Well, I get glimpses of the past and flashbacks now that I have kids. I spent a couple of days at my children’s preschool/pre-K school where Little Buddy attends pre-K and Pumpkin goes to daycare (or preschool or whatever you’d like to call it).  I do realize from time to time, when I self-analyze my abilities, that I do have one ability if nothing else:  kids like me.  I can engage them in learning and don’t make them nervous as some other parents do.  I probably would have made a decent grade school or middle school teacher if I could have supported a family on that salary.  That’s a sad observation, frankly, but one for another post.

I’ll make one other observation, too, unrelated to personal finance or careers: my children’s school concentrates heavily on play, and I like it.  Not learning, but play – directed, but not with any intention towards teaching any specific subject.  It’s interesting as a parent to process the conflicting emotions that arise from watching this:  you want your kids to learn but I also (mentally) slap myself and say “Pumpkin’s not even 3 yet – she deserves play time.”  I’m a firm believer in the concept that kids need play time – creative time, self-directed – to develop themselves.  They’ll have plenty of time to be crammed into desks and forced to learn times tables later, I guess.  Just my parental opinion, I guess.

MonaVie Blackmails Me?: Stunning that a company, or a rep for a company, would stoop this low. Read the article to see how low a supposedly ‘legitimate’ company can stoop. You can also read MonaVie: Multi-Level Marketing Gone Haywire for more idiocy. I can’t believe anyone falls for MonaVie’s crap after I’ve read stuff like this.

Blue Cash Rewards Increase: I’ve owned a Blue Cash card for years, so this is good news.  I’ll take it…

Social Lending Arbitrage Beats Projections: I still think Lending Club is a good bet – if you’re interested in trying it they have a $25 signup bonus right now.  I’d treat it like any other investment – it has its ups and downs, but it can serve as a reasonable diversification strategy versus the market.

Personal Finance the Krav Maga Way: Since I’ve seen all the Krav Maga signs up around my neighborhood, I thought this was an amusing – and timely – post.

Small but Alarming Indicator: This is unpleasant – but not unexpected – anecdotal news.  On the other hand, Bubelah just attended a small business workshop where they barely had enough room for the interested attendees, and I remarked that it must have been all of the laid-off people thinking about launching small businesses (and good for them if they were)…

Life After Debt: What It’s Like in the Third Stage of Personal Finance: Just an interesting read, on many levels (fitness, travel, etc.)

and more…

• The Downside of Owning REITs
• Talking about Deflation
• The Key to Effective Budgeting – Master The Yes/No Factor
• Book Review of Leah Ingram’s Suddenly Frugal
• How Much Mortgage Can I Afford?

teaching and being taught, and links is an original article from the website brip blap.

I’d like to say it isn’t true. I’d like to think a really gifted, talented person with an eye for change could leap out of college and start helping people as a consultant.  I’d like to think that the tools for communication would naturally be there for some of these people:  comfort speaking in front of large groups, the ability to write clearly and directly, the personal confidence to sell products and relate to decision makers without trepidation.

In my experience:  nope, doesn’t happen.

I’m a good public speaker. I can sell.  I can work a technical presentation and apply complex principles to difficult problems.  I couldn’t have done any of this, in my opinion, without the years in the trench:  the years I spent hammering away, unrewarded, at Big 4 firms and multinational corporations.  What they gave me was, at the same time, invaluable and a curse.  They let me work hard.  They put me in front of very senior management or executives at clients before I might have been ready to deal with them.  They asked me to navigate politics, presentations, negotiations and calculations without a net.  I sweated a lot of 11 pm nights at the office working on presentations so I’d be relaxed and able to throw them off without much trouble today.

