About a week ago, I challenged my followers on Twitter to give me their best single piece of money advice in ten words or less.

I was flooded with responses.

After spending quite a bit of time sifting through them, here are the fifty best pieces of advice that came my way (out of well over a hundred - I actually used a spreadsheet to help me figure out the best ones to include). All of these are stellar money tips - and all of them come in with ten words or less. Enjoy.

writealvaro: Don’t invest in what you don’t understand.
mmmeg: I only need one word! ASK!
The_Weakonomist: index emergency fund to unemployment. 9% = 9 months.
MichaelBRubin: Spend more time, less money.
fiscalgeek: The secret to money management is learning to be content.
pearbudget: Know what really matters. Don’t spend money on other stuff.
creditgoddess: Don’t borrow more than you can repay.
dgstinner: A fool and his money are soon parted
jacobmlee: Be mindful of how you spend money.
JoeTaxpayerBlog: Don’t walk away from 401(k) match, regardless of debt situation.
EdenJaeger: Live below your means and save all you can.
tonyblacknyc: Better to sell a little early than a little late.
Kplavcan13: Pay yourself first, you can’t give yourself a bill.
dweliver: Be content with what’s yours and you’ll always have plenty.
centsiblelife: Spend less than you earn. Earn more.
MoneyEnergy: Don’t save at 2% when you’ve got debt at 10%.
thefinancialqb: If you try to get rich quickly, you will go broke fast.
ObliviousInvest: Diversify. Minimize costs. Stay the course.
Matt_SF: Borrowing money for a depreciating asset is a fool’s errand.
benburleson: If you can’t afford it, don’t buy it.
mapgirlsfc: Save regularly and spend less than you earn.
jj_observations: Learn to love left-overs!
tusharm: Don’t spend money that you don’t have.
danielckoontz: Never reach for yield.
randypeterman: “Where will you & your stuff be in 100 years?”
Cat8040: Don’t take on debt.
KasyAllen: Don’t be afraid to ask for the savings!
nhldigest: Best money advice “Don’t Spend More Than You Earn”.
Green_Panda: My advice: Change one money habit at a time.
MoneyEnergy: Don’t count all your chickens before they’ve hatched.
fcn: Save and invest for the long term.
MyLifeROI: If it depreciates, don’t pay interest on it!
jessw61: Save/invest as much as you can.
Lisa_S_47: working hard doesn’t mean you deserve anything you can’t afford.
mtswartz: I’ll do it in two: Spend Less!
GlennLucas: Prevent your government from bankrupting your nation.
myfindependence: Be thrifty but don’t forget to enjoy yourself
spendingsmart: You can’t outearn dumb spending.
randallkirsch: A penny saved is more than a penny earned.
Grumpicus: Use credit cards, NOT debit cards.
flexo: The only one who cares about your money is you.
ceetastic: Before purchasing, I ask myself, “Can you justify the expense?”
moneyhighway: Money comes and goes the memories stay
robertsm85: If you don’t have the money then don’t spend it.
roryboy: if you need to use plastic, you can’t afford it!
msimonkey: Keeping up with the Jones’s is plain stupid.
maverickstruth: Know what comes in, and what goes out.
crazy_eddy: Let your assets buy your toys.
sfordinarygirl: Buy generics/private label because it’s way cheaper
jasonbob7: One word: leftovers!

Now, how about you? What’s the best money advice you can give in ten words or less? Leave yours in the comments!

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 for your kids, you read quite a bit, and you also seem to have a somewhat active social life. How do you do it? Do you not sleep?

There are a handful of tricks to making this all work. I’ll outline several, but I’ll start with the big one.

The line between work and family is pretty blurry at our house.
As I’ve mentioned before, I set aside a block of time each day to spend with the kids - and my wife does the same. This block usually goes from about 5:30 in the evening until 8:30 in the evening, with the last half-hour or so involving one of us putting the kids to bed while the other one does something else.

