If you want to be successful in life then there is one principle you must learn first: Learn principles. What makes a chef great? They know the principles of cooking and flavors and how they balance and then they can take unlikely ingredients and mesh them together into a signature dish. What makes an engineer great? They learn principles and then take those principles and apply them systematically to their work. What makes money managers great? They learn principles, apply them and keep their finances in order and grow their net worth.

Elementary school and primary school, and unfortunately some college classes tend to be about rote memorization. The best teachers I ever had were the ones who took the principles behind the things I was memorizing and taught me those instead of merely cramming data into my head. As a web developer/programmer I have memorized a lot of coding things, but I didn’t begin to think as a programmer until I learned the principles behind smart programming (sometimes called ‘patterns’). My finances were a mess even though I had heard good personal finance bits and pieces, but it wasn’t until I learned the principles behind sound personal finance (influenced by blogs like the Simple Dollar, NCN, and Dave Ramsey’s “The Total Money Makeover“).

Smart, successful people will be able to think with abstraction. They’ll be able to identify the principles that make up great process and then merge those principles, where they apply, to their different areas of expertise. Recently I read a book called, “Critical Chain” and it had lots of good principles in it. It is how I run my budget (which I posted a bit about before, but I’m going to write a further detailed article later), but it wasn’t how I ran my budget before reading it because I hadn’t clearly seen the principle. Once I learned it, I was able to see how it could apply to other areas in my life.

Learn principles, learn how they can be applied across broad scopes of your life, and then forget about rote memorization. It could save you thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, your life, or a few minutes time here and there, but get past the short term rules and start thinking bigger.

I had a great post idea earlier today. Great to the point that I thought it would be my best article to date. Or not. It doesn’t matter because I wasn’t at a place where I could write it, and I failed to write it down! So now you can imagine that this post is brilliant. But its brilliance lies mostly in that as a manager of life (and finances), you need to be prepared to document ideas and be able to come back to them so that you don’t lose important things, or blog posts.

Every time I go to an evening doctors appointment I end up springing for dinner for my family. Usually around $30.00 or so (we’ll pick a place like Jason’s Deli which is potentially more nutritious than a fast food restaurant, but not much more expensive). The evening appointments cost the same as the day appointments at the doctor’s office, but I can avoid missing a lot of work time during the day. The nicety of going in the evening is offset by the eating out, but when you’re sitting there at the restaurant having spent more money than you’d like for the evening you have to account for your choices.

I think I may try taking an afternoon appointment in the future and make up missed work time in the evening because it’ll still cost me less than appointments and dinner. Its time to do investigative surgery and at least try the other approach and see if it saves the money it should save. Hopefully a lesson learned and we’ll just move forward from here.

If you have not see the Strongbad “Trogdor” video, here it is.  I know its weird, but since Homestar Runner and Strongbad tend to be internet icons, I’ll let you decide if the internet is weird before the video, or after the video.  You see: my wife’s relative had her house burn down on Monday last week.  Burninated.  Most everything is gone or destroyed.  It is pretty tough since that sort of event is so life altering.  She’s still waiting on more information about insurance and hasn’t begun (to my knowledge) the process of discovering the costs of rebuilding.

As you can imagine, this post is a reminder to back up documents off-site, or to keep them in a safe-deposit box at a bank/secure location.  I need to do this, too.  Some of the documents that she had are gone forever, some can be had for a fee (reproduction and shipping and handling costs), and some are going to be sorely missed.  Things like children’s first moments, photos, some computer data, and of course various valuables that are destroyed when flames hit them.

Consider her fire as a great lesson for us to learn from.  Consider her blessing in not being home for the fire (and therefore unscathed).  Make sure you have life-important things like wills covered in duplicate.  Make sure you have considered a location to store offsite data (external hard drives or sites that offer low-cost data hosting for such cases are a good idea).  Make sure that you tell your loved ones they’re loved - you never know what might strike, but you do know it won’t be Trogdor.

Note: This post is a tiny bit light hearted because the relative is actually doing pretty well emotionally.  I’m actually feeling kind of sick, but such is life.  Gotta travel tomorrow, so we’ll see how that goes. 

What if you lose everything that makes you financially wealthy? I am going to explore some of this in a video podcast soon, but I wanted to share a story I heard recently that just hit this point home. I know a person who had a tremendous job that promised above average income and a whole list of benefits - but that job came at a cost: it began to affect his relationships.

A time came when the financial pursuits and the relational pursuits had come to a very strong and intense decision making point. The person had to ask himself: what matters most? The way he put it was very powerful: if you lose something and it hurts, you’ve given it priority. The question that he had to ask himself was whether or not his priorities were right.

His story ended well because he was able to continue to earn a solid income, and maintain his relationships as well as strengthen them. This isn’t always the case, but you need to be prepared to let go of what doesn’t matter - and as much as this blog is about personal finance money should not be your number one priority.

The PaidTwice.com blog asks an important question: what else could one save money on for seeking businesses to change their billing, interest making and the like.  She’s after Saturn to help pay for expensive vehicle repairs.  Go read the article and offer up a word of encouragement.

