Over the last month, I’ve posted a series of “One Hour Projects” – posts intended to describe a task that will take one hour that will either directly improve your financial state or put you in the position to have financial rewards come to you. Here, in a nutshell, are all thirty one hour projects, divided up into several groups. If you’ve got an hour to spend on getting your finances in a better place, jump into any of these tasks – at the end, you’ll find yourself rewarded financially and perhaps in other ways as well.

Reduce Your Regular Bills

Cleanse Your Monthly Bills Go through your monthly bills in order to find and eliminate excess regular expenses.
Conserve Water Make a few simple changes around your house to trim your water bill considerably.
Reduce the Interest Rate On Your Credit Cards Take a proactive stance and contact your credit card company to get those rates reduced – and thus reduce the interest you’re paying them.
Go Christmas Shopping At Sale Time Take advantage of sales throughout the year to reduce the flood of expenses you’ll incur at Christmas – and at other gifting occasions as well.
Make Your Home More Energy Efficient Perform several simple one-time tasks to cut down immensely on your monthly energy bill.
Kill the Electricity Phantom Reduce the constant drain of your electrical devices by taking a few simple steps, further reducing your energy bill.
Switch Checking Accounts Eliminate excessive fees of all kinds – and maybe even earn an interest rate – by switching to a different checking account.
Price Compare The Things You Buy Regularly Reduce your monthly shopping bill with a clever technique that reveals the cheapest place for you to shop for the stuff you actually buy.

Make Better Use Of What You Have

Do Some Preventive Maintenance Extend the life span of items in your home by spending a bit of time on preventive maintenance tasks.
Enjoy What You Have Try some interesting ways to increase your enjoyment of the things you already have – and reduce frivolous spending on new things.
Clean Out Your Media Collection Get rid of the media items in your home that you don’t use – and turn them into cash in your pocket with ease.
Perform Basic Car Maintenance Increase the gas mileage of your car significantly with a few simple maintenance tasks anyone can do.

Reduce Your Food & Drink Expenses

Create a Water-Drinking Routine Discover the benefits of drinking water – and find ways to integrate it into your daily routine to decimate your beverage expenses.
Do Some Basic Diet Hacking Make a few very simple modifications to your daily routine to cut down greatly on your dining expenses.
Plan Your Meals For One Week In Advance Use meal planning to greatly reduce your food expenses for the week, both by eating at home and shopping in a cost-effective fashion.
Make a Quadruple Batch of a Casserole Take advantage of buying and preparing food in bulk to reduce the financial and temporal expense of home cooking.

Get Informed

Construct Your Debt Snowball (Or Something Like It) Organize your debts and develop a plan to tackle them directly.
Discover and Catalog Free Events In Your Community Find out about all the free activities in your community – and utilize them to reduce your entertainment costs.
Create A Visual Debt Reminder Give yourself some repeated encouragement for cleaning up your debt by making a debt reminder visual.
Dig Into Your Job Benefits Find out what financial benefits are really available to you through your job – it might be more than you think.
Dig Into A Personal Finance Blog Find out the thoughts and opinions of someone who is passionate about personal finance.
Take A Trip To The Library Discover the resources at your local library, both to reduce your entertainment expenses and to educate yourself about personal finance.
Go Through Your Important Papers Organize your most important documents – and perhaps utilize them to put yourself in better financial shape.
Thoroughly Research A Stock Learn how the stock market works and also find out whether a specific company is worth investing in.
Build Your Own Net Worth Calculator Build a tool to track your financial progress and motivate you to continue making positive steps.

Pave The Way To Greater Success

Touch Base With Professional And Local Acquaintances Connect with people who may be able to connect you with greater success.
Get Involved In Community Volunteering Improve the overall state of the community – and meet similarly-motivated people in the process.
Give Someone A Helping Hand Reach out and help someone – and maybe that help will improve the lives of a lot of people (including yourself).
Keep An Idea Notebook In Your Pocket Keep track of the important ideas that float into and out of your head during a day – one or two of them might be as good as gold.
Open A High-Yield Savings Account (Or An Investment Account) Find a financially lucrative place to put the money you’ve found during these projects.

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices.

