I really enjoy visiting garage sales, yard sales, and thrift stores. I almost always find an item or two that I’m either looking for myself or I’m sure I can sell on eBay for a small profit. Plus, I’m always amazed at the things other people have largely decided to throw out.

Whenever I head out for a few hours of visiting yard sales and thrift stores, I take my backpack along with me. I usually have several items in it that help immensely with a big day of yard sales and thrifting. Here’s what I pack.

A list of thrift stores and yard sales. I’ll usually check the local newspapers a day or two before I plan on heading out to see where the sales are going to be. I make a list of those sales. I also usually make a list of local thrift stores, but I pretty much know where they all are within a twenty five mile radius, so that’s reached the point of being unnecessary.

A map and/or a GPS unit. Just because I have an address of a yard sale two towns over doesn’t mean I know exactly where that is. A local map can help somewhat, but I’ve found that the GPS is even more useful. I simply punch in the address and go. Quite often, I’ll punch in all of the unknown addresses the night before so that I can just click a button or two and go when I’m out and about the next day.

A simple meal. A sandwich, a few vegetables, and a few bottles of water take care of any food or rehydration needs I’ll have when I’m out. This way, I’m not tempted to overpay for some unhealthy food on the go, which would pretty much undermine any benefit of hitting thrift stores or yard sales.

Cash. Yard sales usually operate on a cash-only basis (and thrift stores are quite happy to take cash). Thus, when I’m out, I do my shopping on a cash-only basis. Part of that means making sure that I have an adequate amount of cash on hand before I leave to cover anything I might possibly buy.

Sizes. What size clothes does my wife wear? My kids? Me, for that matter? I make sure to have them all written down so that I can easily identify clothes that would fit each of them.

A list, along with certain measurements. Are there any particular items I’m looking for? Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t. When there is, I make a list of those items so I don’t forget. For example, if we need boy’s shirts, I’ll write that down. Also, if I’m looking for items of a particular size – like a desk, for example – I’ll measure the desired dimensions of the desk and write those down.

A tape measure. If I’m going to be measuring an item – like a desk – I need to have something to measure it with. A tape measure is perfect for that task.

A notebook. I usually have this on hand anyway because I always carry a pocket notebook with me. However, if I spy something interesting at a yard sale but I don’t know if I need it or not, I’ll make a note of it, go home, and check. Sometimes I’ll even return to the yard sale to pick it up.

A rope or short bungie cord. Yes, every once in a while, something comes along that’s just too big to fit properly in a car trunk. In those cases, you might have to tie it down for the drive home. That’s why it’s handy to have a rope and/or a bungie cord on hand to secure the item.

All of this stuff fits easily in a backpack and can be packed the night before (excepting the food, of course). Going prepared makes it much more likely you’ll find the things you actually need when you go thrift store and/or garage and yard sale shopping.

Good luck!

Recently, my son Joe had his fourth birthday. Sarah and I had made the decision that we were going to introduce the idea of an allowance to him after his fourth birthday, along with the idea of saving for specific goals.

In order to accomplish this goal, we decided to get him a Money Savvy Pig for his fourth birthday. Here’s the happy birthday boy with his pig (and an over-the-top goofy grin):

What is a “Money Savvy Pig”?
As you can see from the picture above, a Money Savvy Pig is a bank with four distinct compartments: Save, Spend, Donate, and Invest. The bank has four slots along the top – one for each compartment – and each of the pig’s feet provides access to one of the chambers to empty it individually.

The idea behind it is pretty simple – it makes it very easy and tangible for children to separate (and effectively budget) their money.

How We’re Using It
Each week, we’re giving him $2 in quarters for his allowance – $0.50 for each year he’s been alive. Thus, next year, he’ll get $2.50. We may at some point in the future change this rate, but it works for the time being.

He then splits the money into four roughly equal amounts. Two quarters go in the “Spend” slot, two quarters go in the “Save” slot, two quarters go in the “Donate” slot, and two quarters go in the “Invest” slot.

He is completely free to spend all money that goes in the “Spend” slot as he wishes. If he wants, he can take that money and put it in the other slots in his bank, or he can put it in his pocket and take it to the store with him to buy something small.

With the “Save” slot, we had him identify something that he wanted that was much more expensive than a dollar or two. We told him to think about it and later he told us he was saving for a Batman action figure that costs about $10. So, we told him that he could keep adding to the “Save” slot and in a few weeks, we’ll count it up and see how close he is to it.

With the other two slots, we told him that for now, they’re going to just build up.

For the “Donate” slot, we’re talking right now about the various things that people can donate money to – the local church, the local food pantry where people who don’t have much money can get food, Heifer International, PBS, and so on. We told him that when he gets $5 in that slot, he can pick something to donate to. He has expressed positive interest in donating to PBS, so I more or less expect that to be his first donation in two months or so.

