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Common sense

Entrepreneurship: How much time should I spend on…?

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The other day I remarked that contract teaching is by far the most reliable source of income among my various little enterprises.

Editorial work, however, pays better by the hour, is less taxing, and requires little or no driving around.

Blogging is entertaining and a nice sop for one’s ego but does almost nothing for the bottom line.

Thinking about how Tina and I might market and grow our editorial business, it crossed my mind to block out a certain percentage of the day or the week for each activity, thereby allowing me to schedule in a regular slot for marketing and networking. And this led straight to the question of how much is a reasonable amount of time to allot to one’s various money-making activities?

“Reasonable” aside, how much am I already allotting to this, that, and the other exploit? I spend rather more time on the blog than I should, given the tiny amount of revenues it represents. Really, until recently FaM has been the only one of the three enterprises that I’ve worked on every single day.

Exclusive of Social Security, teaching generates about 64% of my income. Editorial accounts for about 26%, and Funny about Money, about 8%. So, it would make sense for about 2/3 of my working time to be spent on teaching, about 1/4 of my time on editing, and less than 1/10 of it on blogging.

Because so much teaching work is done up-front in the form of course preparation that happens before a paycheck comes in (and therefore represents unpaid labor), it’s difficult to estimate how much of my time actually is spent on that endeavor. I spend about 9 hours a week in class, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours in course preparation, and to grade a single set of papers can take anywhere from 6 2/3 hours to 20 hours. One of my courses is online, requiring zero hours of class time. In a 16-week semester, not counting drafts, I collect about 15 sets of papers. So it would make sense to approximate an average of 6 to 8 hours a week grading papers. That’s approximately 15 to 17 hours a week, not counting the extensive course prep time. Figure about 100 hours for that, and you can add another 6.25 hours a week, for about 23 hours a week on teaching.

That’s more than 50% of a normal work week.

Editorial? Depends on what’s in house. On any given day, I can spend anything from 30 minutes to 16 hours on editing. It probably averages around 8 or 10 hours a week.

And as for blogging, I average about two hours a day on it; 14 hours a week.

So we have 23 + 8 + 14 = 45  hours of paying work a week.

If that’s accurate, then right now I’m spending about 51% of my work time on teaching, 17% of it on editorial work, and 31% of it on blogging.

What that adds up to is this: the smallest amount of my working time is spent on the best paying work. The second-largest slab of my time is spent on work that pays, at most, about $20 an hour—probably considerably less. And almost a third of my working hours are spent on an activity that brings in a laughable $200 a month.

Well. There’s a little insight, in the “what’s wrong with this picture” department!

If one is to work smarter instead of harder, it would make sense for the largest portion of working hours to be spent on the highest-earning activity, no? That would be…yes! Editorial.

I think we (by that I mean me and my associate editor) could do far better by targeting commercial enterprises—more plumbing/HVAC contractors!—than by working with individual writers and vanity presses. We need to go out into the world and meet the people who bring you all that obnoxious advertising and who blanket the Internet with “information” about their products and services. One thing that’s clear: business executives expect to pay other businesses a fair rate. Too often, individuals do not.

And if we want to earn more from better-paying work, then we need to devote more time, proportionately, to the better-paying work.

Duh!

I should probably try to up the proportion of working hours spent on The Copyeditor’s Desk from around 15% to 20% to something more like 40% to 50%.

It would be possible to do that simply by setting aside an hour or two a day to work on marketing the little business, and then intensifying that effort during the winter and summer breaks—using time that would be spent on teaching to network and market to businesses. It might require me to spend less time on teaching, and it certainly would cut into the time available for poking at a keyboard to produce blog posts.

At $50 an hour, an editor working 15 billable hours a week should earn about $750 a week, or about $37,500 a year, given a two-week break. Double the number of billable hours for marketing: 30 hours a week, and you come up with exactly the number of hours/week I’m working right now. $37,500 is about $7,950 more than projected earnings from all three enterprises in a typical year. Helle’s belles: I just got a paycheck from the community colleges for two weeks of teaching three sections.

Is that a reasonable allocation of working vs. marketing hours: 66% in peddling the business and 33% in actual work? Various self-styled experts vary, recommending that the small business entrepreneur devote between 20% and 60% of one’s working time to marketing. So if I were spending “only” 60% of my time at hustling business from other businesses, I’d have 18 hours a week to devote to actual paid editorial work, amounting to $900 a week or $45,000 a year. At 20%, I’d be pulling in $1,800 a week, or $90,000 per 50-week year.

