MAKE MONEY ONLINE POSTS: 01/06/20

الاثنين، 6 يناير 2020

10 Factors That Affect Your Life Insurance Premium

How much you pay for life insurance can vary on tons of factors, including your age, gender and even your favorite hobbies.

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10 Factors That Affect Your Life Insurance Premium

How much you pay for life insurance can vary on tons of factors, including your age, gender and even your favorite hobbies.

Source Business & Money | HowStuffWorks https://ift.tt/2N0PpUS

Make These 6 DIY Beauty Products at Home to Save Money

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How much do you spend on beauty products?

We’re willing to shell out to take care of ourselves. But what if you could save your hard-earned cash and customize your regimen to your needs by making a few of your own health and beauty essentials at home — with ingredients you already have in your pantry?

You can! Here are a few DIY beauty products that’ll help keep both you and your wallet looking good.

6 DIY Beauty Products You Can Make at Home

1. Volumizing Sea Spray

On those all-too-frequent days I can’t get to the beach, I use this hair spray for lots of lift and a breezy scent. You could pay as much as $26 per bottle, but these replacement options will keep you volumized for mere pennies per ounce.

The main components of a great texturizer are salt for volume, a softener to counteract the salt’s drying effect and something to make it smell great!

Combine a cup of hot water with a tablespoon or so of coarse salt — sea salt or Epsom salts work great. The more salt, the beachier the look. Add in aloe, some conditioner you already have or maybe some of the water-based gel in your cabinet to add softness and hold.

After it cools, add a few (optional!) drops of essential oil and pour into your spray bottle. Bend over your sink and spray liberally on damp or dry hair at the roots. Shake, scrunch, flip and otherwise adore your instant big, sexy, beach-day look!

I used this spray almost daily when I was working up north and missing my seaside Florida hometown.

Off-the-shelf cost: $14.99 for 6 ounces.

DIY cost: $1 per bottle at most, and your first batch of ingredients will last forever.

2. Dry Shampoo

When your day is too full of ~~responsibilities~~

excitement for a full shampoo and conditioning, you reach for dry shampoo for a grease-free look that won’t strip your hair’s natural oils — but there’s no need to strip your wallet, either.

Dry shampoo dispenses greasiness with an oil-absorbing powder that disappears in your hair. Depending on your hair color and what’s on your shelves, you can try cornstarch, fine arrowroot flour, baby powder or even unsweetened cocoa powder (my personal fave, though I’m a pretty dark brunette and a total chocoholic). Apply to your roots and comb through until the product disappears.

Not into smelling like chocolate cake or a baby’s bottom? I like to comb in a drop or two of that essential oil I use in my sea salt spray for scrumptious-smelling hair.

Off-the-shelf cost: $23 for 3.5 ounces of a fancy kind, or $6.99 for 3.4 ounces of a drugstore brand.

DIY cost: You probably already have these items in your pantry. Otherwise, maybe a couple of bucks at your grocery store’s bulk bin.

3. Exfoliating Salt or Sugar Scrub for Hands and Body

This product is pretty much just sugar or salt, oil and something that smells good. Go ahead and raid your pantry and grab that essential oil.

Plus, you can choose between a micro-exfoliating granulated sugar scrub or a macro-exfoliating coarse sea salt scrub, experiment with white or brown sugars, coconut or olive or almond oil… the possibilities are endless.

Off-the-shelf cost: $16.50 for 8 ounces at Bath and Body Works, but I’ve seen these bad boys go for $40 for 8.2 ounces from premium dealers. No way!

DIY cost: About $3 per batch, depending on the type of oil you choose

4. Body or Face Lotion

You can make a fabulous body lotion by simply adding a few drops of lavender or tea tree oil to the coconut oil you’re already using.

Or, experiment with shea butter-based lotions and try other nourishing oils, like avocado or jojoba. Depending on how much you trust your face, you could try a gentle mixture — I’m pretty oily, though, so I’d proceed with caution!

Off-the-shelf cost: Amazon lists a 12-ounce Aveeno lotion for $5.93, which is pretty standard for drugstore body lotion. Facial skincare products are hugely variable and can be quite expensive, like $32.76 for 2 ounces.

DIY cost: About $3 to $5 per batch

5. Facial Toner

Check out the ingredient list on that refreshing spritz you use before your moisturizer or in the middle of the day — it’s pretty much a bottle of watery perfume!

By experimenting with tea, rose water or witch hazel, you slash costs and get to figure out what works best for your skin on the cheap. If you’re starting to amass those essential oils I keep mentioning from all this DIY, check out some of these skin-type-specific recipes.

I like using a cotton pad to apply my toner, but you could grab another spray bottle if you enjoy the spritz effect.

Off-the-shelf cost: $45 for 8.4 ounces is not unheard of, though you can find drugstore options for less than $8 for around the same size.

