I love cooking at home.

I used to hate cooking at home, though. I was awful at it. I burnt things. I messed up scrambled eggs beyond all recognition.

But over time, I got better at it. I started figuring out lots of little things that made the entire process smoother and made my results much better without necessarily improving my skills.

Now, I vastly prefer what I make in my own kitchen over what I can get at most restaurants. What I make at home is tastier, usually healthier, and quite a bit cheaper, too.

Along the way, I’ve picked up lots of little techniques for making home cooking much easier and faster. Here are ten that really changed things for me.

Hone your knives. One of the biggest frustrations I had with home food preparation is that whenever I had to chop anything, it took forever and I often smashed them into oblivion. I thought it was cheap knives, but after getting a much nicer one, I had much the same problem after the first use or so. The entire problem was a simple one – the edge of the knife wasn’t honed. Honing a knife’s edge is incredibly simple. Just take a sharpening steel and lay your knife on it, with the hilt of the blade near the hilt of the sharpening steel. Then, with the blade forming a small angle with the steel, drag the blade slowly but firmly back down the steel to the tip. At the end, the tip of the blade should be near the tip of the steel. Then, switch hands and repeat with the other side of the blade, and alternate back and forth a few times. Your previously-dull knife will now slice through vegetables like a hot butterknife through butter.

Don’t fear the crock pot. Crock pots have this strange reputation for turning out bland food. In truth, though, crock pots are just as good as what you put in them – all they really do is cook things at a low heat over a long period of time. The trick is to make sure your ingredients are good and that you’ve added plenty of herbs and spices right off the bat. Crock pots are absolutely perfect for making stews and soups and chilis that benefit from long, slow cooking – just put the ingredients in the crock pot in the morning, turn it on low, and let it sit all day. In the evening, you’ll have a tremendous meal waiting for you. We’ve also found a lot of success slow-cooking pot roasts with lots of vegetables in a crock pot.

You can almost never over-season a dish. The only exception to this seems to be hot peppers, which can drive some people away. Aside from that, you have to go to almost grotesque lengths to over-season most dishes. So, if you’re unsure, toss in some more spices. It’ll usually make the dish more tasty than simply following the recipe absolutely.

Use fresh ingredients. Fresh ingredients are often the key to making a recipe really pop. While frozen vegetables (for example) are passable, nothing beats the pop of fresh vegetables in your mouth. While canned vegetables can work in a pinch, they just don’t compare. Canned meats are convenient … that’s about all I’ll give them. In most cases, there’s more nutrition in fresh ingredients as well.

Store staples in the freezer. Whenever you prepare something that might be used as a staple in another meal, make plenty of it and store the extras in the freezer. Chicken breasts, loose ground beef, loose sausage, and diced onions all work well in this way.

Always make stock out of leftover bones and leftover vegetables. The meal is done. You have leftover chicken bones, or maybe you have some leftover vegetables of various kinds. Perhaps you have a leftover hambone or the bone from the middle of a roast. Quite often, these things get thrown out. Save those leftovers. Just take them to a crock pot, add enough water to the crock pot to cover whatever you add (and maybe half an inch more), then turn it on low and let it slowly cook all night. In the morning, strain the liquid (just to get the big pieces out) and save the liquid in a jar in the fridge. Then, the next time you need to make something using those flavors, just bust out that jar. That stuff is fantastic flavor.

De-glaze at every opportunity. Another great source for flavor is the “glaze” on the bottom of a frying pan after you cook something – that stuff is pure flavor! Just put some water into the hot pan, watch it sizzle, and notice how much of the glaze on the bottom of the pan comes off into the water. That liquid can now be used in a lot of ways, from adding flavor and moisture to rice and side vegetables or allowing the meat to simmer in it.

Stick with comfort foods at first. It’s easy to get caught up in the sexy idea of preparing some novel dish in the kitchen, but if you don’t have the skills yet, it will likely end in frustration and an underwhelming result. Instead, at first, stick with dishes that you know you like that you’re intimately familar with. For me, that means tuna casserole, hamburgers, and broccoli with rice.

