I am about to take the biggest risk I have ever taken as an entrepreneur, and it’s not a financial risk…it’s about you.

Over the past two years I have written a great deal about business, personal finance, and Gen-Y, and in doing so I’ve built what I believe is a pretty decent following. I’ve tried hard to be consistent, not allow guest posts, and keep focus on my journey through life while staying both Young and Frugal. Many of you have stayed with me from the writing droughts to the Forbes issue and I appreciate it; but I want to give you fair warning that it’s all about to change.

Soon it’s no longer just going to be a soapbox for me to stand on, it’s going to be about you; and while I’m excited, I’m also scared. I’m scared because you read this blog because somewhere, somehow, my writing peaked your interest. Maybe you’re young and trying to get through life too, maybe you are older and just enjoy the read, or maybe you’re family and you feel some sort of obligation to read (don’t). The risk is that I will make you not want to come back, the risk, as vain as it sounds, is that I am this sort of glue that keeps you here and without it being only me you’ll lose interest. I don’t want that to happen.

A couple of months ago I mentioned how I was going to shake up my life a bit by pursuing a new Young and Frugal, and on April 1 (no joke) I will be “flipping the switch” on the new Young and Frugal, and I’m extremely excited. I want you to stay on as a reader and one day contributor, I want to challenge you to do things you never thought possible. I want you to help me prove to the world that it is possible to be not only Young and Frugal, but Young, Fun, and Frugal.

Will you accept the challenge?

Want more info? Be sure to fan our Facebook page for more details and inside information!

With the new site, comes a new subscription method. You can (re)subscribe below. We are only initially launching in the cities below, but plan on expanding in the future!

If you are interesting in accepting the challenge for your city, please be sure to let us know! (Note: this does not guarantee that you will be selected)

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“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” -Antione de Saint Exupéry

All 135 characters of this quote fits snugly into the 140 character limit of Twitter, but instead of just tweeting it (which I did), I blogged it.

I think it’s fairly obvious why, but at the risk of having excess I will explain. I had a whole blog post centered around the quote, but the rest wasn’t an improvement on what he wrote, it was excess.

All I can say is that throughout our lives we surround ourselves with excess, excess house, excess car, excess cable channels, excess words in a blog post. And all of this excess only leads to more excess; electricity bills, gas bills, cable bills… We live highly inflated lifestyles believing that these things make us happy, but the feeling of happiness is fleeting, takes us off track, and leaves us wanting more. Our car is no longer the latest and greatest, so we trade it in for another, a bigger/slimmer TV comes out so ours is already outdated, our wants turn into “needs” and we truly think of them that way. When this happens we lose focus of the little joys that make us happiest; things like watching the sunrise, reading a good book, meditating, and spending time with loved ones.

I won’t proclaim to have the answers to perfect happiness, but I would bet that it starts out by stripping away the excess in our lives.

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When I first started receiving an allowance, I did what any kid in my shoes would have done…I stole my brothers old velcro neon yellow wallet, and from then on I would walk around with my wallet just like I had seen my dad and brothers do. A wallet was like magic, you open it up and money comes out. “I’m a big kid now,” I thought to myself.

I went everywhere with my wallet, but I soon came to realize that my wallet was always empty. A couple years later, in an effort to make extra money, I began helping with my brother’s lawn business; but my problem remained…I never had any money for what I wanted and I was always broke. This especially hurt because I was now doing hard work with my brothers instead of the little made up chores my parents would pay me for to rationalize my “allowance.”

“I’m broke” is a funny thing for a 10 year old to say, and even though I still had full access to the ATM (Bank of Mom and Dad), I cherished being able to say that I bought stuff with my own money, so I had to figure out the problem. I remember looking around at all the stuff in my room and figuring out where all of my hard earned money went. I saw tons of crappy toys that I never played with, a pair of really cool sunglasses that I could never wear because I wore regular glasses, and a bunch of baseball cards in drawers. I realized that I had spent money on a ton of stuff that I never used and/or didn’t even like, and to make matters more ironic, I had bought most of it on impulse because I had my wallet with me and thought “Why not?”

