If this is your first visit to brip blap, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and visit my about page.

Oh, young mind, how we envy you! The world is your oyster, and who doesn’t like oysters? Here you are, venturing out into the world. Freedom, independence, adventure are all just around the corner! Mom’s not there to do the laundry anymore, but who cares! Nobody will yell at you when you sleep til 2pm on a Tuesday. Nobody will be waiting to make sure you do your homework instead of watching Sucker Free Countdown. Bliss.

Unfortunately, the boogeyman is out there too. You have to generate some income to pay for the things you took for granted in your home. Yes, of course, the luxuries of shoes, Wiis, ironically detached rock band t-shirts and overpriced notebook computers used primarily for Facebook, but also items you didn’t realize were so horribly expensive while Pops was paying for them - milk, cell phone bills, iTune downloads.

So here are 10 things to remember for the new graduate, about to head off to college.

1. You need to hit the ground running. If you have scholarships and grants, great. You’re already ahead of 90% of the US student population who finance their education with loans. Don’t blow it - make keeping those scholarships and grants your #1 priority, even if it means giving up the Alpha Beta Delta Wednesday mid-afternoon Beer Bash.
2. Please don’t think life is going to be easy majoring in Spanish (for example) and graduating with $50,000 in student loans. Go ahead and do it if you want to - there is something to be said for following your dreams - but I’d think strongly about making some good connections and giving some hard thought to how you’re going to use that Spanish degree, considering about 30% of the US speaks it better than you even after 4 years of study.
3. Party, but not too hard. There is a fine line between making friends, enjoying life and gaining experiences, and lying in the toilet stall with your shirt covered in puke at 3 am in the morning.
4. Spend a lot of time on the Internet learning useful skills - make a blog, set up an online store, learn website design, etc. Do not spend a lot of time playing vampire tag or sending movie messages on Facebook.
5. Don’t play video games. I’m serious. I see this as an immediate and massive threat to your development rivaled only by television. Get out and interact with people - you will never have such free time and so many people ready and willing to sit around and just talk about anything you want! Trust me, you’ll have plenty of time to play video games when you are older.
6. Join organizations. Hanging out with your friends in college is great. But join organizations that will force you to meet people you otherwise might not meet. Join intramural sports. Join interest clubs. Get out and participate. Don’t just hang with your friends in the dorm. And don’t stop joining even after you finish college. There are a lot of interesting ways to meet people that don’t involve a keyboard and an IM account.
7. If a class looks interesting, take it. I was a mathematics major and most of my “extra” courses were Russian, German and linguistics courses. But at the same time I threw in courses on “leisure and pop culture” (about the groupies who follow the Dead, George Jones, Jimmy Buffet, etc.) and economics (because I find economics fascinating). Mix it up. You will find out what you love and hate, and that’s useful to know.
8. Get a credit card now. I know that’s odd advice considering how much trouble people have, but get a credit card and start building a credit history. AND PAY THE WHOLE BALANCE EACH MONTH! I know many people who are in debt today will say “easier said than done,” but learn to pay the whole balance each month. I did. Friends of mine did. It can be done, just like quitting eating junk food. Now is the time to set your habits in regards to money. If you can’t pay off the full balance one month, freeze the card in a block of ice or cut it up. When you pay it off, lesson learned (right?), you can start using it again.
9. Don’t buy any furniture or appliances that you can live without. You will have plenty of time to buy a blender when you have a home. As a college student, you need a bed, a chair, a desk, a microwave or a hot plate, and a fridge. Stop. Don’t buy anything else. Scavenge. Spend your money on decent food for your health, or to have extra money saved up. I scavenged bits and pieces of stereo equipment people put away for my stereo. I had an old black and white TV. I knew that all of the furniture was going to be abused beyond belief (I lived in a fraternity). Nothing I owned in college stayed with me past my first year as a working man, so I’m glad I didn’t spend anything on anything, practically.
10. Live life to the fullest! Think about this: you are at the apex of human development. You are living in an age when change has become exponential rather than incremental. You have won the “birth lottery” by being born in the West in the late 20th century - by attending college you are amongst the best educated, most privileged and luckiest people to live on this planet in human history. DO NOT WASTE THIS TIME! Have fun, play hard, study hard, meet people, spend hours talking about life or love or hopes or politics or whatever you want. But most importantly, be aware that you are in a position that 6 billion people around the globe would die to be in. Seize that opportunity and squeeze it ’til you shake out every last drop.

