For any Frugal Girl readers, I was today’s Meet the Reader post. I talk about the “why” behind saving money (freedom + security) and the wisdom of keeping base expenses low if possible. I take issue with how frugality literature often doesn’t question the decision to be a one-income family and why women need to protect their earning capacity.

Anyway, please check out the interview! In the meantime, I took my 2-year-old to the Please Touch Museum this morning. We have a membership, and they open only to members on Mondays, so it wasn’t too crowded. We had a good time but he definitely wanted to stop at the cafe, which is always a flash point for (frugal) me. My default answer on buying food out is no. I don’t want to start the habit, we bring snacks, we also have food at home…

But he was really excited about it and pointed at a popsicle in the cafe which turned out to be 90 cents. Really! Is anything under a dollar anymore? He ate every little bite and loved it and was so happy about it.

So, I guess it’s good to spend 90 cents for fun. Now let’s hope he stays asleep until camp pick up…

By Linda Formichelli

Time management is a huge industry: e-books, print books, iPhone apps, and software programs all help people cram their too-many to-dos into the time they have. Articles in women’s magazines advise readers on how to shave five minutes off of various tasks, or what to do when they unexpectedly find themselves with a spare 15 minutes (organize your recipes! give yourself a mini-mani!).

One thing all this overlooks is that it doesn’t matter how much time you have if you don’t have the physical energy to get things done. As Laura says, we all have 168 hours per week. That’s a lot — but if you’re exhausted, it will never feel like you have the time to do everything you need and want to do. And even if you do manage to work on your tasks, if you’re tired you’ll work more slowly and with less focus. Energy is key to using your time well.

For years I thought I was the only one who was always tired. “Look at all those people zooming around getting their stuff done,” I’d think. “Why am I the only one who feels this way?” But then I started talking to people, and discovered that almost all of us feel this way. I became a wellness coach a few months ago, and lack of energy has been a common refrain with my clients.

At the risk of making a bad pun, we’re in the middle of an energy crisis. And it’s not hard to imagine why: Many of us expect our bodies to go full throttle and we don’t exactly help them out.

Doctors had no answers as to why I was always so beat, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. After experimenting for a few years, I can finally say I usually have abundant physical energy. (And thank goodness, because I run several businesses and have a 3-year-old who we’re homeschooling!)

Here are a few of the things I’ve learned:

Play Scientist

We’re all different, so the same energy-increasing tactics won’t work for everyone. That’s why you need to experiment to find out what works best for you. For example, a friend of mine feels best when she’s on an almost 100% raw vegan diet, but my energy zoomed when I cut out wheat. I blast through the day after lifting weights with my trainer, but others swear by interval training, while still others do best with a regular yoga routine. You may even find that different supplements work for you; for example, I take a B-complex, vitamin D, and fish oil, but various experts recommend a whole range of supplements you can experiment with.

Recalibrate

Most of us go, go, go until we burn out and hit bottom — and then, with no other choice, we take better care of ourselves until our energy levels return. Wash, rinse, repeat. The trick is to not wait until you’ve hit bottom, but to re-energize as soon as your energy starts to dip — or even before. That way, not only will you avoid the energy roller coaster, but you can take much less drastic steps to get back on track — like a warm bath instead of a week in bed.

Sleep WELL

As Laura discovered when she was researching 168 Hours, most people actually get plenty of sleep. But what is the quality of that sleep? Many of us are wired from checking e-mail on our phones, watching TV, or reading the news right before snoozing. We race through the day and then collapse into a fitful slumber instead of easing into a restful sleep.

The solution: Create a soothing bedtime routine. Turn off the Internet and the TV. Take a bath, read some fiction, do a guided meditation on your iPod. Make sure that the sleep you get is rejuvenating.

How about you — what tactics have helped boost your energy? We’d love to hear your stories in the Comments below.

*****

Linda Formichelli is a freelance writer for magazines like Women’s Health and WebMD, a certified personal trainer, and a professional wellness coach. She blogs about freelance writing at The Renegade Writer and about health and wellness at HappyFit Coaching.

by Manisha Thakor

What are the 4 most dangerous words to your portfolio?

“How should I invest?”