One final thing that you can do that can kick your finances into gear is opening up a high-yield savings account. Many banks now offer online-only savings accounts that offer very nice interest rates, often far exceeding the rates of return you can get from your local brick and mortar bank. HSBC Direct, the online version of HSBC, for example, is currently offering a 5.05% APY account, and ING Direct has a brilliantly simple and intuitive interface that holds a 4.3% APY savings account. Both of these likely decimate what you can find at your local bank – and you can manage the account straight from your computer.

If you maintain any savings at all – or are even thinking about starting – a high-yield online savings account is worth getting. It takes a bit of time to sign up – and you have to have a checking account to link the new savings account to – but once you’ve done that, it’s all about the savings.

Which bank should I use? I generally point people to ING Direct for starters – not only because it’s the bank I use, but because their interface is brilliantly simple to use. Other banks offer higher rates, but ING is probably the best choice for getting used to online-only banking.

Once you have the account set up, it’s worthwhile to set up an automatic savings plan. It pulls out a specified amount from your checking to your savings on a regular basis – usually weekly or monthly, but you can set up about anything you imagine. So, you could set it up to pull out $50 from your checking to your savings every week, or the day after you receive a paycheck. That money then hides away until you need it, earning a 4-5% interest rate.

What about after that? Once a person has their high-interest debts paid off and has some significant money in savings, I usually recommend that they begin investing in low-cost index funds. It’s a great way to start dipping your toes into stock investing without getting buried in fees, and it’s easy as pie – you deposit some money with a brokerage, tell them what fund you want to buy, and they do the rest for you. When you want to sell them, log in and sell them.

Again, I almost always point people who are just getting started towards either Vanguard (my favorite, and where I keep my investments) or Fidelity. Both offer a large array of low-cost index funds for investing, and signing up for an account at either one is quite easy. I consider them to be the cream of the crop for people wanting to buy low-cost index funds and just sit back and watch them grow, but be aware that many of the good funds at both businesses have a high minimum. Most of the Vanguard funds require $3,000 as an initial investment, but their fees are so low that it’s worth it – just save your money in that high-interest savings account.

In fact, that’s a good way to do things. Deposit a small amount each week into a high-yield savings account, then eventually use the money in there to invest. It’s actually exactly what I do – I deposit a sum into an online savings account each week, then use that money for investments. Right now, I’m actually buying into a diversity of Vanguard funds using this approach so that my investment is diversified – later, I’ll use that same plan to keep the portfolio balanced.

There’s no better time than right now to get started – so why not spend an hour and get the ball rolling?

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices.

If you’ve gone through even a few of the one hour projects in this series, you likely have some more money in your pocket. Don’t rush out and spend that jingle – instead, use that jingle to repay your debts, even if it’s just a few dollars a month.

Here’s how the debt snowball idea works. A debt snowball (or similar arrangement) is simply a debt repayment plan that specifies the order in which you should pay off your debts. Typically, there is some logic in the order – in Dave Ramsey’s original debt snowball, the debts were ordered from smallest to largest, for example. You then add up the minimum payments for this snowball, add an additional amount to that total, and then treat that dollar amount as your “debt bill” for the month.

From this “debt bill,” you make the minimum payments on all of your debts, then use the remainder to make extra payment on whichever debt is on top of the list. When that one is paid off, you don’t reduce the total of your “debt bill” – instead, you just have a larger remainder to tackle whatever debt is now on top of the list. Eventually, you’ll be using the whole “debt bill” amount to tackle that final debt – and it will melt away quite quickly.

If you’re spending less than you make but you still have a lot of debt to tackle, a debt snowball is a great thing to start. It commits you to actually getting rid of your debts – and debt freedom is a beautiful place to be.

How do you set this up? It’s pretty easy – all you need is either a piece of paper or a spreadsheet. Here’s the game plan.

First, find the interest rate, minimum payment, and outstanding balance of every outstanding debt you have. You should be able to get this information from the last statement of each of these bills.

Next, sort these bills. I recommend sorting them by interest rate, with the highest one on top. Another method is to sort them by the outstanding balance, with the smallest one on top. What you’re doing here is figuring out the order you’d like to see these debts gone.

Now, list the debts along with their minimum payment in the order you sorted them. You’re going to add up the minimum payments, so keep them in a nice column so you can easily add them up.