DIY cost: Depends on your ingredients, but could cost pennies or up to $4 per batch

6. Face Masks

Whether your skin is dry, oily or a combination — and even if you’re dealing with acne well after high school — you can try tons of at-home treatments. Raid your kitchen for apple cider vinegar, honey and egg whites. How about avocado and cocoa powder?

The good news is, not only do you already have these ingredients on your grocery list, but you can try a variety of treatments without breaking the bank. My oily summer skin loves apple cider vinegar, but milk and honey feels decadent before bed!

Off-the-shelf cost: A 1-ounce charcoal mask from Sephora costs $13.00, but who knows which one’s right for you?

DIY cost: From pennies to $5 per mask, depending on the ingredients you choose

Although a few of these recipes require some initial investments like essential oils, glass containers, spray bottles or shea butter, you’ll be left with ingredients to keep making personalized beauty products for a year or longer — and with extra cash in your pocket.

Jamie Cattanach is a contributor to The Penny Hoarder.

This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.

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Questions About Dog Food, Roth 401(k)s, Minor Theft, Snowblowers and More

What’s inside? Here are the questions answered in today’s reader mailbag, boiled down to summaries of five or fewer words. Click on the number to jump straight down to the question.
1. College savings gift from grandparents
2. Inexpensive dog food
3. Reasons for talking about illness
4. Detail level of financial records?
5. Magic: The Gathering as investment
6. Minor thefts at home
7. Waste of a snowblower
8. Working from home too distracting
9. Roth 401(k) or regular?
10. Planners for 2020
11. Frozen mashed potato uses?
12. Suggestion for New York vacation

Perhaps it is the turning of the year, or even the turning of the decade, that is filling me with a sense of a fresh start or an inflated sense of optimism, but I really feel like this year is going to be a great year. I can’t wait to see what it holds for me, and I hope that it holds amazing things for you.

On with this week’s questions!

Q1: College savings gift from grandparents

I have a really good situation and I wanted to ask your advice on it. I am 21 years old and have three semesters left before college graduation. My parents saved a lot of money for me for college and I got a few local scholarships and thus my tuition and part of my housing and food costs are covered, and an on-campus job is taking care of the rest.

In past years, my grandparents had given me generous and thoughtful holiday gifts. They got me a MacBook a few years ago and last Christmas they got me Air Pods and 10 $50 gift cards to restaurants in my college town “for dates.” This year, though, they gave me an envelope with a check for $10,000 in it and a note saying that they hoped this would help with my last year of school to get me started on the right foot.

I’m honestly not sure what the right move is. What do I actually do with the money and what do I tell them? I talked to my aunt on the other side about this because she’s the person I always go to for advice and she actually directed me at you. I hope you can help.
– Ben

My gut reaction would be to stick that $10,000 in a savings account somewhere and forget about it for a year, and here’s why.

The absolute first thing I would ask myself is what you plan to do when you graduate. Are you going to directly enter the workforce? Are you thinking about graduate school? Are you unsure? If you’re where I was at that point in life, you’re probably fairly unsure about things.

Regardless of what you choose to do upon graduation, there’s a good chance that $10,000 in seed money will help tremendously. Going to graduate school? There’s a big bundle of starter money. Going into the workforce? There’s money to live on while you’re getting a job, or money to help settle into an apartment.

Here’s the truth: you should think of this money, along with your scholarships and the money your parents saved, as a single cup that’s overflowing. Your grandparents absolutely are helping you finish out your school years without any debt, and you can tell them that completely honestly. Furthermore, you can also tell them that you managed to get through without spending all of it and it’s helping with whatever that next step is for you.

So, what do you say when you’re updating them, or they ask about it? Tell them that it’s helping you get through these last three semesters so that along with scholarships and your parents’ help, you’re not getting into any debt. After you graduate, tell them that you actually still have some of it left and now it will help you with that first apartment or that job search or that car or the first semester or two of graduate school, whatever path you choose.

That gift was honestly given to help you build a foundation in life without debt, and as long as you stick to that premise, they’re going to be thrilled with what you were able to do with it. Just use it for something foundational (education, basic needs, a car if you need one) and make sure that you avoid debt going forward.

Q2: Inexpensive dog food

I have a small mixed breed puppy that I found abandoned in a park. Animal control said I could keep it. I didn’t expect to have a dog but I fell in love with the little guy. Had him for two months and have found that the food is more expensive than I like. I feed him Iams Proactive Health Smart Puppy small breed formula as vet suggested as inexpensive option and I get it in a 7-pound bag for $10. Vet said I should feed him 1/2 cup three times a day until he starts skipping a lot then cut it to 1/2 cup twice a day and probably switch to adult food. I’m buying two bags a month. Looking for cheaper options as I am on a fixed income and the vet visits already are hurting.
– Ben

Iams is already a relatively inexpensive dog food in the spectrum of things — it’s not the cheapest, but it’s not a high end food by any means. If it’s what your vet recommended, I’d stick with it as a value option.

