I read a lot of material on personal finance for this blog, from at least one personal finance book a week to issues of Money, The Wall Street Journal, Consumer Reports, and so on. What might surprise you, though, is that most of my reading that really inspires me to write about money issues comes from other sources. Here are seven things I’ve read that have inspired me to keep my financial house in order – and a few of them might be quite surprising to you.

The New Yorker I’ve repeatedly been inspired by The New Yorker to think about my situation in a different way, from how to thrift shop for clothes to the power of checklists in managing your life. In fact, there’s usually at least one article a week that inspires me in some way to think differently about money, time, and how I write about it.

Classic literature I enjoy classic literature quite a lot, as it explores the lives and thoughts of people who live in a different world than mine. It encourages me to see things through a different set of eyes, different experiences, different everything. Such a paradigm shift often reveals many interesting ideas and truths. For example, lately I’ve been rereading the novels of John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row – and I’ve been thinking in detail about the lessons of disasters and extreme poverty.

Writer’s Digest I started reading this magazine hoping to learn how to polish my writing skills for publication, but the most useful parts are the ones on how to creatively assemble ideas and how to structure them in a usable way. Naturally, I apply these techniques directly to personal finance materials, and they often end up revealing new ideas and angles that I hadn’t considered before.

The local newspaper The weekly newspaper in my local town is free – entirely advertising supported. I pick it up faithfully at the local gas station because it lists all of the activities going on in the town, most of which are free and are also great places to meet people and expand my social connections. Plus, there is a general utility in being aware of the latest happenings in my local town.

BusinessWeek I’m able to read BusinessWeek thanks to a subscription at work. What I learn about most from BusinessWeek is efficiency, because in the end that’s what this magazine is really about. In my mind, efficiency is a key part of personal finance, because if you are inefficient with your money or your time, you wind up in debt – or at least with diminished amounts of money in your life.

Personal productivity books There’s a reason I review a personal productivity or personal development book each week. Time is money, and having a poor concept of how you spend your time or wasting a lot of time is basically a waste of money as well. I strive to constantly improve on my time management and my sense that I’m covering all of the important areas in my life and devoting appropriate time to each of them – without it, my life would feel empty in some way and I would also not earn nearly as much money as I did before.

Vogue I often see this on the table at various office visits (dental, doctor, hair, etc.) and I always pick it up because it reminds me on every single page of the absurdity of rampant consumer culture. $1,500 for a pair of sandals that I could assemble a reasonable facsimile of at home for about $10? In my eyes, this type of thing is the enemy, because it devalues our work and our time.

A while back, I discussed five principles of deciding whether or not to subscribe to a magazine. Here they are, in nutshell form:

Do I actually read the magazine?
Would I buy the magazine on the newsstand if I didn’t subscribe?
Does the information in the magazine directly affect my bottom line?
Could I just read it at the library?
Would it make a good gift instead of paying for it?

These questions are quite useful in filtering out potential magazines you might subscribe to, but I currently face a different conundrum. Since many of my subscriptions were given to me as Christmas gifts, I’m facing a pile of renewal notices. This means I have to evaluate my subscriptions to see if I wish to renew them or let them expire, a rather different situation than trying to decide if I want to subscribe. Here are my four signs that I should let a magazine subscription cancel itself.

For starters, I currently subscribe to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Wired, Consumer Reports, Money, and Make.

I have multiple unread issues of the magazine and have made no effort to read them. This is a sure death knell. If I’m letting them build up significantly, that means I’m not really bothering to read them after all, which means that my subscription is money blowing in the wind. This eliminates Harper’s – I have several issues of this backed up while I devour the current issue of other magazines.

The magazine’s content is largely available for free online. Wired has had a few of the best articles I’ve ever read anywhere (Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us by Bill Joy comes to mind), but if I’m willing to stay an issue or two behind, I can read most of the worthwhile stuff online. I don’t really need the technolust in my house, anyway.

