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A few weeks ago, I discovered the queue at my public library’s website. The process is simple: Select your books, wait a few days, then pick them up. They are available from any library in the county, delivered to my local library. That’s awesome. Much more convenient-and cheaper-than Amazon.

So I moved a couple of pages of my Amazon wish-list into the library’s queue.

I must not have been thinking, because two days later, I got an email telling me that 19 books were ready to be picked up and 10 more were in transit.

In this county, each checkout is good for 21 days. For items that don’t have a waiting list, you can reserve 3 times. That’s 12 weeks for 29 books. Hopefully, I’m up to the challenge. Please keep in mind, I’m a father of three, two of whom are in diapers, and I’m married, and I have a full time job.

I have frugally blown every second of spare time for months.

Update: This was another post written in advance. When all of the books came in, I suspended my request list. Little did I realize, the suspension cancels itself after 30 days. That was 30 more books. Whee!

New Ideas

Business

lawn gnome

I had an email exchange with my close friend and business partner earlier this week.

“I get ideas but think they are probably stupid. Okay, I have some ideas. Again, I get scare you’ll think I’m reaaaally dumb.”

My response?

“No ideas are stupid. You start filtering **** like that, we’ll never find the ******* gold.

Brainstorming has no filter. You never know where a “stupid” idea might lead or what associations it might trigger.”

When you are trying to generate new ideas, applying a filter like “That sounds stupid” won’t get you anywhere. It’s idea suicide.

Could a discussion on the possibilities of becoming a lawn gnome distributor lead to becoming a successful manufacturer of combat gnomes?

Brainstorming involves turning off your stupid filters and running with it. Keep a recorder or a notebook handy and keep track of everything. Go off on tangents and see where they lead. Maybe they’ll lead to the gold.

The one thing you can’t do while brainstorming is criticize. If you start shooting down ideas, you are destroying the opportunity to find greatness. Even if an idea is impractical, build on it. There has to be an angle that becomes worthy of consideration. On the off-chance that there’s not, run with it anyway. It’s an exercise in creativity.

I regularly send my friend emails with potential business ideas. Most of them come to nothing, but once in a while, something clicks and we launch a successful venture together. If I were filtering ideas because they might be stupid, we might not have some of the projects we’ve got.

In addition to random & odd emails, I’ve got a notebook of some kind with me everywhere I go to record any passing idea I may have. In my car, I use a voice recorder. I periodically review everything I’ve noted and copy most of it into evernote.

Someday, those pieces may come together into a billion dollar idea.

How do you generate ideas? Do you bounce ideas off of friends or get drunk and shuffle a Trivial Pursuit deck into a Monopoly game?

Net Worth Update

Misc

I looked back at the spreadsheet I use to track my net worth, and realized that I have been filling it out quarterly, though I can’t say that has been on purpose. Apparently, I get an itch to see my score about four times per year.

This quarter is the first time in a long time that my net worth has dropped. We got our property tax statements last week and found out that our houses have dropped a combined $21,700. Since we’re not planning to sell, that doesn’t matter much.

What’s interesting to me is that, even though our property values dropped $21,700, our total net worth only fell $10,567. We’ve been hustling trying to get the Tahoe paid off. It’s going a little bit slower than I had hoped, but it’s progressing nicely.

I do feel good that, even if I would have been focusing on my mortgage, I still would have lost the mortgage race. That means my misplaced priorities of acquiring more debt to snatch a fantastic deal didn’t cost me the race. Now, I’ll be forced to take a vacation in Texas, coincidentally in the same town as my wife’s long lost brother. I think we can make that work.

I rounded off the credit card and vehicle totals because one is used every day and paid off every month and the other has a steady stream of money getting thrown at it, so the numbers change often.

All in all, I don’t have any room to complain. I am looking forward to paying off the truck and focusing on the mortgage. We could swing quadruple payments, which would pay off the house shortly after the new year starts.

Five Signs You Don’t Need That

Finance

Everybody occasionally buys things they don’t need, from DVDs to luxury cars. There are signs that what you’re buy may not be an actual necessity.

Here are five signs you should put that back:

You’re buying that sweater or video game for the endorphin hit, you’re shopping for the addictive high not to fill an actual need. It’s a habit that’s as hard to break as smoking, if not harder. You can’t, after all, stop shopping altogether.
You already have one. Or 10. A relative can’t turn down a sale and she buys for life. She regularly buys 3 of whatever useful gadget is available on the shopping channel. Her house has turned into a sad story of compulsive hoarding.
The rationalizations for your purchase include “It’s cool” or “My friends all have one.” If you are buying something just for the bragging rights, it has become an ego purchase, which is something to avoid. The insidious part of an ego purchase is that you have to keep topping your last purchase and the last purchase of your social circle, or the purchases lose value. It’s a vicious circle.
It doesn’t have a “place”. Where are you going to put it? Is it going to go in the corner, or is there a drawer or shelf it can live on. If there’s no play to consider “away”, you’re just buying clutter. If you must have it, go home and toss, sell, or donate 2 things to make room. If possible, do that before you actually by the new toy. If it’s important, you’ll come back for it.
You didn’t know you needed it 10 minutes ago. If you actually need it, it’s on your list, right? Impulse purchases have been the biggest budget-killer in my house. That’s why we use Alice for the household goods. If we don’t see the it, we can’t throw it in the cart at the last minute. We no longer shop with the debit card, so we have to watch what we buy. It’s embarrassing to have to undo a purchase at the checkout because I didn’t bring enough cash.

What did I miss?

Be Happy With What You Have…

Life

…or you will never be happy.

An emoticon with a smile. For more emoticons i... — An emoticon with a smile.

A newer car, a bigger TV, a nicer house, a fancier phone, better tickets, more friends, more gadgets, more toys…more, bigger, better…whatever.

It’s all a disappointment.

Nothing on that list will provide happiness. If that is your goal, you will spend your life miserable. It’s not possible to buy happiness, either directly or indirectly through the accumulation of “stuff”. A purchase may fuel your ego or trigger endorphins, but it is all temporary. There’s no sustainable happiness in the “high” of the latest purchase.

The search for stuff pales in comparison to the search for meaning. Find your passion and follow that. Chase that to the ends of the earth, and come back feeling fulfilled. Feel something that will last longer than the drive home or the next product release.

Find contentment. At some point there is a satisfying level of “enough”. More than that, you feel empty. Less, envious. Find enough and stop there. Find the level that allows you to do the things you need to do and some of what you want to do. Find your balance point and be happy with it.

Living life constantly disappointed that you don’t have more is a sure way to live life disappointed. How do you find your balance point?

Also, have you started the Happiness Challenge?