Outside of that, the lines between work and family are really blurry at our home. We’ll engage in family activities and in the middle, I’ll yank out my pocket notebook and jot down some notes. I’ll read books for review for The Simple Dollar in the late evenings when my wife is enjoying a piece of meaty fiction. My wife (who is a teacher) will grade papers on the way to an activity while I’m driving, or I’ll gather notes while she’s driving. Sometimes she even helps out with background tasks for The Simple Dollar, brainstorming ideas, correcting posts, and even helping with writing tasks here and there.

It’s not uncommon for us to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon watching a movie in the family room. The kids will choose a Pixar movie we’ve seen a dozen times and my wife and I will fire up our laptops, hers to record some grades and mine to answer some emails.

It doesn’t feel intrusive - at least not to me - because I enjoy the work so much. I love to write. I love to communicate with readers (in fact, I love it so much that I often get behind simply because I want to respond to as many emails as I can). It just feels - most of the time - like just another enjoyable thing to do in my life.

During the school year, the kids do go to daycare, a decision we put a lot of thought into before we chose it. The biggest reason, actually, was for the kids themselves - there are cognitive benefits and health benefits to such attendance. That doesn’t mean that we dump them at the door and run - I often spend days with them, taking them to the Science Center of Iowa or to the library or to the park - but I do try to maximize the time they’re at daycare, doing tasks that they can’t participate in (my work) or would greatly hinder.

The end result of all of this is that my children get my undivided attention vastly more than they did when I was working a full time job. When I had work intruding on my life then, I was either out of the house or mentally distracted when I should have been spending time with them. Now, when they need me and something work-related is on my mind, I have the freedom to slam the door on work whenever I choose. Plus, because I enjoy my work, I also have the freedom to pick it up whenever time allows without hating how it’s interfering with what I want to do - it is what I want to do.

We own one television - and it’s rarely on.
In the last month, the television’s primary use has been twofold. It’s kept us up to date with local storm coverage (since we’ve had some awful weather as of late) and it’s provided the source of our “family movie night,” where all four of us (once a week or so) watch a movie together. Other than that, I think it’s been on roughly two hours (to watch True Blood).

That’s it. The only television we own is down in the basement, and we simply don’t go down there that often. We’re too busy doing other things that we enjoy - activities that often involve active interaction with our children (like drawing pictures or building a giant model railroad).

We do lots of household chores together as a family.
We cook meals together. We clean together. We work on art projects together. We wrap presents together. We do dishes together.

Virtually any task that the children can possibly participate in is done in a social fashion. Everyone gets more out of it if we work together. Sure, there might be minor setbacks when the children get involved, but they offer a lot of help, too. Even our twenty one month old daughter can scrape plates and put them in the dishwasher (seriously) and our three year old loves stirring cookie batter.

The more things like this that we do together as a family, the tighter we bond and the more real world skills our kids have. Doing things this way turns household chores into opportunities for family bonding - and often gets things done just as fast, if not faster.

Many of our friends are also parents.
If you’re friends with parents that have children of a similar age, they’re much more understanding about things like taking kids to the bathroom or washing their hands. They’re also much more likely to be helpful when you need a hand, and you have a lot of experiences and advice worth sharing.

Here’s a perfect example. My wife had four bridesmaids at our wedding - two of them were her sisters and the other two were long-time friends. Today, one of those friends has a son that’s literally one day younger than our own, while the other has a daughter in between the ages of our kids and an infant son. The children have become part of the social bonds tying them all together.

Thus, our roles as parents and as social creatures overlap.

We choose enriching things for our relaxation time.
So when do we relax? Almost every evening, my wife and I spend some time unwinding. That time, though, is often spent reading or playing a game that requires some thinking. Last night, we both read for an hour and a half, side by side, before bed. The night before that, we played Dominion over a bottle of wine.

In short, we make an effort to keep our minds “on” as much as possible during the day.