The aspects of the magazine that interested you at first aren’t representative of an average issue. Here, Mother Jones comes to mind. I read an issue with two brilliant articles in it and I thought it was a well-written magazine portraying a sensible liberal perspective. As I got several issues in the mail, though, it became clear that the magazine had a very strong leftist bent, to the point of often seeming irrational to me. I’ll read one article that seems sensible, then I’ll read something that just comes off as foundationally wrong. In the current issue, a great article outlining treatments given to autistic children is immediately followed by a piece of rubbish about Hillary Clinton’s faith and a few snide taunts about the Senate’s Prayer Breakfast that people from both parties attend. You know, you can write intelligent and well-written articles with both a leftist and a rightist perspective without resorting to base immaturity and taunting. Mother Jones is going in my trash can.

My interests have moved on. Although this doesn’t really apply to the magazines here, this has resulted in a lot of subscription cancellations in my past. Sports Illustrated and Golf Digest both bit the dust for this reason – I kept finding less and less that piqued my interest, even though their content wasn’t really changing. If you find that you’re now reading maybe one article per issue of a magazine you used to devour, ask yourself if your interests are changing. If they are, cut the cord and save your money.

The magazine is overpriced. Make could potentially be in this category as it’s the most expensive one I subscribe to by far, but so far I’ve burnt many hours on each issue and have every one of them stored in the closet so I can do some of the projects with my son and daughter when they grow older. I generally look at it this way – if a subscription to a magazine is costing you more than $1/hour of your enjoyment of it, you’re likely overpaying for it – just look at it at the library or newsstand.

This leaves me with The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Make. I am on the border with Consumer Reports and Money – the fact that I review them here means I’ll likely continue getting them, but without that impetus I would likely move to an online subscription of CR and just read Money at the library once every few months like I do with Kiplinger’s and SmartMoney.

Being realistic about my magazines will save me about $50 in the coming year without any significant loss to my reading diet.

Recently, I downloaded the Consumer Action Handbook, an interesting 178 page document produced by the U.S. government’s General Services Administration. It’s an excellent free resource for basic consumer information of all kinds, including a huge collection of contact information for consumer advocates and customer service departments.

I thought I’d give this free document a walk-through similar to one of my book reviews, but shorter since you can download it and read it for yourself for free.

What’s Inside The Consumer Action Handbook?
The handbook is actually composed of four separate parts, though the first one provided the most interesting reading by far. The actual readable content is only about sixty pages; the last one hundred pages or so is a list of addresses and contact information for various consumer advocates and corporate customer service departments.

Part I – Be A Savvy Consumer
I found this first section to be an enjoyable read. It’s about fifty pages in length and is tightly jammed with basic information on tons of different consumer issues. A brief rundown: general buying tips, banking, cars, credit, education, employment, food and nutrition, health care, housing, insurance, internet, investing, phones, identity protection, privacy protection, home shopping, telemarketing and junk mail, travel, television, utilities, and wills and funerals. Each subject has about three pages or so devoted to it in a highly compressed fashion.

I learned a lot of interesting things from this part of the document – one item in particular saved me money right after I read it. We were about to purchase house insurance at the time I downloaded this and I realized that we were indeed insuring the lot’s value as well. This saved us a nice little bit on our home insurance.

Part II – Filing A Complaint
Many people have little idea how to appropriately handle a bad product or service. There are many techniques and avenues available to consumers who have purchased defective products or been exposed to faulty services and this section effectively summarizes these in just a few pages. This is excellent reference material to read if you purchase a faulty product and don’t know where to go in order to get a replacement or to make others aware of the issue.

Part III – Key Consumer Information Resources and Part IV – Consumer Assistance Directory
The rest of the document is an extremely thorough collection of contact information for consumer assistance of all kinds. The PDF is updated regularly to keep these addresses current, which means that it may be worthwhile to re-download this PDF on occasion. At the very least, once you’ve identified a useful contact from this list, visit the web site of that organization.

