One of the most frequent complaints I get from readers of The Simple Dollar is that I often repeat some of the basic tenets of personal finance. Let’s face it - in some respects, The Simple Dollar is repetitive. By now, I must have riffed the principle of “spend less than you earn” at least a dozen times (well, let’s see … one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve).

So why do I keep writing about this stuff? Why do I often try to hammer away at the same points? Here are a bunch of reasons.

Repetition Breeds Success
Repetition of the key principles every once in a while is good - it serves as a reminder of the basic moves we all need to make. I know that for me personally, repetition and constant reminders of the keys to success, particularly through someone else’s words and thoughts, are key for keeping me on the right path. That’s why I read about 30 other personal finance sites every day and also keep up with tons of reading on the subject.

Repetition is a key factor in many personal finance tactics. The day in and day out repetition of making the choice to drink the less expensive coffee is one that leads to having more money at the end of the month. The month in and month out repetition of investing that money in an index fund leads eventually to a nice big chunk of change. Repetition and persistence are keys to the game.

Easier Said Than Done
The principles may seem easy, but they’re often incredibly hard to actually execute. It’s easy to know the right move to make, but it’s hard to always make that correct move. There are a lot of reasons why this is so, and a regular re-examination of the basics, particularly in terms of personal failures (and personal successes) offers a lot of insight on how and why it’s worth moving forward.

A perfect example is an essay I wrote a while about about failure in achieving short-term goals. I write quite a bit about goal setting - I think it’s a very valuable thing to do. But I often don’t reach my goals - what can I learn from that failure?

Reaching Someone New
I get hundreds of new readers every day, in addition to all of the regular readers. These people often find my blog through Google, searching for things like ” how can i change my life around financial” and “i am scared to get into student loan debt” (yes, two real search terms from people who found The Simple Dollar in just the last hour or so). These people are out there seeking answers and I want to be able to give them the right answers - the best answers.

That means teaching the fundamentals and doing it in a variety of ways so that when that desperate searcher out there types in a term and finds The Simple Dollar, they at least have a good chance of finding the answers they need to get themselves on the right track.

I get emails all the time from readers who have gotten themselves on the right track financially because of The Simple Dollar - and those are the people I write for. Every time I help someone realize how they can improve their financial life, I’ve achieved what I set out to do - and the more people that are helped by The Simple Dollar, the better. Along the way, that might mean some repetition - but that’s a price I’m happily willing to pay.

From Another’s Eyes
Everyone is living a different life and looks at these principles from a different perspective. Take a minimum wage earner - “spend less than you earn” to that person is going to mean something much different than what it means in my life. Similarly, my idea of spending less than I earn is far different than, say, Warren Buffett’s idea of the same principle.

Because of this, it’s easy to analyze these principles through all sorts of filters. How does a college student spend less then they earn? How about a blue collar worker? How about a self-employed person who deals with irregular paychecks? This is why I love talking about reader’s questions, even on issues that were covered before - someone else’s experiences color everything differently.

A Fresh Perspective
A new angle can make an old idea seem fresh again and breathe new life into it. Whenever I think about basic principles, I try very hard to look at them from a new angle. How am I applying this right now in my own life? How did I fail to apply this in the past? How could I apply this in the future? What would happen if I lost my job?

I can also throw in other contexts as well. For example, about a week ago, I looked at how you can apply basic principles to living your dreams and I covered (again) the idea of deliberate practice. But in the context of using it as just a piece of the puzzle to assemble a larger dream - in this case, my reader’s dream of being a golf professional - put it in a different context. It was deliberate practice with a focused and career oriented purpose.

Down the road, I see other contexts for deliberate practice within personal finance that can cast a new shadow on the principle - these currently reside in my “idea box” for future posts.

The Basics Are What Works
In the end, I cover the basics because they are the parts that work. Spending less than you earn is the key to personal finance. Deliberate practice will make you better at whatever you’re working on. Index funds are the best choice for most casual investors. Keeping track of your spending will help you corral the cash that leaves your pocket.

Why do I write about it again and again? It takes vigilance to make these things work. It takes new angles to inspire me - and likely to inspire you. It takes a fresh perspective to grab someone’s imagination and convince them to make a big challenging change.

And in the end, the basic stuff really does change the world.

Perhaps the most frequent question I’m asked is how on earth do I find the time to do all of the stuff that I do in a given day? I thought the best way to illustrate this would be to give an outline of a typical day so you can see what I do during that time.