Surprised? Probably. As the stock market goes up and down, the financial media are full of commentary addressing this question. On the surface it seems like a logical query.

But if you were getting ready to go out, would you ask “What Should I Wear?”… without describing where you are heading?  Of course not. The clothes you’d wear to shovel snow in will be very different from the clothes you’d wear to a wedding.

That’s why “How Should I Invest?” are the four most dangerous words to your portfolio.  The answer to that question is often given as if one size fits all, when it’s anything but. To protect yourself, here are 5 things to think about to make sure your hard-earned money is invested in a way that is appropriate for your specific situation.

1. When do you need to spend that money? If it’s in the next 5 years you typically want to protect that money against inflation in savings accounts, money market funds/accounts or CDs rather than take market risk in stocks or bonds.
2. Do you have any outstanding high-interest debt? If so, paying off that debt may be the best investment you can make as it gives a “guaranteed” return – especially when interest rates on savings vehicles are so low.
3. How steady is your income? A professor with tenure may feel more comfortable taking higher short-run risk than an entrepreneur with variable cash flow.
4. How old are you? The older you are, the less time you have on your side to bounce back from volatile markets and thus the more conservative you’ll want your portfolio to be.  For women, a rough rule of thumb is to take 110 minus your age to arrive at the ideal maximum percentage of your portfolio in stocks.  For example, if you are a 40-year old woman… 110 minus 40 equals 70.  So up to 70% of your portfolio could be in stocks and 30% in bonds (for men, who have shorter life spans, use John Bogle’s oft quoted 100 minus your age).
5. How interested are you in investing to begin with? Unless you are inherently passionate about picking individual stocks or studying active money managers, you don’t need to do these things. I love target date retirement funds and/or utilizing low cost index funds and ETFs.  My favorite “basic portfolio recipe” comes from Boglehead Mel Lindauer. His recommendation: for the percentage of your portfolio devoted to stocks, put 1/2 in a total US stock market index and 1/2 in a total international index. For the portion that goes into bonds, put 1/2 in a total US bond market index and 1/2 into Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (“TIPs”) via funds, ETFs, or direct purchase. From there you can add some additional investment spice in the form of REITS or commodities, but for most people this core recipe will do just dandy.

Bottom line, always remember that before anyone can give you meaningful investment guidance they need to understand where it is that you specifically want to go.

Manisha Thakor, a former portfolio manager, is the author of Get Financially Naked and On My Own Two Feet.

By Sara Caputo

Let me start by saying that I have seen some messy offices, homes and workplaces.  In my line of work, this is my daily reality and the very reason I have a business.  However, early on in my business, I had an a-ha moment.  Just because someone is messy doesn’t mean that they are disorganized and conversely, just because someone is neat, it doesn’t mean they ARE organized.  It’s easy to judge a book by its cover, or in this case, an office by its appearance. However it’s important to go back to the definition of what it means to be organized. Webster says it’s to systemize and give organic structure to something. In simple terms I think it’s about being able to find what you need when you need it.  If we use this as our definition, messiness shouldn’t matter, should it?

According to a Kelton Research survey, workplace clutter tarnishes professional image and interestingly enough, the study revealed that 2/3 of Americans believe that their organizational skills are lacking.  53% admit to thinking negatively of coworkers with messy desks.  A whopping 90% of Americans admit that disorganization has a negative effect on their lives.

So, why the messiness?

Life is moving faster than ever and taking time to put things away where they belong takes time.  It is much easier to let things fall where they fall and collect in the corners due to limited time and energy to follow through and get things back to where they live within your home or office.  In a recent blog post by Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, she stated that the trivial habit of putting things away in the proper place gives people a major boost to happiness.

I think everyone can agree that it feels really good to put things back where they belong and more importantly to be able to find things when we need them.  However, sometimes people who just can’t deal with looking at visual clutter tend to stash things away haphazardly with no order, purpose or system. Remember when we were kids and were asked to clean up our room and usually ended up stuffing things in the closet or under the bed?  The room looked neat but it most likely wasn’t organized. Now as adults, how many of you reading this article have your lunch, purse, food, drinks or personal items in the bottom drawer of your desk?  You know the one I mean.  The one where there could be vertical papers, projects and files ready to be easily found?  When I ask this question in the classes I teach, without fail half the room raises their hands.