Is It Worth Downloading?
It’s an interesting read. For me, some of the information was almost common sense, while other pieces were quite intriguing. I’ve downloaded it and saved it in my reference materials folder on my desktop because I can see myself utilizing the information in the future, if for no other reason than to get a good starting place when seeking out who to contact about a consumer issue. If that’s of interest to you, download it and save it; if it’s not, the document is at least worth a perusal.

I currently subscribe to seven magazines: The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Mother Jones, Wired, Consumer Reports, and Money. That seems like a lot, but it’s actually down from the ten magazines I subscribed to before my son was born.

Why so many magazine subscriptions? There are two reasons, really: one, I ask for them as gifts a lot, and two, I actually read them. I leave the newest issues out on the table for guests to flip through (my father-in-law basically reads The New Yorker and The Atlantic cover to cover when he visits) and for me to read in my spare time; when it’s time to rotate them, I read anything I may have missed, save the New Yorker covers for art projects, and then toss them.

On the other hand, for many people magazine subscriptions are a great waste of money. They sit around gathering dust and end up being lost money for the people who subscribe.

In my opinion, when you’re looking for fat to trim from your budget, magazines should be one of the first places to look. Ask yourself these questions:

Do I actually read the magazine? Don’t idealize the question by saying, “Well, I would if I had time…” If you say that, then you don’t read the magazine and it’s probably a pretty good clue that you shouldn’t be subscribing. Note that this doesn’t mean you have to read every issue, just a large portion of them.

Would I buy the magazine on the newsstand if I didn’t subscribe? This is what actually got me to subscribe to at least three of the magazines above – I kept reading it on the newsstand and often buying an issue. If you find yourself buying even a quarter of the issues of a magazine on the newsstand, it’s more cost-effective just to subscribe to the magazine.

Does the information in the magazine directly affect my bottom line? This is a big reason why I subscribe to Consumer Reports. Prior to writing the issue reviews on The Simple Dollar, I used to primarily subscribe so I could use their online service as a reference to aid in product purchases. Thus, I will likely subscribe to Consumer Reports for the indefinite future, especially since there are several purchases coming up that I will consult Consumer Reports on.

Could I just read it at the library? This is why I stopped subscribing to Science and The Economist – I could easily read them both at the library during my weekly visit (I spend a couple of hours there each week, usually on Thursday evenings, reading periodicals and exchanging books).

Would it make a good gift instead of paying for it? I traditionally receive a few of my magazine subscriptions as gifts from relatives, because it is a great gift that I appreciate throughout the whole year. Would I subscribe on my own? I’m not entirely sure, but I am sure that I do really appreciate receiving a renewal as a gift.

Addressing each of these questions made it clear that if I were completely subscribing on my own, including no gifts or anything else, I would only subscribe to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Consumer Reports, and I am very strongly considering subscribing to Make. This would easily trim more than 50% from my magazine spending in a year.

Take a look at what you’re doing with your magazines – you might be surprised to find the fat that you can excise from your spending.

This post isn’t strictly about personal finance; instead, it serves to answer a question that a lot of readers have asked me over the past few months. What do I read? How do I read? Why do I read? Instead of having a “Simple Dollar reading week,” I tried to compress all of this information into one entry, answering most of the regular questions on the topic that I get from readers. Don’t worry, there is a bit of personal finance buried in here and there.

Why do I read?
As a general rule of thumb, I read primarily to inform myself and improve my understanding of the world. With a few exceptions, the books I read are nonfiction and what I would describe as “heavy” literature; the magazines are also weighty, as well.

How much do you read?
In a given week, I read about four books and about four magazines cover to cover. I also browse dozens of blogs of all stripes.

That’s a lot! How do you keep up?
I devote a minimum of an hour each day specifically to reading, and it’s often more than that. Plus, I have taught myself to read quite quickly.

What do you read regularly?
The magazines I am currently subscribed to are The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Consumer Reports, and Money, the latter two primarily for The Simple Dollar. My wife subscribes to Discover. We seem to also get Wired and Mother Jones, both of which are apparently gifts of some sort, though neither of us really recall the gift. We’re also hoping to add a subscription to Make in the future. If I had to keep only one, I’d easily choose The New Yorker, as there’s something I truly enjoy in every single issue and it’s a weekly.