When you have them all listed, add up the minimum payments. This should give you a nice fat number – that’s how much of your income each month goes to paying off stuff you had to have before you could afford it. It’s a number that you want to knock down to zero.

At this point, you need to take a look at how much you spend overall each month. How much extra can you squeeze out? If you’ve been doing the one hour projects, you’ll probably be able to squeeze out at least a little. Commit yourself to spending a certain extra amount each month to getting yourself debt free.

Add this number to your minimum payments. This is how much you’re going to commit to your debt each month. I found it psychologically useful to find that number I was comfortable with, then rounding it up to a larger number, a nice even target for each month.

When you figure up your bills, use this total number instead of the individual minimum payments. Your “debt bill” is now this number.

When you sit down to pay the bills, make minimum payments on all but the top bill on your list. Then, for that one remaining bill, write a check for the remainder of the money you put aside for debt that month.

Repeat this exact bill paying procedure without changing the total amount you’re putting aside each month until your debts are gone. Obviously, you may want to refigure things if a major life change occurs, but unless something really big happens, stick to the snowball. It will get you out of debt.

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices.

So many times throughout the day, I come up with useful ideas: ideas for saving money, ideas for preparing food, ideas to improve The Simple Dollar, tasks that I need to take care of, and so on.

Forgetting these ideas is as good as money lost. They float out of your mind and most likely are permanently forgotten. Maybe you had a brilliant idea for work that wasn’t quite fully formed yet. Maybe you remembered someone from high school that you should really get in touch with. Maybe you came up with an amazing web application idea that could net you millions. Or maybe you just remembered to get milk on the way home. All of these are ideas worth real money – and they all slip away.

Whatever the thought is, it’s incredibly valuable to jot it down and then review your jottings regularly. That sounds really easy, but it requires a shift in thinking that takes practice. Here’s the game plan:

First, find a notebook small enough to comfortably fit in a pocket. It doesn’t matter really what kind of notebook you use. I personally use a small pocket Moleskine. You’ll also want a writing utensil that fits into a pocket; I use a Fisher Bullet space pen, but a Bic will do just fine.

At first, keep the notebook in a very obvious place. When I was first trying to get used to this concept, I left the pad out all the time so I would always see it. A friend of mine actually tied a piece of string around his wrist and attached it to his little notebook so he wouldn’t forget it when he got up.

Whenever you have a thought, jot it down. No matter what sort of thought it is, if you want to retrieve it later, write it down in your notebook. You can worry about dealing with it later – just make sure that you’ve written down enough so that you can pick up the train of thought at a later time. Most importantly, don’t hesitate to do it in front of others – tell them that what they said was important enough that you want to remember it later, and they’ll be flattered, not annoyed.

Once a day or so, review the new entries. I do this multiple times a day – just after leaving work, when I’m sitting at my desk and can take care of some things, and so on. This way, if I wrote down something like “get milk,” I won’t be already at home before I notice it.

Eventually you’ll get very used to this – and feel empty when you can’t take notes. You’ll also begin to realize how much impact such a simple thing can have on your life – in so many different ways. For instance, keeping a little idea notebook makes The Simple Dollar possible – I don’t know how I would keep up with the required ideas without it.

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices.

It’s something so simple that so many of us overlook in our busy lives: stopping to help people out when they need a hand. For the longest time, I would only stop and help out people if it was completely convenient for me – I didn’t really see the point of helping others out if it didn’t directly benefit me.

One day, though, that all changed. I was sitting on a city bus riding to class (I was a college student at the time) and I saw a woman getting on the bus. She didn’t have change for the fee and the driver asked her to get off the bus. She got upset – she was in a work uniform on her way to a job – and something inside of me just clicked. I saw myself in her shoes. So I walked forward, deposited the change in the slot, and she was able to board the bus.

She sat down next to me and thanked me for paying, then told me a bit about her life. She was married to an individual who was on active duty overseas (this was in the late 1990s – he was not in Iraq, I don’t believe) and trying to raise two children. Her mother lived there, too, and watched the children while she worked, and she was trying very hard to get a promotion at her job. As I watched her get off the bus and go to work, I realized that stepping forward and putting that change in the meter might have caused her to get to work on time – or even a bit early – and might have helped her get that promotion, improving the lives of those children. Who knows what the domino effect from that might be.

