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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Preventative mainentance is a phrase that makes many homeowners’ eyes glaze over. For many busy people, there’s nothing more boring than going around your house doing various tasks that seem to not really be fixing anything.

On the other hand, look at the tale of my hot water heater. It’s about ready to go bad years before it should, but if the owner had just put in a few minutes a year, that heater would have kept running for many more years. If you can double the life of a piece of equipment in your house with just a few minutes’ work, that’s extremely cost-effective time.

In fact, not long ago, I compiled an extensive list of many, many possible home and auto maintenance tasks, almost to the point of overkill.

But how does one keep up with all of these tasks – or even remember to do them at all? The most effective way I’ve found to keep up to date with home maintenance tasks is to schedule them.

Here’s the game plan.

First, make a giant list of your home and auto maintenance tasks. You might want to use my earlier list for starters. You may have other ones that you find you need to be doing. Obviously, some are more important than others, but it’s always good to keep up maintenance on as much as you can to cut down on long term costs.

Next, figure out how often each task can be done. For example, I have three month air handling filters for my house, so this only needs to happen each season. Go through each item on your list and note how often it needs to be taken care of. Many things on that monthly maintenance list don’t have to happen on a monthly basis – instead, choose a regular basis that works for you, like every other month or every third month for some of the tasks.

Then take your event calendar and assign days for the tasks. I use Sunbird for my personal scheduler – it’s a free program you can get easily online – and I use it to schedule home and auto maintenance tasks. You might use Outlook instead, or use a planner or a wall calendar. Just mark down all of the days where you’ll do the tasks. I often put one simple task on a weeknight, like changing an air handling filter, and move the more complicated ones and the ones in multiples to the weekends.

It takes a bit of time to get this all set up, but the rewards are worth it. You don’t have to remember to do all of these things any more – instead, just glance at the calendar and then take care of the brief maintenance task. The end result? Your home – and the appliances in it – last a lot longer, and that saves you both headaches and money.

Regardless of whether or not you include individual stocks as part of your investment plan, having a general idea of how a stock works can be an incredibly valuable piece of knowledge to have. Even for those who only invest via a retirement plan, that retirement plan is usually just a collection of stocks, so knowing how stocks work can help teach you how your retirement plan works – and it might give you insights on how to invest your money more effectively.

What can be gained from this?

First, you’ll get in touch with your risk tolerance. Most stocks, over the course of a small period like this, stagger up and down a little, and possibly see a big lurch. If you imagine that you have some significant money in the stock, the sight of it going up and down day after day will probably tell you whether you can stomach this particular roller coaster or whether you should be investing more conservatively.

It will also likely show you how different news reports affected the stock you were looking at and thus how news reports affect stocks. The Federal Reserve cuts interest rates and your stock goes up. The company exceeded earnings expectations by a cent and the stock goes up. A competitor brings out an amazing new model and the stock goes down.

You’ll also learn what a lot of basic stock investing terminology means. This will help you to understand a lot of financial news and also help you to understand your own investment choices.

If you’re already into individual stock investing, your research will probably tell you whether you would buy into this company or not. This research will at least somewhat indicate whether the company is in line with what your investing philosophy is and whether you believe you can make some money from the stock.

Here’s what you do.

Identify a company you’re interested in. I often identify companies based on the quality of their customer service – if I have a great customer service interaction with a company, my impression of that company goes way up and I’m much more likely to want to do business with them in the future. Of course, the reverse is true – atrocious customer service drives me away.

Just select a company that you’re somewhat familiar with as a customer, either directly or indirectly. For this example, I’ll talk about Herman Miller (MLHR), a company that produces office furniture, including the exquisite Aeron chair.

Investigate the company. Find out how their business is doing. I usually start at the Yahoo! Finance page for a particular stock, so here’s that page for Herman Miller. I usually also check Google’s info on the stock.

Here are a few big things to look for:

Recent news developments and how they affected the stock This is easy to find on the Google page for the stock. What sorts of recent events had an effect on the stock price? Their graph of the recent stock history identifies recent news reports and points to when that event occurred, so you can see what affected it.

