Anyone who has ever paid attention to their health, even a little, knows that there is some correlation between their personal health and well being and what they choose to eat. Eating a well-balanced and relatively low calorie diet is good for almost anyone (though you’ll find yourself getting into a lot of debate when you get more specific than that).

A change in your food habits that leads to a well-balanced and relatively low calorie diet will pay dividends both in your immediate food bill but also in your long term health costs, your personal energy level, and your appearance.

At the same time, anyone who has attempted to make radical changes to their diet all at once has found it very, very difficult to stick with. We are creatures of habit on both a mental and a biochemical level, and there is a very strong push to maintain our current diet.

So, what do we do? Yesterday, I talked about utilizing a “buddy” to help with adopting a positive new habit in your life. Today, we’re going to look at the benefits of taking it one step at a time.

For me – and for most of the peole I’ve interacted with in my life – the key to success with any challenging habit is to take steps that are sustainable above all else. If you can’t sustain a particular routine in your life, you’re going to revert back to your previous routine.

Buddies help you build sustainable routines, of course, but another strong tactic is to simply take it gradually. Adopt a single new tactic – or a very limited number of them – and focus entirely on making those work in your life.

That’s not to say that there aren’t situations where you can throw a bunch of new habits at your life at once and make it work. Sometimes, people are faced with a major shift in their lives that forces them to make changes – or there’s a major value shift that causes them to re-think everything.

Most of the time, though, shifting a bunch of habits at once is very difficult and incredibly hard to sustain.

I’ll give you a specific example from my own life. One of my major personal goals has been to drop weight in a sustainable fashion, and I have seen success over a long period of time. My weight today is a good thirty pounds lighter than it was when I started focusing on my health, and it’s sunstainably lower. Over time, it continues to inch downward.

How do I sustain that change? I usually focus on one specific change at a time, usually a diet-related change. I’ll focus on eliminating a particular food from my diet, for example, and I’ll use that as a reason to expose myself to new recipes and foods. During a period where I avoided wheat, for example, I discovered quinoa, which has become a food that I enjoy very much.

Gradually, my diet has become much healthier than it was before. I am naturally drawn to better choices because I now know a lot of healthy foods that I really like. Without making a lot of small steps, I wouldn’t have this repertoire of healthy foods and I wouldn’t find it natural to choose them.

Right now, my primary habit change is simply to establish that a day that includes a nice, long walk is a normal day, whereas a day without one is not a normal day. I’m doing this by slowly incorporating a morning walk into my routines. I’m not so much worried about distance or pace at this point, just the idea that a morning walk is what I normally do.

If you want to slowly change your diet to a more sustainable and healthy one, try changing one specific thing about your diet. For example, just decide that when you go out to eat, you’ll only order water for a beverage. Change nothing else and wait a bit until that feels normal. Then, you might change it so that whenever you order a salad, you order the dressing on the side and apply it yourself. You might decide to stop buying whatever the least healthy snack is that you keep in your home. You might decide to order one breakfast burrito instead of two each morning. You decide to fill up your drawer at work with a healthy snack (like nuts) instead of less-healthy ones. Aside from these changes, you change nothing else in your life.

Once one change feels normal and completely sustainable, add another. Keep doing this until you gradually begin seeing results while still being happy with the choices you’re making. It takes time, sure, but if you do it this way, it will be a permanent change, and that’s the kind of change thar eally earns long-term dividends.

This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my “photography intern” for this project.

I absolutely hate it when I throw things away. Few things frustrate me more than having a full trash can.

Why? I know that, on some level, I paid for the things that are being thrown away.

If I’m tossing the box that a prepackaged meal came in, part of the cost of that prepackaged meal was the box. The box wasn’t free.

If I’m throwing away the remaining scraps of a vegetable that I chopped up for a dish, those scraps were part of the cost. When you weigh fresh vegetables at the market, they do weigh the roots and the stems.

If I’m getting rid of a pan because the Teflon coating is coming off, the reality that I didn’t buy the best pan is coming home to roost.

If I’m chucking food from the back of the pantry or the back of the refrigerator, I’m paying because I wasn’t organized in terms of my food.

