One wouldn’t have to have read this website for very long to know that Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple and Pixar, is one of the people in this world I admire (in fact, I even mentioned him in the reader mailbag this morning). Earlier today, when I learned that he had passed away from cancer at age 56, I was hit pretty hard by the news.

I don’t admire him because I think Apple’s products are great (I think they’re well designed, but perhaps overpriced for what you get) or because I think Pixar was a great company, but because he managed to find massive success in multiple areas and he did it in his own way, all while coming from a working class background.

I could go on for a long time writing some boring eulogy to him, but honestly, you wouldn’t get any real value out of it. There’s more than enough eulogies to the man online right now.

Instead, I’d rather just share his words with you. In 2005, Steve gave the commencement address at Stanford University’s graduation ceremony. You can watch the video here:

Here is the text of that speech (found on Stanford’s website). I went through the text of it and highlighted a few key pieces. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to this speech and read the text of it. Every time, I’m inspired to do something. It’s just a wonderful statement of what success in life is all about.

Please, take five minutes or so and read this speech (or listen to it).

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960′s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Ten years ago today, I arrived at work without knowing anything of what was going on in New York and Washington. One of my coworkers told me about it (there was still some genuine confusion as to what was going on, so he thought there were planes also headed to crash into the White House) and I thought he was pulling my leg, as he often did.

I actually worked normally for an hour, but I did notice that none of my coworkers were anywhere to be found. I shrugged it off for a while until I tried to check cnn.com for the news – and it wouldn’t come up. Neither would several other news sites. Eventually, I did find a site that confirmed what was going on.

Like a lot of other Americans, I spent much of that day watching the news coverage in shock. How could this happen here? What happens now?

That day (and the events afterward) taught me four real lessons.

You can’t predict the future
Very few people saw 9/11 coming. It changed the lives of almost all of us in some way or another, either due to the incident itself or due to the actions taken in the aftermath.

One very good friend of mine has served multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, as has one of my best friends from my childhood, and both have had effects on their children, their spouses, and their friends. Many other people have had far deeper connections than that, losing family members and loved ones due to the events resulting from that fateful day.

The other consequences are less severe, but present. Airport security immediately comes to mind.

9/11 is just one strong example of how you can’t predict the future. It’s never the smooth ride you envision it to be.

You can, however, prepare for it
Simply put, you can’t predict the future. The best thing you can do is put yourself in a position to handle the widest range of things the future can throw at you.

This means having a healthy emergency fund. This means having a skill set that’s useful in a wide variety of situations. This means having enough of a handle on your financial situation that a job loss wouldn’t be devastating in the short term. This means having adequate life insurance and, if you’re in a good financial position, long term care insurance. This means having a great circle of friends and business acquaintances.

Be prepared for whatever may come.

The person across from you isn’t really all that different than you
The people I disagree with the most politically today are the same people I sat there with on 9/11, with all of us feeling socked in the gut by what had happened.

Those people want a bright future for everyone, just as I do. They want a safe future for everyone, just as I do.

Just because we believe in different paths to get there doesn’t mean that the other person is stupid or wrong. It just means we need to set aside our disagreements and actually have a rational conversation about it.

There is no winner here except us. If we keep playing the “my team” versus “your team” game, no one wins. If we can put it aside and actually try to solve the problem, everyone wins.

This is true in every aspect of life, not just politics or business. Almost always, the person opposite you is pretty similar to you. They have some things that they believe in. They have a goal they want to achieve. The end result of achieving that goal, to them, isn’t all that much different than the end result of you achieving your goal.

Keep that in mind the next time you’re upset at someone who doesn’t seem to agree with you. What’s their goal? What do they really want?

There is no better day than today to reach out and take action
Since you can never be sure what tomorrow will bring, today is the day to start taking positive actions.

Get in touch with that old friend you disagree with. Cancel a few frivolous bills and start building up an emergency fund. Come up with a debt repayment plan. Decide where you want to be with your career, then start getting the education and connections you need to get there.

These are the steps to take to ensure a brighter tomorrow, and today is the day to take them.

Over the past three weeks, I’ve taken a long vacation.

My family and I traveled to the Seattle area to see the sights, visit family, and take our children to Mount Rainier and the ocean.

We attended my sister-in-law’s wedding and reception and a few other events surrounding it.

