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.

Recently, a dustup occurred in the New York Times, where a regular writer on personal finance topics, MP Dunleavey, bought a home on the spur of the moment. The problem? Based on her earlier writings, that home purchase seemed to be far outside of what she and her husband could reasonably afford. Karen Datko at the Smart Spending blog has an excellent summary of the whole story.

Obviously, Dunleavey’s situation made me think about my own. I often relate details of my own personal financial situation on here and I know that if I were to suddenly go buy a McMansion, a lot of readers would be really confused because it doesn’t match up well with what I’ve been talking about for a long time.

It’s reasonable to believe that a personal finance writer would likely be able to make a good personal finance decision for themselves. If I were to buy a major house upgrade right now, it would be because I had the money available to buy it. I would not enter into a financial situation on the spur of the moment.

On the other hand, my exact reasons for making such a move - and the exact mechanisms for doing it - might not be something I’d want to discuss. Let’s say, for example, I received a financial settlement of some sort that I didn’t feel was appropriate to discuss on The Simple Dollar - or that I was legally barred from discussing. I would likely mention the purchase of the house, but I wouldn’t be able to really mention how I paid for it.

Of course, the other option is to simply not mention financial situations that don’t match up with what I’m talking about - in other words, selective editing. With the exception of personal issues, I don’t really do this - it’s basically too difficult to engage in an “alternate reality” when talking about one’s personal finances. I occasionally blur some things to protect privacy, but that’s about all - it’s much easier (and more honest) to speak the truth and come from the heart than to exclude or alter big swaths of the story.

It all comes down to establishing trust. I think that the real issue here is that some of Dunleavey’s readers don’t trust her, for whatever reason. No writer is trusted absolutely, of course, but honesty generally comes through in writing and is clear to readers over time.

Regular readers here know that I usually speak my mind and admit my faults, but that I’m also willing to argue if I feel strongly about something. That’s honest and real, and I think that a big reason why I’ve found so many readers is because of that honesty and reality. There is a level of trust there, and it’s because of that trust that I’ve done things like dropping most of my ads - I value the trust more than I value some short term income. What are my rewards for that? A loyal readership, one that will stick with the site for the long haul and are more likely to trust me if I make a recommendation or a suggestion.

That’s not a conclusion that some writers come to, but that’s not a reason to mistrust them. The reason that it’s worthwhile to read different views on things like personal finance is that you get different perspectives. Some writers focus on the prose - others focus on researching their topics quite well - still others focus on humanizing the topic. There are, of course, some who focus on maximizing the immediate dollar, too, and will write whatever will put a dollar in their pocket the fastest.

The value comes in reading lots of ideas and figuring out which ones are right for you. You may come to trust some writers more than others - that’s completely normal. But that doesn’t mean that the writers who are less forward about their own personal finances don’t have anything valuable to say, and it doesn’t mean that the people who gaze at their own navels a lot are wasting time, either. They’re both valuable.

I think the biggest problem that readers had with Dunleavey’s house purchase is that it seemed very rushed and sudden. After spending a lot of time talking about personal finances and using some personal examples that indicated that they were in “debt repayment” mode, the house purchase was abruptly put out there without any clear explanation about it, and in the way she wrote about it, I think Dunleavey overestimated the trust she had built with her readership.

So what would I have done in Dunleavey’s shoes? First of all, I would have been absolutely sure that I could afford the house according to my own definition of “affording the house.” By some definitions, anyone who uses a mortgage can’t really afford a house, for example, but I’m not that hardcore. On the other hand, taking out a mortgage for five times your annual salary without any money in the bank is pretty clearly a sign you can’t afford it. The actual line is somewhere in the middle.

Assuming that I could afford it, I would probably lay out the whole decision in writing and turn it into a post on here before pulling the trigger. More than once over the last year, readers have been invaluable at seeing flaws in my own thinking and also encouraging me to think about things differently. That’s another aspect of the “trust” relationship - it’s sometimes a two way street.

At that point, if everything seemed appropriate, I would have moved forward with the buy.

If I was forced into a situation where I had to make a move quickly, I would probably say “no” unless I was absolutely sure of the move, and if I said “yes,” I probably wouldn’t abruptly write about it here and just state that I could somehow magically afford it when there’s a clear history that I couldn’t. Instead, I would probably carefully analyze the decision over time on The Simple Dollar, looking at the factors that made me say “yes” quickly, and try to really piece together why I did it rather than just stating that it was the right thing to do.

