most do not. Knowing your destination will help you pick the right path.

Are the Chaos and Clutter in Your Life Keeping You from Financial Success?
It’s hard to be financially successful if you live a cluttered existence. Chaos and clutter make it hard to find the things you need when you need them. This results in things like late bills, missed opportunities, buying things out of convenience, and other financial mistakes. Over time, this adds up to a significant amount of money – and it also adds up to a pattern of living that makes it difficult to succeed.

Give Yourself an Instant Raise Without Increasing Your Take-Home Pay
How do you pull that off? Basically, Crystal Paine’s idea here is to build a basic budget, following more or less the same template that I described in this article about basic budget building. A budget doesn’t magically make you financially responsible, but going through the process of building a real budget often teaches you exactly how you can cut your spending without really altering your life.

Go Totally Plastic-Free – Temporarily
Paine advocates simply dropping all credit card use for a while – and even dropping debit cards for that time frame. Why? Doing that will force you to use cash, and making yourself use cash is a powerful way for you to get deeply in touch with exactly how your cash flows in and out of your life. When you actually see the dollars leaving instead of just swiping a card, each purchase becomes very tangible and very important. Do that enough and you’ve rebuilt (at least in part) your relationship with money.

Coupons Are Not Just For Junk Food
Paine splits the topic of couponing into two chapters (of the nine in the book), which seems to fit since her blog has a strong couponing focus. This chapter really focuses on the basics of couponing, addressing items such as where to find them (the internet, store flyers, etc.), how to organize them (binders, envelopes, etc.), and how to be selective about the coupons you find and use. Simply put, there are coupons for almost anything if you’re willing to look for them and organize what you find.

Beyond the Basics: Advanced Couponing Techniques
From there, Paine goes on to look at how to find a good store to use the coupons you’ve found at (does the store have double couponing? Does it have a customer rewards program?) and how to stack coupons to maximize your savings by finding store coupons, manufacturer coupons, and store sales all on the same item at once. I tend to find that the effort in seeking out such options isn’t worth it, but it’s well worth just keeping your eyes open for these types of bargains.

Twenty-Five Ways to Lower Your Grocery Bill Without Clipping Coupons
Don’t be married to your brands. Don’t be married to your store. Buy things in bulk. Make simple meals at home. Freeze meals that you make. Make your own household cleaners. The ideas in this chapter are great basic frugality tips that anyone can use to save money at home. They just simply work.

Going Out on the Town Without Going Broke
What you’re really looking at here is “bang for the buck.” For example, if you want to go out to eat with your family, try to look for restaurants that offer a “kids eat free” night. If you’re going out with just your partner or spouse, use programs like Restaurant.com to find steep discounts on a meal eaten out. Look for free or heavily discounted cultural events in your area, like family days or free days at local museums or free concerts in the park. There are a lot of things to do out and about that are quite fun but aren’t expensive if you’re willing to look for them.

Embrace Today
A lot of these tactics are filed away by people for “someday.” If you do that, then you’re just committing yourself to more and more of your life devoted to struggling with debt, tied to your job, and feeling that you’re never going to get ahead in life. Today is the day to start living life with more sensibility when it comes to your money.

Is The Money Saving Mom’s Budget Worth Reading?
The Money Saving Mom’s Budget is an absolutely spot-on introductory book to cutting your spending. It focuses much more on the “spend less” part of the equation than the “earn more” part, but that’s often the part of the equation that people find the most success with when they hit that realization that something needs to change in their life.

The title alone somewhat restricts the readership – I probably wouldn’t give a single guy a book called “The Money Saving Mom’s Budget,” after all. However, this would be the first book I’d give to a mother who is just starting to think about making financial changes – a realization that often comes to parents after having a child.

Great book, Crystal.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Money Saving Mom’s Budget on Amazon.com.

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I find couponing blogs like Stockpiling Moms to be fascinating places. Most of the time, they’re devoted intensely towards one thing: listing a huge assortment of coupons and discounts.

While they can be incredibly useful, such sites often miss out on presenting a larger picture of how such coupons and discounts fit into one’s personal finances. After all, even if you’re using a coupon, you’re still usually spending some money, you’re spending time and energy getting the items, you’re giving up space storing the items, and then there’s the issue of whether or not you even need the item or not. All of these are relevant concerns when you’re thinking about buying an item and I often find them at least as important as the latest deals at CVS.

That larger picture is the focus of Savvy Saving, written by the two people behind Stockpiling Moms, Melissa Jennings and Shelley King. The book focuses on being a guide to putting couponing and deal-finding to proper use as a component of a frugal lifestyle.

Stockpiling 101
The authors use the term “stockpiling” to describe a process that I’ve often heard called “extreme couponing.” In other words, the opening chapter lays out the techniques needed to wring every nickel from coupons, store flyers, unadvertised deals, and so on. One of the biggest keys for them is tossing brand and store loyalty out the window. While I can largely agree with them on store loyalty, I’ve learned the hard way that completely ignoring the brand of garbage bag you’re buying can often end in complete disaster with trash all over your kitchen because of the flimsy cheap garbage bag you just got a great “deal” on. Use store and brand loyalty with some sense about how you’re actually going to use the products you purchase.

Collecting Coupons
For Jennings and King, one key part of all of this is collecting the coupons and, perhaps just as importantly, staying ahead of them. This means keeping them organized in some fashion (they discuss several options), keeping the old ones weeded out, and incorporating new ones on a regular basis. The authors seem to advocate a weekly couponing routine, where you extract new coupons from flyers and the internet, integrate them into your organizing system, and get rid of old coupons.

Shopping Strategies
Avoid couponing with your children. Avoid shopping alone at night, because you’re often distracted by the need for focus when shopping, traversing the parking lot, and so on. Remember that when you’re using a pile of coupons, you waited in line and have the right to use those coupons. If the cashier gives you a problem, ask to speak to a customer service rep or a manager.

Storage
The more organized you are about how you store stuff, the less time you’ll have to spend finding the items you need and the fewer items you’ll have to toss out because they went to waste. The authors describe a detailed cataloguing system so that you can easily find items based on when you’re going to use them, such as a “breakfast” list that says what the item is, where it’s located, and when it will expire. This is the type of thing that requires a lot of up-front work but is well worth it when you’re actually using it in the heat of the moment.

Monthly Menu Planning
The authors advocate planning meals by the month, which is a great idea if a lot of your meals rely on frozen items (such as flash-frozen vegetables and frozen meats) and packaged items. It’s very difficult to do this kind of meal planning with fresh items, however. One solution is to leave a few spots in the monthly meal plan empty, with the assumption that you’ll plug in meals that use lots of fresh vegetables. Another solution is to prepare lots of meals in advance using fresh items, then freeze them and use those frozen meals as part of a future month’s meal plan.

Drugstores
One big part of the authors’ couponing routine is to utilize the coupons, flyers, and reward programs at the major drugstore chains – Rite Aid, Walgreen’s, and CVS. By being patient and stacking these offers together, you can often get health and beauty products for free. While this can certainly be a great system, my experience with it has been that it takes a lot of work, you have to accumulate a lot of toiletries in order to stay ahead, and you often wind up with items that aren’t as good as others. If you’re willing to accept the drawbacks, then drugstores can be well worth the effort.

Budget
This is an extremely brief how-to on creating a family budget, not too dissimilar to my own Budgeting 101 plan. The key thing to always keep in mind with a budget is that it’s supposed to help you identify where you’re spending too much in areas where you can control it and make reasonable changes.

Dining Out
Eating out can be a part of a family’s budget – and it’s a budget element that can be easily couponed. The authors discuss many options for cutting down on the cost of eating out, from using things like Groupon and Restaurants.com to simply planning on eating out on “kids eat free” nights at local restaurants. If planned well, eating out does not have to be a particularly costly option if only done once in a while.

Healthy Couponing
One of the challenges of couponing is that many of the coupons are for items that aren’t exactly healthy. A huge discount on Oreos isn’t exactly a bargain in the overall scheme of things. The easiest way to live healthy while couponing is to simply ignore and avoid coupons for items that aren’t healthy. You don’t need Doritos in your home, so why coupon for them? This is right in line with the type of coupon “filtering” that I advocate, where you don’t just go for the biggest bargains but apply some common sense to the situation.

Living “Naturally” Frugal
Hand in hand with healthy couponing is sticking to a tactic of more “natural” living by doing things like avoiding paper plates and cups (sticking with actual dishes instead) and buying clothes from consignment shops and secondhand stores instead of always buying new. Reducing, reusing, and recycling is a natural money saver and it works well as part of one’s money-saving repertoire.

Stockpiling for the Holidays
The authors suggest doing what I consider to be a post-holiday tradition. Buy all of your wrapping paper and Christmas decorations a few days after Christmas and keep it all in a particular place until next year’s holidays roll around. This way, you can catch the huge post-Christmas deals on such items in a sensible way. I also use things like reversed brown paper bags as gift wrapping.

What to Do with Your Savings
If you’re saving all of this money, what are you going to do with it? The biggest mistake you can make is allow the saved money to inflate your lifestyle in other areas. Instead, keep track of what you’re saving and use that extra money to directly pay off debts or save for something big and vital like a house down payment.

Is Savvy Saving Worth Reading?
The advice in this book is fantastic stuff if you’re looking to learn how to really integrate couponing and bulk buying into your financial situation. It can save you a lot of money and this is a really approachable and thorough guide to doing just that.

The only complaint I have – and this is more of a complaint about ultra-couponing in general – is that it assumes that all garbage bags and toothpaste and flour and other items are created equal. That’s just simply not the case. I’ve found time and time again that when I score the lowest price with coupons on an item regardless of brand, I often wind up with odd-smelling deodorant that doesn’t keep me dry when I exercise or trash bags that rip out of the bottom if they’re even close to full. The inconvenience of an awful product costs me far more than I ever save buying a good one.

I use these strategies, but I restrict them strongly by what’s recommended in publications like Consumer Reports and by some common sense.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Savvy Saving on Amazon.com.