My initial reaction is to get a bulk bag of it, but it appears as though this type of dog food only comes in seven-pound bags. When your dog gets to adulthood, the adult version comes in a 15-pound bag for $18, which should save you a couple bucks a month.

Another option, though I’d check with the vet first, is to just get the general “puppy” form of that dog food in a 15-pound bag, which costs $18. I’m not sure what the difference between the general puppy and the small puppy formulations are, but I couldn’t see a major difference in what I could find.

I’d definitely stick with the type of food the vet recommended, and when your puppy gets to adult size, I’d switch to the adult formulation and buy it in the biggest bag you can.

Q3: Reasons for talking about illness

I was wondering if I could make a comment on your advice to Mary who asked about revealing her cancer diagnosis to her family members. I am a genetic counsellor and I work with individuals and families who have inherited conditions. I often speak to patients who do not wish to share their health history in fear of ‘worrying’ their loved ones. But this can have serious consequences. Cancer can have a strong inherited component which means family members of an individual with cancer may benefit from increased screening. If family members are not aware of their family health history they could be missing out on life-saving screening. My advice to Mary would have been to ask her health care provider if her family members would benefit from increased screening based on her diagnosis. If the answer is yes, she should be aware of the risks she is putting her family in by not divulging her health history. I have seen time and time again, patients who do not tell their family important information because they want to protect them, and do not want to worry them. Subsequently, they are sitting in my office 5 to 10 years later after their child or sibling has passed away from a condition that could have been treated if identified early had they been having the appropriate screening, but were not because they did not know about the family history.
– Clara

This is an angle I hadn’t considered in my answer, looking at it strictly as Mary’s illness.

I think this is powerful advice for anyone thinking about an illness they may be suffering with and whether to discuss it with relatives. Find out whether that illness is hereditary or not, and if it is, this may provide an additional motivation to share your illness with them, so that they can take preventive action now to minimize the effects in their own lives.

Thanks, Clara!

Q4: Detail level of financial records?

On other finance blogs people share really detailed reviews of their finances. Do you keep records like that? Do you share them?
– Adam

Once a month, I check in on the balances of a few accounts and do a simple net worth calculation in a spreadsheet that I’ve been using more or less consistently since 2006. On occasional months, I’ll start digging in really deep, especially when my net worth doesn’t move as much as I expect it to given the stock market’s change that month and any big expenses that I know came through that month.

I don’t share those numbers for two reasons. One, the big one, is that it falls on the “too much information” line of what Sarah and I agreed long ago was appropriate to share on The Simple Dollar. Early on, I wrote a few articles that Sarah felt shared too much detail about the specifics of our family, offering details that didn’t need to be shared and put us at some risk of stalking and so on. Given that I have had a few people — I don’t know if “stalk” is the right word — but cross some boundaries over the years, this is a thing I try to keep abreast of. I speak pretty frankly about me and my own thoughts, but I intentionally get much vaguer when discussing my immediate family and even more vague beyond that. They didn’t ask and don’t deserve to have details that could adversely affect their lives shared with hundreds of thousands of people.

The other reason is that I think that sharing detailed finances like that causes people to make useless and negative comparisons with their own lives. My sense is that an article is much better off if it helps someone to decide to bump up their savings a little because it makes sense in their own lives rather than see my finances and income and savings rate and decide that it’s “impossible” or that their life is so financially different than mine that comparisons can’t be made. Basically, I feel like sharing financial specifics cuts off a lot of people (because one’s income is a lot higher or a lot lower, or one’s savings rate is a lot higher or a lot lower, or one’s spending is a lot higher or a lot lower than the reader expects) and causes negative reactions for little positive benefit other than appealing to voyeurs. What can I really say that’s useful and positive about finances that can’t also be said while not talking about exact specific numbers and the negatives that they bring on?

The second reason is much smaller than the first one, though. Simply put, I minimize the discussion of specific things that affect others in my life for privacy and safety, and specific financial numbers definitely falls into that camp. The other part is mostly observation.

Q5: Magic: The Gathering as investment

In 2009, I decided to start investing in Magic: The Gathering cards, seeing how some of the older cards had skyrocketed in value over the years. I decided to put $100 aside each month to invest in sealed booster boxes with the intent of holding and selling them in ten years. I basically bought a booster box a month since then.

In the last few months, the first boxes I bought reached “maturity” and I have been able to sell them for $550 each. My original intent had been to just reinvest this money, but this seems like a poor idea. What do you think I should do?
– Adam

First of all, investing in a collectible like Magic: The Gathering is inherently risky. If the game declines, the value of all of those cards decline. Adam seems to be investing with “hobby” money and not risking his financial future for this, and that’s the way to go if you want to do this. A 400% return on your money over a decade is really good and not something I would ever expect going forward. That’s about 15% per year, every year.