Trash is money lost. It’s packaging for products when at least some of the cost of that product went to pay for the packaging. It’s food that you didn’t find a use for and has gone to waste. It’s items that weren’t the optimal choice because you didn’t make the optimal choice.

One potential response to this is to become a hoarder. I have friends and family members who are loathe to throw anything away and find themselves collecting piles of largely useless items. They have old frying pans, empty cardboard boxes, and countless other items that simply doesn’t have a use.

That’s a questionable response because storage space has a cost. The more stuff you allow to accumulate, the more space you need to store it. It’s an incredibly common thing for people to have excessive living space in order to simply store stuff that they virtually never use, which means that all of their hoarded items is costing them.

I prefer a different response. I focus on buying items that minimize waste. In fact, if you look at many of your purchases through that filter, you’ll end up saving a surprising amount of money. Here’s how.

First, buy reliable items that you don’t have to replace very often. If you’re throwing away an item that you use with any regularity, that means you’re going to have to replace it in the near future. I’m quite happy to research a product and spend 20% more on it in order to significantly increase the reliability of the item. A more reliable item is one that requires fewer repairs (saving you money and time) and less frequent replacements (saving you time and money).

Second, make meals yourself from the most basic ingredients possible. Prepackaged foods generate a lot of trash. Most of the time, you can recreate the item – or make an even better version – by simply making the item from scratch.

There are a lot of examples of this. Instead of buying tomato sauce, buy some raw tomatoes, boil them, run them through a food processor, and strain it a bit. Instead of buying loaves of bread, make several of them yourself with a single sack of flour, a jar of yeast, a container of salt, and some tap water. Instead of buying individually-wrapped slices of American cheese, buy a block of cheese and get out the cheese slicer (seriously, compare this one – you’ll be amazed). In general, the smaller the volume of your waste, the closer to scratch you are with your meal and the lower the cost is.

Consider also using reusable containers for as much as you can. Instead of buying bottled water and chucking the containers, keep reusable containers in your fridge filled with water. Instead of using baggies for your sack lunches, put everything in small reusable containers.

Another tactic you can apply is to compost your vegetable waste. If you grow any sort of plants at all, you can get some value out of a small composter. Save your vegetable scraps, coffee grounds, and egg shells. Turn the mix regularly and wait until it composts into rich brown or black topsoil, then apply it to the soil in which you grow your flowers or other vegetation.

You should also evaluate the other things you toss for genuine usefulness. Can you translate this item into real usefulness in the near future? For example, I’ll often save Amazon boxes, but that’s because I’ll use them for gift packaging in the future. I’ll save egg cartons and newspapers if I’m going to be camping in the near future. However, I won’t save a broken toaster because… well, when will I ever really use a broken toaster?

Recycling is also a better option than just throwing things away. We don’t live in a community with curbside recycling, unfortunately, but we do save many types of recyclables (paper, cardboard, plastic bottles, glass bottles, etc.) on our own and take them to a recycling center regularly. While this doesn’t strictly cut down on your refuse, it does ensure that it goes to better use than simply winding up in a landfill.

Most of the time, when you strive to minimize your trash with sensible approaches, you wind up with more money in your pocket. You also wind up adding less items to the world’s landfills, meaning future generations have a little less of our trash to deal with.

One of the biggest challenges of picking up a positive but challenging habit is finding the consistent motivation to stick with it. If you’re operating by yourself, it’s very easy to talk yourself into taking the easier path.

This phenomenon is true no matter what the habit is. From changes in how you spend money to alterations in your fitness, motivation is often a big determining factor when it comes to success.

I can certainly see it in my own life. When I was changing my finances around, my “buddy” was Sarah. We were constantly there, pushing each other to make better choices, talking over difficult decisions, and congratulating each other on good moves. There was a large social push to make good financial decisions, both for me and for her.

In other aspects of my life, where Sarah and I are not chasing a mutual goal, it’s much more difficult. The simple presence of someone that you’re accountable to that’s also cheering you on makes all the difference.

As was discussed yesterday, exercise has a pretty impressive impact on your financial state. It staves off health care costs and adds to your own energy level, allowing you to tackle more earning or money-saving tactics.