Try cooking something familiar without a recipe. Another great way to really amp up your skills in the kitchen is to attempt making a familiar recipe from memory without using a recipe. This requires you to begin thinking on the fly a little bit as you cook and often forces you into doing things a little different. Sure, sometimes you’ll fail, but you’ll learn a lot from abandoning the recipe.

Get others involved. For me, no kitchen experience is better than cooking in the kitchen with people whose company I enjoy. Being in the kitchen while my wife chops vegetables, my daughter stirs a mixture, my son snaps green beans, or my best friend butters some garlic bread makes the entire experience far more enjoyable no matter how the meal turns out. Get people into your kitchen and cook together – it becomes an amazing social experience.

It’s often said that people are reflections of their five closest friends in many ways: behaviors, income levels, values, and so on.

Five years ago, almost all of my closest friends spent money like it was water. They were constantly doing things like playing poker, pushing each other to “one up” the rest with better gadgets and other material things, going out for drinks all the time, making fun of each other for looking less affluent, and so on. To put it simply, if you didn’t show many signs of material affluence, you were made fun of and ridiculed. You felt like less of a person if you weren’t spending money hand over fist.

Today, all of my inner circle of closest friends are pretty happy just spending an evening together playing cards or a board game. Instead of constantly going out on the town, we go to each other’s homes and hang out, watching each other’s DVD collections or playing each other’s games. We’ll make meals together and eat them together instead of going out for dinner all the time. Instead of talking about who has the latest gadget, we talk about who’s developed a better strategy at a well-played game or what sort of things we’ve been doing to improve the property we already have.

In that same time frame, my own feelings about spending money changed drastically. I went from spending rampantly to being careful about my money. I started spending more time at home rather than out and about, focusing my energy on getting good at a smaller number of things instead of chasing the new.

Perhaps most interestingly, I went from feeling pretty awful about myself to feeling pretty good about myself.

Look at your close circle of friends. What do you see? Chances are, you see something that looks much like you.

If you like what you see in your circle of friends when you look at them from a detached eye, you’re probably doing well for yourself. A good circle of friends is supportive and reinforces your best attributes.

On the other hand, if you don’t like what you see there, you’re probably struggling. A poor circle of friends brings each other down and reinforces one’s worst attributes.

To put it simply, if you want to find success beyond what you’re able to find right now, you may want to look at your circle of friends.

I’m not saying “ditch your friends” at all. Instead, my belief is that people change and grow over time and that growth is often reflected in who you choose to spend your time with.

In my own case, I observed my friends gradually shifting over time. The first major shift occurred when I had my first child. Since I was no longer nearly as available to go out on the town, some of them stopped emailing and calling me. Some of the rest continued inviting me to do social things, but I found that we had less and less to talk about because they weren’t genuinely interested in my life.

After my financial epiphany and, later, my second child, this became even more stark. The things filling my time were my family and my work, so when I would do anything with these riends, we would have very little to talk about. I couldn’t talk about the latest movie or much of anything else, simply because it was no longer any sort of priority in my life.

Over time, I found myself digging deeper into friendships with people who were either going through the same experience I was or were at least supportive of the things I wanted to do. I actually re-established some close friendships from an earlier period in my life and, today, my circle of friends once again reflects me. A single, introverted, frugal guy who loves to play games. A married couple where the husband loves gaming and works at home and the wife is kind, frugal, and has a quirky sense of humor. These are the kind of people we socialize with today.

To put it as bluntly as possible, this change in friendships was in large part responsible for many of my personal changes for the better over the past few years.

What can you do if you don’t like what you see? If you don’t like what you see, it likely means you’re growing as a person in a direction away from some of your friends – and that’s fine. Simply seek out others in your life that reflect your current values better and work on establishing a relationship with them.

You are a reflection of your closest friends. Do you like what you see in that mirror?

In 2003, shortly after getting married, I had an ambitious goal of saving for a 20% down payment on a house by the end of 2007. Over the next year, I did make some savings progress, but I kept falling behind my milestones. Eventually, fed up with myself, I gave up and more or less just spent the money freely. I thought of myself as a complete failure.

When I made that choice, I was exposing my own idiocy in several different ways.

First, I was demonstrating a complete lack of commitment to a goal. Rather than making small sacrifices to fulfill a big long-term dream, I let the dream fall by the wayside in the name of instant gratification.