After that, we hosted several family members who visited us.

After that, I attended a convention while my wife and children visited family members.

During that period, I intentionally tried to avoid checking The Simple Dollar. I set up a service that sent me messages if the site was having major issues. I checked my email once or twice. My largest effort was an idea notebook I kept with me where I wrote down ideas for articles if they happened to come to me.

As I sit here writing this, I’ve just sat down to write material for The Simple Dollar for the first time in a long while.

Most importantly, I feel really excited about doing it. I have a ton of ideas built up (some of them being good ones that will turn into posts). My only writing in the past few weeks has been on my fantasy novel, so it will feel great to write about the subject of personal finance and growth again.

In short, I feel reinvigorated for my work.

So often (and I was certainly guilty of this in the past), we get so caught up in our work that we fail to take vacations. We never turn off our cell phone. We do work in the evenings. We never get time off.

After a while, that grind can turn even the most exciting job into drudgery. It can sap away your spirit and your creative energy and your willingness to really push yourself at work. It becomes routine – and often, a routine you dread.

A vacation doesn’t mean a trip and it doesn’t mean a pile of activities that wear you out and it doesn’t mean just sitting around doing nothing, either.

A vacation means doing whatever it is that you do to recharge your energy and your enthusiasm for your life’s work. For me, that’s spending time with my family, reading, playing games, and, yes, writing, but writing in an area completely different than my usual work.

During the last week or two before this vacation, I felt like I was pulling double time getting all of the articles ready in advance for the trip. By the end, it all felt like drudgery and I felt drained.

Right now (other than a bit of tiredness from not getting adequate sleep the last few nights), I feel as enthusiastic and ready to go with my work as I ever have.

Don’t ever think of vacation as meaning that you’re avoiding your job. Instead, think of it as putting yourself mentally into the position you need to be in to dominate at your work.

This goes for supervisors, too. If you have a key employee and you need that employee to be hitting on all cylinders and putting out great work, give that person vacation time and do everything possible to not bother that person when they do their own thing. What you’ll get in exchange is an invigorated and loyal employee who will churn out a lot of great work.

In short, we all need time away from our work, no matter how much we love it. That time away makes us better.

(Obviously, because of this sojourn, comment approval and emails are way behind. I’ll get to them as efficiently as I can, but it may be a while.)

Memorial Day is a holiday that was originally created to honor deceased soldiers, but has largely grown over the years to honor all deceased people. As a way of commemorating this day, I usually spend some time thinking about what some of the people in my life that have passed on have taught me, and this year, I decided to share five of them with you.

I could easily expand this list with more people – and I might just do it in future years. However, remembering these five and the gifts they gave me in their life and in their passing has filled me with enough emotion to last a month.

I hope that something I do in my life leaves others with something positive in their lives that outlives me. If I’ve done that, then I’ve lived a life worth living.

My grandfather, Johnnie Grandpa passed away when I was seven years old. During the last year of his life, he was very ill and he lived with us for several months near the end of his life. One of my fondest memories of him was watching the 1985 World Series with him in our living room.

I remember how he bore the many pains that the end of his life held for him with grace and dignity. I remember seeing him a few times and knowing that he was in pain, yet he was always able to grab my hand and smile at me with that gently crooked smile of his. I remember that, without fail, he’d save the comics in the newspaper for me, not for anyone else, and he remembered this even through the trials he faced near the end of his life.

He showed me how to face pain and adversity with dignity and grace, something that I’ve tried to do in my own life many times.

My great uncle, Virgil Virgil attacked life with humor and a lust for simply living. He was the type of person who would often stick real truths into the middle of a humorous comment and thus get away with saying things that others wouldn’t or couldn’t.

Virgil was the first person in my life who convinced me that I would actually do something with my life that was different than what my parents had done. Yes, I had the childish dreams of doing things like being an astronaut or a fireman, but it was Virgil that really made me believe I could tread my own path through life.

He showed me that my path wasn’t set in stone and that I could define my own way.

My first cousin, Donnie Donnie was almost exactly my age. We played together quite a lot when we were young and I have several very nice childhood memories that Donnie is a part of.

At age 16, Donnie committed suicide. I remember going to his funeral, almost stunned that someone who had been my age and shared many moments of my childhood with me could just be gone, just like that. It made me realize how mortal I really was.

