Early this year, I posted a popular article, Some Thoughts on Building a Successful Marriage. In it, I gave my thoughts on what it takes to make a marriage work – and since your spouse is your most important partner in your finances and your life, it’s important to have a successful relationship there.

Recently, “Gary” sent an email asking a similar question:

I read your this post about sucessful marriage every month. I was wondering if you can create such step-by-step guide for friendships.

I have lots of acquaintances but I am not good at making very close friends. It could be that I am not very open with my emotions and also influences from my parents but I can’t seem to make close friends.

Gary’s question is borne out of a number of recent posts on The Simple Dollar about the power of friendships and relationships – a topic that we’ll be expanding upon over the next month and a half with the book club reading of Never Eat Alone.

But what do you do after you’ve met someone and you want to actually build a lasting friendship? Lasting friendships are often the backbone of our social lives and help us in countless ways throughout our professional and personal lives. They come through for us when we need help, plus they provide the constant support and companionship that a friendship can provide.

Building strong friendships comes easily to some – and not so easily to others. Here’s what I’ve learned about building long-term friendships.

First, friendships wither without regular attention. If you don’t keep in touch in some fashion with a friend, they quickly become an “old friend” – someone that you might be able to rekindle a friendship with, but someone who’s not really an active part of your life. Sometimes, that happens due to a change in interest or in lifestyle (having children can often cause this), but quite often it happens unintentionally, particularly among people with very busy schedules.

On the other hand, regular attention to a friendship is the essence of building up a lasting friendship. This doesn’t mean you have to have a friend at your house every day to keep a friendship strong. Instead, it means that without regular contact, a friendship will fade.

What’s “regular contact”? There’s no exact recipe for it, but I usually define it this way: if I don’t have some idea of what my friend is doing in two weeks, I’ll get in touch with them.

Intrigued? Here are my fifteen rules for building lasting friendships with people.

Keep multiple lines of easy communication open. The more tools you have for keeping track of someone, the better. If you have their cell number, save it – you can easily text them or call them. If you have their address, pop it into your address. If they’re on Facebook, friend them. If they’re on Twitter, follow them. This allows you to keep track of what’s going on in their life – and makes it much easier for you to contact them very quickly. The more lines of easy communication you have, the simpler it becomes to simply get in touch with them at your convenience, which lowers the barrier to continued communication.

Make sure it’s easy to contact you, too. This is why I’m on Twitter and Facebook (and other social sites as well) – it makes it very easy for people to contact me. I keep an eye on both services (to see what my friends are doing), but equally important, I drop my own updates on these sites (so that my friends can see what I’m doing).

If you use such services and you’re silent on them, you’re engaging in a one-way conversation – and how interesting is that? Your contribution is absolutely vital – people who are following you or have friended you want to hear what you have to say.

Another tip – mention that you’re on such services in the footers of your email. Add a link to your Twitter feed or your Facebook page.

Make contact regularly, but be worthwhile. Part of the reason I follow lots of people on Twitter and friend lots of people on Facebook is so that I can keep track on what’s actually important in their lives. Few things bug me more than people who contact me without having anything to say. “Hi, how are you, I am fine, what are you doing?” contacts simply aren’t very interesting and they don’t sustain conversation.

Keep an eye on what your friends are up to and if you have something interesting to contribute to what they’re doing or saying, contribute it. Send them a message or an email, or give them a ring. If what you have is actually useful, you’ve taken another step towards cementing a real relationship.

Quite often, the thing you have to share isn’t a material item, nor does it cost anything other than a bit of time. Usually, it’s information. Most human relationships revolve around the exchange of information with one another, and if you provide lots of good information, then you’re a lot closer to being a good friend.

Exchange contact at least once every two weeks. I don’t keep track of this intensely – it’s merely a good rule of thumb with a good principle behind it. If I haven’t sent a message to someone recently, I’ll pay extra close attention to what they’ve been saying and look for some avenue for following up. If they’re not involved in online social networks, I will often spend some time attempting to recall what their most recent concerns were, then follow up with those concerns and see how they’re doing.

Direct contact is key to sustaining a friendship. While it can be useful to pay attention to what they’re saying publicly – and they’re likely following you, too – direct contact is still necessary and useful. You might be up to date with what someone’s doing, but contacting them directly by phone or other means is still the key piece of maintaining (and slowly building) a friendship.

Fill up your social calendar. You should strive to fill up your social calendar as much as you can with plans with friends (and others). A meal eaten alone is an opportunity lost – a chance to catch up with a friend, build another friendship, or get together with a larger group.

Pencil in your lunch breaks. Have friends over for dinner and a movie or a game. Once a week or so, host a dinner party and invite a mix of people. If you get invited to things, make an effort to go.

In short, start keeping a calendar and strive to fill it up with as many social activities as you can, particularly ones where you’re setting up events directly with specific friends (or attending larger events with friends). The more full your social calendar is, the more friends you’re building relationships with.