However, exercise is one of those “positive but challenging” habits described above. It takes a ton of internal resolve to succeed at this alone, and many people fail (at least in part) because of this. The force of the short-term desire to relax can easily take precedent over the long-term goals of exercise without some proper motivation.

An “exercise buddy” can provide that motivation.

An “exercise buddy” is someone that you’re essentially in a “mutual coaching” relationship with. You provide some of the role of “coach” to each other for the purposes of exercising. You encourage each other to actually get out there and do it. You provide positive feedback for success. You provide a sounding board for the other person’s ideas. You offer up suggestions. You do everything you can to ensure the other person can succeed.

Most importantly, an “exercise buddy” provides that short-term social pressure that can often be enough to convince you to get out of bed at six in the morning for a jog instead of hitting the snooze button.

Of course, you can have a “buddy” for pretty much any personally challenging positive habit that you’re trying to establish. All you need is to find someone facing a similar struggle, then agree to work together to ensure your individual successes.

Having a “buddy” can make all the difference if you’re attempting to achieve something that’s really personally challenging. If you’re struggling to achieve your goal, whether it’s exercise, money, or something else, a “buddy” can go a long way toward making it work out.

This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Image courtesy of National Media Museum. (For those wondering, Brittany had a wonderful picture for this post, but I chose to make a last minute image switch due to concerns for the amateur model used in the photo.)

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to five word summaries. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. Alternatives to Mint
2. Party games
3. Shopping for insurance
4. Cutting your own hair
5. Renting or buying
6. Entertainment by default
7. S-corporation versus LLC
8. Bragging about money
9. Blogging baby steps
10. Using abundance of lettuce

The education of your child begins at home, regardless of where they go to school.

This is particularly true during the summer, as our two oldest children are enjoying their “summer break” right now. A big part of the focus of our summer has been maintaining and building on the things they’ve learned in the past year, with them taking the lead.

Our oldest child enjoys flash cards, as he’s trying to master a large body of sight words to aid in reading. We’ve been making progressively more difficult sets of “sight word” flash cards for him. Almost every evening, you’ll find him spending some time with his stack.

Our middle child is really focused on fine motor skills – grasping a writing utensil, writing clear letters, and drawing identifiable pictures of things. More than anything, this takes practice, so we’ve been encouraging her at every chance to draw a picture or write a letter.

In both cases, the improvement over the summer has been impressive. If you do a side-by-side comparison of where they were at two months ago compared to now, both have shown real improvement in one of their weakest areas. It’s happened because not only have they taken to the activities, but we’ve set things up that they enjoy doing and encouraged them to do them.

Q1: Alternatives to Mint
Can you recommend an alternative to Mint.com for tracking spending, investments, and savings? I love Mint’s feature set but I’ve been stuck in email support limbo for months on a number of bugs on their site that I just can’t stand anymore!
- Connie

The only successful alternative I’ve found to Mint.com is Yodlee Money Center, which matches many of the features of Mint.

There have been several alternatives over the years that I felt did a very good job, but couldn’t compete with the inertia that Mint.com had. My personal favorite was Wesabe, which is unfortunately now defunct.

Mint does some things very well. However, I don’t use them. I don’t feel they bring enough usefulness to the plate to overcome my concerns about information security. It’s not that they have a poor policy. I just that I don’t feel good sharing my personal information with anyone unless I’m getting significant value out of the trade.

Q2: Party games
Do you have any suggestions for board or card games that work well with large groups of people? We’re going to be hosting a family reunion and plan to have some board games there, but we’d love to have a few that would work well to get large groups of relatives involved.
- Amanda

If I’m playing games with a large group (more than ten people), I usually think of one game – The Werewolves of Miller’s Hollow.

It’s essentially a group deduction game where you’re trying to figure out which people in the group are the werewolves and which ones are not. Everyone gets a secret card telling them whether they’re a werewolf or not, and then the game proceeds during “day” and “night” rounds. During the “day” rounds, clues are revealed as to who the werewolves are. During the “night” rounds, one of the villagers is eaten by the werewolves and removed from the game.

I really enjoy this one. It can work with a very large group and it’s simple enough that anyone can learn it. It usually ends up being a pretty fun and unique experience.

