What kind of summer vacation does one take with a four year old, a two year old, and an infant? One great way to do this (for us) is to take a vacation with a large group, where lots of people are there to keep eyes on children in small, rotating doses.

So that’s what we’re doing this year. We’re going camping with my in-laws, including both of my sisters-in-law AND one of their significant others. With that large of a group, watching such a small number of children becomes easy and rotates easily. With just the two of us… I’m not sure any summer camping trip would be worth it.

The “It’s Too Expensive to Eat Healthy Food” Debate It’s usually not, if you plan for it a little bit – and the long term health costs are certainly lower with healthy food. I think the big opposition to it is that people simply don’t want to eat healthy because their experiences with healthy food were not positive ones and thus they try to come up with excuses for it. (@ casual kitchen)

5 Reasons to Use Tax Preparation Software We’ve been TurboTax users since the first day we had to fill out the forms. It just works. (@ my life scoop)

Made By Hand: In Praise of Amateurs My father did similar things: he could never sit still. My favorite of his projects was the small greenhouse he built so that he could start plants outside in the very early spring. (@ get rich slowly)

How to Make Money on Facebook There are some things that you just shouldn’t talk about on Facebook. This is one of them. (@ brip blap)

How to Tame Your To-Do List It’s all about getting rid of the stuff that isn’t actually important or that you’re not actually going to do. A to-do list is a tool, not something to browbeat yourself with. (@ dumb little man)

A weird sequence of events has caused me to find myself all alone over the coming weekend. My wife is visiting her sister, while my two children are visiting their grandparents. This leaves me with two full days without any real responsibilities.

Of course, me being me, I already have a long list of stuff to do – things that simply require some focused hours and are difficult to do when the family is around. Five years ago, I would have been headed to the golf course or to Prairie Meadows. Times change, I guess.

Lessons for you and me from Warren Buffett’s annual letter Warren Buffett’s annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders often has a lot of interesting personal finance thoughts in it that go far beyond mere investing. (@ pop economics)

The High Cost of Clutter Every time you buy something new and bring it home, you’re adding to the clutter of your home. It’s one more thing to stuff on a shelf. It’s one more thing to dust. It’s one more thing to maintain. It’s one more thing to take up space. Those are costs, both in terms of money and time. (@ get rich slowly)

6 Ways To Keep The Fire In You Burning This can be a challenge for anyone at times, no matter how much they love what they’re doing. (@ pick the brain)

My Valuable Downgrade “Upon completion of the final draft of my latest novel three years ago, I sent out an e-mail to my family and closest friends. Subject heading: “What Has Mark Been Doing for the Last Six Years?” The message field was empty.” Something about that opening really struck me. (@ soul shelter)

Save Money! Get a College Degree In Three Years If I had not been blessed enough to get scholarships to cover my tuition, room, and board, this is likely the college path I would have chosen. Whether I would have been successful at it is another story. (@ free money finance)

When Your Friends Become Social Sellers and Multi-Level Marketers Quite honestly, I view such a thing as directly cashing in on a friendship, far worse than asking me for a favor. I’d far rather spend an afternoon helping a friend patch up his roof than spend two hours at a Lia Sophia party. (@ consumerism commentary)

I’m hosting a free teleclass with Vicki Robin (author of Your Money or Your Life) this evening starting at 5 PM Pacific / 6 PM Mountain / 7 PM Central / 8 PM Pacific and running for roughly 90 minutes.. During it, I’m going to give a short presentation (mostly geared toward people who have never read The Simple Dollar), followed by a long question and answer session.

If you’d like to participate, here’s the URL for signing up. You’ll be able to dial in with any phone when it begins.

Keeping Yourself Motivated Motivation can often be a key challenge for success in anything you want to try in life. For me, I find that lots of small victories and successes as I move forward help a lot. And I do mean small – I felt a huge success recently with my piano practice when I was able to play “The First Noel” three times in a row and do a right hand thumb tuck correctly. (@ freelance switch)

How Much Stuff Does One Man Need? Our problem isn’t my stuff, it’s the kids’ stuff. Thanks to the fact that they’re the first grandchild/niece/nephew for a lot of their relatives, they’ve got a small mountain of things. We slowly make stuff “disappear” from this mountain (the things they don’t play with) and take it to Goodwill, but it’s still too much. (@ get rich slowly)

The Eight Year Escape Plan This is an interesting interview with a person who worked at a full-time job for eight years, but spent her spare time building a side business that eventually became her full time work. (@ the art of nonconformity)

Do You Track Your Achievements? Over the past few years, I’ve basically stumbled onto this exact routine. It’s really a great way to keep track of all of the stuff you’ve accomplished, and looking back on it really helps you to feel like you’re a very productive person, particularly at the times when you’re not so productive. (@ dumb little man)

The New ABCs of Success: Always Be Creating Creating new things is really the foundation of modern success. More and more, creative thought is an essential piece of successful work. (@ pick the brain)

My four year old son has a giant aversion to denim, for some reason that we can’t determine. In fact, he has a very strict hierarchy of desires when it comes to picking out his pants in the morning.