I confess that I have some difficulty doing this. My biggest challenge is that many of my closest friends are spread across the world, far away from where I live, and I sometimes find it challenging to open the door to new friendships. However, I do know from experience that it works – the more full your calendar is, the more strong friendships you’ll build.

Be helpful When a friend asks for help, this is the time to really cement a friendship. Be there for that friend. Help them in whatever way you can. Often, the best thing you can do is just listen without interjecting your own thoughts. Sometimes, though, you may be able to help by completing a task or sharing some information.

As long as it’s reasonable, always step up to the plate when a friend calls you. Such actions are the building blocks of lasting friendships.

Don’t hesitate to ask for help – but do it with tact. First of all, don’t expect help. Sometimes the difficulties of the lives of others means that they can’t help you with your situation, even if you’ve helped them in the past and even if they’d like to.

Second, ask in a personal way. It’s fine to broadcast your need on a service where people have chosen to follow you (like Twitter or Facebook), but don’t just send out a blanket email to all of your friends. Instead, contact the people you really need help from individually, by email or by phone (or even by stopping by). Make it clear that you want their help, not just that you’re seeking help from anyone for a problem you have.

Often, such requests go a long way towards building a relationship as well. Direct requests like this show that you do value a friend’s help and input and will make them quite happy to contribute, especially if the help you’re asking for is simple for them.

Celebrate their important moments in a special way. Don’t hesitate to host a party for someone on a major birthday or milestone. Don’t be afraid to take a friend out to dinner (or put a lot of work into preparing one of their favorite meals) to celebrate their new job or their engagement. Stepping up to the plate and making an extra effort to celebrate a friend’s big moments is often just as important as being there for them when there are problems.

Listen. If you’re saying more than 60% of the words in a conversation with a friend, you’re talking too much. Draw them out and get them to participate by asking questions of them. Listen to what they have to say and don’t interrupt them, even if that’s how you naturally converse. Then follow up based on what they have to say.

People want to be heard and to see that their ideas and thoughts have value to others. When you run roughshod by talking all the time or not actually listening, you’re running roughshod over that and damaging the friendship. If you think doing this is boring – then perhaps you don’t want this person as a friend, but as someone who merely follows you.

If a friend stops replying to your contacts, don’t be insulted – it’s often hard to understand what’s going on in their life. If that relationship is important to you, keep the window of communication open. Send emails on occasion, even if they don’t reply. Give them a call just to see what’s going on. Express some concern, but don’t intrude unless you know the person intimately. Look for a sign that they need help before you intervene.

Sometimes friendships die out. Friendships are based on mutual interests and commonalities. Over a long period of time, your own shared experiences may become those commonalities and you’ll have a lifelong friend, but quite often friendships die out or go dormant. Don’t be dramatic or overwrought about it.

One sure sign that you should perhaps let a friendship rest (and devote time to building other friendships) is if you’re doing virtually all the work in terms of making contact. It may be that the friend’s interests have changed and they have moved on to another part of their life’s journey. Back off and see what happens, but in the meantime, fill your time with other friends.

Never force a friendship to continue. It’s unhealthy for both people. Instead, let it drift away and grow dormant – perhaps in the future, opportunity will cause it to bloom again.

Good luck, Gary.

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 learned that the coworker had claimed that I had somehow “tinkered” with the laptop to prevent other people from logging on. Obviously, my supervisor wasn’t particularly thrilled with this – he knew I had sufficient technical skills to do this and also knew I had been involved in the last week with installing some software on the laptop, so he was at least willing to believe the story.

Of course, I had not done any such thing, but I attempted to make amends. I provided my supervisor with all of the passwords and information that was needed to get onto the laptop and fix any access issues.

By Monday, she still hadn’t been able to get onto the laptop and openly accused me to my face in front of the rest of the team of tampering with her work.

By Tuesday, the problem had been resolved: there were several faulty keys on the keyboard, so her attempts at entering passwords were failing. Once the keyboard was replaced, everything worked like a charm.

At the next meeting, our supervisor opened the floor to her to give a public apology to me, since she had basically insulted my character in front of everyone by implying I was tampering with her work. Her “apology”? “I’m sorry that you feel hurt by my attempts to get the laptop working.”

I was just flummoxed by this. Needless to say, I did not trust her at all after that. My supervisor was also shocked, and he helped to ensure that I wouldn’t have to work with her and, within a few months, she had moved on.

If she had stepped back and issued a sincere apology in that situation, her entire situation would have been different. A heartfelt apology would have left me feeling sympathetic for her struggles with work and gone a long way towards repairing any rifts in the workplace, not just between myself and her, but between herself and everyone else there who thought the accusation was a bit over the top. I might not have fully trusted her, but I wouldn’t have felt the need to avoid her, either.

Instead, she chose the insincere route – and it cost her her job and burnt a lot of bridges, too.