Turning my mind “off” is done in a very focused way.
Obviously, though, being “on” all the time isn’t the best thing, so I have what I think of as an extremely focused “off” time each day. I meditate/pray for about twenty minutes - I clear my mind and do a few very basic relaxation techniques. Often, if I do this later in the day, I find myself hugely mentally refreshed for the evening instead of burnt out after a lot of work.

I used to try to do something like this during my commute, but it never really worked well, so eventually I settled on meditating/praying right when I got home. It’s a late afternoon tradition for me that I’ve used ever since - and it makes a huge difference in my energy and alertness in the evenings.

Doing these things - blending work and parenting and play, meditating, socializing with other parents, and engaging in activities that are usually mentally enriching - has been invaluable for juggling all the roles we have without needing to shell out the cash to bring in extra help (like a housecleaner, for example).

Samantha writes in:

I don’t understand why I need credit at all. Credit just gets you into debt and you wind up paying interest to other companies. What’s the point of throwing my money away like that?

Samantha asks a really good question here - and in some respects, she’s spot on. Poor use of credit is a big net loss for people. Because of the interest payments, you lose far more than you gain.

However, there are a lot of upsides to healthy use of credit.

First, a good credit rating helps your insurance rates. Insurance companies use your credit rating as a factor in determining what sort of rate to offer you on homeowners insurance, auto insurance, and life insurance. The higher your credit rating - meaning the more reliable you are at obtaining credit, then paying the bills faithfully - the better you seem as a risk, because people with high credit are statistically more likely to be safe drivers, safe homeowners, and likely to live longer.

Second, a good credit rating helps you with employment options. Similarly, many employers run credit checks on potential employees and, again, are much more likely to hire people with strong credit because it’s a clear indication that they’re reliable.

Third, credit often offers great buyer protection. If you use credit to make a purchase - particularly credit cards - the cards offer a lot of protection against fraud, identity theft, and other serious problems. If you pay cash, you miss out on those protections.

Fourth, a good credit rating helps you with renting. Even if you’ve made the decision to entirely avoid credit and rent until you can write a check for a home, your credit still affects your housing because many landlords - particularly those in charge of higher-end housing - will check the credit ratings of potential renters and will reject (or charge a much higher deposit) people who have no credit or poor credit.

In the end, it pays to have a strong positive credit rating. This does not imply, however, that it’s good to be in debt. You can have a great credit rating without digging yourself into debt. Here’s how.

First, get a credit card. If you have no credit history, you can usually get one with a low credit limit pretty easily. Look for one that has some sort of bonus connected to a retailer you use. If you shop at Target, get the Target Visa. If you shop at Amazon, get the Amazon Visa. If you get all your gas at BP, get the BP card.

Second, use the credit card for routine purchases. If you stop for gas, use your card and pay at the pump. If you’re at the store buying some items you need and would buy normally, use your card for that routine purchase. Other than these events, forget about the card entirely.

Then pay off your bill in full each month. If you stick to just using the card for routine purchases, you should have no problem whatsoever paying off your entire bill each month. Thus, you never incur debt that generates interest.

Instead, you get all the benefits of a positive credit rating - lower interest rates, better job application success, buyer protection on some purchases, and better housing opportunities - plus the benefits of the rewards of a good credit card - discounts at the retailers you already use. Together, these add up to a net positive, and if you’re disciplined enough to keep yourself from using the credit card for purchases you would not make without it, it’s nothing but a positive.

Here’s another way to think about it. Your credit rating is simply the method many businesses use to figure out if you’re reliable or trustworthy. If you are, they see you as having more value - you’re likely to be a better employee, you’re less likely to have insurance claims, and you’re more likely to pay your rent. By avoiding credit, you’re sending no signal at all to them - and thus they’re unable to decide if you’re reliable or not and thus won’t offer you the best rates.

Positive credit helps you in many ways and saves you money consistently. Don’t avoid all credit because of a fear of debt - responsible people can enjoy all the benefits of good credit without the drawbacks of bad debt.

Good luck.