Sweatpants are at the top of the hierarchy – they’re the most desired item – followed by dress pants/khakis, then corduroy, then denim brings up the rear, far back.

Since he’s four, we often indulge his sweatpants preference. Unless there’s some sort of special event, he’s often dressed in them. Of course, that makes things easy for us – you can practically buy kids’ sweatpants in bulk for a pittance.

Children are so quirky. That’s why I love them.

What Marriage Has Taught Me About Money I like the inherent disagreement about what marriage is in this post. I look at marriage as kind of like a sports team for life. You’re both striving to win and that requires cooperation, but success also relies on individual play as well. (@ get rich slowly)

Writing Another Long Email? Read This. Turning your long, informative emails into a blog is a really, really good idea. In fact, it’s why I started doing the Reader Mailbags and I’ve started doing it with some of my own personal emails on other topics. (@ brett kelly)

Life After Bankruptcy: What’s Next? This paints a pretty rosy picture of post-bankruptcy life, which is a contradiction to many of the things I’ve heard from readers about it. Even this rosy picture, though, sounds fairly difficult. (@ wise bread)

Are Your Working Hours Jeopardizing Your Productivity? I work when I’m most alert – and I can usually crank out a lot in that timeframe. When I’m not feeling it, I do something else entirely, because that’s more likely to make me productive during my next peak time. (@ freelance switch)

the perils of justifying yourself Justifying poor behavior usually leads to a situation that isn’t as good as you might otherwise have. Take poor spending decisions, for example. (@ white hot truth)

For the last year and a half, I’ve used Skype for my business phone – through book edits and interviews and so on, it was used daily (if not more often). During that time, I’d been making calls using my computer’s speakers (for the audio) and my webcam (for the microphone).

Of course, this has a big drawback – namely, echo. It’s usually not bad at all provided that I sit in one particular spot and don’t move from that spot. However, if I move to even scratch my elbow or something like that, the echo can become overwhelming on the call.

After trying several different mic and speaker positions, I finally spent the money to buy a USB headset to handle the calls – and it’s made an enormous difference. Echo-free calling is much, much better.

Sometimes it’s worth it to spend $30 to fix a problem like that.

The Anatomy of a Sucker Some excellent musings on why people fall for scams. At the end, though, I disagree – he says “not all cons are illegal,” while I’d say “most cons are legal.” (@ pop economics)

Personal Branding: For Moguls, Morons or Megalomaniacs? Personal branding means that when people see your name, they think of something – preferably something that’s positive. What do people think of when they think of your name? (@ awake @ the wheel)

7 Financial Moves to Make in Your 20s I’m glad to see that there are a lot of things called “financial moves” that involve building interpersonal relationships on this list. (@ money ning)

Four Small Things You Can Do To Be An Exceptional Communicator More and more, I believe communication skills are the key to success in whatever you want to do in life. (@ dumb little man)

Keeping children’s toys from overwhelming a room This is a familiar problem at our house. Our key is toy rotation – limit the toys in the room, but keep some more of them in a tub elsewhere. Then, once in a while, rotate the toys, bringing some out of storage and putting most of the ones already out away. This keeps the toys fresh for the kids – meaning less need for new ones – plus it reduces the clutter in the room. (@ unclutterer)

This has been the worst winter I have seen in my adult life. We have had several snowfalls of more than six inches over the last two months and the snow has always been at least several inches deep on the ground constantly since early December (starting with the amazing December 8 blizzard).

This winter has finally pushed my wife and I to purchase a snowblower, something we’d managed to avoid for the past two winters in our home. I had been able to keep up with a shovel (and occasional generosity from a very kind neighbor), but after the third or fourth significant snowfall, it didn’t cut the mustard any more. I researched the snow blowers available near here, purchased one, and have used it seven times already to blow snow from our driveway and sidewalks.

Even worse: the long term forecasts have at least five (!) more significant snowfalls by the end of the month.

It’s deep enough that I’m going to clear off my deck today (by hand) because I’m worried about the sheer weight of the snow sitting on it.

I am really looking forward to spring at this point.

The world’s easiest first step into growing your own local food This actually works really well. It’s one of those things you can do in your own kitchen and it’s easy enough that kids can really get into it and learn something about where food comes from as well. (@ no impact man)

The World Belongs to Those Who Hustle Not hustle in the “rip people off” sense, but in the “strive harder” sense. The person who goes home from work and pushes themselves to improve will always eventually come out on top. (@ art of manliness)

Who’s In Charge of Your Life? We all like to think that we are, but if we find ourselves saying “How high?” when someone else tells us to jump, who’s really in charge? Who’s in charge of your life? Who would you like to not have in charge of your life? (@ dumb little man)

Reader Story: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Moved in with Mom Moving back in with mom and dad doesn’t have to be a sign of failure if you come at it with the right plan and the right attitude. It can be the boost you need to move forward from where you are right now. (@ get rich slowly)

How to enlist Gmail to sell your Craigslist items for you I have an item (or maybe two) that I’m seriously considering putting up on Craigslist, but I was worried about how to handle another deluge of questions. This seems like a brilliant idea, one I’m going to use. (@ mighty bargain hunter)

I thought I’d update you on my progress with my 2010 resolutions.