Real apologies consist of three parts.

The Accuracy
An apology that actually works is one that shows that you have real insight into what you did wrong and the effects of that mistake. Doing that well takes some introspection and some willingness to admit that you do have specific faults.

When you realize you’re in a position where you need to apologize, step back for a bit and look at the situation. What exactly did you do wrong? It might be easy to point to a specific thing, but is that actually just one little piece of a larger thing? Figure out both pieces and think about what you really should apologize for. Careful consideration almost always leads to a more meaningful apology.

Another big piece of the puzzle is a willingness to fix the problems that caused the faux pas – and to clean up any problems that have resulted from it. Identify those problems – and take a stand on your own to fix them. Actions speak far louder than words, after all, and if you show you’re working to fix the mistake, that often means at least as much as the words in your apology.

The Delivery
There are three key points you need to get across when you deliver your apology.

“I did something wrong.” A real apology is an admission of fault. You made a mistake somewhere along the way – if you had not made a mistake, you would not be apologizing. Most of the time, we’re able to see what we did wrong – and a big part of apologizing for that wrong is an ability and willingness to state that wrong in front of someone else. If someone is encouraging you to apologize to someone else, that means you made a mistake, even if you don’t recognize it – and if you don’t, it’s time for some real introspection.

“What I did hurt you – and I recognize that.” Your fault, the one you admitted to, caused pain or difficulty for someone else. You need to recognize that if you want your apology to matter at all. This is the core of the apology – you’re telling that person that you do actually recognize that your mistake has caused them misfortune, and it is their misfortune that is at the center of the discussion, after all.

“What can I do to make amends?” Most of the time, an apology is sufficient for beginning to rebuild trust. Sometimes, however, more may be needed – perhaps you need to speak to someone else to repair a reputation, or maybe you should fix an item that you broke. Reaching out and offering to make these amends (and if you don’t know what they might be, offering to do what it takes) goes a long way towards cementing the sincerity of your apology.

The Sincerity
Most important of all, if you can’t be authentic about any of the above parts, don’t apologize at all. An insincere apology is transparent and does nothing to repair the situation. All it does is further damage your own reputation, not only in terms of the person you’re “apologizing” to, but to anyone else who hears about it.

Another note: a sincere apology never, ever expects an apology in return. An apology in the form of “I apologize, but I expect you to apologize in return” is not an apology – it’s a request for someone to apologize to you. It’s inauthentic, and everyone involved will see right through it – and think far less of you for having done it.

If you feel you should apologize, but you don’t understand why, don’t attempt an apology. Spend some time in reflection on the situation until you really understand why you’re apologizing. Never apologize until you’re ready – doing it beforehand not only fails the person you’re apologizing to, it fails you as well, with potentially devastating consequences.

That old maxim is still true: if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.

Several months ago, I mentioned that we’ve been experimenting with using Skype at home for many of our telephone calls, and that I was ready to switch to using Skype as our primary phone. Skype, for those unfamiliar, is a service that allows one to use their broadband internet connection as a telephone line.

In the article, I discussed a number of the benefits and drawbacks of this move. Clearly, it was cheaper than the cost of our land line on paper, but our land line was part of a bundled service with our telecommunications provider, and dropping the land line wouldn’t actually save us that much at all on our total bill. Although it appeared to be pricey on paper, dropping that land line would also cause us to lose our “bundling” discount, and the two almost completely counteracted each other.

So, for the time being, we’ve kept our land line, but I’ve continued to use Skype for many business-related calls.

That brings us to a suggestion from reader “Joe”:

I haven’t had a land line in nearly 5 years and haven’t missed it in the least. In the past 6 months, I’ve also switched to one of the low-cost cell phone providers for huge savings each month. By not having the land line, I’m saving about $40 a month, and by going with one of the low cost providers with unlimited usage I’ve gone to having a $45 a month cell phone bill. Total savings is about $80 to $100 a month versus having one of the pricier wireless providers and a landline at the same time.

Joe’s comment spurred me to do a serious re-evaluation of the telephone lines in use in our household. After all, our monthly telecommunications bill regularly runs into the three figures, including broadband internet, cable, a land line, and our cell phones.

What can we actively reduce from this expensive monthly mix?

The first step for figuring this out is accurately evaluating what we need. To do this, I started keeping careful track of the actual usage of our landline and our cell phones. Here are some key questions we asked ourselves during this process.

Were we actually taking advantage of the portable nature of our cell phones? Are we actually using them as truly mobile devices, meaning are we using them a significant amount outside of the home? If we’re not, then a prepaid cell phone may be all we need to take care of any mobile needs, reducing the monthly bill. From our evaluation, it appeared as though the majority of our cell phone usage was at home.

Were we truly taking advantage of our unlimited plans, or is our call volume low enough that we’d be better off with a plan with limited minutes? We were able to accurately track this by carefully examining our bills – both land line and cellular – over the last few months. How much were we using on each? Were we far below our limits? It turns out that we have never been close to our usage caps on our cell phone, so we requested a change to a different plan that will save us about $10 per month.