How the competitors are doing Look at the company compared to the competition, which can be found on the Yahoo! page. Compare their earnings per share (EPS, how much money the company is making per each share of stock out there) and their P/E ratio (price/earnings, which means how valuable the stock of the company is compared to how much money the company is actually making). You might want to actually peek at each competitor in more detail.

What the company’s insiders are doing Take a look and see what the people involved with the company directly are doing. Are they selling a lot of stocks without anyone buying any? That’s a bad sign. A lot of buying is often a good sign. Don’t be scared away by a little bit of selling – they might be selling the stock to build a home or something – only be worried if several different people are selling stock.

Obviously, this is just a start. Take your time and don’t get lost here – if you don’t know what any word or term means, stop and use Wikipedia to look it up. Use this investigation of a company you’re interested in to find out what a P/E ratio really means and why it’s important, for starters.

Once you’ve invested some time in this, put it on the back burner for a month. Check in on the company news about once a week and see if there’s been any big change, but let it slide for several weeks.

Then, when you have a bit of time, go back and trawl through all of the information again. Has your feeling on the company changed? Do you think it’s doing good business or bad business? Generally, if you can’t see any big problems, it’s doing just fine. It also doesn’t matter whether you’re an expert – the best analysts on Wall Street have at least as much trouble with these questions as you have.

The purpose here is to learn a bit about how stock investing works so that when you have to make a choice about investing, you’re not completely out in the blue. Plus, you might learn a thing or two about your favorite company – a friend of mine got really into this exercise and found out all sorts of interesting – and a few disheartening – things about the large corporation he works for and the soundness of their business. It started off as a learning exercise; it ended with him restructuring his 401(k) plan.

Not too long ago, the local Sears hardware store not too far from where I work went out of business. During their going out of business liquidation sale, I picked up a couple of items that were a stupendous deal merely because they seemed like perfect Christmas gifts for people on my list. Then, I just put those items into a hidden place in our home and wait for Christmastime.

The result of this is that I can often get people gifts that utterly amaze them, without them knowing I didn’t pay too much for them. A great example came a couple years ago when I replaced all my mother’s pots and pans with Calphalon hard anodized stuff. She was completely convinced I had dropped several hundred dollars, but what I had actually found was a great deal – less than $40 for the whole array of pots and pans.

There are several benefits to this strategy:

First, you don’t have the huge Christmas rush on your bank account. If many of your Christmas gifts are already safely purchased and put away, you don’t need to drop a lot of cash at Christmastime.

Second, you have all year to shop, not just the Christmas season. That means there’s no rush to find something for Great Aunt Selma – there’s very little pressure.

Third, it saves a huge wad of money. You can find amazing gifts for just a bit of nothing if you keep an eye on sales throughout the year. I estimate that last year I saved at least $300 on Christmas by following this strategy – and that’s not even counting potential savings on the credit card.

It’s not very hard, either. Here’s the game plan.

Shortly after Christmas (or any time well in advance of the Christmas season), make your Christmas list for the following year. List everyone you’ll need to buy for and come up with a general idea or two for a gift for them. For example, last year for my mom, I listed “cooking equipment” and for my father “outdoorsman equipment.” Very general stuff. I keep this list in my wallet at all times, just as a reminder.

Throughout the year, look for going out of business sales or other spectacular offers that coincide with your list. Going out of business sales are usually great ones to hit if you can, as are sales that match up with the rotation of seasonal items from stores. Since you have the entire year, you don’t have to be bloodthirsty about it – just keep your eyes open.

Keep spare cash available so that you can buy something when you see it. When you find the right item at a spectacular price, you need to be able to grab it right then. Make sure you can always do this. I actually am a year ahead on my Christmas savings, meaning I have all the money I plan on spending on Christmas ready to go one year in advance.