Millie writes in, describing her interesting system of making herself save:

I have my paycheck direct deposited into ING Direct. It comes in like clockwork on the first and third Friday of each month. Then, on the 10th and the 24th of each month, ING automatically transfers about 60% of that paycheck amount directly into my main checking account. I then proceed to live on what’s in my checking account.

Once every few months, I’ll go to ING Direct and do various things with the money. I usually transfer most of it into an investment account - the rest goes to replenish my emergency fund or help with some other short term savings goal.

This really works for me. I hope you share it with your readers.

I think this is a brilliant method for making automatic savings work. It strongly enforces the idea of “paying yourself first” - meaning that personal savings is the highest priority with your money. It forces you to learn how to budget with what you have - if you naturally live paycheck to paycheck, this really enforces some discipline on your financial life. You can throttle it back and forth however you wish - the less you automatically transfer from the savings, the more you will be able to save up for emergencies, debt repayment, and other savings goals.

If a person sticks with this plan over the long haul - no cheating and no dips into the emergency fund for non-emergencies - they can get ahead financially. The smaller the percentage of their paycheck that they transfer, the better off they’ll be.

An Example
Let’s say John brings home about $400 a week. He realizes that with some discipline, he can live just fine on about $300 a week - so he decides to try it out. He signs up for an online savings account, has his paycheck automatically deposited into that account, then sets up a weekly automatic transfer that triggers a few days later to transfer $300 into his main checking account.

John scrimps a little bit - taking on a few cash odd jobs, living lean - but he makes living on that $300 a week work. Halfway through the year, he gets a raise at work - now his paycheck is $425 a week, but he doesn’t change a thing about his savings plan.

At the end of the year, John has about $5,900 in savings. That’s enough to write a check for a fairly reliable car. That’s enough - with another two or three years of this - to have the down payment on a decent home. That’s enough to pay for some night classes or, in a few years, pay for a couple years of schooling leading to a bachelor’s degree.

For a person bringing home $400 a week, $5,900 can be “change your life” money. And all it takes is a year.

Switching to This System
This system isn’t too hard to set up, either. In fact, I use my own (overly complicated) version of this system to manage my own money.

First, start living leaner right now. You’re going to need to build up at least a little bit of buffer in your checking account, because there will be a period where you almost “skip” a paycheck. You’re not really skipping a paycheck, but this system means you’ll start receiving your paychecks about a week or so later than you used to. Thus, you will need some extra cash. Plus, you’ll need to live a bit leaner in order to survive on the smaller “paycheck” that you’ll get.

I usually recommend that people start by trimming some of the obvious fat, particularly through one-time actions. Look through all of your bills and see if there’s anything you can cut - premium cable, excessive cell phone plans, and so on. Work on improving the energy efficiency of your home.

Once that’s done, look at your regular expenditures. What things are you constantly spending money on? Breaking an expensive habit can be invaluable, as can moving away from eating out and preparing food at home instead.

Most people can trim a surprising amount of fat just by doing those two things. The problem is that many people then replace that trimmed fat with other unnecessary spending - but you’re not going to fall into that trap.

Once you’ve built up a little bit of a buffer, it’s time to set up your plan.

Sign up for an online savings account. I use ING Direct and I’m very happy with them, but there are a lot of options out there. An online savings account has the advantage that you can easily manage it at your own computer and also that it earns a solid interest rate.

The real advantage, though, is that it creates a wall between your savings and your spending. With an account at a bank completely separate from your primary bank, you can’t just stroll in and make a big withdrawal on a whim. Instead, you have to log onto your account, execute a transfer, then wait a few days for that transfer to clear both banks. That waiting period gives you time to really think through your decision and it will often convince people that they shouldn’t go through with an unnecessary expenditure.

Once you’ve done that, change your direct deposit at your employer to your new bank. It’s during this period that you’ll have to live lean and pay careful attention to the process, because the direct deposit may not necessarily arrive at your new bank at the exact same schedule as your old bank. Watch your new account carefully to see when the deposit comes in.

