brip blap

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

We spent a completely non-frugal day with Little Buddy and Pumpkin at the New York Aquarium today. I find it strange that a “semi-public” attraction requires $12 for parking, $10 per adult and $2.50 for a bottle of water. So be it - it was fun. At the same time, I am also constantly amazed by the fact that the city of New York remains the #1 tourist attraction on this planet Earth when half the attractions -for example, the NY Aquarium - are 100-year-old decaying institutions. At the same time, you can’t beat the dollar value of $32 spent to watch your toddler go mental seeing jellyfish.

photo credit: michale

Da links, boss, da links! And don’t forget to submit to the Carnival of Careers!

Frugal Tips I Can’t (or Won’t) Do…I couldn’t agree more - there are some roads I will not travel down. I’m not making my own soap…

A day without electricity is worth thinking about. I ran the A/C today, although I was assured several times I didn’t need it.

Once in a while you read articles that make a lot of sense. This reader comment/question made a lot of sense to me - indulge in a passion by being frugal - that’s a good reason to scrimp and save.

The guru of the M-Network, Pinyo, has a new project, Personal Finance Buzz. PFBuzz resembles Digg, but it focuses on personal finance related articles. Users can upload articles and vote others’ submissions up or down.

8 Simple Ways to Save Yourself a Thousand Bucks and I’m Self-Employed! Retirement Plans, Insurance and Tax Considerations are Afoot are a couple of great articles - particularly the latter since I’ve been pseudo-self-employed for a while now.

Your Money Personality is, frankly, weird. Mine is dead normal, though.

Save Money on Gas by Changing Driving Habit?If you didn’t ever believe all of the 55-saves-money stuff, well - here’s the proof.

Financial Secrets in Marriage Could Lead to a Divorce of DebtEr, yes. Thank goodness Bubelah didn’t put me in this position (or, I guess, me her).

Amazon Kindle: Buy or Not?I’ve wondered about this for a while, because it seems like a neat idea… but I keep coming around to the big “why” question. Is having a Kindle worth it?

Spam Sales on the Rise, Common Sense at an All-Time LowIt’s not that spam, no. It is the tasty canned meat product. The moral of the story: people will eat anything.

Isn’t Rule # 1 of Personal Finance to FIRST PUT YOUR MONEY IN THE 401K TO GET THE COMPANY MATCH? Yes, it is…isn’t it?

A great - and recurring - question is this: How passive is your passive income?

Trying to make your financial life whole is not a bad idea at all.

This might be some of the best information you ever got on your resume.

I disagree.

If you have any vague suspicion retired life wouldn’t be better than what you’re doing now, read this.

And it’s always nice to have a few gentle reminders of why I hate corporate life like this.

Using Mini-Retirements to Get More Out of Life… a very gifted writer talking to a guy who - while I don’t agree with ALL of his ideas - is a very interesting person.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Imagine you have $500,000 in cash and a mortgage of $400,000 - and no other debt of any sort. Your mortgage is at a low rate and fixed for 30 years. Should you pay it off? This subject is debated endlessly - whether paying off your mortgage early is a good “investment,” since tying up your money by paying off your mortgage keeps it out of the mythical guaranteed-over-20-years 10% return in the market. Fine, you can use whatever assumptions let you sleep at night.
But let’s take that to another level. If you have $30,000 and want to buy a car, and the dealer offers you a ridiculously low rate - say 2% or less - on financing, should you pay cash or finance? And let’s take that another step further - why wouldn’t you use a home equity loan at a low rate to fund your home improvements, or even buying a car while letting your money work in the market?

photo credit: freeparking

Asking this question is not idle speculation. We DID recently pay cash for a new minivan - we have aggressively managed our cash and savings to put ourselves in a position where we can pay cash for everything. We have no desire to pay off our mortgage early since (a) we plan to move at some point and (b) we have a good rate. But should we have financed the minivan? Was locking up a large sum of cash like that a bad idea? I know it’s a depreciating asset that loses 50% of its value the second we drive it off the lot, yada yada. Our cash is now gone - flown out the door. On the other hand, we can look at our car and say that it’s done and paid for, which is a nice feeling.

