r u l y

The concrete slab on our back patio has definitely seen better days. It was in OK shape when we first moved in and the humid, damp weather we have doesn’t help it any as the years go by. Several contractors have told us that it looks like the slab was never poured correctly and that is why it has so many cracks in it. To fix it properly, it would all have to be jackhammered out and repoured. Since we want to redesign this space eventually when budget allows, we aren’t interested in spending very much to maintain the existing design. But it was getting depressing being out on the patio looking at this terrible, dirty-looking-even-when-it’s-clean, surface.

So, what to do? I took inspiration from the existing slate path leading up to the patio as well as a slate floorcloth project in one of Lisa Quinn’s books.

Off I went to the Home Depot to purchase paint. I found concrete garage floor paint that suited the job nicely. The paint came in just two colors, silver and slate gray, which was even more perfect because those were exactly the colors I needed. While there, I ran into a Home Depot employee who became the guardian angel of my painting project. He insisted that I purchase all of the preparation chemicals to make sure the paint finish would stick around once I was finished.

Step One: Stripping

The first step was to strip off the existing peeling surface. I assumed this was some sort of paint. The stripper is a seriously caustic chemical so make sure you wear gloves, protective clothing and eye protection. You also need good ventilation for the fumes. Since I was outside this wasn’t much of a concern. You also need to hose down with water any nearby lawn and landscaping to protect them from runoff. I brushed the stripper on with a synthetic broom and waited for about 20 minutes. Using an old putty knife, I then came back and tried to remove the surface.

The surface was not coming off easily if at all. I could really scrape it and get a little off but it didn’t seem right somehow. I also knew that this part was going to take forever to finish. I tested several areas of the peeling finish and none of it was coming off with the stripper. So, I just pressure washed all the stripper off. After some research on the computer, my guess is that my peeling surface is not paint at all but probably a skim-coat of concrete! This patio’s problems must go way back.

The skim coat tells us that the patio surface could flake off at any time. Fortunately, slate is a sort of forgiving pattern that looks good with imperfections so we decided to proceed at this point with the project and hope that the new paint surface might help prevent further flaking and deterioration.

Step Two: Etching

The next step in the surface preparation is to “etch” the concrete. This step roughs up the surface so the paint will adhere better. The etching chemicals are strong so the same precautions with regard to protective clothing and hosing down landscaping apply. I diluted the etching chemical in a disposable bucket, poured it on the surface and brushed it around with the synthetic brush.

After it had penetrated for the appropriate amount of time, I washed it off using the pressure washer and a brush.

Step Three: Mask and Prime

In any painting project, there are always more surface preparation steps than actual painting. You can always tell when someone skips the surface prep because the paint isn’t as flawless, flat and smooth. At this point in the project, we were ready to paint and fortunately it was time! Primer went on next.

First, we rounded up all the leftover painters tape in the basement and masked off brick and other surfaces we didn’t want painted.

Finally, it was time to paint! We put a generous amount of primer down. I believe it took at least a gallon and a half for all of our patio. The easiest tool for this was a small spongy roller. It was the best at distributing a ton of paint and forcing the paint into the bumpy concrete surface.

While this project is not really kid-appropriate my children could not be stopped from helping. They found their own paint clothes and ended up doing an excellent job cutting in while I rolled the larger areas.

The primer goes on a watery white and dries clear so there is not much gratification that you have made a positive change to the surface at this point. You also have to completely let go of any perfectionist tendencies when painting outside. Inevitably, there will be dirt and dust blowing into your paint job. Even if you just washed the patio, the paint roller will get very dirty. Just remind yourself that no one will notice in the finished job and that it is supposed to look natural.

Step Four: Base Coat

Our base coat was a silver gray. Since epoxy paints can be very slippery when wet, we added a “Floor Finish Additive” to the paint to make it less slippery. (Note that the package says if you add the anti-slip agent it will reduce the lifespan of the paint, though!)

The paint helpers appeared again and we got to work.

The concrete was really absorbing the paint. I found it easiest to use a wide paintbrush to get the paint into all the cracks. This step took forever and I used all of 2 gallons of paint to cover the patio.

Finally, at the end of this step we begin to see some progress!

Now, if your concrete is in pretty good condition, you could always stop here. The base coat looks a bit like newly-poured concrete. In our case, however, you could still see through the base coat to all the imperfections in the surface beneath so we had more to do.