Once your first paycheck is in the new account, set up your automatic transfer from the new account to your old checking account. You have a lot of options as to how to set this up.

For one, you can match your current payment schedule - only a few days later - and simply transfer a bit less than you bring in. So, if you have a paycheck that comes in every week for $400 on Fridays, you can have a transfer the following Tuesday or Wednesday for $350 to your checking account. This will leave behind $50 each week in your account, which will really build up.

For another, you can slowly spread out your paychecks. For example, if you’re paid every two weeks (26 times a year), you can have the transfer happen on the 1st and 15th of each month for the amount of your paycheck - $400 - which would be 24 times a year. This would leave behind the two “extra” checks you get each year - a total of $800.

Or you can do both. If you have a weekly paycheck that’s $400 (52 checks a year), set up four transfers a month at $350 (48 transfers a year). This leaves behind $50 each time you make a transfer - a total of $2,400 over a year - plus the extra four checks - $1,600 a year - for a total savings of $4,000 over the year.

The key is to make sure that you’re transferring less than you bring in. How exactly you do that is up to you, but the purpose of this is to make sure you’re leaving behind some savings in the account. If $10 comes in, less than $10 should be going out.

Once the first transfer comes through from your new account to your old account, you’re good to go. The system is in place - you can largely forget about it. I recommend not changing anything if you get a raise - let that raise go entirely into savings. Instead, only make a change if you’re sure it needs to happen in your life. If you find yourself actually spending substantially less than you’re getting into your checking, lower that transfer a bit. If you’re struggling to make ends meet and you’re not wasting money, don’t be afraid to bump it up a little.

Good luck! This is a great plan that can really help kick your savings into gear.

Where the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
- Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion

Sure, that line is used for laughs on NPR on Saturday afternoons to describe the placid, fictional Lake Wobegon, but the humor points to a rather serious matter: people constantly overrate their own achievements and capabilities in relation to others.

Here’s a simple example. Let’s say I took you and ninety-nine other random readers of The Simple Dollar and gave you all a battery of tests to rate your intelligence. Where would you predict that you would rank in the end? Would you be in the top half? Would you be in the top ten?

If I were guessing, I would probably put myself somewhere in the middle of the pack. I think I’m fast at putting simple ideas together into a somewhat more interesting larger grouping (I’m good at Jeopardy!, in other words), but I’m not particularly brilliant or anything. I find myself consistently falling short of where I hope I would be in lots of areas.

If you gave me the same question ten years ago - or even five years ago - I know quite well that I would have ranked myself very high with such a question. My set of experiences, to that point, had vastly overrated my small gift of relative speed and convinced me that I had special abilities. Constant positive reinforcement of those abilities didn’t help - seeing people surprised at my speed of limited recall and limited association and having them tell me how impressive it was further inflated my perception of myself.

The same is true for most people and most features. Almost all of us have abilities or features that we consider above average - quite often, we consider the sum of these abilities and features to be above average. And why not? The world around us has shown it to be true - people give us positive feedback all the time, so we must be good, right?

A few things to take into account here.

First, people generally prefer positive interaction. Most people prescribe to the notion that if you have nothing positive to say, don’t say anything at all. They’ll look at an individual, identify whatever traits they can that they deem to at least not be a huge negative, and complement the person on those traits.

A person with average looks - perhaps a below-average figure but above-average eyes - may have heard many complements on their eyes and thus believe that their overall looks are above average - after all, people are complementing you, right?

Second, it’s a good survival strategy to believe we can handle anything. Without an underlying sense of success, people would be afraid to try anything new. New technologies wouldn’t be proposed or even introduced. New ideas wouldn’t be shared. In short, confidence is useful.

Here’s the problem, though. We often overextend our healthy level of confidence to an unsafe point. This happens in two directions - we’re overconfident in some areas where some degree of confidence is appropriate (our own skills, for example) and confident (often quietly so) in areas we have no control over whatsoever (like our continuing health).