4:15 AM I wake up. This is usually followed by a bit of stretching, a cold glass of water, a multivitamin, and a splash of water on the face. I usually try to eat something healthy for breakfast here, and do a quick puzzle.
4:30 AM I settle in for a writing and research session. This usually lasts for two hours.
6:30 AM I take a quick shower if I didn’t take one the night before, and start getting the children ready for daycare.
7:15 AM I drop the kids off at daycare. I’m usually either listening to NPR or an audiobook on my commute, and I use a small voice recorder to record thoughts and ideas.
7:30 AM I arrive at work and begin my typical work day. This day usually contains a half-hour long interlude in the middle, where I either eat with coworkers or answer my personal email.
4:00 PM I leave work. If needed, I run personal errands right after work - a stop at the grocery store or the library, for example.
4:30 PM I arrive home and meditate/pray/stretch for fifteen minutes or so.
4:45 PM I settle in for another hour of writing and research and perhaps some email answering as well. I might also start supper during this, if something needs to bake in the oven for a while or something.
5:45 PM Family arrives home - my wife picks the children up from daycare. I’m devoted to them for a few hours.
8:00 PM I usually write some more starting about now as my children are in bed.
9:00 PM I engage in personal activities: spending time with my wife, cleaning, reading for pleasure.
10:15 PM Bedtime!

Weekends are usually more relaxed. I usually spend half of Saturday and half of Sunday locked in my office writing, with the rest of the time devoted to personal activities, like cleaning up the house, doing family things, etc.

In a few weeks, I hope to transition to something more like this:

4:30 AM I wake up. This is usually followed by a bit of stretching, a cold glass of water, a multivitamin, and a splash of water on the face. I usually try to eat something healthy for breakfast here, and do a quick puzzle, then a half an hour to an hour devoted to exercise.
5:30 AM I take a quick shower.
5:45 AM I do a morning email session to get any communication out of the way, and sketch out my writing for the day.
6:30 AM Children wake up. Depending on the day, I’ll either get them ready for daycare or start going through our normal day routine - we’re not sure how many days of which I’ll be doing quite yet. We’ll focus on the former.
7:15 AM The morning will consist of a research and writing session.
12:30 PM I break for lunch and do my prayer/meditation/stretching, then spend the afternoon hitting the grindstone again. At the end, say at 2:45 or so, I do a second email session.
3:30 PM I stop and do household chores until the family gets home - cleaning, cooking, etc.
5:30 PM Family arrives home - my wife picks the children up from daycare. I’m devoted to them for a few hours.
8:00 PM I engage in personal activities: spending time with my wife, cleaning, reading for pleasure.
10:00 PM Bedtime!

Ideally, this leaves weekends completely free.

The Principles

Obviously, my days for the last year or so have been really packed to the gills. There’s not much time at all for rest and relaxation in that schedule, and there have been many times where I’ve chosen to work or to write over other things. Here are the guiding principles that really made all of this work.

This doesn’t work without passion. If I wasn’t passionate about my main job, my writing, and my family, this would have never worked. I would have found reasons to let something down. If you’re going to try to effectively juggle so many activities at once, make sure they all fill you with passion.

Some sacrifices are needed to bring success. Because I was engaged with so much, I had to often abandon things that I wanted to do, like spend weekends with family or engage in leisure activities. This meant that I had to be willing to make some very hard choices, and I had to keep personally motivated at all times to keep it up.

Free time is valuable. Of course, giving myself very little free time meant that it was quite valuable to me. I always wanted to maximize the value of it - but, surprisingly, that didn’t mean going out and doing expensive things. It meant simply seeking out the things that made me feel the most fulfilled over the long haul. Instead of golfing, for example, I’d take the kids to the park.

“Winding down” time isn’t as necessary as you think it is. I used to think that a “winding down” period after work, where I’d do something completely mindless for an hour, was essential to my life. What I found was that I felt substantially better if I didn’t do that. Instead, now I just stretch and meditate for a few minutes after my work is done and I find I feel substantially better than I ever did “winding down” by watching television or something.

Try different things until you find what fits you. Not every schedule works well for everyone. For a while, I experimented with writing sessions in the middle of the night, which worked well over the short term but left me zombie-like after a while. Eventually, I came to find my current schedule made everything reasonably manageable for me, but I didn’t just get there on the first shot - I tried all sorts of things before I found that sweet spot.