Resolution #1: Lose 40 pounds I lost three pounds in January, so I’m more or less on pace with this one. My biggest challenge here is the weather, which makes it very difficult to just get outside and take a long walk, something I love to do every day when the weather is nice.

Resolution #2: Pay cash for a replacement for my truck I have an adequate amount of cash ready to go. I’m just merely waiting for the right replacement vehicle to come along. Oh, and I’ve had additional truck troubles in the last month, so I have even more incentive to switch.

Resolution #3: Learn to play the piano After testing out two piano teachers, I’ve been taking weekly hour-long lessons from a teacher for the past three weeks. I’ve also been practicing a lot at home. So far, I can read most simple sheet music if I go slowly and I can play a few simple songs at a reasonable tempo.

Resolution #4: Reduce my entertainment and hobby spending by 50% This is going really well so far, as I spent just a few dollars on entertainment in January. If the rest of the year goes anywhere near this well, this one will be easy to do.

So, to put it simply, #2, #3, and #4 are very much on pace, and #1 arguably is. I’m pretty happy with that.

Here are some personal finance posts to enjoy.

Star Trek and The Time Well Spent Continuum In the last Reader Mailbag, I argued that MMORPGs like World of Warcraft and Star Trek Online could be potentially good ways to reduce your entertainment spending. This article actually makes the opposite argument. (@ debt free adventure)

The Hypocrite Test: Should Rich People Pay More? As with many such fundamental political issues, I think there are valid arguments on both sides of the coin and that some reasonable compromises can be reached. The only problem is that people don’t sit down at the table and rationally discuss such issues today – instead, they resort to arguing, insulting, and “straw man” representations of the opposition. I have little interest in that, whether it’s Keith Olbermann or Glenn Beck – I wish they’d both shut up. Whatever happened to the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Such thoughtful coverage of the issues of the day went away with the advent of fifteen second news blips. (@ awake @ the wheel)

Does Renting Make Sense? J.D. pulls out the P/R ratio to take a look at whether renting is more worthwhile financially than buying. The problem, though, is that it doesn’t really take into account individual financial situations. (@ get rich slowly)

How is disorganization and clutter affecting your job performance? In my own case, I notice a serious downturn in productivity when my office gets disorganized and messy. I’m far better off just stopping for a bit to get things in better order than I am just charging ahead. (@ unclutterer)

Earlier this week, I found an issue with the software I was using to manage comments for The Simple Dollar. I deleted a single character in a single line of code, breathed in deep, refreshed the page…

… and 7,000 (!) comments appeared in the moderation queue.

The bug was a simple one. Ordinarily, comments that need to be moderated are assigned a particular number in the database – let’s say it’s a 1. If I approve the comment, the number becomes 0. If I don’t approve it, the comment gets the number 99 and effectively vanishes.

The bug essentially revolved around the fact that some comments for moderation were being assigned the number -1 instead of the number 1. In a code edit, a – sign had been stuck into the code in front of a 1, effectively turning it into a -1. Thus, when I would view the comments that need moderated, I would only see the ones with a 1 and not see the ones with a -1. I’m not sure what percentage of comments this was affecting, but I’d estimate around 25% of them.

Anyway, I’ve got a lot of comments to deal with. I’m going to go through these in batches because it would take several days of nothing but comment moderation to deal with that many comments.

Here are some personal finance articles of interest. This past week, I spent a lot of time reading some lesser-known personal finance blogs and I’ve chose to highlight some of them this week.

Recipe for Survival: 23 Ways Restaurants Save Money This article summarizes very clearly why I don’t like eating out unless we’re eating out someplace quite nice. I simply have much more confidence in the food I cook at home. (@ coupon sherpa)

I don’t want to retire I think the biggest problem for many of us when it comes to talking about retirement savings is that we simply don’t want to “retire,” because often the word “retire” comes with a sense of being old and idle and incapable, whether that’s actually true or not. We don’t want to think about being the generic definition of a retiree. (@ a gai shan life)

When Pigs Fly: How I Fought My Parking Ticket and Beat City Hall A very humorous story about fighting a parking ticket with some good advice to boot, this article mostly made me wonder whether or not it was really worth the time. I think it’s more about the principle of the thing. (@ len penzo)

10 Frugal Ways to get Fit this Winter My frugal way of staying fit during the winter has been EA Active. (@ squawk fox)

Also, I’ve had several articles of mine appear on OPEN Forum, and I’ll be linking to them over the next few weeks. These articles usually focus on small business issues. Here are three recent ones.

Efficient Billing: A Big Key to Solving Cash Flow Problems Being organized when you’re running a small business is key, particularly when it comes to efficiently billing your customers. Here’s some advice on how to do that.

Six Steps to Audit-Proofing Your Small Business The most effective way to audit-proof yourself? Keep a paper trail of every dime going in and out of your business. Here are some effective ways to do just that.

Two Key Numbers You Need to Know to Manage Your Small Business These two key numbers come back to two key elements of a successful small business: cash in hand and effective billing. It’s all about the cash flow, after all.