Need a bigger place?

People are always talking about needing more space. We start to feel cramped with our kids and our stuff and the messes we make. But how much will we gain with the new square footage? These photographs might change your perspective a little bit.

These photos from a series taken by Michael Wolf in a Hong Kong apartment complex. All of the rooms in the complex were 100 square feet.

The article accompanying a few of the photos in the New York Times photography blog ends with these thoughts:

Mr. Wolf finds the most interesting way to display the photographs is in a 10-by-10-foot room.

"If you’re standing inside a room which is exactly the same size as the room you’re looking at, then you realize how small that space actually is," he said. "And then you realize that people have been living there for 40 years. And then you realize that they are happy! That something like that can be, I think that’s the amazing thing. That people can be happy that they have 100 square feet to live in and nice neighbors. That’s basically all you need."

Taking without giving value in return

What does gambling do to its participants? The attitude of taking something from someone else in order to enhance our own position—the essence of gambling—leads us away from the giving path of Christ and toward the taking path of the adversary. The act of taking or trying to take something from someone else without giving value in return is destructive of spiritual sensitivities.  Dallin H. Oaks, Gambling, Morally Wrong and Politically Unwise


In California, 1/3 of lottery funds are given to schools, with most of the remainder being given out as prizes. A substantial percentage is used to advertise the lottery. The lottery covers 1.5% of the education budget for the state. This is based on the information on the official site for the California Lottery.


So, as I see it, we have a large statewide program to randomly distribute wealth, with those with lower salaries giving a higher percentage of their earnings in. We then advertise it heavily, in order to convince everyone that gambling is good. In return, we get a supposed 1.5% increase in education funding. Worth it?

The Step-Down Method: Is living within your means enough?

I have a friend who always lives within his means. However much money he has, he spends just a little bit less than that. He's certainly doing better than those who drown themselves in debt.

It is almost funny to see how quickly he adapts his lifestyle to his current income. He's single, and incredibly talented. When he's employed, he usually makes quite a bit of money. When this happens, he buys all sorts of nice things for himself and eats out a lot. When he's unemployed, he still, somehow, manages to survive (I assume he does some good food storage).

This reminds me of what happened when I got my first full-time, professional position. We immediately bought a bunch of nice things - because we had money. It took us a few months to realize how little money we were actually saving, even though we were making far more money than we had before. Decreasing our spending by a mere 10% resulted in a substantial surplus that we could put into savings.

Though the step-down method is usually targeted at those with debt, it can be especially useful for those who are just barely living within their means. The seven years of plenty are often followed by seven years of famine.

Waste Not!

Waste not is one of the most important principles in saving money. It is also one of the hardest for me to follow. Sometimes I forget about a container of leftovers until it is too late. Sometimes half of the food I give my toddler at mealtime ends up on the floor, and sometimes I buy food without a good plan for using it.

It's something I'm working on.

The article Study Analyzes Food Waste in Britain, is a wake-up call. It is amazing how much food we throw away, and the damage goes far beyond our food budget.

Who said it?

Find this quote:

Now, I believe sincerely that one of the principal causes of the distress that exists among us—and I believe the same thing will apply almost universally throughout the land—is that people have gone beyond their means. They have borrowed largely, mortgaged their homes, their farms, and nearly everything they possess, to keep pace with their neighbors, competing one with another in putting on appearances and in carrying on their business on the credit basis that is so much in vogue in the world. …

Interesting how some counsel hardly ever changes.

Talking About Money

Here's a great article from the New York Times:

Four Talks About Money

I especially like the section about "desired level of affluence", and how important it is for both spouses to agree. Things have worked out well for us financially partly because neither of us had strong expectations of affluence.

That Your Burdens May be Light - Elder L. Whitney Clayton

Elder Clayton of the Seventy gave a talk during conference about the burdens that we face in life. The temporal difficulties related to "provident living" are definitely addressed by his talk.

That Your Burdens May be Light

As I read it, I really thought about the things he mentioned about burdens caused by others. Often, we can have temporal difficulties that are caused by others:

• Robbery, theft and vandalism
• Mistakes of children or other relatives
• Unfair treatment at work
• For children, parents can make mistakes that make their lives temporally much more difficult

In addition, some of our problems may be caused to some extent by others:

• Never having learned self-reliance from parents or other caregivers
• Feeling compelled to offer assistance to chronically needy friends and relatives

These types of burdens pose a double risk - more than just the temporal risk, it can be very easy to hate or despise the person causing the difficulties.

Elder Clayton gives the following advice that I think is especially important in this situation:

Burdens provide opportunities to practice virtues that contribute to eventual perfection. They invite us to yield “to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and [put] off the natural man and [become] a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and [become] as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon [us], even as a child doth submit to his father.”² Thus burdens become blessings, though often such blessings are well disguised and may require time, effort, and faith to accept and understand.

I was reminded especially of one of the times when I didn't handle this type of situation well. While on my mission, one of the Elders that I worked with had never learned how to manage money. Every month, he ran out of money halfway through, and we'd have to request more. Feeling guilty about it, I began trying to spend less and less, so we wouldn't have to request so much extra. During this process, I got angrier and angrier at him, until we couldn't work together effectively. We honestly wasted a great deal of time when we should have been serving the people. Thinking back, if I'd forgiven him and had a better attitude, I'm certain it would have been more than worth the few hundred extra dollars that we used. I can think of a dozen different better reactions I could have had to his poor financial skills. Though he certainly made plenty of mistakes, I can't help but wonder if perhaps mine were greater.