In April and May, National Public Radio featured a series on inexpensive gourmet dishes entitled “How Low Can You Go?” Although many of the dishes looked quite tasty, most of the dishes weren’t actually all that inexpensive, often narrowly getting below $10 to feed a family of four, and many involved arduous cooking processes. I decided to try out some of these recipes throughout the summer to see how I could take the recipes and reduce them down to a simple and very inexpensive form.

I know of Ming Tsai from his excellent public television cooking show Simply Ming. He tends to make a lot of fairly unusual dishes with Asian themes that are really palatable to Western taste buds. So I was excited to try out the recipe he submitted to “How Low Can You Go,” Chicken-and-Corn Fried Rice with Lemon Spinach. Even more interesting, he claimed his kids love it, which made my foodie thoughts perk up even more. Here’s the recipe:

1 pound ground chicken
2 eggs
1 large yellow onion, minced
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon ginger powder
2 ears of corn when in season, or 1 bag frozen (12 ounces)
1/2 (10 ounces) bag spinach (washed, spun dry, de-stemmed, leaves torn)
2 tablespoons naturally brewed soy sauce
Juice of 1 lemon
4 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry*
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/2-inch oil to wok and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

My wife Sarah took charge of this recipe, so my notes below are largely taken from her comments as she was making it.

First of all, here are the ingredients we used.

We wound up using Dole spinach for this because the spinach we got at the farmers market (our usual source for summer produce) was utterly abysmal – the two purveyors had some of the saddest looking spinach we’d ever seen, so we passed. The rice – a mix of white and brown long grain – was pre-cooked a day in advance. We also chose to substitute some ground turkey for the ground chicken, because that’s what we had on hand.

So, anyway, on with the cooking. She cooked the turkey with quite a bit of seasoning by itself, breaking down the pieces. Here it is, frying away on our stove:

Sarah suggests spicing the meat quite a bit here by putting on plenty of pepper and I agree wholeheartedly – black pepper really complements things well.

After the turkey was finished, she cooked the eggs, essentially making scrambled eggs in a bit of oil. This part smelled really good to me:

After the eggs were finished, she cooked the other ingredients together in the remaining oil. A quick note: she decided that there was an excess of oil after the eggs finished and removed most of the oil. I agree – I think with that much oil, there would have been too much in the pan. Half an inch might be the right amount in a wok, but not in a large pan – use just barely enough to cover the pan (once the eggs are done).

Upon adding the rice, the turkey, the eggs, and the corn to the mixture, there was a huge amount of food, filling up our rather large pan.

It smelled heavenly at this point. I (personally) suggest adding a bit more soy sauce than what the recipe calls for, but it was quite good as-is.

Serve it on top of spinach leaves, as the flavor of the spinach combines well. Here’s our final plate:

Did we like it? Almost universally, yes. Even our son, who is the pickiest eater in the house, seemed to really get into it, gobbling it down like crazy. Both children had seconds, though neither one finished their second helping. I loved it, though I would have included just a bit more soy sauce. Sarah loved it, too, though she’s intrigued as to whether it would be significantly different with chicken.

What about the cost? Our cost for this recipe totaled $9.80. But here’s the kicker – there was more left over than we consumed at the table. We were able to get eight more meals out of the fried rice, for a total of twelve meals. Thus, the cost per meal was $0.81 – not bat at all.

Still, if you’re eating for a small family and don’t want to eat this four times, you should reduce the recipe significantly.

Changes I Would Make to Save Cost and Time
The first thing I would do is halve the recipe. The recipe makes a mountain of food and, unless you want to eat it several times or have an enormous family, it makes too much food and the rest will go to waste. One could freeze it, I suppose, but the dish does not strike me as one that would tolerate freezing well.

The second thing I’d do is reduce the oil. This doesn’t change the time, but it slightly reduces the cost and definitely improves the health of the meal. You don’t need half an inch of oil here unless you’re using a wok – even then, it’s perhaps too much.

Third, de-stemming the spinach seemed flatly unnecessary to us. It would be a time investment that doesn’t gain too much – the small stems on most spinach is just fine. We served ours just as it came, after washing.