From the Manager-Tools.com podcast:

“Our inefficiency during the day hurts our family and makes us ineffective because we waist time during the day that had we used that time wisely we would have been much for effective focusing on doing the right things.”
- Mark Horstmann

This quote hit home with me.  When I have an inefficient day (and today has started out as one), it effects not only my clients, but it effects my family and the focus I want to have in my life.  Good stuff.

Last weekend before I headed out on yet another business trip my two year old dropped a toy into the toy-let. I mean toilet. My wife was in the bathroom and attempted to reach into the toilet before the princess drowned, flushed and caused blockage that only mouse-produced royalty could cause. After washing her hands like she had an OCD disorder she came downstairs and alerted me to the problem at hand. I went to the hardware store later that evening and picked up an auger (also called a snake) but had no luck getting the princess to come out of her cave. Apparently the dragons had gotten to her and she was going to need a knight to rescue her. I was thinking a hired knight that charged $45.00 an hour or more.

It turns out that I’m cheap because after some searching on the interwebs I figured that I had a chance at disassembling my toilet/floor connection and getting the princess out myself. So I went to the hardware store and purchased a new wax ring to re-seal the toilet upon successfully removing it from the floor, some caulk (to reseal the grout that was attaching the toilet to the floor as well), and a large plastic drop cloth to put the toilet on so that extra water could be prevented from getting all over our tile floor. As it turned out the drop cloth was not as effective as it could have been but we’ll ignore that problem because this story is less concerned with my failure to contain all of the water.

I had the help of my brother-in-law who kindly used my utility knife to separate the grout from the toilet’s base and then helped me power-lift the toilet from the grout, caulk and wax ring that were underneath the already heavy toilet. The toilet came up, off onto the plastic, and I took an auger to the drain pipe in the floor hoping to retrieve the damsel in distress. No luck, the number-two ogres must have her trapped somewhere else. I rocked the toilet backwards and to my pleasant surprise the “princess of poop” was wedged sideways just inside the mouth of the toilet! I removed her from the ‘can’ and threw her away. I may be cheap, but my daughters don’t get a second chance with girls who hang out in such low class establishments.

I placed a new wax ring down on the floor making sure the sticky wax surface was facing upwards and the gasket was facing down into the floor pipe. I then lined up the bolts that hold the toilet to the collar in the floor so that they would be parallel with one another and hopefully lined up with the toilet’s holes. The most important next step was to take some scrap wood and place it on either end of the toilet’s home and give myself time to line up the bolts and toilet’s fastening holes before removing the wood (with the help of the brother-in-law again) and seating the toilet on the wax ring - you don’t want to mess that up or you could have biological gunk all over your bathroom floor or a waxy mess that you have to replace. We got the bolts and toilet lined up and then removed the wood slowly and positioned the toilet so that the grout matched up just right.

Mission accomplished! In about an hour the princess was saved (and then trashed) and the toilet was cleared - flushing like it was brand new. I had saved money, practiced something mechanical and out of my comfort zone, and got to feel the pride of having done something myself where before I was going to hire it out. There is nothing quite like taking care of your family to bring out an enjoyment of things as mundane as a toilet. Plus now I can tell stories and have G-rated potty humor.

This is the first of a multi-part series on teens and personal finance.  The first part of the series is interview oriented, later episodes will be focused on answering some of the questions posed in the interviews.  The recording quality isn’t what I’d like due to the fact that I had my MacBook Pro and that was it for recording so there is some background noise.

Questions for listeners and readers:

What is the number one source you would recommend learning about personal finance from?  Blogs, books, videos or mentors?

What is the number one mistake you see over and over from people (and maybe yourself) that keeps people from financial growth?

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If you have ever managed people then the manager-tools.com podcast series is for you. Why does this relate to money management? Because if you’re looking to get ahead to increase your income then you will need to be a better communicator and more than likely a manager of people as well as finances. The advice on that site is free (with for-money advice also available), the advice is practical, and it is sure to at least begin to prepare you for life in the wide-weird-world of management.

If you’re currently just an employee then you’ll want to listen to this stuff simply to learn how your manager may be trying to communicate to you. Sometimes managers don’t know that they’re doing a bad job of communicating and you may learn from these audio lessons how to help your manager manage better - heck, you may even want to pass them along to your manager.

If you’re a parent these are valuable because they even apply some things to rearing a child. And let me tell you: rears of children should always be managed. If you’re a manager you should listen to these because odds are you’ve never been trained to be a manager, you’ve just been thrown into it. I have recently been chucked in front of the wheels of an oncoming management train myself and this sort of thing is going to be handy.

I would recommend starting at the bottom of the page and working your way up so that you can get a feel for their methodology. Its not difficult to listen to and you’ll want to keep a pencil & paper or a word processor open to take notes. I have a page of notes from one podcast already and am just starting my second. This stuff is dynamite strapped to the body of a dead manager - go ahead and light the fuse… its attached to you.