After I came to this childish epiphany I began saving by hiding money around my room. Before I knew it, I had enough money to buy the new baseball glove I wanted, and when my parents realized I had started saving, they took me to the bank to open a savings account.

As children it’s easy to realize why we save. We set our savings goals for the short term in the form of the items we want. We save up, get our new toy, and set our eyes on the next savings goal, but as with everything in life, our perspective changes as we grow older.

I went a long time just making deposits to that savings account, in fact even at 16, when I finally did touch it, I managed to not waste all of it lifting my Jeep (OK, I did waste most of it). Soon after spending way too much money on my Jeep, I set my sights on homeownership. And for the next 6+ years I saved and invested with this end goal in mind; then when Mary and I got married, our combined savings allowed us to realize this goal.

As we grow older our financial goals change from being weeks away, to months away, to years away, to decades away. And now as I write this, financial goals are harder than ever to define. For us, goals are no longer defined by material things like a car or a house, but they are defined by ideals and the dreams of another generation that wanted to escape the workforce all together. Now these dreams that once seemed so defined are now obscure words that mean different things to different people. Words like entrepreneur, travel, and retirement.

To you retirement may mean leaving the workforce all together and escaping to some exotic beach. To me that sounds like an empty world of boredom because I don’t plan to retire in the traditional sense. I want to be just like my 89 year old grandfather who is still a highly sought after consultant; he doesn’t need to work but chooses to, and thus he remains the smartest and most quick witted person I know.

Saving without having an understanding of what you are saving for makes saving that much harder. You say you are saving for retirement but what does that mean to you? How much will it cost to live the lifestyle that you want for the number of years that you want? You want to start your own business? Awesome! How much does it cost to be an entrepreneur? You want to be able to drop everything and travel the world? How much will it cost, where will you go, what will you do? And most importantly, how long do you need to save to achieve your version of these goals?

Going through a series of questions like these either by yourself or with your spouse may be the most important time investment you make. Doing this allows you to define your goals and have a true understanding of why you save the way you do. Maybe you’ll find that in order to finance your goals you won’t need as much money as you thought so you can cut back on saving, or maybe you want to keep the same pace to achieve those goals earlier. Regardless, having a name to every dollar you save makes saving that much easier because it gives you a defined end goal.

Why do you save?

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A few weeks ago I was at the beginning of a 2 hour drive back from a friends lakehouse with my brother when, in the 105 degree Texas heat, the motor for the passenger window broke and the window would not roll up. I spent the rest of the drive progressing in emotional state from pissed off that my brother broke the car (which he wasn’t at fault) to being flat out grumpy because I was so hot, to laughing so hard I cried because of how ridiculous we felt.

Have you ever noticed that setbacks always seem to occur at the worst possible time, and more importantly that they always occur to you? Your computer crashes the night before a paper is due, you get sick before new health insurance kicks in, or you get in a wreck just after you drained your emergency fund to get your transmission fixed. It never fails, Murphy’s law (or what my family has come to know as “Luck of the Bowen”) always seems to show up at the most inopportune times making life much more hectic.

Now take a second and think about all the incidents like this you have had in your life; where it seemed like something that ordinarily would have just sucked, happened at the most awful time.

In looking back, was it really that bad? I would guess not. I know that when I think about the events in my life where everything seemed to go wrong, I realize that whether it was a true catastrophic event or something as silly as the car window not rolling up I am the person I am today because of how I got through them and what I learned from them.

Being a member of the Bowen clan, luck of the Bowen is always in effect and it always hits the pocketbook. As a result Mary and I have taken what we’ve learned from past experiences and started some “hedge” funds to hedge our bets against the expenses that always come out of nowhere.