While having a neat and tidy home or office might look appealing, the truth is that it really doesn’t matter what it looks like. What matters is how it functions and supports you in how you naturally live and work.

Consider how your spaces function and support you. Here are a few questions to ponder:

1.  Can I find what I am looking for with relative ease?  (relative ease = less than 5 minutes)

2.  Do I end up touching documents, emails, papers, files more than 2-3 times?

3.  Are my workspace systems reflective of my current work, projects, family, life?

4.  Do I operate in concentric circles? (That means that the items you need/use most often are closes to you and the items you need/use least often are furthest away from you)

5.  In general, do I get things done at in my workspace or do I get distracted and lack productivity?

All of these are more important than whether a desk looks messy.

Sara Caputo is the author of The Productivity Puzzle, and the owner of Radiant Organizing, a productivity and organizing company based in Santa Barbara, California. 

By Cali Williams Yost

A friend called the other night seeking advice.  Her son’s transition back to school hasn’t gone well and he’s struggling.  Her mother broke her hip and she’s managing a team of in-home care givers long distance.  And she’s been doing the job of two people since her co-worker quit.  “What should I do?” she pleaded.

First, I pointed out, “Do you remember what happened to me at the beginning of the year?” “Yes!” she laughed.   Between January and March of 2011:

1. My intrepid nanny, who’s missed five days of work in the ten years she’s been with us, was in bed with a cold for a week;
2. On average each week, my children have had at least one half or full day off from school due to the seemingly endless snow, and
3. Finally, I contracted an inner ear infection that morphed into vertigo just as I was getting ready to speak at a conference in New Orleans.

In other words, during the first six weeks of the year, my work+life fit stank (I’d use a bit more colorful term but I want this post to be SFW).

I pulled out all of my tricks to deal with the unexpected body blows: I called in my back up care; I traded off coverage with my husband depending upon who had the more urgent deliverable at work; I got up earlier and went to bed later; and I cut out all non-essentials from my schedule (bye, bye blogging).

I muddled through without any major disasters, either at work or at home. Regardless, it all still stank. It wasn’t fun. It was stressful and hard. But I figured out a while ago that if I made daily perfection the bar against which I measured my work+life fit success, I’d be doomed. So, I’ve learned to roll with it the best I could whenever the turbulence strike.

Sitters get well, snow stops, and ear infections heal.  And my fit improved.  It always does, until the next time it just stinks. And if it stinks for too long, that’s my signal that a bigger change might be required. But, most of the time, it’s a matter of simply hanging in there.

Parents aren’t the only ones who have to muddle through now and then.  Anyone can have  a pipe burst unexpectedly, a dog eat a towel and need emergency surgery, the car not start, or the weather strand them in the airport during a business trip or on vacation. And those are just a few examples. Unfortunately, no one is immune from a period of work+life fit turbulence.

So my advice to my overwhelmed friend was simple: Control what you can. Be good to yourself. Beam with pride for making it through the next 24 hours with as many of the basics completed as possible. Wait for the sun to shine again. It will.  Children will settle into a routine, hips will heal, and new people will join the team.

Has your work+life fit ever “stunk?” How did you muddle through to the other side?

Cali Williams Yost blogs at Work + Life Fit and Fast Company, and is the author of Work+Life: Finding the Fit That’s Right for You  (Riverhead/Penguin Group, 2005). Connect with her on Twitter @caliyost. 

by Lorie Marrero

When talking with readers, and reading posts in our message boards, I sometimes find that things people are grappling with are actually one phone call away from getting resolved! I am often surprised at this in my own life, too, when I have one of those days where I knock out tons of stuff on my list.