Here’s another example: I have two people on my list who both enjoy board games. Recently, a game shop in my area decided to clean out their board gamingg section and had a very sudden sale of the games, many of which had sat there unsold for a while. I heard about it, walked in the door, and got a copy of Ticket to Ride for $12 (a spectacular board game) and several other board games for sub-eBay prices. I took them home, eBayed all but Ticket to Ride (and two others I kept for myself) and broke even. Free Christmas present for a relative, two free games for me, all because I took a bit of time to prepare.

Got an hour to burn? Make up your Christmas list for next year, then see if there are any going out of business sales or other great opportunities around. You might be able to save a pile on the Christmas season, plus cut a lot of stress out of your life.

For a long time, I kept my primary checking at the local branch of a large international bank. Over the years, though, they slowly bled me with lots of little fees here and there: a monthly maintenance fee, a $2 charge on pretty much every ATM use, and overdraft fees that were sometimes triggered by the other fees (yes, at least twice, I was hit by an overdraft fee when maintenance and ATM fees emptied my account).

After estimating that the fees were costing me almost $10 a month – and also considering that I was not earning any interest on the balance – I made the move to switch my primary checking account to ING Electric Orange, which is basically fee-free and offers a 3.5% APY. It’s worth the constant money savings to switch your primary checking account to a bank that’s happy to have your business and treats you well – a $20 swing per month for me was quite nice.

So how can you tell if it’s worth your time to switch to another checking account? Here’s what I would do.

Evaluate your current checking. Do you end up losing money every month because of your checking account? Are you really annoyed by fees or customer service? Those are usually the signs that you need to be looking for a different checking account. I’m often amazed at how atrocious the checking account for most people really is.

Make a list of required and desired checking account features. Do you need to be able to write immediate paper checks? What about ATM use? Do you need a check card? Do you desire a return on your deposits? Do you need a local branch to conduct business in? Everyone’s needs are different. I found that I rarely used my local branch and was writing almost no paper checks at all, for instance, which meant that I could focus on no fees and a return on my balance.

Go checking account shopping. The checking account navigator at Bankrate is very useful for this. Find an account that has all of your required features, plus is strong in the optional areas.

Switch! I wrote a detailed guide on how to switch from one checking account to another, based on my experience switching to ING Electric Orange.

Making a switch to a checking account that treats you better will not only reduce your frustration level, but can put some coinage in your pocket each month.

A week ago, one of the One Hour Projects suggested making your home more energy efficient. Those steps reduce the energy that the devices you already have are using, but there’s another major step you can take to reduce your energy use: eliminating phantom power usage.

What’s “phantom usage”? Whenever you leave a device plugged into a wall socket, it continues to constantly draw a small amount of energy, without cease. Usually, this is on the order of 1 to 5 watts, which means that it would take 200 to 1,000 hours for a single device to even use a single kilowatt hour, which costs $0.10.

Big deal, you think? Consider how many devices are plugged in all the time needlessly in your home. The toaster. The cell phone chargers. The power cord for your printer and scanner. All of the stuff on your entertainment center. Let’s say you can find fifteen such devices in your house, and they use an average of 3 watts. That’s 45 watts around the clock – more than a kilowatt hour each day. Three bucks, every single month, without fail, and that’s assuming your devices are minimally draining. For example, my laptop charger uses 30-40 watts all the time when it’s plugged in.

Ouch! How do I stop this? Here’s the plan.

First, regularly go through your home and unplug as much as is reasonable. Unplug the toaster, the cell phone charger, and so on. Any electrical devices that aren’t required to be on or extremely difficult to reach should be unplugged. I do this once every few days.

What about items that are hard to reach? I include the plugins for all the items in the entertainment center in this group, as I have no items there that must remain plugged in. I also include all my computer equipment in this group. For those, I get a SmartStrip LCG4. For about $40, this provides a power strip for a large number of devices. Even better, one of the devices serves as a full switch for it!