If you’d like to be a consultant – a REAL consultant – with a grasp of your subject and the sort of calm, unhurried patience you see in the most polished advice-givers, let me give you a tip:  spend a decade getting your brains beaten in by a consulting firm or a corporation. There’s no better training for confidence than to have your confidence challenged, pushed and tortured for years.  It’s sad but true.  If you work out, the true muscle-building activity takes place on the rep where you “fail” – the rep where you can’t lift the weights one more time.  That’s the point at which new muscle mass – scars, really – build up your muscles and increase your strength.  Being pushed to prepare that presentation or asked to analyze that acquisition on short notice is what will make you a better consultant.

There is no shortcut. When I was hiring for a multinational corporation, I didn’t look to independent consultants two years out of MBA school.  I looked to the Big 4 and other consulting firms.  Why?  Not because I had any love lost for them (I didn’t, at all) and not because they had the best prices or even the best people.  I did it because I knew these were people who had been pushed since day 1 at their firms to fail.  The “upwards or out” mentality is useful even if you’re not in a corporate position.  You’re either increasing your skills and widening your contact pool or you’re heading out.  This is the philosophy of the Big 4.  Up or out.  It makes sense, even while it’s a sad way to live.

So if you think about becoming a consultant, think about putting in a long time in your chosen profession as an employee first. Get that job at an engineering firm, or hospital, or accounting firm, or whatever.  Make sure you can cut it.  Once you’ve stopped failing, or struggling, maybe you’re ready to sell yourself as a consultant.  Just don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that there is no job bigger than you or tougher than you; as a consultant, you have to be constantly aware that eventually “the one” project will arrive where you can’t quite keep up.  And that’s when those ugly skills and pathetic abilities – staying up late and working while everyone else is out at the local bar – will come in handy.

how to become a successful consultant is an original article from the website brip blap.

Asking this question might seem stupid, but I think that it’s easy to confuse yourself. As an example, I usually have two (or more) people who might be THE client. The first is a day-to-day manager, who lets me know what he or she needs and expects. The manager might not be just one person, but for the sake of argument we’re just talking about a single person (I’ll call him or her or them The Manager). The second person who might be THE client is the person who signs the invoices and – basically – pays me. Usually the second person is the manager’s manager (or even a couple of times removed). I may have some minimal relationship with that person (I’ll call him or her The Executive) and probably don’t get much daily direction from them.

So when conflict arises between The Manager and The Executive, who do I need to worry about? I know that my first instinct is to guarantee that The Manager is happy, since he’s the guy I have to deal with on a daily basis. He has a better chance to judge whether the product of my work meets requirements or not, and if I don’t meet his requirements I’m going to be in trouble.

On the other hand, The Executive pays the bills. If she’s not happy with something I’m doing, or something The Manager is passing on to her that I’m doing, I may not have that client on my list much longer. The Executive is the one hobnobbing with other executives and influential people in my industry, and a bad word here and there could really hurt me (and a good word could help me). The Executive may not understand what I’m working on and may not be in a position to judge my work fairly, so a lot of my interaction with The Executive is probably brief presentations at high level meetings where a smile and a confident speaking tone make a bigger difference than the details of the work.

The easiest answer is to say “take care of both of them.” The truth is that in many consulting relationships (and this goes for employees, entrepreneurs, etc.) the consultant is usually swimming in turbulent waters. The desire of The Manager to look “more useful” to The Executive than the consultant is often eddying just under the surface. The Executive is often more concerned about how the consultants present in a meeting – can they sell the project? make it look snazzy? – than whether the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed.

So given that you can’t please everyone all the time, what’s a poor consultant to do?

Early on in my career, I worked with a senior accountant on a difficult project – in the example above, he was The Manager. I didn’t see eye to eye with her most of the time. However, I was lucky to form a friendly professional bond with the overall project manager, who became a mentor to me and was The Executive. I had some tough times with The Manager, and The Executive heard about it. The Executive, however, knew me well enough to push me forward to other higher-profile projects and laud me to other executives.

