Lately, I’ve been under a lot of stress – perhaps the highest level of stress I’ve been under since switching to a full-time writing career. I’m in absolute crunch mode with my second book, with a manuscript due in a few days. I’ve also been slowly moving into public speaking – and I certainly get a healthy amount of stage nervousness. There have been multiple medical issues with my family (two different child illnesses, plus an issue with my wife that I’ll post about in great detail later this week). There have been several family-related demands lately as well.

Add that all together – plus the usual issues with a busy household with two young kids – and I’m feeling the stress. I’ve not had time as of late to exercise with all of the demands on me, either, which is something that really has been useful over the last year for keeping me energetic.

One major thing I’ve noticed is how this has all directly affected my personal choices when it comes to spending. To put it simply, I’ve been more tempted than I have been in a long time to spend money without really thinking about it. In fact, just a few weeks ago, I wrote about one experience along those lines.

I’m not alone in noticing this phenomenon. In this article on MoneyCentral about stress and spending, the author makes the astute point that we often spend to relieve stress in the short term, but it adds up to additional stress in the long term.

I’ll absolutely agree with part of that. Overspending today will unquestionably lead to more stress in the long term. If you spend money today on something purely impulsive, you won’t have money to spend tomorrow on something genuinely important to you. That $30 impulse buy today means you stay in debt for a little longer and pay a little bit more interest along the way.

However, I think there are at least two more connections between stress and spending not addressed in that article that I’ve noticed in my own behavior.

First, when you’re stressed, you’re simply not as mindful as you might otherwise be. Normally, when I’m in a buying situation, I’m pretty mindful of the situation. I recognize the temptations around me and the subtle cues I’m being fed to buy more than I should.

When I’m stressed, though, I’m distracted. Stress is caused by something that’s on your mind, sapping away at your consciousness. When that happens, those subtle buying cues become radically more effective. Instead of rationally looking at the situations you’re in, you look at it with less than your full attention – and those subtle little cues take over.

Second, stress pulls you away from those important to you, and sometimes you overcompensate. While finishing up my manuscript and rushing to make my deadline, I’ve found myself working into the wee small hours of the night many nights. This leaves me exhausted the next morning – and I recognize that I’m not quite as “there” for my children as I normally am in the morning.

Then, when my son, who’s been wonderful through all of this, will innocently turn to me and ask, “Dad… can we go bowling?” or something similar, and that perfectly plays on my desire to do fun things with my children combined directly with my sense that I’ve not been doing quite as well as I have been lately. The end result? I’m far, far more susceptible to saying “Sure!” and going bowling than I would be under less stress.

To put it simply, a higher stress level makes it more likely that you’ll spend unnecessarily. Thus, the reverse is true: if you can reduce your stress level, it’s likely that you’ll also reduce the prevalence of frivolous spending in your life.

Having said that, here are the five stress-reduction techniques that work best for me.

Focus on what’s stressing you. I find that distraction and avoidance usually make me more stressed out. Instead, if I actually focus on what’s stressing me and attempt to come up with a real solution for the problem, I not only feel better in the short term, but I also contribute to a better long-term solution as well.

Talk about what’s stressing you. My wife is a wonderful listener. Find someone who will listen to you rant and rail about what’s bothering you. It’s cathartic.

Meditate. Spending twenty minutes praying or meditating deeply can really clear your mind of a lot of detritus and put you in a much calmer place. I find more rest in meditating for twenty minutes than in sleeping for two hours.

Exercise. Whenever I consistently exercise, my energy level is significantly higher, plus my stress level is naturally lower. I find that I feel much more able to deal with the challenges of life.

Eliminate a less-important life element. One big cause of stress is an overstuffed schedule. If you’re in this situation, seek out an element of your life that you can let go for a while and just let it go. Perhaps it means withdrawing from a community group. Maybe it means slowing down your schedule of washing the carpets. Whatever it is, step back and give yourself some breathing room in life.

The lower the stress, the less you spend.

I’ve written many, many times about how relevatory keeping a “thought notebook” in my pocket has been for me. Whenever I have a stray thought that might be useful at all to remember later, I jot it down in the notebook and then review it later, usually a couple of reviews a day.