So, let’s say that I hook this up with my computer setup, plugging my printer and scanner and monitor and such all into it. Then, I include my tower as the “master” device. When I turn off my computer, the electricity is switched off to all of the devices, allowing no phantom drain. When I turn on my computer, the juice is restored to all devices. The same thing can be done for pieces of your entertainment center, using either your television or your surround sound as the master. It only takes a few months for this strip to pay for itself, but the setup might take some time.

If this seems like a bit much for you, a power strip with a switch on it provides the same effect. Flipping the switch not only powers off all of the devices, but it kills the phantom drain from the devices.

If you do nothing else, just take a minute or two once a week to unplug any devices in your house that don’t need to be plugged in, like a toaster or a cell phone charger or a laptop adapter that’s not in use. This will save you significant money that’s currently being eaten by the phantom monster.

No, I’m not going to talk again about eating at home or about how you should skip fast food. Instead, I’m going to talk about a handful of basic dietary things you can do that really, really save money over time. Some have a bit of a startup cost, but they will all save you some serious cash over the long run.

Drink your own bottled water, at least 64 ounces a day. Water is something that many Americans simply don’t drink enough of, and when they do, they often do it by drinking highly overpriced bottled water. The health effects are numerous: you feel less hungry (and thus eat less), reduces tiredness, and it helps your immune system in battling disease. Even better, water is about the least expensive beverage you can buy if you bottle it yourself.

Here’s what I recommend: get a few water bottles, fill them up from the tap each evening, and put them in the fridge. During the next day, grab them and drink them regularly, then in the evening, replace them again. I use six 16 ounce water bottles in this fashion and I generally get through almost all of them in a day.

What if your tap water is bad? Get a tap filter, seriously. Given the number of gallons that a single filter can clean, tap water is still way cheaper than the bottled stuff.

Never skip breakfast At first glance, this seems to fly in the face of reason – wouldn’t eating breakfast be more expensive than not eating breakfast? Well, if you plan it well, breakfast can be really cheap and very convenient.

How does it benefit you? The biggest reason is that it provides a natural energy boost to start your day, and not a caffeine-based one, either (though breakfast can be supplemented by coffee, of course). The second biggest reason is that it encourages you to make better choices at lunchtime – without breakfast, it’s much easier to not make good choices either out of a lack of energy or a deep hunger. I didn’t really believe this myself until I tried it out – breakfast makes a huge difference in my day.

Eat more fiber. This is another idea that might surprise many of you, but it really works. If you like sweets, instead of picking up some candy, try eating some fresh fruits instead, like blueberries or raspberries or dried apricots or raisins, all of which are cheaper than good chocolate. I’ve started keeping dried fruits around to sate my needs, and I already really enjoy eating whole wheat bread – it’s more flavorful than white, especially if you make it yourself.

These options might directly save a little money, but the real savings comes over the long haul because these choices improve your health. I’m the last person to suggest that someone goes on any kind of strict diet, but even a small change or two can, over time, improve your health and thus reduce your health care costs over your lifetime.

Even better, add a bit of exercise to the pot. I am a huge fan of the fitness ladder, which is basically just a bunch of very simple exercises that you can do to put yourself in better shape. They can be done in fifteen minutes; I usually just do them right before a shower because I usually get a bit out of breath and sweaty.

So here’s the one hour plan: make an extra effort to do this stuff for a week. Try drinking more water and keeping more of it on hand. Eat some breakfast. Try some dried fruits, and maybe give a loaf of a whole grain bread a try. Maybe even exercise a little. See if it replaces other routines in your life simply and naturally. You might just find that you’re as happy as you were before, maybe even more healthy, and definitely with a few more coins jingling in your pocket.

About six months ago, my wife and I were going through our DVD collection looking for items to clean out. As we did this, we rediscovered a pretty nice little pile of about twenty five DVDs or so that we deeply enjoyed but had found their way to the recesses of our collection. Rather than watching new movies for a while, we decided to go through this pile, watching a few movies a week until we had rewatched these old favorites.