The post Review: Savvy Saving appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

One element of personal finance that has always fascinated me is the psychology of why we buy things. The push and pull between clever marketing and branding and the desire to not completely empty my wallet is a struggle I’ve dealt with throughout my life and witnessed countless others struggling with as well.

It’s also a topic that I’ve read quite a bit about, particularly concerning marketing to children.

The challenge with this topic is that the sophistication of the techniques used tends to grow over time. Yes, many of the principles remain the same, but the implementations change. Technology is a big factor in that, but so is the wider acceptance of marketing toward progressively younger children. The internet is a big factor, but so is the use of surveillance in tracking what you do.

Martin Lindstrom’s book focuses on all of these factors, creating a pretty clear picture of how powerfully marketing can reach into our day to day lives, particularly those who think they’re immune to or above the reach of marketing. That marketing shapes what we buy, how we buy it, and how much we buy and spend.

Buy Buy Baby
Lindstrom opens with a look at the huge rush toward marketing to very young children. Many of the basic ideas we have about living are formed in the first five years of life, so marketers are now targeting the very young in order to set many of their ideas and buying preferences that will stick with them throughout life. There are several effective ways of doing this, but perhaps the most interesting is marketing to parents by making kid-oriented versions of the things we buy as adults (like kid-targeted yogurts and the like) and also doing things like making kid-friendly apps on electronic devices such as the iPhone.

Peddling Panic and Paranoia
Anti-bacterial soaps and other such products sell well because marketers have created the impression that germs are everywhere and can harm you, when in fact the evidence shows that using a lot of antibacterial products actually makes you more susceptible to illnesses because your body hasn’t built up resistances. Fear sells this product, and fear is a powerful salesperson. A similar logic applies in the produce aisle, where companies focus far more on the appearance of freshness than that of actual freshness, because vegetables and fruits that don’t appear perfectly fresh might make you ill or have other ill effects. Never mind whether or not they’re actually fresh, of course.

I Can’t Quit You
Companies have become much more sophisticated at encouraging cravings and consistently brand loyal behavior. The most powerful tool at their disposal is the microreward. If you engage in a behavior repeatedly, you receive some small reward for your effort, often one of negligible cost for the manufacturer but perhaps of great reward for you. A new crop type in Farmville, for example, or the instant taste of new information from a smartphone. These microrewards can be incredibly addictive and can keep you using a product over a long period of time. Such microrewards are often paired with micropayments – $0.99 for a new app, $8.99 for a monthly subscription fee, and so forth.

Buy It, Get Laid
It’s not simply about being attractive to the opposite sex any more. Instead, it’s often about associating the product with someone who is attractive to the opposite sex. Sometimes, it’s an Adonis-type figure – someone who is obviously attractive and of your gender simply using a product. At other times, someone who is seemingly normal – or, in some cases, of a socially awkward class – using a product and suddenly becoming very attractive. It’s progressed beyond just showing someone attractive holding a product and pitching it. It’s now a clever method of aspirational roleplaying for the viewer, as they want to visualize themselves as the person on the screen who is incredibly attractive to the opposite gender. Sometimes, it’s not even someone who is attractive – instead, it’s what that gender thinks is attractive to the opposite sex.

Under Pressure
Whenever you see someone you identify as a peer doing something, there’s a subtle pressure for you to do the same. It’s a pressure that often manifests itself on a subconscious level so that you are scarcely even aware you’re doing it. Buying habits are just one example of this (and it’s one big reason I encourage people to find frugal friends). What your friends buy and use rubs off on you, and it’s the reason that established brands are often very entrenched and hard to knock down without a huge amount of effort with the other techniques described in this book.

Oh, Sweet Memories
The sweet smell of nostalgia is a powerful one. Marketers constantly try to tap into our happiest memories, particularly from our childhood, and utilize those good feelings to convince us to buy (or at least associate those feelings with their product). Why do marketers so often repackage their products the way that they looked twenty or thirty years ago? It will often be enough to generate warm memories in a shopper’s mind, and that’s often enough to get the product into the cart. This is the end result of all of that effort marketing to young children – they set the hook of nostalgia then, and then pull the line when you’re older and have disposable income.

Marketers’ Royal Flush
Celebrities are marketed just like products. They’re marketed so that you’ll want to pay attention to what they’re doing, so that you’ll watch their movies and television shows and attend their concerts and so forth. They hire public relations firms to promote them just like a company would promote a product, and if they’re well-promoted, they can charge people for their films, their books, their albums, and so forth. In the end, famous people make more money if they’re promoted well, the products that famous people associate themselves with make more money, and everyone wins except for the average consumer.

Hope in a Jar
Whenever a trend exists, companies will hop on board to associate their products with it. When breast cancer awareness was a large trend a few years ago, products couldn’t wait to have that pink ribbon on the label so that buyers could feel like they were making a difference when it came to breast cancer. When the economic downturn happened and people became more concerned about simplicity, “simple” versions of products began popping up all over the place. Buzzwords like “wellness” and “natural” are all over the place, which is just a way to sell more or less the same old product by connecting it to the “new” way of thinking.

Every Breath You Take, They’ll Be Watching You
Technology has played a huge role in all of this. The internet, through services like Twitter and Facebook and Google, makes it very easy to identify cultural trends and demographic groups and market directly to them. If you search for something on Google, you’ll find ads related to whatever you’re searching. If you “like” something on Facebook, you’ve given marketers a clue as to what you like, making it easy for them to tailor their marketing straight toward you, tempting you in conjunction with the things you already like.

I’ll Have What Mrs. Morgenson Is Having
All of these tactics are amplified through the world around us. You might be wise to all of these tricks, but many of the people in your social network are not, and they’re often prone to speaking candidly in ways that amount to repeating the marketing material they’ve been given. This is true regarding everything from product reviews to political opinions. The people you’re closest to are the best marketing tools because you implicitly trust them.

Is Brandwashed Worth Reading?
While the book is light on solutions, Brandwashed does a very powerful job of revealing how deep the rabbit hole goes when it comes to marketing products, information, and people to us in the digital age. It’s a story I’ve read before, but the specific implementations change every time I hear the story, and it’s those specific changes that provide the real eye-opener and bring the message back home again.

For me, Brandwashed is the current standard-bearer I would point to when encouraging people to read a book on how pervasive and powerful marketing is, and I think everyone should read such a book at some point in their life.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Brandwashed on Amazon.com.

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I’ve written about 250 book reviews on The Simple Dollar since I started the site in late 2006. Along the way, I’ve found a few books that I just immediately recommend for certain topics. My general personal finance recommendation is Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s Your Money or Your Life. My regular debt management recommendation is Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover. For investing, I usually recommend Larimore, Lindauer, and LeBoeuf’s The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing. Time management? I’ll point to David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Throughout all of those books, though, I’ve never really found a single book I could recommend about entrepreneurship. There’s not been one book that really talks about the process of taking an idea you have in your head, investing your spare time and effort into it, and building it into something sustainable that can earn you significant money over time. The closest book I’ve found to that goal is Michael Masterson’s Ready, Fire, Aim, which does a very good job covering the topic, but feels incredibly rushed in places.

That’s why I felt pretty optimistic about reading Dave Ramsey’s latest, EntreLeadership. Ramsey is very good at hammering home the basic ideas you’ll need on a topic and pairing it with enough motivation to get you to go out there and try it yourself.

EntreLeadership Defined
In order to be successful, an entrepreneur has to be a leader. Even at the very start, when a business is nothing more than a side gig or the germ of an idea, it will never get started if you don’t step up to the plate and say that things need to happen. Even then, you’ll have to communicate with people and likely delegate some of the tasks that have to be done. Without some leadership skills, it will never happen. Entrepreneurship and leadership are intrinsically connected, and the principles of leadership help even the nascent entrepreneur.

Start with a Dream, End with a Goal
A lot of us have dreams of what we’d like to do with our lives. I’ve made no secret of my dream to be a writer. Others dream of other things. The difference between a dreamer and an entrepreneur is whether or not they can convert that dream into a goal, particularly a goal with a plan to get there. A dream is a fun indulgence, but it doesn’t come true if you don’t set it as your destination and focus on how exactly to achieve it.

Flavor Your Day with Steak Sauce
A big key of entrepreneurship is good time management. In order to have the time each day you’re going to need to make your business work, you’ve got to have a great grip on your time. Ramsey advocates using to-do lists, but also reflecting on Covey’s four quadrants (important and urgent, not important and urgent, important and not urgent, and not important and not urgent), where, obviously, important should always trump urgent.

“Spineless Leader” Is an Oxymoron
The best thing you can do as a leader is to make decisions quickly based on the information you have and be able to explain why you made those decisions. “Leaders” who don’t make decisions tend to lead organizations that fall apart. Leaders who make decisions without basing them on information tend to make horrible decisions. Leaders who make decisions based on information but can’t explain them tend to sow mistrust with their team.

No Magic, No Mystery
This chapter is most of the key ideas of a “business 101″ class wrapped up into a single chapter. Ramsey covers the life cycle of a product (introduction, growth, peak, decline) and how to start over again. There’s also a deep look at marketing a product, with basic ideas such as scarcity and appeal covered in the discussion. Almost any business you get into will involve some level of marketing, so it’s important to understand the basics of it.

Don’t Flop Whoppers
Here, Ramsey discusses the process of turning a detailed idea or a small side business into a larger entity. There are two keys to this, in Ramsey’s eyes: passion and calling. Passion is something that gets you excited to get out of bed in the morning. You can’t wait to get started on the activities at hand. Calling is what you want to achieve in your life. I’m passionate about writing, but my calling is using my words to change people’s lives.

Business Is Easy… Until People Get Involved
One of the biggest challenges in growing a business beyond a solo gig is the people. I can speak to this from experience: it was dealing with employees (interviewing, training, cleaning up their mistakes, etc.) that was the single worst experience of running The Simple Dollar, in my eyes. Ramsey offers a lot of good material that covers the entire life cycle of an employee, from the hiring process to maintaining good work to letting go of problematic employees.