I think a person’s attitude towards debt has something to do with the types of investments they’ll make and their risk tolerance. I’ve said before that my family’s beliefs about debt were hard-core fundamentalist: debt was pure evil. Even mortgages were necessary evils. Investing is done with cash in hand; real estate investing is foolish because you can’t play the game without using other people’s money.

I’ve come to realize that one of my greatest weaknesses in terms of wealthbuilding is lack of focus. Bear with me here. I talk with people who invest in real estate and they have a relaxed attitude towards taking out huge debt on investments. They’ve done their homework, studied the market, etc. - and then gotten a mortgage from the bank and bought. This is not something I think I could ever do; yet at the same time I have spent a lot of time trying to educate myself about real estate investing. There is no point. If I am going to continue to build wealth it has to be in ways that I am comfortable with because the necessary focus and discipline aren’t there, otherwise. I hate debt, and investing in real estate requires debt. On the other hand, I have no problem with investing in individual stocks - because I have a deep understanding of financial statements and the operations of public corporations from my experience in auditing. So why don’t I stick with worrying about strengthening my knowledge in the area I understand and appreciate, rather than the one that gives me the heebie-jeebies?

So I sit back and decide that having a unifying principle - like paying cash for EVERYTHING - not only helps me sleep better at night, it makes sense within my realm of understanding and expertise. Liquidity is not my goal: a lack of debt and investments that generate cash flow are. I’m going to stick to investing in what I know, and try to forget about areas that I don’t care for and I don’t understand that well, like real estate. I think I will get rich sooner doing that.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I confess that a lot of the advice I give on this blog is often something I don’t do myself. I’ll give a good example: on Memorial Day we had a bunch of relatives over and did a big “shashlik” - a Middle Eastern/Far East/former Soviet Union form of lamb shish-ka-bobs - had a few drinks of the little water and spent most of the day lounging around under a tent outside my townhouse, enjoying the first 80-degree day in the northeast this year. I didn’t think or worry about money, or this blog, or my financial freedom, or anything else, other than eating, having a few drinks and enjoying some leisure time under the sun.

I also bought a mountain bike and a child carrier seat this weekend (not frugal), and spent a lot of time riding around with Little Buddy exploring the neighborhood. It’s decent exercise - it’s not exactly jogging, but it’s fairly difficult considering we’re on a riverside and near the Atlantic, so we have harsh and heavy winds quite often. The point being: I was tired at the end of the day after eating FAR more than I have been accustomed to, exercising a lot and soaking up a lot of heat and humidity. Little Buddy was beyond giggly after receiving bike rides and Spiderman sunglasses to keep his eyes from tearing up.

So I lounged in my easy chair last night, glanced at my computer after a long day of eating, drinking and biking and thought of Brip Blap and decided “eh, forget about Tuesday.” In the same way I didn’t spend any time doing anything to better my financial situation, to make myself more fit or more wealthy. I chucked a day overboard.

I’m not really sure if this is a good idea or a bad idea. I’m not sure that I’m the type of person to devote myself single-mindedly to wealth-building. I think someone who WAS single-mindedly devoted wouldn’t MIND worrying about it. My brother-in-law, who’s a lifelong entrepreneur, fielded phone calls all day long about business ideas from his friends and business partners. I think he does a lot of this - I spent some time talking to him about his real estate investments and I was left, as I always am, a little bit dumbfounded by the amount of risk that risk-takers seem to take on without pause. I know a lot of people would say “oh, spend time with your family, don’t worry about tomorrow” - but is that short-term thinking? Should I be thinking about being financially free when my kids are in their early teens, or worried about spending a few extra hours with them now when they (based on my own experience) won’t really remember it?