So that’s what we did for the next two months. We cuddled up on the couch and rewatched Citizen Kane, My Man Godfrey, Arsenic and Old Lace, and so on (yes, we’re both big fans of old movies). The only expense for many evenings of fun was the energy to run the DVD player and the television and the cost of many bowls of homemade popcorn.

During this period, not only did we not buy a single DVD, but we also cancelled our Netflix subscription. We realized we already had more than ample entertainment, and if we got a strong desire to watch a specific new release, we could just rent it locally. Our entertainment budget dropped significantly.

We had so much fun doing this that we’ve since done the same with our book collection, rereading a big pile of our old favorites and even “bookclubbing” a few of them, where we read the same book at roughly the same pace and talk about it. I now have a pile of about twenty five books on my nightstand just waiting to be read – and they were all found in our book collection.

This provides three separate financial benefits. First, it keeps me from buying more media – I have no reason to buy more books for enjoyment (or even get them from the library) with a pile like that on my bedside stand. Second, it increases the value of the books I already own – getting several more hours out of each one makes them a more effective purchase. Third, it provides a very inexpensive and simultaneously very fulfilling activity to fill my time – not quite free, but pretty close to it – because a big stack of books to read often encourages me to read more than I would otherwise.

Here’s what you do.

Dig into one of your media collections and pull out twenty five items that make you excited when you see them. This can be books, DVDs, videos, CDs, old magazines – whatever you have a significant collection of. You can pull out more than 25, of course, but don’t pull out the majority of the collection, either (unless you’re deeply passionate).

Then, over the next few months, spend time enjoying the items you picked out. Read those books again (or maybe for the first time). Watch those DVDs. Listen to those CDs. Reread those old magazine articles. Just enjoy this stuff you have during your ordinary leisure time.

What happens? You’re suddenly making your leisure time far less expensive than it was before, while at the same time getting serious enjoyment out of things. This means a big savings in the pocketbook without giving up the things you enjoy.

A while back, I mentioned how I build my own price book. While this is a great idea, for most busy people it would take a lot of extra work to execute it. However, I know from personal experience how much money a price book can really save you.

Here’s what I recommend instead: use the basic framework of the price book idea to just identify which local grocery store is cheapest on the items you buy regularly, then stick with that store. For me, identifying the store with the best prices for my purchases saves me about $20 a week over the average store – and it wasn’t the store I thought was cheapest, either.

Here’s what you need to do.

First, identify all of the grocery stores that you’d be willing to shop at. For me, the nearest town with any competitive shopping has a Hy-Vee, a Dahl’s, a Fareway, a Super Target, and a Wal Mart Supercenter, among the ones I would be willing to shop at.

Next, make a list of the twenty or thirty (or more) items you buy regularly. This includes basic food staples like bread, eggs, and cheese to toiletries and other such supplies. List produce, list beverages, list prepackaged meals – whatever it is that you buy regularly. For me, this list ended up with about thirty items on it.

Once you’ve done that, make a regular shopping trip to each of those stores. While there, note the price on each of these items in that store. I found it useful to print off several copies of the list of items, then take a copy of it to each store as I went, so I could jot down the prices. Take down the price of every item on the list – if a store doesn’t carry a particular item, find the closest substitute and note that.

When you’ve done this for each store, just add up the prices of all of the items to get your total for each store – and then you should do your regular shopping at the store with the lowest total. I’ve done this myself, and I discovered that the least expensive store for the items I buy regularly was not the store I expected it to be, and when I switched my regular store I found that my average grocery bill dropped noticeably – about $10 a week. Week in and week out, that adds up to $520 a year, even if you’re focusing entirely on basic ingredients and fresh foods, as I do. I can easily see how the difference might be much more if you buy a lot of prepared food items and sodas and such.

Admittedly, this one will take more than an hour – perhaps as much as two – but the rewards over the long haul can be tremendous.

My wife and I generally plan a week’s worth of dinners at once for several reasons. First, it’s clear to both of us what the dinner plan is well in advance. Second, we’re able to be sure we have everything we need for dinner on hand. Third, it’s way cheaper than even making meals off hand at home – and way, way cheaper than eating out or getting take out.

