Turning what you love to do into a second income stream
Well, no: not THAT what you love to do!
My late friend Jerri, about whose shopping hobby you read recently, had an incredible eye for clothing. She owned racks and racks of really cute clothing, much of it designer-label and most of it purchased on sale. She absolutely loved to shop, and she was very good at it.
Right now I have on a beautiful silk shirt that her daughter gave me. It’s a couple of sizes too large—Jerri was a bit portly in her old age—but worn over a coordinating shirt, it works to create an awesome, arty-looking tunic. The effect is really nifty.
If I had known that Jerri could do this—find amazingly cute clothing in stores where I never shop at prices I never manage to extract from retailers—I would cheerfully have paid her to help me shop.
I’m no good at shopping. When I go into a clothing store, what I see is a jillion square feet of look-alike clothing that
a. doesn’t fit me;
b. by and large is ugly;
c. looks like it was designed for or by a teenaged hooker; and
d. is hugely overpriced.
It’s a real struggle to force myself to paw through rack after rack after endless rack of this stuff searching for something that fits, that looks OK on me, and that I can afford. To me, shopping isn’t fun; it’s a pain in the tuchus.
Jerri’s shape was even less like a 17-year-old babe’s than mine is, and she managed to find a boutique’s worth of clothing that looked good on her. Two or three sizes smaller, and it all would have looked good on me, too. She had a real skill. IMHO, it was a salable skill.
I know I’m far from the only woman who views shopping for clothes as an unpleasant chore—several of my friends have expressed the same sentiment, including one with a real flair for style. It seems to me that Jerri could have made herself a nice sidestream income by hiring out as…what? A shopping coach! She could have indulged her joy in shopping by selling her time as a shopping consultant to women who don’t enjoy searching for that one thing that works among the acres of chaff. Because she had a wonderful and funny personality, she could make a shopping trudge into a fun outing. I’ll bet she could have found enough women who would have paid her to help them buy clothing to supplement her Walmart salary pretty handsomely.
On the other hand…
Some years ago a friend of mine was left penniless during a divorce. Literally, for two or three weeks she ate nothing but zucchini out of a backyard garden, while she used the few dollars she had to feed her two small children. She let the dog run loose to forage out of the neighbors’ garbage cans. She took a miserable job waiting tables, an occupation for which she was decidedly not suited—this was in the days when coffeeshop owners felt free to order their waitresses to wear skimpy costumes and bone-crushing shoes (sex sells hamburgers, too), and so you can imagine what the job was like.
This friend had studied photography on the college level for several years and had quite a gift for it. She had an acquaintance who owned a major portrait studio in the city. I asked her why she didn’t try to get a job there or at least see if this person could help her get in with some other studio.
She said she didn’t want to spoil something that she loved to do by having to make a living at it. Since she didn’t last long at waitressing, apparently she felt strongly enough about this that she was willing to go hungry rather than turn a pleasurable pursuit to profit.
What say you? Given that it’s a good idea to establish more than one stream of income, is turning a hobby into an income-generating occupation out of bounds? Would you convert your favorite pastime into paying work?[polldaddy poll=1169792]
‘Nother moment of fame
Last week Funny’s hint on how to get better, cheaper hamburger made the Money Hacks Carnival, which went live at Steadfast Finances with an eye-catching ferris-wheel photo. For some reason this is a carnival I tend to overlook, possibly because it doesn’t go up on the same schedule as my usual haunts. And it shouldn’t be missed: this week, for example, the carnival gathers quite a few interesting and useful posts.
Check out the Online Savings Blog, where Fred Siegmund has the temerity to suggest that teachers should be paid fairly, and that to get there we need to update the FLSA. Passive Family Income reports the growth of mini-Hoovervilles in the woods near his home; reminds me of the clusters of six to ten homeless people I’ve seen camping together along the Arizona Canal. Over at Financial Wellness Project, FWP figures ways to reduce the cost of vehicle insurance (he drives a motorcycle, but most of these would apply to your car or truck). And at Bible Money Matters, Peter gets a conversation going about the advisability of borrowing against your 401(k).
Dow up, in spite of it all
Well, folks, I tried to bring down the world’s economy by staying home on Black Friday, and it didn’t work: by golly, the Dow had its best week since 1932. Apparently it’s not necessary for us all to keep spending ourselves into bankruptcy to keep this country going.
Not that some didn’t have their hearts in it. In Palm Desert, enthusiastic shoppers got excited enough to take a few pot shots at each other, killing two. Even more amazingly, at a Long Island Walmart happy consumers trampled an employee to death in their stampeding ecstasy over the bargains to be had inside the store. Wow! What a country.