Writing about personal finance sometimes turns out to be harder than you might think.

Over the first full year of The Simple Dollar’s existence, I’ve written a pile of articles, some good, some bad. I went through each month and tried to pick out the five best from that month to produce something of an anthology of 2007. Here they are, the best articles of the year.

January
+ 31 Days to Fix Your Finances
+ The FICO Battle: Ten Common Tactical Mistakes When Dealing With The Credit Score Blues
+ Review: Real Money
+ Emergency Funds: How and Why You Should Get Started Right Now
+ I Hate Leftovers: Fighting The Battle With Recycled Food … And Winning

February
+ The Art of the Thank You Note
+ 15 Things You Can Do Right Now to Help Your Career
+ Stay At Home Parenting: Is It Worth It?
+ Twenty Three Ways To Improve Your Finances This Weekend
+ “I’m Too Tired To Cook” - At-Home Dining Solutions For The Overworked Family

March
+ The Art of the Slow Cooker
+ How To Make Your Own Laundry Detergent - And Save Big Money
+ Eight Baby Items We Bought That Weren’t Worth The Money
+ Review: The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing
+ Why Johnny Can Read: Simpson’s Paradox and the Greatly Exaggerated Death of American Public Education

April
+ Review: Rich Dad, Poor Dad
+ Charity: Why You Should Give Your Money Away
+ Ten Financial Reasons To Turn Off Your Television - And Ten Things To Replace It With
+ 15 Ways Department Stores Try To Trick You Into Spending More Than You Need To - And 10 Ways To Fight Back
+ The Economics of Speeding, or How I Got A Ticket This Morning

May
+ A Reader Runs In Place
+ 101 Goals in 1001 Days
+ Review: Never Eat Alone
+ Six Points of Advice If You’re considering Loaning Money to a Friend
+ The Furniture Dilemma

June
+ The Financial Implications of Living with Mom and Dad
+ Trimming The Fat: Forty Ways To Reduce Your Monthly Required Spending
+ I’m Making All The Right Moves, But I’m Still Unhappy
+ Interesting Insights Into Life Insurance From An Actuary - How He Would Buy Life Insurance
+ What Aspects Of Personal Finance Bring You Happiness?

July
+ One Thing You Can Do Today That Will Put You In Better Financial Shape Tomorrow
+ Review: Made to Stick
+ How to Get a Free iPhone
+ Renting to Get Richer?
+ How Much Cash Is Appropriate To Carry?

August
+ Ten Things Any College Student Can Do To Prepare For Success In Life
+ Losing a Friend Over Money
+ The New Person At Work Is Getting Paid More Than I Am! How Can I Handle It?
+ A Guide To Setting And Reaching A Net Worth Goal
+ The Stay At Home Parenting Question Hits Home - Hard

September
+ Making A Major Life Change: Is It Time For Kathy To Abandon The City?
+ Is The Value Menu Really A Value? Comparing The Homemade Double Cheeseburger To The McDonald’s $1 Version
+ When A Frugal Life And Social Gift-Giving Come Into Conflict
+ Seven Things I Thought About While Holding My Second Child For The First Time
+ Review: The First National Bank of Dad

October
+ Reflections on Your Money or Your Life
+ Developing a Financially Frugal Personal Health Plan
+ Ten Steps To Financial Success For A Minimum Wage Earner
+ The $21 Food Week: Is It Possible? Is It Healthy?
+ How Can A Frugal Person Buy Expensive Items? A Deeper Look At Frugality

November
+ Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on the Back of Five Business Cards
+ Homemade Bread: Cheap, Delicious, Healthy, and Easier Than You Think
+ Piecing Through A Major Life Decision
+ When All Hope Seems Lost…
+ The Top Ten Personal Finance Books I’ve Ever Read

December
+ The Meaning of It All
+ Is An All-Cash Lifestyle Useful For Kicking The Debt Habit?
+ Does Peer Pressure Keep Us From Succeeding?
+ Frugality and Socializing: Finding Potential Friends Who Are Not Consumerism-Oriented
+ Going Inside The Wall: What Are We Fighting For?

As many of you have probably noticed, this morning I removed the majority of advertising from The Simple Dollar. This was a tough decision that I’ve been thinking about for a long time and I’ve finally reached a point where it’s clear that it’s the right move for me and for all of my readers.

What happened? Most of the ads on my site were provided by a program called Google AdSense. They provide most of the ads that you see on various sites on the web. They paid quite well and have been by far the biggest revenue provider for The Simple Dollar.