Q3: Shopping for insurance
My husband and I have been married for 3 years and have a 1 and 1/2 year old son. We’re trying to reduce our expenses so that I can work fewer hours and spend more time at home with our son. One of the bills we’re looking at is our car insurance. We have an expensive plan with State Farm. We have never done any price comparisons so I’m planning to shop around. My husband, however, is very nervous about going with “cheap” car insurance. When he was a teenager, he nodded off at the wheel on a long drive, ran off the road, flipped the car, and one of his passengers (his friend) was injured. My husband was covered under his parents’ insurance at the time and it covered everything but left some emotional scars. He is now, of course, much older and wiser and more responsible, but he also knows that accidents happen. Any advice for choosing car insurance that will help him feel safe but also fits in our budget? Any other suggestions to keep insurance costs down? We drive older, safe cars (2000 Silverado, 2005 Highlander) and we both have clean driving records. We also own a home – we hear a lot of commercials about “bundling” home and car insurance for more savings…is this wise? Where do we begin?!? Many of the big companies claim they give you the competitor’s pricing, too. Can I rely on that or do I have to call ALL of them?
- Shawn

My experience with insurance offering “competitor pricing” is that they don’t compare the price of the exact same plan with other competitors.

Most insurance companies do not offer exact duplicates of the plans offered by others. There are usually lots of variations and packages and the like.

When a company does “comparison pricing,” they are indeed showing you the price of a competitor’s package that includes every feature you’re wanting, but often that competitor’s package is one that’s not an exact duplicate of what you’re looking at. The big reason is that Progressive asks you questions that let them very accurately determine exactly how much to offer you for your insurance, but because they don’t have the actuarial formulas for the other companies, they can only offer estimates of what the other companies would offer (and it makes sense that those estimates would be on the high end). There’s nothing at all wrong with what Progressive is doing – in fact, I’d say they’re doing the best they can with what they know.

If you truly want to get all of the prices, you should shop around.

Q4: Cutting your own hair
I can’t understand how you cut your own hair and make it look decent at all. How do you keep it even in the back? How do you trim neck hair? How do you have any styling that’s not just the same length everywhere?
- John

Mirrors, mostly. I stand in front of a bathroom mirror and use a handheld mirror to examine the back of my neck to ensure that I can trim things well back there.

As for even trimming, clippers do that very well. Just keep running them over the same areas and you’ll get the effect you want. I usually clipper the sides a bit shorter than the top and use a “fade” brush to cover the uneven area between the two.

It looks fine, in the end. It takes a little time, especially at first, but it’s worth it to do hair cuts at your convenience for pretty much no cost.

Q5: Renting or buying
My husband is in the Navy and he recently got a change of duty station and we will be moving to Key West shortly. For a rental we can expect to pay about $3,000 a month. We know my husband will be there for 3 years and then we will have to move again. At the end of 36 months in rent we would have paid $108,000. This seems like a ton! With interest rates so low we would be able to get a lower monthly mortgage if we purchased a home in the price range of $400,000 and would only pay about $1900 a month. Are we better off renting for 3 years or buying a house? We know for sure we will only be there 3 years so we would need to sell at the end of 3 years, but it seems lie with renting we are just wasting our money when we could be putting it into equality for a home.
- Jeanine

My usual rule of thumb is that you should look at the monthly costs of renting or buying and go for the one that’s lower. Sometimes, that’s renting. Other times, that’s buying.

In your estimate, there’s an $1,100 difference, and that’s probably enough. However, you need to also consider property taxes (which will add up to a significant amount, especially in a state with no income tax), homeowners insurance, and any homeowners association fees. You’ll also be responsible for your own home repairs and improvements, which would likely be covered in a rental.

My gut says that it would end up being pretty close. In that case, I’d probably lean towards buying, because you’re building some equity that way.

Q6: Entertainment by default
My wife and I have a theory that people tend to have what we call a “default entertainment” that they use to fill their time when they don’t have anything else urgent to do. For many people, it’s television, but it can be any number of things.

I think that one big way for people to be frugal is to have a “default entertainment” that doesn’t cost anything or costs very little. That way, when you fill your empty time, you do it with something that isn’t going to put you in a hole.
- Gerald

I actually agree with this quite a bit.