Step Five: “Slate” Finish

For the last step of the project I needed tape. I was aiming for a faux tile look so I wanted to use tape that was very narrow, similar to a 1/4″ grout. When I was at Home Depot, the same guy who helped me with the paint before just happened to be there. I explained to him the look I was going for and my disappointment that the tape selection available was 3/4″ at the narrowest. Rather than just tell me to make the best of it, he encouraged me to look for auto pin-striping tape that comes in narrower widths. He was really pushing me to make this project as good as it could be. (It is certainly one of the bright sides of the down economy that we now have excellent customer service.)

So, I went in search of narrow tape and found it in an unexpected place. . . the craft store! The most affordable option for my purpose was 1/4″ quilters tape. I am not exactly sure what quilters use this tape for but it comes in 1/4″ rolls with about 10 yards to a roll.

The next step was to tape off the patio. I was going for a “messy tile” type of look. I didn’t want the lines to be too perfect or it wouldn’t look real. So, I roughly taped things off into large tiles. You do need to measure and keep the tiles approximately even to make the effect work. You could be as detail-oriented as you want here. Since I had such a huge surface to cover, I opted for a simple look with larger tiles.

Once the pattern was down, I mixed up the slate gray paint with the non-slip additive and used a sponge to gently sponge it all over the patio. It was not necessary to be consistent or accurate with the sponging. It was just fine if some of the base coat showed through. I tried not to get the paint too wet near the tape lines so it wouldn’t bleed under the tape.

When the topcoat is dry, it is pretty easy to find a helper to take the tape off for you. This is probably the most fun part of the whole project.

You can even save on tape by re-using the masking tape for each section. Yes, it gets a little less sticky with each use but I re-used my lines about 3 times with no bad effects. Here you can see a finished section and a taped-out section awaiting painting.

This part took several days to complete working just a few hours at a time. You probably could finish it all in one day if you really pushed and bought more masking tape.

Finished Results!

The finished patio is a pretty good trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) effect if I do say so myself. No, it’s not perfect but it is so much better than it was!

And for a few before and after comparison shots:

Before: Patio with damaged concrete.	After: patio with faux slate paint finish.
Before: concrete steps.	After: "Slate" steps
Before: concrete close-up	After: "slate" close-up

Overall, I am really pleased with how this came out! While it was a little time consuming due to the area to be covered, it wasn’t that difficult to achieve. My only wish is that the paint also came in a brown tint so that I could have double-sponged the top coat for an even more convincing look. I also need to paint the fence, as you can see!

Overall, the cost for materials for this makeover was about $250, not including brushes, pressure washer, etc. and other materials and tools we had already. It was about $0.50/square foot, far cheaper than using actual slate tiles or repouring concrete. It remains to be seen how the paint will hold up with the weather but so far so good. We also have a little bit of the materials left over to do our garage floor, which my husband is really looking forward to! This would be a great Father’s Day surprise makeover project.

What do you think of this makeover? Would you be willing to try something like this? Please share in the comments.

P.S. I have no affiliation with Home Depot, Behr paints or any other product shown here.

This past week, a kind neighbor asked if my children would like to dog-sit for a week while their family was on vacation.  We have talked about getting a dog sometime in the future and thought this would be a great test-run for us to see what caring for a dog is like.

The dog we had the privilege of watching is a complete sweetheart and probably close to the ideal dog for my children.   It was small and easily manageable, extremely gentle and not aggressive, and just generally very sweet.

Here are a few things we learned from taking care of a dog for a week:

1)      Organization Helps.  Since I have never owned a dog before, my poor neighbor had to answer a ton of questions for me about dog care.  Our dog-owning neighbors warned us that taking care of a dog is much like having another child.  I wasn’t quite anticipating how many things we would need to monitor for the dog, like when it ate and how often if went to the bathroom.  It would have helped to have a checklist on our fridge to make sure we had taken care of all the basics.  Sometimes it was hard to remember things like when the last time the dog was out for a walk.

Based on my experience, I created the dog-sitting worksheet below.  Feel free to use or share it for your own dog-sitting efforts.  It would be great if the owner filled this out and gave it to the dog-sitter.