Those changes alter the recipe quite a bit. Here’s my alteration:

1/2 pound ground chicken
1 eggs
1 small yellow onion, minced
1/2 tablespoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon ginger powder
1 ear of corn when in season, or 1/2 bag frozen (6 ounces)
1/4 bag spinach (washed and dried)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Juice of 1/2 lemon
2 cups cold, cooked long-grain rice, brown and white combination, preferably day-old so it’s nice and dry (that’s about 3/8 cup of white and 3/8 cup brown when dry)
kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Canola oil

Heat a wok or large saute pan over medium-high heat. Lightly coat with oil. When oil shimmers add chicken, season with salt and pepper, and brown, breaking up any large chunks with wooden spoon or spatula. Remove chicken to a plate. Add about 1/4-inch oil to wok (unless using pan, then just coat bottom) and allow to heat; add eggs, which will puff up. Cook scrambled eggs and remove to a paper towel-lined plate. If necessary, add more oil to wok to lightly coat, then add onions, garlic, and powdered ginger, and cook until nicely caramelized, about 5 minutes. Add corn, rice, chicken and egg, and toss to combine. Add naturally brewed soy sauce, toss to combine, and check for seasoning. Place mound of raw spinach in center of four dinner plates. Drizzle with lemon juice and season. Top with fried rice to cover. Enjoy!

A reader asked me if I could break down my ideas into a handful of principles. After some careful thought, I came up with a list of fourteen basic “rules” that summarize my money and life philosophy. I’ll be presenting these as a weekly series.

One of the first things I did when I started turning my financial situation around is to start keeping track of my net worth over time. Each week (and later each month), I calculated the value of all of my assets, all of my debts, and the difference between the two (my net worth).

Later, when I began to try to improve my physical shape, I started keeping careful track of several metrics: my weight, my resting heartbeat, and the number of miles I was walking and jogging. Even more powerful, I started sharing my walking and running data via the Nike+ website, allowing me to compare my progress with others.

I like to call it the “keeping score” effect. Almost always, it becomes more fun to work towards a difficult goal if you have some sort of method of comparing your progress to the progress of others, or comparing your current state with your state in the past. You can see the improvement clearly – when you look and see that your net worth is up $10,000 compared to last year or you see your average mile is more than a minute faster than it was a couple months ago, it feels enormous. It’s a giant rush.

The entire point here is to keep yourself motivated towards your goals. Keeping score keeps your big goals front and center in your mind. Combining that with a visual reminder of your goal can be particularly powerful, as it keeps your goal front and center in your mind and also demonstrate your progress clearly.

There are countless tools out there to help you keep track of your personal finance progress. I tend to lean towards tools like Wesabe or Open Office or Quicken, which allow you to preserve the security of your account information but require a bit more work. On the other hand, you have tools like Mint, which gathers the information for you but requires you to share all of your account information with one site (which really concerns me from a personal security standpoint, regardless of what Mint’s privacy policy says).

I find it worthwhile to carefully track my progress in four areas:

Track your assets. For me, I only include the assessed value of my home plus the balances of any investment accounts and savings accounts I have. In a normal month, I expect this amount to move up slowly over the previous month, meaning I’m actually saving money. Some months see a precipitous drop, though – for example, if I buy a car, that’s usually a pretty big money hit, since I don’t include my car as part of my assets since they depreciate so much.

Track your debts. This is key if you’re trying to plow your way through a a debt repayment plan. Each month, you record the balance of each debt, then add them up. If you’re actually pushing well on that debt repayment plan, the total balance of your debts should significantly drop each month. If you don’t see your debt dropping, you need to take a serious look at what’s going on.

Track your net worth. This one’s simple – just add up your assets and subtract all of your debts from the total. Obviously, each month, you want your net worth to be higher than the previous month. I like to make a note of the difference from month to month and I strive to increase this difference each month.

Track your spending. Whenever you spend, jot it down. Keep track of all of it and, at the end of the month, add it up. Even more important, divide that spending into categories – utilities, necessary food, eating out, entertainment, books – and total up each category. This technique is powerful because it shows you the areas where your spending is out of control and you need to tighten up.

As I mentioned earlier, when you keep track of your progress in this way, it becomes a huge aid for setting goals. Here are three ways I have used the above data to set short term goals for myself, pushing me to new heights:

I want my net worth growth to be better this month than last. Let’s say my net worth goes up $1,000 from June to July. I then want my net worth growth from July to August to be $1,001 or more. Obviously, I can’t control the growth of the stock market, but I can control my spending impulses.