For me, I have two hobbies that fill my empty time: reading and playing games. If I have unused time for self-entertainment, those are the options I choose. Television is not one of them.

Reading and non-electronic gaming require very little energy at all. I can read in any room with a tiny LED light that uses less than a watt of energy. With board games or card games, I do need some lighting in the room, but that’s really the only expense. In both cases, there is an initial purchase, but no upkeep costs for a book or a board game (though there is a small upkeep cost for lighting).

With television, you have the initial cost of the television purchase (and perhaps a DVD player purchase, too). Most people also subscribe to a cable or satellite package. Thus, there’s the very high initial cost (a TV and a DVD player costs more than a book or a board game or a deck of cards) and the rather high upkeep cost (television programming, plus powering the television, DVD player, and cable box).

My philosophy is to go cheap on entertainments that aren’t your default. Sarah’s default is usually television (she watches more programs than I do), so we keep the service around for that reason. Without Sarah, I would happily remove cable service and likely remove the television as well.

Q7: S-corporation versus LLC
I am curious why you would choose a S-corporation over an LLC? I am starting my own business in the Fall, an afterschool program and I am required to carry insurance because I deal with students after school without the support of the school nurse. I was told to start an LLC and shop around for insurance. Any advice would be greatly appreciated since I am in the process of starting to advertise my services.
- Charlie

This article spells out the differences between LLCs and S-corporations pretty well.

They are actually pretty similar, but there are some advantages to each type. The biggest reason I usually suggest the S-corporation is that it usually results in a better tax situation than the LLC. As the linked article puts it:

S corporations may have preferable self-employment taxes compared to the LLC because the owner can be treated as an employee and paid a reasonable salary. FICA taxes are withheld and paid on that amount. Corporate earnings after payment of the salary may be able to be treated as unearned income that is not subject to self-employment taxes. For more information and whether this might apply to your particular situation, please contact your accountant or tax adviser.

If you plan things ahead of time, the tax rules on an S-corporation can save you some tax money. Given that most of the other features of the two are pretty similar, I would choose an S-corporation by default because of this unless there are specific reasons not to.

Q8: Bragging about money
My older brother loves to brag about how much money he makes and all of the stuff he owns. It gets really old. How can I tell him how to stop talking about it without causing more problems? We’re frugal people and someone bragging about their three new cars is rather grating.
- Angie

This seems like an obnoxious behavior.

If I were in your shoes, I’d take your brother aside and say that you’re really proud and impressed with his achievements, but that telling everyone about them all the time tends to undermine them and makes his personality less likeable. Suggest that he might see more success if he cools it on bragging about his current success, as that bragging can easily grate people and drive them away.

After that, I suggest just changing the subject quickly if it comes up and maybe giving him one of those “raised eyebrow” looks that siblings can pull off. (I’ve seen my wife and her sisters pull off a lot of communication with just a glance and a facial expression twitch.)

Q9: Blogging baby steps
Here is to hoping you have a suggestion for an adult student, age 38, finishing up college. As an an English major with very good writing skills, what side jobs are available? I would love to edit others peoples’ writing for a few sheckles. I see opportunities for my services all the time, but cannot think of a ways to approach said opportunities. Ex: a letter to a homeowner’s association that was in desperate need of an editor. Oy. With all of my studies, I do not have the time to develop the huge network and I imagine this type of work involves. I plan to start blogging to increase my web presence. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
- Annie

One approach I would take is to make sure you’re involved and available where editors are hired. The first place I would stop is a site called Media Bistro.

You should also keep your eyes on Craigslist, as there are sometimes posts there for people seeking editors.

Blogging will help with an online presence, but it won’t bring clients straight to your door. You should combine it with social media interaction with people, such as Facebook and Twitter.

Q10: Using abundance of lettuce
Most years, I plant a lot of lettuce because it never seems to grow very well. Whether it’s rabbits or what, about 80% of my lettuce never seems to make it to harvest.