Death of a Salesman
The best thing a good salesman can do is to focus on the customer and come up with solutions for that customer in mind. Sometimes, that means doing things that aren’t directly beneficial for your business, such as helping with things that are outside of your business or suggesting products and services that you don’t sell. If a customer walks away from you happy with the exchange and in a better place because of it, you’ve succeeded in your goal.

Financial Peace for Business
Businesses need to manage their finances well and, yes, be frugal. Owning a business isn’t a ticket to spending like a madman. Here, Dave takes the personal finance advice from Financial Peace Revisited and applies the advice to small business management. It actually works quite well, because the basic principles of personal finance – spend less than you earn, avoid debt, etc. – work very well for small businesses.

The Map to the Party
When a business grows into a multi-person outfit, the key to success is communication. The more people feel that they’re able to communicate and that their ideas are of value, the more they actually do communicate, the more involved they are, and the better decisions you can make for the business as a whole. Good communication feeds on itself, as does bad, so the best thing a leader can do is be candid and open.

People Matter Most
The people in your business matter more than anything else. If you can’t do right by them, you can’t do right by the rest of your business, and if you can’t do right by that, your business will eventually fall apart. Treat the people who work for you well. Respect what they need and work with it. Listen to what they’re telling you and don’t brush it off. The more you do that, the more they’ll respect you (if they’re good people that you want working for your business).

Caught in the Act
One key way to build your business is to make sure your business is recognized, particularly when you’re doing good things. Little steps, such as your email signature or your stationery, makes a difference. Mentions in the media also help. The more little pieces of positive recognition you have floating around out there, the more likely it is you’re going to draw in a random customer off the street.

Three Things Successful People Never Skip
Contracts, collections, and vendors. Dealing with each of these is the kind of detail work that can drive a person mad, but it’s the details of these things that can make or break a small business. Being detail-oriented in these areas almost always pays off.

Show Me the Money!
Be generous to the people that cause you to win. There are a lot of ways to do this – bonuses, higher salary, and so forth. Keep in mind, however, that the reason to do this is to reward the people that are showing good performance – and good performance is demonstrated in the form of happy customers.

Mastering “the Rope”
At some point, you eventually have to start delegating decisions to others as your business grows. The key to that is to make sure you’re surrounded by people you trust who you know will make decisions that are good for the business as a whole, people who share your perspective on how the business should be run. Your immediate team should consist of these people.

Is EntreLeadership Worth Reading?
This is the best single book on entrepreneurship that I’ve yet read.

Most of my problem with other entrepreneurship books is that they give short shrift to the early growth of a business, when it grows from an idea to a side business to perhaps a full time solo endeavor or one with one or two employees. They skip this part and move on to the point where a business has a handful of employees.

While that latter part is important to understand, so is the infancy of the business. It’s often that infancy that makes or breaks potential entrepreneurs, and Ramsey spends a good half of the book talking about issues at that level before moving on to growth issues.

Ramsey maintains the friendly tone that has worked well for him in personal finance books, and it works well here with entrepreneurship. There’s just the right level of detail in the information, mixed with great anecdotes.

If you’ve ever thought about launching your own business, this is a great book to start with.

Check out additional reviews and notes of EntreLeadership on Amazon.com.

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Unless you’re intentionally sticking with purely entry-level jobs or greatly restricting your career choices, you’re going to eventually find yourself in a position where you have to publicly present your ideas. It might just be to a room of peers, it might be to a large crowd, or it might even be to a large television audience, but in any of those events, you’re going to be practicing the art of public speaking.

I’ll be straight with you. The best way to become a good public speaker is to practice at it, but practicing at it involves a lot more than standing in front of a mirror and looking at yourself while you’re talking. There are a lot of little pieces that need to come together for effective public speaking.

Scott Berkun has been a public speaker for a long time. It was actually his talk on the myths of innovation that convinced me to find out more about him, and it was the strength of his public speaking style that convinced me to give Confessions of a Public Speaker a read.

It was well worth it. Confessions of a Public Speaker is probably the best book I’ve ever read on the art of public speaking. It balances the entertaining and anecdotal nature of such a book perfectly with hard-hitting and useful advice on getting up in front of a crowd and sharing your ideas.

I can’t see you naked
The trick to a good presentation is to realize that the audience mostly just wants for the presentation to be over so they can do other things – maybe get back to their work, maybe network with other people, maybe goof off. Because of that, they’re mostly not going to notice the small mistakes you make, so don’t worry about them. What about the big mistakes? Just try to roll onwards from them, preferably using them as a launching pad. For example, if you make a blunder, say, “You think that was bad? …” then share an anecdote that ties you to the audience and (hopefully) helps you to get back on track.

The attack of the butterflies
The best way to relieve nervousness before a talk is to practice it enough beforehand so that it feels natural and to eliminate little things that can make you nervous beforehand. Do things like getting a good night’s sleep the night before a talk, eating a healthy meal a couple hours beforehand, chatting with people in the audience before a talk (so that they seem friendly and not oppositional), and getting there in plenty of time so that you don’t have to rush and little hiccups become easier to deal with.

$30,000 an hour
What’s a justifiable amount for a public speaker to earn? Berkun breaks down a $30,000 speaking fee and really lays out how it’s not all that unreasonable for a 60 minute speech. It requires two days to create the presentation, the stress of speaking for that long, the time to travel there and handle the logistics of getting from your home to the venue and back home, and the career effort it took to reach a point where you can command a nice speaking fee. He makes a great case for why good public speakers ought to earn a lot.

How to work a tough room
The best defense against a tough room is on-site preparation. Get to the room as early as possible and get a feel for how you’ll sound in there. If there are other speakers, watch them and see how the crowd reacts to them. Are they an easy crowd or a tough crowd? If you’re the first speaker, encourage people to sit near the front, not spread out throughout the room (this way, you have a smaller area to focus on with your gaze and attention). The more you know the room and the crowd, the better off you are.

Do not eat the microphone
There are four key parts to assembling any good presentation. Take a strong position in the title of the presentation. Think carefully about your audience. Make your specific points as concise as possible. Know the counterarguments from an intelligent audience and address them. If you do these things, you’re going to have a presentation that grabs their attention and makes your case as well as possible. A good way to start is to simply list the five key points to making whatever case you want to make, honing those key points down, then making sure you’re able to handle the inevitable counterarguments.

The science of not boring people
The shorter your presentation and the faster the pace of it, the less likely you are to bore people and the more likely you are to make them leave with a positive impression of your message. Presentations that go on too long or dwell too long on specific points are often easily forgotten, which completely undoes the entire point of your presentation. Make it snappy.

Lessons from my 15 minutes of fame
My favorite point from this chapter is that memorization and teleprompters are evil for the vast, vast majority of speakers. If you have your speech memorized or are just reading it, you’re almost always not sounding genuine or human. Focus on knowing your points cold and delivering them naturally without reading a single thing. This sounds much more conversational and much more interesting to the person receiving the message.

The things people say
The best way to improve on your presentation is feedback, but feedback isn’t as easy as you might think it is. Having someone just watch your presentation and critique it doesn’t really help. A much better tactic is to ask people how your presentation compares to other ones, as it’s much easier for people to compare and contrast two things (plus it feels less insulting when pointing out your flaws). Another great tactic is to simply videotape your own presentations, then watch the tape and see what’s wrong with the presentation.

The clutch is your friend
If you’re not connecting what you’re talking about to the lives of the people you’re presenting it to, they’re not going to be very interested. How is this relevant to their lives? Another key: you can’t just tell them it’s relevant. You’ve got to show them. Doing something is the most powerful way to learn, and you’ve got to get as close to having the audience do something as you can in the format of your presentation.

Confessions
The remainder of the book is almost like a blog. It addresses a bunch of very specific points about presenting, such as choosing the right pointer (this one) and how to properly put a wireless microphone on (clip it to your neck, then hide the cable inside your outer shirt). There’s just a bunch of good little tips here.

Is Confessions of a Public Speaker Worth Reading?
If you are on a career path that is going to involve making presentations in public at any point, Confessions of a Public Speaker is going to be well worth reading. It’s the best single volume on public speaking I’ve yet read.

The only complaint is that there’s not a whole lot on actually creating slides and building a presentation. Thankfully, a book I reviewed earlier, Presentation Zen, does that wonderfully. These two are great complements to each other.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Confessions of a Public Speaker on Amazon.com.

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I was about to review the third edition of Liz Pulliam Weston’s Your Credit Score several months ago when I found out that a fourth edition was forthcoming, so I waited until this new and updated edition was released to write this review. What I found was that the book remained a detailed and useful resource concerning how credit scores work in America.

Part of the challenge of credit scores is that the exact formulas for calculating them remain trade secrets. At best, companies like Fair Isaac issue guidelines on how to improve your credit score, but they don’t tell you exactly how they’re calculated.

Unsurprisingly, this can result in some serious confusion. Even worse, these scores are used for all kinds of things, from determining how trustworthy you are during a job interview process to determining your rates when you buy insurance.

Weston has written a pretty solid concise guide to understanding and navigating this minefield.

Why Your Credit Score Matters
If your credit score is good, banks will want to do business with you. They’ll provide you good rates on things like mortgages and car loans. If your credit score is bad, banks will pretty much avoid you because, to them, you’re not worth the risk. Even if you don’t really care about such things, it’s important to keep tabs on your credit score because it’s often the first way you find out that your identity has been stolen. People open up lines of credit in your name, use them for purchases, and you’re the one holding the bill – not something you want to have happen to you.

How Credit Scoring Works
Your credit score is calculated based on your credit report, which is a compiled document about you listing all of the sources of credit you have, such as student loans, credit cards, car loans, mortgages, and so on. You can get your credit report from the federal government at annualcreditreport.com. Generally, five factors make up your credit score: your payment history (have you been making payments?), how much you owe (do you owe a lot?), how long you’ve had credit (longer is better), your last application for credit, and how many different types of credit you use, and all of these pieces are obtained from your credit report.