For the “Invest” slot, we’ve told him that it’s just going to build up for a while. Our plan with that is to wait until there’s a “lot” of money in it (from his perspective). Then we’ll use that money to introduce various ways to invest, starting with a savings account at the local bank.

Does a Four Year Old Understand All of That?
No, nor do I expect him to.

We’ve started doing this when he’s young so that saving seems like a completely natural thing to him as he becomes more aware of money and how a person can use it.

I don’t expect him to fully understand, and he doesn’t. For now, he really only understands the “spend” part and the “save” part of the bank – the other two are mysterious.

We are quite sure he understands the “save” slot. We told him that he’s free to put any money he gets as a gift into any slots he wishes and he chose to put almost all of it into the “save” slot because he wants the Batman action figure that he had chosen as a goal. He put a smaller portion of it in the “spend” slot and a bit each in the “invest” and “donate” slots.

We’re also quite sure he understands the “spend” slot, since he wanted to take a dollar out of it a couple of days ago to buy a Hot Wheels car for the race track his grandparents gave him for his birthday. We, of course, approved this, since it’s money he can spend as he chooses.

The other slots are a mystery at this point – they’re clearly there for him to grow into it.

What About Sibling Rivalry?
Joe has a two year old sister who loves to do exactly what her big brother is doing. So how are we handling that? We decided to start her on an allowance, too, but a much simpler setup is in the offing for her.

For her, we’re just giving her four quarters on allowance day (again, fifty cents for each year) and allowing her to put it in her bank. We don’t have any rules on how she can use it, but for now they’re really not needed. She simply enjoys putting “monies” in her bank, just like her big brother.

When she’s four, if Joe is seeing success with his bank and we’ve seen it as a valuable tool, we’ll get her one, too.

One big reason for doing this is the idea of peer reinforcement. If they’re both saving together, it seems more normal. It isn’t just them doing it – one of their peers is saving, too.

Over the last few months, I’ve been slowly shopping for a minivan to replace my truck. Since the truck will not seat three young children safely (I could jam them in there in an illegal fashion), I will have to replace the vehicle by April at the latest. That’s on top of the fact that the vehicle has a mountain of eminent repairs that are needed.

As I shop for the minivan, I keep coming back to one central question: what exactly am I buying here? On the surface, it seems obvious – I’m buying a minivan. But that’s not what I’m really buying.

First of all, I’m buying something that will get me, my wife, and all three of my children from point “A” to point “B”. The entire point of buying such a vehicle is for transportation.

That being said, I am not buying a status symbol. As long as it’s clean and safe, I really don’t care what it looks like. It doesn’t have to be shiny, new, or top of the line. I don’t really care what the opinions of the people around me are about the minivan I bought. Does it meet my needs? That’s what matters.

Is a status symbol a need for you? Probably not. Is it a want? Probably. The question you have to ask yourself is how much extra money you’re willing to pay for a status symbol whose luster will fade in a year or two.

I have three primary concerns when buying this car.

First and foremost, it must be reliable. Next April, I will have three children under the age of five. I don’t want a vehicle that has repair issues bubbling just under the surface. For me, reliability is more important with this vehicle than it was with my wife’s commuting car that we bought earlier this year, in which our priority was fuel efficiency. I’m using Consumer Reports as my primary guide for this, which is pointing me towards the Toyota Sienna or the Honda Odyssey.

Second, it must be safe. I require a vehicle with good safety ratings and a history report that shows that it’s never been in accidents. Again, my concern in this area is raised by my specific requirements – this vehicle will be used to transport myself and my children.

Third, it must have storage space. We often go visit family for a week two or three times a year. In order to accomodate two younger children, a baby, and two adults for a week, there’s going to have to be some significant storage space in the vehicle. On top of that, It’s this need for additional space which is pushing us toward a minivan instead of a large car.

Beyond that, fuel efficiency is a secondary factor, as is ergonomic seating (chairs that provide lumbar support and don’t result in numbness and back pain after a long drive).

I do not care about having a drop-down Blu-Ray player. I do not care about leather seats. I do not care about having a perfectly silent ride, nor a perfectly smooth one. If those features came for free, I would take them, but I’m not about to pay much for them at all.

I am the one buying the car. Because I’m buying early, I can wait until the right vehicle comes along. I don’t merely have to choose whatever is available on the lot. This enables me to look at other options, such as what’s being sold on Craigslist and other sources directly by individuals. Given what I want, I have the cash on hand to buy pretty much anything within those requirements.