We have our emergency fund for general emergencies, so far we have managed to save away 3 months expenses if both of us loose our jobs, and 6-8 months if one of us loses a job. We feel like we are in a good place with our emergency fund, and we continue to add to it every month, but we realized that there were other things for which we needed to be putting money away in preparation.

The car window breaking led to us starting a fund to replace the car. After all it is 11 years old with 150k+ miles on it. On top of that, my Labrador continually eating things she shouldn’t (Christmas Ornaments, Bottle of Tums, the Couch, a Chair…) and our Chihuahuas overly expensive teeth cleaning bills ($600) led us to hedging our bets for the dogs and creating a pets fund in which we put money every month for when one of the big pet expenses comes up. (Yes, pets can be VERY expensive, but in my opinion they are completely worth it).

We created these additional funds because we have learned from past experiences which forced us to use credit cards when we didn’t have the money available.

On top of all of these things we are currently evaluating life insurance policies outside of our work coverage, because life is just that unpredictable.

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What’s that you say? You’ve spent hours perfectly crafting every word in order to make yourself look fantastic on paper? You even read my advice on resume building? That’s very kind of you, but I repeat, no one cares, and here are 5 reasons why.

• Resumes are boring. No one wants to read them, not even recruiters. It’s a chore that takes time, and realistically the last time you did read one (instead of glance at it) was when you were writing your own.

• People are lying to protect your feelings. When was the last time you or someone you know told a friend you wouldn’t forward their resume on because it was crap? When was the last time you asked for resume advice and everyone told you it looked good? Friends think a lot of things, but very few friends will be brutally honest to help you, if no one is giving you constructive criticism try sending it to other people.

• Your resume won’t get you a job. Do you really think someone is going to hire you based on a piece of paper?

• You’re exaggerating. Everyone does it to a point, but did you really collaborate with the team on the $300 million dollar project, or did you just make copies for them? If by chance someone does read your resume, they are reading it with a skeptical eye and taking it with a grain of salt.

• You are sending it into a black hole. Applying online? Unless you have a persons e-mail address not a generic recruiting address, it will most likely never be seen by  a human eye. Even if you are sending it to a real persons address, remember it’s a chore to open it and they probably don’t want to.

With all this said, it’s true, no one cares about your resume, but you should still care. As much as it kills me to say it, resumes are still very important, and here are 5 reasons why:

• It’s not for other people, it’s for you. Your resume should be a running tally of every impressive thing you have done, and you should use it as a refresher to remind yourself of these things. It should be up to date whether you are job hunting or not, and when you accomplish something of note, write it down. You can always shorten your resume, it’s very hard to lengthen it. Know your resume backwards and forwards and be able to expand on everything on it without fumbling. Even know what doesn’t make the final cut, your resume will help you in the interview (but be careful to not only talk about what is on the resume).

• It is currently the most accepted way to showcase yourself. We are fast approaching the days when someone will say “send me your link” instead of “send me your resume,” some early adopters have already started this with LinkedIn, however, for the time being the resume is still the most accepted way to showcase yourself.

• Key words help you get a foot in the door. Remember that black hole I wrote about? There is a way out, and that is through key words. More often than not applying to a generic recruiting e-mail address will send your resume into a software program in which it will be looking for key words. If it matches the key words, then someone might look at your resume to see if you fit the bill and invite you in for an interview. So remember to use industry language. (Note: although this is my most hated form of applying for a job, I actually did get my current position this way. It never hurts, but don’t get your hopes up.)

• Be true to yourself. A little embellishment is expected but always be true to yourself and NEVER lie on a resume. Lying on a resume is career suicide and it will come back to haunt you. It is better to not get the job by being honest, than to get it by lying. Just ask George O’Leary, former head coach at Notre Dame who was forced to resign because he lied on his resume.

• It won’t make you, but it can break you. First impressions are important, and the resume is frequently someones first impression of you. While it may not make you, it can definitely break you, so in the off chance that someone actually looks at your resume, it needs to be easy to read and perfect. One misspelled word and you are through.