I’m going to try a little experiment here, just to see how it goes. From now until Saturday, March 8, 2008, you can ask any question you’d like in this thread - a specific personal finance question, a philosophical question, a personal development question, a pop culture question (maybe you have a video game related one you’d like to get off your chest), a cooking question, even a personal question about me. The only guidelines are to keep them family friendly and to avoid asking for personal information that, well, no sane person would provide. If you’ve ever had a simple question you want answered, now’s the time.

After the deadline, I’ll go through this thread and collect questions. Many of them will be answered in one long question-and-answer style post in the next week or so. Most of the rest will be turned into individual posts - researched and posted over the next month or two.

So, fire away in that comment box. What would you like to read about? What do you want to know? I’m listening!

(This is something of a test run for the idea. If it’s a success, I may do this regularly. If it’s a failure, I’ll quietly relegate this to the dust bin of history.)

I quit my job.

It is scary as can be to write that sentence. Unbelievably scary. I’m walking away from a good paying and very stable job. I announced my resignation this week, and my final day will happen before the end of March.

Why?

So, why did I make this decision? There were a lot of reasons, all balled together, so I thought I’d walk through them one at a time.

I want to devote more time to my family. As my writing has taken off - both on The Simple Dollar and in other forms - I’ve been more and more compressed for time. This has meant that I’ve spent weekends in the basement trying to write while my children play above me, their pitter-pattering feet on the floor making me wish I was with them. It’s meant that they spend more time in daycare instead of with me. It’s meant that when we go on vacations, I take my laptop along and write instead of enjoying special times with them. My son is a little over two years old and my daughter is almost six months old. If I keep doing this, I’m going to miss their childhood - and I don’t want to do that, not for all of the financial rewards in the world. In all honesty, this is the biggest factor that pushed me over the edge.

I want to devote more time to my writing. I love writing. There’s simply no other way to put it. The art of putting written words down on the page fills me with an elemental joy that I can’t describe. Some windows have opened for me where people are paying me to do this, and I can’t possibly turn away from it.

We’re in very good financial shape. If it wasn’t for this reason, I couldn’t possibly think of making a move like this. We have only a tiny amount of student loan debt and our mortgage and that’s it - no credit cards, no car loans, no anything. We have quite a bit of money in the bank as well and other sources of income, too.

We know how to live frugally. We’ve learned how to live way below our means over the last few years. We simply don’t spend much money at all, especially compared to our income. We spent substantially less than 40% of our income in 2007 - the difference was folded into paying off debts rapidly, with all of our car loans, our credit card debts, and much of our student loan debts just vanishing very rapidly.

Working in my home office and eating leftovers out of the fridge is far, far cheaper than commuting, buying gas, and succumbing to temptations along the way. I’ve calculated that my monthly savings just from not commuting is about twenty hours and $250 - and that’s assuming that I never stop for anything other than an occasional coffee or something. Plus, my lunches will be much cheaper - there will never be a temptation to eat out.

My wife is also considering a move to a job very close to home. Currently, my wife commutes about forty five minutes just to get to work. She’s considering a move that would reduce her commute to about three minutes.

I’m in the perfect position to leave my current job. I love my current job, so I’ve been waiting for the right time to make this move. I wanted a point where I could really walk away with minimal regrets, and now is just that time.

What Will I Do Now?

So, what’s my plan for after this switch? I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and here’s what I have in mind.

At first, I’m going to get substantially ahead in my writing for The Simple Dollar. One consistent worry I always have about The Simple Dollar is that I never feel far enough ahead with the writing - it’s almost impossible to walk away from it for a vacation or an illness or an emergency because I don’t have adequate time to get ahead on the writing. So, my first project is to “bank” a lot of articles and have them ready to go so that if I need to, The Simple Dollar can keep running just fine while I step away for a bit.

This also means I’m going to have the opportunity to do some deep research and write some things that time simply hasn’t afforded to me.

Second, I’m going to shop my book hard to get it published. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a book that’s largely finished in first draft form. I’m going to polish it up and start shopping it hard, something that’s a time sink that I haven’t had time to do.

At the same time, I’m looking strongly at some freelance writing opportunities that will pay pretty well. I’m in discussions related to a newspaper column and perhaps a regular slot on a local radio show.

I’m going to start the long-discussed cooking/food blog. The focus is on preparing tasty and healthy meals at home for a family - while I won’t necessarily lean towards discussions of frugality there (I’m more concerned about tasty, then healthy), the very nature of cooking at home is a frugal behavior. When it launches, I’ll let you all know.