Figuring this out has truly been world-changing to me. It’s helped me to retain good ideas, remember to do certain things, and record data that I’ll need later on (like addresses and phone numbers and such).

One of the big reasons this has been such a step forward for me is that, by default, I have a forgetful mind in terms of short-term things that I need to do. I’m great at remembering long-term things, like the date in 1989 when I had my appendix removed, but short-term things slip my mind all the time if I’m not careful.

Most of the time, such slippage is no big deal, but when it comes to things like remembering to, say, pay the electric bill, it can be a big deal. I have been late on bills before simply because I forgot to pay them – not because I didn’t want to pay them or couldn’t afford to pay them. The same phenomenon holds true for other personal finance tasks, like remembering to rebalance an account or to check on my children’s 529.

Luckily, such incidences are becoming much less frequent as I figure out more and more techniques to keep me from forgetting such things.

Automatic transfers and bill payments have perhaps been the most useful tool for me in this regard. Every payment I have that has a static payment amount – meaning it’s the same every single month – is automated. I also have a number of automatic transfers into multiple savings accounts that are geared for specific goals.

An “inbox” is always in place on my desk. Whenever a new bill or other item to deal with comes in, I put it in that inbox and it stays there until it’s dealt with. I just go through the items in it two or three times a week and deal with what I find there.

A daily “to-do” list posted in several places reminds me of the things I need to do every day – in other words, defining my normal daily routine. I even include such mundane things as my hygiene routine on this list, but it also includes things like daily work tasks. I also have an instance of “check your idea notebook” and other such things on it.

Google Calendar helps me keep my schedule straight. I have monthly reminders of several different bills and other personal finance tasks on there. These calendar entries automatically send me reminder emails as the day gets closer. Beyond that, I also have every birthday and other event that I can possibly need to remember on it – and these also send reminders to me.

A strong mail-handling routine also helps things from falling through the cracks. All mail is collected in a central place in our home (the entryway table) and is processed in a batch once or twice a week, with all junk mail getting tossed and all bills going in my personal inbox. Doing a batch processing of the mail and having a prescribed way to handle all of the pieces keeps individual pieces from falling through the cracks.

The end result of all of this is that I rarely forget important little things. I don’t rely on my brain to keep all of this stuff straight – instead, there’s a “net” of safeguards and systems that help me to not lose anything through the cracks.

Isn’t it all kind of redundant? Yes, in several places in the system, I’ll see multiple reminders of the same thing. It can be kind of annoying to see mentions of my parents’ anniversary in three different areas.

However, such redundancy pretty much ensures that something important won’t slip by unhandled. I’d rather have three notices of my parents’ anniversary and remember it than just one notice and forget it.

If you have as strong a tendency towards short-term forgetfulness as I can have at times, it’s really useful to get a system in place that’s redundant and really easy to maintain. This system works well for me.

When I first started becoming interested in cooking, I went through a short period where I watched a lot of programming on Food Network. The idea behind it – in my own mind – is that I could learn about cooking through watching and then I could immediately apply it in the kitchen.

What I found is that I would absorb a few good ideas or techniques, but I would have absolutely no desire to go out in the kitchen and actually employ these new ideas and techniques. Instead, I always had this vague sense that I had somehow already accomplished the cooking effort for the day, so instead I would prepare something incredibly easy and call it good enough.

My only success, in fact, came when I would actually be in the kitchen preparing the meal at the same time as the hosts. I would do this by using the DVR, pausing when I needed to. If I didn’t do that, I usually wouldn’t bother. Not always – there were rare exceptions to this – but usually.

What I found instead is that if I actually wanted to prepare a meal in the kitchen, I was a lot better off reading about the technique and visualizing myself doing it. If I had no idea, I could always watch a YouTube video, but usually a passage from a technique-heavy cookbook like Joy of Cooking and some imagination would do the trick.

I never really thought about this again until recently, when I had a long chat with a guy who has a side business revolving around home repair and remodeling. He related a very similar experience to my own. Whenever he’d catch a show or two of a program like This Old House, his motivation to actually get out and do something went straight downhill.

What do these two experiences have in common? After watching someone else accomplish something, we felt much less compelled to go out and accomplish the same thing ourselves and, often, felt a subtle sense of having actually accomplished something merely by watching someone else do it.

