Last week I was out walking with a friend when she admitted she was scared she would never have kids.

"We'll never be able to afford them," she said as we made our way around the block and up the next street. She and her husband are about our age (and not getting any younger), and I could tell she was worried.

"Oh, I'm sure you'll figure it out," I said as I tried desperately to change the subject. That was terrible advice and I knew it, but it was the same advice someone had given me several years before. (And probably for the same reasons.)

Landlords and property owners have their fair share of problems: They have to manage, accommodate, repair, etc., their property. It's a lot of responsibility, and with great responsibility comes great headache.

But it ain't all roses for renters, either. We've got rent increases, security deposits, and unannounced, inescapable construction. Last Saturday, I woke up to the sound of drilling on the wall next to which I sleep. It was 7:30 in the ever-loving morning!

As a renter, there are a handful of important laws and considerations that many of us overlook. At least, I know I've overlooked them. So I figured they were worth sharing. Here are some money-related things to keep in mind if you are a renter.

Have you considered how your life would freeze to a standstill if a general outage cut electric power for more than two or three days? As every summer dawns, it's a question more and more people ask, because demand for electric power is growing inexorably, and summertime is when the grid always gets strained to the max. Many experts say all it will take is one unusually bad heat wave and a single computer glitch. The last major outage happened in the summer of 2003, and it affected over 55 million people.

Our lives depend on electricity more than just about anything else, but there are few things we take so for granted. (You couldn't read this post without it.) Environmentalists have effectively put a stop to all new construction of traditional power stations, and a growing portion of new construction is for clean energy sources. Clean energy may sound sexy, but it's still unreliable: Wind turbines generate electricity only when the wind blows, which might not be when you need it. Likewise, solar energy generation fluctuates with weather conditions. All it takes is one confluence of circumstances to shut down your power.

That's a mess. Once your cell phone's battery runs down, how will you recharge it? Think you can run down to the local Starbucks to get some coffee (your coffeemaker is dead, remember) and recharge your laptop, cell phone, tablet, iPod, toothbrush and shaver? Think again. All your neighbors will have descended on that little coffee shop en masse because they'll be without power too.

When someone has to make funeral arrangements, they often look to the funeral home for help. They select one of the three coffins suggested by the funeral home. Often it's part of a mid-priced package deal, one that includes pretty much everything you need, and then some. And in a lot of ways, it makes sense that we turn to the experts, especially if we've never had to make funeral arrangements before.

But there's a big problem with relying on a funeral home to help you make decisions: The people advising you have a vested interest in getting you to spend more.

A Sales Pitch at a Funeral Home

A funeral home is a business. And like any business, the pricier the arrangements, the more money they make. They're there to sell their products and services. Never was that made more clear to me than when my friend passed away quite suddenly last fall.

Recently, an old friend emailed me for help with his family's financial woes. The confession that followed wasn't pretty, and included tales of student loans, car loans, unrestrained spending, and empty bank accounts. It was all bad news, which I found rather surprising considering their relatively high income. So, of course, I asked about their fixed expenses. What were they?

We emailed back and forth for quite a while, and he gave a few more details of their situation. For example, their house payment was only around $900. Affordable. Car payments and student loans consumed around $450 each month. Not shocking. Then there were the expenses that everyone must contend with -- things like groceries, gas, school supplies, and insurance. It was all rather boring.

Follow the Money Trail

So, what was the problem? This is a couple who easily pulls in six figures and lives in an incredibly affordable part of the country. Their fixed expenses were relatively low, but they were constantly coming up short on funds. Why? Obviously, something was going on, but they couldn't put their finger on it. And neither could I.

In January, I accompanied Kim to an appointment with Paul, her investment adviser from Edward Jones. Paul's brother was my best friend in grade school and junior high, and we have many mutual friends. I sat and listened while Kim and Paul talked about her investments and how she ought to invest for retirement. I didn't participate much, though, because this is Kim's money, and I didn't feel like it was right for me to take an active role.

I did ask some questions about index funds, though. Kim's money is entirely in individual stocks (like Apple) and expensive load-bearing funds such as VFCAX (Federated Clover Value Fund), which has an expense ratio of 1.19 percent and a sales load of 5.5 percent.

Paul argued against index funds, saying:

Confession time: Despite a financial and business education more comprehensive than most, I never invested. I grew up poor and just couldn't wait for my first "serious" job and those big bucks. It was so bad, I decided to drop out of college in my senior year. "None of this ivory-tower crap is going to make me any more money," I told everyone who would listen. Fortunately, both of them were able to talk me off the ledge. One of them was my future wife, bless her little gizzard.

After graduation, my illusions were shattered: There are no high-paying jobs in a recession for someone with just a bachelor's degree. There are hardly any jobs at all. Carol Burnett came up with the formula: Comedy = Tragedy + Time. That explains why I've been able to entertain so many guests after dinner with the now-humorous details of my early career. Bottom line: It took several years to set up a household on entry-level wages. My big break came when, in the final year of my MBA, I landed a job that tripled my income. (No matter what all the critics say, no single degree makes you as much money as an MBA.)

Finally, we were rolling in it. The top restaurateurs in town knew us by name. You would think that someone with such a solid education (in accounting and finance, no less) would realize the time had come to start investing. You would be wrong. We had accumulated us some Joneses along the way, up with which we had to keep, and we did some serious "keeping" for the next few years.

It's almost spring, you guys. I don't know about the weather in your neck of the woods, but that's a welcome thought where I'm at, and I live in Texas!

(Northerners, feel free to make fun of my idea of a cold winter. I don't care. I did not sign up for anything colder than highs of 50 degrees.)

At any rate, I've been on a cleaning and organizing kick, a bit of early spring cleaning, if you will. I don't know what's gotten into me. Maybe it's that the days are getting a little longer and that we've finally had some consistent sunshine around here. And those might be the reasons we spring clean in the first place, according to TLC's How Stuff Works:<

A few years ago, I wrote about how to lend money to friends without letting it ruin the friendship. To quickly recap, a friend needed help paying the rent. She had never asked me for money in all the years we'd been friends, so I knew she had to be in a pretty desperate situation. In fact, she was even on medical leave and tried to return to work early, but her doctor (and therefore her employer) refused to sign off on it.

So although I normally think that lending money to friends is a bad idea, this seemed different. I loaned her the money. Although she promised to pay me back, I looked at the loan as a gift, and expected that I would not be repaid. It would have been nice to be repaid, but I was being realistic based on all of the stories I've heard about lending money to friends. Therefore, I was only willing to lend what I was willing to lose. I also helped her boyfriend get a job.

My friend never did repay me, which was fine because I'd already assumed that I would not be repaid. Her boyfriend took the job offer and promptly lost the job. (She told me that the boss expected her boyfriend to "just do whatever he was told to do." Um, yes, that's how most jobs work, especially when you have next-to-no experience.)

I had lunch with my friend Craig a few months ago. Craig is an architect, and he took me on a tour of his company's offices. "The cool thing about this building," he told me, "is that it's especially resilient." I could tell from the way he said it that the word resilient meant something a little different than what I might expect.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

Craig explained. "In architecture, resilience refers to a structure's ability to return to its original state after a disturbance. Say strong winds cause a skyscraper to sway or an earthquake shakes a house. If they're resilient, those buildings move with the outside forces but then return to normal when things calm down."