Each of these directions has a different set of tools to help you succeed.

For overconfidence, try placing your skills in competition with others - the more direct, the better. Many people avoid competition because they fear losing or looking bad. I argue that losing is actually more valuable than winning. It teaches you that you’re not the best and shows you what you need to work on.

For example, I often use my subscriber count as a way to compare myself to other bloggers. It’s easy to see that I’m left in the dust by many other blogs - Daily Kos and TechCrunch, for example, have orders of magnitude more subscribers than I do. This is proof positive that I’m not the best writer out there. I respond not by thinking “I’m a failure,” but by thinking “I know I can do better than that” and seek ways to reach out even more.

For misplaced confidence, visualize some worst-case scenarios. What happens to you if you’re hit by a truck tomorrow morning? What happens to you if you get a serious disease? What happens if those things happen to your spouse? Your child? What if your company goes under tomorrow morning and you walk in facing a pink slip?

Those scenarios often point you in the right direction for finding appropriate ways to actually back up your personal confidence. Start an emergency fund. Create a master information document. Get a good term life insurance policy. Build good relationships with people in your career field - and in your neighborhood.

In other words, back up that confidence with something real. The better the structure behind you, the more likely it is that you really are living in your own Lake Wobegon, where things really are above average, safe, and secure.

When I first started writing The Simple Dollar, one of the biggest struggles I had was figuring out how to redefine some of my friendships - a struggle I discussed at length.

The problem was that a good number of the people I spent lots of time with were constantly engaged in activities that involved spending a lot of money. Constant golf trips, constant traveling to gaming tournaments, constant shopping for music and electronics - these were simply the things that we did.

Eventually, I came to realize that for some of the friends, these expensive activities were the sole basis for our friendships. Without the weekend golf outings or gaming tournament trips, several of my friends simply vanished into thin air. Other friends, of course, were (and still are) quite happy to do other things not necessarily based on expensive activities or shopping excursions.

In fact, one of our biggest social highlights now is inviting friends over to play board games in the evening - games like Ticket to Ride and Puerto Rico and Power Grid. An evening with dinner, a glass or two of wine, a few small snacks, a thought-provoking game, and some great conversation is a spectacular way to spend time.

Even further, I’ve found that engaging in frugal activities in my community - such as participating in service groups, attending community events, and so forth - has connected me to many new friends with whom I share a lot in common.

Some of you may be asking yourselves, “I have no interest in dumping my friends in order to get ahead financially!” And you shouldn’t! Friendships aren’t things that should be tried on and discarded on a whim like so many blouses on a discount rack.

Instead, a truly worthwhile friendship grows and changes with you. If your interests change - if who you are and what you value begins to change - then your friendship will either gradually grow with you or it will melt away, replaced by new friends.

I often look at friendships as falling into two classes:

One, you have friends that you associate with primarily because of shared interests. When I played Magic: the Gathering, I had friends who also played, and that was our primary touchstone of friendship. The same holds true for many things: location (the neighbors that you invite over for barbecues on occasion, but wouldn’t keep in touch with if either of you moved), employment, and so on.

These friends are wonderful to have, but their friendship is limited to the external things you have in common. As those things begin to change, your friendship will go away.

Two, you have friends that you associate with primarily because you care about one another. These friendships often begin with a shared interest, but then they grow into something more: a genuine interest in and caring for each other.

Take, for example, my closest friend, John. Our friendship began thirteen years ago simply because we lived on the same dormitory floor. Later, we found we had common interests in gaming (to an extent), but over time, it developed into a true friendship that has lived through many moves, career changes, interest changes, and so forth.

Why does the friendship persist? We care about each other. Not only am I concerned about his well-being (and he about mine), that caring extends to pretty much any aspect of each other’s lives that we’re willing to or wish to talk about. If John has a new interest, I’ll want to learn about it. If he has a problem, I’ll do my best to help him through it.