Were we using text messages significantly enough to pay for a plan for those, or would we be better off paying per message? This one was easy for us – we were only using a few texts per month, so we called and requested a switch to a “pay per message” plan that will save us $5 or so per month.

Is our cell phone service (while at home) as reliable as our land line service? In our case (luckily), the answer is yes. We live rather close to a tower that seems to be used by several providers, so almost every cell phone provider has stellar service from our home.

Do we travel significantly? With a three year old and a one year old at home, travel isn’t a normal part of our lifestyle, but it’s an important question to ask. The more travel you do, the more important a cell phone would be in comparison to a land line.

Taking all of these factors into consideration, the clear route for us (for the time being) is to wait until our contract expires, cancel our cell phone service, and get prepaid phones. This is our tentative plan, one that we’ll keep in mind as we monitor our phone usage over the next several months.

What’s the take-home message here? Walking carefully through your usage of such services can often point you towards ways to save money. Keep in mind what you’re actually using and what you actually need and you’ll eventually be led to the best deal for you.

I received a heart wrenching email from a reader that I’m going to call “Peggy.” Here’s a few excerpts from that email:

[...] In short, we are going to have to be out of our house by October 24. We’re going to move in with [my brother] and his family for a while and then later try to find a place to rent.

We made bad money mistakes and we know what we did wrong. We should have never bought our house. We should have never got that mortgage. We just tried to make the best life possible for [their eight year old son].

So here’s my problem: we haven’t told [our eight year old son] about this yet. We don’t know what to tell him or where to even start. This is the only home he remembers living in.

My mother thinks we shouldn’t tell him anything. We should just say were moving to a new place and we’re going to live with [my brother] for a while.

But [he]’s smarter than that. He knows there is something going on and he won’t fall for it.

What should I tell him?

This email (which, admittedly, I edited a fair amount to protect the privacy of Peggy, her son, and the rest of her family) caused a more painful reaction for me than anything I’ve read since I’ve started writing The Simple Dollar. I look at my almost three year old son and I can’t imagine having to explain to him in a few years why we have to move out of this house that he’s grown up in.

Needless to say, over the last few days since I received the email, I’ve spent a ton of time thinking about Peggy’s situation. It’s the first reader email I’ve brought up with my friends, and I also mentioned it on Twitter, just to try to get more angles and perspectives on it.

My first reaction was to agree with Peggy’s mother and encourage Peggy to simply not talk about it. It’s a very frightening time when you’re losing your home. I can’t imagine explaining it to a child. You’re in some ways ripping away one of their basic elements of security in the world.

Some further reflection brought me to a different conclusion, though. My thoughts actually began to turn around when I was taking my son to daycare. He’s just a bit short of three years old. We stopped at a gas station on the way because gas was clear down to $2.89 and I wanted to fill up my tank.

I told him we were going to stop at the gas station and he asked if we needed gas. I told him that we didn’t, but that I wanted to get gas now because it was really cheap – that way, we could have more money left over to buy other things. He immediately shouted, “So we can buy more pizza with wheels!” (His favorite food is a plain cheese pizza with black olives on it – pizza with wheels.)

My two year old son understood the basic idea of budgeting: sometimes you need to spend less on some things so that you can afford other things. In the end, that’s the basic reason why one would lose a house to foreclosure. Conceptually, an eight year old should be able to understand it.

I asked a few people I know who are actually parents of children between the ages of seven and nine how they would handle it, and they almost all provided passionate arguments on behalf of candor with the child, confirming my idea that candor is really the best approach here. To a certain point, of course.

If I were in Peggy’s shoes, here’s what I would do.

First, I’d spend a lot of quality time with my child right now. Even more than you do right now. You’ll need a strong bond with your child to make this go smoothly. Why? Your child needs emotional touchstones, and you need to make yourself the strongest touchstone you can during this time so that the transition is easier. It is at least somewhat likely that your child sees your current home as a touchstone, and it’ll be very hard for your child to separate, so you need to provide another rock for your child to lean on.

Spend some evenings at the park or out and about in the community doing things together, just you and your family. You can spend some evenings at home, of course, but don’t spend all of them there – try to cement that bond with your child independent of location.

Second, I’d cement the concept of a home as something you buy and sell. Point out where other houses are for sale and explain that someone is trying to sell that house. If you see a “SOLD” sign, point out that someone has bought that house from someone else that’s trying to sell it.

This firms up the idea that it’s a normal thing for people to buy and sell their houses. Be candid about it and answer the questions that your child might have. Given Peggy’s timeframe, I’d try to do this several times in the next few days.

Third, I’d use some candor to explain the situation to the child. Simply tell the child that the family needs to live in a smaller house because the house they live in now is too expensive. They don’t have enough money to keep paying for that house. Do it in a caring way – a serious talk, but without overwhelming emotion and no aggression at all.