Now that’s working smarter!

There’s another model, of course: videlicet, I do most or all of the marketing and Tina does most or all of the editing. In this scenario, I earn a salary from the S-corporation for my services and Tina gets paid an hourly contract rate.

So let’s say I manage to bring in 40 hours a week worth of work. That’s $2,000 a week, or $100,000 in a 50-week year. We split the income 50-50, and we each earn 50 grand a year.

LOL! Not likely that I could corral that much paying work at $50/hour. But anything’s possible. One never knows until one tries, does one?

😉

Car: Budget (and wheels) rescued

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Okay, so we all remember how Chuck, the redoubtable owner of Chuck’s (Awesome, Incredible) Auto Service, opined that the work needed to keep the aged Dog Chariot running would come to some $1,300. And how this led me to speculate that now may be the time to raid my Car Savings and purchase something newer, jazzier, and more fuel-efficient.

Well. Yesterday the Chariot had its second major surgery down at the car hospital, and the mechanics handed over their bill:

$786. And change.

Say what? “Did you include the price for fixing the oil leak last week?”

“Yup. This is the total.”

Good thing I didn’t decide to trade the thing in, eh?

My decision to keep it was based on the theory that $1,300 is a far cry from the $20,000+ a new car will cost. Think of how much farther a cry $786 is!

Awesome! This will mean I just may not have to raid the long-term living expenses fund to pay the bill.

I’ve got about $538 left in the budget, to last 22 days. That’s more than enough if I don’t eat out or diddle away money on clothes or buy booze or indulge in any similar distractions. Somehow I think I can get restrain myself for three weeks. Let’s say I have $200 left from the regular discretionary budget by the end of the June/July cycle: that leaves $586 to scrounge up somewhere.

Conveniently, about $1,700 remains in emergency savings, despite the dental bills, a large chunk of which were paid for out of that cookie jar. Of course I don’t want to draw it down by $600 (give or take). But I certainly can. It gets replenished at the rate of $200 a month, so if no more ridiculous things happen (yeah…), it will be back to normal in three months and looking flush in four or five months.

Meanwhile, the boys down at Chuck’s believe the car will run pretty much trouble-free for another 50,000 miles. One of them thinks it could run well for another 100,000 miles!

I put about 10,000 miles a year on a car. At that rate, the Dogmobile will last another five years.

In five years, I’ll be 71 years old (holy gawd!). If I buy a new car then, it should run at least ten or twelve years, maybe longer. By then, it’ll be time to quit driving.

In other words, if the Dog Chariot runs another five years, the next car really will be the last car I’ll have to buy. Hallelujah!

Not that I’m in any hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil… But among my favorite things to do, buying cars ranks up there with…oh, having a root canal without anaesthetic. I just loathe dealing with car salesmen. Much, much worse than dentists!

And…I have enough savings to buy one, count it, (1), more vehicle in my lifetime. If I buy a car now, it probably won’t last until I’m forced to get off the road. Unless things magically get a lot better (and between you and me, I believe the exact opposite is in the works), I can’t imagine how I could possibly come up with the cash to buy even a second-hand car in 2021.

So, driving the Chariot until it falls apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay is going to work out. Very nicely.

🙂

Image: Colorized car engine. en:User:Amal. Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The Standing Blogger…or, Computer as Idiot Box

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Once again we’re reminded of how unhealthy it is for us to spend most of our waking hours seated at a desk or loafing in our favorite easy chair. The latest report tells us a 14-year study showed women participants who spent six or more hours a day sitting down were 40% more likely to croak over prematurely than women who spent the time standing or moving around; men got lucky this time—the sitting male is only 20% more likely to die.

Six hours? Six hours?? Would that I could get off my duff after only six hours! Dunno about you, but between blogging, editing, and grading papers, I spend eight to ten hours a day, every day—that’s seven days a week—sitting in front of a computer. That would be in normal times; get a crunch, and you can revise that figure upward to twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours. Easily.

We’re told, too, that no amount of exercise reverses the damage done by this habit. Holy mackerel. I’m doomed.

This is an issue that’s been nibbling at the periphery of my consciousness for quite some time. It doesn’t take a controlled scientific study to tell you sitting on your duff all day long ain’t natural and cain’t be good for you. For the privilege of loafing in front of a computer exercising my fingers ten to twenty hours a day, I’m paying in pounds. I’m getting fatter and fatter and fatter.