What are you buying when you buy a car? Do you know what you want? Do you know what you don’t want and aren’t going to pay for? Have you planned ahead enough that you have the time and ability to explore lots of options to find what you want?

After all, the last thing you want to do when buying a car is to find yourself on a car lot needing to make a purchase and having no idea what you really want or need. Such a situation is delicious prey for car salesmen.

Each Monday, The Simple Dollar opens up the reader mailbags and answers ten to twenty simple questions offered up by the readers on personal finance topics and many other things. Got a question? Ask it in the comments. You might also enjoy the archive of earlier reader mailbags.

I’m 34 years old; live and work in Washingon, DC for a non-profit organization I’ve been with for 10 years. My salary is quite good, and the benefits are great. Those benefits include a current 13.5% contribution to a 403b (they start at 7.5, then add a point for every two years of service, add a couple of points when you cross each decade threshold, etc) without needing an employee match. So, confession: I don’t contribute to it on my own at all. In the early years, I was wasteful, and now I’ve been focusing my money on getting out of debt first and foremost, and rebuilding my emergency fund (which has gotten tapped to pay for mother’s funeral, emergency veterinarian bills, etc in the last year).

Am I making a mistake not contributing some of my own cash as well? I feel like 13.5% of my salary puts me in good stead over the long-term, and that there will be time enough to contribute more in a couple of years when I am out of debt. My parents both died long before retirement age, too, and I am not planning on having kids who can inherit the retirement money if I have the same fate…).
- Karen

First of all, your benefits are stellar. There’s simply no other word for an organization that puts 13.5% into your 403(b) for you without you having to contribute to it. That’s a benefit most of us would kill for.

At this point, you need to step back and look at the big picture. Are you on pace for the type of retirement you want? I’d take a look at a good retirement calculator.

Two key questions worth thinking about: when do you intend to “retire” from your current career, and at that point, how much of your salary will you need? If you like to work, your intended retirement age will probably be higher than it would be if you can’t wait to retire. If you want to try a second career in your retirement years, your percentage will be lower than if you want to spend your retirement traveling.

Many will argue that you can’t know this. My belief is that the truth is somewhere in the middle – people usually know if they’re of the type who’s happier working and being productive and who’s happier with pure leisure time, but the specifics of your life can change.

Run some appropriate numbers through that calculator and aim a little on the high side. Of course, with 13.5% already being saved, you’re probably fine no matter what you do.

My question, which is prompted by your fall cleaning post, is whether people have been able to find a market for their stuff in this economy, or, to put it a little more optimistically and pragmatically, what strategies have people used to sell their stuff? My neighbor and I have a yard sale in late spring every year, but this year, for the first time ever, we hardly sold anything, making the whole event seem like a waste of time. Along the same lines, I am wondering whether people have found it harder to sell stuff on EBAY, or whether they have had to change their strategies for such sales.
- Barb

My experience in buying and selling on eBay and Amazon auctions, as well as a semi-frequent thrift store visitor, is that the secondhand and discount marketplaces are thriving right now and that it’s a perfectly good time to sell used goods. Most of the economic downturn is coming at the expense of more upscale retailers.

People tend to focus more on bargain-hunting when the economy is down, but rarely do they make true changes to their behavior. They might choose to shop for the thing they want on eBay or Craigslist or at a thrift store, but they’re still going to buy an item if they want it. A retail economic downturn usually means only a 10-15% drop in sales, which means 85-90% of the items they were selling before are still selling.

In short, if anything, now’s a better time than usual to dive into selling used stuff, because there are plenty of buyers out there.

My boyfriend and I are traveling to Prague in the Czech Republic over Thanksgiving weekend and are trying to figure out the best way to exchange money. Is it best to a) change cash in the US to travelers’ checks, b) change US cash in Prague to Czech crowns, or c) take out cash in the form of Czech crowns from local ATMs while there? I also have about 40 Euro left from my last trip to Europe that hasn’t been changed back to US dollars.
- Valerie

Your best bet is to look at your various conversion options before you leave and choose the one that gives you the most crowns for your dollar now. Your best option depends heavily on the policies of the bank you use compared to other options.

Depending on your credit and personal responsibility, it might make the most sense to simply make most of your purchases on a credit card. Visa and MasterCard are widely accepted in Czechoslovakia and you are simply billed for the amount. Be sure to tell your credit card company that you’re traveling before you leave. Assuming that you pay the bill in full when you return, this is a safer option than traveler’s cheques.

One guaranteed piece of advice: avoid currency exchanges at the airport. Their rates are atrocious. I would also probably advise doing the currency exchange there because your options are more limited than they are here in the States.

You’ve talked before about how you don’t like consumerism. How does that affect how you buy Christmas presents for your children?
- Ed

I’m more of the philosophy that you get children a small number of quality presents instead of piles of unnecessary stuff. I also am a big fan of gifting experiences to people.