FICO vs. “FAKO” – Competitors to the Leading Score
The primary formula used for calculating a credit score is called FICO (short for Fair-Isaac Corporation) and it’s the general formula that’s used for calculating your credit score. Unfortunately, the FICO formula is a trade secret, meaning we don’t know exactly how it works. Some companies offer alternatives to FICO, but none of them have caught on.

Improving Your Score the Right Way
How do you improve your credit score? First, get your credit report, as mentioned above, and then make sure you know what every entry on that report is and that it’s correct. Next, make sure to pay all of your bills on time, and then pay down your debts. Also, if you’re trying to improve your score and you’re carrying any debt at all, it’s probably not a good idea to close any of your credit cards or lines of credit.

Credit Scoring Myths
The biggest myth that goes around about credit scores is that your score will be helped by closing old credit cards or having your credit limits reduced. This actually can hurt your score if you’re carrying any debt because it alters the “how much you owe” element of your credit score, which is based on a comparison of your actual debt versus your credit limit. The closer you are to your credit limits on the whole, the worse off you are. So, if you have a $2,000 debt on a card with a $2,500 limit and another card with $0 debt with a $2,500 limit, you’re utilizing 40% of your credit limit. Not bad. But if you cancel that $0 debt card, you’re suddenly using 80% of your credit limit – not good.

Coping with a Credit Crisis
Many people tend to retreat into their shell when things get financially bad, but that usually just makes things worse. A much better approach is to handle it head-on. Look for ways to free up some cash by selling off things in your closet. Prioritize your payments so that you’re not going to lose your home or your car. Contact some of your lenders and discuss the crisis you’re going through – some lenders will put your debts into forbearance during a job loss or other such situations. Weston discusses credit counseling (and doesn’t give it much of a thumbs-up) and bankruptcy as final options after you’ve tried everything else.

Rebuilding Your Score after a Credit Disaster
Much like dealing with a bad situation, recovering from it also requires you to be proactive. Check your credit report regularly and make sure it’s correct with regards to your current situation. Resolve the bad spots still left on your report. Also, if you have the opportunity, make sure that you get positive things about yourself added to your report. If you have a line of credit that’s not being reported that’s in good shape, try to get that to appear on your report by contacting the company who is offering that line of credit.

Emergency! Fixing Your Credit Score Fast
It’s difficult to get changes made immediately to your report and your score. If you do try this route, you need proof of what you’re saying or else you’re just wasting both your time and their time. A much more reliable route is to focus on the positive change you can make over a month or two by doing things such as paying off as much of your credit cards as possible (improving your ratio, as described above), using your credit cards very lightly, and trying to get positive things added to your credit report.

Insurance and Your Credit Score
Insurance companies use your credit score as an element of determining how much to charge you for insurance, so one of the best things you can do to improve your insurance rates is to improve your credit score. Of course, that’s not the only factor in determining your insurance rates, as things like your deductible amount also influence how much you pay.

Can Bad Credit Cost You a Job?
Employers often use credit scores to help winnow down applicants for an open position, particularly in a poor job market. If an open position has a deluge of reasonably qualified applicants, employers are going to look for reliable and trustworthy people, and like it or not, credit scores are often used as a quick thumbnail to check how reliable and trustworthy people are.

Keeping Your Score Healthy
Pay your bills. Pay down your debts. Have an emergency fund. Have adequate insurance (for example, life insurance for you and your spouse). These things all go a long way toward ensuring that your credit score is healthy for the long haul.

Is Your Credit Score Worth Reading?
Weston’s book focuses in on credit scores like a laser beam. If you ever had any interest in understanding how credit scores work and how they affect your life in more detail, this is absolutely the book to pick up.

Keep in mind, though, that this book hits a home run with the topic at hand, but doesn’t really address much else in terms of personal finance (outside of issues directly connected to the topic), so if you’re looking for more of a full picture, you might want to pick up a different book and look at this one as a supplement.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Your Credit Score on Amazon.com.

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As many long-time readers of The Simple Dollar know, I’m quite focused on time management practices. Without good time management skills, I would have never been able to get The Simple Dollar off the ground.

One particular facet of time management was always a challenge for me, though. I would always find that I was more productive on some days than others and at some times of the day as opposed to others. I also began to realize that there were other factors tied heavily to my productivity: the amount of sleep I got the last few nights, whether I forgot to take medications, and so on.

Eventually, I began to realize that energy management was in a lot of ways as important as time management, and that’s exactly the philosophy described in this book, The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.

Fully Engaged: Energy, Not Time, Is Our Most Precious Resource
The basic premise of the book is that people are most productive when they go through periods of high stress followed by periods of renewal. This is in contrast to the typical idea of time management in which everything is approached like a marathon with a consistent level of stress throughout. The problem with that route is that it doesn’t account for your natural fluctuations in energy. It eventually leads to “burnout” or significant disengagement (you’re just collecting a paycheck).

The Disengaged Life of Roger B.
Roger B. is a person who spends so much of his time responding to external stimuli (the incessant demands of his job, a busy family, community responsibilities) that he’s essentially burnt out on everything and isn’t giving good performance in any area of his life. This is mostly because he never takes time for himself to genuinely relax and figure out what he wants out of life. I’ll admit that pieces of the story sounded incredibly familiar to me.

The Pulse of High Performance: Balancing Stress and Recovery
The key idea in this book is that best way to really perform well in any area of your life is to stress that area hard, then follow that period with a respite that’s free from stress. That doesn’t mean being on call or just having low stress. It means time to recover and rethink. It means a genuine period of rest and reflection and regrowth without a continuation of the stress. A great sports champion doesn’t play nonstop. Why should a great writer or a great employee?

Physical Energy: Fueling the Fire
The authors start off by looking at physical energy, heavily looking at physical fitness as a way to build up physical energy. They recommend that people train by working very hard for periods, followed by periods of almost no work at all. Stress your body nearly to the point of breaking, let it rest and recover, then repeat. This will make your body stronger.

Emotional Energy: Transforming Threat into Challenge
A similar theme – stress, rejuvenation, repeat – pops up again here when looking at emotional energy. Rather than facing a steady ongoing level of emotional stress, you should look at that consistent threat as a challenge and tackle it head on. Yes, this will cause a great deal of stress at once, but resolving that issue will reduce your stress over the long term.

Mental Energy: Appropriate Focus and Realistic Optimism
You can’t just focus mentally on one thing all of the time. You also can’t focus entirely on what others insist that you focus on. You have to spend at least some of your time doing what you want to do, unwinding from the tightness that you’ve built up. Without that unwinding, you’re unable to keep the things you need to focus on in your life in perspective and you’re unable to determine what’s realistic regarding them.

Spiritual Energy: He Who Has a Way to Live
Here, the authors argue that much of the ongoing stress in our lives comes from living in a way that isn’t in accordance to the values we have, whatever they may be. Often, living in accordance to those values means occasional peaks of stress (when doing something that’s hard) followed by a sense of peace and ease of living because those values guide you. You aren’t doing things that are wrong to you, making life easier to handle.

Defining Purpose: The Rules of Engagement
So, how do you really get started on this? The authors say that the foundation of all of this is purpose. Why are you here? What do you want to do with your life? What’s the destination? On top of that are your values, which guide you to that purpose. You move toward that purpose by simply taking on challenges in your life head-on, then taking genuine breaks where you turn off that cell phone.

Face the Truth: How Are You Managing Your Energy Now?
It’s often hard to face the real challenges in our life. We tend to take shortcuts that work well in the short term, but fail us in the long term. We keep up a wall at work. We take a pessimistic, snarky attitude about things. The list goes on and on. However, if we take that short-term heat head on and face the truth of our situation, we can move onto a path that actually makes life easier.

Taking Action: The Power of Positive Rituals
How do you keep going on this path? The authors suggest positive rituals. All of us have a morning ritual where we go through certain actions automatically each day. If you want to move toward the big goals in your life, you need to add to your daily rituals. Make going for a walk each day “normal.” Make working on your novel a bit each day “normal.”

Is The Power of Full Engagement Worth Reading?
I felt that The Power of Full Engagement offered up a powerful perspective on managing one’s time and energy. The idea of bearing down on particular things then alternating them with a rest period is a powerful one. The book also does a great job of walking through the ramifications of that perspective in different dimensions of life.

If you’re finding it difficult to achieve the things you want to achieve in life, The Power of Full Engagement is well worth a read. I found lots of food for thought in those pages, which is the most I can really ask for from a book.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Power of Full Engagement on Amazon.com.

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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.

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One of the first books I reviewed on The Simple Dollar was Dave Ramsey’s More Than Enough. I found it to be an interesting take on personal finance, as it ties together personal finance and character and personal growth into a single package. While I didn’t think that it was the first book you should read if you were in personal finance panic mode, I did recommend it as a worthwhile read.

A few weeks ago, a reader emailed me and suggested that I read what my reader described as a “companion” to More Than Enough, entitled How to Have More Than Enough. My reader suggested that it was a much better read than the first book.

Store Manager, to Aisle One, Please!
Many people feel unhappy with big aspects of their life, but they also find change to be stressful. The key thing to remember about any change that you take on in your life is that the end goal of it is to put you in a place where you are no longer unhappy with some aspect of your life. For example, choosing to live a life that involves less spending can be really stressful, but the end goal of it is actually a stress-reducer: freedom from debt and financial worry.

Foundation Failure
Why do people get into situations where they’re unhappy with some aspect of their life? Ramsey’s argument is that some basic foundation of their life has failed in some fashion. Ramsey argues that most lives are held up by a series of posts, and when one or more of those posts begin to rot and fall away, the entire structure of our lives begins to fall apart. Thus, the best thing we can do is to constantly shore up those things that we rely on. This chapter focuses a lot on values – the immediate things that we hold true and hold dear in our lives. What are we doing to reinforce those things? Most of the rest of the book focuses on nine more of these “poles” that hold up everyone’s life.

