In terms of the rest of the laundry, several people wrote to say they never buy any launderable item in red because it always runs, even after many washings. I stopped buying red many years ago for this very reason.
And many people shared this idea about cutting drying time in half, which I’d never heard of before, but I now do regularly: Run your clothes through the dryer only long enough to get out the wrinkles (ten to twenty minutes, depending on the items and the dryer and the setting). Then hang them on hangers in your closet to dry completely.
This won’t work for every climate, but if you can do it, not only will it save you time and reduce either the gas or electricity used by your dryer, it also eliminates wrinkles, which eliminates ironing. It also reduces the damage and wear and tear to your clothes that are caused by extended exposure to high temperatures.
Then you can get rid of your iron.
Another great laundering tip I got from readers is to use laundry disks (available from Real Goods Trading Corporation, 555 Leslie Street, Ukiah, CA 95482 (800) 762-7325).
These are 2 1/2-inch-diameter disks filled with ionizing ceramic beads. You just toss them into the washer with a load of clothes and they eliminate the need for harsh detergents—in your clothes and down the drain. They also eliminate the rapid fading of dark colors that comes from using detergents with whiteners. They are recommended for everyday washing, but do require warm water. I’ve used them for over a year now and find them very effective for cleaning, though I do use a teaspoon or so of detergent when I launder our dusty trail-hiking clothes.
They come in a set of three disks for $49 and last for between 500 to 700 laundry loads (roughly two years for most people).
TEN
Lifestyle Issues
78. The Simple Computer
Frequently, people ask me, “Did you get rid of your computer when you simplified your life?”
I always explain that using a computer saves me untold hours and is a tremendous simplifier for me as a writer. I can’t imagine being without one.
I began to realize that people who ask this question are of the “simplifying means getting rid of everything and moving to the cabin in the woods” mind-set.
But it’s a fair question. Given the rapid pace of the technological advances that are taking place every day, we’re all going to have to address the issue of whether or not the computer—and the Internet, E-mail, virtual reality, software for every conceivable application, and computer developments we haven’t even thought of yet—will actually simplify our lives.
You can ask a dozen people whether or not any of these advances will make things simpler, and you’ll get thirteen different answers. It’s not an easy question, and I believe we each will have to answer it for ourselves. Some of us won’t be able to move forward in our careers unless we’re computer literate. Others will find limited computer applications for their lives. And still others will be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age.
I recently conducted my own random and admittedly limited survey of a couple dozen acquaintances from around the country who are computer literate and who are active on the Internet. Even though they all agree that at the present moment the Internet has some sorting out to do before it actually becomes a useful tool for the average person, the consensus among all the people I spoke to was basically that, like it or not, the computer and Internet are here to stay, so we might as well get used to it.
Yes, perhaps. But the telephone is here to stay, too. And so is the television. That doesn’t mean we have to allow them to take over our lives. For me, right now, a computer with a simple word processing program, a laser printer, and a fax are extremely helpful for my work as a writer. And I have no doubt that the Internet will someday soon prove to be a valuable reference tool.
But, knowing myself as I do, I will have to exercise a fair amount of discipline in my use of it, just as I do with television. I’ve already met a number of technocrats on the Internet who may never return to the real world.
Obviously that’s their choice. (Or possibly not—there are addictive aspects to being on-line, similar to the addictive habits of sitting in front of a television screen, that we won’t understand the effects of perhaps for some years to come).
But now that I’ve created a wonderfully simple life, I plan not to lose it to the Internet. We can keep abreast of the technology that is appropriate for our lives without losing our souls to it. All it takes is a clear vision of how we want our lives to be, and the discipline not to let them be overrun by so-called progress.
79. E-Mail
E-mail simplifies the mail and information handling for many of us.
But it can also complicate the process. I have a friend who uses E-mail exclusively now to keep in touch with her friends and business associates. It’s so easy, she tells me. She can type a message, press a button, and send it to two hundred people in just a couple of minutes. And she does this now on a regular basis.
Yes, but she now spends several hours a day reading the return responses and then, in some cases, sending out another message. This is simple?
If you use E-mail a lot, you might take a quick moment to analyze how much more time you spend now dealing with the daily mail and various communications than you did before you incorporated E-mail into your life.
As one reader, Amy Newman, pointed out, “E-mail and voice mail were supposedly developed to make our lives simpler. This can be accomplished by responding immediately to 90 percent of all messages. E-mail should be responded to on-line, if possible, and should never be printed, responded to by hand, then retyped by yourself or an assistant—it amazes me how many people still do this. It takes practice to be confident enough to respond immediately, but it will save lots of time if you handle it on the spot.”
E-mail is another convenience—just like the automatic washer and dryer—that is easy to overdo. It can complicate our lives precisely because it’s so easy.