This year, all of it lived, which is great. The problem is that now we have absurd amounts of lettuce. What can we do with this stuff before it spoils?
- Colleen

The first thing you need to do is give your lettuce the longest life possible after harvesting it. The second you get it in the house, separate the leaves and rinse or soak them in water to remove all dirt and pesticides, and then dry them thoroughly. You can use a towel to dry them, but a “salad spinner” also works. You can also make a “homemade” salad spinner by putting a bunch of the lettuce in a mesh bag, taking it outside, and twirling it until all of the water comes out. When you’ve done that, wrap the lettuce in paper towels or dry handtowels and store it in the fridge.

As for using it, there are a lot of things to try. Lettuce is great on most types of sandwiches and can form the backbone of salads.

However, when I was growing up, the most common way of eating lettuce was to serve it as a side dish in the form of wilted lettuce. Essentially, you just make a hot dressing out of some sort of fat – bacon drippings are often used, but you can use the oil and droppings from other things you cook – and pour that hot dressing onto the lettuce, wilting it.

I’ve heard good things about braised lettuce, too, but I’ve never tried it.

If you still have excess lettuce, I would give some away or trade it with neighbors and friends that have gardens. My wife has traded harvests with friends and neighbors many times (watermelons for pumpkins recently, for example).

There isn’t a good long-term way to store lettuce that I’ve found, but there are certainly a lot of uses for it.

Got any questions? Email them to me or leave them in the comments and I’ll attempt to answer them in a future mailbag (which, by way of full disclosure, may also get re-posted on other websites that pick up my blog). However, I do receive hundreds of questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.

Physical exercise is something that helps your life in a lot of ways, many of which translate directly into dollars.

For starters, a regular routine of physical fitness will help raise your energy level, making you feel more ready to tackle projects like air-sealing your home instead of kicking back on the couch. If you channel that energy well, you can accomplish a lot of things that cut back on your overall spending.

At the same time, that fitness routine can improve your wellness, cutting back on your health care costs. That’s clearly true in terms of long-term health, but it can have short-term health benefits as well. In both cases, you’re saving money with fewer medications, doctor visits, and medical procedures.

Beyond that, there’s a common sense of well-being among people who exercise. I just feel better when I consistently exercise, both mentally and physically. I don’t get sick nearly as often, I’m upbeat about things, and I feel much more ready to tackle what life throws at me.

Exercise is almost a no-brainer if you want to save some money.

One of the drawbacks is that many people associate regular exercise with the expenses of equipment and gym membership. It doesn’t have to be that way at all.

For me, the most enjoyable type of exercise is going outside and walking or running. I love a nice long walk/jog at the start of the day (before breakfast) and sometimes a family walk in the evening after supper.

For my personal walk, I’ll put on my headphones and enjoy a podcast along the way. I’ll usually end up learning something new during that process.

With my family, we’ll usually have a family discussion about something. On our last family walk (a two mile jaunt that our six year old and our four year old completed, and our two year old completed in part before giving up), we spent most of the time talking about why there are different kinds of trees and also about some ongoing family issues.

If you want something more, I’d suggest that you take a look at the wonderful book You Are Your Own Gym by Mark Lauren and Joshua Clark. It’s written by an elite Special Operations physical trainer and focuses entirely on exercises of all intensities that you can do at home and that require essentially no equipment.

There are also a lot of internet goal-setting and motivation tools for exercise. Fitocracy, WorkoutBox, 200 Situps, Couch to 5K, and countless others offer free or low cost online motivation tools that can help you keep moving forward with your goals.

Exercise is a fantastic way to feel better about yourself, have more energy, and put yourself in a better physical place. If you want those kinds of improvements, it’s up to you. Get started today.

This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my “photography intern” for this project.

Over the past several years, The Simple Dollar has (at least in part) been a chronicle of how I’ve improved my financial situation.

When I started the site, Sarah and I had a negative net worth, were facing a bone-crunching pile of debt, and the most valuable asset to our names was a used truck.

Today, Sarah and I have a nice positive net worth, are completely debt free, and own our home.

Those accomplishments are nice, but by themselves, they really don’t mean too much.

I don’t believe that wealth is measured in dollars and cents. Money is merely a tool that can help you find the things in life that bring you value. Money can open some doors, but it is up to you to walk through them.

I think a little before-and-after illustration will show you what I mean.

Seven years ago, I was extremely stressed out about my job. I knew that if I made a mis-step, I could easily be fired, and if that happened my family and I would be in a very painful financial place.