There’s a biological explanation for this: mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are neurons (i.e., pieces of the brain) that fire both when a person acts and when a person observes the same action performed by another. In other words, parts of our brain respond exactly the same when we do something or when we watch someone else do that same exact thing. Like, for example, preparing a meal or watching Paula Deen prepare one, or do a home repair project or watch Bob Vila do that same project.

To put it simply, we often get the same feeling from watching someone else do something that we would get from doing things ourselves.

When you think about it this way, it pops up time and time again in our lives. We feel happy when we read about someone else experiencing happiness and sad when they experience sadness. We feel a sense of accomplishment and joy when the hero overcomes adversity. We feel fear when the monster is sneaking up behind the hero on screen, even though there’s no monster in the room with us.

And, quite often, those emotional rushes are enough to fulfill us, reducing our drive to actually accomplish things.

Let me put it as simply as I can. If you want to succeed, do. If you want to follow, watch.

After a period of watching a lot of Food Network shows, I began to realize that I wasn’t actually becoming a better cook or, frankly, cooking much of anything at all. Instead, I began to read a lot more about cooking, often in the kitchen with the book open in front of me as I mixed something up and threw it in the oven.

The same phenomenon repeated itself when I dug deep into my own personal finance recovery. I would read lots of tips and often feel a strong sense that my finances were already in better shape because I had read it. It was only by continually pushing myself that I was able to actually improve my financial life, not just rely on mirror neurons to give me a sense that it was improving.

Watching and reading about someone else’s success is a great starting point for your own success. But that’s all it is, a starting point. It’s up to you to take the next step and actually do something. Don’t trick yourself into a false sense of accomplishment just because you watched someone else succeed with these tactics.

What are you going to do today?

When I was in seventh grade, a bunch of twelfth graders grabbed me one day. They tossed me in a trash can, popped a lid on it, then rolled the can (with me and some trash inside) out into the middle of the school’s parking lot. They then administered some kicks to the can and left me there.

I crawled out as they were laughing and high-fiving each other, grinned, shrugged it off, and went on about my business. It was the right attitude to take. A few other seventh graders provided an enormous reaction to the situation – telling the principal, throwing fits, challenging the much older kids to fights. Those reactionary kids were subjected to ever-escalating forms of bullying and hazing, while the ones who just shrugged it off were at worst ignored and at best given an occasional positive recognition from the much older kids.

Now that we’re all adults, we might think that such bullying has been left behind. This is playground fodder, after all – the nonsense and torments of high school is in the past for most of us, right?

The truth is that even as adults, we’re subjected to bullying in various, more subtle ways – and our reactions to that bullying often determines our futures.

Don’t believe me? Take these ideas into account.

Advertising is a form of bullying. The purpose of an ad is to make you somehow feel less adequate if you don’t have the product they’re pitching. In essence, it’s psychological bullying – the point is to make you feel inadequate while the people who have the product are superior to you.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” is a form of bullying. Again, when your peers have certain status objects, these objects can subtly make you feel jealous and make you feel less adequate than you once did. They have a nice new car and you do not – why not? Again, when you buy into the “keeping up with the Joneses” mindset, you’re agreeing to feel superior when you have things they do not and inferior when they have things you do not – mutual bullying.

A boss like Bill Lumbergh, forcing you to work on Saturday and Sunday, is a bully. He’s a bully because he has power over your freedom and he knows it. Such a boss knows that you’re financially reliant on the job you have and that your situation in life, if you were to be fired, would be disastrous. So he uses that power like a club to beat you into submission and to make you give more and more of your time and life energy to the organization.

Fortunately, we have weapons that we can use to fight against financial bullying.

The biggest tool is an appropriate sense of “enough.” You don’t need more things. You don’t need better things. If you’re reading this, in all likelihood, you already have abundance in life. Sure, it’s fine to have some desires, but those things are just that – desires. They don’t define who you are and they aren’t a requirement for living. You already have enough.

Another tool is self-confidence. You don’t need products to make yourself worthwhile – you already are worthwhile. You’re surrounded by people who care about you. You have countless opportunities to do many, many things every day to make the world a better place.