Yay, graduates!

Popularity: 5% [?]

Patrick, of Cash Money Life fame, has tagged me to give my best financial move in college. This “organically growing” meme was started by plonkee. The first part was posted yesterday.

Best Financial Move In College #2: Learning an “exotic” foreign language.

If you read this blog, you probably know that I’m a Russophile. I lived in Moscow for several years, I can read/write/speak Russian fairly comfortably and my wife is Russian. Key the computer geek theme music: I mentioned that I was a finalist in the International Science Fair: I wrote, in Basic on a Tandy Color Computer with a cassette-tape drive, a very primitive artificial intelligence program that reliably translated English into Russian, grammatically correct. I even had to develop the Cyrillic font. I did all of this after buying a Russian grammar book at a public library for $.10 and using it to set it up - I didn’t know Russian at all.

Anyway, after the ISF my interest in Russian waned. I always joke that my ancestry is German with a little German mixed in. Even though the Original Blap Ancestor ventured to the new world in the 16th century, my paternal ancestors clung to German ways and traditions and language. And I mean they clung. To the best of my knowledge, my dad was probably part of the first generation of Blaps to speak English at home rather than German. So in high school and college I had a strong motivation to take German, and I did.

But I always liked foreign languages. I took French and Latin as well and decided in my sophomore year that Japanese would be a good challenge. Keep in mind that this was the mid-80s: Japan appeared to be well on its way to becoming the dominant economic power of the 21st century. We know now, in retrospect, that Japan’s economy tripped and stumbled and has never really recovered, and China and India are now careening past it, but at the time it seemed that Japan might become an economic superpower at a minimum and THE economic superpower if everything fell right.

I decided to take Japanese. It was a new course at Hometown State - only one class was offered. So on registration day I woke up and strolled over to the registrar only to find that it had filled up in minutes and no slots were available. I was disappointed, but I still wanted to take a language. I thought Spanish might be useful, but boring (I didn’t care for French when I learned it - romance languages don’t appeal to me). I skipped through the catalog until I saw Russian and remembered my little project at the ISF four years earlier. And best of all, it was at 10 am so I could sleep late - back in college I had yet to discover the benefits of waking up early.

Russian was fantastic. The teacher was a guy straight out of PhD school, passionate about the subject and the culture. He invited his students to his home, showed us Russian movies, introduced us to actual Russians (quite the novelty in the Deep South in the 80s, let me tell you) and managed to get Russian food. I loved the intellectual challenge of the language - a different alphabet but more importantly a language completely removed from the European languages’ interrelationships.

So why was this a good financial move? I’ve already mentioned it in 8 steps to a six figure career, but here it is in a nutshell: it gives you instant credibility as a smart person (deserved or not). Employers and contacts and almost everyone I meet expresses shock that I can speak Russian, read it and write it. I don’t think it demonstrates much intelligence, personally. Language acquisition is more of an inborn skill, I think. But I do think that learning Russian demonstrated some intellectual curiosity and the fact that I stuck with it indicates some intellectual discipline. I have benefited hugely in my career from knowing Russian. It meant that I was plucked out of obscurity as a junior staff member of a Big 6 (now 4) accounting firm and hurled into the middle of the mid-90s Russian economic explosion. It opened up opportunities I would never have had as just another staff person.