80. Automatic Payments
Gibbs and I reduced the complexity of our financial chores in a number of different ways, including closing out all but one bank account, eliminating all but a couple of credit cards, avoiding consumer debt, and consolidating our investment portfolio within just a couple of families of funds. And of course, our shopping moratorium (#56) has not only drastically decreased our spending but has also reduced the expenses we have to track.
After hearing from many readers that automatic payroll deposits and automatic payment withdrawals had greatly simplified their lives, I decided to explore those options.
It took a single phone call to set up the automatic payroll deposits. It took an hour or so to contact the companies I receive bills from each month—the mortgage, insurance, utilities, and so on. Each vendor mailed or faxed their own form requesting bank account information and our signatures so they could access our bank account for bill-paying purposes. It took a month or two to process this paperwork.
Now, payments for all but a few of the monthly bills are automatically deducted from our checking account. There are a couple of local utilities that are not, at this time, set up for automatic payments. Those I pay six months to a year in advance, so I only have to handle those bills once or twice a year.
The only check I write monthly is for the credit card bill, since at the present time the bank that services the card is not set up to utilize automatic payments.
The process of keeping track of the monthly charges is quite simple: I receive a statement each month from the utility companies, for example. Using the method of handling-it-only-once (#44), when the statement arrives in the mail I enter the amount that has been deducted from my checking account into my check register, which I keep at hand. At the end of the month I use the bank statement, which lists each automatic payment transaction, to reconcile the payments the bank made against the entries in the check register.
That’s it. No check writing, no envelope addressing, no return addressing, no stamp licking, no having
to get it into the mailbox on time. I’ve literally gone from spending a day or more each month on the bill-paying and record-keeping process to now spending little more than an hour each month.
One reason I hadn’t pursued this avenue earlier was because I feared that by using automatic payments and deposits I’d lose control of the process. I imagined that deposits would get credited to someone else’s account and that payments wouldn’t get made by the bank, and then I’d have to spend hours straightening it all out. I clung too long to the belief that I could maintain better control if I was taking care of the payments myself each month. But I’ve been taking advantage of automatic payments and deposits for over a year now without a single glitch.
If there’s any simpler way than this to pay bills, I’d love to hear about it.
81. Use a Monthly Spending Plan
One of the easiest ways I know to simplify your finances is to keep track of your monthly income and expenses so you can establish a workable spending plan to live within.
Numerous books are available today that will show you how to set up and maintain a budget. I describe several on the Reading List.
Or you can simply sit down and draw up your own system. I started years ago using a National Brand 14-column, double-page 11 x 8 1/2-inch analysis pad—available at any office supply store—to keep track of income and expenses.
It’s quite simple. The various expense categories—mortgage, taxes, insurance, food, utilities, and so on, are set up vertically in the left-hand column; the months run across the top of the double-page spread.
At the end of the month I transfer the entries from our check register to the appropriate column in the budget book, total them, and deduct them from the monthly income.
At the end of the year, I total each expense for the year and divide by twelve to get the monthly average for each category. That number, adjusted up or down as needed, then becomes the budget figure for the coming year.
I keep this process very simple. This is not double-entry bookkeeping. It doesn’t have to balance to the penny. In fact, to make it easier, I round up the numbers and never use the decimal point. It takes only a few minutes each month to total the columns and to keep up with the figures.
Tracking income and expenses makes it possible to increase your savings and control your spending, and it provides valuable information at the end of the year that can be used for the coming year’s budgeting. It also greatly simplifies your tax records and reduces the time you have to spend gathering information for filing your tax return.
But probably the greatest advantage a spending plan offers is that it puts you in control of your money. Having that control will simplify your life.
82. The Simple Credit Card
When Gibbs and I were looking at ways to simplify our finances, we got rid of all but one or two of our credit cards. Not only did this drastically cut back on the hassle of keeping track of, rotating, and making payments on several different cards each month, but it cut back on the amount of junk mail we get each day.
Now that most grocery and department stores and even the U.S. Post Office accept credit cards, we use one card for all our routine monthly expenses such as groceries, gasoline, and any miscellaneous expenditures such as haircuts, personal items, office supplies, and so on. We keep a second card as a backup for traveling, since many hotels and car rental companies can tie up your available credit until your charges are finalized.
Since we know from our budget figures how much we spend in each category each month, it’s easy to stay within our self-imposed limits. This way we don’t have to carry excess cash around, which is more difficult to keep track of (and easier to slip through our fingers); and we don’t have to carry a checkbook—though we do keep a couple of checks on hand for the rare vendor that doesn’t accept credit cards.