If I were you, I’d take half of the return and reinvest it, as you seem to know what you’re doing here, and take the other half and diversify it. For example, do you have a Roth IRA? If not, take the other half and put it in a Roth IRA each month.

So, going forward, let’s assume you can sell a box for $500 each month. You take $250 and reinvest it (maybe along with the $100 you’re continuing to invest? I don’t know if you’re doing that.). You also take $250 and put it into a Roth IRA.

At the end of the year, you’ve contributed $3,000 to your Roth and you have $3,000 in additional Magic product in your closet, probably somewhere around 30 boxes. If you continue to do this, you may have to rethink storage options eventually, or else scale it more towards the Roth IRA. For example, if you just keep investing $100 out of pocket in this way and put all of the returns into your Roth, you’d fully fund a Roth IRA each year.

If I were in your shoes, I’d probably go with a 50/50 split for now. Remember, this is all proceeds from hobby money, so it’s not like you’re basing your financial future on this.

Q6: Minor thefts at home

I have become convinced that someone with access to my home is committing minor thefts on a regular basis. Several times in the last few months, cash and small items have gone missing without explanation.

Do you have any suggestions on how to figure out who it is without putting in a big security system?
– Marie

Honestly, if I were you, I’d get a few Wyze security cameras ($20 a pop) and put them in a few places around your home where you think the thefts are occurring, but obscure them as best you can. Any time you notice something missing, review the footage. The footage is uploaded to the cloud so you can review it for 14 days, or you can buy microSD cards for a few bucks to give yourself some offline storage.

It will be fairly difficult to deduce who is doing this without some sort of tool to assist you and I think this is perhaps the most cost-effective option.

I will advise you strongly to set this up yourself and not let others know about them. This may take some work and time, but they’re pretty easy to set up and they work well with a smartphone. If you’re at least a tiny bit tech-savvy and have WiFi at home, this is what I would do.

Q7: Waste of a snowblower

I live in northern Illinois and bought a snowblower four years ago during a bad winter. Since then I have used it maybe three times altogether, and two winters I haven’t used it at all and I’m sitting here on New Year’s Eve and it’s T-shirt weather. What a waste. Any way I can get value out of it? No one is going to want to buy a snowblower used around here.
– Dan

A snowblower is just one of those things that’s really useless until that exact moment when it’s insanely useful. Just be patient with it.

Keep it maintained. Make sure you change the oil and gas regularly and do whatever it says for maintenance in the manual. Start it up a couple times a year to make sure everything is in good, working order. Keep it covered.

That way, when you do need that thing, it’ll start right up for you and get to work on that snow removal task.

Clearly, you live in an area where such snowstorms do happen sometimes. Just be patient with it.

Q8: Working from home too distracting

I have read The Simple Dollar for many years and hope you will have some advice for me as a long-time worker from home. I started working from home in May of last year and I find it really difficult to be productive. There are simply too many distractions around. I could be doing dishes or the laundry or reading a book or watching something on Netflix or playing a video game or walking the dog and there is no escape from it. I can only be productive when I am shoved right up against a deadline and that has backfired hard on me a couple of times. How do you manage to have an article up every day while working from home?
– Shane

I have a bunch of tricks up my sleeve.

For one, I have a block of time each day where I work. It starts at about 8 a.m. and lasts until noon or 1 p.m., when until I feel my focus slipping. That block of time does not move unless there is an absolute act of God involved or I’m on a vacation. I usually spend some time in the afternoon reading or going through emails and such, too, but I can jump in and out of that for the most part.

During that time, I turn off every possible distraction I can. My cell phone is in a mega “do not disturb” mode where the only thing that gets through are calls or texts from my children’s school or my wife’s phone — that’s it, everything else is blocked. I block all kinds of distracting websites on my computer. I turn on some sort of ambient noise or music to help me focus and listen with noise-canceling headphones. I have a notebook near me to jot down any stray thoughts I will want to follow up on later. I’ll often start a load of laundry or a load of dishes just before I start so I feel like something “productive” in terms of the household is happening during the early part of my workday.

Some days, though, the house really is too distracting. On those days, I usually go to the library and use one of its “study rooms,” which is basically an empty room with a table and chair. I go in with my laptop and a pile of personal finance books and magazines from the shelves and spend the day reading and outlining future articles, again with every distraction I can have turned off, such as having my cell phone in mega “do not disturb” mode. I’m not a big fan of coffee shops as I find them fairly distracting.

I find that stretching and a bit of mild exercise right before that work session tends to help, as does having some coffee and some tea on hand and drinking some of both as the session goes on.

I also find it very helpful to have a plan for what I’m doing work-wise for the next several days at least. If that’s possible at all for your job, spend some time planning out your tasks at least a few days in advance. Sit down and spend a bit of one day on a pure planning session.