AdSense is an automated system where people bid for ad placements on sites with particular words on them. So, for example, The Simple Dollar would usually receive ads from people who bid on ad placements on pages with words like “credit” and “money” and so forth.

It sounds good, but there’s a big problem: this automated bidding system allows anyone to bid, and I don’t have much control over who does the bidding. The end result was that the site would have ads from payday loan places, credit card brokerages, shady subprime lenders, and such.

My only control over this is by maintaining a list of websites that I would block ads from, but that list can only be so long. Thus, for the last several months, I would notice an inappropriate ad on my site, add it to the filter, and then I’d have to delete another one.

This juggling act got old fast, and I would get increasingly frustrated by having sites that I personally disagreed with on my site. This morning, the straw that broke the camel’s back appeared: an ad featuring a scantily clad woman advocating a payday loan site showed up. The ad bothered me a lot - it is literally the opposite of the message that I’m trying to talk about on this site.

Thus, I made the decision to abandon all of the ads. There are basically no ads anymore - I abandoned everything that didn’t give me strong control over the content of the ads. This basically ensures that I’m not advertising stuff that bothers me from an ethical standpoint - and thus ensures I’m not effectively recommending anything unethical to you, the reader. If you look around now, the site looks quite a bit cleaner and more appealing. The site now does a much better job of reflecting my perspectives on personal finance issues and I have much better control over the small number of ads that remain.

In the end, I finally realized that the real reason I write The Simple Dollar is to help bring about positive change in people’s lives, and when the site showed ads that really conflicted with that mission, I was undercutting what I want to do here. Sure, the income was nice, but quite often I was having to make some justifications that I really didn’t like, and that hurt you, the reader.

The downside The downside to this, obviously, is that I’ve decimated my income for the site. This was extremely painful to do - it was like quitting a high paying job because of ethics and taking a much, much lower paying job.

My hope is that some of that income will be made up for by donations and that an eventual increase in traffic helped by a cleaner design will bring in other advertisers that don’t fill the site with unethical ads. Either way, this choice will dramatically reduce the overall income from The Simple Dollar for the short term, changing my plans for the coming months.

Please, let me know if you have any thoughts on this change.

After communicating with many of my readers and doing some soul-searching, I’ve decided to somewhat slow down the posting frequency on The Simple Dollar, starting tomorrow. I know this announcement is going to please a lot of my readers who complained that I was moving too fast and that they couldn’t keep up with all the articles.

How much slower? First thing, I’m eliminating the morning roundups and changing them into weekly roundups. The weekly roundups will be almost exactly like the morning roundups, except they’ll have ten (or so) links to interesting articles I’ve found in the last week. This will pop up on Wednesdays.

Second thing, I’ll post only two articles a day and only one on Saturday. I’ll still continue the weekly personal finance book review on Friday and the personal productivity/development book on Sunday. If anything, the average article quality should go up because I can be somewhat more picky about my ideas.

So, a weekly schedule will look something like this: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday will have two regular articles; Wednesday will have a weekly roundup and a regular article; Friday will have a personal finance book review and a regular article; Sunday will have a personal productivity/development book review and a regular article; and Saturday will just have one regular article. More than likely, when the book club returns, it will appear weekly on Mondays.

Why? The first reason is that countless people have encouraged me to start the cooking blog I’ve long discussed, so I’m going to give it a shot. This won’t be ready to go for a while, as the posts on that blog will be rather time-intensive. I will say, though, that the current plan is for that blog to have one post per day, and I hope to launch it sometime in March or April. Don’t worry - when that blog is launched, I’ll be sure to mention it loud and clear on The Simple Dollar.

The second reason is that I was beginning to feel quite strongly that some of the great discussions that go on in the comment threads at The Simple Dollar were being hindered by the speed of the posting, and that by slowing down, articles will have more time to ride on the front page, gather comments, and build up interesting conversations.

I view this move as the first step towards chasing my dreams of writing full time, as it allows me to explore another venue before making that leap. I hope that when the time comes, you’ll all take a moment or two and see whether the cooking site is of interest to you (I expect that it will be quite interesting for some and not so much for others).

Right now, I’m sitting at a crossroads as to the future direction of my career and, by extension, my life.

The Decision

Throughout my life, I’ve harbored a dream of being a professional writer. I’ve always felt a great deal of power and of emotional release in the written word, dating back literally to my early grade school years when I would write very long letters to relatives and to several pen pals that I had who were in nursing homes. A few key people along the way, namely my late great uncle and my high school English teacher, offered me the right kind of encouragement at the right time to keep that flame alive, but I made other choices in life and followed a completely different career path, one that I’m quite content with.