So, for example, I would have no problem wrapping up a picture of Disney World or of Yellowstone and giving that as a gift along with a promise of a family vacation there. That would be one of, say, three gifts they would receive.

I have no problem with giving gifts or receiving them. However, I’m not a big fan of giving gifts or receiving gifts that are unwanted and just result in more “stuff” for people to manage that they don’t really value.

So, for all of my friends and family reading this, if I ever give you a gift that you don’t want, absolutely feel free to take it back or re-gift it. Please don’t keep unnecessary stuff in your home.

I’m a public school teacher, and as you can imagine, this was a bad year for our union to be re-negotiating the contract. Bottom line is, I’ll be bringing home less money per week next year than I am this year, and I’ll be getting fewer benefits. Though many teachers are well-paid for their efforts, young teachers like me typically start out very low on the pay scale. Next year will be tough.

Could you give me the lowdown on HSAs? I understand the basics. What would be the risks in going with an HSA plan? What would be the benefits? Who would you see as the optimal candidate for HSA, and who would be a person that should stay with a PPO?
- CT

In a nutshell, HSAs are just savings accounts that your employer deposits money in that you can withdraw solely for health-related expenses. This is usually done through a reimbursement system or via a debit card that accesses the account which can only be used at health-related businesses.

In general, HSAs are a solid option for younger workers who are in good health. The older you get – and the more known conditions you have or know you will develop – the better off you are sticking with the PPO.

Given that you’re young and healthy, it’s likely that the HSA is a reasonable option for you. However, it does carry a risk. You’re basically betting against a very expensive medical emergency in the next year or two. While that’s potentially a good bet for you, it becomes a much worse bet for people with pre-existing conditions and people who are older.

When you just close your eyes and let yourself dream, what do you dream about? If everything goes perfectly for you, where will you be in ten years?
- Adrian

I dream of being a best-selling fiction writer. I dream of having a house out in the country with a large office for writing, a small barn in the back, and some woodlands there. I dream of happy, healthy, and curious children.

More than anything, though, I dream of not being afraid of what the future holds. Even with all of the positive changes in my life over the past few years, I’m still afraid of what might come. I haven’t reached the level of financial security I’d like to reach.

My husband and I put aside money into a few mutual funds to save for a house shortly after we were married (about 6ish years ago). The money is in 3 Vanguard index funds: an S&P 500, a long-term bond fund, and a European fund. We are getting closer to buying a house (probably 3-4 years away now). How do I decide when to take the money out and put it in something more safe. Honestly, with the rocky stock market, I don’t think we’ve made any money at all on our investment. It’d be nice to get some more stock market gains seeing how low money market accounts are now, but I don’t want the money to be too volatile, as we would really like to put down a large downpayment on a house once my husband finally gets a real job (i.e. finishes his postdoctoral training and gets onto the academic market).
- Amanda

The real question to ask yourself when deciding whether to move money into something more conservative is to ask yourself whether you can tolerate the worst possible outcome.

For some situations, like retirement, the worst possible outcome – losing 20-30% of the investment over the next few years – is intolerable. For others – perhaps yours – it’s not nearly as vital.

If losing some of that money you have now would really hamper your plans for the future, move it into something more conservative. If that house you’re talking about isn’t an absolute requirement within four years and you’d be fine if it didn’t happen right then, leave it there.

My biggest problem during my workday seems to be uneven energy. I seem to run out of steam at about eleven and so I go eat lunch with some people. After that, I feel almost exhausted for a big part of the afternoon.

I know the solution to this is eating breakfast, but I can’t get into a routine of eating breakfast. I don’t like most breakfast food. What is your breakfast routine like?
- Payton

I usually eat breakfast with my kids each morning. We usually eat something different every day. One day, it might be oatmeal; another day, it might be scrambled eggs. We might have a bagel or toast for breakfast along with some fruit.

Don’t worry about tying yourself into a “traditional” breakfast food. Eat whatever sounds good to you that’s reasonably healthy and provides some energy. If it’s fruit, great. If it’s a salad, great. If it’s a beef and bean burrito, great. Just find a food that works for you in the morning.

I need to have surgery on my left jaw joint. I’ve had various appliances and procedures over the years, all of which have helped (or not) to some degree, but now things have degraded to the point of constant pain and not being able to eat more than pudding (and even that hurts, believe it or not). However, I just found out (literally on Friday, three days ago) that my employer’s health insurance has a specific all-encompassing exclusion for jaw-related treatments of any kind (I have paid for the smaller procedures and appliances out of pocket in the past, so I didn’t realize there was such a total exclusion that would zap me now), and this surgery will be $11,200 minimum. My oral surgeon already sent off an impassioned plea to the insurance company, which was met with a total denial because of the exclusion. I’ve been told there’s no point in appealing, again, because of that exclusion. The dental plan also will not touch it. I can get along awhile longer without the surgery, but the pain and inability to eat much will only get worse, so at some point I pretty much have to have the surgery. I refuse to go the narcotics route.

