5 year-end tasks for tomorrow

I’d like to claim to be a model of economic efficiency, but that would be a bald-faced lie. This year, I’m running even farther behind than usual.

So I’ll be scurrying around tomorrow, making sure to take advantage of the last day to squeeze in some important 2011 money tasks. Among others tasks, I will:

Make a Goodwill run. We itemize our deductions, so donations of clothes, toys and household items in good condition win us a tax break. This year I’m using the iDonatedIt app to keep track of our donations.

Make some last-minute charitable donations. I just checked Mint.com to see how much we gave this year, and the total is lower than I intended. So I’ll be making a few donations to our favorite charities.

Set up automatic contributions for next year. The easiest way to give is automatically. Some of the causes we benefit (Save the Children, public radio, the Los Angeles Food Bank) are charged every month to our rewards-earning credit cards, which we of course pay in full. I’m going to look for opportunities to set up a few more automatic donations so I won’t be scrambling at year-end next year.

Create my tax file. I’ll pull out the file where I’ve been tossing 2011 tax information and organize it a bit, including a list of tax documents we’re expecting that we haven’t received yet. As those arrive, I can check them off—and follow up with the issuers if we haven’t gotten the documents by mid-February, when we typically file our return.

Get ready to enjoy a happy new year. In the first days of 2012, I’ll be jotting down some personal and financial goals for next year, since putting our intentions in writing is a powerful first step to achieving what we want. For tomorrow, though, we’ll just be kicking back as a family, ringing in the new year at home. May your celebrations be as peaceful and happy, and may you have a wonderful, prosperous new year.

I apologize to waiters everywhere

Apparently a number of restaurant servers thought my column on holiday tipping was advising people that they could stiff their waiters and waitresses in December.

Good heavens.

The column “Holiday tipping: When it’s okay to skip” points out that holiday tips are voluntary and can be reduced or eliminated if you’re in tough financial straits.

Now, I knew that some people don’t know what a holiday tip is. I hear from them every year when my holiday tipping columns run, because they think I invented the custom and they want to let me know how outraged they are that I did so. I typically get as many emails from those folks as I do from the people who want their particular job category added to the list of those who customarily get holiday tips. (This includes a fair number of mail carriers. For the record, federal regulations prevent U.S. Postal Service mail carrier from accepting cash tips or any gift worth more than $20. A federal job with civil service pension isn’t worth risking for a few extra bucks at the holidays.)

But the outraged servers are new, so I’ve asked MSN to add a paragraph defining what a holiday tip is: an extra, voluntary payment given in December to acknowledge good service throughout the year.

To be clear: you don’t get to stiff your server, or your cab driver, or your bell hop, because it’s the holidays. Or because you don’t agree with the whole idea of tipping, or because you’re just a grump. If you’re not going to tip, you shouldn’t use services where tipping is expected.

Book giveaway! Free! Free! Free!

My book “The 10 Commandments of Money” is coming out in paperback later this month–and I’m making room on my bookshelves by giving away five copies of the hardcover version.

You can enter to win a copy by leaving a comment on my blog (not my Facebook page). Make sure to leave your email address (which won’t show up with your comment, but I’ll be able to see it). The winners will be chosen at random.

The deadline to enter is midnight Pacific time on Friday. So–comment away!

It’s different this time? Maybe not.

Tom Petruno is one of the smartest guys I know. Now that he’s leaving the Los Angeles Times, we’re really going to miss his insights on the markets, the economy and the world.

You should take a few minutes to read his last column for the Times, because it offers a sense of perspective that’s too often missing from today’s business coverage. He writes:

I’m stepping away at a time that is strikingly reminiscent of my first few years in the business of covering financial markets and the economy. That was 1979-82, in what was then considered the worst U.S. economy since the Great Depression.

Sound familiar?

…

Many Americans’ attitude toward the stock market was exactly the same then as now. In 1979 the market was mistrusted or outright despised. What was the point of owning stocks? The Dow Jones industrial average was no higher in 1979 than it had been in 1964.

The rest of that story is that after so many years of pinging between 600 and 1,000, the Dow Jones Industrial Average in the 1980s finally started its long, explosive climb upwards. (The DJIA closed today at 11,555.)

Many of you reading this probably don’t remember those years, and some of you who do are convinced it’s different this time. Like Tom, I’ve been hearing the doom-and-gloomers predict the end of the economic world for decades now. And whaddya know…we’re still here.

This is not to downplay the severe financial beating so many have experienced. There are people who have lost everything they had, and who aren’t likely to get all or even most of it back. The unemployment rate is scary and so is the all the debt we’ve accrued, as people and as nations.

But we have survived worse. I think we will again.

When giving hurts

Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of the megabestseller “Eat Pray Love,” has an essay in the latest issue of O magazine called “Confessions of an Over-Giver.” She writes that when she suddenly became rich from the proceeds of her book, she indulged her long-standing tendency to give too much–and did it on a grand scale. “I was like an alcoholic locked in a distillery–what wonderful and terrible luck!” she writes.

She paid off her friends’ credit card bills, helped them catch up on their mortgages, even bought houses for two. Now some of those friends aren’t her friends any more.

By erasing years of obstacles, she also sometimes erased their dignity. Sometimes her over-giving, as she puts it, left her friends “feeling shamed and laid bare.”

“Sometimes, for instance, ‘lack of money’ hadn’t been a friend’s problem in the first place: Maybe her real problem had been lack of confidence or organization or motivation. Maybe by erasing her money problems, all I’d done was suddenly expose her other problems.”

The chances of you coming into a windfall big enough to buy houses for your friends and relatives may be, alas, pretty small. But Gilbert’s words help us remember that sometimes what we think is the problem really isn’t the problem. That can help us when we struggle with money in our own lives, or when we’re asked for a loan or a gift from someone who always seems financially underwater. Maybe money will help–but maybe not.