I want to cut my spending in this specific category by 50% next month. If I notice that I spent more than I thought in a certain area last month – like books, for example, or on eating out – I set a goal for the next month to reduce my spending in that category by a decisive amount without jacking up my spending elsewhere.

I want my debt to drop more this month than last month. Doing this works hand in hand with my net worth goal, but in a slightly more specific way. I’ll push hard to find a few extra dollars that month to roll into a debt payment.

I’ve also found that the social aspect of such tracking and goal setting is powerful. If you like to do this online, Wesabe is an incredibly interesting and powerful tool for sharing your information and comparing it to the progress of others. You can offer encouragement to others, let them encourage you, and push towards goals together.

I’m highly partial to doing this offline, though. Find a personal finance buddy and meet together regularly to encourage each other, share your progress and your challenges, and offer useful tips to each other. For me, the reality of meeting someone face to face makes such progress tracking more real – and it also adds a stronger edge of competitiveness to the mix.

In the end, keeping track of your personal finance progress is key. It shows you quite clearly where you’ve been, how far you’ve come, and where you need to go. It helps you see the areas where you’re successful – and points out the areas where you need more work. It constantly pushes you forward to bigger and better things.

In the end, watching your steps helps you follow that trail straight to your dreams, whether it’s a financial dream or a dream in any aspect of your life.

On our DVD shelf, which is admittedly quite thinner than it used to be, there are quite a few DVDs that we’ve watched once and are simply accumulating dust. Assuming a cost of $15 per DVD and a two hour movie, our hourly cost is about $7.50.

On the other hand, we have our Pixar movies. We picked up Toy Story 2 – our son’s favorite movie – for about $11 and we’ve watched it at least nine times, while also digging through the special features several times. Our hourly cost for that DVD is about $0.60.

Here’s the difference: we’re not passionate about that first movie, but our son is very passionate about that second movie. It’s his choice on almost every family movie night. He loves it.

That dust-collecting movie would have been far better off as a rental. We could have dropped a dollar, rented it somewhere, enjoyed it once, then returned it. That reflects our passion much better than owning the movie because we enjoy watching a wide variety of films, not watching and re-watching the same ones over and over (outside of a small handful of them). Cost per hour – $0.50.

Here’s another example. My wife has owned a flute for many years. She’s put thousands of hours into the flute over the decades and is quite good at it, making beautiful music while my attempts sound like awful noise. Her cost per hour of use of that flute is down in the pennies at this point.

A while back, she decided to take on learning the keyboard. She picked up a pretty solid budget keyboard for $99 and set it up in the basement. At first, she played it quite a bit, but before long, the novelty of it wore off. Now, most of the touches that the keyboard gets come from our children, who occasionally enjoy climbing up to it and pounding the keys for a few minutes.

My “back of the napkin” calculation on that one, the cost per hour of use of the keyboard is somewhere around $4.

There’s a pattern here. If a purchase is in line with someone’s passion, the cost per hour of that purchase is pretty low – it’s a value. If a purchase isn’t in line with a passion, the cost per hour on that purchase is very high – it’s a waste of money.

There are some really useful conclusions that can be drawn from this.

First, it’s fine to spend money on your passions if you know what they are. If you’re passionate about something, you’re going to wind up investing a lot of time on it, simply because the activity is important to you. Thus, it’s completely worthwhile to invest in that passion.

Take, for example, someone who drinks several cups of coffee in the morning as opposed to someone who drinks perhaps one cup a week. The person who drinks a lot of coffee is passionate about it and will likely get value out of a coffee grinder and whole beans. The person who drinks perhaps one cup a week will get very little value out of that same coffee grinder.

Second, if you’re unsure about your passion, it makes sense to rent equipment or buy low-end equipment. In the example above, my wife might have been better off if she had simply bought a very low-end keyboard, perhaps a used one from a yard sale or from Craigslist or Freecycle. This would have lowered the initial cost quite a bit, so that we didn’t have as much invested when she discovered that she didn’t have a real passion about playing the keyboard.