• Ruly Dog-Sitting Worksheet

Also, thinking about space planning in your home helps too.  For the first few days, confining the dog to a smaller area of your home helps since the dog is adjusting to you and might have accidents.  When you take the dog outside, it helps to have two sets of doors between you and the outside to prevent escapes.  For example, we always made sure the back gate was closed before we opened the back door.

2)      Dogs Eat Almost Nothing.   When you are used to feeding people, feeding a dog seems almost too simple.  The dog we were watching ate only about 2/3 cup of food daily!  It seems astounding that an energetic creature can sustain itself on so little food. We had to remind our children that the dog only ate twice a day and that we didn’t need to fill the bowl every time it was empty.

3)      Dogs Get Lonely.  Dogs love to interact with people and when they are left alone they miss you and give you sad looks.  I found so many parallels between the dog and my 8-month old son in this regard.

4)      Dogs are Great Motivators for Exercise.  As we contemplate the obesity problem in this country, we might look to our canine friends for help.  As far as I know, you can’t really exercise a dog too much.  They LOVE to go for walks and they are so EXCITED about going–jumping up and down, grabbing the leash, etc.  It is easy to motivate yourself to walk when you have such an excited friend who appreciates the favor.  Dr. Andrew Weil wrote a touching article about how dogs have changed his life and how they alleviate depression and promote exercise in many people.  If you don’t want the responsibility of owning your own dog, you could always ask a neighbor if you could walk their dog for exercise.

5)      It’s easy to get attached to a dog.  The dog has been gone for about 24 hours now and I am having to retrain my brain not to worry about feeding and walking it or waking up early to let it out.  In such a short period of time, the dog became a part of our family.  We looked forward to seeing how excited it would be when we got home and it was a great companion on walks.

So, while we aren’t yet ready to take on dog ownership just yet (we definitely need a fenced yard first), it was a fun experiment and we are grateful for the opportunity.

Are you a pet owner?  What would you add to my dog-sitting checklist?  How do pets enrich your life?  Please share in the comments.

We had a beautiful ring of daffodils around our front tree this year. I can’t take credit for it. The previous owners put this in and it comes back year after year, thrilling my daughters with its blooms.

After the blooming, however, the greenery starts to get a little tired. It may also serve as a “nest” for deer who seem to like to lie in it and munch on my daylilies.

Looking at this mess of leaves, I remembered my post on the perfectionist gardener and the concept of braiding the leaves came into my head. I didn’t think I would ever become one of “those” gardeners. While individual small braids was out of the time commitment question, I went for a huge braid of the entire nest. It’s a bit sloppy but hey, aren’t messy braids the latest fashion trend?

Just a bit of fun . . . and it made it easier to weed underneath!

This month I am out in the garden pulling weeds, planting, mulching, watering and trying to take a high level view on how my efforts are going so far.

Almost two years ago, I gave an overview of the Virginia native plants I was trying to grow. My hope was that they would be easier to grow in our poor, clay soil, good for enhancing the local environment and perhaps deer tolerant. Native plants are surprisingly hard to find! They typically aren’t available at most nurseries and big box stores. I have had to order all of mine online. Native plants also typically come in “bare root” form, which means when you open the shipping box to plant them, all you have is just a bunch of stems to plant underground. While you spend hours doing it, after all that planting effort the average viewer will see absolutely no difference in your garden at all. Kind of depressing.

With regard to my own native plant efforts, I have both good news and bad news.

FAILURES

First, the bad news. These were the plants that never grew. I couldn’t tell you why. Perhaps the soil was too poor. Perhaps I didn’t water enough or the soil was too wet. Perhaps they succumbed to diseases. Perhaps wild animals found the roots delicious.

Teaberry/Creeping Wintergreen

Bare root plants, creeping wintergreen.

Initial fall planting of a row of creeping wintergreen. Never survived to grow the next spring.

This was one of those plants I was really hoping would work out. It’s a beautiful plant, has a wonderful scent and year-round appeal. It is also supposed to be a quick-spreading groundcover and an “easy care” plant. Unfortunately, none of that came to pass.

Black Cohosh/”Bugbane”

Black cohosh bare root plants. None survived to grow in spring.

