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I’m sitting in my cold apartment, eating yet another lunch of Ramen Noodles. I’m 5 pounds lighter than I probably should be, and my jeans have a big hole in the knee. I climb into my car with one burnt-out headlight and pray the gas will hold out until tomorrow. After seeing how much food I can squeeze out of ten dollars, I return home to hop on the computer and I breathe a sigh of relief.
“Oh good,” I think to myself. “My credit card payment cleared on time.”
Anybody else see what’s wrong with this picture?
This isn’t really that much of an exaggeration, either. Last fall and in the beginning of last winter, this was my life. And you know, it’s actually a portrait of a lot of lives. Today, I’m a couple pounds heavier (it takes a while for me to gain weight – sorry, ladies), my gas tank is full, and my cupboards are far from bare. That’s because the first thing my fiancé and I figured out in our budget was The Four Walls.
Dave Ramsey teaches The Four Walls as the basic needs for living – no matter what, these things need to be covered:
Now, you notice he doesn’t say:
Sure, those things are nice, but they’re not basics. For food, you need ingredients for a healthy diet. That means you need to start cooking. Go to Amazon and type in “cooking for beginners” and you’ll get a ton of books that will teach you how to apply heat to food and watch a timer. That’s really all there is to cooking. Heck, my chicken recipe for this week consists of spreading mayo on chicken breast, rolling it in bread crumbs, and putting it in the oven for a little while. And it is some of the tastiest chicken I’ve ever made! Don’t overwhelm yourself at the thought of having to cook. Remember, this is for your health and well-being.
For shelter, find a modest space that you can live in for a while. It may mean having to downgrade a little bit – a smaller space, maybe a place that doesn’t have an on-site gym or pool. Included in there is money to keep the lights and the heat going. This is for the comfort and well-being of you and your family. This could even mean selling your house and renting for a while. It might suck, but it might be necessary if you are struggling to make ends meet. Let’s be realistic about what you can afford. Don’t choose a living space based on emotion.
For clothing, make sure you’re not naked and you’re dressed appropriately for the climate and occasion. Simple stuff.
And for transportation, let’s keep gas in the tank every week and have a modest car that will get you to and from work. Something that runs.
I do listen to Dave Ramsey’s radio show on my Sansa Clip every day, and he gets a lot of calls from hysterical people drowning in debt. To calm them down, he says, “Okay, let’s budget this out – start with the basics” and he walks them through the Four Walls. At the end of it, the person has stopped crying and he says something like, “See? Life seems a little less scary when you know you’re going to eat and keep the lights on, doesn’t it?”
We learned in grade school what the basics to living were. Yet, somehow, in our Spend-Spend-Spend culture, we’ve gotten away from it and forgotten. All of a sudden, we’re buying crap we don’t need and sacrificing dinners to pay for them. It’s stupid, and I’m just as guilty of it as you are.
When you sit down to put together your budget, take care of those things first. Even if that means you can’t pay a credit card bill right now, you need these things. What good is a decent credit score when you’re eating ham sandwiches in the dark because they turned off your electricity? Life takes on a whole different perspective when the basics are covered. Those are the moments when you think, “You know what? We’re going to be okay.”
And what about that bill that you can’t pay? Well, you may just have to tell them you can’t pay right now. Then you go out and you start working harder to bring in more money. But you have to take care of yourself first. Let the collectors stomp their feet and whine. You need to eat.
I have budgeted $30 a week for groceries for myself. It’s a very liberating feeling to go into the grocery store and have an obligation to myself to spend that $30 every week on food to keep my cupboards full. Having that psychological peace keeps your head on straight when you have to deal with the rest of the garbage of your financial situation. That’s a big key in getting out of it!
So remember: before you pay for anything, put dinner on the table, keep you and your family protected and warm, stay covered up, and get yourself to work and back. Build on that, and you’ve got yourself a solid plan. No amount of debt in the world is worth sacrificing those things from your life.
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Google Chrome is one of those programs that has been around for a while, but when you first tried it, you weren’t that crazy about it. It was somewhat buggy, it didn’t have any type of customization available, and you couldn’t block ads. As much as I wanted to make the switch (being the Google nutjob that I am), I couldn’t do it without a few features that just weren’t available:
1. I needed ads blocked. Period. Even most of them would be sufficient.
2. Add-ons. I want to be able to customize it.
3. A way to integrate my Google Bookmarks so that I can use them like regular bookmarks.
Then one day a couple months ago, I heard that extensions were finally hitting the mainstream. Google Chrome Extensions were a great idea, but you needed to download Chromium, which was the “guinea pig” version of Chrome (which means it doesn’t always work properly), and you had to do a lot of nerdy command-line work to get it up and running. It wasn’t pretty. Once one-click extension support came around, it was time to dive back in.
Now, a few months later, I couldn’t be happier.