Short of quitting my job, divorcing my husband, giving away all my assets and applying for medicare/caid, is there any other option I’m not seeing? Or any other way to handle the finances that might make it less painful in the wallet?
- Cindy

You’re likely far more informed about your options in this situation than I am. However, three things pop into my mind.

First, have you sought out multiple opinions on the subject? If you have not sought a second opinion on your jaw, you might be missing out on a treatment option that drastically reduces your costs and gives you the results you want. Your oral surgeon could be one of the best in the world, but he still might be missing some detail.

Second, have you simply tried negotiating? Tell your oral surgeon that it would be difficult to pay for the procedure. Offer to barter what skills or time you have in exchange for some part of the payment. See what’s possible.

Finally, have you looked at any form of third-party dental insurance? There may be forms of insurance that will cover your procedure. It might not be a bad idea given your spouse has also had oral issues.

Whatever happens, good luck!

Peyton Manning or Tom Brady?
- Evan

Drew Brees.

Got any questions? Ask them in the comments and I’ll use them in a future mailbag.

Every other Sunday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal productivity, personal development, or career book.

If you’ve been reading my weekly roundups for long, you know I’m a big fan of the Unclutterer blog and its chief writer and editor, Erin Doland.

I link to Unclutterer frequently because I believe there is a strong connection between clutter and financial problems, since clutter represents having more physical possessions than you can manage and all of those possessions cost money. Plus, dealing with clutter requires a time investment and in our busy lives, time has a very high value.

Unclutter Your Life in One Week essentially offers a “detox” plan for getting clutter out of your home, office, and life, ostensibly in one week. I should say right off the bat that I found actually accomplishing all of the ideas in this book in one week to be impossible. That doesn’t mean the book has value, but you should not expect that all clutter in your life will be gone in one week if you follow this plan. Although, I will say that there is some function of how cluttered your life is when you start and how thoroughly you’re going through your life with the plan.

That being said, the advice in this book is stellar, in my opinion. Let’s dig in and look at some of the specifics.

The Foundations
Most of us have lives that are overbooked, overworked, and overstuffed. We have more things that we want than we possibly have time for. I’m certainly in this boat myself – I’d trade all the material items I have for another four hours in my day.

In our rush to jam even more into our lives, our lives become inherently complicated. We accumulate more things than we can deal with and some things begin to slip simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day. Those “things that slip” often take the form of clutter – items in our lives that we simply don’t have the time to process. These tend to build up throughout our lives, filling up our homes and our day planners with a backlog of things that need to be taken care of and things we don’t have the time to actually enjoy or use.

Dealing with clutter is an intense process, because it not only requires dealing with this backlog of stuff, but it also requires dealing with the elements in your life that are causing clutter.

Monday
Monday is the best day of the week to begin establishing new routines. It’s also a good day to tackle the “firsts” – the elements of clutter you face first throughout your day.

For example, many of us face a cluttered closet in the morning when we wake up, so a good first step is to get your clothes in order. If you have more clothes than you can adequately fit in your dresser and closet, you need to eliminate some.

At work, the first thing we often see is our desk or workspace. Figure out a place for all of the stuff that you see – and don’t be surprised if the space for many of those things is the trash can.

Tuesday
Tuesday is the most stressful day of the week, so it’s the best time to tackle the areas of your life that cause you the most stress and require the most work to keep up.

At home, Erin encourages decluttering the bathroom (with the goal of being able to easily find all of the things you need but tossing the things you don’t actually use that tend to fill up your bathroom closet) and also streamlining your household chores. I find in my own life that when I have a household chore routine, things are more likely to work well.

At work, one should take a look at filing all of their papers so that the documents one needs can easily be found and the less-important things are out of the way. At my previous job, I found that having a filing cabinet split into two pieces worked for me – a single drawer for stuff I actually used sometimes and the rest for stuff I needed to retain but would rarely look at. 99% of the time, I’d just look in that one drawer and find what I needed.

Wednesday
Wednesday is “hump day” and a perfect day to focus on communications and processes in our day.

At home, take a look at your kitchen and your bedroom. For us, at least, the kitchen alone can be a major project for de-cluttering. One big tactic that works is simply reducing your kitchen implements, replacing fifteen low-quality single use items with one high quality item that simply does the job. You don’t need a butcher’s block, you just need one really good chef’s knife, a bread knife, and a paring knife. You don’t need tons of casseroles and Pyrex, you just need a few high-quality French ovens. A more streamlined shopping plan helps, too.