Since then, I make a regular effort to help people out if I see an opportunity. Although the time adds up over a long period, individual acts don’t take very long at all and they usually go a long way towards lifting someone’s day out of the doldrums.

There are three ways that this can benefit you – one directly and two indirectly:

First, you feel better about yourself for having done it. If I help someone get their cat out of a tree or return a shopping cart for an old lady, I feel better about myself. It genuinely lifts my mood for some reason.

Second, the person you did the favor for has a good chance of doing a similar favor for someone else. This is the “pay it forward” phenomenon and it actually exists – I’ve witnessed it over and over again.

Finally, on rare occasions, that small deed will pay off in some hugely unexpected way. Once, I spied an abandoned child in a department store. He was crying. I stopped for a moment and asked him who he was there with and when he saw her last, then I grabbed a worker at the store and asked if he could page the mother over the intercom. He didn’t know her name, so we just used a description of the boy. I then kneeled near the boy for a while and calmed him down by telling him his mother was coming for him – and sure enough, she arrived. The mother had been quite upset as well. I began to walk away and the mother handed me a gift card for the store, saying “Take it – and thank you so much!” The gift card was for $100. While you should never expect such things, they do occasionally happen.

Over the next week or so, keep your eyes open for people that might need a helping hand. If you notice someone who is having a problem that you might be able to help with, from a cell phone call to pushing a cart or anything else, just step up and offer to do it. Do it several times. See how you feel inside after you do it, and then see if this little move didn’t just make the world a better place.

Along those same lines, if you’re ever in a situation where you need a hand, look around you and imagine if others had this same philosophy. By doing your part to encourage a philosophy of offering a small social helping hand, you encourage others to do the same – and eventually that helping hand will come back around to you when you really need it. Consider it a form of social insurance – by paying the premiums of helping others, sometimes you’ll collect some amazing dividends.

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices.

One of the biggest expenditures in many people’s lives is that of bottled and canned beverages, whether it be soda, sports drinks, or even bottled water. Considering that you can get four gallons of tap water from your tap for a single cent, it’s easy to see that substituting other beverages for this highly inexpensive resource can save you a lot of money rather quickly. If you drink a case of soda a week (costing $6), that’s an annual savings of $312 – well worth it.

Not only that, most people don’t drink a healthy amount of water in a day. The National Institute of Medicine advises that “men consume roughly 3.0 liters (about 13 cups) of total beverages a day and women consume 2.2 liters (about 9 cups) of total beverages a day.” Since only 20% of that comes from food, men should be drinking a little over 10 cups a day and women should drink a little over 7 cups a day – and the average American drinks far less than that.

Plus, it’s always a healthy choice to replace beverages that you’re drinking with water. Every time you make that choice, you’re choosing to eliminate all sorts of things from your diet – everything from caffeine to high fructose corn syrup and excess salts.

The problem for most people is upsetting their routine, so spend some time making it easy for yourself to change the routine. Here’s the game plan.

Every time you have a tendency to grab a beverage, get water instead. Make it your mission to do this for one week, and if you don’t like it, then don’t continue with it.

Fill some water bottles and put them in place of where you normally store beverages. I have a shelf in my refrigerator for beverages. As I went through my last go-round of Gatorade, I refilled the bottles with water and put them back in the fridge. This way, my normal routine of reaching in and grabbing a bottle wasn’t interrupted.

Don’t buy replacements for the beverages you already have. If you buy Gatorade or soda – or even ordinary bottled water – by the case, stop buying it. Instead, just keep water around and available in the refrigerator.

The real key to changing your beverage drinking habits, as with changing any habit, is to focus on changing the routine of it. Converting to drinking mostly water for your liquid intake is financially worthwhile (and healthy, too), but taking the time to modify any expensive habit is worth your time.

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices.

One of the things I enjoy doing is getting involved with my local community, though with two children in diapers and my other responsibilities, I don’t get to spend as much time doing it as I would like. When I first started paying attention to city council meetings and looking carefully at ways to volunteer to help youth recreation leagues and such, I mostly looked at it as a spiritually fulfilling way to spend my time. By working for the community, I was making the community a better place for everyone involved.