Nothing very abrupt: just a very, very slow but steady accretion of love handles and belly fat and tight, tight jeans.

When your size 12 jeans are too tight, you know you’ve got a problem…

I keep telling myself I’m going to go on a diet, going to set a timer to go off every twenty minutes and make myself get up and stretch or walk around the house, going to take the dog for 30- to 40-minute walks twice a day, going to bicycle every day, going to swim 20 laps every day… Right. Well. Tomorrow, for sure.

All those promises go into the same trash barrel, along with the New Year’s resolutions and the good intentions.

Killer app?

The problem is the computer. It’s like a magnet. I can’t stay away from it, even when I’m not actually working. First thing in the morning, I stumble across the four feet between the bedroom and the office, turn the damn thing on, read the mail, read the Play-Nooz, write a blog post. Now it’s not the first thing in the morning anymore. And now it’s time to get down to work. Fix breakfast, throw down some food for the dog, and head back to the office to start computing for pay. When the work is done, do I get up and move around? Hell, no! I cruise the Web (StumbleUpon is one of my favorite toys), search my favorite news sites for the day’s most lurid stories, read other people’s blogs, comment on other people’s blogs, play Internet games, glance up at the clock…and it’s 11 p.m.! Haven’t had dinner, haven’t fed the dog, and most certainly have walked neither the dog nor me.

The computer is like the family TV of yore. Television was decidedly addictive. I knew people—many people—who ran it all the time, from the instant they rolled out of bed in the morning to the minute they went to bed. Some friends would have a TV in the bedroom, where they deliberately left it running as a lullaby to send themselves off to sleep—they’d put a timer on the thing so it would go off after they were out.

This, obviously, was not healthy. But the computer is worse, because it’s interactive. When a television is blathering, it’s sending its message at you: the noise and pictures are coming out of the set toward you, and your only task is to change the channel now and again. But, unless you’re running a movie or music, a computer demands that you physically be in front of it. To make it do its hypnotic thing, you have to be there feeding messages into it.

When I was a kid, my family had the television going all the time. It was on while we were cleaning house, on while we were cooking, on while we were washing dishes, on while we were ironing (to this day I can’t iron without a TV program to alleviate the boredom), on while we were eating, on while we were reading the papers, on while we were doing our homework, on while we were sewing or knitting or pasting photos in the family album, on while we were playing, on while we were talking (isn’t that quaint? In the olden days, family members conversed with each other). All of which is to say that the TV did not necessarily interfere with physical activity. In fact most of the time we were moving around the house while the boob tube was blathering on.

Okay. Flash forward to 2011. We now have these fundamental facts:

1. I am not gonna give up my computer habit.
2. None of us can give up our computer habit, because it’s now the basis of our lives and social interaction and, heaven help us, our livelihoods.
3. Whatever is to be done about the health effects has to be simple and easy to work into one’s daily routine…and that, I’m afraid, does not mean setting the kitchen timer to interrupt your train of thought every twenty to sixty minutes.
4. There actually is a very simple solution.

Yes. There is a simple solution: Stay off your duff while you’re in front of the computer!

Where does it say that you have to sit down to use your computer? You don’t. You can work on a computer standing up.

Instrument of death?

Before you fall off your well-worn chair laughing at this concept, consider:

Some years ago, I went through a spate of tenacious back pain. It hurt all the time, and it went on for so long I thought it was going to be a life-long problem that would never go away.

After a year or two of this, a friend who was a licensed massage therapist and yoga instructor started giving yoga classes at my house. The women in her group ranged from early middle age to their late 70s, and one gal was so overweight as to be disabled.  All of us were beginners. So, as you can imagine, the level of the yoga we were doing wasn’t very strenuous.

I found that after a few weeks of this, the back started to feel a little better. If such mild exercise helped with that very stubborn pain, I figured, there must be other things I could do to fix it. Maybe there was something in my life that was contributing to the pain, and maybe I could change it. My attention turned to my daily habits.

And on inspection, what should I find but…yes! A threadbare desk chair. I realized that then, as now, I was spending uncountable numbers of hours in front of the computer, and as I was sitting there, I was slouching grotesquely, perched on my tailbone with my feet up on the desk and my head stuck forward, staring at the screen. Hour after hour after hour.

The execrable posture and the fact that I sat in the same bad-for-you position most of the day had to have some bearing on the back pain. How many chimpanzees spend their waking hours sprawled in a chair with their feet on their desk and all the weight of their bodies bearing down on their tailbones? This could not be natural.