Yet another tool is financial independence. If you’ve been careful with your spending and put yourself in a position so that if you did lose a job it would not be the end of your world, then you’ve got a great deal of financial independence. You can’t be beaten down due to your “need” of a salary any longer, which gives you the freedom to take risks at work and explore new potential areas of employment without panicking or being afraid.

In the end, the solution to bullying is up to you. Do you choose to let the world tell you what to do? Or do you choose to walk your own path with your head held high?

For me, September is the unhappiest month of the year.

Sarah, after being off all summer, returns to work at the end of August, leaving me alone at home many days with my thoughts and my work. This also means that the children’s daycare attendance increases as well.

The house goes from noisy and happy to empty and quiet. Even as I attempt to fill it with music and NPR, it still feels somehow vacant and still. The liveliness is gone – no more children’s laughter floating up the stairs to cheer me while I’m working and no more occasional interruptions by Sarah just to let me know she’s thinking of me.

Unsurprisingly, my mood slips a little bit. I tend to get more caught up in details – and I also have a greater tendency to get distracted.

Perhaps most worrying is that I have a greater tendency to spend without really thinking about it. It’s the old “comfort” thing – I’m unhappy with the way things are, but if I buy something, I’ll feel better about it.

Over the past few weeks, that feeling has manifested itself several times. I bought a few books and a couple board games that I would have never bought.

On Monday, it manifested itself incredibly clearly, in a way that almost shocked me. My kids both needed some new socks and perhaps a few new pairs of pants, as fall is coming on and their supply of well-fitting long pants is pretty small. Buying the socks and pants wasn’t the problem, though.

After I left the store, I stopped by a gaming shop on a pure impulse. I was just walking past it and it crossed my mind to stop in and say hello to one of the employees that I knew.

Almost before I thought about it, I left with a game under my arm.

Many people might say, “So what?” I don’t buy myself many items. The few things I do buy myself are bargain-shopped to death. So why not live a little?

Here’s the problem: the game doesn’t solve the problem that is making me unhappy – in fact, it just makes it a little worse.

The piece of my situation that makes me unhappy is not seeing my wife and children as much as I’d like. I love spending time with them and, after spending so much time together with them all summer long, I miss them.

Buying a game is a short term panacea – it might bring me a fleeting sense of enjoyment, but in the long run, I could have easily just played one of the other games in our board game collection in the basement closet.

I know what the solution to that problem is. If I keep my nose to the grindstone each day, I can take more time off and go do fun things with my children. If I take advantage of the writing and presentation opportunities I have, perhaps my wife can take a year or two off from her job while the children are young (I know quite well that she’s doing the work she loves and that she simply wouldn’t permanently choose not to do it). If I’m careful with my spending, I can open the door to some amazing experiences in my children’s future.

If I had chosen not to spend the $30 on the game, I could have tossed that money into a savings account. If I had simply chosen not to wander into that store, I would have had an extra hour to focus on finishing up my book or writing a stellar article.

It’s easy to say that I’m being too hard on myself. On the other hand, if I don’t keep an eye on the little choices, the big dreams start to float away.

In the end, the truth is simple: if you’re buying things to console yourself, ask yourself if that purchase is really going to solve your problem. Is buying a new video game going to make it easier for you to interact with people socially? Is buying a new wardrobe going to help you get into better shape? Is restocking your liquor cabinet going to make it easier to actually invite people over? is buying a new car going to help you get a date?

The answer to each of these things is “no.” The solution to these problems doesn’t come from buying things. They come from making authentic changes in your life – how you interact with others, how you work, and how you take care of yourself. They might put a little bit of grease on the skids, but if you can’t get the engine moving forward on your own, all the grease in the world won’t make a difference – and you’ll find, in the end, that you wasted a lot of time and money and energy on that useless grease.

Put your wallet back in your pocket and ask yourself one thing: what is it that you really want? The more of your energy you put towards that real goal, the better off you’ll feel about yourself over the long haul.

(The Simple Dollar podcast is on a one (or possibly two) week hiatus while I finish my book. It’ll return to your Tuesday afternoons shortly.)