Over time, though, I began to see a lot of ways in which helping out in the community helped me out personally:

I connected with lots of different people. I met tons of people in the local community, many with useful skills and interesting stories to tell. I would often find that people are much more willing to talk to you and be friendly with you if they see you helping out with a youth baseball league or assisting in keeping a park clean.

I discovered resources I never knew existed. I found all sorts of public resources in my town and in ones nearby that I had no clue existed. Only by volunteering – and thus talking to a lot of people – did I find out about some of these things. Local free events, small businesses with incredibly good rates, and so on.

I spent a lot of quality, enjoyable time without any expense to myself. I got to spend a lot of time out in the fresh air doing all sorts of activities that I could clearly see enriched the lives of not only myself, but lots of others.

Obviously, volunteering projects are more than a one hour activity, and many of those activities aren’t palatable to some people. So, instead of saying “jump into a volunteer activity,” you should spend the time finding one that works for your needs and your schedule.

Here’s what you do.

First, go to VolunteerMatch and see what volunteer activities in your area come up. I looked for all volunteer activities within 50 miles and pulled up a ton of stuff for me, and I live in rural Iowa – other areas will likely pull up many more than that.

You should also contact your local park and recreation service for your town. Many towns have more tasks that need to be done than they have people to do them, from refereeing youth league soccer to cleaning up the city park.

Now that you have a huge batch to pick from, whittle it down to only the stuff that sounds fun to you. If you’re not 100% confident, go on to the next one. Look for that activity that’s right for you, not just one that sounds like it would be useful but doesn’t really get your fire going.

Hopefully, you’ve found a few activities that match your interest. Call up the organizers and see when you can volunteer. Obviously, you’ll need to find ones that can match your schedule.

After all this, you should have one or two exciting activities that fit well with your lifestyle. From here, it’s up to you to jump in and see what happens. I predict it will be more fulfilling than you think.

This post is part of The One Hour Project, in which you can spend just one hour to put your finances in a better place without a big lifestyle change, through frugality or other financial choices.

One of the most frustrating expenses in our home is the water bill. Even though our rate for water is about $0.0006 per liter, it adds up very quickly. This means that for every 16 liters we use, it costs us a cent. On the surface, that seems cheap, but it adds up very quickly. A single shower, for instance, uses about two gallons per minute, which over a ten minute shower adds up to 20 gallons. Every normal shower costs a nickel in water usage – and that’s just for starters. An average toilet flush eats 3 gallons – almost a cent. Once you start looking at the water use in your house from that perspective, it really adds up.

Thankfully, there are a lot of very easy ways to reduce your water usage by doing one-time tasks. Here are some things you can tackle in an hour that will cut down on your home water usage – and thus reduce your water bill every single month.

Fix (or have fixed) your leaky faucets. Do you have any leaky faucets in your house? Even at a rate of just a few drops a minute, gallons of water are pouring down your drain each month – and that becomes significant money wasted over time. Take a bit of time and see if you can fix the faucet – and if not, consider the possibility of replacing it.

Check for hidden leaks. Look underneath every toilet and sink in your house. Is there a leak anywhere? Leaks under here are just as wasteful as the ones from faucets – you should get them fixed, not just for the water loss, but for the health of the boards in your home.

Install a low-flow shower head in your most heavily used shower. A low flow shower head drastically reduces the water use during each shower. If your primary shower is used twice a day and it saves ten gallons per shower, that’s 7,300 gallons a year in savings – about $15 on our bill. A low-flow shower head pays for itself in about two years and then is just profit after that.

Fill a 20 or 32 ounce soda bottle with water, screw the cap on tight, and put it in your toilet tank. That makes the toilet use a bit less water for each flush. If you flush a toilet three times a day, over a year this simple move can save more than a dollar on your water bill – and our toilet certainly gets flushed more often than that.

Take quicker showers. A nice long soak is luxurious sometimes, but most of the time we can all take quicker showers. Start timing them and set goals to make your shower shorter and shorter. Not only does it save serious money on water over time, but it frees up more time for you to do other things. Try timing two showers for a trial run and see how it goes.

Water your lawn more efficiently. Do it in the early morning or late evening, and deep soak the lawn when you do it (put a tuna can out in the yard where you’re watering – when the can is full, you’ve watered enough). This will drastically reduce the amount of watering you have to do, saving time and water.

Do these things and watch your water bill fall through the floor.