Second, I didn’t step back, revise, and rework the plan. When I realized I wasn’t making the goals I had set, I didn’t sit down and re-evaluate things. Instead, I acted like an idiot again and just spent the money with reckless abandon.

Third, I allowed that failure to define myself more broadly as a failure at money management. I just believed I didn’t have what it took to be successful at saving. I let myself believe I was a broader failure just because I couldn’t handle that goal.

Setting a big, audacious goal for yourself is inspiring. It makes you feel good about yourself and pushes you to accomplish things beyond what you believed to be possible for yourself.

I’m going to be debt free in three years.

I’m going to have six months’ of emergency fund in the bank by the end of this year.

I’m going to have seed money for my business idea an a year.

We conceive of these great goals, we plan for them, we sacrifice for them.

And then they fail.

Something changes along the way. An unexpected event occurs. We make a few bad spending choices. We overlooked some key element that completely alters the picture.

And we’re left with that empty feeling of failure. We didn’t make that goal. Instead, we just messed it up, like countless other things in our lives (yes, everyone messes up – a lot).

I could sit here and list my own goal failures all day long – as if the one starting this article wasn’t bad enough – but one thing this failure has taught me is that failing at a goal doesn’t mean you’re a failure or even that the goal or the plan was a failure. It just means you need to go back to the planning stage for a bit. Here’s how.

First, never define yourself as a failure because you failed to accomplish a goal. The inability to accomplish a goal is, yes, in part due to your mistakes, but there are usually countless other factors involved as well. A breakdown in a plan merely means that you need to step back, look at what went wrong, and re-work the plan.

Second, look for the root cause of what went wrong. There’s usually an obvious answer, but that’s not the one you want. I suggest using the “five whys” game when figuring this out. State why it seems that the plan failed, then ask yourself why. When you answer that, ask yourself why again. Repeat it until you get down to a root cause that can’t be broken down again. Often, it takes five or so “whys” to get there.

Third, address that root cause. It might be something you can take care of immediately. It might be something that you’ll have to slowly modify over time. Whatever it is, figure out a plan for addressing that specific root cause and focus on changing that.

For me, the real root cause of many of my financial troubles was a lack of persnal control. I would constantly sacrifice the long term for the short term, because I loved the rush of instant gratification. So, the first step for me towards completing a lot of my bigger goals was to simply break that addiction to instant gratification. I mostly did this by utilizing the other changes in my life (having a baby, mostly) and finding ways to get that gratification rush without spending money (like snagging a hot book on reserve at the library, for example).

You may find that your bigger goal has to be delayed a bit while you deal with the more immediate problem. Maybe you need to work on your own behavior, or maybe you found you need a bigger emergency fund. Get the smaller goal finished first – the bigger goal can wait.

Fourth, ask yourself if the big goal was something you really wanted in the first place. You may find that, after fixing the root problem, your perspective has changed. The long term goal you had in the past doesn’t reflect the new understanding of yourself that you now have. If that’s the case, great. It’s a powerful sign that you’re growing as a person. Don’t be afraid to abandon a goal that no longer matches what you want or the person that you are.

Finally, try again. Start over on your modified goal or give some thought to a new goal. A failure doesn’t mean that you should give up on your big dreams. Instead, it’s just more insurance that you’ll make great progress towards your goals.

Megan writes in:

I’m by far the most financially sensible person in my family. I spend far less than I earn, yet I’m happy with the things I do have. I have my retirement savings in very good shape (even after the mess last year!) and I have a big emergency fund and almost enough savings for a 20% down payment on a nice house – and I’m only 26!

Recently, I spent a weekend with my older brother and his two children. They both receive an allowance, but their mother indulges them constantly and allows them to spend it without even thinking about it. I would like to do something to help these kids get a good financial education when they’re young so they don’t make the mistakes that most people make in their twenties that haunt them forever (I made some of my own, too).

What do you think I should do? What’s appropriate to do?

I find myself in a similar position whenever I’m around my own nieces and nephews. There are many thing I wish I had the opportunity to teach them, but my window of opportunity for doing so is extremely limited.