Isn’t that expensive?
Not really. Magazine subscriptions are one of my favorite gifts, and so I often get a couple of renewals for Christmas gifts.

How do you read magazines?
I basically have a “last in, first out” stack of magazines beside my bed, as I do most of my magazine reading in the hour or so before sleep. I usually mark things with a pen that are interesting that I want to look at later on. We don’t save them at all, though we do occasionally save articles in electronic form by scanning them, and we would save each issue of Make if we were to subscribe because we see lots of possibilities for parent-child projects in it.

What about books?
I usually devote about an hour per weekday and two-three hours on a weekend day to reading a book. This timeframe enables me to read about four books a week on average. I usually try to do at least some of this where my son can observe me, so he can see that reading is a thing that people do as part of the normal course of a day.

Wow! Four books a week! Isn’t that expensive?
Not really. I have a lot of tools for getting books on the cheap: PaperBackSwap, the library, and a volunteer book exchange program that I’m involved with. I do occasionally buy new books, but not very often and usually only after some extensive research.

What were the last ten books you read?
This is as of April 25, 2007, and gives a pretty good snapshot of what I’m reading right now (and also a preview of some likely future reviews on The Simple Dollar):
The Four Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The Random Walk Guide to Investing by Burton G. Malkiel
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee
The Now Habit by Neil Fiore
The Truth About Money by Ric Edelman
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes
The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier
Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath

Again, why read so much?
I’ve read at a similar pace for my entire life (actually at a higher pace during my high school and collegiate years), and as a result I have a pretty firm basic understanding of almost any topic. Because of this, I can now go to a dinner party and be involved in one conversation on the changes in music distribution caused by the 1980’s “do it yourself” methodology, then turn around and talk about Milton Friedman’s Chilean Miracle with someone else, then just as quickly be involved in a chat about … well, pretty much anything. More than once, this has proved very useful to me, and here’s an example.

When I interviewed for a job a few years ago, I was asked to wait in a waiting room until the time of the interview, so I pulled out a copy of a book I was reading at the time, Ron Chernow’s excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton. The person who was to interview me noticed this book and we started to discuss it, and from there the discussion branched out into many different areas. By the end of the interview, I had not been asked a single question that was really related to the job, but I got the job anyway. Later, I found out that the person interviewing me was blown away with how well-read I was and how well I could assemble the ideas, and that was enough.

If you choose stuff that makes your mind work, reading is far from a waste of time.

In the May 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine (which should be on newsstands shortly – I am a subscriber), a fascinating cover article appears entitled “Manufacturing Depression: A Journey into the Economy of Melancholy.” Written by Gary Greenberg, a psychotherapist, the article’s main idea is that true depression is actually an extremely rare event and the prevalence of depression in America is manufactured.

So why are so many Americans “depressed,” at least in the eyes of modern medicine?

First, most of the people who are currently diagnosed as depressed are actually just melancholic, which is a normal, healthy mood. Often, people who are strongly melancholic a good deal of the time are also not depressed – they merely have other factors in their life that are contributing to a melancholic mood. I admit that I often am in a melancholic mood and have wondered if I am depressed, but often doing certain activities repeatedly will improve the mood over time, so this part of the article seems highly true to me.

Second, the tests for identifying the depressed and also measuring the progress of the depressed rely on each other for statistical validity. From the article:

The way that these researchers decide whether these tests can accurately indicate depression is by correlating responses on them to reponses on tests already known to measure depression – a good idea, unless there is no anchor on the end of the chain, in which case you may have created a self-validating semiotic monster.

In other words, the only evidence that a test for depression actually indicates depression is that another pre-existing test says so.

Third, in FDA clinical trials, antidepressants only make a very small difference in treating depression, as compared to placebos. Another quote from the article:

The advantage of antidepressants over placebos in those trials [FDA trials for Celexa] was an average of two points on the HAM-D [a very common test for registering improvement in treating depression], a result that could be achieved if the patient ate and slept better. The average improvement in antidepressant clinical trials is just over ten points, which means, according to Irving Kirsch, a University of Connecticut psychologist, that nearly 80 percent of the drug effect is actually a placebo.