Now I enjoy the consumer society as much as the next person. What could be better than being able to buy every electronic toy, every glad rag, every ludicrously sweet and gummy riff on a cup of coffee the human mind can conceive in every city, town, and wide spot in the road? And yeah, I know it’s unAmerican to resist (not to say futile). But here’s my problem with consumerism as the driving force of an economy:
It’s fake.
It doesn’t DO anything. It’s hollow. It’s empty. It’s a STIFF PARROT. Dependence on buying as a major engine—possibly the main engine—in our country’s economy means that we depend on hot air. On nothing. Why? Because we’re producing less and less. Try to buy something that’s made in America—go ahead: try to find a baby’s crib manufactured in this country. Read the label on a package of hamburger: the mashed meat you’re buying came from Mexico and Canada, with maybe a little coming from the U.S. Americans aren’t doing anything productive.
Oh, you say: but we’re all doing brain work. That’s why we need such a highly educated workforce.
Ever notice how many young people with solid degrees from excellent universities are working in call centers or selling books and gewgaws at a Barnes & Noble?Ever actually looked at what goes on in high-rise office buildings? Not much.Most of the activity entails pushing paper, whether physically or electronically. Have we counted lately how many of our people spend their working lives answering telephones or pushing papers? Or selling stuff, most of it imported? Few of these jobs are highly paid, because few of them deserve to be highly paid. Because they produce nothing.
As the real estate bubble was blowing up, I recall wondering who all those houses were being sold to, and how. Most of the people buying new Styrofoam-and-plaster houses were already living in the Valley, in perfectly fine block homes in perfectly fine neighborhoods. They were being induced to take on huge mortgages to move (about once every three years, at one point) into cheaply built structures in elbow-to-elbow tracts. This was called “development.” Basically it was a form of churning. Nothing of much value was being built, and nothing that made our city better was happening.
Go out to Scottsdale, Arizona, and you’ll see mile on mile on mile of expensive homes, well beyond the means of a family with one middle-class earner and well beyond those of a family with two middle-class earners. Where, I used to wonder, was all that money coming from? The answer, as we all know now, was nowhere: it was make-believe money.
It was fake. Fake money generated through bad lending practices and paid for, all too often, with jobs that produce nothing.
We need to get back to making things. That cheap labor overseas to which we’ve outsourced our productivity is undermining our economy in more ways than simply making well paid blue-collar jobs extinct. It has sapped the intrinsic value of what we do for a living, and in doing so, it saps an important part of our people’s work ethic and, ultimately, our country’s ability to survive. Americans expect to earn more than slave wages for factory work. And a population that earns more is in a position to pay more. Over time, the off-shoring of productivity and the influx of cheap goods have meant that our real wages have dropped, because employers do not have to pay us as much to keep us happy (in a superficial way) and because the unions that used to keep our wages up have been mothballed. Prices have had to come down not because stuff is produced more cheaply overseas but because American workers couldn’t afford the products if they were manufactured by people who earned a fair wage.
America’s economy needs to be rebuilt. We need to structure our economy on production, not on paper-pushing, circularity, and sales commissions.
Black Friday: To plunge into the maelstrom or not to plunge?
There are a bunch of things I’ve been thinking that I’d like to get, whether or not I’m laid off next month. It’s eleven o’clock in the morning; the mobs (if any) will be in full force at the stores by now. Do I want to go out and see if I can get stuff at a discount?
Lemme think… Here are the items I imagine I need:
- A small HDTV-ready television to sit on top of the refrigerator, to replace the tiny portable I have up there that’s too old to make the conversion.
- A pair of nightstands large enough to accommodate a book and a glass of water without pushing the lamp off onto the floor.
- A small occasional table for the living room, to replace a table that’s pretty much worn out.
- A Macintosh laptop
- Apple’s Airport gadget
Do I really WANT to run out and search for these things? Let us consider…
A small HDTV television
Televisions are stupidly overpriced these days. It’s unlikely that I can touch what ought to be a $60 gadget for much less than $350. Do I really need to spend $350 to watch the PBS NewsHour while I’m fixing dinner?
Verdict: Naaahhhh! I’ll miss Jim Lehrer come February, but there’s a perfectly fine radio in that room. I can turn on NPR News instead. Also, with the HD service, you can catch the NewsHour later in the evening on one of KAET’s three HD stations. It’s not like there’s anything else to watch during prime time, most evenings.