I’m going to dabble in local politics. This is something else that time compression hasn’t given me the freedom to do. Church council, city council, school board - these are all things I want to do.

I’m also going to spend some time on other side businesses and opportunities. Small-scale computer repair, things like that. I’m also going to look at helping my wife get her soap making side business up to speed, and I may raise a bumper crop of tomatoes, can some tomato-based foods, and sell them locally. I also have a few other strings that I may tug on, too.

I’m going to still send my children to daycare some for the socialization aspects, but we’re considering a reduced schedule that gives some stay-at-home-parent time. We’re going to ease into this over the next several months to see what works best for all of us and what matches our financial state.

Most importantly, I’m going to detach a bit from the heavily-compressed nature of the last two years of my life. In the summer, we’re going to spend some significant time visiting friends and family, people who I haven’t really been able to connect with in a while. I’m going to spend a ton of time with my kids outdoors, too - working in the garden, playing at the park, and so on. I’m going to breathe, something I haven’t done in a while.

All in all, it’s the single scariest thing I’ve done in my life, but I think it’s the right thing to do.

After recently getting rid of many of the ads on The Simple Dollar website because I was bothered by their content, I received an utter tidal wave of responses from readers encouraging me to put the ads back because they created a strong revenue stream for the site and enabled me to move ever closer to doing this full time, which would in turn enable me to go a lot further in promoting the messages that this site is actually about. That’s a catch-22 if there ever was one.

I’ve been struggling about what to do with regards to those ads and I’ve come to what I think is a healthy balance for the site. I’m going to bring back the ads as before, but with a bit of a twist. Below each ad, I put an email link that says “Report an unethical ad.” If you happen to spot an ad that is for a payday loan site or something that’s obviously far outside the message of this site, just click that link and let me know about it. I will specifically block that ad.

This is the ad policy I’m going to try on for size for a while. Please let me know what you think about it.

As many of you know, I’ve been writing a book over the last several months in my spare time, and it’s basically completed. I wanted to give you an update on the project and let you know where things are going with it.

What’s the status of the book?

The first draft is finished and it’s in an “incubation period” - it doesn’t have a final title yet. The incubation period is a technique I’ve used for a long time on important writings that I’ve done. Basically, when you finish something, you put it away for a month or two and not even look at it at all. Then you get it out, print it, and read it offline with a pen in hand. That elapsed time takes away the intimacy of the writing, allowing you to read it with a somewhat fresh perspective. I hope to do this at the end of February, which would bring me to a second draft. When the second draft is done - depending on how I feel about it - I’ll either incubate it again or give it to a few close friends to read, and then I’ll be ready to do something with it.

What’s the book about?

Unlike most personal finance books, it’s got a large amount of autobiographical material to it. In fact, the original framework of the book was an expansion of my very popular Road to Financial Armageddon series, which was basically a financial autobiography.

The biggest focus is on the time when I was making the big mental switch from spending too much to being a fairly frugal person. How did I make that mental switch? What things did I focus on? How did I begin the debt recovery process? What thoughts really shocked me into change? I tried to address these questions in great detail, focusing both on how I answered the questions and also the techniques people can use to make that transition.

I think it turned out really well. It’s the book I wish I had during my financial meltdown.

When can I read it?

That’s the question I’m puzzling over right now. My original plan, when I first started writing it, was just to see if I could actually do it. Writing a book is a significant undertaking, particularly one that anyone will actually want to read. I didn’t really think about a publishing plan when I started with it.

Now that it is (in large part) finished, I’ve got to make some tough decisions. Here are the three routes I’m looking at.

The first and most obvious option is to publish the traditional way, by getting a literary agent and having that person “sell” the book to a big publishing house. I’ve had casual conversations with a few agents, but I’ve not cemented any sort of formal agreements with anyone. This route probably offers the best route in terms of wide distribution for the book and has the most potential to attract mainstream media attention to what I’m doing, but it is probably the least directly lucrative option and likely would take the longest time to actually get the book into people’s hands.

The second option is to self-publish and try to promote it myself. This means that I would take on the burden of getting the book published and distributed, but all promotional efforts have to be handled alone. This offers the best opportunity for a return on my time investment, but it’s worse than the first option in terms of distributing the book to a wide audience.

The last option is to publish it as an ebook or as a series of posts. This is the option that requires the least effort from me at this point and gets it out there the fastest, but it also is the worst option for wide distribution. Part of the advantage of doing a print book is it enables my writing to exist in another medium that can get distributed in ways that this site really can’t.