Vision – Binoculars Looking at Your Future
Vision refers to knowing where you want to go in life. This ranges from something as simple as what you want to accomplish this week to what you hope to accomplish over your entire life. If you focus on nothing but today, you’re going to walk in a rut in your life and never get to any of the places you’d like to go someday. The big key is to just start thinking about it and writing it down. What would you like to have people say about you at your funeral? What has your life meant? What can you do to get there?

Unity – A Tangled Rope Is Just Loops
Unity simply means doing things with respect to the people around you. So often, it’s easy to just do what we want and ignore what others need or want. However, if you focus on listening to the needs of others and incorporating those needs into your daily actions and choices, you’re going to find that your entire life flows much better. This goes from things like cleaning out the dishwasher to big things like how to spend a big windfall. The more you listen to the key people in your life and involve them in your major decisions, the easier your life will flow and the more they’ll involve you.

Hope – Fuel for the Explosion!
Is the future awash with possibilities or is it something to dread? If you look at the future as something to avoid and to fear, then you’ll find that your future is indeed a darker place. A much better approach is to look at one’s future as a place for hope and optimism, where the things you want in life are destined to happen. A key part of this equation is to look for the good “what-if”s and chart a path to them, and also look for paths away from the bad “what-if”s.

People Who Need People – Support and Accountability
You need other people in your life. For many people, though, it’s a surprise to learn that others need them in their lives. There are people out there who need you to be at your best. At the same time, those people are often the ones who can be there for you when you need help. It’s a two way street of support and accountability that can constantly push you on to better things if you let it happen.

Intensity – Move the Rock
Many people are willing to give up at the first obstacle. If you come at your goals with a low intensity, it’s going to be very easy to derail you, and any goal that’s worth achieving is going to have some obstacles along the path. Instead of letting those challenges derail you, you’ve got to focus hard on those challenges and overcome them. For example, if you’re watching your weight, instead of eating that delicious piece of pie, you’ve got to have the intensity and content of character to push it aside.

Diligence – That Dirty Little Secret
On the flip side of intensity is diligence – the ability to stick with something through thick and thin. It’s easy to ramp up the intensity in challenging moments, but it is diligence that will get you through the plateaus and the valleys where success seems far off. For example, intensity will get you through Thanksgiving dinner without gaining five pounds, but diligence will keep you from eating 500 calories a day more than you should and slowly gaining weight. It’s a focus for the long term.

Patience Is Power
Hand in hand with diligence is patience. Most goals don’t happen overnight. Many goals don’t happen in a year. In the society we live in today, it’s easy to have a mindset that you need results now and if they don’t immediately happen, something’s wrong. That mindset will keep you from achieving great things because it will cause you to abandon goals before you can possibly achieve them. Patience is an essential key for building a great life.

Contentment
It’s easy to fall into a mindset where you want what others have. It can be a very pernicious mindset to crawl out of, too. The key to success is to simply be happy with the things you have, even when you could have other things if you were willing to sacrifice some of your goals. Without goals, it’s easy to fall into a trap of keeping up with the Joneses and never being truly content with what you have.

Giving – The Great Misunderstanding
When we are scared or when we don’t feel confident about our lives, we tend to clench our fists and hold on to what we have. A big step towards being happy with our lives is a willingness to let go of that tight grip and give of ourselves to others, not just in the form of money, but in the form of time and talent and energy. By doing this, we can begin to see that the bounty of gifts we have is actually more than enough.

Is How to Have More Than Enough Worth Reading?
This book is actually very much like More Than Enough except with some additional workbook elements added in. I compared the two books side by side and found that there really wasn’t very much material at all cut from the original book. Instead, this version mostly just benefits from the direct addition of workbook materials.

If you’re just looking for a book that focuses on character and personal growth and how it relates to personal finance, either How to Have More Than Enough or More Than Enough will suffice. However, I think I would give this one the edge because, due to the workbook elements, it provides just a little bit more push for you to actually start evaluating your life and making positive changes and some more food for thought about living a values-oriented life.

Check out additional reviews and notes of How to Have More Than Enough on Amazon.com.

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Connie writes in: I trade books by mail. It costs me about $2 to send out a book via media mail and I have to also spend the materials to wrap it. If I just swap page turners at my local used book store, I can get them at $2.50 a pop if I buy a bunch at once. Am I really saving anything trading by mail?

This sounds like you use PaperBackSwap, a service I love and have been using for years. Much like you, I’ve been curious at times whether or not it’s worth it and I’ve ran the numbers several times. Each time, I’m pretty sure I’ve decided it’s a good deal.

For starters, my estimate of the cost of my supplies is about ten cents. I use a sheet or two of printer paper, a single printed page with black and white ink on it, and some packing tape. Media mail varies by weight, but the typical range for me is $2.41 for a paperback in the mail. So, my total cost for shipping out a book is $2.51.

Now, let’s compare that to the used bookstore. At my local used bookstore, they will take most books in trade for anywhere from $0.25 to $1. They also sell used books at varying prices, anywhere from $1 (for Harlequin romances and the like) to $5 (mostly hardbacks). There’s also sales tax on your purchases, so that tacks on another 7%.

If I were just swapping for Harlequin romances, the local used bookstore would probably be cheaper. I could trade in one for $0.25, buy a new one for $1 (minus the $0.25 credit), and walk out of there having paid about $0.80 for a novel.

However, most of the books I want to read there are on the $3 or $4 shelves. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction, some science fiction and fantasy, and some general fiction, too. I might get $0.50 in trade for the books I bring in, but my net cost is either $2.50 or $3.50 for a book I want to read, plus the sales tax. That means either $2.68 or $3.75 for a new (to me) book after paying the sales tax.

If you add on top of that the fact that I can do PaperBackSwap at home whenever I want and there’s a much more extensive selection there, it starts to become a no-brainer.

In Connie’s case, she’s shipping out books for $2.51 via media mail, or she’s buying them for $2.68 at her local used bookstore. For her, the cost is pretty close, so it really comes down to other values. Would she rather support the local business? Or would she rather enjoy a larger selection online?

As for me, I’ll just keep using PaperBackSwap. It’s a service I’ve used for many years to recycle my read books because it’s convenient and the selection is pretty good.

There’s also another take-home point here. If you’re an avid reader, trading used books is really a bargain. Let’s say I spend eight hours reading a book that I swapped for $2.51. That means I was entertained for a cost of about $0.30 per hour.

While that’s not as cheap as the library, it’s pretty cheap, and there’s no danger of late fees or other such things if you don’t get your book finished or if your son drops a library book behind his bed.

Not only that, if you read something at least a little challenging, you’re growing your mind, too. You’re learning something new and improving your literacy. That’s what I call a real value.

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A week or two ago, I was scanning the radio dial while on a road trip, looking for something interesting to listen to, when I stumbled upon a guy talking rather excitedly about investing. It was Adam Bold, and he was hosting a program called The Mutual Fund Show.

While I didn’t necessarily agree with his show on every point, I did agree with him on most things, and I did appreciate the enthusiasm he was bringing to investing. He made it seem incredibly approachable and even fun, while also keeping in mind the fact that it was quite important to your future.

After listening until the station faded out, I decided to see if Adam Bold had a book available to read, and he does. The Bold Truth About Investing is a thin little volume where Bold lays down his ten commandments for building personal wealth.

It is worth keeping in mind as you’re reading that Bold got his start by founding a financial advising firm, The Mutual Fund Store. While encouraging advising is naturally going to be part of his perspective (more so than mind), most of the advice in the book is quite good.

Know Yourself
Some people are aggressive in how they like to invest. Others are conservative. Some people tend to spend what they have. Others can barely stand the thought of their investments not growing. We all have different personalities. The trick is being able to put the elements of our personalities that limit us aside when making investment choices. You have to be able to follow sensible principles when you invest, some of which may override your personality’s default.

Know When to Invest
Bold suggests holding off any investing until you’ve achieved two things: pay off “bad” debt (meaning those with high or variable interest rates) and build a “rainy day”/emergency fund. I completely agree with this perspective. If you’re on a sinking ship right now – which is where you’re at if you have “bad” debt or don’t have an emergency fund – putting money into investments won’t right that ship. Investments help with the future, but they can’t help if things aren’t right today.

Know Your Advisor
This chapter provides some good basic advice for finding a financial advisor. Bold talks about fee-based and commission-based advisors (I’d pretty much insist on a fee-based one if I were ever choosing one) and covers some basic questions to ask advisors. I treaded pretty lightly on this chapter because of the fact that Adam runs his own financial advising shop, so there was at least a little promotion of The Mutual Fund Store here.

Have a Plan
A plan starts with a goal. What do you want to do with your money? Do you want to have a very secure retirement? Do you want to build a house in ten years? Do you want your children to be able to go to college in fifteen years? A goal helps to establish a timeline and also helps to establish how much risk you should take on – without a goal, you’re flying blind. From a goal comes a plan – risk, diversification, updating your investments regularly, and so on.

Be in the Best Funds Possible
By “best funds possible,” Bold does not mean the ones that had huge returns the last few years. He means funds that have a long history of having solid and reliable returns. For me, this usually means index funds, but Bold doesn’t really look at those too much. Instead, he encourages looking at all funds and find ones with a mix of risk level that all have consistency in their returns over the long haul.

Avoid Any Hidden Costs
Here’s where I agree with Bold wholeheartedly. When you buy an investment, know every single fee involved before you buy. What’s the mutual fund’s expense ratio? More importantly, is the fund carrying a load – and if it is, avoid it like the plague. Bold does come out a bit against index funds in this chapter, arguing that although they cost more they tend to have a better return over the long haul. That might be true in some funds, but their year-over-year variability makes them more volatile. I’ll stick with my low cost index funds.

