To Put the California Fires in Perspective

"A third of state's avocado crop lost to fire, more threatened" -AP

And since "Ninety-five percent of United States avocado production is located in California (and 80% occurs in San Diego County)" I expect prices to jump. I can only imagine what it will be like...probably like buying avocados on the East cost, tiny shriveled things for $3 a pop.

Reason #43 That I love the USPS

"Having long been genuine admirers of the United States Postal Service (USPS), which gives amazingly reliable service especially compared with many other countries, our team of investigators decided to test the delivery limits of this immense system. We knew that an item, say, a saucepan, normally would be in a package because of USPS concerns of entanglement in their automated machinery. But what if the item were not wrapped? How patient are postal employees? How honest? How sentimental? In short, how eccentric a behavior on the part of the sender would still result in successful mail delivery?"

See your salary in real time. Warning: May be depressing

Enter your salary any way you'd like, and this site will not only show you how much you make a day/hour/minute/second but it'll start a counter telling you how much you'd made since you clicked the calculate button.

I feel like I've hit it big now that I made it to the penny-per-second threshold.

Google Alerts

I was messing around with Google a while back and I found the Google alerts tool. Basically you enter in a search string and it emails matching hits in a digest format.

Imagine my surprise when it spit back a letter I wrote to the SPCA about, I dunno, four years ago? It was right after G. and I got the Stella-Dog and, though I wrote it, I find it terribly sweet.

The Money Game

About three years ago I decided to start saving money. It tripped me out that I was 28 years old and really had no savings and really didn't own anything of appreciable value. I started simple, I just put $100 in a savings account per pay check and then applied whatever I could to my credit cards. Maybe $500 a month. Within a year I had enough money for a trip to Europe and $0 in Credit card debit.

I then upped my savings account to $250 per pay check, started give $100 to my parents and increased my contribution to my 401k. The next year I took a trip to Costa Rica and Peru.

This year I made a wager with a friend of mine. Her roommate was moving to Germany and wanted to save $10k. On a $30k salary. And did it in one year. We decided to challenge each other to pull it off. It would require about $850 a month (a third of my take home salary). I scaled back my 401k savings, and started off well with $1000 in tax return money. At first it was a pain in the ass, I dipped back into the savings once when I overextended myself. But after a while a flow sort of developed, one paycheck was savings and spending money for two weeks and then the other was rent/bills and spending money for the next two weeks.

Another strange thing happened. After a certain point the money in savings sort of became fictional. As if it wasn’t money I could withdraw from a back and count and roll around in, but rather just a bunch of points. It makes it less fun to have the money but probably much safer.

I managed all of this without a significant increase in salary those three years (2% over inflation)

Things that helped me greatly.

• The advice of Andrea for paying off credit cards. Cut up all but one card. Take that card and wrap it up in paper and tap it closed, you can use it if you need to but that layer of paper is a mental barrier. Pay the minimum on each card. On the card with the highest interest rate, pay as much as you possibly can on that card till it is paid off. Then take whatever amount you were paying on that card, and apply it to the next card and so on till you pay them all off. Keep them paid off and keep the one card in paper.
  

• Reading the Money forum on Craigslist. Some good advice from there;
  
• When you get a windfall of money take 10% of it and spend it on whatever you want. Take the other 90% and save it or apply it to credit cards.
• Look at how you spend money and how you can save it. Start with what you really need and see what you can pare down. I’m a cheapskate so there wasn’t much but I did save about $15 a month (or $180 a year on my phone bill).
  
• Take a side job or a hobby that pays. It doesn’t have to be lame, you could be a valet or just do oil changes at a shop on Sundays. $100 a month is over a grad a year.
  

• Reading the Richest man in Babylon. It is a book written in the 20's which dispenses financial advice through a collection of parables set in ancient Babylon. Reading a book of parables to achieve financial independence is pretty low on my list of ‘hip’, but it really did work for me and has for many others. I checked out a copy for the local library and it had been donated by some financial group.
  

• The $10k challenge with Alyssa. This I suspect will ultimately have the largest long term effect on my finances. All of the other activities got my head above water and got me focused on having a stable financial life. But this challenge helped me focus on setting larger, longer term goals. I just recently got a promotion so my goal for 2008 is to save about 75% of my raise in addition to the $10k. That and take another international trip.