This was another plant I hoped would work out. I was particularly interested in its insect-repelling properties. I planted some near the doomed teaberry plants and perhaps there was something wrong with the soil or water content in that location. My notes say that something came up the following spring.  Perhaps one small leaf or shoot but it apparently wasn’t memorable enough to photograph and hasn’t appeared since! Frustrating!

Jack in the Pulpit

These were tiny little bulbs that never produced any evidence of life. These bulbs are edible (even to humans when they are dried) so the chance that some forest animal ate them as a snack is probably pretty high. I’ll have to write these off as too delicious for my garden.

SUCCESSES

Turk’s Cap Lily

Turk's Cap Lily bulb

Turk's Cap Lily approximately 1 year later

This is probably the showstopper of Virginia native plants. It is a beautiful orange color and has a beautiful shape. I planted about 3 roots of these lilies. Only one has bloomed and I only got one bloom on a single long stem. I am hopeful that the one bloomer will come back this year and that the plant will eventually multiply into something more substantial.

Bleeding Heart

Bare roots of wild bleeding heart.

Bleeding Heart approximately 18 months old.

Bleeding hearts are supposed to be excellent plants for the shade garden. The leaves have a delicate appearance to them and the small, colorful flowers add a small but noticeable pop of color. I planted about 3 of these and as of this moment only 2 are surviving. One is a good, healthy, substantial plant with flowers and the other just a meek stem. The substantial plant was vigorous right from the start. I had leaves and flowers one month after planting in the fall!

Christmas Fern

Bare root (tendril) of a Christmas fern when first planted.	Christmas Fern approximately 18 months after first bare root planting.
Fern tendrils	Fern tendrils unfurl to make new leaves.

For one of the most shady spots of my front garden, I was hoping the Christmas fern would be the answer to my prayers. So far, it has done quite well! I planted about 5 or so of these. As of this moment I have about 3 that are growing quite well and 1 that is just one leaf but is still hanging on. The ferns are interesting to watch. They send up curly, fuzzy stems called “tedrils” that eventually unfurl and make leaves.

Spiderwort

The spidery root of spiderwort.

Spiderwort in bloom.

This is another beauty. It has a small bluish-purple flower that opens during the day and closes at night. The stems and leaves are kind of unremarkable and basic. So far, these have generally all grown well. All I have is a stem here and a stem there though, not a generous clump of flowers. This is another plant I hope will grow with time.

Bloodroot

The insect-like root of bloodroot.

Bloodroot flower in spring.

The distinctive leaf shape of bloodroot.

It’s an incredibly cool name and a “dangerous” plant to boot! This little plant is poisonous but so beautiful. It sends up a white daisy-like flower in spring and then has unusual butterfly-shaped leaves. This was a great plant to teach my daughter about the concept of poisonous plants. So far, I still only get about one flower per plant but they are spreading just a little bit. This year, I seem to have 3 leaves per plant instead of one.

Bottom line, my native plant success rate is about 62%. I do enjoy learning about the native plants and I am thrilled with the ones that have made it. There is a bit of disappointment though. Compared to buying larger plants at a garden center and getting the instant boost of color and perhaps more vigorous growth, these natives are just really, really subtle and slow-growing. It would take another native plant expert even to appreciate what I have done so far.

I have a new appreciation for “Don’t pick wildflowers.” rules that you see at national parks and other places. After seeing how slowly some of these plants grow, you can understand why picking could set the plant back a year or more in growth.

We will keep going with native plants but I have decided not to focus exclusively on them. Native plants are sort of like doing calculus in your garden. It’s nice to take a break and do something more like simple arithmetic by planting the tried and true garden plants that are full and bushy right from the start. So, our garden, like our lives, will be a curious mix.

Do you have labor of love plants in your garden that only you can appreciate? Please share in the comments.

Despite celebrating Easter and being on Spring Break, I am still making some progress on my unfinished yard and garden tasks.

One of my leftover projects is to finish transforming the patio furniture skeletons in my yard into hammock-style pieces like I showed last year. The pieces I have left to finish are the harder ones: namely the chaise and the “swing chair”/glider.

I am pleased to report that the transformation of the chaise to a rope chaise is now complete!

There is something about this design that makes it very inviting to sit in. While previously it also looked inviting in my first makeover project where I spray-painted it black and added a cushion, I have noticed that when it comes to patio furniture especially, there is something psychologically comforting about knowing that you can see through the chair to the ground. Maybe we are worried that there are bugs or other creatures hiding beneath?