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein

In response to my recent article, Are Poor People Lazy?, where I concluded that laziness doesn’t always equate to poverty and vice versa, Pamela left this comment:

There are many factors that lead a person to the life they are living. I am quite shy. No matter how much I socialize no matter how many times I try to assert myself I remain shy. Because of this I do not take classes or do many of the things suggested for me to do to get ahead in life. So according to you I am lazy. NOT SO. If allowed I would work 12 hour days at my job.
I also agree with many of the comments that being in the right place at the right time can have a more positive outcome on you life than anything.

For most of my life, I’ve been very shy. Sometimes, I’ve been able to cover it up by essentially adopting another persona – simply pretending to be someone else who was outgoing – but that would only work for short stretches. Usually, I would just maintain that level of false outgoingness until I could get out of the situation.

I told myself that it was impossible to be any different than that. It was a convenient excuse, as are all excuses that take us away from great opportunities in life.

In truth, adopting that “outgoing” persona, escaping social situations, and believing I was just shy and nothing could be done about it was merely taking the path of least resistance in life. In other words, it was the easiest path available to me. Being more social and extroverted was far outside my comfort zone – it was a lot easier to just put on a mask, get through the situation, and remain introverted.

It has taken me a very long time to grow beyond that level of introversion and shyness. I’ve had a lot of painful social interactions along the way, and I’ve practiced in ways that would have seemed ludicrous to me years ago.

Now, though, I feel completely fine starting up conversations with people I’ve just met. I can lead conversations with others, as well as follow their lead, and I actually enjoy it because of the human interaction as well as learning a lot of things along the way.

Being more social has opened up a lot of avenues for me. I’ve met interesting people, gained some public speaking opportunities, and built a lot of friendships in the community.

If I had just continued to follow the path of least resistance, I would have never had these opportunities.

Is the path of least resistance laziness? Some might argue that it is – I don’t. People can work quite hard on the tasks that they’re most comfortable with.

However, opportunity rewards people who step outside their comfort zone. The Einstein quote that starts this article really sums it up: if you just keep doing things the same way over and over again, you’ll keep getting the same results. If you don’t like the results you’re getting in some aspect of your life – your economic situation, your personal situation, your health, and so on – it’s time to take a new path, one that’s not easy.

Find it hard to be social? Read Never Eat Alone and How to Win Friends and Influence People and start acting on what you read.

Find it hard to lose weight? Start exercising every day, even if it’s hard, and throw out most of the junk food. Try drinking water instead of soda – it’ll be hard at first, but fighting through that resistance is what will make change happen.

Find it hard to learn and grow your knowledge? Turn off the television and read books on subjects that you don’t know much about. If they’re over your head, back off and read simpler ones first.

Find it hard to execute some particular skill? Use your spare time and practice it, even if practice seems difficult and you’d rather be doing something else. Play the guitar until your fingers hurt. Cook every meal for a month from scratch.

Find it hard to get out of debt? Cut up all of your credit cards and erase those numbers from all of your online accounts and learn how to live on what you have.

Once you’ve broken through some personal barriers, you’ll find that opportunity knocks more often than before. You’ll understand the world around you better – and people will interact with you in a more positive fashion.

It’s hard to change course, but if you keep doing what you’re doing now, you’re going to keep getting the same results. Now’s the time to get off that path of least resistance and try the hard way.

I’m often tempted to spend money that I shouldn’t.

I’m good at restraining my impulsive nature. I don’t simply go into stores and then emerge later with a hefty bag, a credit card bill, and a dazed look on my face. Still, in certain places, I am strongly tempted to spend. I look around and see tons of items that I’d like to have. Here are seven places that really fuel my spending desires.

Bookstores What can I say? I love to read – I read about ten books a month for my own enjoyment and probably five more for The Simple Dollar and other professional purposes. The smell and feel and sight of a new book is like manna to me. I usually resist most of my impulses by arguing to myself that I can get those books at the library or off of PaperBackSwap, but it’s definitely a struggle – one I don’t always win.

Williams-Sonoma As I get more and more adept in the kitchen, I’m slowly upgrading my kitchen equipment to superior versions of the cheap (and sometimes problematic) equipment I have on hand. Williams-Sonoma does an extremely good job of convincing me to accelerate this upgrade process, enticing me with better knives, a wide array of very nice pots and pans, and lots of other items.