At work, re-evaluate your commute and your communication processes. How do you get to work? Does your trip fill you with unnecessary distractions and angst? Look for the least stressful way to get to work. When you’re there, look at how you communicate with others. Does it happen in an orderly fashion with appropriate emotions? I find that “communication sessions” work well for me, where I spend a period of time each day just handling communiques, then I turn off those communication channels to allow myself to focus on other areas.

Thursday
On Thursday, the focus should be on organizing your living spaces at home and focusing on your workflow and processes at work.

At home, look at the places you spend your time during the day. For us, that means our family room, and the obvious place to look there is our entertainment center, which is often a mess thanks to kids pulling out DVDs and playing with various items. Another spot to look is our book collection in the laundry room, which could sorely use some time.

At work, examine how you work on projects. Do you have difficulty completing them? Do you have too many projects? Start using the “five whys” and dig into the reasons for this. Quite often, there are some simple things blocking you from a much better workflow.

Friday
Friday’s focus is solely on uncluttering your schedule. Most of us have schedules that are so full to the brim with activities that we scarcely have time for important things in our lives. How many of you read the previous activities and thought, “That sounds awesome, but I don’t have time for it!”

The best way to do this is to simply prioritize the things you’re doing. Figure out what elements are truly of low priority and either treat them as such or find ways to completely eliminate them. Then, look at the higher priority things and look for ways to compress them – perhaps, instead of watching a show live on Tuesdays, you can record it and watch it commercial-free on Wednesdays. Perhaps instead of unwinding after work, you can spend a brief bit of time truly relaxing and then get on with the things you need to do.

The Weekend
The biggest benefit of unclutterinig is that it truly frees your weekend. If you have established routines for handling everything throughout the week – and you’ve uncluttered your time enough to allow for it – your weekends go from being “catch up” time to being big blocks of free time with which you can do whatever you want.

That’s really the reward, isn’t it?

Is Unclutter Your Life in One Week Worth Reading?
Absolutely. This is the single best book I’ve ever read on organizing your life. Much like my favorite book on time management, Getting Things Done (and, incidentally, Unclutter Your Life in One Week has a foreword by the author of GTD, David Allen), Unclutter Your Life in One Week shines because of the small implementable details, like the few pages devoted to how to organize your clothes and fold your shirts (seriously – I started using that method and it works really well).

If you were to do everything in this book, it would take much longer than a week, without a doubt. However, the modularity of it allows you to pull out pieces to tackle the most egregious parts of your life and then gradually move to other details as the “de-cluttering” advantages become clear.

This book has found a semi-permanent home on my bookshelf as I move towards decluttering some of my own life (like that nightmarish junk drawer and the train wreck that is my closet and, frankly, my time schedule).

A post on a “savings generation gap” at Get Rich Slowly the other day caught my eye. In it, J.D. argued that there’s a “generation gap” between spenders and savers. People who are over some particular age threshold – somewhere around 35 or 40 – tend to save their money, whereas people who are younger than that tend to spend their money.

I agree with J.D.’s general conclusion that there is some sort of gap between spenders and savers, but I think the age thing is merely incidental. In my eyes, the real difference between spenders and savers is that the savers realize that they have something to lose.

In my own life, I was a big spender during my early professional years. I lived in an apartment with my wife and, in essence, had very little to be responsible for outside of my job and my marriage. I worked hard at both of those, but in terms of worrying about taking care of the future, there really wasn’t much to take care of. I didn’t have a house. I didn’t have dependents. I wasn’t established in the community yet – most of my friends were holdovers from college who were similarly unanchored. I had lots of free time.

Roll the clock forward several years. At that point, we’re living in a house. We have two children. I’m involved in several community projects and serve on multiple boards. We have lots of friends and acquaintances in our town, too.

Before, I didn’t really have too much that I could lose. If I spent all my money, there really wasn’t any risk involved with it. As long as I kept up with my career, I could live through my money mistakes. I felt very free to spend with reckless abandon because there was little real-world consequence to spending in that way.

Today, if I spent like that, there would be serious consequences. Would we be able to keep our home? Would we have to leave the community we’ve worked hard to establish ourselves in? What about our children? Am I doing what I can to take care of them? As I write this, I’m sitting in a home that’s a huge six-figure investment of our money – I need to make sure it’s not falling apart, either. The income from my writing career is notoriously unstable, too.

I save because I now have things in my life that I need to protect. That wasn’t true earlier in my life.