Because of that, it was rather difficult for me to use my time and energy for other things that mattered to me. I didn’t spend adequate time with my wife and children. I didn’t spend adequate time doing volunteer or community work. I let my dreams of writing largely shrivel up.

Today, my stress level related to my professional work is almost nonexistent. Because of our financial state, if I make a mis-step or decide to choose another path, we can survive that shift quite easily. My children will still have food on the table, a roof over their heads, and everything they need in life to succeed for quite a while.

I’m also able to make career choices that maximize the time I can spend on things that are important to me. Weekend trips with my family is time spent with them, not time glued to my cell phone seeing if anything needs fixing. I’m on community boards, volunteer for political campaigns, and volunteer for youth sports. I can write to my heart’s content, and I feel completely free to do so.

Wealth isn’t money. It’s not material possessions, either. Wealth is being able to choose to do the things you want to do.

At this point, the primary purpose of achieving more financial success is not to accumulate possessions. It’s to simply secure those things in life that bring me value: lower stress, the freedom to spend plenty of time with my children and wife (and perhaps grandchildren, someday), the time and energy to volunteer for the things I want to volunteer for (and sometimes other resources to support them, as well), and the opportunity to write.

These are my goals. They’re the things I want out of life. The list doesn’t include much reference at all to physical possessions because, honestly, they just stand in the way of the things I actually want.

Those goals motivated me to turn my financial ship around. It worked because those were the things I truly wanted in my life. They were not short term desires, nor were they things that I wanted to please others. They were my goals, originating from the life I wanted to live.

The real question is what are your goals? What are your reasons for wanting to achieve a better financial state? It’s quite likely that they’re going to be different than mine.

However, most of the techniques for getting there are going to be fairly similar to my own. Spend very little time and energy and money on the things that don’t lead you to your goals. Look for creative ways to reduce that spending even further. Channel that savings into whatever needs to exist for you to achieve the goals you have.

Being rich isn’t about having a big bank account. It’s about having the life you want, and that’s in reach for most people if they commit to it and focus on it.

Baking soda and vinegar are two things that I always buy in bulk, simply because they both offer up so many uses at such an inexpensive price. Most of this post is going to consist of a list of things you can do with these items outside of cooking, but I’m going to restrict it to things I’ve done myself. There are many more uses out there.

Baking soda alone can be used to remove odors from almost anything, from refrigerators to carpet. Just sprinkle some in the offending area (on the carpet, in your shoes) and let it sit or put some on a plate and let it sit. It just sucks the odor right out of there.

If you mix enough water with baking soda to make a paste, it works well as a toothpaste, a facial scrub, and as a sunburn reliever. I actually have some baking soda paste applied right now to my left shoulder to alleviate sunburn. It will work on pretty much any minor skin irritation, too.

If you’ve got heartburn, mix a teaspoon of baking soda in a cup of water and drink it. It cures my heartburn more effectively than almost anything else.

Pour a spoonful in a dirty or smelly toilet bowl and leave it sit for a couple of hours. The odor will go away, as will at least some of the stain (if not all of it).

There are more esoteric uses as well, such as putting a couple pinches of baking soda in the water you use to soak dry beans to reduce the “gassiness” of the beans.

What about vinegar?

Pour some vinegar on unwanted grass or weeds at full strength and those weeds will shrivel up and die. This works great for sidewalk cleanup.

Use half a cup of vinegar in lieu of laundry softener to make your clothes feel wonderfully soft (there’s no vinegar smell, either). It also helps to brighten up bright colors.

You can remove many stains from fabrics by applying a mix of one part vinegar to four parts water. This mix gets rid of many minor stains. If the stain is tough, apply some pure vinegar directly to the stain (it gets rid of coffee stains, for example).

Mix five parts water to one part vinegar in a spray bottle to wash windows (it’s a lot cheaper than Windex and works just as well).

If you have some wilted vegetables, soak them in water with a teaspoon of vinegar and they’ll freshen up quite a bit.

If you have hard water stains, soak a cloth with vinegar and let the cloth sit on those stains. This does a great job of removing them.