Given that antidepressants can easily cost as much as $3 a pill, this is a pretty significant article worth reading for people who are suffering from clinically diagnosed depression. The questions raised by this article, written in a highly reputable and fact-checked publication, are serious enough that a person taking antidepressants should ask some serious questions about what they’re really taking – and why.

While I am the last person to claim any sort of medical expertise, I do know what it feels like to exhibit many of the symptoms of depression and my own experience showed me that making some lifestyle changes and committing myself to them enabled me to move away from a constant state of melancholy into a much happier life. The tips below are no substitute for medical advice, but if you are concerned about feeling depressed, here are ten tips for battling a melancholic mood with free or nearly free things that may help.

Have fun. Do something that can completely take you away from the feelings of your everyday routine. Turn off your cell phone for a few hours and dive into something with your whole heart. For me, this is actually the library, or else a long walk in the wilderness. Because I’m cut off from the routine and the pressures that go with it, I come back feeling genuinely reinvigorated and ready to meet the challenges of life.

Eat well. Make sure you’re getting enough fruits and vegetables in your diet – and, no, the lettuce on your fast food hamburger doesn’t count. If you don’t prepare food for yourself, try eating food at restaurants that prepare well-balanced meals.

Get some exercise. If you’re out of shape, just go for a walk around the block. Stretch yourself out a time or two a day by flexing all of your joints as far as you can. A strong exercise regimen is a big commitment for some, but anyone can take the time to stretch and go for a walk.

Drink lots of water. The USDA recommends eight 8 ounce glasses of water a day, not soda or beer or anything else. Turn on your tap and drink – it’s really inexpensive and one of the best things you can do for yourself.

Associate with people that you primarily associated with when you were happy. In other words, try to reconnect with old friends and family members. Sometimes, you’ll discover that your social crowd is sometimes responsible for your negative feelings – and if that’s the case, you need to make some changes to your social life.

Set small goals – and reach them. Don’t go home and sit around in a state of sadness because you can’t accomplish anything. Set a very small goal that you can reach in an hour or two, then just try to do it. When you’re able to do that, try easing into a productivity plan like GTD which anyone can use and is very effective at making you feel really productive. A sense of achievement is one of life’s greatest natural boosts.

Get a normal amount of sleep. For most people, a normal night of sleep is between seven and ten hours. If you’re getting significantly less or significantly more than this, try to adjust your sleep so that you’re in that range.

Get regular massages. My wife and I give each other massages and it may in fact be the most consistent long-term mood elevator in my life. If you don’t have a significant other or a close friend who can give you a gentle massage, it may be worth saving up nickels and dimes to get a professional one.

Don’t expect dramatic mood improvement overnight. If you walk around the block, get an endorphin rush, and use that rush to do four or five things that have been nagging you, and suddenly you feel really good, don’t despair if the sadness returns. An overall mood, especially an entrenched one, doesn’t change overnight. Try doing more of the positive things that made you feel better instead.

Go to sleep thinking about the positive things you did today, not the negative ones. Make it a goal to do at least one positive thing in a day – walking around the block, going to work and getting your tasks done, sweeping the kitchen floor, getting through your GTD inbox, whatever it takes – and then think about that success as you go to sleep at night. It gives your mind something good to focus on as you wind down in the evening and drift off to dreamland.

If it is true that you are merely suffering from melancholy and not depression, some combination of these activities can almost assuredly lift your mood – and save you the tremendous cost of professional help and antidepressants. However, if these do not help, please seek a medical professional.

Over at Dethroner, Joel is going off on some of the content of Details magazine. Here’s the offending quote in question (from this Details article):

Clinging to tradition is your prerogative. Go ahead and refuse to trade in your “perfectly good” 2001 Lexus; shampoo with Pert Plus even though something in a better-looking bottle might make your hair look shinier; order the lone chicken dish on the menu at a sushi restaurant. But there’s a point at which a resistance to modernization stops being charming—especially when it leads you to do something that’s profoundly detrimental to your appearance, such as cramming a wallet in the back pocket of your pants.