A pair of nightstands
Hmm. I would like a better pair of nightstands. The ones I have won’t accommodate much more than a lamp. The phone has to sit on the nightstand that’s on the other side of the bed from where I normally sleep. With Cassie having taken up residence on the bed, there’s now a dog as well as a broad expanse of mattress and a tangle of bedding between me and the telephone. In an emergency, climbing out of the nest and over the dog to dial 9-1-1 in the dark could pose a problem. Plus I hate it that I have to throw books and magazines on the floor under the bed when I’m ready to go to sleep, and that I have to be e-x-t-r-e-e-e-m-e-l-y careful not to bump a glass of water onto the floor if I have the temerity to bring such a thing into the bedroom.
The only pieces I’ve seen that appeal and that are anywhere near my price range are at Ethan Allen. Three hundred fifty bucks is on the high side of the price range, and when you consider that I need two of them, I’d have to get a significant discount to afford them. On the other hand, such a discount might be available today.
But…just to find out whether a discount is available, I’d have to consume a quarter tank of gas traipsing to Scottsdale through murderous traffic and then fight for a place to park. Ugh. This is not a pleasing prospect. I’m not sure it’s worth the effort. I have a perfectly fine pair of nightstands that will do. I just need to quit putting a glass of water on the nightstand and quit complaining about having to store reading material on the floor.
Verdict: probably nix
A small occasional table
Pier One apparently has been having trouble moving the junk off its floors. Those stores have sales all the time, and some of their stuff is sorta cool. I’ll bet I could get something comparable to the cheap Indian inlaid table my father rescued off the docks in Ras Tanura back in the 1950s and preserved for the ages in polyurethane.
On the other hand, probably I could spiff up the Indian table with the application of some cleanser, a bit of steel wool, and another coat of polyurethane.
Verdict: Go buy some mineral spirits, a small can of polyurethane, and a paint brush.
A Macintosh laptop
At first blush, the comment on that proposition is har har har har har!
On the other hand… I’ve been getting some ominous error messages from the iMac—yesterday even M’hijito couldn’t figure out what its problem was—and my Quicken records have been converted to Mac format and can’t be unconverted. If I’m to keep my Quicken archives with any continuity, I’ll have to stay with Apple.
On the other other hand, I could start anew on January 1 with a much, much cheaper PC. The MacEmperor, after all, has few if any clothes. Both platforms have their shortcomings and their annoyances. It’s easy to store all of one’s Quicken files in PDF format, so at least I’d have records in case of an audit.
But on the other hand, Windows is annoying as hell; Dell’s customer service varies from nonexistent to excruciating; and all the antivirus, antimalware, and firewall software clogs the operating system to the point where it barely runs. Ugh. Do I really want to get another one of those things?
Verdict: If I don’t buy any tables I could probably afford a small Mac laptop. Maybe.
Apple Airport
Do I need this?
No
Do I want it?
Yesh.
Can I afford it?
Sure.
Verdict: Probably. Maybe. Get this. Yeah. Get this.
Well, you can be sure that the Apple Store won’t be offering any discounts. They never do…’cause they don’t have to. So there’s no hurry to race out and get these highly optional pieces of gear.
Think I’ll stay off the streets today. It’s time to do the laundry, anyway.
Moral of the story: Weigh each purchase before running out to buy it on sale. You may save yourself not just the mark-down, but the whole marked-down price. 
How to make real cranberry sauce
Good TG dinner. Guest asked me for a recipe for the cranberry sauce we served. Videlicet:
You need:
1 bag of fresh cranberries
1 cup sugar
1 cup water
1 orange
1/2 stick cinnamon or a few twists of a cinnamon grinder, or about 1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
a few twists of a nutmeg grinder, or about 1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
saucepan
sharp paring knife or vegetable peeler
slotted spoon
small serving dish
Using a sharp knife or vegetable peeler, peel the zest off an orange. Cut the orange in half.
Combine the sugar and water in the saucepan and bring to a boil. Allow to cook down about 1/4. Add the cranberries, orange zest, and spices. Bring back to the boil and then turn down to medium heat. Cook gently until the berries burst. With the slotted spoon, lift the berries out of the syrup and place in a dish. Pick out and discard the cinnamon stick and the orange zest (actually, this makes a candied orange zest that can be eaten or chopped finely and served over the berries or over ice cream).
Remove the seeds from the orange and squeeze the juice into the remaining syrup. Reduce (boil down) the syrup by about 1/3 to 1/2. Pour this over the berries. Cover and chill.
Watch out for “sales” that aren’t
A local TV station reports that alleged markdowns at a Linens & Things going-out-of-business sale are anything but.
Our Intrepid Reporter took a close look at the price tags and discovered some showed X-ed out prices that were lower than the “sale” price. Other items had layers of price tags, through which an archaeological dig showed prior lower asking prices. An item advertised as 30% off had been marked up more than 40%, so that the “sale” price was more than the former sticker price.
Be careful out there.
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