These chairs are pretty comfortable too, as my daughter will attest:

As preparation for another makeover tip I will share hopefully next week, I wanted to add some protective caps to the feet of the furniture. The downside of wrought iron furniture is that it is quite heavy. It is pretty hard for the average person to pick up a piece of wrought iron furniture to move it around so a lot of dragging and pulling goes on.

I went looking for a good cap at the hardware store and came across this item which fit the bill perfectly.
They are called “insert cups” and they fit inside the bottom of the feet so they don’t even show! Another benefit I wasn’t even considering.

When I tipped the furniture upside down to put these new insert cups on, I noticed that the original furniture must have come with plastic inserts but they had worn away or degraded with time. This is what was left.

And this was the new look.

We will see how they hold up and whether they will allow for better drag-ability of the furniture with less scratching but I was quite pleased with the overall result.

I still have some more work to do in this area but so far so good. Do you have a patio furniture spruce-up tip? Please share in the comments.

This week I am on spring break so my posting schedule will be a bit relaxed as we take a rare moment to stop and smell the roses and enjoy time with family. I hope you have the opportunity to do the same.

We celebrated Easter on a practically perfect Sunday. The weather was warm and the sun was shining. It’s usually a challenge weather-wise to wear your Easter dress without a sweater but this year no sweaters were necessary!

One of the generational differences between us and our children about Easter is that they associate Easter egg hunts with plastic eggs filled with Rolos rather than hard boiled eggs. There was a great article from The Salt Lake Tribune about this recently.

When I was growing up, most egg hunts were of the hard boiled kind with the occasional L’eggs pantyhose egg filled with treats courtesy of my grandmother. Now, plastic Easter eggs are elevating to an art form. We save them each year and now have quite a collection of eggs of different sizes. Two of the additions to the collection this year were:

The Hello Kitty Easter egg someone gave out to her preschool class. (Huge kudos to the mom that found this one!)

The football (and soccer and basketball) shaped eggs we found at the dollar store. We have to add a few male-oriented eggs to “man up” the collection of pink and pastels now that my son has arrived.

For my son who is not yet eating candy, we also found the “Hide and Squeak” egg toy which he loves.

Recently, there has been a lot of medical research released about the hazards of eating too much sugar. My daughter was also reminding me of all the “candy holidays” we have: Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter. While I am in no rush to give up our candy and chocolate goodies and we will most likely never give it up entirely, the research does give me pause. Nobody wants to harm their children but giving up all candy, particularly at major holidays, would be very tough. As I was thinking about this, however, I realized that there already were a few ways that we already celebrate Easter without candy.

In our massive egg collection, we do have some “eggs” that are not for candy. For example, we have some musical instrument shaker eggs I had left over from a birthday party celebration that we tossed into our collection too. We also have a small toy carrot from a supermarket playset that made it in. The children don’t mind at all about these non-candy eggs. They enjoy the thrill of the hunt. As I think about the sugar research, I will look for opportunities for other “eggs” from things we already own. We could also revert back to hard boiled egg hunts or fill the plastic eggs with some sort of healthy treat.

As I was looking for things to fill the Easter baskets with, I decided to save up the spring and summer clothes shopping we were doing already and tuck those items into the baskets. My children loved getting clothes in their baskets. Mom and Dad got new jeans and the raincoat, shorts and tees were all well received by the kids. The baskets looked full and fun and were a great reward.

We found some cute 100-piece art sets at Michael’s on sale for less than $3 and picked those up as treats too. Another hit!

For the adult Easter basket, I like to stop in at Harbor Freight Tools for some inexpensive tool-oriented goodies. This year’s finds were a motorcycle puzzle (for about $2) and a metal stamping set (for about $5).

So, while we aren’t aiming for a sugar-free Easter per se, we have already made some small steps toward deemphasizing sugar as the core of our Easter traditions.

How were your Easter celebrations? Do you worry about too much sugar during the holidays? Please share in the comments.

For the past several Easters, my tradition has been to make Easter dresses from the stockpile of material and yarn I have lying around. You can see my work from 2011 here. This year, I modified the tradition slightly by purchasing material.