But that’s not the biggest part of it. Without developing my Russian skills I wouldn’t have met, pursued and married my wife. Maybe if I had taken Japanese I would have lived in Japan, developed a fondness for all things Japanese. Hard to say. But I do know that the decision to learn Russian set in motion the life process that brought me to where I am today: with a wife who is focused on the same things I am, personally and financially. So that’s actually the single biggest reason why that was a great financial move.

So what was your best move?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Patrick, of Cash Money Life fame, has tagged me to give my best financial move in college. This “organically growing” meme was started by plonkee. This will be a two-parter because I didn’t want a post that looked like a short novel…

I have what might be an “unallowed” answer, so I’ll give both of them. One of them had a huge impact, one of them had less of an impact, but both were important long-term decisions.

Best Financial Move in College #1: I attend a public university.

I will be as clear as possible about this: my choice of college has made more of an impact on my financial life than any other decision I have made. A little background: I was a good student in high school. I was class valedictorian, I had high scores on my SAT and ACT exams, I was a varsity athlete. I had received a full scholarship to attend school in Germany as an exchange student; I was an International Science Fair finalist; I had clubs and academic honors and extracurriculars out the yin-yang. I applied to a fairly wide spread of colleges, ranging from my hometown state university to small private liberal arts schools (one I really liked I’ll call Tiny Private) to well-known-very-good-but-not-Ivy schools (one of which I will call Regional Private) to the big grandaddy of them all, Harvard.

I got accepted to every one. I got scholarships to every one. I got tennis scholarships, academic scholarships, etc. etc. However, many people are surprised that anyone who was accepted to Harvard would turn it down. I did. I applied to Harvard on a whim, with no serious intention of attending even if I was accepted. I sent in the application on the deadline date. I started the application, handwritten, in black ink and when that pen died I finished in blue ink. I did it because one of my friends told me there was no way I could get in, and I took the bet. I had no intention of going there. I actually had my mind set on Regional Private - and received a full scholarship there, too.

But one school was ferocious in their recruitment - my hometown state university, which I’ll call Hometown State (for obvious reasons). They were relentless - they gave me not only a full scholarship but they swamped me with calls, meetings with academic deans, calls from alumni, even additional scholarships to cover the costs of books, fees, housing, and on and on. Part of this was due to my dad’s relationship with the university, but a lot of it was simply because I was well-known there already - friends of mine had parents who were professors or administrators or otherwise associated with the school.

I visited Regional Private School and detested the people I met, who were condescending and intellectually dead rocks. Harsh, I know, and maybe it was bad luck, but as a multi-generational legacy (I would have been a third-generation student there) but I couldn’t stand it on multiple visits, including a “new prospects weekend.” I toyed with attending a few other schools, including Tiny Private, but I decided the cool atmosphere didn’t make up for the fact that nobody had ever heard of them or that the academic and social programs were limited.

I decided to go to Hometown State. It was the best decision I ever made financially, for one reason: I actually made a profit attending school. After tuition, fees, books, fraternity dues, food, everything I made a profit. I got a bachelor’s degree and started day one of my postgraduate life with money in the bank and no debt. I think (although I don’t know) that even with full scholarships at Tiny Private or Regional Private or Harvard I would have had enormous expenses not covered by tuition scholarships. My parents would have covered many of those expenses, I’m sure, but I would still have struggled.

I have never regretted attending Hometown State for a minute. To this day I point to that as one of the best decisions I ever made. I loved college. I did well academically. I was again active in all sorts of things: club sports, varsity lacrosse, a fraternity where I was pledge trainer, social chairman and rush chairman at various times, and interest groups from a Russian-language club to political organizations. I did all of this without having one minute’s strain or stress or worry about how I could afford this, or how I was accumulating debt. And I have still done well in my career.