In my own life, I’ve found the most success when I stick to these principles:

Connect with the children as deeply as possible. The absolute best way for a non-parent to connect with a child is to get down at their level, listen to what they say, and talk to them as if they were an adult. Do that frequently and children will quickly begin to like you and see you as something of a mentor. Doing this makes it much easier for you to introduce ideas to them – they’ll be open and receptive to what you have to say.

Offer nonthreatening advice to the parents. One really effective way to do this is to give them a book or something practical that helps the parents with the financial teaching process. For example, you could give the parents a copy of the book Raising Financially Fit Kids by Joline Godfrey. Offer it not as a criticism of what they’re already doing. One great way to do this is to say simply that you had money problems when you were younger and you’d love to be able to help those children you love not have the same difficulties you had. Most parents will appreciate such parenting advice given in this fashion.

Give gifts that reinforce money lessons. A powerful way of doing this would be to give a child a Money Savvy Bank as a gift, with a small amount already in each slot of the bank. Then, encourage them to split their allowance – or any other money they get – among the pieces of the jar. The bank comes with a great parents’ guide as well, one that might encourage the parents to get involved and reinforce the lessons of the bank.

Lead by example. If you have a strong connection with the children, they’ll want to emulate what you do. You can thus ingrain good financial choices in them by simply behaving in a financially responsible fashion yourself. Take them shopping with you and show them how you do it – make a list, don’t buy stuff that’s not on the list, etc. Tell them your own goals for the future and say you put aside money every week for that goal. Then, show them that you’ve achieved that goal when you do (like when you buy a car or some other tangible item). Don’t fill your house with lots of stuff – reject consumerism, but do it without bragging about it or dropping names. Walk the walk – children notice.

Be positive about good financial choices. When you notice the child making a good financial choice, compliment it. Positive reinforcement works far better than negative reinforcement – negative reinforcement is mostly used because it’s easier.

Good financial habits don’t appear out of thin air. They require good role models and examples that show the benefits of living in a financially stable way, as well as basic ideas on how to do it yourself. You can drop these breadcrumbs in the lap of any child if you do the groundwork of connecting with that child first.

It happens to the best of us. We resolve to make some change in our life and, for the first month or two, it goes great. We see real progress in the area we want to change.

And then it happens. We give into temptation and make a mistake – sometimes a big one. We devour half of a Sara Lee pound cake after two weeks of careful dieting on raw foods. We blow $150 on clothes after a month and a half of careful spending control.

And we feel horrible about it later. We feel some guilt. We feel some shame. We begin to doubt that we can ever do this. And we eventually revert back to our original behaviors.

I found myself doing this recently while writing my second book. During much of the summer, I was taking long walks five days a week (by long, I mean 4-5 miles) and I felt incredibly good. But as the deadline for my book approached, I found myself skipping these sessions simply because I was so focused on writing. Then, when I’d realize that it was too late to go on a walk that day, I would be upset and frustrated with myself. Eventually, though, I began to simply discard my old routine, replacing it with long evenings of writing.

It’s happened to me many other times as well. I’ve backslid on spending promises, on musical practice pledges, and so on.

Why do we all do this? This is obviously a common human thing – one only needs to read a newspaper a month or so after New Year’s to read about tons of backsliding. What causes us to stumble back against our best intentions?

To put it simply, it’s all about the planning. When we stumble, it’s a clear indication that our plan for success had a fatal flaw in it.

What kind of flaw? In my own experience, I’ve found four different types, each with four different ways to correct it.

Poor time management. In the case of my exercise routine, my own time management was to blame. Instead of planning ahead to make plenty of time to finish my manuscript, I indulged in a lot of fun activities in the late summer that ate up several days. The result of this is that in September and October, I was pressed not only to keep my normal work activities going, but to also finish and polish up a full book manuscript. This caused me to have to make some tough choices and discard a lot of “important but not urgent” things – like my long walks.

The solution? If your commitment requires you to put aside a significant amount of time regularly, work harder at your other tasks on a consistent basis so that you have a “buffer” to help you in the event of a crisis. Get ahead on your projects at work. Take care of household tasks as they come along instead of allowing them to build up into a wall of work.