In retrospect I was probably unfair to The Manager but I learned my lesson – please The Executive. Or did I learn my lesson? At various times in my career on other projects I got carried away with the day-to-day tasks and forgot about The Executive. When the project ended, The Manager looked like a star and The Executive barely knew who I was. Again and again, I realized that the consultant who won the next project was not the detail guy, or the smartest guy, but the guy who forged the best relationship with The Executive.

That’s not to say that you can get by schmoozing without doing good work, but good work won’t do much for you without schmoozing. The relationship with The Executive is always critical to landing the next client. The Manager may be able to help you as well, but chances are good that they won’t talk you up TOO much, fearing a reduction of their own image.

Identifying your client won’t always be easy, but it’s a part of the job that can’t ever be overlooked. If you can please everyone, congratulations – you’ve found an easy client. If you can’t, make sure you know who The Executive is, and make sure they know who you are. I think you’ll find that it makes all the difference – not just now, but in the future, too.

learn one lesson: who is the client? is an original article from the website brip blap.

The school teacher population is going to be made up of a lot of teachers making between $40,000 and $51,000 a year – maybe younger teachers, or lower-cost-of-living areas. The other half might make $51,000 to $70,000 or so.  There might be a few outliers in expensive areas – New York or San Francisco – but there will not be teachers making $450,000 a year.  The system is not designed to allow anyone to escape into a significantly higher pay bracket (and we’re talking about teachers, not teachers who become administrators – that’s a different job).

That’s a real difference from some other professions. Take the Big 4 firms – Ernst & Young, Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG.  An auditor in a Big 4 firm probably makes less than a schoolteacher to begin with (particularly on an hourly basis).  These lower-level auditors make up the majority of the employees of the firm.  For every partner, there might be five managers, each of whom might oversee ten staff (for example).  So 6 of every 56 people are managers or above, and only 1 in 56 are partners (I made up those ratios, but based on my experience that’s a fair guess).  So the median’s lowered to account for the huge number of lower-level staff.

But in an environment like that, the chance for exceptional rewards for exceptional performance exists. Now, if you’ve worked in a corporate environment or read my last post on stupidification, you know that exceptional performance is not always the requirement for getting rewarded.  Sometimes it’s being the CFO’s nephew.  But as compared to the teachers above, there is a chance that earnings can grow far, far beyond their starting levels.  A teacher can’t, even if they win an award as the greatest teacher in their state.  An outstanding diplomat can’t break out of the government pay grades.

What all of this means is that not only do you have to consider the starting salary for your career, but you have to look at what the possibilities for exceptional earnings are.  I know earnings are not everything.  Many people can also fall into the trap of believing that they will be the exceptional performer, but in a bottom-heavy organization far more people will quit or be fired than will make partner or executive.

So consider average career earnings, and then think about whether you are willing to be the exceptional performer. If you aren’t, maybe the average career earnings aren’t that critical.  If you don’t plan to excel, a career where everyone can be expected to be compensated within a narrow range is fine.  If you do plan to excel, make sure it’s in a profession where that excellence might result in reward.  That’s not to denigrate teaching or praise public accounting.  I realized early on in my career in public accounting I wouldn’t be a partner; I didn’t have the drive to be an exceptional auditor.  So I joined the lower level of the median salaries and might have been happier – and done better over the course of my first 10-15 years of working – had I done a job search and chosen a different career path, with a narrower bank of average career salaries.

Note:  I haven’t read Seth Godin’s Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? yet, but I gather that’s what that book is all about – the idea of making yourself into an “artist,” which Godin believes makes you deeply committed to becoming indispensible to your organization.  Maybe I should read it…

average career salaries is an original article from the website brip blap.

I grind my teeth at work when I hear the phrase “dumbing it down.” I heard it once when an employee of my client, a Fortune 500 company, said he was making a presentation to a division CEO. My coworker, a middle manager, had to explain some accounting issues to the CEO and said in order to do so he’d need to “dumb it down.”