As Gen-Y becomes more of a staple in the work place I see a lot of this changing, particularly the accepted resume format. I believe we will transition to websites with professional bios being the standard (non-boring) way to showcase yourself. But in the meantime, I’ll continue my love/hate relationship with resumes.

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As the Treasury Manager of the company, and the writer of this blog, I try my hardest not to get caught up in it, though I admit it’s hard. As a personal finance writer, I preach to be conservative with your money: save, invest prudently, and keep an emergency fund; and as a financial professional in charge of all of a companies cash I act the same way, because if there is one thing I know, it’s that the party always ends.

Adorning the walls of my office I have hung constant reminders of this: vintage advertisements for Chrysler and Chevrolet. Every time I look up and see the ad for “The New 1967 Chevrolet Pickup” or the “Silver Anniversary Edition Chrysler New Yorker,” I think about what their management would have said at that time had someone approached them to announce that their company would go bankrupt. As much as I’d like to think they’d sit down and ask “how? when?” I have a feeling that they would have laughed it off. After all it was the heyday of the automobile!

Think about approaching an internet startup in 2000 (really, any startup will do), with the same information. Money was being handed out left and right, it was a huge party!, but the vast majority of them got caught up in the party and never looked at the bottom line. For a prime example, watch the movie e-dreams which follows the rise and fall of kozmo.com.

What about telling Bear Stearns in 2005? Worldcom or Enron in 2000? Blockbuster in 1999? All of these companies were at the peaks of their “Party” stage in these times, only to go drastically downhill a few short years later.

With all this said, I’m not against the “party,” in fact I love the party stage it’s fun and very exciting, but like any party, you have to party like the party will end, or else you wake up in the bushes wondering where your clothes went.

In personal finance partying like the party will end means saving, planning for retirement, and keeping an emergency fund, all while still enjoying your money. In the business world, that means always keeping an eye on costs (I just saved the company $15k by changing vendors for deposit tickets), managing the funds prudently (and safely), always striving for efficiency, and growing the business at a manageable pace.

If you stick with this advice, the party will last longer, and you’ll be prepared if it abruptly ends.

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In college I got a Tivo with lifetime service, which added fuel to the fire of my TV escapism. No longer did I have to plan my evenings around TV, my Tivo would allow me to be free from the agony of ads and timeslots, but my Tivo was smarter than  me. It started recommending new shows that I might like. Soon I was staying up until 1 or 2am every night just to finish my TV Shows. My schedule began to conform to the shows that Tivo recommended and now I was back in the same rut as before except I was watching more TV. 

Then something magical happened, something life altering, something fantastic… Hollywood writers went on strike. There were no new episodes for me to watch, and I found myself having <gasp> free time.

This concept of free time is something that I had never felt before, I had always consumed myself with TV because it gave me a false sense of accomplishment. What would I do with this free time? Well, I became productive. I started working out more, I finished the many half-finished projects from remodeling the house we were living in at the time, and I started writing this blog. But perhaps the most surprising thing about all of this is that the only thing I missed about TV was the ridiculous antics on The Office.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we don’t watch TV…truth be told the only shows I consistently watch are The Office and 30 Rock, and Mary swaps out 30 Rock for Private Practice; we just watch TV differently now. I have an antenna in the attic that picks up all of our local stations in HD, and I have a computer hooked up to the main TV. The computer enables us to watch whatever we want from the iTunes store or Hulu whenever we want, and we have our trusty Tivo set up in the bedroom.

Now Mary and I focus our time productively on being entrepreneurial. We each have business plans that we are working on, and we are working together to start selling some of our home baked bread at a local farmers market. Who knows, the lack of cable may not just save us money, it may make us money.

Have you ever thought about what you could do if you cut out TV? I bet it’d be pretty amazing.