Perhaps more importantly, it also showed me how your actions can echo through the lives of those you care about. When you hurt yourself or hurt someone else, that action affects a lot of people. It brings them grief and sadness. When you hurt a human being, you almost always hurt a lot of people at once, whether you see it or not.

My great grandmother, Elva All of my memories of this lady come from the final twenty or so years of her life, when she lived alone in a house well into her upper eighties. She was stubbornly independent and absolutely insisted on doing things for herself, often pushing herself to complete exhaustion in an effort to just do it herself.

I remember often wondering how this little old lady managed to keep her home clean, feed herself and keep food in the refrigerator, send an endless supply of letters to friends and family members, keep up with the hockey season (she was a Wisconsin girl and liked hockey her whole life), and all of the other things she did. She seemed so small and frail until you talked to her and watched her take care of things.

Her bravery and desire for independence was infectious, to say the least.

My uncle, Kenny Kenny passed away from a liver condition several years ago. More than anyone else, Kenny showed me that it’s okay to be whoever you are, no matter the seeming consequences.

Kenny’s life rejected so many of the expectations people had for him, from beginning to end. He truly did things his own way and he realized that the people that really mattered would stick with him throughout it.

It was because of Kenny that I’m not really ashamed of anything I do. I am who I am, and take me for that. The people that matter in my life certainly do take me for who I am.

Since my tongue-in-cheek post on Monday about my “seminar series,” I’ve been stunned at the outpouring of emails and notes from people who wanted to pay me anyway for that “seminar.”

I really appreciate it. I deeply appreciate it.

Right now, though, I’m in a financial situation where, for the time being and for the near term, I don’t need that money. I actually live the things I write about on this site. My financial situation is relatively secure (nothing is absolutely secure, but I’m happy with where I’m at).

Yet, at the same time, I deeply understand the desire to give. I often donate to websites and web tools that I use or find valuable or find inspiration, just because I know how much work and passion goes into putting that out there.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about how to handle this. I thought about my life and the people in it. Pretty quickly, the right answer came to me.

Three members of my close family all work for the same charity. This charity does tremendous life-chaning work here in the United States on what’s often a shoestring budget.

This charity is L’arche Tahoma Hope in Tacoma, Washington.

L’arche Tahoma Hope is a charity that runs a series of homes in the Tacoma area. These homes – mostly just ordinary houses, but one is a small farm – are places where small groups of developmentally disabled adults live along with L’arche volunteers and workers. These developmentally disabled individuals are not able to live on their own and often come from families who are extremely challenged to care for them.

What L’arche does is provide a community situation for these individuals to live in. The people who work for L’arche live in these homes right alongside the developmentally disabled members of L’arche, helping the people there live the most full life possible in a community of their peers, where everyone is valued regardless of their disability.

When I’ve visited there, I’ve been amazed to see how developmentally disabled people have had the opportunity to live a full, social, happy life where they have friends who view them as valuable equals, something that would be very difficult for them to have in almost any other situation.

You don’t have to spend much time there to see the enormous positive impact on the lives of the people who live there. At the same time, I’d be the first to admit that it takes someone with special skills and a special heart to do the work that needs to be done to make this possible.

Even a cursory look at their annual report – they leave their books pretty wide open for anyone to look – reveals that they manage to pull this off with a surprising lack of funds, considering they run four fully-staffed homes. They don’t waste money there, and they make use of every single dime they can get.

Please, if you’ve even considered giving a dollar to me or to The Simple Dollar in the past, channel that giving to L’arche Tahoma Hope. If you’ve ever wanted a small charity to champion, consider L’arche. Every dollar helps.

You can visit the L’arche Tahoma Hope website or jump directly to donations through JustGive.org.

Thank you.

(I not only wrote this for today’s post, but for the ability to share this link in the future with people who write to me asking to donate money.)

Many readers of The Simple Dollar have come here over the years to get ideas on personal finance, improving their life, improving their career, and improving their use of money. Although many of the articles heavily include details from my own life, I don’t really have a great full summary on why I write The Simple Dollar. How am I qualified to write such a site? Where did I come from?

So, let’s address all of that.

For starters, I’m not a finance specialist. My educational background is in the hard sciences – life sciences and computer science (I received two degrees in two very different disciplines). My path to writing about personal finance comes largely from my own experience, with some very healthy support from the multitudes of stories from my readers as well as an enormous amount of reading on the topic.