Your child is going to have questions. Answer them as simply as you can. You don’t have to get into the nuances of ARMs. Just say that we got to make little payments on the house at first, but now the payments are bigger and we have to choose between things to spend our money on. My two year old could largely understand this and several other parents have assured me that their seven, eight, and nine year olds could get it, too.

Finally, make the changing experience seem as fun as you can. Get your child involved in packing things up. Take pictures of box contents together for easier packaging. Be there for your child if your child has a hard time with this – the child might or might not get upset during the process.

The most important thing is to be there for your child. You are that child’s constant through this difficult time of change. Take that very seriously, because your child will probably really need that emotional safety at this time.

When my wife and I approached our financial meltdown, our financial planning and spending was in pure chaos. We both spent according to our whims and we tackled bills and such without any real pattern or consistency. Neither of us had any real idea what the other was doing financially, and we certainly didn’t have any big dreams that we shared beyond the nebulous “let’s build a house in the country” idea that we’d floated in a very vague sense for a long time but never bothered to make any more concrete.

Since then (about two years), we went from living in a crackerbox apartment to owning our own home. We’ve eliminated somewhere around $30,000 in debt (and rising fast). Even more importantly, we worked together to find options that made us both happier in terms of our careers and home lives and we settled in on some big goals. We’re on the same financial page, too – we both have a pretty strong grip on our current financial state.

How did we make this transformation happen? It’s a transformation I’ve alluded to on here before and one that many readers have asked about. Here’s how we did it – and how you can do it, too – step by step.

Step One: The Moment of Change
My moment of change was very specific: a long night holding my infant son and realizing that I needed to make some financial changes in my life. After that, I became really committed to change – I read tons of personal finance books, sold off a bunch of my stuff, and so on.

The only problem was that this was a personal epiphany – not one that my wife had shared with me. I already had my individual moment of change, but my wife had not. So, all I asked her was this: “Could we sit down and figure out where we’re at in terms of saving for a house?” She was a bit uncomfortable, but she agreed, and we sat down and simply talked about it.

I think, for her, the revelation that we were so far away from ever having a house of our own, even though we were making solid money, was the moment of change. I remember a Saturday afternoon a few weeks after my own revelation, sitting at the kitchen table with my wife as our son napped, going through our financial statements. More than anything, I remember her reaction as we rubbed away at the surface of things, looking at the stupendous amount of debt we shared and how small the assets we held actually were, and I remember saying, “We’re not going to be able to get a house any time soon. We’re not even close… we’re in trouble.” And I remember her shuffling through all of the papers, collected together for the first time, with a really worried look on her face, the kind of worry that I’ve almost never seen.

The important part – the part that made all of this work – is that we experienced this moment of change together. She knew I was scared. I knew she was worried. And because of that shared experience, we realized that we needed to work together to make some big changes in our life.

This is a difficult talk to have for many people, so here are some tips on getting started and how to follow up on it to reaffirm your relationship.

Step Two: A Commitment to Honesty
Prior to that talk, we never paid any attention to each other’s bills. If a credit card bill came in the mail with my wife’s name on it, it was simply something I didn’t touch, and vice versa. I had little grasp on her financial state and she had little grasp on mine.

We decided that this had to end – we needed to be fully on the same financial page. We adopted a new policy: anything that came in the mail could be opened and looked at by either one of us, no questions asked. If we talked about any money issues, we were allowed to say what was on our minds without any consequences in terms of hurt feelings or anything like that.

Something was financially wrong in our lives, and our best hope for fixing the problem was each other. We realized that every secret we kept from each other and every feeling we kept inside for “tact” was blocking us from going where we wanted to go. But where did we want to go?

Step Three: Shared Dreams and Individual Dreams
We spent a lot of evenings then talking about our dreams. What did we want to do with our future? We shared a dream of having another baby, hopefully a little girl and of someday owning a home. We had a lot of different dreams, too: I harbored dreams of being a self-employed writer and I also wanted to take some wonderful international vacations when our children got older. My wife had different dreams: she wanted to live way out in the country, she dreamed of being in our own house before our second child was born, and she harbored some long-term dreams of going back to school to pursue her master’s degree.

These were nice dreams – and surprising ones, too. In some ways, we had similar visions of where our lives were going, but in other ways, our dreams were very different. One thing we both realized, though, is that our dreams weren’t going to happen if we didn’t make some changes. We were throwing away our dreams on $50 meals, piles of electronics, tons of books, and lots of other unnecessary stuff.

Step Four: How to Compromise Without Giving Up Your Dreams
We tried to figure out which of these dreams were the most important to us. We decided to buy a less-expensive house first, live there for a while, then eventually build a house in the country like the one my wife dreamed about. We decided to go ahead and have a second child as well, and we recognized that in order to live out our other dreams, our first step was to get financially stable, with our debts gone and a healthy emergency fund. Without those things, we wouldn’t be able to have the freedom to allow me to chase writing dreams or for my wife to ever go back to college.