The problem comes in when people believe that the first type of relationship is actually the second type. They’ll keep working hard to maintain a friendship, even though the basis for that friendship is slipping away. They’ll keep going out for expensive golfing excursions, even though the cost is one that now makes them feel guilty and keeps them up at night. They’ll keep going clothes shopping, even though they’re trying to cut down that wardrobe.

In the end, the lesson is simple: don’t be afraid to lose friends if you change interests, passions, or activities. True friends will stick with you no matter what you choose, and when you do make that switch, you’ll find new friends that share your new passions.

The biggest stumbling block for this is that we all fear change. It’s easy to imagine losing the friends - it’s harder to imagine gaining new ones. Thus, we imagine ourselves lonely and empty and thus we keep engaging in things that don’t make us happy in order to stave it off.

Don’t be afraid of the right kind of change. Follow your heart - your true friends will follow, too, and you’ll find new ones along the way.

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 people do want influence and respect. Similarly, people with money often seem to have a great deal of influence and respect. Thus, on a very simple level, many people who seek influence and respect do it by seeking money.

There’s only one problem: money does not result in influence and respect - instead, influence and respect often lead to money.

Many entrepreneurs want to be Richard Branson - he’s a billionaire, he’s dashing, and he has influence. What they don’t see is that in the late 1960s, he was selling records out of the trunk of his car at cheap prices. People came to him because he could help them find cheap, good records - not because he had a pile of money.

Many bands want to be The Beatles - they had more influence than pretty much any pop band ever and all of their members are/were fabulously rich. The Beatles had influence and respect first, though - they paid their dues for pennies in the clubs in Hamburg and played for years in obscure little clubs in Liverpool with barely enough money to put food on the table. They became THE BEATLES only after honing their craft for years and building not only a great local following, but good relationships with other bands on the Liverpool scene.

Many writers want to be Nora Roberts - her books are read by millions, she has an adoring fan base, and she brings in $50 million a year in royalties (my “writing hero” is Stephen King, but the same things largely apply to him). What they forget is that she wrote genre romances by the shovel full in the early 1980s for book-churning publishers like Silhouette, slowly building influence but not earning much at all.

What do these examples have in common? They built respect and influence first. Money came later when their influence and respect became clear.

If you’re sitting there worrying about how you’re going to become rich, it’s very likely you’ll never become rich. You might be able to earn a solid living in that area, but true and sustaining riches follow respect and influence, not a great scheme to put cash in your pocket.

So how do you get respect and influence?

You find something you can throw your heart into. If you don’t enjoy doing something, you won’t find yourself compelled to do it every day. If you don’t find yourself compelled to do it every day, someone else who does feel that compulsion will be the one who succeeds.

Many people tend to take this advice down the wrong path. They’re passionate about golf and thus they get in their minds that if they play obsessively every day, they might be able to get on the PGA Tour. Likely, that’s not true. You have to find a good balance of your passion and your natural talents. Perhaps you can become a golf teacher. Maybe you can become a salesman or an equipment designer for Callaway.

You work diligently at it. This isn’t just a matter of putting in long days of work - although that’s valuable, too. In order to really thrive, you have to practice the finer points of what you’re doing, smoothing them out until they’re perfect.

For example, if you want to be a writer, you need to write every day, even if it’s not for sale or for public consumption at all. If you want to be a great salesman, practice selling everything in a wide variety of situations. If you want to be a great musician, practice that instrument until your fingers bleed - and just attempting to play Seven Nation Army over and over again doesn’t cut it.

You find ways to share your work widely. The Beatles played several shows a night until they were ready to pass out from exhaustion. Nora Roberts wrote for a label that didn’t pay her greatly but distributed her work widely. Richard Branson carried his first record store around in the trunk of his car, taking the records to the people who wanted them.

The internet makes this easier than ever before. You can share your work as widely as you wish. However, there’s a new problem - a lot of people are doing the same thing. So how do you stand out? Be better than everyone else. Engage interested people as much as you can. Join in conversations that interest you even if they have nothing to do with what you’re doing (people will find your work if you’re interesting).