Simply put, I’m not interested in theories about personal finance. I want to know what actually works in my own life or in the lives of my readers.

So, where did I come from? I grew up in a small town in rural Illinois, along the Mississippi River. My parents never had a whole lot of money. My father worked at a factory which regularly had massive layoffs followed by calling the workers back a few months later. He had several side businesses, mostly revolving around fishing and gardening, a pattern I followed, to a degree. My mother was a homemaker who had her hands full, because not only did I have two brothers, she also stepped up to the plate to be a surrogate “mom” for many children that lived near us as well as her own two younger siblings. Our dinner tables were usually crammed full of people every night.

There wasn’t a lot of money to be had, and when there was any money, my parents were always wanting to spend it in ways that would make up for the lean times.

I eventually went to Iowa State U., majoring in life sciences and, later, computer science. I wanted to major in English lit, but I didn’t believe that it would ever earn a good living for myself. I was very lucky to be able to go there as my parents had almost no money put aside for college. Instead, I managed to get enough scholarship money to cover enough of my education to get me through with large but not overwhelming student loans. I made a few money mistakes there, too.

While in college, I fell in love with my future wife, Sarah, who actually grew up pretty close to where I did.

After college, I got a good job and got married. I made one key promise to myself during my adult life, that I would always strive to be the best parent I possibly could. So, when our first child came along, I began to focus a lot of my attention on what he would need for his future.

To put it simply, I didn’t like what I saw. I was spending far more than I earned. Sarah and I had over $20,000 in credit card debt, several consumer loans (for furniture and the like), a pile of student loans, two car loans, and no money in savings. I didn’t have enough money in my checking account to cover the bills.

At the same time, I was finding that my job was often taking me away from my child (soon to be children) when I felt they needed me the most. I was away on business trips when my son took his first step and when my wife found she was pregnant with our second child. I had to skip out on lots of family events to get work done on weekends.

In short, I was obviously heading down a path to a future I didn’t want: an absent father and a tenuous financial situation.

I decided to make some serious changes to my life. Starting in October 2006, I started The Simple Dollar, to share those changes as they happened.

Since then:

I paid off every single debt listed above. I paid off all of our credit cards, all of our consumer debts, all of our student loans, and all of our car loans. We’ve also replaced both vehicles and own those as well without any outstanding loans. Our only debt at the moment is our mortgage, which we chose to get later on once our finances were in a much-improved state and we realized that mortgage payments were as good a deal for us as rent on an apartment big enough for our five person family.

In 2008, I walked away from that job. We had lowered our living expenses so much that by 2008, the income that The Simple Dollar was beginning to generate enabled me to walk away from the job that was causing such stress. I’m now a stay-at-home parent who balances that with writing.

I wrote two books. The first one, published in late 2008, was 365 Ways to Live Cheap. In 2010, The Simple Dollar, a more biographical work where I detailed how I turned my life around, was released.

I’ve written more than 3,000 articles for The Simple Dollar. I currently write two articles each day, which I give away on this site. In the past, I used to write more, but I was often unhappy with them as they often felt incomplete.

I switched to a vegan diet and lost thirty pounds. In 2010, after some medical tests, I made the choice to switch to a vegan diet for my long-term health. Since then, I’ve lost just shy of thirty pounds during an Iowa winter and I feel wonderful.

While doing all this, our household currently has three children that are still preschool aged, including one infant still in diapers.

I write The Simple Dollar for one reason and one reason alone. I write it because I know that there are people out there who are sitting at a point in their life that they’re unhappy with, and often it has to do with the grip that money has on their life. I know exactly what that painful grip feels like and there’s nothing I want more in life than to make it possible for them to escape that grip and follow whatever path life has in store for them with less fear and more personal freedom.

I write about what I do most of the time because I know how valuable it is to realize that you’re not alone in trying to escape this grip. I managed to do it and there is nothing I’d like better than to help you to do it, too. That’s why I don’t sell seminar series or audio courses. My books are available at the public library and all of my thousands of articles are available here free for you to read.

If you find even one thing on this site that helps you to put your life in a better place, then we both win.

This week, someone from my past reached into the present and dropped a job offer on my lap.