Our first step was to focus in on the dreams that we actually shared. That meant we decided to focus intently on our dreams for a house – that became priority number one.

Our second step was to builld a firm financial base for the things we wanted to do down the road. If we actually wanted to do things like take great vacations, look at new career directions, and eventually buy a patch of land in the country and build our dream home, we couldn’t continue to throw money down the rat hole of expensive debt repayments and stuff we didn’t really need.

Step Five: Turning Dreams Into Long-Term Goals
As we talked about these dreams, we realized how effectively they led straight into some medium and long-term goals. Here are the four big ones we committed to early on.

Our first goal was to build an emergency fund. We wanted to get a few months’ worth of living expenses in the bank so that our plans wouldn’t be derailed by things like car repairs.

Our second goal was to get our spending and debt both under control. Basically, this meant eliminating high-interest debt while weaning ourselves from a life filled with purchasing.

Our third goal was to start saving for our down payment and eventually buying a house. Once we built up that emergency fund and eliminated some of our most onerous debt, our savings would be redirected towards a down payment.

Our third goal was to smooth out any bumps in our credit report and maximize our credit scores. This meant paying every bill on time and getting our debt-to-credit ratio in shape.

Step Six: Turning Long-Term Goals Into Short Term Goals For Both of You
These sounded great and we both knew that achieving these goals was what we really wanted, but they were so huge and so nebulous that we realized we’d never make it based on these ideas alone. So we set some short term goals to help us with the day-to-day reality of things.

I found weekly goals helped me the most. I’d make pledges like “only one after-work stop this week” or “only $20 in entertainment spending this week.” I found that with small goals like this, I could accomplish them easily and also easily see how they were helping with the big goals. Plus, if I achieved the goals for a few weeks, I found that this new behavior was quickly becoming my normal habit.

My wife functioned better with monthly goals. She’d target things related to monthly bills, like “make a $300 extra payment on this credit card this month.” Then she’d use a gut check each time she went to spend to help her get things more in line. This doesn’t mean she abandoned all spending (neither did I), but seeing how this little move really fit into a bigger context really helped.

Filling our weekends with frugal projects helped, too. We did things like purge our media collections, install CFLs everywhere to cut down on energy use, learn how to cook at home and prepare foods for the upcoming week, find free things to do in the community, and so forth. We instituted money free weekends to teach us how to entertain ourselves together without spending money.

We constantly talked about and shared our successes on little goals – and big ones, too. It was great having a partner committed to the same things I was committed to. Without her, it would have been much more difficult to succeed.

We also looked for simple ways to move forward on our other goals as well. I was already committed to writing 1,000 words a day, but I didn’t really share it much at all and it wasn’t focused – it was mostly haphazard journal writing. I made more effort to share my writing with others, and with my growing passion about our financial recovery, I started The Simple Dollar to just practice my writing and share the experiences with others. I didn’t think that this would ever be a significant success – I mostly started it just to work on my own writing and share what I was thinking about.

Doing these things together encouraged us both to stick with it – not only were the goals short and manageable, but we both had cheerleaders and we both saw how they fit into our bigger dreams.

Today is the day to get started. Sit down with your spouse, find some shared inspiration with that person, set some goals together, then work together to make it happen.

Communication.

No matter what you do in life, communication will earn you money.

You’re a person working in a cubicle on hard problems. The ability to present your work to the boss during performance reviews will make or break you. The ability to present your work to coworkers will help your project go better. The ability to talk to peers at conferences will open up new connections and possibly new career paths for you.

You’re a person who’s involved with artistic work. Your ability to sell your work relies on your ability to communicate. In many cases, your work itself relies on an ability to communicate – art speaks, does it not?

You work at a minimum wage job at a burger joint. Good communication skills get you to the front counter, where the work is typically more varied and more interesting and you have the opportunity to show off customer relations skills to the manager, who will begin to value you as a key employee, leading to potential raises and better scheduling.

You’re standing at the bus stop. Other people are waiting around, mostly just fidgeting. Keeping quiet will earn you nothing. Starting a conversation with the guy in the business suit holding a copy of one of your favorite books might start a valuable friendship.

Here are ten things you can do immediately to improve that skill.

Introduce yourself to others as often as is reasonably possible. If you’re in a situation where you’re in close public quarters with others that you do not know (like a meeting room, a party, or a dinner table), introduce yourself to them, and initiate some conversation. Likely, if you’re sitting there quiet and nervous, they’re feeling the exact same way. Even in the worst case scenario – the conversation doesn’t go well – at the very least, you got some conversational practice out of the deal.

