It turns out that her overdraft fees totaled $1,300 in the last year.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. He didn’t freak out or start yelling about how to negotiate out of bank fees. He simply pointed out something very gently: “What if you could focus on your overdrafts? If you eliminated just that fee, you’d be so much better off.”

Not set up an entire investment plan and global asset allocation. Not create a fully automated system with multiple accounts and savings strategies. Just focus on one big problem.

Now the question is…what’s your one big problem?

(Mine is eating out too much.)

Amazon book comments on a book titled Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?: The Boom Will Not Bust and Why Property Values Will Continue to Climb Through the End of the Decade - And How to Profit From Them. Sadly, this book was written by the former head economist of the National Association of Realtors. The 5-star reviews from 2005 are sad, hilarious, cheerleader-ish comments for the real-estate boom.

Story about someone who had to cut his brother off because he kept asking for money.

JLP shows how you can save TONS of money by investing yourself instead of paying a broker.

How women look for men who have their financial house in order. It is wildly misconstrued by clueless commenters who are determined to miss the point.

His friends insist that long-term investing is “boring” but then have improperly allocated portfolios. With good math examples. Remember, asset allocation is the most important part of your portfolio, not the individual investments you choose.

See all my links on my del.icio.us feed and twitter.com/ramit.

Here’s how to stand out, from a recent post. Note: This doesn’t only apply to programmers. Everyone should have a portfolio.

I am in college, but have lots of free time, so I can work fulltime at a startup plus add in a lot of extra hours (I know how startups are) on site or by telecommuting.

I applied to a few, sent my resume, etc.. but the same thing always happens. They want a portfolio.. links to things I’ve worked on. I am a programmer, PHP/Rails/C/Ruby/etc.. but I don’t have a degree in anything related to CS, and no professional portfolio.

I’m thinking the only option I have is to get a regular $8/hr job, while working on more and more projects in my free time. Enough projects to get a startup interested in me.

My response:

You’re a programmer, so why don’t you create a portfolio for yourself? Find interesting things that you wish software did — and build it for yourself.

Maybe you want a new way to integrate your iPhone with Outlook, or you wish there was a way to scrape all the images off a web page with 1 click. Whatever. Then build it. There — you have a portfolio.

Do you contribute to open-source projects?

Have you started a blog?

Or have you found someone who has an idea and helped them to build it?

Without some/all of those things, you’re just another programmer. Ask yourself how you can stand out.

There are a couple books that had a huge impact on my career. Rather than the typical how-to-get-a-job books, they’re a little different:

Staying Street Smart in the Internet Age: What Hasn’t Changed About the Way We Do Business (it has nothing to do with the Internet age, and everything to do with a kickass mindset in your current job).

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. (It’s not just for businesses. I used the ideas in this book to convince Seth Godin to hire me as his first-ever intern and work on a bestselling book with him.)

For more book recommendations, see a list of 50 other books I recommend.

• BoulevardR: Personalized guidance on your retirement goals
• Buxfer: Track your spending online
• CakeFinancial: Centralize your portfolios, compare your performance to others
• Credit Karma: Free credit scores, offers based on your score
• FindABetterBank: Compare banks
• Mint: Track your spending online, find offers based on your spending
• Prosper: Borrow or loan money online
• SmartHippo: Use the “power of the herd” to find better mortgage rates
• TrustedID: Get identity protection
• Vestopia: See how Wall Street pros manage their portfolios
• Wesabe: Track your spending, save money, join an online community
• Zecco: Online trading/investing community

And if you’ll be there tomorrow, let me know.

• My friend’s rule of thumb about men on Match.com
• Where to find a virtual assistant
• How to get a PO box

Here’s my twitter page.

[Update]: You guys are nuts!

One of them is complaining about her job, but says that she can’t get another one because she’s uncomfortable with her computer skills. Which led me to this post.

If you take a $2,000 computer class and it lets you get a job with a $10,000 salary bump, you should do it. No question.

If you buy one book per week, for $20 each, that’s $1,000 per year. If you get one good idea per week, my friend Paul told me, it’s worth it. If you apply that idea, I can’t even guess how much it would be worth.

If you buy a new car for $8,000 more than a used car, it can sometimes be worth it.

Put the numbers in context and look at value, not just cost. A $2,000 conference sure sounds like a lot. But if you make $80,000 off it, it sure looks like an investment. (Which is exactly what another friend, Erica, just did.)

Of course, the excuses will come. I don’t have that kind of money. (Answer: Save up.) How do I know if the class will get me that better job? I could probably take the same class for $100 somewhere else. All this stuff is free online, anyway.