Well, years before, my then-husband had a law associate who dealt with his own chronic back problems by working at a standing desk. The firm special-ordered him a beautiful standing desk—it was a handsome piece of furniture—and he claimed this kept the back pain under control.

Ordering up a standing desk from Thomas Moser was out of the question. I certainly couldn’t afford to spend upwards of $6,500 just to see if it would work. However, gathering dust out in the garage was an old drafting table we’d bought for our son when he was a little boy. A brief inspection revealed that the top, meant to be used at an angle, could be adjusted to lay flat—at a height that would let you stand up to work on a computer.

So I washed it down, dragged the thing back to my office, put it together, set it up, and voilà! a standing computer table!

With my PC and keyboard perched on this thing, I had to stand up to work or play on the computer. A hard wooden stool, bought very cheap at one of those big linen & household goods stores that are now defunct, served as a perch when my feet started to ache.

And it worked! The back pain went away.

Soooo… Would the circulatory damage also go away (or not start) if a person worked standing up at a computer on a high table?

After the back had been feeling better for a good while, the table exited during a redecorating frenzy. The thing took up a lot of room and really made the office ugly and cramped. So I got rid of it.

Now, I guess, I need to get another one. Amazon has a similar model, only with a fake wood plastic veneer instead of a white plastic veneer. As you can see, these things give you a fairly roomy top—leave the pencil holder off, and you get an expansive flat workspace. The little shelf on the bottom is too flimsy to hold reference works and binders, as intended; but it works nicely as a footrest when you’re perched on a stool. Mine didn’t have that back thing, which would get in the way of your feet, but I’ll bet I could find one just like my old drafting table at an art store.

For the nonce, though, the solution is free: it’s called the kitchen counter. I’m working on a Macbook in the kitchen instead of on the aged iMac. In some ways, this is an improvement: the iMac is so old it won’t take Snow Leopard, and so I can’t load Lion into it, either. It runs at the speed of a galloping snail, which is one reason I pass so many hours in front of the computer: much of that time is spent watching the computer grind away…and grinding my teeth as it grinds its silicon innards. The MacBook runs like a rocket, by comparison.

Yesterday I read 60 pages of a new client’s copy—about five or six hours of work—while standing at the kitchen counter.

Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But not only wasn’t it awful, it had these salubrious effects:

• Forthwith I found that because I was standing up, I was inclined to take occasional breaks for short yoga exercises.

• All the time I was standing there, weight was bearing down on the osteopenic bones in a non-impact way. That’s exactly what your skeleton needs as it ages.

• Before long I realized I could practice balance exercises without interfering with work concentration. Get this: today I balanced on one foot for a full minute without teetering, and in fact quit only out of boredom, not because I fell over. This is huge for old ladies. And for men, gentlemen: you can fall and break your hip, too.

• I got through the work faster. A lot faster. Because I wasn’t loafing in a chair, I was less inclined to wander off to cruise the net, so I stayed on task longer. And because this computer runs faster, much less time was wasted on waiting for things to happen.

• The kitchen got cleaned the first thing in the morning—who wants to look at a dirty dish while they’re working?

This could work.

Eventually, if I decide it’s a healthy thing to make permanent, I’ll have to get a new drafting table for the office. The kitchen counter is a little low for comfort, and it’s inconvenient to have the printer in the other room. For the moment, though, setting the MacBook’s cardboard carrying box under it holds it at the right height.

I think if I’m going to shove a tall table in the office, I’d like to get rid of the old furniture, replace the clunky old desk with a couple of lateral files, and go considerably minimalist. Less junk is better.

As less sitting is better.

iPad: Probably Not Now…

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Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland on a first-generation iPad. Evan-Amos. Public domain.
Down the rabbit hole on an iPad

This morning we learn that Google has signed up the British Library to its digitization project: holdings published between 1700 and 1870 will be added to the 13 million books Google has already scanned. Much of this stuff is available free on the iPad.

{sigh} I had decided to reward myself for the crushing amount of work I just ground through by having The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., buy me an iPad. It would be handy for editorial and teaching work (to say nothing of serving as an incredible toy!), and I figured CED could afford the $25/month ATT connection. And with Skype or some such on it, the thing would function as a cell phone, too.

But when I went over to the Apple store on Saturday, they didn’t have the model I want, and their manager seemed less than enthusiastic about selling one to me. Basically he said that you have to keep coming back to the store to see if they have the desired iPad in—often to nail what you want, you have to go back several times a day! He suggested ordering it online.