What happens if you discover that you are passionate about it? If you find that you do have a passion – that you’re staying up late playing the keyboard or working in the woodshop – upgrade your equipment as needed. If you can identify a good reason to upgrade a piece of equipment that you’re using all the time, upgrade it. If your original piece of equipment was inexpensive, then it won’t be too much of a loss to upgrade.

In the end, the cost per hour of your equipment is a great indication of what you’re passionate about. The things that have a very low cost per hour are things that either were already nearly free or that you’re passionate about.

On the other hand, things that have a high cost per hour of use are things that you should strongly consider trimming in your life. For example, we’ve stopped buying individual movies, instead moving towards renting movies for family movie night. I’m also strongly considering moving to a pay-as-you-go mobile phone plan.

It’s easy to get started: just spend some time looking at the things in your life. What do you spend a lot of time with? What do you not spend much time at all enjoying? Likely, the things you don’t spend much time on – especially in comparison to the cost – are great places to trim away a little fat. Start looking at your expenditures through this filter and you’ll likely surprise yourself at what you might discover.

A while back, I wrote about my best friend (besides my wife), John. John doesn’t spend money on frivolous things at all – he spends way less than he earns and is really careful with his money, saving up for the future. He lives in a very small apartment in a poor neighborhood, bicycles to work, and doesn’t engage in any expensive hobbies.

Until recently, he had been socking his money away in an ordinary savings account. He bought a few certificates of deposit along the way to increase his savings rate, but he was (and still is) pretty risk-averse. He had no interest in putting his money at risk.

Several months ago, he shocked me by announcing he had purchased twenty acres of undeveloped land within driving distance of Des Moines, a pretty serious investment. Given how risk-averse John was with his money, the purchase really surprised me – he never struck me as a real estate developer.

Recently, he invited my family down to the land to camp for the weekend – he had wanted to “clean it up” some before we checked it out.

We were really impressed.

It turns out that John spends many of his free evenings down on this patch of land, clearing away brush, building walking trails in the wooded area, and building a small camping area. He built a picnic table there and a fire ring and made nice piles out of the brush he had cut, perfect for small campfires.

The majority of the land is a large, fairly flat prairie, with a small creek on one edge of the land and woodlands covering perhaps a third of the land. As we hiked all over the land (with our kids in tow), John kept pointing out all of the things he had done to improve things. He had cut back poison vines here, cleared brush there, made a trail here, collected berries there, and so on.

It was obvious he was thoroughly enjoying the land.

I asked him about his long-term plans with it. He has a “ten year plan” for the land that involves starting with a large shed in which to store equipment, followed by everything he would need to put on the land for it to be wholly self-sustaining: a wind turbine or two, geothermal heating, a well, a large garden, and so on. He intends on paying for each piece with cash. Eventually, he intends to build a cabin of some sort, then a larger home after that, building as much of it himself as he can.

Even more notable, he intends to pay for every step along the way with cash.

It’s obviously going to be a good investment. A nice, self-sustainable home within driving distance of Des Moines and plenty of fairly cultivated woodlands all around will have some serious value in ten or fifteen years. If John chooses to live there forever, he’s got a great situation around himself. If he chooses to start the whole process again because he enjoys the work in his spare time, he can sell the whole thing and get started with a nice bankroll.

The real value, though, is that John is really enjoying the investment. Being outside and working on the land like this is his hobby. The cash he put into the land might return him a nice financial profit someday – or it might not. But it’s returning him a very large personal happiness return right now.

To me, that’s a great investment. I don’t care about whether he gets a 1% return or a 10% return on his money from this. What matters is that he’s enjoying that investment. It’s bringing joy into his life in a way that a chunk of money in the stock market could never do.

When Sarah and I drove away from there, we both couldn’t help but think of our dreams of owning a home in the country. While I don’t have the passion for building that John does, I certainly have a lot of passion for the natural beauty of living in an area like that, where the only houses in view are on the horizon.

The return you get from an investment isn’t always represented in dollars and cents. Sometimes an investment can return a lot more than that.

This is the ninth of twelve parts of a “book club” reading and discussion of Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover, where this book on debt reduction is teased apart and looked at in detail. This entry covers the tenth chapter, finishing on page 182. The next entry, covering the eleventh chapter, will appear on Saturday.

When I was growing up, my parents didn’t save any money for me for college. Not because they were neglectful, but mostly because there weren’t resources for such saving.

