“I like to put my links to my other sites at the bottom of my pages. is that hurting me?”
Possibly if they are on the same IP. There is a degree involved here. Doing it with dozens of pages has no risk; hundreds of pages is probably fine; tens of thousands of pages is link farming.
“and I’ve heard its better to have one way links to a site than recips;”
No advantage at all. It’s SEO goofballism to think if the New York Times does a story about your site, and links to you, that you would be worse off if you linked back to the story.
“so I’ve been thinking I should link some sites to some, others to others; and as i understand it; make sure there isn’t a loop made in the process.
does that sound like a good plan?”
It’s by far the worst thing you can do. This is a link scheme, and you’ve even said so. Search engines can and definitely should penalize such behavior.