But here’s the main question: am I a lazy git for jettisoning one of the last few free days before my next contract kicks in on watching the clouds, biking around with my son, eating shashlik and drinking vodka Russian old-school style? I don’t know. Part of me says no, it’s fine: life trumps the crass pursuit of money. Part of me says, yes, you’re a dope: first you waste a day here, then one there, then 10 years are gone and you’re whining about working until you’re 65. It’s a tough balance to strike. You want to be rich, but you want to enjoy it while you’re young; you want the enjoyment of running around with the kids and playing soccer instead of hammering away at your portfolio or working on your side businesses until you’re falling asleep at 3 am.

So it’s gone: Memorial Day is shot as a wealth-building day. I spent it drinking, eating, playing, talking and laughing. All well and good, of course, but then again it’s spent and it’s one more day I didn’t get any closer to financial freedom. I’m not sure sometimes that having financial freedom in my 50s and 60s is worth having nose-to-the-grindstone days in my 30s and 40s. Probably I’ll have a different opinion 20 years from now - if I’m still writing for this blog then you can check in and see.

The struggle between this long-term and short-term thinking is probably at the core of my mental struggle on a daily basis; trying to decide whether a short-term benefit outweighs a long-term benefit accompanied by short-term effort. Most people probably say fine, I’m going to charge this plasma TV or this Wii on my credit card and have fun TODAY - to hell with tomorrow, I’ll be old and won’t have any need for it then. Making that exchange once, or twice, or three times might be acceptable - but paying for your happiness today until you’re 65 or 70 is something I dread.

photo credit: Stewart

Popularity: 3% [?]

This post originally appeared on American Consumer News as a guest post. I wrote it at the end of summer, so I’ve updated it to be relevant for the beginning of summer, for those of us who live in temperate enough climates to consider camping in the summertime.

Camping is a frugal activity in the first place; compared to going shopping or heading to the movies or even going on vacation to the beach it’s practically free. Just imagine if you stepped away from the computer you’re sitting at right now for a moment and found yourself outdoors. Imagine the space, the quiet, beautiful nature scenes…but if you aren’t careful, also hundreds of dollars of camping equipment, gas money, fees, batteries and food! You can avoid spending a fortune before enjoying the outdoors, however.

photo credit: oskarlin

• First of all, when considering what equipment you need, look around your home. Too often, new campers will rush out and buy specialty outdoor gear and equipment. There is no need to buy specialty equipment for most of your camping needs. A pot is a pot! You can bring a pair of pliers for taking hot items off the fire. Almost anything you need for camping is probably lying around your house right now, other than a compass and a tent.

• Consider renting your equipment. Renting is often a bad idea if you’re trying to be frugal, but consider renting items that you use infrequently. Maybe you usually go camping with your friends who own a large tent, but one weekend you go with a different set of friends who don’t have room for you in their tent. Rather than buying a tent that will go unused for a year or two at a time, consider renting one. You will pay a fraction of the price of buying new equipment - and as a bonus keep clutter out of your life!

• Look online for “quitter’s goods.” As with many hobbies, many people leap with enthusiasm into camping only to wake up three years later with a giant tent they only used twice. Deals can be found on used camping equipment at all of the usual sites like eBay and craigslist. Their mistake can be your gain - and you are saving that equipment from ending up in a landfill somewhere!

• Buy equipment off-season. Just like fashion, many sporting goods stores will be looking to unload their camping gear towards the end of summer or early autumn to make room for the winter items. Wait until it’s cold to buy and you can get some significant discounts.

• Join a club. REI offers a membership club that pays back 10% of your eligible purchases as a ‘dividend voucher’ annually. Many sporting goods stores will have ‘frequent visitor’ cards that can save you money, as well.

• Use space blankets. A high-quality space blanket reflects up to 80% your body heat back to you. Most of them weigh mere ounces and they are incredibly useful if it gets chillier than you expected, which can happen even in the summer. An emergency blanket will cost less than $5, and even a top-of-the-line blanket should not be more than $15.

• Use solar powered lights and radios. Investing in solar lights and radios saves money on batteries in the end. Hand-cranked flashlights and radios work very well, too. Many of these devices can even be used to charge a cell phone or a PDA if you just cannot stay unplugged for a whole weekend!

