Archive for the 'Money' Category

It’s that time of year again

Published at January 2, 2011 in Domesticity, Health, Home improvement, Money, Library stuff, Sports, Clotheshorsery, Vanity, Frivolity, Food, work work work and Travel. 5 Comments

Time for resolutions I won’t keep!

I’m going to try something different this year and set some concrete goals that will be easier to reach than something vague like “Eat better.”  Many of these goals are craft-related, since I inherited my mother’s propensity for starting projects and not finishing them.

1. Speaking of Mom and projects she never finished, finish the sweater she started knitting for me, oh, ten years ago (she died just over eight years ago).  Finishing this sweater was the reason I took knitting lessons in the first place, but I kept putting the bag with the unfinished sweater aside, or in a closet.  Part of that was due to it being kind of painful to look at the thing after she died, part of it was that I gained a lot of weight after she died and wasn’t going to fit in the sweater even if I did finish it.  But now I can look at the thing without getting teary, and I’ve lost enough weight over the years that I can wear it.  Plus, it’s motherfucking cold in my apartment and I NEED a big fuzzy sweater.  I’ve now got the skills to do it, too.

2.  Quilting projects: I’m making a quilt for my sister, and I also want to finish a quilt that my great-grandmother pieced and never finished, both because it would be a great way to honor Babushka and also because of the aforementioned state of motherfucking cold.

3. Home decorating: I need to locate my stud finder, so I can hang the pictures I already have, and then I need to go out and get my other pictures framed and hung.  I have a desk to paint, chairs to paint and re-cover, and at some point I should get a few more chairs and a vase or two.  Plus mirrors.  I also need a filing cabinet, badly.  This may not be a year in which I do anything with my bedroom, but I’m okay with that for now since I don’t really have a vision for it like I do with the rest of the place.

4. Sports: I haven’t lifted weights since last July, when I fell on the sidewalk and injured my shoulder, and then re-injured it in September.  I’ve decided to go a slightly different direction, doing a combination of yoga, running, and eventually some scaled-back weightlifting.  Running has gone very well; unlike in years past, I seem to have resolved some of the issues with my knees so that I’m not wearing my patella in some strange place after only a few weeks of the C25K plan.  I’m on Week 7 now (actually for the second time — I’d reached it in September, right before my second fall, which also rolled my ankle) and so far, so good.  My knee’s a little tender, but the exercise is actually doing it good.  I’d like to do a half-marathon and marathon this year, using the Jeff Galloway run/walk program.  Brooklyn Half-Marathon is in May, with the particular day yet to be announced, and I’ve signed up for the lottery for the NYC Marathon.  I’m also planning on doing the Bay to Breakers 12K in San Francisco in May, which will probably be the week before the Brooklyn Half.  If I don’t get into the NYC Marathon, I’m going to try for Chicago or Marine Corps.  All of these will be not only goals in and of themselves, but also opportunities for travel to places where friends and/or family are.

5. Food: I’m back to being mostly vegan, which is pretty easy since it’s a little hard for me to eat out much here if I have to walk everywhere I go; I also work in a place where the lunch options are very very limited.  I’ve got access to a really great food co-op and live around the corner from a grocery store, so I can easily get good, fresh ingredients and do a lot of cooking.  I’ve got a freezer packed full of individually-portioned meals I can just grab and go, and I’m working hard on using my cookbooks for more than just the old standbys.  My big goal this year is to stop eating mindlessly and to pay attention to and enjoy what I eat.  I’ve also made a special effort to clean off the dining room table, now that I have a dining room, and to have dinner AT my table with napkins and placemat and candles.  Bonus: the dining room is the only room that really gets heat.

6. Appearance: I managed to weed a lot of crap out of my wardrobe just before I moved, so I do wear a lot of what I have.  But I’m not wearing all of it, so I need to figure out why not and make any necessary adjustments.  For example, if I’m not wearing something because it doesn’t fit, I can make it fit or get rid of it; if I’m not wearing something because I don’t really like it after all, it has to go.  It *is* pretty nice having a lot of closet space free.  I also want to figure out this year what my style is, so that I can have some kind of consistent look.