… and Joel had this to say, among other things:

Not content to attack back pocket wallet wearing by itself, Details has to grinds its stiletto heels into its readers to get its frivolous point across. You drive a seven-year-old Lexus and wash your hair with cheap shampoo? Barbarous wretch, unsuited for copulation! How do you roll off the chaise lounge every afternoon?

Joel takes the approach that the magazine’s content is damaging to male self-image, and I agree with that, but I actually think the problem runs much deeper.

In theory, Details (and other magazines like it) sell image. The articles are all about how to create a persona for yourself that is attractive to others, particularly the opposite sex. That’s fine, as there’s definitely a place for such material in life – I advocate that even highly frugal people pay attention to appearance and master social skills.

However, this is a perfect example of where selling image crosses the line into blatant consumerism. Insulting the reader for driving a “perfectly good” 2001 Lexus? Insulting the reader for using Pert Plus instead of an expensive shampoo that may or may not make your hair shinier?

That’s not about selling image, that’s about selling products. There is no consumer product in the world that will actually change who you are, no matter how expensive. It might change the appearance of who you are, but in the end it is you, not the car or the hair, that makes all the difference.

If you read that paragraph in Details and felt guilty, don’t. It’s attempting to sell you something and using your own emotions against you. Even worse, this material appears in the portion of the magazine that is supposedly content, not advertising. I would expect that marketers would use emotional hooks to convince me to buy a product, but when I read this, the truth is clear: when you buy “image” magazines that publish drivel like this, you’re paying money for an advertisement, nothing more, nothing less.

If you want to project a good image, keep clean, dress well, and know how to communicate. If you’ve got those three covered, you’re ahead of a great majority of the human race. You don’t need to drive an expensive car or use $100 shampoo to make a great impression.

Today, my wife and I spent an hour at a bookstore waiting to meet some acquaintances. As I usually do, I browsed the magazine rack looking for current personal finance magazines when my eyes stumbled upon Make. For those unfamiliar, Make is a relatively new magazine that focuses exclusively on do-it-yourself technology projects, something that I was extremely passionate about at one point in my life.

Ordinarily, I might glance at an issue of such a magazine, go “Hmmm…,” and put it back on the shelf, but one thing made me pay attention: in the lower right of the cover, it said “The $5 Guitar Amp.” Given my musical interests, my technology interests, and my frugality interests, it almost became inevitable that I picked up the magazine and found the article.

And I fell in love. Here’s why.

Almost all of the articles focus on doing things yourself. This is basically one of the fundamental principles of frugal living: doing things yourself to save money. Even if the items made aren’t useful, they are great in the sense that they are about self-reliance, and you can learn new things by doing them. The entire magazine is little else.

Most of the articles have very little expense. As I mentioned, the cover of issue #9 mentions a $5 guitar amp. Many of the projects only require stuff laying around the house or garage. For example, one article explains how to make a stellar hammock out of an old bedsheet and two pieces of vinyl rope. Another one shows how to make a rather elegant coffee table out of plywood. If you’re a photo enthusiast, there’s a great ten page description of how to build your own pinhole camera out of, well, a lot of inexpensive bits.

These projects are great to do by yourself or with others. The magazine’s instructions are detailed enough that you can do most of the stuff alone, but also interesting enough that you can easily involve others. I look forward to doing a lot of these types of things with my son when he gets older.

Almost no ads. Whenever I read magazines, I get sick of the ads. I counted nine pages of ads in this 192 page issue. ’nuff said.

There is one big drawback, though: it’s rather expensive. The cover price is $14.95 an issue for the magazine. However, the content is so spot-on that I am considering a subscription to the magazine in the future.

If you have some spare time and are interested in technology and frugality, I’d highly recommend checking out Make’s web site as it includes a ton of supplementary material to the magazine, as well as more projects and ideas.