Don’t Buy What You Don’t Understand
If you don’t know what exactly an investment is, don’t invest in it. That’s simple enough. How deep does the knowledge have to go, though? Bold basically encourages people to be wary. If you can’t explain how the investment works in a sentence or two and can’t easily find out what the investment is made of, then you shouldn’t put your money in there. A black box managed by someone else is not something to trust your future to.

Be Proactive About Managing Your Retirement Investments
If you’re not investing for your retirement yet, start now. Start immediately. You need to be on the ball with your retirement, and the earlier you start, the less you’ll have to save (yes, seriously – if you start now, you won’t have to save as much as you would if you started in a few years). If you’re not sure what to do, just use your company’s 401(k) and choose a target retirement fund – you can always change it a bit later on. If you don’t have a 401(k), start a Roth IRA. The key is to start saving now.

Stick to Your Plan
You can’t react emotionally to what the stock market is doing. If you do that, you’re going to make investment mistakes. Markets are going to go up and down. That’s just what they do. When you invest in stocks, part of that investment means enjoying the years when the market is up 15 or 20%, but holding on for dear life during years like 2008 where the market is down 40%. If you jump off when things are flying downwards, all you’re doing is locking in your losses, because when you move to something more conservative, you’re giving up the “bounce” that stocks get when they hit bottom and rebound.

Live Well, For You Cannot Take It With You
When you’ve reached your investing goal, that means it’s time to start spending it. A 401(k) or a Roth IRA is meant to be used when you reach retirement age. It can be scary to see that total start to go down, but if you don’t start spending it, all you’ve done is create a very valuable asset to hand down to your kids.

Is The Bold Truth About Investing Worth Reading?
This is a short book, one that’s clearly written for people who are thinking that they ought to invest but are very nervous and unsure about the prospect. Bold uses very clear and straightforward language when talking about these things. I can easily see this book being exactly what a person might need to get over their nervousness about jumping into investing.

While I don’t agree with Bold on every point – for example, I think most people can manage their investments themselves using online tools and I think that index funds are the best way to go for investing – I agree with him on the vast majority of the principles outlined in this book. This is a great book to read for anyone who is trying to make up their mind about getting started with investing.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Bold Truth About Investing on Amazon.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’ll be the first to admit that personal finance workbooks never really clicked for me. I’ve tried reading and using a few of them over the years, but virtually every time, I felt like the forms and blanks within the book were constraining me and didn’t match what I wanted to do. I have always felt much better reading books until I understood the concepts, then doing things myself independently of the books.

Of course, such an attitude is a direct reflection of how my mind works. For other people – including a lot of readers of The Simple Dollar – workbooks are a great way to start going through the thought process of getting one’s finances in order. They do an excellent job of connecting the orderly process of one writer’s personal finance philosophy to a set of step-by-step tools for readers.

This, of course, brings me to David Bach’s Finish Rich Workbook. Bach has written a pile of books over the years, many of which I’ve reviewed (Smart Couples Finish Rich, Smart Women Finish Rich, and Start Late, Finish Rich, for starters) that all espouse the same general personal financie philosophy of cutting back on unnecessary expenditures and channeling that into long term financial goals. Yes, he’s the guy who came up with the much-debated “latte factor.”

Start the Journey to Living and Finishing Rich
The book starts off by checking to see what you know about your finances through a series of checklists. The items on these lists often push you toward expanding your knowledge in specific areas that you don’t have a good grasp of. For example, one entry says “I know whether my income would be protected by disability insurance should I (or my partner) become unable to work. If I have disability insurance, I know the amount of the coverage when the benefits would start, and whether they would be taxable. If I don’t have disability insurance, I know why I don’t.” If you’re unable to check that box, you’ve got a pretty clear conversation and thought starter right there.

Find Your Money
Here, Bach encourages people to essentially make their own net worth calculator by collecting together all of the things that they own (including financial accounts) and all off the debts that they have, then subtracting the debts from the assets. This is a very good thumbnail for seeing how your financial progress is going, particularly if you routinely calculate it and compare it to earlier results.

Create Your Purpose-Focused Financial Plan
I actually quite liked this section. The plan that Bach wants you to create starts off by you figuring out what the five things you value most in the world are, then assembling a goal related to each one that you want to achieve, then building your financial plan based on those five goals. For example, if I value education, I might have a goal of saving for half of my children’s college education, so how would I achieve that? I’d open a 529 (an immediate action), set up an automatic contribution, and watch it build over time.

Find Your Latte Factor
How do you pay for these financial goals? Bach’s solution is to dig through your life and look for ways where you’re spending money needlessly, then trim or eliminate them. The “latte factor,” of course, refers specifically to cutting out an expensive morning coffee, but that just scratches the surface of the idea. For many, this seems un-fun, but I tend to look at this as a challenge of sorts, seeking out things that I can cut without making life less enjoyable.

The Debt-Free Solution
Here, Bach encourages people to move toward a debt free life, which is a great financial goal for anyone to achieve. The plan is essentially a pretty standard debt repayment plan, but Bach does a pretty good job of walking a person through assembling a plan that works for them.

Pay Yourself First
So, you’ve got all of these goals and plans, but how are you going to make it work? One big tactic to use is to pay yourself first, meaning that you allocate money to these goals and plans right off the bat, then strive to make life work with what’s left over. This is a pretty strong strategy, as we often modify our lifestyle choices based on the cash available to us.

Create a Security Plan
Here, Bach delves into insurance issues, looking at things like life insurance, long term care insurance, and so on. These tools are there to make sure that all of your hard work doesn’t go for naught because of an unexpected event. Bach’s advice is largely good but occasionally delves into what I would consider unusual recommendations, so I would use this chapter as a jumping off point, not as a final answer.

Recapture Your Dreams
Here, Bach looks at the ins and outs of specific investments. How do you need to invest if you want a high return (with high risk, of course)? What about if you need a very safe investment that has a steady (but lower) return? Bach walks through savings accounts, bond investments, stock investments, and so on with the goal of matching specific investments to the goals you’ve set in the earlier chapters.

How to Hire a Financial Advisor
My advice is generally to not hire a financial advisor and figure out instead how to do things for yourself, but many people feel better hiring one anyway. This chapter largely serves as a research and interview guide for helping you to find an advisor that works well for you. The key piece of advice here is a home run: never delegate control of your money. Your advisor should never be able to make any financial moves without your explicit permission. Allowing such moves opens you up to be burnt badly.

Keep a FinishRich Journal
Bach’s final advice is to simply keep a journal describing your financial journey. Why do such a thing? Writing a journal entry makes you reflect on the things you’re writing about and helps you think about the journey ahead from where you’re at in a very intimate way. I’ve been an avid journaler of my whole life for many years and I find it very valuable for reflecting on my day just passed and the days ahead.

Is The Finish Rich Workbook Worth Reading?
This is a book that’s very strong in terms of holding your hand and walking you through each step, but it’s a little light on the depth of specific issues at times. If you’re looking for something that will help you get started, this is perfect. If you’re looking for something to answer all of your questions that you’ve ever had, this book will be a little light.

I would absolutely recommend this book to someone who works well with a guided environment… with one caveat. Some of the specifics in this book are a bit dated, as the most recent revision came out in 2003. The advice is still quite strong, but there are references to financial institutions that no longer exist and tax rules that have been superceded since 2003. A revision could be in order here. If it gets a revision, this book would get a thumbs-up as a solid beginner’s workbook from me. For now, it still gets a thumbs-up, but perhaps not a really strong one.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Finish Rich Workbook on Amazon.com.

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If you’ve read The Simple Dollar for a while, you know that I’m a big believer in the maxim that time is money. I’m quite passionate about time management, because I see it as a way to maximize what I earn from the time I spend working so that I can spend more of my time doing other things that I’m passionate about, like spending time with my family or reading engaging books.

In fact, one of the most powerful books I’ve ever read was David Allen’s classic time management book Getting Things Done. It drastically altered how I managed my time and made it possible for me to hold down a full time job and build The Simple Dollar at the same time while also maintaining a home life with a good marriage and two very young children.

Since then, I’ve read a lot of good time management books. For the most part, they’ve simply supplemented the GTD system that I already use with specific tactics or made me re-evaluate some life choices in a philosophical way.

This book, 18 Minutes by Peter Bregman, comes very highly regarded from multiple readers of The Simple Dollar who recommended it to me (I get about ten book recommendation emails a week). Bregman writes a column for the Harvard Business Review on managing yourself, of which a significant focus is time management.

The focus of this book is on eliminating distraction, finding focus, and making good choices about what to do with your time. His approach is a bit different in that he talks about making proactive distractions for yourself, so that when you’re distracted from the task at hand, you stumble right into something else that’s useful.

Pause
So many of us with busy lives are so caught up in the overabundance of things that we have on our to-do list that we never bother to stop for a moment and ask ourselves why we’re doing thse things. Often, we’re filling our day with things that are, in the big scheme of things, pretty unimportant, and those unimportant things are crowding out the genuinely important ones.

Bregman’s advice is to simply “pause” for a bit and get things in perspective. A “pause,” in Bregman’s book, is a time where you simply look at the things you’re doing and order them in terms of how important they are to you in your overall life. Where do we want to be going in a general sense? What kind of person do we want to be?

Recognize that all of the choices we make have costs and they have benefits. A choice to work late might mean less sleep or less time building a deep relationship with our spouse or our wife. What’s the right choice? It can be a challenging question, but without pausing sometimes, we don’t have the time to give it the thought it needs to be sure we’re coming up with the right answer.

What Is This Year About?
One big part in determining what’s important is thinking about the things you want to achieve over the medium term and the long term. Where do you want to be a year from now? Five years from now? Which of the things on your plate is most likely to help you get to that place?

So much of what we do on a daily basis has little impact on our lives from that perspective, and thus it’s worthwhile to actively lower the importance of such things. The things that are actually important are the things that have long term impact on our lives and we should strive to focus on those as much as possible.

What Is This Day About?
This, of course, brings us to today. Once we understand what big things we want from life, it’s easier to prioritize the things that need to be done today. In other words, if we have a long checklist of things to take care of, which of those actually has a significant positive impact toward our long term ideas?