Temptations. Eating five slices of pizza after dietiing all week is giving into temptation. Buying a $300 pair of shoes after being careful with your money all month is giving into temptation.

We’re all tempted by things. Quite often, our resolutions are a recognition that such temptations are bad for us in the long run, but we desire these things all the same.

The solution? I’ve found two that work. First, an allowance of splurging often helps keep our better behavior in check. Allow yourself $25 a week to splurge with. Put that $25 in cash in a jar on top of the fridge. Then, when you’re truly tempted, take down that jar and freely spend it with no guilt. This trick often “releases” the pent-up desires that we build up without destroying all of our positive work. A similar trick is to allow yourself one saucer-sized plate of whatever food you desire twice a week or so.

Second, supportive friends that are involved with and aware of your goals will often help make it easier. Perhaps they’ll diet or exercise with you, or at the very least won’t tempt you to go shopping and spend money.

False commitment. We commit to some sort of change, but on some level, we’re not really committed to it – and we know it. We pledge to give up eating fatty foods, but we don’t really want to do it at all. Often, we’re just trying to commit to something because we know other people value it, not because we value it.

The solution? Such a commitment will never work over the long haul. You need to spend some time rethinking why you are committing to this goal. Often, such goals are conceived and attempted out of a desire to fix an interpersonal relationship of some kind, often one that’s suffering due to reasons completely unrelated to the goal. Focus on fixing the relationship, not on “fixing” some element of yourself that you’re not committed to fixing. Try communicating in a healthy and mature way – and if that’s impossible, it may be time to step back from that relationship.

Self-destructiveness. You have a self-destructive element that undermines whatever you attempt to do to improve yourself. This can often be borne out of low self-esteem.

The solution? If you find yourself doing this, it’s likely that you need counseling of some sort. Discuss the situation with your medical doctor and ask for a referral to a trained mental health professional that can adequately help you overcome such urges.

Let’s not pull any punches about it: big, life changing goals are hard. They become even harder if you aren’t surrounded by people who support you and want you to succeed and if your desire and commitment toward the goal is not complete.

It’s important to remember that a stumble is not a failure. It’s a wake-up call to regroup, replan, and succeed.

November is here. Winter is sneaking up on us, and with winter comes winter heating bills for most of the United States. I live in northern Iowa, where temperatures can get quite cold in the heart of the winter months and, since I work from home, I have to utilize lots of different tricks to ensure that we’re not burning too much energy just to keep the house warm.

Last winter, I catalogued several of the best tactics to share with you at the dawn of the next winter. Here they are.

Check your insulation.
Take a quick peek in your attic. What do you see? Do you see any bare spots not covered in insulation? Attempt to identify what type of insulation you have and make sure it’s up to the level of insulation you need for your area using this helpful insulation guide along with this tool for understanding insulation R-values. Proper insulation is key to keeping your house warm.

Make sure your home is air sealed.
Air leaks and drafts allow warm air to quickly escape your house, resulting in tremendous heating and cooling bills. The solution to this problem is to check your home for air leaks and properly air seal any leaks you discover. This useful guide from the Department of Energy will walk you through the entire process.

Close the vents in unused rooms (and seal them off, if possible).
If your home is well insulated and you have a room or two that’s not actively being used, turn off the air vent in that room and seal the room as best you can. The temperature in that room will drop significantly when you do this as you’ll no longer be heating it – and no longer paying the bill for heating it, either.

Invest in thick socks.
I work from home in Iowa, and I’ve learned that there’s no better way to stay warm in the winter at home than to wear thick socks. Thick socks keep my feet warm even if I keep the temperature in the house low, and feet are one of the primary thermal indicators for the body as well as being a relatively poorly circulated extremity. Keep the feet warm and the rest of you will be fine.

Test the lower levels of your thermostat.
Along with wearing warm socks, I often tend to turn the heating down during the day (raising it when my family is at home, which is basically just a manual version of the effect one would get from installing a programmable thermostat). I work on the upper level of my home where it’s warmest, so reducing the house temperature during the day rarely has any negative impact on my work – but it certainly saves on energy costs.