Well. I don’t want to order it online. I want to see what I’m getting and ask questions of real human beings and read the paperwork before I walk off with it.

So, I guess I don’t really need that thing. I’ve managed to stumble through 66 years without it, and I expect I’ll live another 20 or 30 years without it.

The interruption in the drive to buy an iPad was just enough to raise the question: Is this a need or a want? And more to the point, can CED really afford the thing?

Answer to the first question: want.

Answer to the second: apparently not.

The delay in gratifying that want gave me time to reconsider the S-corp’s performance. And I see that because Adsense has been underperforming over the past few months, CE Desk is just barely earning enough to pay my sidekicks and cover the operating costs I’ve recently shifted onto its books.

Fortunately, a couple of new clients recently appeared at the door. And we’re supposed to start a big project management account in July. If we perform decently on that, there’s a good shot the project management thing will develop into steady, long-term work.

Tina is extremely good at project management—that is, as a matter of fact, what she does on her day job. She’s so good at it that the Chinese government is going to keep her on contract as managing editor of the huge international business management journal she runs through the Great Desert University, even after the GDU gives her its second shafting (they’re laying her off again). So, I’m expecting that she will take over management of this huge client and farm out the grunt work to me and our other sidekick. But…it could be awhile before we see actual work and pay come in from this enterprise.

At any rate, when you run a business you have to apply the same frugalist principles as you do in operating your personal finances. To wit: always ask if it’s a need or a want!

But darn. I really did want that gadget. Way to market a product, Apple!

We’ll revisit this question later in the year, when we see how 2011 shakes out. Which leads us to another rule in common between business and personal finance: never bet on the come. 😉

Image: Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland on a first-generation iPad.
Evan-Amos. Public domain.

Tardy Roundup: Dishwash detergent edition

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Finally am climbing out from under the mountain of work. Monday the last of the five courses I’ve redesigned and rewritten went up onto their new sites. Yesterday I gave myself a vacation day. Soooo…. More work has already started to accrete: Haven’t written the newsletter that was supposed to have been done last week; haven’t got a single post ahead and so am late with today’s post.

Yea, verily. It’s quarter after 11 and I haven’t done anything even vaguely resembling paying work. Whyyyy? Because I spent half the morning scouring gray film off my glasses and stainless cookware, that’s why.

And why would that be? Because dishwasher detergent no longer works, thanks to the infinite wisdom of the Green Shirts and their lobbyists. As you know, last year the government mandated that detergent manufacturers remove phosphorus, the ingredient that softens water and makes dishwasher detergent function in hard-water areas. In going through my stockpile, I broke into a new container of Finish (phosphorus-free) Powerball tabs, to ill effect. First thing I noticed was that the price hasn’t changed but the package size has: 20 fewer packets. That’s 16% less product for the same or more money. (But don’t worry, folks, be happy: there’s no inflation!) Second thing, of course, is that the stuff doesn’t get the dishes clean. However, it does coat them with a sticky film of whitish-gray gunk that has to be scrubbed off with Barkeeper’s Helper.

To get that $500 appliance sitting under your kitchen counter to do something useful now, you can try one of four things:

• Add a teaspoon of TSP (available at paint stores and some hardware stores—read the label and be sure to get the real thing, not “substitute”) to each washload; or
• Buy commercial dishwasher detergent, which thanks to the wisdom of the restaurant and hotel industries and their lobbyists, was exempted from the new law; or
• Use the dishwasher as a giant dish rack to drain the dishes you now have to wash by hand; or
• Replace the dishwasher with a wine cooler or a new under-counter cabinet.

Me, I’m opting for the commercial dishwasher detergent, which can be found in restaurant and janitorial supply houses or through an online retailer. Yeah, I know: shameful unregenerate environment-wrecking earth-killing megabitch! But…before you hurl that epithet, consider: in these parts sewer water is not returned to rivers and lakes (we don’t even have any rivers or lakes anymore). It’s filtered, which removes most of the phosphorus, and then it’s used to irrigate golf courses, of which we have more, per capita, than any other state in the nation. There, what little remains of the phosphorus is consumed by the grass: it’s a fertilizer.

Well. That project done, that issue resolved, it’s on to more interesting things. To wit: what’s been going on in the blogosphere while I’ve been wandering around the seventh level of Hades?

I got quite a boot out of Crystal’s daily and weekly blogging checklists, over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff. Oh, to be young and full of energy again! 😉 Seriously, if I would get my act that much together, I’d spend a lot less time spinning my wheels.