• Bring your own food and carefully plan your menu for each day. This may sound obvious but on longer camping trips people often run out of food or realize that they did not bring some ingredient for a meal they just have to prepare. Also, remember to bring plenty of food that does not need to be heated up to eat in case of rain! Making sure that you bring adequate supplies of food and drink to last your entire trip will definitely save money.

• Carpool. Check online listings for your destination to see if carpooling is available. Quite often people living near to you will be willing to share a ride to your destination, and who knows? You might just meet some interesting new people that way, too. With the price of gas staying high, this may be one of your biggest money saving ideas for any trip.

Following these tips will help make your next trip to the great outdoors both fun and frugal. Get out and enjoy!

Popularity: 3% [?]

“Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used” -Hunter S. Thompson

You always have to wonder about the way the world works when it has one of those random burps of synchronicity. My problogging days are numbered now. A Fortune-single-digits company hurled out a six month consulting contract; a neighbor put me on the fast track to an interview for an officer position with an investment bank; and a financial software company that’s very close to some of my expertise asked me if I was interested to come on board to help them obtain seed capital to launch a significant expansion. All of this happened today. To show how messed up my brain is, all I could think about was how sad it was that today, after four weeks of staying home, the weather finally turned nice enough to go to the playground… and it’s almost over.

I’m certainly not in a position to blow off all of these feelers. I’ll probably stick with contract consulting; it’s easy, it’s good money and it’s generally compatible with my desire not to work til all hours. I know jobs in investment banking or start-ups are going to be insane hours, and I have minimal desire to go back to being an employee. Nonetheless I sometimes feel that you can do yourself a disservice not to at least hear people out, and the start-up, in particular, has the intriguing possibility of getting me in on the ground floor of something semi-big (the company has a single shareholder and two employees right now, so obviously it has some big room to grow). We’ll see. But since problogging didn’t exactly pay for my mortgage - although it certainly has started to pay for my electric bill - I have to go back to consulting, at least, in order to keep accumulating cash for investing and paying our quite-minimal-bills. Oh, and I got my stimulus rebate. La-di-da. Money well spent, Mr. Government. I’m sure that’s going to solve our problems.

On to the links! No particular order… Money Writers and around the web, all mix’d up.

How Much More Work Are Two Kids Compared To One?

Dead on. Having just added squirmy person number two to the clan, this guest post from Mike of Quest for Four Pillars hit the nail right on the head. “I believe that for the mother, it’s more difficult to go from zero to one kid than from one kid to two. For the father, it is the opposite - it is harder to go from one kid to two than from zero to one.” Could not be more true!

67 Year Old Advised by Accountant to Not Enroll in 401k - Should He Find a New Accountant?

Sounds like this 67 year old guy has two problems: one, his accountant doesn’t know his stuff, and two, he’s 67 and still working. Granted, maybe he loves his job, yada yada - but I would hope that by 67 I’m secure enough in my retirement savings that I’m either (a) actually not working or (b) not sweating investing in my 401(k) plan. Ouch.

I Borrowed Money On Zopa. Here’s Why…

In the category of walking-the-walk, Lazy Man is borrowing money on a P2P site. He has a good rationale and he’s asking his readers to pitch in and lend to him at a nice fat interest rate. Check out his reasoning - it sounds too good to be true but hey, so did Google….

Free Trial of Blockbuster Total Access Can Save You Money this Summer Movie Season

Other than a completely unnecessary diss of Batman, this article points you in the right direction: avoid the theater, get a home delivery of DVDs. You can avoid the idiots who go to theaters (like the subhumans who brought their toddlers to Alien-vs.-Predator when I went to see that in a not-rare-enough-moment-of-stupidity) and watch from the comfort of your own couch. Seriously.

Why your Retirement Account is NOT an Emergency Fund

Er. Uh. Yes. This reminded me of the conversation I had with a CPA, who was moaning about his credit card debt. Read that again. A CPA. Certified Public Accountant. A CPA with consumer debt, to me, seems like a doctor who smokes. Crazy.