Use a hot water bottle. We also tend to dip our thermostat down a bit at night when we’re snuggled in our beds. Unfortunately, after a long winter day, a bed might not necessarily be cosy right at first. Thus, I often use a trick that my father used when he was a boy – a hot water bottle. We use a reusable microwaveable hot water bottle filled with a gel-like substance. A quick heating in the microwave just before bed means that the bed quickly gets cosy warm – a perfect resistance against the cold nights.

Open the blinds on the sunny side of the house – close them on the other side.
In the winter, I do this on the top two floors of our home (where most of the windows are). In the morning, I open all of the blinds and curtains on the east-facing side of the house and make sure everything is closed on the west side (usually done the night before). Then, when I eat lunch, I switch the two. Then, just before dinner, I close everything on the west side of the house. This goes a long way towards maximizing the benefits of direct sunlight and minimizing the heat lost to windows not facing the sun.

Stick together – share a blanket.
If you walked into our family room, you’d see that we already have several blankets out for the winter months. We love to cuddle up as a family under a blanket or two on the couch, sharing our natural body warmth with each other. It keeps us all close together and toasty warm.

Use the oven.
Who wants to go out to eat in the deepest part of winter anyway? Stay home and cook something in the oven. Not only will the food preparation save you money, you’ll also find that the oven is far more energy efficient in the winter. How so? It works with the warming of your house rather than against the summer cooling of your house.

Drink warm fluids.
For me, winter is filled with cup after cup of hot tea and hot chocolate. Drinking a warm fluid makes me feel much warmer (and likely does slightly raise my body temperature). For me, the effect lasts for about forty minutes, a time in which I can get away with a temperature a few degrees lower. During the day, I’ll often prepare myself a giant mug of hot tea and slowly sip it over the course of a few hours. The small energy expense of heating up the water is more than replaced by the energy savings of being able to lower the house temperature a bit more.

Three recent emails from readers have made me focus lately on how much preparation for disasters we should be doing. First, from “Adam”:

Do you think it’s reasonable to take some of the money I use to invest each month and buy gold bullion coins to keep in my safe? I’m worried about the dollar collapsing.

And from “Eve”:

My husband and I have always used a spare room in our basement for storage of extra bulk supplies we’ve purchased, like toilet paper and the like. Recently, my husband has started talking about using that room for dehydrated meals and water storage in case of a major disaster. Do you think this is a good idea?

And from “Noah”:

Do you think non-hybrid seeds are a good investment?

These three readers all have something in common. They all are at least somewhat under the belief that a major calamity of some sort is on the verge of occurring – either a natural disaster, the fall of the government, the extreme devaluation of the dollar, or some other event that will radically alter our day-to-day way of life.

My general answer to all three of these people is the same. None of the ways of utilizing their extra money is an inherently bad way of using extra money. These items won’t necessarily earn a great return on the investment, but they aren’t worthless, either. Instead, I would encourage them to find ways to make these choices compatible with the way they live their lives today.

To Adam, who wants to buy gold coins: by all means, add gold coins as a small part of your overall investment strategy. I would not invest in nothing but gold. If I were you, I’d simply buy them at a slow rate – perhaps saving $100-200 a month (or more, if you’re able) and buying a coin whenever I could afford one. Then, I’d just sit on those coins, using them only as a last resort. This is particularly true if you have heirs to which you can pass those coins onto.

To Eve, who wants to begin storing food and water: instead of storing a bunch of dehydrated food packets that you may or may not ever utilize, I’d start a garden and teach myself how to can vegetables. Then, over time, eat some of the vegetables you can to maintain a steady supply in storage. For example, you might can a summer’s worth of vegetables the first summer, leave them alone that winter, can a second summer’s worth of vegetables, then eat the first summer’s worth the following winter. My parents used exactly this strategy growing up and it worked just fine.

To Noah, who wants to start buying seeds: I’d invest in a greenhouse setup (grow lights in your basement, if nothing else) so that the seeds don’t go to waste. After all, in most home storage situations, seeds will eventually go bad. Within that greenhouse, I’d replenish the seeds each year and also grow myself plenty of food. A greenhouse makes it much easier to actually protect non-hybridized seeds and plants from diseases and predators, since the advantage of hybridization is that the final plant is much more sturdy than many non-hybridized plants. One good way to get involved in this is to get in touch with the Seed Savers Exchange, a group dedicated to preserving and passing on heirloom plant varieties.