A person hearing this phrase could take it one of two ways. The first, more relaxed way to understand it would be that it’s a friendly gesture. If I’m talking to a rocket scientist who is trying to explain how they shot down a spy satellite last week, I’m not going to understand much about thrusts and vectors and attitudes and so on. That rocket scientist is going to have a lot more success explaining it to me by drawing a picture or waving his hand around in the air and making explosion noises.

But I suspect the way my coworker delivered it was that he believes himself superior to this division CEO. Now, I am the last person who believes success in a corporation indicates intelligence (and you only have to read the headlines from the Dennis Kozlowski fiasco to see why) but at the same time for a middle manager to loudly and cheerfully tell a conference call of a dozen people that he’s going to condescend to explain something to a successful corporate divisional CEO just because that CEO isn’t a CPA seems, well, dumb. To assume someone gets to that level of a corporation without a fairly solid understanding of finance seems somewhat naive to me.

People have a hard time understanding the difference between summarizing, simplifying and stupidifying (my word). Learning to choose the right one is important:

Summarizing: This rocket will deliver 10,000 pounds of explosives at 543 mph directly into the satellite, vaporizing all of the dangerous toxic fuel prior to reentry of the debris and the potential dispersion of the fuel in gaseous form, causing mild harm to nearby people.

Simplifying: This rocket will destroy the satellite and eliminate the threat of harm.

Stupidifying: Boom!

Too often people choose to stupidify advice instead of simplifying it or summarizing it. I think stupidifying happens as a matter of course in corporations as a political move – an effort to keep specialized knowledge as “leverage” – and is the enemy of teamwork. Stupidifying something is also much easier than putting in the effort to write a clear and concise summary. If the subject you’re explaining isn’t important enough that you feel the need to clearly summarize it, or simplify it, then most likely the “dumbing down” is not for the benefit of the recipient, but for you.

(photo by psd)

stupidifying the corporation is an original article from the website brip blap.

1) Monster.com is the largest and most commonly used job search website that operates as a tool for potential employees to browse listings directly from employers.

• Pros:  According to the Wall Street Journal, 73 percent of employers spend a considerable amount of time browsing the database for potential employees. According to Greenfield Online, 61 percent of online job seekers choose Monster.com over competitor websites.
• Cons:  Creating a resume that stands out can be difficult because of Monster’s inflexibility that forces the job seeker to stick to its strict format. Also, some Monster listings are outdated or come from questionable sources. Some users have reported that they never received a response from the employer, not even an acknowledgment of a successful inquiry; this occurs because listings are often posted by recruiters and not actual employers.

2) Indeed.com is a job search engine that monitors listings from other websites. Indeed does not require the user to submit a resume, but opens up a window to job listings from other major websites.

• Pros:  Simple interface. Indeed does a great job at making the job search process simple and efficient. Also, users can subscribe to job searches which will notify them of any new listings.
• Cons:  Because Indeed is simply an interface to search for job listings, it doesn’t have a system implemented that allows the user to apply to the jobs without setting up an account with the website where the listing stands. This can be time-consuming and inefficient.

3) LinkedIn.com is a business-oriented networking site that connects potential employees to employers through a unique database.

• Pros:  LinkedIn’s unique networking capabilities can lead to interesting results. Reaching to one employer will lead to another, which leads to another. LinkedIn acts like Facebook for the job search market.
• Cons:  LinkedIn is typically utilized by professionals in any given field, so it is not as welcoming to those looking to break through in a new career.

4) Careerbuilder.com is a job listing database that allows the user to apply for jobs right through its website.

• Pros:  Like monster.com, Careerbuilder details job listings through a search that can be narrowed to suit the job seeker’s needs. The interface is simple, efficient and noteworthy because the site makes job recommendations for the user.
• Cons:  Not much makes career.com stand out from its major competitor Monster. Monster has a higher installed base of recruiters and job listings.