On a lark, I started The Simple Dollar, intending to just write about personal finance in my spare time. Somewhere along the way, it took off beyond my wildest dreams and now brings in about one and a half million page views a month just to the site alone, not counting the over 10,000 RSS subscribers and nearly 10,000 email subscribers. The sheer volume of visitors, which has come about without any advertising, without me having any sort of media presence at all, without any networking, or anything else, indicates that something is going on. What that something is, I don’t profess to fully understand, but something I am writing is striking a chord with someone somewhere.

Here’s the decision, then. Do I take that as a sign that I have enough value as a writer to make that my career, or do I follow the safe road and continue doing what I’m doing? It’s a debate that I’m struggling with a great deal internally, and one that is also challenging my wife, too.

What Making This Leap Would Entail

I’m a planner - I can’t help myself. I’ve carefully thought about and considered what I would do if I did decide to make the jump to a full-time writing career.

First of all, I’d continue The Simple Dollar, obviously. While I don’t make enough revenue from this site for me to ever feel “safe” about it, I do make a bit of revenue, enough so that with my wife’s salary and my frugal choices, we would be fine at home. However, my dreams for being a writer don’t revolve around sitting around all day just thinking of blog posts on personal finance issues.

I’m also currently involved in some offline writing projects, including contributions to several different print media sources. Most of these are paid opportunities, and I hope to build on them as time allows.

I also have a completed book proposal and am seeking a literary agent. I feel that I have a story worth telling that builds into some strong advice for people who were where I was at two years ago, advice that I haven’t really seen gel together in a book anywhere else. Again, this is something completely new to me and I’m learning about how such things work as I go along.

My next move would be to start an instruction-oriented cooking blog. In fact, that’s part of why I wrote an entry earlier this month about making a loaf of bread. It let me think about how I would want to write about food preparation in a blog form, while writing something instructional and relevant to the frugal-minded audience of The Simple Dollar. My idea is to write one entry a day in a format something like that bread recipe, with later entries building upon some of the content of earlier entries. This would enable me to extend my passion for cooking and also for writing.

I have some other projects on the far back burner as well, but this outlines my immediate plans if I were to make the leap.

Why I Should Make The Leap

First of all, my current responsibilities are causing me to burn the candle at both ends. I currently handle my real job during the day, spend time with my family in the early evening, and sleep a limited amount at night, and I squeeze in The Simple Dollar and other writing responsibilities in the slivers of time around this, mostly in the early morning when the house is quiet, late in the evening, in an hour or so slot after I get home but before my family does, and usually one afternoon a week. While I’ve not burnt out on this schedule yet, I feel that it could lead to burnout, and I’ve felt it coming close more than a few times.

Second, my tentative plan involves me spending more time with my children. Our current plan not only would free up time that I could spend with them, but it also includes two days a week that I spend effectively as a stay at home dad. We would still take our children to daycare three days a week, but for the other two, the kids would stay home with me. I want to just spend a lot of quality time with them, taking them to the library, reading to them, playing outside with them, fixing them lunch, and so on. Plus, switching to this plan enables me to be there for them when they’re sick, rather than the constant battle my wife and I often have when one of us has to take time off for child care.

Third, this whole plan reduces our costs drastically. A solid portion of our daycare cost vanishes. My transportation costs to and from work vanish. Our food costs go down, since we’d almost exclusively eat freshly prepared meals at home instead of the mix of home-cooked meals, take out, and other things that we eat now. My temptation to spend goes down drastically, too, since I’m not tempted by driving through commercial sections of cities near where I live any more.

Finally, the sky is the limit. How far could this really go? I don’t know, but I do know that giving it my full attention will provide more fuel than what I’m giving it right now.

Why I Shouldn’t Make The Leap

First, it’s a very sharp decrease in financial stability. Our income would become much less stable and we’d have to rely quite a bit on our own frugality to get us through. I think our financial pillow right now is pretty solid and our debts are melting away quite nicely right now (which further reduces required monthly expenses), but the loss of stability is unnerving, particularly with two children and a decent-sized mortgage.