7. Financial: I’ve started using Mint to track my money, and my new job has TIAA-CREF, so I’ve gotten started on a retirement plan (matching doesn’t happen until I’ve been employed a year).  I’ve identified several areas where I spend disproportionate amounts of money, so I can work on cutting that back. I’m also saving for a car; I plan on spending less than $2500 for a mid-90s Honda or similar that will run for a while.   Just like with the eating out, living here has curtailed my spending because I’m not passing stores and places to spend money all the time.  I’m also not reading like I used to, so my book habit is not being fed. My book habit really is shameful; I’m a librarian, after all, and I should be borrowing books rather than buying them.  And I should be selling off what I have; I see Amazon keeps asking me if I’d like to sell some of the books I’ve bought through them, so I may just take them up on that.

8. Personal: I’m still not into the idea of dating, but I want to make some friends here outside of work.  The yoga studio I attend seems to be a good place to meet people, especially since you’re asked to introduce yourself to the people on adjoining mats before class starts.  I’m also a member of the food co-op, and that seems like a good way to meet people as well; working there is optional, so I plan on signing up soon.  There are also extension classes to take and the local running shop organizes group runs every week, which will help with my half/marathon training and get me out a bit.  I’m also planning on taking advantage of the first paid time off I’ve had in about 10 years to do some travel, including a horsepacking trip through backcountry out here as part of the extension classes.

9. Professional: I’ll start teaching legal skills in the fall, which will give me some great experience.  I’ve also committed to writing a couple of articles, I’m involved with some committees and caucuses in my professional association, and I also have opportunities to do some outside work for pay and recognition.  I’m doing all this partly because I’m positioning myself for a return to New York or a move to another big city for my next job, and partly because I really do like my new career.  I made a good choice.

It may be time to admit partial defeat

Published at September 18, 2010 in Money and Home improvement. 0 Comments

I’ve got multiple items up on Craigslist.  Some have sold, some have not.  I just sold a camera today, and two of my three bookcases have gone, as well as my TV.  My dining chairs and a matching armchair have somehow managed to generate great interest, down to scheduling appointments to pick them up, but no actual follow-through.  They’re still here, even though they’ve been listed three times, with multiple people responding each time.

I didn’t manage to even list a couple of things, such as an old Kenmore sewing machine I bought off eBay and never opened, and my desk, which is pretty much just a tabletop and legs from IKEA.

I may wind up bringing a bunch of stuff with me and trying to sell it there.   While it’s a pain in the ass, at least I have a garage out there to store this stuff in, so I won’t have to have people in my apartment when they come pick it up.

What the fuck? No, really, what the fucking fuck?

Published at June 23, 2009 in Money, Rich fucks and New York Fugging City. 3 Comments

We’re selling naming rights to subway stations now?

If a $4 million deal is approved on Wednesday, the nexus of subway stops at Atlantic Avenue, Pacific Street and Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn will add an additional name to its already lengthy title: Barclays.

This may seem odd, since Barclays is a bank based in London with offices in Manhattan, and the only Barclay Street on the city map is not even in Brooklyn. (It’s in Manhattan, in the financial district.)

Oh, but guess who’s behind this little deal?

There will, however, soon be a Barclays Center, the sports arena planned as the focal point of the Atlantic Yards project, and the developer, Forest City Ratner, has agreed to pay the transportation authority $200,000 a year for the next 20 years to rename one of the oldest and busiest stations in the borough.

I might have known. The MTA and Forest City Ratner are awfully cozy these days.  And the Times blithely rolls along with cute little gosh-that’s-a-mouthful jokes and largely uncritical coverage of the massive boondoggle that is Atlantic Yards.