I think the idea that “saving is for old people” comes from the journey that people take in life. Early on, we have fewer elements in our life that we need to protect. We don’t have a home. We often don’t have a marriage. We often don’t have children. We often don’t have an established role in the community. We often don’t have an established career.

Later on, many people do establish these things. They begin to realize that they can indeed lose their life’s work. They want to protect all the work that they’ve done. So they begin to save. Often, this is coupled with other shifts in life perspective as well.

In that context, there is something of a correlation between age and saving tendencies, because older people have more to protect and are more aware that it needs to be protected. Older people have the fruits of many years of labor, something that younger people simply have not had the time to bring to harvest yet.

Of course, looking back on my journey, I regret not saving during my early years. Most of the things I spent money on then have left me with nothing at all now except for a worse position in life. Spending so freely for so long directly means more worries today – a result that I could have easily prevented by looking with even the slightest critical eye at my purchasing choices.

Did I need to learn that lesson? I don’t know. I think that some people need to learn it. I think that others have it ingrained in them from an early age.

Many newer readers of The Simple Dollar haven’t been exposed to the hundreds of great articles in the archives of the site, so this is a weekly series that highlights the five best posts from one year ago this week, two years ago this week, and three years ago this week. I call it … the Time Machine.

One Year Ago (November 8-14, 2008)
The Readers Speak Out: Their 25 Best Actions for Saving Money I asked the readers for their single best action for saving money. They responded – big time. Here are the twenty-five top ones, all of which received multiple responses.

Accountability For a lot of people, accountability is a four-letter word.

Taking Dramatic Change One Day at a Time Whenever I want to make a major change in my own life, I find it works far better if I take that change one day at a time instead of committing to big, long-term things that may be impossible for me to reach.

Paying Others to Provide a Service: When Is It Frugal? I think it is if you’re directly replacing the time you’d spend engaged in that service with something truly more valuable to you. This requires a keen sense of how valuable one’s time is, something a lot of people don’t have.

Some Thoughts on the Small House Movement: Is It Something Worth Considering? I think the size of our house is about right (perhaps with slightly bigger bedrooms and perhaps one more bedroom to accomodate our next child), but I know couples without children that have substantially larger homes than we do.

Two Years Ago (November 8-14, 2007)
Should I Report Ethical Misconduct At Work? I don’t think it’s always as cut-and-dried as people want to make it out to be. If I see my boss taking some extra coffee, I’m not going to try to get him fired. But where’s the line?

Should You Report Sexual Harassment in the Workplace? Similarly, I don’t think it’s as black-and-white as many would like to think it is. Sexual harassment is wrong, but I’ve seen threats and blackmail involving sexual harassment for calling someone “dear.”

Toy Catalogs and Children: Are They a Good Match? As of yet, we have never plopped our kids in front of a toy catalog near the holidays. Here’s why.

Fun I must be a real bore if I talk about money all the time.

Melancholy and Spending I believe there’s a huge connection between low self-esteem, sadness, and a lack of control over your spending. A positive attitude makes it harder for advertising to work its magic.

Three Years Ago (November 8-14, 2006)
Review: The Millionaire Next Door The first book I ever reviewed on The Simple Dollar is still one of my favorites.

The Road to Financial Armageddon #8: Meltdown Here’s the story of how I hit financial bottom. It’s painful.

Building a Financial (and Personal) Idea Diary I use one of these every day. I keep a little spiral notebook in my front pocket.

Setting and Meeting Daily Personal Finance Goals Microgoals are a big part of personal finance success. In fact, The Simple Dollar would fail without daily goals.

Applying the Peak-End Rule to Personal Finance The peak-end rule pops up over and over again in life. If you can figure out how to use it to your advantage, it can really help you save money.

If you’d like to browse through more of the archives, visit the chronology, where all posts are listed in chronological order.

Nine Ways to Get More out of The Simple Dollar
This is kind of a FAQ for new readers and is posted each week along with the Time Machine. Here are nine great ways for new readers to dig deeper into The Simple Dollar.

1. Subscribe by email or RSS. Visiting The Simple Dollar’s website is great, but for many people, it’s more convenient to receive the articles in another form. It’s easy to join 60,000 other subscribers and get The Simple Dollar’s content by email or in your RSS feeder (if you’re unfamiliar with RSS, check out Google Reader.

2. Comment. Each article on The Simple Dollar has lively discussion. Just click on the green square in the upper right of each article on the website and join in!

3. Read my story of financial meltdown and recovery. The Simple Dollar isn’t based on what I’ve read in books or learned in school. I’ve made a lifetime of financial mistakes – The Simple Dollar is a record of what works for me during the process of getting my life on a better track.

4. Download my free 49 page e-book. Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page is completely free. It summarizes all of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way about personal finance in one tidy package – in fact, all of the main principles can be found right on the cover.