We were shopping at our local Wal-Mart a few months back and I noticed they re-opened a crafting/fabric section that had previously been closed. There was a large table with $5 bolts of fabric on it. Most of them were outdoor types of fabrics. I didn’t really need outdoor fabric but I peeked through the stack anyway and came across a beautiful, shimmery material in a bluish grayish tint. I wasn’t sure what type of fabric it was and the label only indicated it was “various blends.” “This is a gorgeous color!” I thought. “It would make a great dress.” Thus, the idea was born.

Originally, I wanted to make Christmas dresses but Christmas was just too busy for sewing. In a rush, though, I did manage to squeak out the skirt portion of the dresses. My daughters wore the skirts to the Nutcracker along with their leotards, tights and wrap sweater warm-up tops. It was perfect for the ballet.

When Easter rolled around, I was again short on time so I needed a way to quickly finish the dresses, preferably in a way that didn’t involve sewing buttons or zippers. I invented a quick halter-style pattern with long ties and they finished in just a few hours. I added on a little bling from a small piece of beaded trim, again from Wal-Mart!

My daughters tried them on and thought they were fun but had to add their own style to them too!

“Where is the flower?” my older daughter asked.

I explained that there wasn’t a flower. It just had the sparkly trim.

“It needs a flower,” she informed me. Then she found a hair clip her chic aunt sent her that is made out of a Tab soda pop can. She clipped it onto the neckline of her dress and it was fantastic! Plus, the fact that it just clipped on instead of pinned on meant that it didn’t poke any holes in the fabric.

Then my younger daughter wanted one too so we found another flower hair clip sent from another wonderful aunt.

Voila! The finished dresses, which remind me a little of Betty Draper from Mad Men.

My son had an outfit too that I didn’t make but purchased. His outfit will be featured in an upcoming post.

While my design suffers a bit in the fit department, I am pleased with the overall look and for about $5 a dress in materials, it’s great for the pocketbook too!

Any Easter fashions or fashion tips to share? Please let loose in the comments.

*I have no affiliation with Wal-Mart other than being an avid shopper.

I have come to love our pressure washer. We end up using it for so many things. Some people might be fine with the water pressure from their regular hose but since we are on a well system, the water pressure can be pretty anemic. The pressure washer really helps us blast dirt off of things, saves time and probably saves water too.

We have some seriously aggressive weeds in our garden. They can be really frustrating since it is so hard to get most cultivated plants to grow well but the weeds sprout just fine all over the place, even in the smallest cracks.
Every spring, we face a line of weeds in the tiny cracks of sidewalk in our back garden area. There is only about ¼ of an inch for them to grow there, but for a weed, that is apparently plenty of room to grow and flourish.

Rather than dig them all out by hand, which is time consuming, or use a toxic chemical, we just break out the pressure washer. We turn the jet to a small stream and it just blasts those weeds out of all the tiny cracks.

Of course, there is a downside. It does make a little bit of a mess with all that dirt flying everywhere. On the plus side, you get a free mud facial out of the deal but you will have to spend a minute or two spraying off the sidewalk as well.

Pressure washing your weeds is especially helpful if you have a lot of area to cover. As you can see, the results are immediate and excellent!

Do you have any time-saving weeding tips? Please share in the comments.

My time is entirely controlled by Mother Nature lately. It started a few weeks ago when my daughter brought home a terrible norovirus-like illness she picked up somewhere. It spread quickly through the whole family and forced us to rearrange all of our plans to rest and recover. Lately, we have been doing some work in the yard and our days are basically controlled by the weather. If the weather pattern changes rapidly, we have to reschedule our entire day on the fly. It’s kind of a pain but nature is also an excellent teacher. If you struggle with perfectionism or you like things just so, it might be the best thing in the world for you to spend more time outside.

Over the course of this month, I will be sharing several projects I am working on to make my own yard look more organized. Last year, I focused on gardening projects that didn’t require much planting and were primarily about various hardscaping elements you can put into your garden.

This year’s focus is simply to finish up a lot of garden projects that have been on my to do list forever. Some are very small and simple, others complex. There will be some hardscaping as well as some planting.

First up, a very simple weeding tip.

It’s a bit past the end of March but time to recap March’s posts on the investing mindset as well as highlight favorite comments and recent organizational news stories.