Honestly, I’m unsure which path to take right now. This is an area where my expertise is rather limited. My goal is to maximize my audience, and I’m willing to earn less per copy sold to ensure that, but that doesn’t firmly point me towards one route or another.

What do you guys think? I’m open and listening, as always.

In this post, I’m going to compile five of the most common comments and questions I get from readers, along with my response to them.

A Dire Situation

Help me! My complex financial situation is incredibly dire!

While I’m quite happy to offer suggestions to readers about their finances, I make it clear that I am not a financial advisor. My advice is that which you should expect from a layperson, no different than if you asked a buddy over a beer what he thinks you should do with your finances.

Most of the time, if the situation seems dire and complex, I encourage the person to seek professional assistance - but that often gets a pretty bitter response. I am never going to offer detailed suggestions over email, simply because a single email, no matter how detailed, can ever really make the whole situation clear. If nothing else, I don’t know who you are and whether or not you have the fortitude to actually dig out of the situation.

If you’re truly scared about your situation, the solution will almost never be found in a single email to a personal finance writer. The biggest benefit that I can provide is an ear to listen to your problems - I’m probably not the person to be providing the solution (although I would love to if I could).

Investment Advice

I just came into $X. How should I invest it?

The first answer I always have is do you have any high interest debt? If you have any debt above, say, 7%, use this money to pay off that debt.

After that, you need to figure out what your most important goal is. Are you saving for an education? A car? A house? Retirement? Which one of these feels the most pressing in your life right now? For most people, one of those will stand out - for example, right now I’m most worried about our own next car purchase, so my focus would be on saving for a car.

Once you’ve got that figured out, figure out how far off that goal is. If it’s more than ten years, you should probably be putting it into the stock market, preferably in the form of low-cost index funds like what’s offered through Vanguard. If it’s less than ten years but more than one year, I’d shop around for the best long term certificate of deposit rates at various banks. If it’s less than a year, the best place to put it is probably in a high interest online savings account. That’s my rule of thumb suggestion.

No Answers!

Why didn’t you answer that email I sent you two and a half weeks ago?

While I read every email I get, I do receive about 300 messages on an average day. If the email doesn’t seem to need a response (at least to my reading), I usually don’t respond to it. For a while, I used to send out a highly automated “Thank you for writing!” message in response, but I honestly felt like that was more cold and impersonal than not writing back at all. The other option would be to attempt to formulate a real response to all of those messages. With that many messages, let’s say I spent just a minute on each one. Five hours, gone. There’d be no time left to write The Simple Dollar.

That’s not to say I don’t respond to some of the emails - many of you know quite well that I do respond. The challenge for me is dealing with all of those messages and figuring out quickly which ones need a response and which ones do not. If you wanted an answer and didn’t seem to get one from me, mail me again and make the question more clear. It’s quite likely I read your message and didn’t see that you had a question.

Getting Started With Blogging

I’ve just started a blog, or I’m thinking about starting one. You seem to have had success - how can I get started? What do I need to do to be successful?

In terms of the basic mechanics of blogging, your best bet is to bop over to Wordpress.org and get a free one to start with. Experiment with it, see what you can learn, and see if it fits you.

Most people, though, aren’t interested in this. They know the mechanics of blogging, but they’re yearning to learn how to take those mechanics and build it into something compelling that others will read. That’s quite a bit trickier. A while back, I laid out everything I know about blogging in a series entitled Building a Better Blog - you can either read the entries individually for free or download the whole thing as a PDF for a small fee.

The biggest piece of advice? Feel free to dabble, but realize that you won’t be a success unless you have a passion about your topic - the kind of passion that will encourage you to write day in and day out for years about that topic. If you can’t even conceive of doing that, you probably won’t make it as a top notch blogger.

ING Direct Versus Other Online Banks

Why do you encourage people to use ING Direct? Online Bank X has a 0.7% higher APY, and Online Bank Y has a 0.5% higher APY! ING is a ripoff!

If you’re looking for a place to just stockpile a liquid cash portion of your portfolio, then by all means you should chase the highest rate. But, with the ongoing rate wars, banks bouncing their rates up and down all the time, and banks appearing and disappearing on a regular basis, it’s basically impossible to make a consistent recommendation of a bank to put your money. If this is what you want, go to Bankrate.com and find the one with the highest rate. In fact, it’s reached a point where people have basically spammed comments on The Simple Dollar talking up their rates that I just delete such comments - informed readers can use Bankrate if they are just hunting for the best rate.