Hey, Firefox is a great product. Go ahead and download it if you’d like. It’s stable and it’s popular. But Firefox is very prone to bloatedness. After a while, it takes forever to load Firefox. Chrome just pops right up. It just feels light. Check out the screencast I took below of a comparison between a Firefox start and a Chrome start and you will see what I mean. The little box that pops up in the middle is Launchy, which is my application launcher. In layman’s terms, the box pops up and I start typing the name of the program. When the box disappears, that means I hit “enter” and the application is starting. First I try opening Firefox, then Chrome. Check it out:
If you time it, Firefox takes a full 7 seconds to load up for use, and Chrome takes about 1/2 a second – that means Chrome, in this situation, is 14 times faster loading!
Interested yet? Here are my full reasons why you should give Chrome a chance:
Okay, okay – enough gushing. Time to get into the nuts-and-bolts: how do you set this thing up? Remember – it needs to do all the stuff that my awesome Firefox setup could do.
This is easily the most complicated part of the process, but it’s not that hard, really. Without a true contender to the ad-blocking throne, the best way to do it, in my experience, has been through a program called Privoxy. There’s a 7-step process to it that is awesomely-simplified in this post by Lifehacker and Geekzone. Just follow it, step-by-step, and you’re done. Bada bing.
Remember from my Firefox setup, I make full use of bookmarklets – little bookmarks that can do some awesome things in your Bookmarks Toolbar. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to open up a Firefox window next to your Chrome window and literally drag your bookmarklets from Firefox and drop them into the Chrome toolbar. If you don’t have that, here are links to my bookmarklets and what they do. Instead of clicking on the link, just drag it up to your Bookmarks Toolbar:
Like Firefox plugins, these add-ons help you further customize your browsing experience. There are plenty out there, so feel free to browse around. Here are mine:
No complicated Greasemonkey stuff. Just click “Install” on these bad boys:
Am I preaching to the choir? Do you already use Chrome? What are your favorite extensions/scripts? Why should we encourage more Chrome usage? If you’re a diehard Firefox user and you’re not convinced, tell us why. If you’re an Internet Explorer advocate, seek help immediately – we cannot help you here.
Time for another edition of Big Pile o’ Links, where I feature some of my favorite links and groups of articles from all over the wonderful world we call “The Internet”:
Ah, Evernote. It’s one of the most useful and versatile programs/cloud storage ever, and yet so few Cooler People use it. It’s not just for tech bloggers and people with lots of crap to write about – it’s also incredibly useful for normal people in their day-to-day lives. I use mine every day, and I can’t tell you how useful it has been at the office, at home, or even running around. Here are some great links from recent times that list a bunch of great, easy ways you can start using Evernote more often in your life:
Job got you down? Feel like you’re headed the wrong way? Here are a handful of great articles (and one AWESOME documentary!) to help you make some changes:
It makes the world go ‘round. Here’s a quick handful of resources to further your knowledge on the subject:
Phew! There you go! Another Big Pile o’ Links for your pleasure. If you have an article or site or tool or whatever that you want featured in the Big Pile o’ Links, send it my way at tom@thepracticalnerd.com (it doesn’t have to be yours either, just something you like!).
Most of you know that I am a huge fan of Dave Ramsey and The Total Money Makeover. My fiancé and I are currently going through his Financial Peace University course at my church, and I am proud to say that I recently announced on my personal Facebook account that she and I had successfully completed "Baby Step 1" of his program. WOO!
"Baby Step 2" in Dave’s program is to pay off your debts, except for your mortgage. There are a lot of different ways that you can pay off your debts. Some suggest attacking the highest interest rates first so that you save the most money. Dave’s idea is a little different: line up your debts from smallest-to-largest and pay them off in that order. Some disagree with the method, saying you waste money by not attacking the highest interest rates. Dave’s philosophy? "Dealing with money is 80% behavior and 20% math." In other words, the momentum you build by paying off smaller debts psychologically will help you stick to paying off debt, rather than the frustration of having to pay down a giant debt with a high interest rate and not seeing any noticeable progress.
I have to say, I’m with Dave on this one. Paying off a small debt really encourages me to keep going, as that’s a result I can see. But this philosophy can be applied elsewhere, which is why I would like to completely rip off Dave’s "Debt Snowball" and introduce to you the "Life Snowball".
Here’s how it works: write out all the goals you want to accomplish, from easiest-to-hardest. Then attack them. You can apply this to a day’s worth of to-do’s or a lifetime’s worth. Either way, the momentum you build by checking things off will propel you to work on the other stuff.
For example, here’s a typical "to-do" list for me on a day off from the office:
Now, what’s most important on that list? I would say either the blog post or the 10 cold calls. If I start with those, I might be a little sluggish to get going, waste all morning doing those things, and then have to cram a bunch of stuff in the afternoon. The vacuuming wouldn’t get done, and the receipts might sit until the next day.