You can really deodorize the garbage disposal by making some vinegar ice cubes. Toss these cubes down the drain, then run the disposal with some cold water.

These uses just scratch the surface – they just happen to be the ones I’ve found useful in the last year or so. A simple Google search will find you many, many more ideas (some untested, I’m sure).

This post is part of a yearlong series called “365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),” in which I’m revisiting the entries from my book “365 Ways to Live Cheap,” which is available at Amazon and at bookstores everywhere. Images courtesy of Brittany Lynne Photography, the proprietor of which is my “photography intern” for this project.

Each week, I highlight ten things each week that inspired me to greater financial, personal, and professional success. Hopefully, they will inspire you as well.

1. George Orwell on those kids
I think I’m wiser than my children at the moment, because the oldest one is six. However, I think that my parents are wiser than I am. As for intelligence, it’s an individual thing, but I think younger generations have an opportunity to learn from what the older generations did. However, Orwell has a pretty good point here.

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” – George Orwell

I think that’s true on the whole for how each generation perceives itself.

2. Dropbox
Dropbox has been an essential tool for me for a while. Not only can I easily move documents from my desktop computer to my laptop, I can easily view all of them on other devices as well. I can also easily share documents from my Dropbox with others, if needed.

All it does is creates a new folder on your computer (for me, it’s a sub-folder of “My Documents”). Everything you save in that folder is synchronized with your Dropbox account. Any computer that you’ve installed Dropbox on will also have a Dropbox folder, and so anything you save on any of those computers can be found on any of the other computers with your Dropbox. It’s that easy.

Dropbox makes so much of what I do so much easier, and it’s just so simple to use.

3. Carl Jung on what irritates us about others
If there’s something out there that irritates you, the issue is probably with you, not with the irritant.

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead to an understanding about ourselves” – Carl Jung

Spend some time figuring out what irritates you about that thing, and you’ll probably learn something about yourself.

4. Tracy Chevalier on how she looks at paintings
I loved this presentation. Tracy mirrors almost exactly how I look at art and how I feel in an art gallery.

To me, a painting is a way to see how someone else sees the world. What do they find important in a scene? How do they experience color? How are they able to translate what they see to a canvas? Some people do this very well (like van Gogh) and it becomes incredibly vivid and alive for me.

5. Larry King on learning
I saw this in the email signature of a reader who I’ve been exchanging emails with.

“I never learned anything while I was talking.” – Larry King

You can learn a lot by listening, though. People tell you so much, both through their direct words and their indirect messages. Listen and you’ll learn.

6. “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” by David Foster Wallace
I’ve decided to start including some of my favorite essays or short stories in these “pieces of inspiration” columns, because so often articles will just stick with me and alter my thinking for a very long time.

This essay reawakened an interest I had in tennis that had been dormant for more than a decade. As a teenager, I used to love to play tennis and I watched the majors (and even some other tennis events) fanatically on television (during the years when the dominant players were Ivan Lendl and Jim Courier and Andre Agassi). I stopped following it for years, but something about this essay pulled me back in and, after watching for a while, turned me into a big fan of Roger Federer.

7. Dale Carnegie on arguers and dodgers
A person who argues is standing up for their position, regardless of whether their position is weaker or stronger than another.

“Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.” – Dale Carnegie

A person who dodges either has no position to stand on or is trying to hide it from you.

8. A family in their garden
I love looking at older pictures and seeing reflections of the things my own family does. That’s exactly what I see here.

There are many times when you’ll find all of us in the garden, often harvesting something. It’s something we do together that’s a reflection of the past but just as enjoyable today.

9. Israel Salanter on souls and bellies
This quote resonates deeply with my spiritual side.

“Most people worry about their own bellies, and other people’s souls, when we all ought to worry about our own souls and other people’s bellies.” – Israel Salanter

It is not my place to determine if someone else is doing right or wrong in their spiritual journey. I am not their judge. My place is to make sure that people have what they need to succeed, whether it’s food or shelter or whether it’s something else entirely.

10. Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel
Some songs take you to a particular place and time.

This takes me straight to the summer before I went to college. I felt like my whole life was changing right then, and this song somehow spoke to it.

I’ve found myself returning to this song during every period of major change in my life. Something about this song resonates when things are changing.