None of those things individually make a big difference. It’s the combination effect of all of those little nudges in the right direction.

Q9: Roth 401(k) or regular?

New Year resolution is to start saving for retirement. Everyone says our work 401(k) is great and they do 1:1 matching up to 8% so I am signing up next week to contribute 8%. There is a Roth 401(k) and a regular 401(k) for our contributions and workplace goes into regular. Should I use regular or Roth?
– Lynn

If you’re eligible for it, and your workplace is putting money into the regular one, put your contributions into the Roth 401(k).

For the moment, the Roth 401(k) seems like a worse deal. They take the money for that after your taxes are calculated, so you won’t see any tax benefit right now. With the regular 401(k), you’d see a bit of a tax benefit immediately.

However, with money in the Roth 401(k), you won’t have to pay taxes when you take the money out of it when you’re retired. It’s going to mean much lower tax bills then.

Basically, putting money into a Roth is like paying for some of your retirement taxes today rather than in retirement, where you’ll be glad to have every dime. I’d definitely go with the Roth in this situation.

Q10: Planners for 2020

I am interested in the planners that you are using for the new year. Would you mind telling me about the one you are using?
– Anna

In October, I posted an overview of a bunch of goal-oriented paper planners and shared what I was using at the time. I thought now is a great time to update that a little.

This year, I’m using two paper planners and three digital tools.

I have a Momentum Planner that I’m using to break down my big initiatives for the year into daily steps. This is more of a “reflect on what I need to do today and tomorrow” kind of thing.

I also have a Hobonichi Techo that I’m using as a daily journal and habit tracker (I was going to use a Clear journal, but I got this as a gift and wanted to use it instead). I use the summary pages to track habits I’m working on and the daily pages as a brief journal of the day and a list of things I’m grateful for. I still do a morning “brain dump” but I’m currently doing that in a pretty ordinary notebook.

For digital tools, I use Google Calendar to keep track of all of my events and appointments, Things to keep my ongoing to-do list, and Evernote to keep track of all of the things I want to make note of and remember. I also keep a pocket notebook that I often jot stuff in but then move to one of these three tools once a day or so.

My goal is to get everything out of my head and into some kind of trusted system. I find that having to remember things is incredibly distracting and takes me away from the task at hand.

Q11: Frozen mashed potato uses?

After both Thanksgiving and Christmas I had a bunch of mashed potatoes leftover and decided to freeze them along with some other leftovers. I didn’t really think about what to do with them but now I have a bunch of freezer bags full of mashed potatoes.
– Ashley

You can basically use them for anything you’d use normal mashed potatoes for.

You can serve them on their own as a side dish. You can use them as a topping on a casserole like shepherd’s pie. You can make potato pancakes with them. You can make this really good cheesy mashed potato and egg skillet.

Probably my favorite use, though, is to use mashed potatoes as a soup thickener. Take some of the broth from a soup you’re making — two or three cups — and add half a cup or so of mashed potatoes to it, then blend it together. That’ll make the broth way thicker, and you can pour it back into the main soup and stir it in. Want it even thicker? Take out another couple of cups of broth, add a half cup of mashed potatoes, and blend it again, then pour that back in.

I will say that in my experience mashed potatoes freeze better if you initially added a little butter and/or cream to them on the initial cooking. The texture seems just a little off to me if you didn’t do that, but they’re still perfectly usable.

Q12: Suggestion for New York vacation

Suggestion for your summer vacation — drive to New York state. Camping is great, Allegany State Park is a particular favorite; the Finger Lakes are gorgeous; and, of course, Niagara Falls. Then tack a few days of NYC on. If you travel home via Pennsylvania and Southern Ohio, plenty to see there, too. Hocking Hills area, Ohio was great. Amish country/Lancaster, Pennsylvania is also reasonably priced and family-friendly.
– Julie

This note from Julie came in right at the time Sarah and I were piecing together our summer vacation plans, and this actually matched what we had in mind. We had decided on driving the trip, stopping one day to visit family, then going to the Finger Lakes for a few days, then New York City for several days, then driving back through the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area and visiting Gettysburg.

As with our other family vacations, I’ll be posting a listing of low-cost and free things we found that were worthwhile on those vacations after we get home. I usually like to actually do the things we discover first and list only the ones we found that were really worthwhile without much of a sticker price.

For example, last year we went to Colorado and previous family vacations included South Dakota, Yellowstone, and, yes, Disney World. If you’re planning a summer trip for your family, hopefully, these articles will help.

Got any questions? The best way to ask is to follow me on Facebook and ask questions directly there. 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 many, many questions per week, so I may not necessarily be able to answer yours.

The post Questions About Dog Food, Roth 401(k)s, Minor Theft, Snowblowers and More appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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Inspiration from Sam Harris, Owls, Dissatisfaction, Voltaire, and More

Once a month (or so), I share a dozen things that have inspired me to greater personal, professional, and financial success in my life. I hope they bring similar success to your life. Please enjoy the archives of earlier collections of inspirational things.