5. Follow me on Twitter – or other social networks. I post tons of interesting articles, quotes, follow-up material, commentary, and other material on Twitter. Follow me! If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s essentially an open discussion forum for people to share ideas and thoughts with other like-minded folks – you just choose the people you want to listen to and their ideas and thoughts are all delivered to you on a single page.

I also participate on several other social networks. Feel free to check me out on del.icio.us (it’s where I collect links, from which I select the ones that appear in my weekly roundups), wakoopa (what software I use), GoodReads (what books I’m reading), Facebook, and FriendFeed (which aggregates everything). I also have an irregularly-updated personal site, TrentHamm.com.

6. Dig through “31 Days to Fix Your Finances.” 31 Days to Fix Your Finances is an article series that outlines how you can get a grip on your finances over the course of a month.

7. Send me your questions and suggestions. Send me an email and let me know what you’re thinking, what you’d like to see, and any questions you might have. I try to respond to as many emails as possible and I read them all. I may even use your question in a future article!

8. Become a “Friend of The Simple Dollar.” If you find the stuff on The Simple Dollar valuable and are willing to spend five minutes or so a month to help me out with small things, please consider signing up to be a “Friend of The Simple Dollar”.

9. Email a great article you find to a friend. Find an article that you think your friend would love? At the bottom of each article, you’ll find a link that says “Email this” – just click on that, type in your friend’s address, and send it right along to them!

In a little less than two weeks, Thanksgiving will be upon us, immediately followed by “Black Friday,” the busiest shopping day of the year. Black Friday is quite often the day that pushes retailers over the line into profitability for the year (from the red to the black), hence the name. Naturally, since it’s the day following Thanksgiving, many people in the United States have the day off from work, and since the holidays are approaching, many will also use the day to get started on their holiday shopping.

In order to get customers into the stores on Black Friday, many retailers offer enormous sales on a handful of specific items. These items are often sold at a loss in order to simply get people into the store, because the logic goes that if a customer is in the store, they’re likely to buy other things. Plus, it provides some positive word-of-mouth promotion for that retailers, as people will talk about where they got enormous bargains on that day.

As a result, many retailers heavily advertise their “Black Friday” sales in the week or two leading up to that day. Websites proliferate online, tracking the bargains to be had.

And, through it all, the big goal is to whip consumers into a buying frenzy.

Such a frenzy is bad news. Getting caught up in participating in Black Friday just to get “deals” on stuff you don’t really want or need or items that may or may not be good gifts for others is a sure way to watch your money float away.

That’s not to say that Black Friday can’t be useful to someone with savvy – it certainly can. It just requires a bit of finesse and forethought.

Here’s exactly how I handle “Black Friday.”

I make a very careful list before looking at the fliers. In other words, I already have my Christmas list in hand. I know who I’m buying for, how much I’m spending on each person, and I also ahve a few ideas for each person to help me shop.

Beyond that, there’s often a specific item or two I’m looking for for myself. This year, for example, I’m looking for a replacement laptop. The ol’ frugal laptop has served me well for quite a while, but it’s suffering from a number of hardware issues. So, my eyes are open for a replacement, probably a middle-tier Windows 7 machine capable of photo editing and a bit of gaming.

Thus, before I even take a peek at a “Black Friday” flier or website, I know exactly what I’m going to be looking for.

Next, I use the internet to view lots of flyers at once and compare them. My preferred website for doing this is blackfriday.info, but there are lots of them that provide a similar service.

Why do I do this? First, browsing through lots of ads online – because they’re usually just lists of items – cuts down on the impulse buy possibilities. I’m not sucked in by intriguing pictures of items I’m not interested in buying.

Second, websites provide tons of sales lists to me at once. Instead of having to dig through lots of newspapers on Thanksgiving Day, I can just visit a website and get all of the details I want in one spot.

Once I’ve done that, I come up with a plan of attack. I’ll usually identify an item or two that’s got a strong price and matches something I’m looking to give out as a gift. On Black Friday, I’ll get up early and visit only those stores, and when I go, I’ll take a list for each store and get only those items. Everything else is just a leech on my wallet.

Finally, I’ll check online retailers a few times on Black Friday. Online retailers, particularly Amazon.com, offer all kinds of sales throughout the day on Black Friday (and sometimes even on Thanksgiving Day). I’ll check these a few times, looking for items that are actually on my list.

The big rule for all of this is simple: unplanned buys on Black Friday (or any day) are usually really bad ideas. Step back and think about what you’re buying and you’ll find value on Black Friday. Dive in head first waving your credit card like a mad man and you’ll come out of the day with a bunch of stuff you don’t need – including some fat bills.