While investing like this will likely not produce a great financial return, it does offer another kind of return. For many people, such preparedness offers peace of mind – a sense of protection against the unknown. That has real value, particularly if you find the state of the world to be a stressor in your life. If having some gold in your safe or food supplies in your basement causes you to feel more at peace, then it’s providing a non-financial return that has significant value in your life.

What sort of preparation do we do along these lines? At home, we have about a month’s worth of food on hand along with about twenty gallons of potable water. A good portion of the potable water is actually in gallon jugs in the freezer, helping to fill the freezer and thus reduce the maintenance energy needed to keep the contents of the freezer cold. We do not own any gold bullion, though I’ve considered buying a coin or two at a very slow rate.

Investing is more than just pure dollars and cents. Investment provides psychological security and peace of mind as well, which can be tremendously important for some people. If you’re in a position where you’re worried about the state of the world, I see no reason not to invest some of your time and energy into securing your position as best you can. After all, that’s what investment really is, at its core.

FMF pointed me to this article from the Washington Post on the sad end of Bud Post, a lottery winner from Pennsylvania:

William “Bud” Post III, 66, whose $16.2 million in lottery winnings brought him debt, despair and heartache, causing the kind of trouble often recounted in country-western songs, died of respiratory failure Jan. 15 at a Pittsburgh area hospital.

“Everybody dreams of winning money, but nobody realizes the nightmares that come out of the woodwork, or the problems,” he said in 1993, five years after winning the Pennsylvania lottery.

His problems included a brother who tried to hire a contract murderer to kill him and his sixth wife; a landlady who forced him to give her one-third of the jackpot; and a conviction on an assault charge, after Mr. Post fired a shotgun at a man trying to collect a debt at his deteriorating dream house in northwestern Pennsylvania. He went bankrupt, came out of it with $1 million free and clear and spent most of that windfall, too.

Obviously, Mr. Post made a number of poor decisions along the way – divorcing at least five times and associating with criminals, for two.

However, there’s a deeper thread here. Mr. Post’s “deteriorating dream home” is mentioned, as is “bankruptcy” and spending most of a second windfall. It’s fairly easy to conclude from this story that Mr. Post spent his money buying stuff that was beyond him to maintain.

Money buys you three things: it buys fun, it buys security, and it buys time. The only problem is that if you neglect one of these three things at the expense of the others, you lose them all.

Mr. Post, as many people who win the lottery, focused on buying the fun. He bought his dream house and tons of other material items – the article mentions a twin-engine plane (even though he didn’t have a pilot’s license), two additional homes, another truck, three cars, two Harley-Davidson motorcycles, two 62-inch Sony televisions, a luxury camper, computers and a $260,000 sailboat, among other items.

The only problem is that when you focus entirely on the fun, you miss out on both security and time. If you load your life with fun things, you no longer have the time to actually enjoy each fun thing – instead, they go to waste, falling apart and neglected. Similarly, if you avoid proper spending on securing your future, you wind up right back where you started – in Mr. Post’s case, on a $475 a month disability check.

This idea is true for any income we bring in. After all, earning $50,000 a year for 30 years amounts to a $1.5 million windfall.

Instead of spending all of your money on every little thing you imagine you might enjoy, you’re far better off putting some of your money into a small handful of things you truly care about and will enjoy over a long period of time and putting the rest into ensuring that your situation will be provided for over the long haul.

In other words, when you bring in money, it’s fine to spend some of it on something fun. However, you’re usually better off buying or experiencing one or two high quality things – things that really mean something deeply to you or will provide many, many hours of enjoyment – than lots of things, because if you own lots of things, the time you spend on each one is lessened and the time you spend maintaining your things goes up, reducing your overall enjoyment by quite a bit. The rest of the money is usually best spent securing the things that you do have, so that you don’t wind up without any resources when luck eventually turns against you.

Fun, time, and security – keeping them in balance is the best way to maximize the money you bring in, whether it’s a big windfall or an ordinary paycheck.