If this job offer had appeared three years ago, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. It allows me to work from home. It allows me to take complete control of an interesting software development project in an area where I have some significant domain knowledge and experience.

After some thought, I turned it down.

It’s not that we couldn’t utilize the money – we certainly could. It’s not that I wouldn’t find the work itself interesting – I certainly would.

The reason I didn’t take the job is for two real reasons.

First, to do so would have meant a serious change to The Simple Dollar. In 2006 and 2007, I managed to keep The Simple Dollar going while working a full time job, but it was my only hobby, I had only one child at the time, and most of the articles back then were not nearly up to the standards of the articles I write today. Today, I have three children of different ages (meaning they each have different needs), plus The Simple Dollar requires significantly more effort than it did back then, with more readers, more emails, more comments, and more effort required for a worthwhile post.

If I were to take on a full-time effort, it would have to come at the expense of The Simple Dollar. That’s not really a choice I want to make at this time.

Second, this would be a return to work that didn’t incorporate my family. With The Simple Dollar, I can engage in activities that support the site while also engaging with my family. If I work to make an inexpensive, healthy, and tasty dinner, I can not only feed my family, but I can format that into an article. The line between work and home life often blurs in a way that my family really benefits from.

If I took this job, I would no longer have such opportunities, and the aspect of my life that would be shortchanged is my family. The entire reason I chose to take the pay cut and go full time with The Simple Dollar is for my family, so that I could spend much more time with and much more attention and focus on them.

The real lesson here is that sound financial management in my life is the only thing that makes this choice possible. By keeping spending in check, always spending less that we earn, and planning ahead for the future, my wife and I are both free to make career decisions like these.

That type of freedom is well worth giving up trips to Best Buy and daily lattes and whatever else we might be spending money unnecessarily on. Our career choices aren’t constrained by needing to maintain our income level to survive. Our only major monthly bill is our mortgage and we’re working as hard as we can to make that one go away quite early.

What else does that freedom afford us?

For the past few weeks, I’ve been developing a website with a friend that focuses on discussing board and card games as a social and intellectual activity. At this stage, we’re brainstorming ideas and I’m filtering them a bit utilizing what I’ve learned from The Simple Dollar. This is engaging to me because it hits the requirements I stated above – it engages my family (as I can play games with them) and it doesn’t detract from The Simple Dollar.

Maybe this will take off. Maybe it will never see the light of day. In either case, I have the freedom to work on it and the knowledge that I can ride it wherever it may lead. If it fails, I’m financially secure enough to just mark it up as experience.

Frugality and good financial planning underlines everything in this post. It puts you in control of your career instead of being at the mercy of your boss. It puts you in control of your life instead of at the mercy of your cell phone.

That, to me, is worth giving up buying stuff I don’t really need and not having the best of everything at all times.

This past weekend, our infant son fell quite ill. He got a very high fever that kept spiking up to a worryingly high number, then falling a bit, then spiking again. He was completely lethargic. He seemed most content simply resting with his eyes open while being held, which is as far away from his usual chattering and clapping and noisy and boisterous self as can be.

At the same time, we found out that an old friend of ours (“Walt,” from an old post) was in hospice care. We have had difficulty staying in touch with him since our move because he was fairly reclusive. While juggling our child’s illness, we tried to find out where he was staying so that we could visit him, but shortly after we found out, we learned that he had passed away from liver cancer.

Did I spend enough time with Walt? My wife spent more time with him than I did over the past few years, checking in on him to make sure he was doing all right.

Is my son going to be okay? The warmth from his cheeks often felt so hot against me.

All of the bustle in the world just stops sometimes. I have so many ongoing concerns, yet all of those seemingly important concerns just melt away when things like these happen.

What’s really important, then?

Is it more important to buy another computer game off of Steam, or to spend an hour visiting an old person whose week you’ll make just by visiting them?

Is it more important to hold your healthy child for a moment and tell them that you love them, or to pay no attention to their childish games while you’re busy watching the big game?

So often, when you start cutting things down to what’s really important, you begin to realize that most of the stuff you spend your money and time on really doesn’t matter all that much. There are so many other worthwhile and genuinely valuable things to do with your time, and often that leaves your money there in your checking account to make it much easier to take care of yourself.

Goodbye, Walt. Thanks for a final lesson that I’ll remember deeply.