But, typically, if I have that list, I’m starting with the litter. That takes 5 minutes. Then I check it off. I’ll move on to the workout. Then I vacuum. Then I build my grocery list. With that momentum, I fly through the rest of the list. I love checking things off, and then the list shrinks until it doesn’t look like much. All of a sudden, I’ve cleared it and it’s only 3:00 in the afternoon.
In fact, you could compare it to a workout. You don’t walk into a gym and hop onto the bench press. You stretch, you run a little, do some lighter reps. You have to get that blood moving first. You need to warm up. When you are attacking a list like this, you need to warm up first. Then your brain will say, "Hey, we’re getting a lot done! Let’s keep going!"
The key to getting things done isn’t a complicated system, it’s about motivation. Winning over your brain is 80% of the battle, because your brain will fight you tooth-and-nail. Think about your own goals – could you work them doing the "Life Snowball" method? Try it out and see what happens. It’s not like it will hurt anything!
Boy, do I hear this stuff a lot.
I’ve got friends and family who will ask about The Practical Nerd, and then they’ll spout off some reason why they don’t follow it and apologize to me. First, it’s not like I get offended for every person that doesn’t read what I have to say. My words aren’t for everybody (though, in most cases, they should be reading this stuff!). But as a blogger, you tend to thicken your skin towards that stuff. But the Cooler People of the world have an excuse for not reading a few blogs, and they think they need an excuse for everything. Just think of some of the long, drawn-out explanations you might hear for the following topics:
And the list goes on. Today, however, I want to go with the three reasons I hear most often for people who tell me they don’t follow The Practical Nerd, or blogs in general. Consider it my rebuttal to the Cooler People of the world.
Hey, back off! It’s only for nine months!
Yes, I have recently moved back in with my parents to save some dough before I get married and be a grown-up forever. But I want to list just a few types of people who have very successful blogs: brilliant marketers, people who have successfully morphed their lives into dream lives, sports commentators and pundits, best-selling authors, people who lost weight without having high-priced personal trainers scream in their ears while millions of people watch, and personal finance experts. These are not people who live in their parents’ basements. These are people who have changed lives and are darn good at what they do. They have valuable life experience and they share it with you. This leads to…
Bloggers do rant, there’s no doubt about that. But here are a few blogs I follow that have some ridiculously useful information:
That’s just the tiniest footprint of all the blogs out there. Sure, some are full of idiots who just want to complain about [insert topic here]. Some are celebrity rumor blogs like that piece of crap Perez Hilton. But some are honest, interesting people who are trying to teach and help. Those are the people I follow.
In addition, there are plenty that give you a good laugh after a long day, like 11 Points, Awkward Family Photos, Calvin and Hobbes (the best comic strip of all-time, every day).
This one is easily the most common one I get, and usually the word “life” is emphasized as a way to make me feel like some kind of loser.
Do you ever read a magazine? How about the newspaper? Ever watch anything on TV? Then you have time. It’s that simple.
What is the best use for your time? Is it watching another crappy fake “reality” show? These are shows with people who add nothing to society other than generally wanting a bunch of attention so that they can justify their giant contracts and sponsorships by playing to your emotions with overproduced crap. Why not experience the true reality of people’s lives and actually learn from and enjoy their experiences without corporate involvement? That’s what a blog does. The blog is the ultimate reality show. There are podcasts, video podcasts, and plain ol’ blogs that all exist for people to bare their lives. There are some captivating stories out there that would put the “I’m a single father with three kids and instead of getting a job I traveled all the way here to sing for you” stories to absolute shame. Put down the remote and belly-up to the monitor for a few minutes.
Newspapers and magazines are going by way of the dodo. Think you’re going to miss much? Most magazines have their articles on their websites, and most can be subscribed to. Same with newspapers. You can get your daily dose of news just about anywhere, and you can tailor it to just be news you’re interested in.
Then use an RSS subscriber like Google Reader to pull them in. Instead of searching through each individual website, it will highlight all the new content, pull it to the front, and you can move through it, skipping articles you don’t want to read and highlighting the ones you do. The other reason I use Google Reader is because it’s web-based, so I can access it on my work breaks or on my phone’s web browser, which is great for waiting rooms and other times where you just need to kill a little time. Plus you don’t have to carry around anything extra – you already have your phone! And finding that article from the past you were just thinking about is as easy and entering a few terms into the search box. All your sites are saved and past content can be searched in seconds.
The truth is, many blogs are written by respected, well-rounded people with inspirational and practical advice for you that can be read any time. You have the time. Start following a few blogs and see how your life will change for the better as a result. Or not. Then you can go back to sitting on the couch and watching Jersey Shore instead. I’m not here to judge.