1. Sam Harris on how good your life is

“There are at least a billion people in this world, who’ll consider their prayers answered if they could switch places with you.” – Sam Harris

Whenever you find yourself struggling to feel content or happy with your situation in life, sit back and consider the possibility that there are a lot of people on this earth whose dreams and prayers would be completely answered if they were to switch places with you.

Around 700 million people don’t have consistent access to clean water. Around 800 million people do not have enough food to lead an active healthy life. Around 1.6 billion people don’t have adequate shelter from the weather.

I’m not suggesting any sort of charitable movement or anything like that. I’m simply suggesting that when you feel down on your luck, sit back for a moment and consider that a very large slice of humanity on this globe is lacking some combination of adequate drinking water, enough food to live an active, healthy life and basic shelter to keep out the weather.

For me, that thought instantly makes me feel extremely grateful for all that I have in life.

2. Hobonichi Techo 2020

A wonderful friend of mine gifted me this planner, which has immediately become my preferred habit tracking tool. It’s just about perfect for what I want to do.

Basically, at any given time, I have somewhere between 6 to 10 habits and behaviors I’m trying to track and improve. This planner is basically perfectly designed to make it easy to track that number of habits, as well as providing space to record specific details and thoughts about your day.

Basically, near the front, there are several pages that have each month displayed as a table, with each date as a row followed by ten squares. Those squares are absolutely perfect for tracking habits. Later on, there’s an individual page for each day, where I can write down more detailed notes if I want to.

Unless you are tracking a ton of habits at once, this planner is almost perfect as a habit tracking tool. I’ve been having fun setting it up and I can’t wait to use it all year long.

3. John Holt on intelligence

“The true test of intelligence is not how much you know how to do, it’s how you behave when you don’t know what to do.” – John Holt

No one knows everything. We all hit our knowledge limits at some time or another. I know, for me, it happens frequently.

What do I do when I don’t know something? Do I bluster? Do I pretend like I do know? Or do I shut up and listen? Do I start investigating the question so that I do know?

I think all of us do a little of one type of behavior and a little of another. We all want to seem knowledgable and sophisticated, so we sometimes stretch what we know, nodding when we’re lost. At other times, we look up something we don’t know so that we improve our understanding of the world.

The thing is, the more we lean toward actually knowing things rather than “faking” that we know things, the more we actually know and the less we have to fake.

Furthermore, it’s not the knowledge we acquire that makes us intelligent. It’s our willingness to respond to not knowing things by taking the effort to learn it that makes the difference.

Be a lifetime learner. You’ll always be glad you did it.

4. David Asch on why it’s so hard to make healthy decisions

From the description:

Why do we make poor decisions that we know are bad for our health? In this frank, funny talk, behavioral economist and health policy expert David Asch explains why our behavior is often irrational — in highly predictable ways — and shows how we can harness this irrationality to make better decisions and improve our health care system overall.

The interesting part about this video is that it all feels like common sense, but we so often don’t make the choices that make common sense. The things we need to do to stay healthy are really rational and sensible, but so many of us don’t do it. People don’t wear seat belts. People eat terribly unhealthy foods. People consume drugs.

The problem isn’t an information deficit. The problem is a behavior deficit. We know what we need to do to get healthy. We just often don’t do it. Why? Present bias. We value what seems good right in the moment rather than what’s good long term. That’s why we eat cookies. We hate the feeling of missing out.

Doesn’t this all kind of sound like personal finance? It’s because it is. Most of the mental traps that keep us from getting healthier are the same ones that keep us from improving our finances.

5. Robert Frost on tearing down

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.” – Robert Frost

It is so much easier to tear something down than it is to build something up. It is much easier to knock down the walls of an institution than to really understand what it is built upon.

Most of the time, we don’t do either one. We walk through the halls of life, not really thinking or worrying about the “why” of what we’re doing or the options that are available to us. It’s only when we see something that we feel is wrong, something that we feel is broken, that we pay attention.

Often, the instinct when we first see the problem is to knock down what we think the source of that problem is.

The thing is, there’s usually a reason for what happened, and more often than not, it’s not what you think it is.

I’m reminded of how I recently read a review of a restaurant online. The review was scathing, criticizing several things about the restaurant but particularly laying into the waitstaff, complaining about how there were empty tables but they had to wait and about how the service was bad.

Upon reading the responses, however, you learn that three members of the staff were told to go home because they were sick, leaving the shift manager and a person who had just finished training to handle all of the tables. They chose to close off a portion of the tables for the night because it was beyond their capacity to handle them all. As the normal traffic flowed in, they couldn’t all be seated, and the service was as good as you could reasonably expect in that situation.