One way to effectively do this is to simply surround yourself with things that all have a positive impact toward our long term goals. Load your office down with things you’d like to make progress on over the long term, and do the same with your home.

Thus, when you are distracted, something that Bregman more or less describes as inevitable, the things you’re distracted by are also things that relate to a long-term goal. For example, if one of your big goals is improving your fitness, put a resistance band near your desk. That way, when you’re distracted, you’ll see that band and do some stretches, filling your time with something goal-oriented instead of something useless.

Is 18 Minutes Worth Reading?
The entire focus of this book seems to be dealing with our overcrowded lives, where our day-to-day activities don’t match up with the things we want out of our lives. I found that it offered a lot of good, sensible advice, but the specific implementations seem to be extremely varied in that you’re going to find some that work for you and a lot that do not, and the ones that work for you are going to be different than the ones that work for someone else.

For me, I felt like I got quite a lot out of this book. The ideas in it made me reorganize my office in a more “goal-oriented” fashion, as described above, as that was the most powerful idea that came from this book for me. If I can get one “home run” idea from a book, then it was a worthwhile read for me, and I think there are a lot of “home run” ideas in this book for people struggling with time management.

Check out additional reviews and notes of 18 Minutes on Amazon.com.

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One of the biggest keys to personal success is found in the title of this book. Willpower. Do you have the ability to consistently take the less easy path in an effort to achieve a goal?

Willpower is a struggle for most everyone, including me. It’s hard to consistently make the right choice for a greater good, particularly when there is a lot of appeal in the easier choice. It can be hard to not buy an item you want. It can be hard to not take another drink. It can be hard to devote your evenings to building a business. I’ve been there.

Roy Baumeister and John Tierney have put together a fascinating book on the topic of willpower here and since it’s a topic that runs through The Simple Dollar, I felt a review of it might be worthwhile.

Is Willpower More Than a Metaphor?
Willpower definitely exists. It’s observable in the sense that people will choose not to make the choice that would bring short-term comfort and will make the choice that brings longer-term benefits. The authors draw on the example of Amanda Palmer, who worked as a “living statue” through some pretty horrible situations. She made herself stand still in order to do the job and to build a reputation as someone who could handle this through whatever might happen. The key? In Amanda’s words, focus on one project at a time. Be so single-minded that nothing else really matters.

Where Does the Power in Willpower Come From?
In other words, how do people find the ability to “power through”? Usually, the basis for willpower comes from a backbone of something enjoyable or something you value or something you physically need. The authors discuss all of these things, including the need for adequate sleep and adequate nutrition to have adequate willpower as well as less basic desires such as family and friendship and human interaction. All of these things create the “power” we need to push through and achieve great things.

A Brief History of the To-Do List
To-do lists typically don’t work because they’re usually loaded with things that drag you in different directions. One thing might involve a commitment to your family, while another things points you to your office and yet another involves a promise made to a friend. One’s at home, one’s at the office, and one’s somewhere else. It’s incredibly hard to follow through on such a list if there’s no consistency. The authors actually take a look at the GTD time management philosophy as an approach to solving this challenge.

Decision Fatigue
Sometimes, our willpower breaks because we’re faced with too many decisions in a given day, which results in “decision fatigue.” We’re tired of making decisions and just don’t want to think. What’s the solution here? You should create a situation where the “easy” path is the one that matches your goal through advance work. Create situations for yourself so that it becomes very easy to continue to press toward your goal.

Where Have All the Dollars Gone?
Another area where willpower shines is money, something that readers of The Simple Dollar may have picked up on over the years. You have to have willpower to not spring money leaks all over the place. What’s the solution to this? Quantifying. Keep track of every penny you spend so that you know exactly where every dime is going. This works in other areas, too, such as food consumption and exercise.

Can Willpower Be Strengthened?
Just like almost anything else, willpower is strengthened through practice. If you find yoursel able to push through to achieve one goal through consistent willpower, other goals that require such willpower become easier. This ties in well with the single-minded nature of willpower, which is itself something to practice. When you focus in on a goal over and over again and show yourself that you can do it, doing it again becomes just that much easier.

Outsmarting Yourself in the Heart of Darkness
How do you keep going in particularly trying times? The authors use the example of Henry Morton Stanley’s exploration of Africa to show how one effective method for mastering willpower works: cutting off your route back to the place where you were at. Tempted by food? Throw out all of the junk food and you’ve made it much harder to eat that junk food.

Did a Higher Power Help Eric Clapton and Mary Karr Stop Drinking?
Here, the authors look at Alcoholics Anonymous. Does belief in God cause people to stop drinking? The authors seem to say that faith in a higher power can be a powerful self-motivator in terms of willpower. When it becomes difficult, people can look to their faith. They don’t go deeply into theology here, but I think there’s some very interesting possibilities in terms of looking at faith’s connection to willpower and the idea of free will.

Raising Strong Children
How do you raise children to have willpower? The key is to not focus on the end goal of the things they’re doing. Instead, focus on the process. Focus on making those individual hard choices along the way that produces a goal. Don’t praise the “A” on the report card. Instead, praise the hard work that it took to get that “A.” I fully intend to tell my children someday that I’m not really proud of the good grade, but that I’m proud of the work that went into it and the improvement as a person that came out of that work.

The Perfect Storm of Dieting
The book winds down by tying together many of these threads into one common application of willpower in the modern world: dieting. Most of the tactics and ideas in this book show up in dieting, from making the small decisions to cutting off the escape route, and it ties deeply into self-esteem issues for many. One big tactic: focus on the day-to-day achievements, not the numbers on the scale.

Is Willpower Worth Reading?
Willpower addresses a fundamental human challenge with good humor, great ideas, and science backing it up. It’s loaded with thoughtful approaches backed up by research and intriguing stories all over the place.

I view the challenge of willpower as a fundamental human challenge, and this book is a brilliant analysis of that condition. I’d recommend it to anyone and it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I am absolutely going to re-read this book, and soon. I can’t pay a higher compliment to a book than that.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Willpower on Amazon.com.

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One common question I get from entrepreneurial readers is how exactly people make money with social media. How can you actually make an income posting tweets and Facebook updates?

It certainly can be done. I’ve used social media in the past to both directly and indirectly earn income, though the earnings were never big and I never devoted a ton of time to it. I know of verifiable stories of people earning quite a lot from projects revolving around social media.

This book by Jamie Turner and Reshma Shah focuses exclusively on the question of how you take something you have – an idea, a product, a book, a website, or pretty much anything else – and increase the value of it by social media.

In other words, social media doesn’t make money by itself. It makes money by connecting something of value you have to the customers who might buy it.

The Social Media Landscape
The entire purpose of social media, from the perspective of someone who has something of value that they want to share, is to get positive interest from potential customers. There are a lot of forms this can take, from creating a Facebook fan page and updating it to making a Twitter account.

Good social media use goes beyond just sending out little updates about what you’re doing. It also involves engaging the people you’re talking to by listening to what they have to say and utilizing it in your responses and in your further updates. In other words, it’s a conversation, and one that has value because people who are involved in that conversation have some sense of involvement in whatever you’re doing. It builds a connection, one that people will often follow up on with their time and/or their wallets.

How to Set Yourself Up for Social Media Success
The biggest thing you can do to set yourself up for success is find your customers first. For example, let’s say you’ve written a fantasy novel and you’re thinking of self-publishing. The best route to take is to get involved with groups that are talking about fantasy fiction. Get to know them. Where do they congregate? What do they talk about? What do they like and not like?

Jump into that conversation. Talk about the things they’re talking about. Share what you like – and what you don’t like. Ask questions, because people love to talk about what they think. The more involved you get in the conversation, the deeper the bond you’ll build with your prospective audience.

Social Media Platforms
In essence, this section of the book lists a lot of social media platforms and discusses how exactly they function and differ from each other. The authors are pretty thorough, integrating smaller social networking sites and such activities as blogging.

In the end, the platform itself is secondary. The question is whether the audience you want to talk to is there. Thus, it’s worthwhile evaluating each of these in terms of the people you want to reach.

Social Media Integration
This is where the rubber really meets the road. How do you convince people to get into whatever it is you’re interested in.

My experience has been – and this book seems to match it – is that the best route to success is to simply talk every once in a while about what you’re up to. For example, if you’re trying to get a book off the ground, occasionally mentioning your book (maybe 2% of the time at most) will intrigue people you’ve been conversing with. Overdo it and you turn them off.

How to Measure Social Media
The challenge with social media is measuring the success of it, and it all comes back to “return on investment.” In other words, the question of whether you have success or not should rest entirely on the number of clicks you get, the number of sales you get, and the number of responses you get.

The advantage of social media is that there’s little financial cost involved. The disadvantage is that there’s a lot of time involved. So, what you’re looking at really is the response you get for the time you spend. You’d be surprised how often it’s worth it.

One final thing that I really liked about this book is that it included a long checklist of things to do if you’re thinking about diving into this. This is incredibly useful, but it’s only really useful if you’ve read the book first.

Is How to Make Money with Social Media Worth Reading?
If you’ve ever wondered how people make money using social media or if you’ve ever had something you’d like to build an audience for or sell using social media, this book does a very good job of spelling it out. I would highly recommend this book to someone who has a product or an idea that they want to popularize.

In fact, I may be using it in the near future on a separate project of my own.

Check out additional reviews and notes of How to Make Money with Social Media on Amazon.com.

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One of the most interesting realizations I’ve ever made about my money-spending habits is that, when I was spending money hand over fist on things I really didn’t need, I was mostly seeking fulfillment.

I had this sense that there was something missing in my life in a really deep way, but I didn’t really know how to fill that hole. What I found is that when I spent money freely, I could often cover up that sense of emptiness for a short while, but it always came back. As my financial position got worse and worse, that sense of emptiness got bigger, not smaller.