That is my “unfair” answer, since it wasn’t IN college. I’ll give my “fair” answer in my next post.

photo credit: me! an original photo!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Today when I woke up before dawn, I realized it was my first day of being a full-time problogger. I’m still in the corporate mentality of thinking of Saturday as a “day off,” though. I realized that might be one of the first things that has to disappear to make that corporate mindset disappear and the entrepreneurial (or whatever) mindset appear. There is no need to wake at 6, work from 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. I need to work when I feel like it and (considering I have a stomach-achey two year old and a 9-months pregnant wife at home) when I can! But just as I can take Monday morning off now to go to an appointment with the pediatrician, I also need to work on a Saturday afternoon when it’s time to get a link post together. And I also need to start thinking of this blog as my work and my inspiration, since it’s my only income source now! Even if I’m planning on going back to consulting in a few months, it’s still exciting to lock myself into this mindset: I am an entrepreneur, a problogger, a writer! What a cool feeling.

From The Money Writers:

• Looking for Cheaper Gas?

  One of the bizarro-world aspects of life in New Jersey - everything else costs a fortune, taxes are sky-high but our gas is dirt cheap and every single last station is completely full-service; self-service isn’t even allowed. Took me a while to get used to it but now I’m spoiled.

• Create Your Own Dollar Plan: Step 1

  If you spend any time reading this blog, you’ll know I love creating and measuring and talking about goals. This is the kickoff to a series I know I’ll like, and I’ll be looking for tips to work on my own dollar plan.

• Giving Money as a Gift, How Much?

  This is a question that’s bugged me a lot being married into an ethnic group where money is far and away the most common gift given - my take is around $100 per (adult) head attending the event, I guess.

• 4 Ways You Can Profit from the Falling US Dollar

  So it’s come to this: hedge against the loss in the value of the local currency by getting currency from a stable, healthy economy. Last time I did this it was Russians hedging against the ruble by hoarding dollars. Now it’s Americans hedging against the dollar by hoarding euros. Sigh.

• Coupon Tips and Tricks That Can Cut Your Grocery Bill By 80%

  I hate coupons and basically just try to grab the cheapest natural food available, but after reading this comprehensive how-to I may give one more stab at the mystical art of coupon cutting.

• Maybe Higher Food Prices Are Actually Good For Us as a Society

  “Because of higher grocery bills, people are resorting to such ghastly tasks as cooking at home, growing some of their own food, and using leftovers!” The end times are near, indeed. Sheesh.

• Finovate Start-up: What Would You Ask Vestopia, SmartHippo and other companies?

  The founder of start-up SmarterBoar is offering to fire off questions at Finovate on your behalf.

Elsewhere about ye olde Webbe:

• Leave Your Shoes at the Door: Three Ways To Be a Friendly Visitor to Your Environment

  This was an awful, but very powerful image for me: “imagine that next to your gravesite (or what have you) when you die lies a pile of things that you have consumed and discarded over your lifetime - especially the non-recyclables.” Ugh. I don’t want to, but I did, and it made me want to change some habits.

• Rules To Follow In Times Of Inflation.

  These are three great points, but one of them is critical: in times of (hidden) inflation, saving money can be counterproductive. That “high yield” savings account? You may be better off using it to do repairs you’ve been putting off on the car or house (or other necessary expenditures). Spend the money before it loses value. I’ve seen it happen before, in Russia - it can get to the point where buying a TV is a better investment than putting money in the bank. Scary, but true.

• 10 Ways New Parents Overspend On Their Newborns

  I had to laugh at this article. Oh, those poor first-time parents, buying this and that item that they will never need! I am now preparing to be a grizzled veteran parent with baby #2 and there is no way I could ever possibly spoil our baby girl with cute little outfits and toys. And those, my friends, are famous last words. We are doomed to repeat history

• So You Want To Be In Management

  This article probably deserves a little more thorough analysis on my part, but two quick comments:

  • 1. “Please respect my time by not coming at 5:30 PM with a critical issue we could have discussed at any time during that day.” Amen. When I was a senior manager I hated hearing about “blow-ups” at the end of the day. I wasn’t a heart transplant surgeon, I was a finance manager. It could wait.