Make a concerted effort to remember names well enough that you can call them by name later. Always ask for people’s names and try very hard to remember them. At the end of the conversation, get a business card from them and, later, jot what you can remember about them down on the back of the card – the occasion in which you met, any key information that stands out, etc. If you can’t get a business card, jot their name down in a notebook with similar information. This will help you remember. Then, if you think you might be meeting that person again, review the information a bit before you go. This will help you immediately have an impact on them the next time you meet.

Take every opportunity you can get to speak in front of a crowd and give presentations. If you’ve got an opportunity to speak in public, always take it. Not only does this force you to know how to organize your thoughts and communicate them to others, it provides countless opportunities to open up interactions with people who share your interests and concerns.

Put extra care into explaining your work to others. Whenever you have a chance to explain your work to others, put in plenty of care so that they’re able to understand it without their eyes glossing over. Comment your code. Think of everyday analogies for what you’re doing and use them. Try as hard as you can to avoid technical talk unless the situation specifically calls for it. In short, the better you can explain what you’re doing to a layman, the better you’ll appear not only to upper management, but to people in future interview situations.

Share what you know about your work as widely as possible.
It’s always worthwhile to start a blog covering your professional area. Not only does it give you an opportunity to sort through your thoughts and concepts, it also allows you to share your ideas with a wide world. Plus, doing it regularly simply makes you a better communicator. Here are five great examples of strong professional blogs:
Joel on Software is written by Joel Spolsky, a software developer
Seth’s Blog is written by Seth Godin, a marketing consultant
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents is written by Jeffrey Zeldman, a web developer
DennisKennedy.blog is written by Dennis Kennedy, a lawyer
Doctor David’s Blog is written by Dr. Davide Loeb, a pediatric oncologist

Compliment others sincerely. If someone does something well, compliment them, and do it sincerely. Most people go through the drudgery of their workday and their daily life without realizing that people sincerely appreciate their efforts. Thank people for the effort they put out for you, from the company president all the way down to the janitorial staff. Thank the administrative assistant who helped you get your paperwork filed. Compliment the person at the beauty salon who just got an excellent new hair style. I even go so far as to tell people that I see on the street that they look beautiful today or that they’re wearing great clothes (”I love that jacket!”). Even if it gets you nothing more than a thank you, you’d be shocked how often such things come back around in the long run.

Participate in social groups where you have a high likelihood of meeting new people. Find a group or two that match your interests or beliefs (faith, community service, books, etc.) and get involved. Go to those meetings and make an effort to meet new people there. Take leadership roles.

Attend conferences and conventions with the goal of meeting people. Don’t attend conferences in order to listen to the talks. Attend conferences to meet people. As soon as you’ve decided to go to a conference, see if you can get involved in the organization a bit. Help run a session, or be a “substitute” speaker if one is needed. During the rest of the meeting, make an effort to meet people who share your specific interests and work on building the beginning of friendships with them. If you’re eating alone at a conference, you’re wasting that conference.

When people talk, listen and ask occasional questions. Most people prefer to talk about themselves and their own interests much more than listening. If you’re having a one-on-one conversation, most people tend to feel best about it when they’ve done about 60-65% of the talking. That means that you’ll almost always make for a better conversationalist if you shoot for 35-40% of the talking. The best way to do that is to just listen carefully to what the other person is saying. Watch them – don’t let your eyes wander. Ask an occasional question or two. This doesn’t mean you should be silent, but it does mean you should let the other person do the brunt of the talking.

Talk about your own mistakes before ever criticizing others. If you’re ever in a position to criticize others, always be up front with your own mistakes, foibles, and flaws. You will never come off well if you try to create an air of perfection around yourself while criticizing others. It’s never a bad idea to lead with an anecdote about a mistake you’ve made in the past, even in interview situations (of course, there you’ll want to continue by explaining how you fixed the mistake, if reasonable). Trying to come off as perfect makes you seem less human and thus criticism from you seems much less palatable. Show some flaws – you’ll come off better in the end.

About two weeks ago, I did something incredibly stupid. Without even really thinking about it, I let my wife down. I made one of those careless, thoughtless little mistakes that when you realize what you’ve done, you might want to slap yourself in the head about it, but a mistake can’t be undone.

My first temptation was to buy her some sort of gift to “make up” for my mistake. I know what sorts of things she likes, so I browsed through some sites and found a couple of great items that I could give her that would patch things over.

But then I came to my senses.

Buying my wife something won’t make up for a mistake I made. In fact, buying her something right now would just send a message to her that I view her love and respect as something that can be bought.

The only way to deal with a poor decision or with a marital rough patch is through communication. If your partner is upset with you, especially if you really can’t understand why, don’t get mad. Listen. Talk through the problem. Ask questions. Figure out what you can do so that the mistake doesn’t happen again. Let your partner know that you truly do love him or her, and that you aren’t a perfect person, and that you made a mistake. Then, try to take all of that into your own heart and make improvements within yourself.

Buying a gift and not talking about the problem? That just paints the wrong kind of picture. It merely shows that you view your issues as something that can be wiped away with money. And they can’t.