Isn’t it amazing how we procrastinate things that are so simple? Here are some things I have experienced personally, I have seen with our clients, or our members have told us about:

• Home repairs. Our glass shower door wasn’t closing…for months. Our handyman tried many trick-fixes that didn’t work. ONE PHONE CALL: Fixed the next day for $150. Ugh, why did I wait so long? I still relish each time I take a shower and it closes properly.
• Cracked windshield. ONE PHONE CALL: Fixed the SAME day, and the guy came to my house to do it. It was only a 7 minute call to my amazing insurance company, USAA–it was so remarkable I noted the time on my phone handset.
• You’ve misplaced a document like a tax statement. ONE PHONE CALL: You can usually get someone to send you something via email or even fax that same day.
• You don’t know how much something costs. ONE PHONE CALL: You can usually find out what you need to understand and more from calling the relevant company. If you want to get straight to a human being at large corporations, there is a list maintained online at GetHuman.com that allows you to bypass the phone menu nightmares.
• You have junk that needs hauling away and items that need to be donated. ONE PHONE CALL: You can get all of your clutter hauled away and your stuff taken to Goodwill®!

What could you knock out today that ONE PHONE CALL would solve? Are there nagging repairs, dental or medical appointments, or pieces of missing information that you need to get off your mind? Take a moment and get it done! Then tell us about it in the comments.

Certified Professional Organizer® Lorie Marrero is the bestselling author of The Clutter Diet: The Skinny on Organizing Your Home and Taking Control of Your Life. She is also the creator of ClutterDiet.com, an innovative program allowing anyone to get expert help at an affordable price. Her organizing books and products are sold online and in stores nationwide. Lorie is the spokesperson for Goodwill Industries International, and she is a sought-after expert for national media such as CNBC, Family Circle, WGN News and Woman’s Day. She writes weekly as the organizing expert for Good Housekeeping’s Home Style blog.
 

by Camille Noe Pagán

Some people are so good at self promotion that you barely realize they’re tooting their own horns as you’re marveling at whatever they just accomplished. I’d argue that writers are rarely among this breed; too many of us feel uncomfortable talking about even our truly stellar feats—while a smaller group swing the other direction and crow about every single victory (“I wrote twelve words today!” “Week 472 on the New York Times bestseller list!” etc.) until they make everyone around them cringe.

Like so many of my colleagues, I’ve struggled with how to promote my writing. Although I’m proud when I do good work and when good things happen as a result, I worry about whether I’m being too shy—or too self aggrandizing. Over the past few months, however, two simple questions have dramatically changed my approach to self promotion. Before I undertake any promotional effort, from the minor to the major, I ask myself:

1. Is it helpful? In the age of “brand you,” you may feel like you have to sell yourself as a product—and let’s face it, that can feel icky. Why not think of yourself as a service instead? Talking about yourself gets old really fast, but providing other people with information doesn’t.After all, there’s arguably no better way to advertise yourself than to be useful.

To wit: While I was preparing for bookstore events for my novel, The Art of Forgetting, I felt nervous. I regularly speak about freelancing and journalism—sometimes in front of several hundred people—and I’m rarely anxious beforehand. I thought about why this is, and realized that it’s because I feel like I’m being helpful when I do these presentations, and it feels good to be helpful. I was nervous about my readings because I was envisioning having to sell the audience on the novel. The solution: I switched up my material so that it was more information-based (for example, I talked about the phenomenon of brain injury and also talked about my writing process and some insights I’d had while working on the novel). The result: I was able to speak with confidence and the audience was engaged.

2. Is it fun? I use the word “fun” loosely here, but in essence, I mean: Is it something I’m really excited or happy about? Is it something that others will get a kick out of? For example, last week I received a couple very nice reviews for Forgetting. Needless to say, I was thrilled about all of them, but one from the Chicago Tribune genuinely made my month. It was thoughtful, the reviewer described the book exactly as I would have myself, and as a bonus, I’ve been a loyal Tribune reader for eons and was reading in Chicago the day after the paper covered Forgetting, so the timing could not have been more perfect.

So, the Tribune review was the one I chose to Tweet about and post on Facebook because darn it, I was really excited about it! (I still am  ). Because I hadn’t been posting every single review I’d received, I didn’t feel weird or guilty about mentioning it, and I had dozens of people read it and respond with warm, genuinely congratulatory comments. That fit my definition of fun.

There may be instances where you may have to promote yourself and you won’t be able to answer “yes” to one of the above questions. But for everyday promotion, these can be an invaluable tool in toeing the line between keeping your name out there and being annoyingly self-congratulatory.

Camille Noe  Pagán is a journalist (O, Forbes.com, Parade, Glamour), mom to two kids and author of the novel The Art of Forgetting.