The next paragraph is a bit of a rant, feel free to ignore:

I’m not against having cable entirely, I’m mainly against it’s pricing structure, much like gym memberships, cable companies take your money while giving little to nothing in return. In fact they don’t really give you anything except for the opportunity to spend your time watching TV. I would actually be willing to pay a premium per channel to be able to choose the channels I want, I don’t need 100 channels, I don’t even need 25, why not let me choose and make more on a per channel basis? But I digress…

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Even as we get older peer pressure is still extremely powerful. Have you ever noticed that no matter how old you are thugs hang out with thugs, executives hang out with other executives, and entrepreneurs hang out with entrepreneurs? The list is infinite! I wakeboard and I hang out with other wakeboarders, I’m ambitious so I surround myself with ambitious people… get it?

By surrounding myself with wakeboarders I am constantly pushed and encouraged to try new tricks, by joining a local running club I am pushed to become a better runner, and by making the effort to surround myself with entrepreneurs and others who think differently I am encouraged to take risks to follow my entrepreneurial dreams.

So take some time to think about what you aspire to be and do. Do the people you surround yourself with share these same goals and aspirations?  Do they want to see you succeed? Do they push you to be come better at a mutual interest?

I’m not saying to dump your friends, I have many good friends who don’t share some of my most important interests, but think about the groups or “cliques” you belong to. What are they doing to further your career and aspirations? If nothing then make the effort to surround yourself with the people who will!

What if you want to be an entrepreneur, but all of your friends want to work their 9-5 for the rest of their lives? Go find an entrepreneur! They are in every city and small town. It doesn’t have to be the CEO of a large company, it can be the owner of the local hardware store; it doesn’t matter! Walk up to that person and explain that you want to be an entrepreneur and start asking questions, set up a weekly meeting, even ask them for a part-time job like Holly at WorkLoveLife did with a local coffee shop! These acts get your foot in the door to meet their entrepreneur friends as well as give you an understanding what it’s like to run a small business.

The internet is the most useful place to start. Search for local groups on Meetup or LinkedIn and find the group that fits your interest. For startup culture a local Dallas Entrepreneur, Alex Muse, co-founded a great blog group called SpringStage that is a coalition of bloggers who write about startups and startup life, it truly is a great resource.  Use Twitter and start following those you admire; I love how I’m able to follow Guy Kawasaki and Lance Armstrong, both are people I greatly admire! 

What are you waiting for!? Surround yourself with the people you want to be like and others who share your passions to ensure that you make your own dreams come true!

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Since that time I have learned a great deal, and I admit to not knowing half as much as I thought I knew when I graduated.  But on top of learning a great deal, I’ve seen a great deal.  I’ve seen my older coworkers be too comfortable in their positions, I’ve seen them take themselves too seriously, and I’ve seen them continually be out of touch with the real world.  I’ve seen what it’s like to work for a large company, and I’ve seen what it has done to the creativity of my coworkers.  So in their honor, I’ve compiled a list of 23 things I know at 23 that I pray I remember at 43.

1. Just because your salary grows doesn’t mean your lifestyle should
2. Physical fitness is the best way to mental health
3. Don’t stop dreaming
4. The Industrious Gain Wealth, While the Wealthy Remain Industrious
5. Allow your inner Michael Scott to show Edit: I know he’s an idiot, but he always puts people first.  That’s what I meant.
6. Think Different
7. Welcome other ideas
8. Look down, that’s the furthest you’ll fall.  Look up, how high will you fly?
9. If you don’t let people blow you away, you’ll never be impressed
10. Make time for the things you love, they make you who you are
11. Laugh
12. Don’t be afraid to say no
13. Stay in touch with college students, they are where innovation comes from
14. Dream Big
15. Public Companies are where innovation goes to die
16. Share ideas: If you’re scared you’re going to get screwed you’re never going to get laid
17. If someone wants it more, let them have it, if you want it more, compete for it and prove it.
18. Observe behavior
19. Keep It Simple
20. Stay flexible and open to change
21. Stay Informed
22. Surround yourself with those you strive to be like
23. I can (still) Change the world

What do you want to make sure you remember in 20 years?

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