Fortunately, I’m a lucky enough man to have a wife who is very forgiving of my inequities. In fact, if she’s reading this right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if she were scratching her head, trying to remember what exactly I’m talking about. At least, I sincerely hope that’s the case.

Marriage isn’t easy. No relationship is truly easy. There are always going to be times when you do something stupid and rash and make someone else upset by your poorly-considered actions. What makes a relationship work isn’t how you avoid such mistakes, it’s how you handle them.

Whenever you’re in a situation where you’ve made a mistake and you’re trying to patch things up, don’t spend your time buying flowers or making grandiose promises about great things to come. Instead, remember just four words:

You can’t buy love.

Then head home, sit down, and have a real conversation. Instead of trying to buy away the problem, try to solve it with real understanding, love, and compassion instead.

A few days ago, I made an offhand reference to using Skype to nearly eliminate the cost of a land line phone at home. A surprisingly large number of readers were curious about this and wrote in with interesting questions of all kinds, so I thought I’d walk through what Skype is, how we use it, and why it might work for you in some situations but not in others.

What is Skype?
Skype is a service that allows you to use your computer and high-speed internet connection at home to place telephone calls anywhere in the world for a very cheap price. The plan we’re testing, for example, allows us to make unlimited calls within the United States and Canada (both land line and mobile phones) and an hour’s worth of international calls each month for $2.95, plus unlimited free calls to anyone with a Skype account and their computer turned on. If you want to buy an entire year’s worth, you can get a year’s worth of unlimited free long distance in the United States and Canada for $14.95.

It’s not a scam, it’s completely legit. Skype just uses the internet instead of the telephone system to send phone calls.

Wow! Are there any drawbacks?
There are several, and their severity depends on your situation. For us, they’re pretty minor.

First, this service only allows you to make calls out. For calls in, you have to pay for an additional service, called SkypeIn, that gives you a phone number. Calls to that phone number will pop up on your computer like an instant messenger window – you just click answer and you’re good to go.

Second, you need a microphone of some sort to hear your speaking. I originally used an old Bluetooth headset (headphones with a voice mic that connected easily to my computer), then later I started using a webcam for this purpose. The point is you need some sort of microphone to pick up what you’re speaking and speakers or headphones to play it back to you. Yes, this would mean you’d sit at your computer and carry on a conversation near it without an actual telephone. If you want to actually use a telephone-like device, they make those as well, but there’s an additional cost. We have one and it works well throughout our house – it pretty much functions like a normal telephone.

Third, the voice quality is almost always great, but sometimes breaks up. It depends entirely on the quality of your internet connection. I have never had a call break up at all, but others with low-speed connections or poor internet providers.

So what would be a good setup to replace my home phone?
First, you need a high-quality internet connection. If you can’t just get internet without phone in your area, then Skype won’t really benefit you unless you’re making a lot of long distance calls and would just use this to save on long distance. If you can get internet without phone, that’s an even bigger bonus for using Skype – you save money automatically each month. Your internet connection must be a fairly high quality one, though, or else calls will be choppy. One way to try it out is to download Skype and play with the free service to see if it works for you.

Second, you need a method to speak and receive the voice data from Skype. This means either a microphone or webcam and computer speakers or headphones or a wireless Skype phone (like this one). Hopefully, you already have at least one of these options.

Third, you actually need the Skype program and an account there – it’s a lot like instant messenger, so if you can use your instant messenger program, Skype’s not hard to figure out. It’s auto-detected every device I’ve tried to use with it without skipping a beat – I just ran Skype and it identified the items.

Fourth, unless you have a very expensive Skype-only telephone, Skype requires your computer to be on and connected to the internet. That means there is an energy cost. You can mitigate this by using some clever tactics to reduce home computer energy use, but if your computer’s not on, you can’t receive or make calls. That’s a varying-level drawback depending on your lifestyle.

If all of these requirements fit you, Skype can save you quite a bit of money even just on long distance charges or minutes on your cell phone. If you’re around the house and have a strong internet connection, it’s essentially unlimited long distance to the United States and Canada for $14.95 a year – that’s a great bargain.

Are you using it?
Yes, indeed. My wife and I have started using it a lot at home. I’m sold and am ready to drop our land line to use only Skype, but my wife isn’t quite there yet, mostly because it seems like such a strange concept and she wants a longer test period – plus, she’s not used it nearly as much as I have. My calculation is that this drop will save us about $45 a month when we actually go forward with it, which I believe is just a matter of time until my wife is comfortable enough with it (I’m letting her make the call entirely herself, based on her own judgement – she knows I’m ready to switch, so we’ll switch when she’s ready).

Skype is an option well worth considering, especially if you’re a heavy phone user. Each situation is different, but if you have the things necessary (most importantly, a high speed connection at home), you can eliminate a land line and/or save a lot of minutes on your cell phone package by using Skype.