You live your life in such a way that you don’t need riches. The less you spend, the less reliant you are on what other people tell you to do. This gives you the freedom you need to actually throw yourself into something where you can build influence and respect.

It’s a lot harder to take a big risk if you need that fat paycheck provided by your employer, after all.

So, here we have it: my argument, in a nutshell, is that the path to riches comes from influence and respect, and the most powerful way to build influence and respect is to live your life so that you don’t need riches at all.

If you dream big, hop on board the train to your dreams. It passes through Frugality, makes a few stops at Passion, Diligence, and Hard Work, and finally finds its way to the twin cities of Respect and Influence - the place where your greatest dreams begin to come true.

When I sit back, take a breather, and evaluate the things I have on my plate, I often find that lots of little personal finance tasks have built up.

I’d like to finish my emergency information binder.

I’d like to spend some more time researching various Vanguard index funds.

I’d like to get caught up on my filing - I have a few months’ worth of papers just sitting in a box, unorganized.

I’d like to actually give Quicken for Mac a fair shake.

I’d like to sit down and run some serious numbers about our savings for our children’s college and see if it will be adequate for how much we want to help them.

The list goes on and on, actually.

With each of these tasks, I’d feel quite good if I was able to finish it up. Getting those papers to file out of the way would be very nice. Filling up my emergency information binder and getting it safely put away would provide some real peace of mind.

The problem is time. I look at each of these projects, think about them for a second, decide that I really don’t have time to tackle it right now, and move on to something else - writing an article (like this one), playing with my kids, working on a book draft, or something similar.

Yet, lately, I’ve actually been moving forward on each of these tasks. They’re not yet complete, but each one is seeing real forward progress. How? Here’s my method for digging through my personal finance chore list.

First, I just write down every such task that comes to mind. I don’t let them stay in my head at all - I get them down on paper. This is a basic tenet of the “Getting Things Done” philosophy, and I use it in almost every aspect of my life.

Second, when I have a nice long list, I break each item down into tiny bite-sized chunks of activity. An individual activity shouldn’t take more than five minutes at a time. So, for each task, I might have one activity that I’ll repeat a bunch of times, or a series of very simple steps. In either case, it guides me to the conclusion that I want.

Here’s examples from each of the five tasks I mention above.

For the emergency information binder, a simple action would be to simply fill out one item in the binder in detail. That’s it - just fill in one piece.

For the research, I just pledge to look up one fund and note the pieces of information I’m looking for for each one - just a handful of things.

For the filing, each action is simple - file five items out of my “to be filed” box.

For Quicken, the steps are easy - the first one is to simply run the installer program, then each action after that is to hook up a single account into the system.

The children’s savings issue is a bit more complicated, but it can still be broken down: get all the data I need for each account (the balance, the investments, the history of those investments), build a spreadsheet piece by piece to do the calculations I need, then run the numbers. Each piece of the spreadsheet could be a separate step.

When I have this giant list of easy five minute tasks, it’s a lot easier to convince myself to burn five minutes to do just one of them. Instead of sighing and thinking that I don’t have time to deal with three months’ worth of filing, I think “I have five minutes and I can make some progress right now!”

Then I jump up and get to work.

Why don’t you try the same thing? Make a big list of all of the personal finance tasks you’d like to get done, but haven’t. All of those tasks that you think about during idle moments but put them off because they seem overwhelming? Write them down.

For each one, come up with a few tasks you can do to move yourself forward - but make sure those tasks are quick. Tiny little things that you can do in five minutes are what you’re looking for.

Then, over time, use these little tasks to fill in the gaps. Do one during a commercial during Lost. Do another one while the rice is boiling on the stove. Do another one while your daughter is working on a math problem independently.

Before you know it, those big tasks will be done - and you’ll enjoy some real peace of mind knowing that another piece of your financial future is in place.