Where are we at now? I’m doing just fine, with just one college loan remaining, and my parents are safely in retirement, leaving me without worrying about how they’re going to make ends meet.

This experience, when I reflect on it, makes me question the value of college savings. I do understand the benefits of helping my children through school, especially if they realize the value of it. However, looking at things from a post-college perspective, I’m actually much happier that my parents are safely retired than I would be if they had floated my college bill and were still working.

For me, at least, it makes sense to focus on retirement savings and make absolutely sure that it’s covered before even considering college savings. I think we’re there.

What to Expect from College
Many parents seem to expect that once the kids are out the door to college, they’re well on their way to a lucrative career. Ha. On page 169:

If you are sending your kids to college because you want them to be guaranteed a job, success, or wealth, you will be dramatically let down. In some cases, the letdown won’t take long because as soon as they graduate they will move back in with you. Here me on this: college is great, but don’t expect too much from that degree. [...] Because we have turned a college degree into some kind of “genie in a bottle” formula to help us magically win at life, we go to amazingly stupid extremes to get one.

This kind of talk is anathema to some. How dare someone impugn the value of a college education!

Here’s the thing: the actual college education only teaches you a bit of what you’ll actually need to know in the workplace. The value of college comes in other areas: the relationships you build and the skills and ability to actually get through the minefield. The college degree merely says that you were able to navigate the minefield, not that you picked up invaluable knowledge that will help a business make money.

I found that the “cramming” skills I learned in college didn’t pay off until I had secured a job. The relationships I built paid off helped me get my foot in the door for my first big job interview, but I had other opportunities on the table that weren’t connected at all to those relationships. My actual college degree? It was a nice resume filler, but it was not what got me the job and it was not what helped me succeed when I got there.

Devaluing the Pedigree
Page 171 discusses the idea that where your degree comes from doesn’t matter that much:

In some areas of study and in a very few careers, where you graduate will matter, but in most it won’t. Pedigree means less and less in our work culture today.

The panic that people feel about how they “must” get into this certain college is completely overblown, from my perspective. You succeed or fail based on what you do and the relationships you build, not the environment around you. You can flame out just as well at MIT and at your local tiny state school. You can also succeed dramatically at both if you work at it.

I would far rather have a child that went to a small school without a great pedigree, took advantage of all of the opportunities there, built some great relationships with people, and got good grades in an area they’re passionate about than to go to Harvard and flunk out after two semesters.

Pedigree matters less. What matters more is the individual: did they take advantage of their opportunities, or let them idle around them?

College Lifestyle Adjustments
When I was in college, there were two groups of kids. There were the kids with “helicopter parents” who gave them plenty of cash to spend, seemed to stop by the dorms all the time, and would actually call professors on their behalf. There were also the “free” kids, the ones whose parents dropped them off, came and visited on occasion, but mostly let the kids do their own thing.

I was in the latter group. My parents came and visited regularly, especially when I was a freshman, but success was largely up to me. They never contacted a professor, and outside of a $10 or a $20 bill left behind on occasion, they didn’t provide me with funding beyond buying some of my textbooks as my “birthday” or “Christmas” present. I had a job starting my first semester and I kept multiple jobs throughout my college years.

Dave riffs on this on page 171:

[T]hose precious kids can probably get a good degree if they will suffer through lifestyle adjustments and get a job while in school. Work is good for them. In past generations, students lived with relatives, slept in dorms, ate cafeteria food, and endured other hardships to get a degree.

I do not want the path my children have to college to be incredibly easy. For me, the aspects of college where I actually learned things were the areas where I was pushed and challenged. Having everything paid for makes big swaths of college incredibly easy – and many college students, especially those lacking self-motivation, will fill those gaps with gratuitous wastes of time and money.

Obviously, the path shouldn’t be impossible, but no path that is a cake walk is one worth taking.

Tuition Inflation
College tuition goes up by leaps and bounds. On page 174:

College tuition goes up faster than regular inflation. Inflation of goods and services averages about 4 percent per year, while tuition inflation averages about 7 percent per year. When you save for college, you have to make at least 7 percent per year to keep up with the increases.

In other words, if you want your investment today to actually grow faster than the rate of tuition growth, you need to be making more than 7% on your return.

