My next learning curve... from brute force to hybrid with rules.

Can anyone point me in the right direction to increase my understanding of hybrid attack options (rules) to create a smarter system?  I'm trying to teach myself to use the hashcat system.

So far I have taught myself to brute some old Truecrypt files I had laying around, but it takes a very long time with longer passwords (more time than I have) and that's going to be a problem when I take on a bigger challenge, so I realize I have to learn to do it smarter.

I made a "bumbler.dict" file with all the likely words I used in passwords around that time (I actually know the password now, but I want to learn because I have larger targets I've lost the password for next).

So when I was doing the crack before I was doing:
hashcat64 -m 6211 -a 3 bumblers.crypt -i --increment-min 8

But I'm wanting to figure out how to incorporate the bumbler.dict into this trying to take baby steps and read help/faq as I go:
hashcat64 -m 6211 -a 3 bumblers.crypt bumbler.dict -i --increment-min 8

But I get "no usable dictionary file found".

It's a plain text list of words that are carriage return delimited, what am I missing?

Next for me is to figure out how to append and prepend the common characters I use, but I think the faq is clear on that, so I'll hit that next.