How I Save Money With My ING Direct Checking and Savings Accounts

If you aren’t already using online banking, hop to it. I looked at ING and decided it didn’t offer a great enough benefit over my current setup, but if I was starting from scratch I’d definitely go with Big Orange.

Capital One Online Savings Account Opened

On the other hand, if you’re looking to squeeze every possible last tenth of a percentage point out of your online savings, Capital One’s slightly better than ING.

Create Your Own Dollar Plan: Step 4

Reflecting on your priorities and values is a critical part of any life planning. If you don’t have a core set of values it’s hard to steer the ship, so to speak. You need to have some guiding priorities, too. Write them down.

Elder Care Costs - A Total Black Hole?

Elder care is a crisis waiting to unfold as the Spawn-of-the-Greatest-Generation aka the Boomers start aging. I have watched my parents deal more or less successfully (but not without huge amounts of stress) with my grandparents. It’s a tough cycle in a country where people move away from “their village” and the traditional pattern of elder care (living near enough your parents to care for them) breaks down.

Will you ever put a penny in your 401k again?

I’ve had a raging debate in my head as I watch my limited-choices-but-decent-match 401(k) plan sputter and die during the soft market here - could I do better putting that money in a Roth? I hate dumping my money in some mutual fund that’s losing money each month just because (a) I don’t have enough choices to get something better and (b) I think I’m doing myself a favor with pre-tax money and a moderate match. This post crunches the numbers on a bad-return 401(k) versus a slightly better return non-tax-advantaged account, and the results will unsettle you.

25 Ways to Help a Fellow Human Being Today

Simply put - nice thoughts. Not all of them will apply to everyone, but nice nonetheless. I’ll say this on #10: good luck. I used to do this when I was straight out of college and living in a fairly depressed major Southern city in a downtown area. I used to offer to buy sandwiches for homeless guys who would approach me for money late at night when I’d stop to get fast food or gas or a Coke or whatever when I was coming home from another beat-down day working for my accounting firm. It’s an interesting experience. Most of them weren’t bad guys, and usually they seemed happy to have someone talk to them, so from that point of view I helped, I guess. But my observation would be that 9 times out of 10 I would get a stream of complaints about how the food at Location X just didn’t suit them and could I please just give them the cash? It wore me down enough that I gave up, and now I just give money to charities like this one…for children. I’m not saying that so much to discourage anyone from offering to buy food for the homeless, I’m just offering my opinion - as someone who’s done it - that’s it’s tougher to do than it sounds.  People who do it are better, and more patient, than I.

photo credit: billypalooza“

Popularity: 2% [?]

I’ve started entering carnivals again with a vengeance, and I’ve noticed that there isn’t really a carnival that addresses careers (or lack thereof). The Carnival of Personal Finance does include a category for careers, but it’s aimed more at the financial aspects of careers. I am not trying to compete; my thinking was that a less finance-focused career carnival would be interesting. I decided to leap into the void:

Announcing the Carnival of Careers!

I’ve set up a homepage for the Carnival of Careers (still a work in progress), and you can enter submissions here at blogcarnival.com. This carnival is designed to share posts and articles about career management, career stories, job information and work/life balance. All submissions to this carnival should be related to careers or jobs topics and specifically mention the concept. Any off-topic or unrelated submissions will not be included. All entries should be written within the last month and not submitted to any other blog carnival. Entrants are expected to link back to the host or they won’t be included in future carnivals. The submission deadline is each Friday at 11:59 pm, and the carnival will run each Monday. The first carnival will run Monday, June 2 and every Monday thereafter.

Please enter - you can submit entries for the inaugural column starting today! I’d love to see a strong carnival with a lot of interesting pieces about career management, workplace tips, managing work/life balance, even posts about how to ditch your career once you achieve financial independence!