How can you do that? Well, there’s no guaranteed way to get that kind of return. However, if you start early in your child’s life, you have a period of almost twenty years to watch your dollars grow in a long-term investment, which means you can take on more risk than you could if your kid is fourteen.

I have my children’s college savings almost entirely in stocks (the oldest child is three years old). As they get older, I’ll slowly begin to shift their savings towards bonds and safer things, but for now, the potential growth of the stock market and the time frame I have for saving makes stocks a great choice.

Will Baby Life Insurance Work?
I know of several grandparents who have written to The Simple Dollar asking whether buying whole life insurance for their newly-born grandchildren is a good option. I told them no – I suggested starting their grandchild a 529 if they’re saving for college and if they really wanted life insurance they should buy a small term policy for the grandchild. Dave seems to concur on page 174:

Baby life insurance, like Gerber or other Whole Life for babies to save for college, is a joke, averaging less than a 2 percent return.

Whole life insurance is never a good deal. If you’re tempted to invest in it, consider something different. Instead of dumping, say, $100 a month into a whole life policy, buy a similar insurance policy for $10 or so a month, then invest the other $90 or so into a dedicated investment – a 529, a Roth IRA, or even just a taxable account. Put it into index funds through Vanguard (that’s what I do with my dollars) and just sit back.

You will be ahead. Why? The $90 you’re investing in index funds won’t have commissions taken out – the cost of a typical index fund is about 0.2% a year, while whole life funds have commissions so large that they often eat the entirety of your first few years’ worth of contributions.

If you’re thinking about it, get the information and projections from your insurance salesman, step back, and run the numbers yourself. Compare your investment in that policy with an investment in an index fund like VFINX and see where things wind up.

What Kind of Account Should I Use?
On page 175, Dave points towards a Coverdell account:

I suggest funding college, or at least the first step of college, with an Educational Savings Account (ESA), funded in a growth-stock mutual fund.

An ESA is often referred to as a Coverdell, named after the late Senator Paul Coverdell.

I usually recommend a 529. What’s the difference? The Coverdell has the advantage of enabling you to choose your investments on your own instead of choosing among the plans offered by various states. Iowa’s plan, though, is handled by Vanguard, which is who I would choose, anyway.

The big drawback to a Coverdell, from my perspective, is that it has to be used by age thirty or else given to a younger relative. I don’t like this at all, which leans me towards the 529. Many students who go on to graduate school often wind up in school past age thirty; others may make the choice to go back for a different degree after some years in the “real” world. If I invest in my child’s 529 and they have money left after getting that four year degree, I’d like it if that money sat around in case they chose to go back to graduate school or for another degree later on in life. That option is cut off with a Coverdell.

What I hope for is that my children will earn enough scholarships to cover their undergraduate degrees (I earned enough for a majority of my expenses). If that happens, they can keep that 529 for any graduate work they might do.

Do you have any other thoughts on this chapter of The Total Money Makeover? Please share them in the comments – and feel free to respond to any of my impressions as well. After all, a good book club is all about discussion!

On Saturday, we’ll tackle the eleventh chapter – Pay Off the Home Mortgage.

A friend of mine who has published a small pile of books made a really good suggestion recently: why don’t you use Twitter to really practice your key phrases? In other words, if you’re trying to find a sharp way to say something, work on honing that sentence yourself, then toss it out there on Twitter on its own to see what others think.

So I’ve started doing that. As I work on my book, there are certain phrases and sentences that I work on carefully – the ones that really need to express a single idea very well. If I get one that I like, I often share it on Twitter, whether or not I think it’ll wind up in a book or in a post or something else entirely.

My favorite example of this? I was working on a freelance article about, well, freelance writing. I wanted a visually expressive and very playful lead-in sentence. I worked through several iterations, then finally tossed it out there:

Writing is like eating mashed potatoes: you need to finish up while it’s hot, but you’re tempted to spend your time sculpting.

It was a hit. Multiple people wrote to me asking what my source for that “quote” was.

I think the challenge of fitting an interesting idea into 140 characters or less forces you to be a better writer.

Anyway, on with some personal finance links.