Second, I’m not sure how far my writing can take me. In the past when I’ve mentioned this idea, readers have immediately criticized my writing. To be fair, much of my writing for The Simple Dollar is not polished, finished writing. I often take what I’m feeling, organize the thoughts, give the sentences a quick review, and publish. To me, that’s how blog writing should be done, because blogs are about the idea churn, not about publishing finished pieces that you’d want to submit to The New Yorker. They need to be readable and accessible and logical, but grammatical perfection and ideal word choices aren’t always necessary here. In the print world, they’re much more important. Can I carry whatever knack I have for assembling written things here and carry it over to print media? I believe I can and I’ve seen early signs of it, but in many ways it is a different ball game.

Third, I’m afraid of burn out and regret. I’ve been writing fervently here for more than a year and I feel like the fire is just getting started, but I’m betting the future on that fire continuing. Will it? I’m not certain.

Fourth, to a great extent, I like what I’m doing now. There are intellectual and creative challenges there that I quite enjoy and I would deeply miss if I walked away. I have considered a part time approach, but I’m pretty sure that many of the aspects that I enjoy the most would vanish if I went that route, as the creative space would shrink quite a bit.

So What Do I Do?

To be quite honest, I’m not sure. I’m planning on spending this Thanksgiving doing some serious soul-searching and talking about these issues with the people whose opinions I value the most in my life, namely my wife, my parents, and my wife’s parents. I hope that by the end of the Thanksgiving weekend, I will have come to a decision on this. I know that it’s been the top issue on my mind for a while now and I need to really figure out what direction I’m going and put my full heart and soul behind it.

Over the last month, I’ve been re-reading Your Money or Your Life slowly and carefully for the book club, and it definitely again shifted the way I think about a lot of things, as I wrote about in the conclusion.

One thing it made me realize is that I already have all of the things I really value the most. I have a loving wife, two great kids, a nice home for them to live and grow in, plenty of options for entertainment, a website that I truly enjoy spending hours each day writing on, a job I deeply enjoy, and an extended family that I cherish. What else do I really need?

At the same time, I make tons of little decisions each day that deny this basic fact. I spend money on stuff I don’t need. I lust after new video games when I already have many that I’ve not mastered. Often, I don’t eat nearly as well as I would like to, justifying it in various unnecessary ways.

When I reflect on those two facts, I really get unnerved. I really do have a strong grip on my financial life now, so it’s not a concern that I’m not saving enough money. It’s more a concern of am I really living my life to the fullest? When I do something dumb like eat fast food or buy a video game with a pile of unbeaten ones at home or buy a book at the bookstore when I can just request it at the library, what exactly am I doing? In some way, on some level, I’m sabotaging my future for something I don’t really need.

Well, right now I’m deeply inspired to take it head-on, so I’m going to commit to a few things for the month of November that’s going to be really challenging for me. Here they are.

First, I am going to refrain from all unnecessary spending for the entire month. If it’s not necessary, I won’t spend it, period. No fast food. No games. No books. No anything. Every time I get an urge to buy fast food, I’ll go home and prepare something there. Every time I want a video game or something for entertainment’s sake, I’ll just play something I already have. Every time I feel the urge to get a book, I’ll simply read one I already have or stop at the library. The only exception to this is if I buy a Christmas gift for someone else, or elements to make such a gift. No. Extra. Spending.

Second, I am going to take care of a list of five personal chores around the house that I have just simply been delaying for various reasons. Here they are, in all their glory:

1. I am going to clean and sort through all of my clothes, eliminate all but a minimal wardrobe, and get rid of the rest.

2. I am going to go through the remaining boxes from the move and eliminate most of the unnecessary clutter that resides in them.

3. I am going to go through the remainder of my books and reduce my personal book library, excluding books I directly use for The Simple Dollar, down to 50.

4. I am going to prepare in advance fifty family meals worth of food, which is especially vital with my wife nearing her return to work after the birth of our daughter.

5. I am going to completely clean out the remaining unsorted paperwork and integrate it into my filing system.

Note that each of these tasks will aid in my personal financial situation in some way.

Finally, I pledge to write ten truly great posts for The Simple Dollar. I tend to go through waves on here, periods where I feel like I’m posting great stuff and other periods where I don’t feel it is as good as it could be. Part of that comes down to commitments to single posts - do I put in the work to make a single post really great, or do I just post it and let it go? Most of the time, I take an idea, flesh it out in my mind, then just post it quickly and move onto the next one, but during November, I’m going to take the time to craft ten individual truly great posts. I won’t mark them, but hopefully you’ll be able to recognize them.

These are my commitments for the month, an outgrowth of reading Your Money or Your Life. Hopefully, it inspired you to make some changes as well.