You don’t know. That’s part of deciding what’s valuable and what’s simply a cost. But remember, buying something is not just about a number. If the value exceeds the cost, do it.

• Got 60 seconds? Take my survey on Job Loyalty: How Loyal Are You?

• High school seniors get an ‘F’ in finance. People will read this and cry for more personal-finance education, but it’s not just about more — it’s about the quality of the education. Who needs to learn about balancing their checkbook anymore?
• One of my favorite blogs on productivity. Cal Newport, a 4th-year PhD student at MIT, writes “Study Hacks: Demystifying College Success,” but it’s about more than just studying.
• Many people refuse to lower their house prices. “People say, ‘I don’t care about the market — my home is still worth what I paid for it in 2006,’” Mr. Glinert told me. “And I say, ‘To you. Only to you.’”
• A list of common misconceptions.

Get an automatic 6-month extension by filing a simple IRS form.

And if you still haven’t picked up a copy of the 2008 Tax Makeover Guide, check it out here:

My college roommate JRK sends me some interesting thoughts about the upcoming government tax rebates from an MIT report. As usual, it’s not just about rationality, but about the form in which the money is delivered (debit card vs. check):

• [The 2001 tax rebates] “show that taxpayers spent about two-thirds of their rebates within six months of receiving checks.”

• “The 2008 rebate program is aimed at low-income households, because these households are the least likely to save the rebates.”
• “…rebates that are received as electronic deposits may seem less like spendable cash, and more like potential savings, than checks that taxpayers receive in the mail”
• “I suspect that giving people a prepaid debit card will do more to rejuvenate the economy than mailing out checks, but direct deposits wouldn’t be nearly as effective,” Ariely said in a recent commentary for the Marketplace radio program. “I also suspect that if we added a line on the debit card that reads ’spend the government’s money’ this would work even better.”
• “If consumers save rather than spend the money, there will be no stimulus”

Interesting: McCain’s net worth is about 40 times higher than Obama’s.

Much of the Clintons’ net worth comes from Bill Clinton’s speaking fees, which average $150,000 per talk. (More details in another article: “On one particularly good day in Canada, Clinton made $475,000 for two speeches, more than double his annual salary as president.” Note: The article also says only 20% of his speeches “were for personal income.”)

Assorted links you might like:

• A while back, I was featured in this New York Times article (where Marci, the NYT career columnist, wrote about my book, blog, and speaking). Check out her career blog — it’s very good.

• Jonathan Clements, the single-best personal-finance columnist, has left the Wall Street Journal. See a great parting interview here.
• The Freakonomics authors make fun of idiotic reporters’ coverage of daily stock events as they struggle to assign causality to essentially unexplainable events. “Here are a couple of stock-market headlines I’d love to read one day,” they write. “‘Stocks Surge, Reasons Unknown; May Be Nothing More Than the Random Fluctuation of a Complex System.’” I wrote something similar in The Worst Financial Advice From Around the Web.

Anyway, how often have you heard this phrase?

“If you get a tax refund, it means you’ve given the government too much money.”

This oft-repeated phrase assumes rationality: ‘If you get a refund, it means you sent extra money to the government! Why would you let them make interest off your hard-earned money? You should only send the minimum amount!’ Then these people are usually out of breath because of their own self-proclaimed brilliance.

Technically, they’re right. I live in a world of reality, however, which means that “technically” isn’t always correct. Here’s why I’d rather get a tax refund than owe the government money:

First of all, if you end up owing the government money at tax time, most people don’t have extra cash lying around. We know this because they are horrible at managing their money and have record debt rates. Sorry, it has to be said.

Second, how much interest are we really talking about? Let’s say you get a government rebate of $600. At my high-interest ING account, that’s $1.50/month in interest. Oooh, the government is making bank off my money! Get a life.

And, in fact, people’s opinions reflect this:

…when asked if they’d prefer to owe taxes, get a refund or break even, none said “owe,” according to the USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. Fifty percent hope they break even, and 45% hope they get a bigger refund this year than last.

In real life, $600 that you owe to the government would affect your life far more than getting $600 back, meaning it’s better to get money back than to owe it. So if you end up getting a tax refund, don’t feel bad. And don’t just follow what the pundits say. We live in the real world, and there’s a difference between the best decision and the financially smart one.

Read more or buy now.

Bonus: The first 5 people to purchase the ebook will receive free copies of H&R Block’s TaxCut software (a $59.95 value, free).