Top Ten Disaster Preparedness Tips for Families We live in an area that has tornadoes, so our family has a very clear tornado procedure – even my three year old knows what room we go to if the siren goes off. Having such procedures in place makes it easier for the entire family to be safe in such a situation. (@ dumb little man)

Learning to (Un)Love Leverage Why is the “conventional wisdom” in business practice completely disastrous in day to day life? I think it’s disastrous in business, too – look at the myriad of failures in 2008. (@ megan mccardle)

Will Forced Frugality Last? I don’t think it will. Many, many people have their behavior steered by popular culture, and I think (to a certain extent) popular culture is promoting frugality. It’ll go away, like any other fad. Sadly enough. (@ wisebread)

Winning on the Uphills Challenges are what make you. You don’t get better when things are easy – you get better when you’re pushed hard. This applies to pretty much everything in life, from personal finance to exercise. (@ seth godin)

Emergency Fund Is For Emergencies ONLY – 6 Ways To Leave It Alone We tend to go to the opposite extreme. I try as hard as I can to avoid touching even a dime of our emergency funds. In fact, I probably go too far. (@ debt free adventure)

The ninth episode focuses on the realities and challenges of freelancing, a topic requested by podcast listeners and Simple Dollar readers. Total length: 15:20

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Episode Notes
Here are some additional notes that go alongside the comments in the podcast. Approximate times for the corresponding links and notes are listed.

0:00 – The theme song is a snippet of a Camper van Beethoven concert on October 25, 1986, shared via their very open taping policy. Listen to the concert in its entirety.
0:25 – Several of the requests came after my appearance on the July 6 episode of The Personal Finance Hour, where these topics were touched on but not delved into.
1:13 – My primary libraries for such use are Ames Public Library and Parks Library, both in Ames, Iowa.
5:17 – 365 Ways to Live Cheap is basically a small compendium of frugality tips sold at a very low price.
7:45 – Thus, my true hourly wage is higher even though I’m not working more and I’m earning a bit less.
11:22 – Deliberate practice is a big key to getting better at anything.
14:45 – A little preview of next week.

One thing I’d like to do in a future episode is have an audio reader’s mailbag. If you have a microphone on your computer and can record an MP3 of a simple, short question you might have on personal finance, careers, pop culture, or anything else you’d like me to answer, record it as an MP3 and send it to me. Keep the total recording under 15 seconds, please. Also, if you use Skype, feel free to ask your question that way – my username is trenttsd.

Comments and suggestions welcome.

And now for something a little different…

I recently read a fantastic article by Paul Graham entitled Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, in which Graham outlines that people who “make” things run by a much different work schedule than those who “manage” things. A key excerpt:

There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.

When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

After reading this and reflecting at length on many of the twists and turns my professional life has seen, I came to realize that the schedule is just one of many professional differences between managers and makers – and the most successful places where I’ve worked have found ways to make these differences work.

First, an aside: the terms “manager” and “maker” themselves deserve some reflection. I think the best way to look at it is this: does the person in question create something wholly new during their time or are they moving resources around? For example, a system administrator fits better in the “manager” category most of the time, while a programmer fits better in the “maker” category. A janitor would actually be a “manager,” while a brochure designer would be a “maker.” Got it?

Let’s walk through some of these, starting with Graham’s point.

Schedules and Multitasking
As Graham observed, makers often must focus on a single task. The challenge of creating something new requires full attention, often for extended periods, and without that full attention, it is incredibly difficult for a maker to do their job.

Managers, on the other hand, are inherent multitaskers, suited to deal with things as they come along. They solve problems as they come and simply focus on the next task that has to get done.

Unsurprisingly, these two butt heads, as Graham notes.

What’s the solution? I like the solution that worked well at one of my previous workplaces. All meetings were to be scheduled on Wednesdays, preferably first thing in the morning. We might have three or four meetings in there, but they were all lined up together so that there would be as little interference as possible with uninterrupted blocks.

Wednesday mornings usually involved one central “all hands” meeting, then several smaller meetings, often pretty informal, with specific groups. We all knew that this is what Wednesday mornings meant, so we planned around it – no seven hour tasks for Wednesdays.

Beyond that, there was a second simple rule: don’t interrupt someone if their door is closed. An open door meant that the person wasn’t bearing down on a problem and you could chat with them freely. A closed door meant “send me an email and don’t expect an immediate response.” This was a useful cue for the manager types and the maker types.

Problems to Be Solved
Managers often focused on problems of people and resources. How do we keep this system running? How do we resolve this personal conflict? Who do we hire for this position?