Wineries If I stop at a winery and enjoy a tasting, I usually wind up buying at least a bottle. There’s something about the atmosphere of a winery that gets me into the right mindset, and adding onto that is the fact that I truly enjoy a glass of a distinctive wine, it’s unsurprising that I often leave wineries with a bottle or two in my bag.

Food co-ops Stores that put obvious care into their food selection often entice me to be much more willing to buy foods impulsively. At regular grocery stores, I usually avoid impulsive food purchases by knowing that the item is usually going to be full of ingredients I shouldn’t be eating or won’t taste all that good. At a food co-op, that’s often not the case at all – and thus I’ll find myself picking up items like feta made from sheep’s milk.

Gaming shops I love playing games against family and friends and gaming shops tend to bring out my strongest tendencies. I particularly like board games, and if I witness a game demonstration and the game seems fun at all, I’ll often be very tempted to talk myself into buying it.

Art supply stores My biggest weaknesses in art supply stores usually come down to notebooks/sketch books and writing implements. I can easily fill up notebooks with jotted notes, quotes, ideas, and other things, and the feel of a good pen in my hand is almost intoxicating and actually does a good job of fueling my writing tendencies.

The Apple Store I usually don’t buy anything at Apple Stores. Instead, they just do a great job of convincing me to save up and spend much more than I should to buy a MacBook Pro or a new desktop machine or an iPod Touch. Apple puts a lot of care into the little details of their devices and, after spending a lot of time using them, I’ve come to really miss them when I use other devices.

There, my confessions. Putting them all down on paper like that is fairly refreshing for me, as it helps me to realize that I use quite a few different techniques to minimize the temptation to spend in those places. I’ve mentioned some of these tactics before in various other articles, of course, but here are eight different tactics that I use to minimize the negative influence that these tempting places have on my wallet.

Avoid them entirely. The easiest way not to be tempted is to simply not visit these stores at all. This works to a certain extent. For years, I had a routine of going to a bookstore each Tuesday (to check out the new releases) and each Friday (to “celebrate” the end of a workweek). This routine usually meant that I would wind up buying a book or two at each visit, which could easily add up to $40 a week.

By simply breaking that routine, it was easy to see a tremendous amount of financial benefit – as much as $2,000 per year. While I still do visit bookstores on occasion, they’re no longer part of any sort of routine. This makes the individual visits much more enjoying, since they’re more infrequent and not based on any sort of schedule.

Take notes. If you visit a store, fall in love with lots of items, and are tempted to buy, stop. Pull out a notepad and write down all of the things that are tempting you. List the books, food ideas, clothing, games, or other items that are really intriguing you.

This serves two purposes. First, you can take the list home and do further research on the item(s) and some comparison shopping. Second, it allows you to utilize the “thirty day rule,” where you agree not to buy the item for thirty days and then re-evaluate at the end of the period whether or not you actually want the item.

Go with only cash. If you visit a place with such obvious temptations, leave your wallet behind. Just take in a small amount of cash, whatever you’re completely comfortable with spending there and won’t feel guilty about afterwards. So, if you’re going to a bookstore, take a $20 bill. This allows you to splurge a little, but prevents you from spending more than you should.

The real key here is to not bring in plastic, which effectively gives you access to far more money that you might otherwise have. Without strong willpower, credit cards can be a real danger, so it can be good to avoid them until you do have the personal fortitude to avoid over-the-top spending with them.

Go with the right kind of friend. Some friends encourage you to spend. They talk up the items they see, complement you on your choices and taste, and encourage you to splurge a little. Those kinds of friends will almost always cause you to have a bigger bill than you want.

I prefer shopping with either my wife or my closest friend, John. Neither one of them encourages me to spend more than I should. My wife usually makes no comment whatsoever if I choose to make a purchase. John usually just criticizes items in a humorous way, making them seem less appealing while also being entertaining. The end result? I buy less than I would if I were there with a heavy-spending friend.

Set an explicit budget. Each month, I allot myself a certain amount of money to spend on whatever I wish. Since I plan for it, I can spend that money without guilt, and this money is often spent at the places I described above.