It only takes an hour to plan it and get the supplies you need on hand, from the moment you’re sitting at home with a piece of paper in front of you to having everything you need for the whole week in your cupboard. Here’s what you do.

Grab the weekly flyer from your favorite grocery store. I get mine with the Sunday paper and in the regular mail. If all else fails, pick up the flyer on your way home from work, but it’s pretty easy to get your hands on one.

When you’re ready to plan, sit down with the flyer, a sheet of paper, and a pen. List the seven days of the week on the paper with enough room under it to list what you’re planning on eating for that meal.

Next, go through that flyer and circle a few on-sale items that seem tasty to you. These will serve as the foundation for your meals for the week – yep, you’ll take advantage of what’s on sale to plan your meals for the week.

When you have the items you like, come up with seven meals using those ingredients. Let’s say hamburger is on sale. You might want to have hamburgers one night and maybe beef tacos another night. Even better, look for meal ideas that use multiples of the ingredients on sale. If you don’t have any bright ideas, use the basic do-it-yourself casserole recipe and find ingredients to match.

Now, when you’ve filled in all seven slots, figure out all the ingredients you’ll need for the meals. List them out if you need to. Then check and see which ingredients you already have on hand. A well stocked kitchen should have most things you need on hand, but at the end of the day, you’re going to want everything at home.

Make up a shopping list of everything you need. List every item that you’ll need for these recipes, nothing more, nothing less. You may want to include some simple items for other meals – I generally encourage fresh fruits and oatmeal for breakfast because they’re relatively cheap, very healthy, and filling.

Then, head out to the store. Stick strictly to that shopping list – get nothing else. When you go through the checkout, look at the number on your receipt at the end and realize that your entire family will eat seven dinners (and maybe even more, including leftovers) for this amount. Of course, it is a bit more because you’ll be using stuff you have at home, but the savings will really be obvious.

Give this a try for one week, and look at that receipt when you’re done at the grocery store. When you realize that is your food bill for the entire week, you’ll feel a lot better about your money.

About once a month, I spend an hour doing nothing else but touching base with a long list of professional acquaintances as well as with people in my local community. To many, I send them an email asking what’s new, give some basic information about what’s new with me, and usually attempt to start a conversation of some sort, usually in the professional realm but sometimes on other issues. For a small handful, I actually ring them up and say hello – these are ones where the connection is tighter. If they live near me, I’ll usually make a regular effort to stroll over and chat with them when it’s at all possible.

Why do I do this? There are several reasons.

The biggest one is that I like to keep in touch with what all of my professional acquaintances are up to – this simply gives me a good idea of what the trends are in my field in general. I also have what I call “soft” friendships with many of them – we’ll hang out at meetings and share a few drinks or a meal.

I also often get an opportunity to make connections between people – for example, if I know one freelancer with a particular skill and another person who needs help from someone with that skill, I don’t hesitate to connect them. Not only is it mutually beneficial for them, but they both end up with positive feelings towards me – and a greater willingness to help me if I need a hand.

Also, whenever there comes a time where I need something, I suddenly have a large group of people that can help. This can mean a foot in the door for a new job, some professional assistance, or actually in a few cases, some personal support (when we moved, for example).

In other words, doing this is beneficial in many dimensions.

If this sounds really intriguing and worthwhile to you, I highly recommend the book Never Eat Alone, which I reviewed in detail a while back. It describes why connecting with people is so important and provides a tremendous amount of guidance on how to get started, even for a relatively anti-social person like me (actually, asocial is probably a better word).

So how do I get started? Here’s what you do.

First, make a long list of all of your professional acquaintances, as well as community leaders you know. I usually just collect names, email addresses, perhaps some additional contact info, and a few little pieces of information as a reminder of who they are, and I keep them in a Word document.