Makers often focused on creative problems. How do we write this piece of code? How do we make this experiment work? How do we model this phenomenon?

What’s the solution? In effect, it became clear that in the optimal workplace, the managers served the makers. If the managers were doing their jobs well, the makers would be focused on their problems without hindrances.

Another important step in this area is that when great products came from the makers, everyone got credit for it. The system administrator might not have any idea what the solution – or even the problem – was about, but by bringing his skills to bear in solving computer resource issues, he made it possible for that solution to occur and thus deserved some of the credit.

There was a strong culture enforced that you were looked down upon if you didn’t give plenty of credit where it was due.

Communication
Managers were often focused on tangibles: people, equipment, and products. Their communication often demonstrated that, as they would describe things entirely in the real world.

Makers were often focused on intangibles: ideas, theories, and potential solutions. Their communication often revolved around these areas, things that might mean very little to the managers.

What’s the solution? Everyone – managers and makers – had very clear and specific concrete goals in mind – the end products. Then, everything was discussed in terms of those products. The managers would think about what resources needed to be applied to get that product. The makers would focus on solving the creative problems that would need to be solved in order to produce the product.

Who would represent the work when talking to others? It depended heavily on the audience. At conferences of peers, it was often the makers who took the stage, as they could talk about the concepts quite well. When pitching the results for more funding, the managers would take the stage, as they were focused on the concrete elements of the results.

Networking
Obviously, makers tended to build good connections with other makers and managers tended to build good connections with other managers. That’s not to say that relationships didn’t bridge that gap, but the strongest connections were between makers and between managers, not crossing that gap.

Obviously, both styles of connections are really useful. Makers and managers can bounce ideas off their peers, but crossing that gap can provide really useful insights as well.

What’s the solution? In terms of conferences, makers went to meetings where makers congregated and managers went to meetings where managers congregated. Connecting with peers was the key here.

However, inside the office, there was often a point of having that manager/maker gap crossed. Managers and makers would often have lunch together. The head of the office might be seen having a dinner with a newly hired programmer, and a researcher grinding through an intense project might be eating with a system administrator. Many special projects would involve a maker and a manager working together, too.

What Can You Do?
So, how can you put these ideas to work where you are? I suggest five tactics for making your workplace more useful for everyone (which will not only improve your own standing, but help everyone get more done).

First, make an effort to schedule some big blocks of undisturbed time and make the schedule clear to everyone, even outsiders. Suggest this to everyone in your office. In effect, create some periods where, no matter what, people won’t be disturbed from their work (without an utter emergency). This gives makers time to settle in and managers time to focus on more introverted tasks (and meetings with other managers).

Second, try to bundle meeting times. See if you can find a certain day of the week that’s mostly devoted to meetings and other such interactions. This makes the uninterrupted blocks much easier for everyone to implement.

Third, offer comments that focus primarily on the end product. Don’t worry about what printer goes where (unless you’re the system administrator, in which case you should deal with it on your own) or what algorithm to use (unless you’re a programmer, in which case you should talk about it directly, programmer to programmer). Instead, when you’re meeting together with both managers and makers present, focus on just the product. It’s what you all have in common and it’s what you’re all focused on in the big scheme of things, so focus on that. Take the implementation details elsewhere.

Fourth, keep the product in mind when you’re working, no matter what you’re doing. Almost everything you do has some connection to the end product. Keep that connection in mind – and make that connection clear to everyone. Even things like expense reports have a connection – they help compensation for trips or other activities go to the right place, and those trips and other activities helped the product. If there truly is no connection between your task and the end product, you should be asking why this is happening.

Finally, give lots of credit, always. The artist doesn’t accomplish much if the janitor doesn’t empty the trash. The janitor doesn’t have a job if the artist doesn’t produce. You need each other and you both deserve recognition for making the end product a reality. This doesn’t mean you thank every single person for every single thing, but you never lose by thanking contributors of all kinds whenever you’re talking about your work. The managers make life manageable for the makers and the makers make life for the managers.

Time and time again, I’ve seen that modern workplaces thrive when they do more of these things and waffle when they do less of these things, from my years working for a huge employer to my days working for myself at home. You win – and everyone wins – when everyone realizes they’re really working for the same things – a great product, recognition, and a fat paycheck.