What you can, and can’t, expect from blogging

Published at April 19, 2009 in Meta and Money. 32 Comments

I spent three years or so writing for two big, A-list political/feminist blogs. So I know a thing or two about blogging, and what to expect from it. And more importantly, what NOT to expect from it.

And what you can NOT expect from blogging is that readers pay you for the content you put out there for free.

Not that you can’t make some money from a blog. But it’s important to understand just what it is that makes the money. See, it’s not your content. It’s your audience. Because where you make your money on a blog is from advertising, and the rates for advertising are dependent on your audience, both its size and its perceived interests. If your blog has a large audience of the kind of people who advertisers think will spend money on their products (such as food blogs or Apartment Therapy), you can charge them to access your audience via paid advertising. If you don’t have much of an audience (or your audience is not perceived as the type to spend money*), you won’t be able to charge much. You attract the audience via content or widgets or what have you, but don’t kid yourself that it’s your writing that pays the bills.

Newspapers, magazines, radio and TV work the same way — I did a few years in journalism back in the day as well, and I can tell you that the size of the paper is not determined by how much news there is, but by how much advertising was sold for the day.** Indeed, when the paper goes to layout, the number of pages is determined by the number, size and placement of the ads, with the total ad space over a certain percentage of the available space. What is left is called the “news hole.” So when your editor wants 12 column-inches on a story, that means that that’s all the space you have available to you for your content, even if what you have is really a 16-inch story. Your content, in a way, is immaterial to the business side of the operation (and there is a division, traditionally, between editorial and business), except inasmuch as it brings in readers, increases circulation, and makes it easier for them to sell advertising at good rates. Your content, in other words, is a delivery vehicle for the ads, which is the profit-generating part of the business. This holds true even if you’re a blogger for a traditional-media outlet and get paid for your content. As Roy Edroso said in response to Dan Collins’ asking him about what kind of welfare the Village Voice gave him:

Keep this under your hat, but the Voice sells ads and uses the money to pay us. That’s capitalism, comrade, and as much as you and I dislike it, it’s the deal we’re stuck with.

Dan, you may or may not know, writes for Protein Wisdom, which was one of the right-wing blogs supported by Pajamas Media (he took offense to Roy’s characterization of the Pajamas Media arrangement as “welfare” and decided to hurl it back, without understanding that there is more than one model out there). At least until Roger Simon and the boys pulled the plug on the financial support they were giving the blogs, in favor of putting money into PJTV, which is a subscription-model podcasty sort of thing. Mostly, it seems to involve stilted videos by Dr. Helen supporting the patriarchy. And Joe the Plumber.

Mind you, unlike blogs, newspapers have separate advertising reps, whose entire job it is to sell advertising space and thus generate revenue. Blogs generally rely on ad networks to sell ad space, with varying results. Another problem is that advertisers underpay (or bypass) blogs due to faulty perceptions. But if you’re going to make money at blogging as a blog owner,*** you have to devote a certain percentage of your time and brainspace to the business side of things. Continue reading ‘What you can, and can’t, expect from blogging’

How to get lucky in the stock market

Published at March 16, 2009 in Money and Spend!. 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about that line from Wargames in regard to the stock market:  The only way to win is not to play.

For years, I’ve been kicking myself about not having a job that affords me 401(k), and not having an IRA, and in general being in a very precarious situation financially — that was, of course, my own doing, intermittent periods of unemployment notwithstanding.

And when I sold my apartment last year and wound up with a big chunk of money in my hand, I thought I should invest it, or put it somewhere it could make some money for me.  It’s not that I trusted the stock market, exactly, but it seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and interest rates on Treasury securities were so lousy.  Instead, because I couldn’t get past the inertia, I just parked it in an online savings account and some CDs.

Probably a good decision, I’m thinking, even if my savings account’s interest rate has been slashed to 1.65% recently due to the financial crisis.  Not that I really “decided” so much as defaulted into this position.