After the huge success of asking for the best money advice in ten words or less, I decided to repeat the experiment. About a week ago, I challenged my followers on Twitter to give me their best single piece of career advice in ten words or less. Again, I was flooded with responses. After spending

Milton writes in with a good question, worthy of discussion: I don’t see why I should spend fifteen minutes making a batch of homemade laundry detergent just to save a few bucks when I could spend that fifteen minutes building my career. Most “frugality tips” seem like a waste of time. Let’s say you have

I’ve seen it over and over again: the person in the office with self-confidence is the one that gets the plum assignments. The promotions. The raises. The recognition. The others, who sit back quietly, get left behind (and sometimes resent it). For a long time, I was one of the resentful folks. I had a

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a career, personal productivity, personal development, or entrepreneurship book of interest. Without really paying attention, I picked up Daniel Pink’s book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko at the library. I just glanced at the cover, noting the subtitle (“The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need”) and that it

If you’re like a lot of Simple Dollar readers, you’re reading this article at the start of your work day (and if you’re not, imagine you are, at the start of your next work day). You’ve got a pile of things to do today, some of them urgent, but many of them not so urgent.

One common question I’m asked a lot is how we actually balance our work lives and our family lives. Barb sums it up best: How do you do it? You write tons and tons of stuff for The Simple Dollar, your wife works a full time job, you seem to have tons of time available

Charles writes in: The real reason people want to be rich isn’t so they can buy stuff. It’s so they can have power over others. People want influence and respect and they see that people with money have influence and respect, so they seek money. I agree with the point Charles is making – many

An acquaintance from my previous career wrote to me recently asking about the steps I took when I made the switch to working at home: It’s official: I’m ready to get out of here. I’m tired of working here and I have a lot of people lined up to hire me for home catering and

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development, personal productivity, or entrepreneurship book. It’s no secret to long-time readers of The Simple Dollar that I loved Keith Ferrazzi’s first book Never Eat Alone. I thought it was a brilliant discussion of how to network ethically in the modern world by building real, valuable

A career is like a brick wall. If it’s built well, from a collection of bricks that fit well together and are thoughtfully put in place, it can be a very strong foundation for whatever dreams you may want to reach for. A great collection of bricks, well assembled, will build a platform for you

Recently, a friend suggested to me that there are two distinct types of careers – and it left me thinking quite a bit about my own career choices. First, there are stable careers. You’re an hourly employee or a salaried employee with small bonuses (or none). You work hard to try to get ahead, but

One of my favorite sections in what is undoubtedly my favorite personal finance book, Your Money or Your Life, discusses the process one can go through to find a job that is both high in integrity (meaning it’s actually in line with your values – you’re not selling your soul or killing your spirit by

When I was in college, the vast majority of my classes were effectively training for a career in research and scientific data management. Seven years after graduation, though, I find myself drawing instead on the transferrable skills I picked up in other classes: public speaking, writing, leadership, information management, and so on. To put it

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal development, personal productivity, or career book. At almost every job I’ve ever worked at, from a minimum wage service job where I helped people print documents to a full time job in a research lab, creativity and initiative have been rewarded. A person who is a

Doing my taxes this year was an interesting experience. In 2008, my income was down substantially as compared to 2007 – no real surprise, considering I quit my full time job in March 2008. What was really surprising for me, though, is that our family’s spending dropped almost as precipitously. Across the board, expenses were

Let’s try a little psychology experiment. In the image below, read out all of the colors, not the words themselves. You can say them out loud, or in your head. Now, try the same for this batch of colored words. Remember, say the color, not the word itself. It’s at least a bit harder, isn’t

When I graduated from high school – and again when I graduated from college – I received quite a few gifts from friends and family members. Most of them fell into two categories: money inserted into graduation cards, or items intended to help with my life in the near future (like a gas card or

I strive quite hard to create a dividing line between my “work life” and my “personal life.” Generally, that means setting pretty strict hours for work and for personal time and striving as hard as possible to not let either side cross that line. Let me give you an example of what I mean, drawn

One Saturday during one of my previous employments, I received an interesting phone call from my supervisor. He informed me that one of my coworkers had took a work laptop home with her and that she was unable to log on to the laptop. When I asked what this had to do with me, I