Since I know what that limit is, I can spend up to that limit without any sort of guilt whatsoever. If I’m at Williams-Sonoma and see an item that costs two or three months’ worth of free money, I’m patient with it. I’ll wait two months without spending much “mad money,” then pick up that item without any guilt at all.

This is perhaps my most-used technique, and my wife uses it as well.

Use the ten second rule. Sometimes, on an impulsive whim, you’ll pick up an item and make the split-second decision to buy it. As you head to the cashier, stop for ten seconds and ask yourself if you really need this item after all, or if you couldn’t get a better deal on it elsewhere.

For me, this works quite well to at least slow impulse buys. I’ll usually put the item back and add it to my list (see the earlier tip). It doesn’t necessarily mean that I won’t end up with the item in the future, but it will be bought with a rational, not an impulsive, mind.

Never go without a purpose. And, no, social engagements aren’t a purpose.

Why are you shopping? If you’re doing it just to spend time with a friend – or even mostly to spend time with a friend – your wallet will thank you if you find something else to do. Why not go through the stuff you already have? Why not spend time in a public place that’s not designed to convince you to spend money?

If you actually do go shopping somewhere, particularly in places that you know tempt you to spend money, make sure you’re going with a specific purpose. There’s a book you want to pick up. There’s a French oven you want to look at. You have some technical questions about your MacBook. You get the idea.

Find a substitute. Remember above, when I mentioned that I’d buy three or four books a week at the bookstore? Sure, I did read most of these books, but very rarely more than once. So, why not use the library?

Most of the big temptations above have great substitutes for me. Instead of going to game stores (usually to talk and browse games), I visit a few community gaming websites to get most of the same effect. Instead of hitting food stores, I use farmers markets for the same effects. This helps me stay away from many of my worst temptations.

What places tempt you the most? And what techniques do you use to control your spending there?

If you’ve read The Simple Dollar for long, you’ve seen tons of lists of money-saving tips, from 100 little steps for saving money and 100 free things to do this weekend to fifty ways to have fun by yourself on the cheap and my frugal vacation guide to Dallas/Fort Worth, just to name a few.

A few days ago, an old friend of mine wrote to me about The Simple Dollar. She’d been reading the archives for a while and had finally caught up with the most recent posts. One of her comments was quite interesting and worth discussing:

The articles I didn’t like were when you listed tips for cutting your spending. Most of them are just simply outside the realm of possibility. Most people don’t want to do a bunch of extra work or do something really unenjoyable or ruin something fun just to save a few bucks.

Her example actually revolved around a tip she found on the site where I suggested making sandwiches on vacations instead of eating out for every meal:

I’m on vacation to have fun. Eating a “sandwich” that consists of some awful lunchmeat jammed between two pieces of dry bread does not equal fun. I just simply won’t do it, and most people won’t, either.

Since I couldn’t find the tip she mentioned after searching for an hour, I’ll explain it in more detail in a “mini-post” right now – two posts in one!

A Frugal Vacation Tip From My Childhood
We rarely went on vacations when I was a child. The only true vacation that we went on before I was in high school – meaning a trip that wasn’t either camping within 50 miles of home or visiting relatives – was a trip to Saint Louis in 1986 with my parents, one of my brothers, and one of my cousins.

We didn’t have a huge budget for the five day trip, so my parents used several techniques to save money. My father got discount Six Flags and baseball tickets through his credit union in some sort of package deal. All five of us shared a single room with one large bed, leaving us three kids to sleep on the floor. At least two of the days, we didn’t do anything at all – instead, we either just stayed at the hotel in the pool much of the day or wandered around Saint Louis near our hotel, exploring.

But one big trick that my parents used on this trip was to eat sandwiches for every lunch on the trip. The day before we left, my parents bought several loaves of bread, some cheese, and some bologna from a local deli counter, along with some condiments and chips. Each day for lunch, we’d either gather in the hotel room and make sandwiches at lunch time or we’d pack a lunch in the morning and eat it when we were out and about.

We plowed through several loaves of bread, a few packages of bologna, a few packages of cheese, and a bottle of ketchup and mustard, but the total cost of the food was less than $15 – and it provided five lunches for five people. Compare that to the cost of eating out … anything. It was a huge savings – it likely amounted to getting our hotel room for free.