5) Dice.com is a job search hub website that is specificially taliored to jobs in the tech field.  I’m not as familiar with this site as others, but tech-y friends of mine refer to it all the time.

• Pros:  If a user is seeking a job in an information technology field, for instance, this is the best website to start at because it details recent firings at firms, wage standards, advice, as well as job listings.
• Cons:  Dice’s advantages are also its downfall. There is nothing here that stands out from its major competitors other than a focus on tech jobs. Users may want to search other job listings, which they cannot do on Dice.

Although each website provides a service that can benefit job seekers, some are tailored for specific audiences while others have a broader appeal. Job seekers need to figure out what they are searching for before they create an account at any given site. The beauty of the internet is that they can sign up for more than one website.  Personally, I’ve found one job through Careerbuilder, two through Monster and one through LinkedIn.  The other two came from my college and from a cold call I made to a company I really wanted to work for.  These days you’ll hear a lot of disparaging remarks about certain job sites – particularly Monster.com – but I’d still recommend keeping half an eye focused on them.  They still exists because people can, and have, found jobs through them.  Don’t discount any avenue towards finding work.

5 Best Websites for Job Seekers is an original article from the website brip blap.

I’ve known more than one guy with the following life story: working at a corporate job as a middle manager, married with young-ish kids and settled in normal sized house in an acceptable neighborhood. Maybe the kids are really young, even though he’s in his forties; like me, a lot of men (and women) are waiting until later in life to have kids. The house is comfortable but small. The job is OK but if the guy’s honest with himself he knows he’s not likely to soar to the CEO floor in the 15 or so years of working life he has left to him.

So here’s the question: if you make X dollars at age 40, say, and 40% of your income goes to your mortgage that you took out at age 38 – a 30 year fixed mortgage – and you’re expecting a 5% raise every year (if you’re lucky) – when will you reach the finish line?

I know the common perception is that if you own instead of renting there will come a blissful moment when you burn the mortgage documents and skip off into sunset worry-free. In my mind, two things will be happening in 30 years when my mortgage is paid off that will throw a big monkey wrench in those plans.

Property taxes

Perhaps you live in Cheyenne, Wyoming. If so, your property taxes are the lowest (on average) in America, probably around $1000 per year. That’s $83 per month, a doable figure. However, if you live in places like Garden City, New York, your taxes run closer to $9000 per year, or $750 per month. One thing I can guarantee about both Cheyenne and Garden City that holds equally true for both is that 30 years from now, those taxes will be higher. Will they have grown at a rate faster or slower than your annual raises at work? With the strains looming on the US economy – an enormous national debt, rapidly ageing population, and so on, I’d be willing to bet those taxes will eat up a big chunk of your post-retirement income after you’ve paid off the mortgage.

Shoddy construction

On this point I only have my own limited experience to go on, but I remember laughing out loud every time someone asked me in New Jersey if I expected to pay off my mortgage on my townhouse in 30 years. I laughed because I really didn’t expect my townhouse to last 30 years. We moved in while construction was going on in the community, and I saw how these homes were built: pressboard and 2 by 4s. Not stone, not metal. K. Hovnanian put them up fast, using what (ahem) APPEARED to be workers who might not have been entirely legal citizens. These were not structures built to last. These were not cheap places, either; it was a very expensive gated neighborhood with fancy homes (think elevators installed in the homes, riverfront views, etc.) Most American homes will need substantial and continuous maintenance and repair work in 30 years. So think about that mid-70s guy dealing with a crumbling home. Again, no mortgage, maybe, but those bills can mount up quickly.

…the dead end

I still think you ought to own if you want to own, and you ought to work for a corporation if that’s what twirls your pigtails, but this scenario just looks like a dead end to me. This house I’m in now needs to be my last one, or else I’m going to need to move into a place where I can pay off the mortgage substantially sooner than 30 years or I’ll be working to pay the mortgage (and other costs) into my 80s. If you don’t think that’s a dead end, I don’t know what is. I for one don’t want to be struggling away at age 75 to finally pay off my mortgage just to get stuck in a crumbling house paying exorbitant property taxes. Figuring out how to stay out of this dead end ought to be a high priority for anyone who looks to buy a home in their late 30s or later.

the dead end of home ownership is an original article from the website brip blap.

