A man I met while he was doing some work for a neighbor of mine some years ago is now a great friend of mine. When we met, I needed some similar work. I liked what I saw he was doing and told him so. I told him about the work I needed doing. He gave me a fair price and I hired him on the spot. He respected my appreciation for fine work and willingness to pay a fair price for it.

I work at home, and during the time he worked for me so did he. We had plenty of chances to get to know each other better. We discovered that even though the work we do is as different as night and day, we approach it in very much the same way. We both realize the work we do has little to do with how much time and effort we put into it.

We know that the true value of a job is in the results produced. He combines raw materials with skill and knowledge and time to produce his results. I combine information and ideas with skill and knowledge. The products we produce are far more valuable to those we produce them for than the prices we ask them to pay. That's why our services are in constant demand. It's why we both work hard at working as fast as we can, but not so fast that quality suffers.

Saturday night my wife and I went out for a really nice dinner at a very high end restaurant. How high end? The main courses cost about as much as our normal weekly food bill. The entire evening cost about as much as groceries for a month. Rest assured, that wasn't a place we could afford to eat on a regular basis. It was one really terrific meal though.

Over coffee the next morning we pronounced the previous evening a resounding success - the best meal we'd ever enjoyed together. We want to go back sometime because really enjoyed ourselves. It was well worth the tremendously high price.

Funny, but I heard that lyric only yesterday, the day before the twenty year anniversary of, Black Monday, the 508 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Black Monday saw the Dow lose 22.6% of it's value in a single trading day.

I remember where I was, what I was doing and the shock I felt that day. I had little to my name at the time, but what I had was more money than I'd ever had before. Suddenly it was worth nearly a quarter less than it had been before the weekend.

You'd almost have to be living under a rock to have missed the news that Apple will be opening up their iPhone to third party developers. My first reaction to the news was that they were throwing in the towel, giving up, acknowledging there was no way to keep the hackers from prying their way in and providing the average consumer a way to get herself sideways with Apple just because she wanted a cool screen saver program.

But I think it goes deeper than that.

I spent a few minutes yesterday looking at how my various investments are doing relative to each other. Because I hadn't looked in on progress in a while I wanted to see whether any particular investment (or investments) had been doing better than others. If one or more individual securities do well - or one or more perform poorly - then it might be time to rebalance that portfolio.

It's a fairly easy process, especially if your broker provides a nice pie chart of your investments on your portfolio summary page like mine does. I just look to see if any of the pieces of pie are significantly larger or smaller than the average slice. If your broker doesn't show these pie charts, they're easy to construct with your favorite spreadsheet program. Just use your most recent brokerage statement and create a pie chart of your holdings.

For the most part my investments were not out of line this time around. The one exception was my 401(k), where all investment had performed equally well except one - the Emerging Markets fund. The slice representing Emerging Markets had grown to be about twice the size of all the others.

You probably know that I'm a big advocate of ETFs, also known as Exchange Traded Funds. You buy an ETF the same way you buy a stock. The difference between an ETF and a stock is that the ETF security itself is a share in any number of individual stocks or other securities. The combination of securities that make up the ETF security gives the ETF it's character. For instance, you can buy an ETF which represents the real estate market, or a basket of bonds or even the S&P500.

In that sense, ETFs are a lot like Mutual Funds. Unlike Mutual Funds however, ETFs are not actively managed. Once the basket of stocks is selected for an ETF, the management job has little to do with stock selection. As a result of not having active management, ETFs feature drastically lower management fees. And that's why I favor them for my investment portfolios.

I'm no legal expert. I make it a point to pick up the phone and call my lawyer if and when ever I'm thinking about any kind of new arrangement with another person or company. By new, of course, I mean anything out of the ordinary. Anything at all.

A story I heard this weekend illustrates just how loosely you should define "anything new" when it comes to arrangements.

The daughter of a gentleman for whom I did some work many years ago is about to find herself homeless.

I got a phone call yesterday from a representative of a local investment firm. The caller was not your average telemarketer. She was well spoken. Her delivery was unhurried and respectful. I could tell right away this wasn't your average boiler room operation. Now I don't normally give telemarketers any time at all, but because of the obvious differences between this caller and all the others, this one I decided to listen to.

The pitch was presented as something new and different. She told me her firm's strategies "fly in the face" of traditional investment strategies for superior risk adjusted performance.

OK, I know it's only October, but it's always good to be thinking ahead. This is just a quick note to remind you and me (because I always forget these things and have to go look them up again) that the 2008 IRA contribution limit is $5000 for both Traditional and Roth IRAs

If you happen to be over 50 years old, your 2008 IRA contribution limit is $6000 because you are eligible for catch-up contributions.

Speaking of catching up, you've made your $4000 IRA contribution for 2007 already, haven't you?

I'm a firm believer in making sure every dollar I have is working full time on my behalf. Money sitting idle is a bad thing in my book. If it's not invested then it's depreciating.

You should adopt this philosophy. Make sure every last dollar you own has a job to do. You're the CEO of You, Inc. Your investments are your employees. As CEO it's your responsibility to organize your employees for maximum growth of your little enterprise. Here are six fundamental strategies you should use to ensure each and every dollar is invested in the most optimal way.