Personally, I feel that focusing on maximizing the rate and jumping back and forth between banks is a waste of time, because virtually all online banks are within a percentage point of each other. Let’s say you’ve got $10,000 in your account and you want the best possible return. Your local bank might offer 1%, while the best rate online varies between 4.1% and 5.1%. Even if you’re in the lowest of the online banks, the cash difference between that and the highest online one is $100 over a year (meanwhile, the mere commitment to online banking over your local bank is going to be at least $310 a year, so the real value move is switching to any online bank). Even if you just spend one hour a month checking rates and moving your money between online accounts, your effective hourly rate is $8 an hour. You’re better off working at McDonalds.

I recommend ING Direct (and I have since the day I started The Simple Dollar) because it’s the online bank that I use. I don’t follow the rate wars - it’s not a productive or valuable use of my time. I simply wanted a bank that was competitive with online rates, but my biggest criteria is usability and customer service. Can I quickly do everything I need to do via their interface? Is their online bill pay service free and sensible? Can I set up sub-accounts to help me partition and manage my savings? If I do have a problem, can I quickly get someone on the phone? Is the bank sturdy, meaning is it backed by a large enough bank that I don’t have to worry about it blowing away in the wind like NetBank? I tried using a number of online banks, but none of them had the service that ING Direct had. That’s what I want from my primary bank, and that’s why I use ING Direct.

Again, if you’re going to chase rates, you’ll likely always find a better one than the bank you’re at, but if you’re trying to choose a full-featured bank that will handle your primary checking and savings while giving you good rates, customer service is going to be the biggest part of the choice. Out of the online banks, none of them touch ING Direct. I’ve never had a problem with them in the years I’ve been using them, and every time I’ve had any question or needed anything from them, I’ve quickly had my answer.

I was hoping to time this better with other bloggers in a more broad announcement, but it looks like the idea is already out of the bag (see (Leo from Zen Habits, who jumped the gun). That’s okay, it’s the idea here that matters.

I hereby release all copyright on all written (non-comment) material on The Simple Dollar to the public domain.

What does that mean? If you want to reuse an article from The Simple Dollar in your newspaper, newsletter, or anything else, go right ahead. If you want to hand it out in your Consumer Ed class, print it out. If you want to edit it to suit your own needs, go right ahead. All written material on this site is now in the public domain.

Obviously, if you do use it, I’d appreciate some attribution (Trent Hamm) and a link back to The Simple Dollar (http://www.thesimpledollar.com/).

Why? Over the last few months, I’ve been reflecting a ton on The Simple Dollar, why I write it, and what I want to do with it. The more I considered it, I really began to realize that the whole reason I write The Simple Dollar is for you, the reader. That’s it.

I write so that someone out there who’s desperately scared about their debt situation might find an answer that they need, or the right piece of help at the right time. I write so that people who are in good financial shape have a place to bounce ideas off of each other, often taking what I write in an unexpected direction. I write so that maybe, just maybe, I can help the average person out there make a better decision or two about their money and then sleep better at night because of it.

By releasing all of the written content into the public domain, I have a far better chance of actually reaching people than I ever would keeping that content here and restricting the rights of people who want to share it. Maybe an article from this site will now show up in a community newspaper, where someone without internet access, down on their luck, will read it and get inspired to make a change in their life. Maybe something will show up in another web forum somewhere.

What about… There are obviously some downsides to this decision.

Losing revenue? Making money is very, very nice, but it’s not my biggest goal. If it were, I wouldn’t have abandoned most of my advertising a while back. Obviously, I greatly appreciate donations, but they’re not the end-all. I’d much rather have something I say reach the people who need it.

Fewer Google searchers coming to visit? If my information is out there in more place, more people will read it, not less.

Control over your work? If someone more talented than me can come along and spin my words into something great, go for it! If someone less talented than me takes my work and butchers it … well, then, they probably won’t build much of an audience anyway. If someone merely republishes it without attribution, at least the readers will get something of value out of the content.

As for the other issues I’ve thought of, they’re all so minor that they don’t even merit a notice compared to the value of helping people when they need it.

So, in summary, I release all written content on The Simple Dollar to the public domain. You can use and alter it in any way you choose without attribution or notice. Attribution to Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar, along with the site’s URL, is appreciated, however.

Edit: Please note that this does not include reader comments. It only pertains to the articles themselves.