Dr. Drew – the famous radio/TV addiction-specialist doctor of Loveline, Sober House and Celebrity Rehab fame – has a layman’s definition of addiction: it’s any activity that you continue engaging in despite adverse conditions. Hits it right on the head, I think.  If you keep drinking after a DUI, you’re addicted. If you keep doing drugs after going to jail, gambling after your spouse has threatened to leave you, eating sweets after developing diabetes or smoking while you have a cold, you’ve got a problem. You don’t have to experience the adverse condition to be addicted, of course, but the adverse event is the proof, if you will.

I like this definition because you can apply it to many other areas of life. For example, if you keep charging crap on your credit card after you’ve started being charged interest for past purchases, you’re continuing in the face of an obvious adverse event. The interest is a fine, a continuing adverse event that would cause a normal, non-addicted-to-credit person to stop using the product. And many, many people have a far more severe addiction: the addiction to their job.

Just to prove I’m not preaching, I’ll use myself as an example. I have a good job – although, strictly speaking, it’s not a job. I do contract consulting and I am able to charge substantial rates for my work. I flatter myself sometimes that it’s because I’m just that good, but the real reason is that I offer my services to giant corporations for whom my fee is a footnote to a footnote to a rounding error. They don’t mind flinging some cash in my direction to avoid the hassle of hiring a permanent employee to finish their projects; they don’t have to train me, give me benefits and then file endless mounds of paperwork before they let me go.  I can come in, do the work with a minimum of supervision, and leave with no fuss.  So I get paid at a premium.

And because of that I’m addicted to my job. I’ve continued doing it for years, despite many adverse events and conditions, some obvious, some not. The job is stressful due to boredom, physically uncomfortable working conditions, long commutes, inflexible working hours and sometimes unpleasant coworkers (overworked, underpaid, and overstressed themselves). Audit often results in uncovering illegal, unethical or simply incompetent work by other employees. Stress comes easily when others around you are constantly suspicious, frightened or hostile that you are “out to get them.” And despite being freer than the the average employee to direct my work, I still have the adverse work conditions that arise from a direct exchange of my time for the client’s money: my income increases and decreases directly in proportion to the hours I work. Stress if I work too much and stress if I earn too little. Could you pass some cheese, by the way? I need it to go with my whine.

But how many people are addicted to their jobs? I know the argument is always that a job is a job in this economy. Fine. I am sure all of the people who stuck with their “good jobs” at now-shuttered assembly lines throughout Michigan are patting themselves on the back that they stuck with a good job instead of getting out and getting training in a new field before GM and Chrysler imploded. I’m sure that all of the finance guys who were putting in 80 hour weeks at my Wall Street clients are happy they put in all that unpaid time doing a job they hate before being laid off in 2008.  Sometimes clinging to a job to the bitter end is a bad thing, even if it provides some temporary financial security.

It’s not just financial security; that job addiction can impact your long-term health. Many of us are happy to be moderately fit, moderately overweight and to have a job that doesn’t make us throw up before going to work every morning. Whitman’s quote about most men living lives of quiet desperation is not any less true for being massively over-quoted by people like me.  I don’t think any parents dream for their kids to grow up to slog through life delivered in two-week increments when a paycheck arrives.  Nobody wants to have a slow trickle of stress poured down their throat for 40 years.  Your health – physical and mental – will inevitably suffer.  True health is being free of addiction to any behavior that hurts you – be it alcohol, gambling, drugs, violence, TV, a bad job, on and on. It’s not enough to be fit and hate your job, either. It’s not enough to hate your job but endure it simply to make money.  Whether you’re literally prostituting yourself for another puff off the crack pipe or figuratively prostituting yourself to break your spirit for 40 years so you can visit the beach twice a year for a week, you’re a junkie.

photo by Dominic’s pics

job junkie is an original article from the website brip blap.