The waiter probably isn’t out to get you. Rather, the waiter might be dealing with things in the back that you don’t even know about and is trying to keep things as pleasant for you as possible.

Don’t assume the worst in others. Don’t tear them down. Not only are you often wrong about the situation, tearing down the situation will almost never make things better for you. In fact, it’ll often make things worse.

6. An Antidote to Dissatisfaction

From the description:

Everybody is familiar with the feeling that things are not as they should be. That you are not successful enough, your relationships not satisfying enough. That you don’t have the things you crave. In this video, we want to talk about one of the strongest predictors of how happy people are, how easily they make friends and how good they are at dealing with hardship. An antidote against dissatisfaction so to speak: Gratitude.

This wonderfully animated video makes a great case for the value of simply feeling gratitude for the world around us, particularly as an antidote to mild dissatisfaction with the world.

When you step back from the feeling of being mildly dissatisfied with the things in your life and the world around you, and instead ask yourself what things are really good in your life and make a list of those things, it really helps.

This hits on the same theme as the quote that starts off this article. Your life might be challenging or difficult or unpleasant in some fashion, but you have so many good things in your life. Even worse, we often overlook those great things and dwell on those relatively minor discomforts.

Take me. I spent most of the day when I was writing this worrying about where a missing package was. The value of that package was maybe $100, but I let that thing make me feel rather dissatisfied and disgruntled all day long. If I step back and look at it, this is completely silly. It’s such a minor thing in life. I have so many good things, why dwell on that minor bad thing? The package did turn up eventually, making the dissatisfaction even more silly.

When you feel dissatisfied and unhappy, step back and think of the good things you have in your life. Try to make that response a routine rather than acting out.

I also want to note that the channel that this video comes from, Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, is one of the best things on Youtube in my opinion. We have binge-watched the videos from this channel several times and ended up in tons of conversations about physics, philosophy, and countless other things. It’s a wonderful channel for a curious mind.

7. Franklin Roosevelt on life’s path

“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” – Franklin Roosevelt

We all want the good life, but we often overlook how it is the hard moments in life that make us stronger and much more able to actually achieve the good life.

In 1998, I was placed into a job where I absolutely did not know what I was doing. I still, to this day, don’t know why I was given this job. I was responsible for a project that I didn’t understand, with countless intricacies and so much knowledge required that I simply didn’t possess.

I gave it my all. I made a mockery of it. I was demoted and basically fired.

The thing is, that was probably the most important job I’ve ever had in my life. I already knew how to work hard, but what that job taught me was humility. What I should have done is spent the first month or two doing nothing but learning about what I was doing and what was going on, even if it meant that there was no forward progress, simply so that when it did begin moving forward again, it wouldn’t immediately go off the rails.

I ended up applying that lesson over and over again in almost every job that I took on. I firmly believe I wouldn’t be where I am now if I hadn’t utterly failed at that project back then.

You might get lucky and have a smooth life no matter what you do, but if you’ve never navigated through really tough waters, it doesn’t take much to upset the boat. I’d far rather have a life that knocked me down a few times than a life where everything was easy, because I’m going to know what to do when things don’t quite go as planned.

8. James Watkins on persistence

“A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.” – James Watkins

Success doesn’t come overnight except with extreme luck. Rather, most success is but over a very long time, with small consistent steps, until suddenly the path is clear of obstacles.

If you want to do something amazing, the best thing you can do is figure out something you can do every single day without fail that chips away just a little at the obstacle before you. A little chip one day, then another little chip another day. You can swing away at it all you want, but you’ll wear yourself out and the obstacle will persist. Rather, you want to chip away at it, chip away, chip away.

What can you do today to get yourself closer to where you want to be? That’s a great question, but you should think of it more in terms of what you can do every single day without fail to get yourself closer to where you want to be.

9. Sturgill Simpson’s cover of In Bloom

This is a cover of Nirvana’s 1991 classic song “In Bloom,” done in a very different style. Here, Sturgill Simpson gives it a very mellow and downbeat Americana styling, changing it from a song about being disconnected from music fans (the original) to a song about the difficulty of figuring out how to love someone (this one).

I love genre-bending covers like this, particularly ones that manage to tweak the meaning of the original while still staying true to it. The obvious song to point at here is Johnny Cash’s cover of the Nine Inch Nails song Hurt, which changes the tone of regret so beautifully from the original.

I find myself often listening to the music of Sturgill Simpson lately, particularly his albums A Sailor’s Guide to Earth and Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. The songs address themes that aren’t often covered in country or Americana music, and it’s all done with such a deft touch that you can kind of just get lost in it. That’s talent, and it’s inspirational.

10. Winston Churchill on distraction

“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.” – Winston S. Churchill

Modern life gives us infinite distractions. You’re probably viewing this on some device — a computer or a smartphone — that frequently distracts you from things you should be doing. Your television is a distraction. A lot of people are distractions, too.