Eventually, I started to ask myself the real question that mattered. What fulfills me? For me, it’s about my family. It’s about reading and learning new things. It’s about playing board and card games with others, particularly my friends. It’s about cooking a great meal. It’s about getting a great night of sleep.

These things fulfill me. They seem simple and, to many, boring. Day in and day out, though, these are the things that leave me feeling good about my life.

This brings me around to this wonderful book, Choosing Simplicity by Linda Breen Pierce. The crux of the book is that many of the complexities and challenges we have in our life are ones we put there by our own choice – and they make us miserable. In the chase to have everything, we often lose the capacity to enjoy it. You’re far better off having something (and the ability, time, and energy to value and enjoy it) than trying to have everything.

Why Simplicity?
Simplicity simply means finding room in your life for the things you actually value instead of cubby-holing them into the bits of space you can free up after all of the other activities. For example, if you don’t really value having a big house, have a tiny one. That way, you spend a lot less time on home upkeep and you can spend a lot more time on activities you actually value.

My Story: True Confessions of a Yuppie Lawyer
Pierce tells her story here, which has a lot of similarities to my own. She spent a lot of her life essentially trying to have everything: the impressive career, the material trappings, the big residence, and so on. In the end, though, the chase of all of these things left her empty and wondering what she really wanted in her life. After reflection, she realized she didn’t really want very much of it.

Turning Points: What Motivates Us to Start the Journey?
At some point, there’s a realization that we’re leaving behind the things we actually value in order to take on what we think we should value. There are a lot of reasons for this, of course, but the turning point for many is that simple realization. Why are you living your life?

A Parent’s Choice: Saving Life with Our Children
Earlier today, I spent several hours at the park with my children. My oldest child and I taught my youngest child the joy of going down a slide on your stomach. My daughter and I went on a long hike searching for a bathroom and singing the same silly song over and over again. When we left, I asked them if they had fun and they all yelled, “YES!” It didn’t cost us a thing. It gave us all a ton of fresh air and exercise. The children fell asleep in the car on the way home. There is no activity I can think of that I would rather have filled my day with. Yes, we could have done lots of structured activities or we could have parked them in front of a movie while we did dishes and laundry, but does any of that really matter in comparison?

Urban or Rural Simplicity: Choosing a Nurturing Milieu
You don’t have to live in the country to enjoy simplicity, nor do you have to live in a city to enjoy it. The change comes from you, not from your surroundings. The choice should come down to the handful of things you really value, and that’s a personal thing. If you enjoy big gardens and walks in the woods, live in the country. If you love free cultural events and easy access to people with very similar interests, live in the city. You can live simply either way.

Work We Can Live With: A Balancing Act
If you live simply, you no longer have a pressing financial need to work in an all-demanding job. You can take a lower-paying position, one that fulfills you more and doesn’t completely drain you of all of your time and energy. It will leave you with the time and energy you need to do the things that really matter in your life.

On the Road to Simplicity: Travelers in Transition
For most of us, this type of change isn’t a light switch. We can’t wake up tomorrow and quit our jobs to start being a small scale farmer in Virginia because that’s what we’re passionate about. There’s a transition period, where you learn to live in a more simple fashion and reshape your financial and time management to match the new life you have.

Long Timers: People Who Have Always Lived Simply
For others, this entire thing comes naturally. Often, it’s because of the lessons they learned in childhood, either from those who truly practiced it or from their own experiences regarding the dangers of trying to have it all and not really having anything.

Starting Out Simply: Generation X Takes a U-Turn
In earlier generations, it was easy to leave school, walk into a high paying job, immediately buy a house, and have the trappings of that standard “American dream” life. Today, it’s not so easy. Housing prices are out of proportion with the income of new graduates, as are the student loans they’re saddled with. Newer graduates are pushed into a life of simplicity to some degree, though it’s often not by choice.

Having Enough: Living Simply with Financial Freedom
Pierce seems to largely set up complete financial freedom as a goal here. Financial freedom here refers to simply having enough money in savings (or in other sources) to provide adequate income to cover living expenses without working. This is one of my major long-term financial goals, for most of the reasons that Pierce describes. The big one? It makes your life a lot more simple.

Living Well on Very Little: Amazing Stories of Courageous People
You don’t even need that much regular income to live a great life. The key is being able to separate the things you actually value from the things you’re doing because others value it or because you’ve been conditioned to think you value it. Once you strip away those layers, you can get through life with surprisingly little.

Community: Are We Our Brother’s Keepers?
A community is a group of individuals that support each other in good times and in bad. When you’re a part of a community, there’s security and joy because you know you’re taking care of each other and, when you need it, you’re taken care of, too. Being a part of a community has great benefits, but it also involves some responsibility. Do we want to step up to the plate? (I do.)

Environmental Champions: A Passionate Love for the Earth
Another aspect of living simply is that it benefits the environment, not because some sort of “green” initiative, but simply because by living in a simpler fashion, we produce less waste and have less impact on the environment. For example, if one is passionate about gardening and one chooses to live a simpler life that enables more time for gardening, that person is producing more of their own food. It’s no longer made in an industrial fashion and shipped for long distances. That’s a positive impact without a “green” initiative.

Is Choosing Simplicity Worth Reading?
If you’ve ever struggled with finding meaning in your life or wondered why it is that you never seem to have time and energy and money for the things you care about, you’ll find a ton of value in Choosing Simplicity.

It makes an eloquent case for and provides a nice guide for transitioning to a less complicated lifestyle, one with fewer time and money and energy demands that leaves you with the resources needed to do what you find fulfilling. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Choosing Simplicity on Amazon.com.

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All of us have fears and doubts about what we’re doing and where our future is headed. I know I certainly have those fears and doubts. I constantly wonder if I’m making the right choices with what I’m doing, professionally and personally.

Uncertainty is a double-edged sword. Sometimes, paying heed to it is the right move and it’ll keep you on a better path. However, there are a lot of times where uncertainty shouldn’t keep you from doing something and getting past uncertainty is the key to success. In those situations, it’s best used as a guide to where you want to go.

Jonathan Fields, the author of this book, does a great job of digging into how to overcome uncertainty and how to use what it can teach you for greater success in almost any area.

Why Uncertainty Matters
No one on Earth has all the answers to all of the questions. Uncertainty is simply a part of life. The biggest difference between success and failure at anything is how we address our uncertainty. If we address it by running and sticking with what’s safe (and this applies for everything from political opinion to career choices), we fail. If we address it by digging into what we’re uncertain about, even if we don’t necessarily make a big change because of it, we succeed. Uncertainty isn’t an opponent. It’s a guide.

What Uncertainty Does to Us
Uncertainty makes us afraid, not only of our own failure, but of the judgments of others. “What will my friends think if I announce to them that I’ve changed religions or political beliefs?” “What will my parents think if I tell them I’m thinking of quitting my job?” We also fear loss, in a sense that the results of the change we’re going to take on are going to be worse than what we have right now. All of these things bundled together make uncertainty an incredible source of angst.

The Myth of the Fearless Creator
No one does anything of significance in the world without some fear in their gut. There’s no one out there, no matter how they appear, that does interesting or great things in their life without some doubt residing within them. The key difference between success and failure is how you use that fear and doubt. Do you use it to withdraw? Or do you use it to guide you to success?

Find Your Certainty Anchors
The first step in this process is to figure out your “certainty anchors.” In other words, what things are you absolutely certain about? What experiences are ones that you can rely on? What things can you rely on, no matter what? Simply put, once you figure these things out, you can always rely on these things and experiences as examples of your own success. For example, I know I can succeed with paying down my debt, so this experience of success shows me I can handle other things that require willpower.

Build Your Hive
For something to be successful, you’re going to need criticism and suggestions for improvement. The only problem is that it’s easy to hear suggestions and criticism from sources that might not have your success in mind. The best way to handle this is to find a group of people that you genuinely trust – and genuinely trust you – and be completely open with criticism within this group. Everyone in this group is honest with each other and also encouraging of each other, offering criticism only in the sense that it should improve whatever the people are doing.

Socializing Creation
This idea of a “hive” works even with the creation of an idea. There’s nothing wrong with throwing out a concept to a group of people that you trust and receiving their feedback on your concept in order to build it into something greater. For example, if you have a trusted friend, you could throw out a business plan or an exercise plan or a change in philosophy that you’re considering and that person would offer you genuine feedback on it – and you would do the same for that person. If you have a collective group, even better.

Train Your Brain
One key to making something challenging work is to adopt the ability to focus specifically on that thing. This involves cutting out distractions from both your broader life and from the specific situation. Fields also discusses the benefits of exercise in achieving this, pointing to a lot of studies on the benefits of exercise for mental focus. There’s also some discussion of the benefits of a “growth” mindset versus a “linear” mindset, which basically means that you’re more interested in learning how the process works than always getting the right answer.

See the Forest
Some of our biggest doubts fall into the heat of the moment. What will this person think of me? What do I need to be working on right now and how do I know if it is right? These are instances of seeing the trees, but not seeing the forest. When you’re caught up in immediate doubts, look at the broader picture of what you’re trying to achieve. Does it matter what this person thinks of you right now if you’re building a better you? What task can you take on that has the best chance of building something great in the long term?

Own the Story Line
We often visualize stories of failure when we’re imagining what could happen in the future. Rather than believing those stories, we need to use them. What things happen that cause this kind of failure? What can we do to make sure they don’t happen? The more negative story lines you eliminate, the more positive the story line of your reality is.

Is Uncertainty Worth Reading?
This is the best personal finance or personal growth book I’ve read this year. Period.

Every single one of us struggles with uncertainty in life and this book is loaded with food for thought on how to deal with that uncertainty. I can say without hesitation that some pieces of this book have made me deeply rethink how I address some of the more challenging areas of my life (exercise) and some things I’ve been afraid to tackle (writing projects).

I recommend this book to almost anyone. Put it on your library request list or pick it up at a bookseller soon. It’s a really worthwhile read.

Check out additional reviews and notes of Uncertainty on Amazon.com.

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