Then, contact each of them individually. I find that emails work well for this, but don’t just send a blanket form letter. Actually write to each person. You can reuse elements if you’d like, but the point is to send something distinct and individual to each person you want to touch base with.

When you start getting responses, respond sensibly and also look for potential connections you can make. You might be surprised at what starts happening when you do this – and do it every once in a while over time. If nothing else, it will help your career, often in ways you don’t expect.

When I first got my job, I pretty much paid minimal attention to the benefits that were available to me. I signed up for a 401(k), but only put in enough to match. I signed up for the cheap health insurance option. And that was it, even though if I dug around, there were lots of other benefits available to me.

When I finally got some sense, though, I realized I was missing out on a lot of worthwhile stuff that my organization offered to me, so I started digging around. I wound up with free meals, free college coursework, free tickets to sporting and cultural events, a free term life insurance policy, and much more. How? I spent some time digging around the benefits office at work and finding out about all of the programs. All told, it only took about an hour to discover all of this stuff. Obviously, your mileage may vary, but here’s what you should do at work when you have an hour to burn.

Look through the employee material given to you when you signed up for work. Look for all of the benefits programs available to you. Almost always, there are several things mentioned in the manual that were never mentioned during the orientation session. Catalog everything you find that might be of interest to you.

Place a friendly call to the benefits office. Ask if there’s a full listing of benefits programs. If you can’t get one of those, ask for an updated copy of the employee orientation materials. This will provide additional material to look through.

Sign up for every program you find of interest to you. I found a life insurance program that I didn’t even know existed when I started digging. It’s basically free term life insurance for every employee – if you know about it. I figured that signing on a dotted line was well worth getting a life insurance policy that lasts while I work there equal to a multiple of my salary. If you find anything of interest or benefit to you that’s part of your benefits package, sign up for it.

Utilize every career advancement option available to you. For example, if your organization will pay for college credit, start taking something. Start on an evening MBA, or work towards a master’s degree in your area of expertise. If you can get free tickets to cultural events, get everything you can and use them instead of doing other things that would actually pinch your wallet.

My philosophy is that if it’s a benefit at work that’s given to all employees, I might as well be using it since the company’s already paying for it and viewing it as part of my compensation. You should, too – don’t hesitate to look up the programs available to you and sign up today.

Keeping your focus on getting out of debt can be a challenge for some people. It’s so incredibly easy to just not think about it at all and make a bad financial choice, like putting something unnecessary on the credit card or going out for an expensive dinner and drinks.

One of the most effective tools I use to remind me of my progress is a visual debt reminder. It’s simply some sort of visual item that reminds you of your commitment to reduce or eliminate your personal debt and also to simply spend less than you earn.

The inspiration One form this might take is an image of that which is inspiring you to become debt free. For me, this would be my children, particularly my son who was the person who really inspired me to start turning things around.

The goal If you have a specific goal in mind, you might also want to include a picture of this goal. My wife and I have a 15 year goal of buying a piece of land in the country and building a home on it, so for us we would potentially use a picture of a country home as our visual reminder.

The progress bar You might also want to construct a progress bar that shows your progress as you move from your current debt total to zero. Each time you calculate your debt total, you’ll (ideally) move a bit closer to zero, so you can fill in a bit of the progress bar.

What I did for myself was combine different elements. I digitally placed a progress bar at the bottom of an image so I could see myself progressing towards the goal of being debt free.

What should one do with such a reminder? I keep such reminders all over the place: on the dashboard of my truck, in my wallet wrapped around my credit cards, and in a few other places where I’ll see it regularly. It constantly reminds me of my goals and my real priorities and cuts down greatly on the influence that spur of the moment things have on me.

Take a few minutes, sit down at your computer, and create for yourself a visual reminder of your personal finance goals. When you have one designed, print out a few copies and put them in places where they’ll remind you of what your real goals are (I really recommend wrapping one around credit cards, for instance). Then, as you make progress towards your goal, take pride in this effort and start filling in that progress bar. As you see it constantly filling up over time, you’ll begin to see the connection between your good choices and your dreams.