Distractions keep you from getting the things done that you want to get done. They keep you from achieving goals. They drain your focus, your time, your emotional energy and often your money.

Stop looking at barking dogs (I actually think this is an apt description of much of social media). Rather, stay focused on your destination. If you find yourself continually looking over at the barking dogs, it’s time to make some changes. Delete that barking dog app. Turn off that screen.

11. The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows

From the description:

Nick Bostrom prefaced his 2014 book SuperIntelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies with a chilling parable illustrating how foolhardy humanity’s pursuit of strong, recursively self-improving general AI is without FIRST considering how to control and motivate it.

I’m sharing this video, not because it provides some grand answers about life, but because it asks some pretty good questions in a way that’s really approachable.

I watched this video together with my kids and it kept coming up again and again over the past few weeks, in snippets of dinner table conversation or in references when we were listening to a story on the radio during a car trip.

If there’s a lesson to be had here, it’s this: whenever you’re about to make a major move of any kind, you owe it to yourself and everyone else involved to spend some time thinking about what it will actually be like after this change. What might the drawbacks be? It’s easy to be an optimist about changes that you want, but what’s lurking back there?

An owl might solve your problems, but an owl might also eat you.

12. Voltaire on today’s courageous decision

“The most courageous decision that you can make each day is to be in a good mood.” – Voltaire

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that being in a good mood is often a choice. Yes, there are definitely things in life that can sour our mood, but the truth is that most of the time, you really do decide your mood or at least a healthy portion of it.

I can choose what I think about, and if I choose things that are uplifting, I generally feel better. If I choose things that drag me down, I feel worse. I can also choose to do things that make me feel better (like taking a walk or just going outside) or things that make me feel worse (vegging on the couch all day).

Those choices are up to me, and they’re still up to me no matter what the world around me is doing.

That doesn’t mean that this is some kind of magical solution to depression or other mental illnesses. They’re not. Rather, they’re tools that can help pull someone out of a minor funk or simply brighten someone’s day.

The post Inspiration from Sam Harris, Owls, Dissatisfaction, Voltaire, and More appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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5 Money-Saving Challenges That’ll Help You Bank More Cash

We all know saving money is something we should do, but we often view it as a chore we’ll get around to doing “some day.”

It’s time to flip our perspective and think of saving money as a fun challenge instead.

Let’s push ourselves to beef up our emergency funds and stack our cash reserves. Let’s fight for better financial futures — one dollar at a time.

Need a game plan on your journey? Here are five money-saving challenges that can help.

The Pantry Challenge

This money-saving challenge gives your wallet a break from your normal grocery shopping routine. Skip going to the store for a week, and get creative with the ingredients you have in your pantry, fridge and freezer.

When Penny Hoarder writer Tiffany Connors tried the pantry challenge last year, her family relied on wilted veggies, freezer-burned soy burgers and a random assortment of other forgotten pantry items. But they survived the week and saved about $150 in the process.

The No-Spend Challenge

The no-spend challenge is exactly what it sounds like. You freeze your spending (with the exception of bills and necessities) for a self-designated amount of time, saving all the money you would have blown.

The classic method is to cut out all unnecessary spending for a month, but you can execute a no-spend challenge in different ways. You could implement a certain number of no-spend days during the month. You could target a particular shopping weakness — like no new clothes for the next 90 days. Or you could choose to freeze spending during a special occasion, spending time with loved ones rather than exchanging gifts.

The Five Dollar Challenge

The five dollar challenge involves squirreling away every $5 bill you get as change. If you’re paying for something with cash and the cashier hands you a bill with Lincoln’s face on it, that currency goes right to your savings stash.

If you can put aside just two $5 bills a week, you’ll end up with $520 in savings by the end of the year. If more $5 bills come your way throughout the week, even better.

The Penny Challenge

This money-saving challenge starts with saving just one penny (yes, just one cent) and increasing your savings contribution by an additional penny every day. On day two, you’ll add $0.02 to your savings. On day 200, you’ll throw $2 (aka 200 pennies) into the pot.

If you continue the penny challenge for a whole year, you’ll wind up with a total of $667.95 — or $671.61 if it’s a leap year. You can make this challenge more manageable by grouping your daily savings deposits by the week and transferring that amount from your checking account to your savings account rather than scrambling for spare change every day.

The 52-Week Money Challenge

The 52-week money challenge helps you put away $1,378 in one year by making weekly contributions. Traditionally, you’ll save $1 the first week, $2 the second week, $3 the third week and so on for 52 weeks.

But if don’t want to be stuck with saving over $200 in December when you’ve got a ton of holiday expenses, you can get creative with how you carry out this money-saving challenge. Try one of our 52-week money challenge hacks, like selecting your weekly savings amount by random lottery rather than going in ascending numerical order.

Nicole Dow is a senior writer at The Penny Hoarder.

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