It’s a simple matter to use the monthly credit card statement to record the entries into our budget ledger (#81), and every expenditure we can put on a credit card means one less check we have to reconcile with the monthly bank statement.
We found that it does take some discipline not to get carried away with credit card expenditures, and it’s vital that you know the parameters of your budget so you don’t go over your monthly limits. We make certain to pay the amount in full each month so there are no interest charges.
Using our credit card this way has greatly simplified the monthly record keeping. Now, all of our regular monthly bills are deducted from our checking account through automatic payments(#80), and most of the remaining expenditures are paid for by one check to the credit card company.
A debit card, available from your bank, is another simple way to take care of miscellaneous purchases and eliminates the need to carry extra cash. It works like a credit card, except the charge is deducted directly from your checking account. The charges are shown on your bank statement each month, and so can be reconciled and entered into your spending record as expenses.
A debit card eliminates the monthly check to the credit card company and of course there’s never any possibility of interest charges for unpaid balances or late payments. Most banks don’t charge for this service. If you use a debit card, be sure to enter each transaction in a check register just as though you were writing a check, and deduct it from your running balance. This makes it possible to keep track of expenditures as you go through the month.
83. Is Quicken Quicker?
A couple of years ago my accountant suggested that I could greatly simplify my annual tax preparation chore, as well as my monthly bill-paying process, by getting one of the mass-marketed computer bookkeeping programs that would automate these routines for me.
I consider myself to be moderately computer literate in terms of word processing systems, having used a variety of programs on various computers in the writing of my books.
But I hadn’t gotten involved in computer bookkeeping systems because, even with my past involvement in real estate investing, most of the software available in those days seemed to be excessive for my needs. The fairly efficient bill-paying, budgeting, and end-of-year statements I did by hand were relatively easy and served my purpose well enough at that time.
But now that I’m simplifying, I’m always looking for easier approaches to time-consuming routines, so I decided to explore how the computer could simplify my life in this regard.
I spent roughly a hundred dollars on the software, checks, and envelopes, and a couple of hundred dollars on the consultant I hired to help me learn the program and to totally revamp my bill-paying methods.
After using the new system for roughly six months, I came to the conclusion that, for me, this is not simple. Since I don’t keep the computer or the printer running when I’m not using them, it became far more trouble than it was worth to boot them up, replace the paper in the printer tray with computer checks, input the payment information into the program, print the check, pull out the computer envelopes, tear off the perforated checks, insert then into the envelopes, put a stamp on them, and drop them in the mail.
Now that all my monthly bills are handled by automatic payment through my bank, and I write only a couple of checks each month, using a computer program is overkill. Unless you’re paying and tracking a significant volume of checks each month, now and even into the forseeable future, automatic payments are a much easier and less expensive way for the average household to simplify the bill-paying process.
Using a computer program for bill payments does, of course, eliminate the end-of-the-month number crunching, since the numbers are totaled instantaneously. And a computer program makes it possible to quickly analyze your income and expenses from many different angles.
If you’ve got a small in-home business and a significant number of bills to pay throughout the month, or if you have a complex tax picture, handling it all by computer would no doubt be simpler. But I accessed the system only once a month, so one consideration for me was the learning curve required to stay on top of it. In effect, I
had to start all over again each month to get up to snuff with the program.
I also believe that, with the exception of monthly income and expense records, the charts, graphs, and reports that the software promoters tout as adding clarity to our financial picture are unnecessary for most of us. If you want those reports, or enjoy spending your time generating that type of data, that’s one thing. But for those of us for whom that information is irrelevant, much of the advertising hoopla about the convenience of computer bookkeeping is overstated, at best. At worst, these programs can be far more complex than they appear.
No one can deny the incredible benefits computers offer us. And it seems possible that automated everything is just around the corner. But often, even with computers, we still need to evaluate objectively whether a particular application, or the way in which we utilize it, can really simplify or at least add something to our lives.
84. The Simple Time Management System
My system for time management parallels my system for keeping stuff organized. If we reduce the amount of stuff we allow to accumulate in our lives, we won’t have to organize it. If we cut back on the number of things we have to do each day, we don’t need a large double-page spread on which to track them.
If you take a close look at your system, you’ll see that the things which are the most important aren’t scheduled in there anyway. How many of us ever write in “Spend time with my kids today.” Or “Take time for my soul this afternoon.” Or “Have sex tonight.”
Many people are finding a smaller date book is much more compatible with the simple life. As reader Melissa Keane wrote, “I moved out of my Filofax calendar with a full page per day because it led me to believe I could really do all that in one day. I’m a writer-historian-researcher, so most of my days can be filled with a one- to two-word notation: ‘library,’ ‘archives,’ or ‘write.’ I don’t need hour-by-hour appointments noted.”
Living the Simple Life Page 12