This month, we discussed several facets of the investing mindset—strategies to organize your thinking about your finances to make good decisions that result in financial rewards.

1) Invest in what you know. We started off with a reminder that when you are trying to invest in something you don’t understand, you are likely to make mistakes. So when you are faced with a situation you have no experience with, you need to make the time to do your research and learn as much as you can to make informed decisions. Never assume that you can just guess and coast by or follow what everyone else is doing.

Anonymous commented:

“The only person looking out for your interest when it comes to your money is you.” Well put. Yes, finances can be complicated, but not necessarily incomprehensible. If your banker or financial advisor isn’t willing to take the time to explain things and help you make the right kind of risk decisions that allow you to sleep at night, it’s time to make some changes.”

Matt commented:

“As always, solid, lucid advice. I think it’s also important to remember that ordinary people in the investment market are competing with professionals who devote their careers to it. We can take advantage of their skills but it will cost us. Or we can concentrate on understanding a specific sector and place our own bets. There it’s no easy, simple way to beat the market.”

2) Always remember the difference between shopping and investing. We looked at the recent resurgence in couponing and discussed several other examples where people try to use shopping as a “savings” or “investment” strategy.

Ruth filled me in on an aspect of couponing I did not understand:

“. . . a girlfriend printed like 80 coupons for KY Jelly that was on sale–something most of us do not need 20 of! Well, at the commissary (she checks every place you can buy stuff on earth thru site shopping and also various websites)–with the coupoon price she could actually get $.80 back because the coupon was worth more than the original price in this case—so she used the rest of the money on groceries. So the goal is NOT to buy your core staples–it’s to “make money” on oddball stuff so you don’t have to pay for groceries. MOST people actually end up donating the extra unneeded items to shelters etc. And then they know which stores on which days double coupons, etc. It’s truly an art!!”

Angela commented:

“I have also heard the goal of couponing is not to save on stuff you do want, but to make money on other items you may or May not want/need so you can spend THAT money on wanted items… But, since I place a value on my time, the hours I’d need to learn to play / prepare to shop / that game do not equal the ‘savings.’ I realize that once you figured the system out and it (maybe) equalized time spent vs money saved, there might be real savings to be had… But I just find other stuff I’d rather be doing with my time!”

This month as I followed a coupon blogger I learned quite a bit about how couponing works for an expert. Essentially, you need to clip and save high dollar value coupons and hope that there is a massive sale before the coupon expires. You can then use the coupon to get either free or heavily discounted items. In March, this particular blogger got contact lens solution and dog food totally for free with coupons. For my shopping style, I have yet to be convinced that coupons are a winning strategy for me but if I see a rare coupon that is for something I actually buy, I make sure to use it or stock up when non-perishable items are on sale.

3) Maintain a healthy skepticism about all things. Particularly when it comes to money, you always have to stop and think about what is motivating someone to make a particular recommendation. We also have to be realistic and know that when it comes to money, there are many cases where people don’t play by the rules and you need to be alert to looking for fraud or other unethical manipulations.

Lou commented:

“There are so many stories of this nature out there that are quite frightening. I have stopped reading about them for a while, and am not sure when I will resume. For those that don’t play by the rules, I wish there were faster ways to catch them so as to prevent any loss to those playing fairly.”

4) Good investors are always open to learning math and calculation methods. Yes, math is not just for school students. We all need to keep our math skills sharp. I gave an example from The Wall Street Journal showing a common error made when estimating returns on a portfolio.

On this front, this month I learned about a website called Bedtime Math Problem that encourages parents to tuck their kids in at night by reading a story AND doing a simple math problem! It’s a simple but brilliant concept. We have started doing this at our house. You can sign up here for their free email list.

5) Restate a complex investing scenario into something you do understand. It is all too easy to just give up when trying to understand something requiring detailed focus and concentration like money management. But we don’t have to give up. There are many ways to look at any situation and even the least sophisticated among us can have at least some understanding of what is going on. We took one of the most complicated financial situations out there, the U.S. government’s financial situation, and proportionately scaled down the numbers to reflect what the government’s finances would look like if the government was a typical middle class family.

6) A good investor makes decisions first by numbers and secondly by emotions. We again looked at the U.S. government’s financial situation and tried to understand why the budget numbers never add up. I summarized the three main budget proposals from Democrats, Republicans and the Tea Party. We also looked at statements from Comptroller Dodaro in the latest report on the government’s finances indicating that regardless of what budget measures are taken, the government has a lot of financial clean-up and organization to do.