I’m also looking for future hosts starting as early as June 9th, and every Monday thereafter. The only requirement is that you occasionally address career topics on your blog. Anyone who hosts will be added to the blogroll permanently. Please email me at bripblap…gmail (you can piece that together; hopefully the spambots can’t) if you’re interested.

And in other carnival news, my entries for the past week: at the Festival Of Frugality – If I Had A Car Edition my article about saving money on food was selected as an editor’s pick at the Festival! I should start keeping track of how many editor’s picks I get - surely there is a prize of some sort? I also had articles at the Carnival of Personal Finance: the Q & A edition and the Carnival of Money Stories.

Popularity: 3% [?]

About a month ago, before I started problogging, I was walking in midtown Manhattan when I saw a strange sight: a young woman walking down the street singing at the top of her lungs. She was not particularly striking, but she looked about the same as most of the current pop stars if you took off the celebrity- makeup-artist applied makeup. Her voice was quite good; I’m not a fan of R&B music but she was belting it out well enough that I could appreciate the quality of her voice. I like music, and I listen to a lot of it in a lot of different genres. She wasn’t bad.

On the other hand, she looked crazy as hell. If you aren’t familiar with the modus operandi on New York city streets, here it is: if you see someone doing something crazy you just move on. You don’t stare, you don’t alter your walking path; you treat the guy screaming about the Queen of England’s control of the drug trade like you’d treat a lamppost - you just keep going. To notice is the cardinal sin. But I noticed. Maybe she was crazy, maybe she was just happy and didn’t care and maybe - just maybe - she was taking a chance on walking through Manhattan, a place lousy with movie stars and agents and whatnot (we were near the MTV studios, for example) and putting her voice out there where someone might here it.

I like this idea and choose to believe that’s why she was singing. Maybe that’s the key to being famous - being oblivious to the embarrassment. Was Britney embarrassed putting on that schoolgirl’s uniform for “One More Time?” That’s possibly a bad example… she doesn’t appear to have the embarrassement gene - but that’s one way to get famous: have no shame. Here are six more ways to get famous:

1. Work hard. A lot of overnight success is the result of years of hard work. George Clooney spent 10 years acting in bad shows like “Facts of Life” and “Roseanne” before hitting the semi-big time as part of an ensemble cast in ER. His first movie role (The Peacemaker) was a bomb. He kept at it and today, of course, he can snore on camera for 90 minutes and have a hit.
2. Get noticed. Look at Paul Potts. Take a shot by singing opera in a pop music contest. Get out there and do something different.
3. Go off-road. Robert Kiyosaki said investing in index funds and worrying about debt were the marks of a poor person’s mentality. Whether you agree with him or not, it did get him noticed. Take a position different enough from the norm - and defend it well - and people will notice.
4. Be successful. Warren Buffet is a clever guy, but let’s face it - the reason we listen to him is not his sparkling wit or his charming personality (both of which he has), but the fact that he is the richest man on the planet. If you succeed in your field, people will notice.
5. Aim for a good hook up. Whether it’s landing the rock star hubby or the rock star agent, making sure you make the connections may make up for a lot. Johnny Depp got his start in acting while he was a struggling rock musician because his wife, a makeup artist, had a famous client who told Johnny he’d hook him up for acting gigs if the music wasn’t working out for him. That client? Nicholas Cage.
6. Trust in yourself. If you want people to notice YOU, love yourself. If you project confidence, happiness, intensity and success people will love that. Take Kurt Cobain. He was obviously a guy in a lot of personal pain. Yet at the same time, when you heard him sing you heard a titan; he projected a massive, overwhelming personality through his music that made him a star. It never made up for the struggle in his personal life, true, but it was clear he knew what he was doing musically.

So if you want to be famous, be a little crazy. Sing out loud, introduce yourself to the friend of a friend of a friend who knows a producer, write a book. Not everyone wants (or needs) to be famous, but fame’s just like anything else in this life; if you want it badly enough and work hard enough to get it, you have a good chance at it. Just don’t forget your buddy Steve.

photo credit: dtcchc

Popularity: 2% [?]