Since then, I’ve been a big believer of making picnic lunches while traveling whenever there’s a reasonable opportunity to do so. Often, on long road trips, we’ll stop at an exit and instead of hitting a restaurant, we’ll stop at a park, pop open the back, and dig into the sandwiches we packed – or stop at a grocery store, pick up a loaf of bread and a few other items, and head to a park to make our own sandwiches (and save the inevitable left over bread).

It’s cheaper and healthier and almost as fast as the other options.

So, here we have it. I like to make my own sandwiches for lunches on road trips and vacations, but my friend comments that such tactics are “outside the realm of possibility” as it degrades the quality of the vacation just to save a few bucks.

This type of phenomenon pops up time and time again. It might be “outside the realm of possibility” to pry that morning coffee from your hands. It might be “outside the realm of possibility” to drive a ten year old car (my truck is thirteen years old! I must be a loser!). It might be “outside the realm of possibility” to make your own laundry detergent. You wouldn’t even think of doing such things.

But why?

Here’s the way I look at the world. If something has an obvious benefit, I’ll consider it instead of brushing it off immediately. Most money-saving tactics fall straight into this category – so, in this example, the obvious benefit of making such sandwiches is that they’re healthier than fast food and quite a bit cheaper.

The obvious benefit of trimming out a morning coffee is that you save $5 every morning and break a caffeine addiction.

The obvious benefit of driving an old vehicle is that you’re not spending money on a new car payment.

The obvious benefit of making your own laundry detergent is that your detergent is about 1/10th the cost of detergent bought at the store.

Thus, I’m willing to at least consider most frugal tactics – I don’t immediately rule them as being outside the realm of possibility.

Obviously, each of these options has some sort of cost.

A sandwich on a trip is likely not going to be quite as tasty as going to a restaurant, and you’ll likely be eating in a park instead of a restaurant (with kids, this latter part is an advantage, but it might not be for others).

Trimming your morning coffee means that you’re either drinking lower quality coffee or you’re giving it up entirely. Maybe you can just move from the Starbucks routine to making your own (a big savings right there) or just try different brands to find one that suits you (for example, my wife reports that Eight O’Clock Coffee is the best bang for the buck out there).

An old vehicle is somewhat less reliable and likely gets worse gas mileage. These two factors pushed us to upgrade our car earlier this year, moving from a 1999 Mercury Sable with a failing transmission and about 24 MPG to a 2009 Toyota Prius that gets 46 MPG. We debated the upgrade for the better part of a year.

Making your own laundry detergent takes about fifteen minutes, so it’s really a factor of how you value your free time in the evenings or on weekends.

In some cases, I’ll go for it – I’m still driving my old rust-bucket truck, I make my own laundry detergent, I make sandwiches on the road, and I don’t drink coffee anymore at all (aside from a once-a-month or so treat).

Others might balk at one or more of those choices, choosing to stick with what they’re already doing or a more expensive route. I do this with many food choices – I’ll buy eggs from a local farmer at a premium, for example.

That’s fine – it’s all about personal value. What’s dangerous is not even considering such options and immediately ruling them out of the realm of possibility. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think it comes down to one thing: fear of change.

Frugal choices often require doing things differently than you did before. For some, the thought of changing their routine – even if there’s an obvious net benefit – is bad. This can affect every aspect of one’s life.

Here’s a great example of how powerful routine can be. Once a year, my wife and I spend a day with two of our friends that live about six hours away. It’s usually a “weekend getaway” for them that we interrupt for an afternoon or so. Every single year, though, the two of them choose to go to the same place. They stay in the same hotel. They go to many of the same places. Earlier this year, when we met up, I asked them why. They both shrugged their shoulders and then suggested it was because it was familiar – it fit like an old glove. Choosing something different would just seem… wrong.

The next time you outright reject a frugal choice, ask yourself whether you’re rejecting that frugal choice for a good reason or you’re rejecting it because it would mean you’d have to change a comfortable behavior. Quite often, stepping outside a comfortable behavior can offer huge benefits, not only in the immediate choice, but in that it makes you more flexible and open to other little choices.

Making your own laundry detergent or your own sandwiches on the road isn’t outside the realm of possibility, after all.