7) Past performance does not guarantee future success but history is an excellent teacher. I took a look at how my 401(k) savings did last year and gave you a form that you can use to check up on your own investments.

Other posts:

A reminder about daylight savings time and taxes. I also gave a tax organizing tip to make filing next year a little less painful. For those with taxes still to file, we are now at 13 days and counting.

I continued my own investor education with reviews of two books:

First, I Will Teach You to Be Rich by Ramit Sethi. I think everyone should have at least one finance guru to follow. If Suze Orman does not excite you, give Ramit’s advice a try. He comes at financial management from a slightly different perspective and particularly appeals to a younger audience. He is going to start answering more questions from readers on his YouTube channel. You can watch his most recent (hilarious) answer here.

Second, I reviewed the book Aftershock with the ominous subtitle, “Protect Yourself and Profit in the Next Global Financial Meltdown.” I really hope that this situation never comes to pass but we can all learn a lot from the economic discussion in this book. We also have to learn not to be afraid of terrifying financial news and instead arm ourselves with a Plan B for when things don’t go as we hoped.

Fun posts:

I wrote a post about the 24 Hours of Le Mans race to be held in July as a treat for my Dad’s birthday.

I also showed you my children’s St. Patrick’s Day outfits this year that also saved me some “green” as I spent just $4.50 on accessories!

Ruly Ruth continued our healthy cooking series with a delicious pears with berries dessert review.

Money News

The Atlantic published a fascinating article called Prices Are People: A Short History of Working and Spending Money about economic trends since 1974. This article was part of a new series called The Money Report giving a consumer-eye view of the world. Article titles include: “How Investing Turns Nice People Into Psychopaths.”

Smart Money published a fascinating article “Fix Your 401(k)”about the myriad of problems in employer-sponsored 401(k) plans.

“I personally think the 401(k) should be abolished.”

–Matt Goff, a Houston financial adviser whose practice serves small-business owners needing help with their company retirement plans, quoted in “Fix Your 401(k), SmartMoney Magazine, March 15, 2012.

Politics aside, a beautiful piece of writing From George Will in The Washington Post about how trying to be too organized with the economy might be a problem and that we need to leave room for surprise and creativity. Love the highly quotable phrase “a ruinous itch for tidiness.”

“America now is divided between those who find this social churning unnerving and those who find it exhilarating. What Virginia Postrel postulated in 1998 in ‘The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress’ — the best book for rescuing the country from a ruinous itch for tidiness — is even more true now. Today’s primary political and cultural conflict is, Postrel says, between people, mislabeled ‘progressives,’ who crave social stasis, and those, paradoxically called conservatives, who welcome the perpetual churning of society by dynamism.”

–George F. Will, “The inexorable march of creative destruction,” The Washington Post, March 21, 2012

Money woes are clearly piling up around the globe. I learned via Twitter of the ongoing debate in Ireland over the “household tax,” which sounds similar to the U.S. property tax system. The economic woes in Ireland have led the country to impose a tax of roughly $133 per household. The New York Times reports that half of Irish homeowners refused to pay.

The biggest news in March, however, was the Supreme Court hearing on the Affordable Care Act. I found the Supreme Court testimony on all sides so incredibly beautifully argued. There was so much to think about and everyone was so excellently prepared. Truly, this was a law professor’s dream. It was also an excellent example of how people with very strong opinions can intelligently and respectfully have a productive conversation. Our Supreme Court justices earned every penny of their pay this week. Strangely, I put the audio on in the background and used it as motivation to do my own organizing. (Totally nerdy, I know.)

We are now (finally!) going to move on from money organizing. For me, it is time. While trying to organize my money mostly gives me a sense of control and confidence, this month’s discussion was the first time I found thinking about money a tad depressing. When I think too hard about retirement planning or paying down the national debt, I find it forces me to focus on my own mortality, which for a young person is just too overwhelming! But for 30 days out of each year, I force myself to take on all of these serious topics so that I can have full enjoyment of the rest of the year. I hope this month’s topics have caused you to do the same.

Please check back Friday when I will introduce a new organizing theme!