  • 2. “I don’t believe it’s my job to motivate you. You should motivate yourself. My job is to provide you the resources to do good work, set goals and expectations, and follow up.” Maybe I messed up here. The single greatest thing I loved about managing people was motivating them. My staff loved it too, and I doubt you could find a single person who ever worked for me who wouldn’t say that I tried to motivate them. Maybe it didn’t always work, but I tried, because I like it. It’s why I think I would be a decent life coach or career coach - would I? Hm.

• We Feel Like Fools for Saving Our Money

  “Don’t assume that dropping 15% into a 401K, having $1000 in an emergency fund and having a “steady job” are enough to protect you and your family.” I don’t know who this guy Steve is who’s writing at Prosper but he sure is pessimistic about the economy.

• Sharing Salary Figures on Facebook

  “If we can talk about how many orgasms we have with our mate, why can’t we discuss how much we make?” If that quote doesn’t get you to read this article from the Times, I don’t know what would.

• 21 resources for budget travel

  Here’s a great “list of lists” for budget travel resources. I present it for your reading pleasure, not mine, since with a toddler and an infant baby the only travel we’re going to be doing is going back and forth to the local supermarket for diapers. I’ll just wait until the kids are old enough to go hang out in a yurt in the Gobi.

• Learning to Love Water, the Frugal and Healthy Beverage

A very, very simple statement that’s almost impossible to follow: there is no need to ever drink any liquid whatsoever other than water, other than pleasure. Water serves all of the “liquid intake” needs humans have. I guess theoretically I should drink nothing but water, but I sure would miss that Shiraz and morning roast (not together people, I’m not a degenerate).

photo credits: Jaypeg21 and Marcus Vegas

Popularity: 2% [?]

I had an interesting question from NH Mom of 3 about my WIDD idea. A WIDD, in case you don’t remember, is a “what I done did” file - a record you keep of all of the projects and details of your past positions.

“I wonder, is there a way to “cram” and get down onto paper what you have done on past assignments to make a starter WIDD file? I an in between positions currently (not of my choice, and not planned!) and am starting to interview elsewhere. Any advice?”

My response was that I think if I was trying to recreate a WIDD file from scratch, the very first thing I would do is contact anyone who I’d stayed in touch with from that job and ask them what I did. It sounds strange, but it is the simplest way to get started. Either your former colleague will remember (maybe they worked on the same project, or they supervised you or were supervised by you) or your ex-colleague will at least trip off a few associations in your head that might help.

I had a former colleague call me about a month ago to ask me if I remembered the name of a project we’d worked on five years ago. Fortunately, I had my records and was able to help her out. Try reaching out to some of your former coworkers! People are usually happy to hear from former colleagues and also usually happy to help. You have to admit to yourself the possibility that your former coworkers might be more organized than you are, or simply have better memories.

If that doesn’t help, you can always look back through any old calendars or appointment books you might have. Most people keep some sort of calendar with important dates on it. Even if the calendar has minimal details, look at it. I recreated a few of my projects in Europe once by looking at my (paper at the time) calendar with flight information on it. Seeing “10:15 am flight to Kiev” jogged my memory about a particular project I did there that I had forgotten about.

But none of your former colleagues are available, you tossed all of your calendars and you’re getting frustrated. Try a memory-jogging exercise. Sit down in a quiet place and start trying to remember your jobs. I’m not talking about the projects you worked on or the duties you had. I’m just talking about the physical aspects of your job. Think about the faces of your former colleagues. Think about where the coffee machine was. Recall your desk. Keep a blank piece of paper next to you and scribble down anything that occurs to you. Go back after a day and look at the notes again and see if it has sparked a memory.

When all of this fails, I would suggest hitting the Internet and finding a job description similar to the one you had. Many companies will advertise job specifications on sites like monster.com. These descriptions may either serve to refresh your memory or give you a starting point to just create a bare-bones description.

Thanks to NH Mom of 3 for the question! If you have questions, feel free to email me and I’ll do my best to answer either by email or here on brip blap!

photo credit: CJ Sorg

Popularity: 2% [?]