Frugal Scholar has published SO many nice posts lately, it’s hard to pick one out. Blogger won’t let me comment on that site anymore—it’s decided I have to sign up first for my own Google Blogger site, for which I have no use and which I ain’t a-gunna do. So about all I can manage is to tell you from here how great some of these stories are. Check out her interesting observation that one may not need to shred documents after all. (But, by way of comment, Frugal: one day my neighbor walked into the alley to dump her trash and found a man sitting on the ground next to our four-house dumpster going through the paper he’d pulled out of there.) Also don’t miss Frugal’s post on frugality and aesthetics, which contains a link to some very inspirational decorating images.

Had to forward Revanche’s post about her new doggle to M’hijito, whose puppy was born just a few days ago. Heh heh heh heh…  As Gai Shan Life fans know, Revanche and her PiC have been contemplating their coming wedding, which has led her to some fairly amazing ruminations. How many of us can lean back and murmur, smugly, Thank God we’ll never have to go through that again?

Over at My Journey to Millions, Evan has found a site that will disgorge a free credit score for you. As you’ll recall, I recently ordered up credit reports from Annual Credit Report.com, but credit bureaus do not normally share your actual credit score without charging a fee. There’s a sales pitch at the site Evan discovered, but as he explains, it’s easy to avoid if you know about it.

Money Beagle, who apparently is still biding his time until Mrs. Beagle delivers the latest Beaglet, tells a very funny story on himself (uhm…funny if you enjoy watching other people’s Laurel & Hardy antics).

OMG! Hang onto your hats, folks, and check out the entire freaking wardrobe Mrs. Accountability scored for under twenty bucks! Not only did she practically steal the stuff, the clothes are cute and will look great on her.

Nicole and Maggie… Theirs is one of my fave blogs, which I’ve finally, just this minute, gotten around to adding to Funny’s blogroll. This post from Grumpy Rumblings felt particularly apposite this week, after I’d spent a fair amount of time listening to both KJG and La Maya hold forth about the peculiarities of their extended families.

Over at The Digerati Life, Silicon Valley Blogger has been posting a lot of nice pragmatic stuff. But in amongst the good advice, what should pop up but one of those ruminations that I tend to favor, a piece by writer Jacques Sprenger on money and couples relationships.

Y’know, I doubt if any living, breathing blogger can crank more posts in a single day than Julia at Bargain Babe. Every day, it’s deals deals deals—you really need to subscribe so you can keep your eye on this site. Today there’s a cookbook giveaway, and then leads to fistfuls of grocery coupons and free seeds and paw cleaner…paw cleaner? Go there, get that.

Check out this fast but interesting post on the psychology of brokitude, over at Money Crush. As much is not said here as is said…and that’s what makes it intriguing.

Microfibers, microfibers, OMG microfibers! At Ultimate Money Blog, Mrs. Money does a dance to spring microfiber cloths and asks readers for creative ideas on using the things.

So it goes. And now I must excuse myself to write a very, very, very overdue newsletter.

Credit Report Check

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If you don’t already know it, take note: Going online to get annual credit reports is amazingly easy and fast.

The site to visit is Annual Credit Report.com, because it does not try to sign you up for any gimmicks or paid recurring reports. You get what you order here, with no hassles and no sales pitches.

You can order reports from any or all of the three major credit bureaus: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. They don’t give you your credit rating (though you can purchase it for a nominal fee), but they do signal any problems.

Because each credit bureau is required to provide one free credit report per year to consumers, it’s a good idea to set up a calendar reminder to hit one bureau every three months, giving you an ongoing record instead of one annual picture.

However, each bureau is a little different; they don’t all have identical data. I was concerned enough about the late, great Macy’s fiasco that I wanted to be sure no black blot was lurking on my records, especially since one’s car and homeowner’s insurance rates can be affected by negative credit reports. If I decide to buy a car, even though I pay in cash I don’t need whatever extra hassles or charges might ensue from any negative items, so I decided to order all three reports this time.

TransUnion was the only bureau that disgorged a detailed report for me. Equifax and Experian produced one-page summaries, and I couldn’t see any way to get in and see a full report. The summaries, though, sufficed, because they both reported no negative items.

At any rate, it’s extremely easy. Where in the past you had to fill out three separate online forms and enter a lot of data, now you fill out one form at Annual Credit Report.com plus answers to a few identifying questions at each site, and voilà!

It’s worth your time to do it.