Quid-pro-quo means “something for something” and in a capitalist society we’re trained to think about this rule governing almost all transactions, both commerce and personal. Just as we expect to hand over $1 for a pack of gum, the guy selling the gum expects to receive that $1. Most people say “I love you” with the expectation that it will be returned with “I love you, too.” Very few transactions escape the quid-pro-quo “law”: maybe doing things for your children, or working overtime for your employer (but even there, you might argue you’re hoping to keep your job in exchange for unpaid work).

But networking isn’t (exactly) like that. You can’t expect someone to return something of equal or greater value every time you help someone through networking. If someone puts you in touch with a new client that generates six figures of income for you, do you owe that person a six-figure client? Do you owe them anything? No, you don’t, but you do owe someone something. At the risk of sounding like I’m using a movie to establish my point, you have to pay it forward.

If all networks operated on a quid-pro-quo basis, many people would find large networks a full-time job. The advantages to helping out newer members of an industry or smaller businesses would be minimal, because you couldn’t count on them to return your help quickly or easily. That’s not how a network should work, though. You’ll often read in career advice books/blogs/columns that you should give help in a network (or on Twitter or whatever the social media darling of the day is) without expecting an automatic equal return of the favor. That’s true to a point: you should give help without expecting a return of the favor from that person, but you do have every right to expect a return of the favor from the network as a whole. It may not be immediate – and it certainly may not be obvious – but that return over time has to occur to make the network worthwhile.

Look at how you help people in your network, be it social, professional, educational – whatever. If you aren’t receiving at least equal value back out of your network compared to what you put in, your network is broken. There will always be those who take more than they give, but on whole the network has to provide more value to you than you put into it. If it doesn’t, get out.

Of course value can be companionship or fun, not something as quantifiable as clients or services. But value has to be there. If you find yourself putting more of yourself into any of your networks – and I’m including ‘social media’ such as Facebook or Twitter as well as traditional networks like professional associations, churches or friends – then maybe you should consider finding a new way to spend your time and effort. If it doesn’t make you money, then it should be fun. If it doesn’t make you money and it’s not fun, why are you doing it? There are many other activities you could be doing that make you money or let you have fun instead. Go do them.

photo by ** Maurice **

networking is not about quid-pro-quo is an original article from the website brip blap.

I see this in my work environment all the time. It’s a tired story, but for the millionth time I’ve been asked how I can stand to be a consultant despite “all the uncertainty.” I had to hold my breath and then point out that I’ve outlasted 50% of the employees in the department I’m in. Employees are uncertain. Full-time employment is rapidly becoming a burden to companies – short-term expert consultants are far more valuable and cost-effective than full-timers. I’m not saying that’s a good thing – but it is what it is. I’m just amazed, again and again, that I have to explain to employees that my job as a contract consultant is just as secure, if not more secure, than theirs is.

A few links from around the web – including congratulations on this one, Blogging for U.S. News & World Report; frequent commenter Syd has a cool new gig going at a “real” media publication – go check it out!

• The Top Five Unexpected Costs of Retirement
• Finding Self Employed Health Insurance
• The Importance of Creating a Savings Account
• Frugal Father’s Day Gifts
• The Importance of Paying Attention to Financial Statements | Million Dollar Journey
• Hire a Contractor vs Do it Yourself
• Our Ooma Phone Six Months Later
• Beyond Homeschooling Your Kids: Radical Unschooling?
• My Experience of Using Twitter to Get Better Customer Service
• I’ve got a dirty mind
• Another Debt Crisis Is Brewing, This One in Student Loans

full-time employment is uncertain, and links is an original article from the website brip blap.