Round-ups

Commenting on the post about the costs and benefits of joining a fitness club, TB of Blue Collar Workman remarked humorously that maybe I could become a blue-collar worker, which certainly would run the fat off quick enough.

LOL! I wish.

Actually, on all those dead-end mornings during all those dead-end years of driving through the concrete ditch between here and the Great Desert University, I used to daydream about how I wished I could make a living with some light craft. No, not like what TB does—I’m not and never have been up for hauling busted trees and repairing busted plumbing. What I’d really like to do is make something beautiful—jewelry, maybe—that people would buy.

Preferably for a fair amount of cash. 😉

Therein lies the difference between teaching and working on a magazine’s staff. Both are underpaid jobs. But with publication work, you end up with a physical product that you can hold in your hand and say, I made that. With teaching, you rarely have anything to show for your work. Occasionally a student will resurface, years after you’ve forgotten the person’s name, and tell you how brilliant you were and how you changed her life. But usually they don’t…usually there’s no feedback at all. Just hard work with little reward and less pay.

At any rate, TB’s remark brought to mind how much I would love to go to one of the “Customer in Residence” workshops at the Thos. Moser factory, where they build beautiful, zen-like pieces of hand-crafted furniture. Much like the furniture prices, the cost for a workshop is outrageous,  ($3,500 for one person, plus the bracing retail price of whatever you build), but you get to spend a week learning how to make those beautiful and functional objects.

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a (highly marketable) craft that you could do out of a studio or workshop on your property nestled in some staggeringly beautiful rural location?

I covet Thos. Moser furniture. Can’t afford it, but covet it dearly. Right now I crave a Newport chair to replace my threadbare office chair. How beautiful is this?

It’s on sale right now for a mere $975. Plus shipping. Hey! It’s a $250 saving.

Hm. Where to come up with $975 plus another two or three hundred bucks to ship it… Maybe I could kidnap one of the neighbors?

Of course, it’s not very practical in an office. I roll around from computer table to file drawers to bookcase and back, all day  long. Interestingly, Moser has an office chair version of that little beauty:

Even if I could afford the modest $1,625 price, to my mind the caster arrangement really uglies it up. So does the black seatpad, which will set you back another $150.

Oh well. Too late now. Too late ever to buy a gorgeous Thos. Moser chair. Too late to master a craft and build it into a paying enterprise.

What’s Going On in the Rest of the World?

Want to start a business? Lazy Man and Money has an incredible round-up of resources, including a link to something called Kickstarter, best described as crowd-sourced patronage.

Just when you think your costs are blinding, you learn what it costs to live somewhere else. Faced with astonishing homeowner’s insurance bills and annoying exclusions, Planting Our Pennies decides to self-insure an exterior structure vulnerable to storm damage.

Donna Freedman has been junketing in New York, and as she often does, posting entertaining despatches at Surviving and Thriving. This woman would make a great foreign correspondent…

Hmmmm…. Did you know Budgeting in the Fun Stuff has a bunch of co-owned sites as part of the Blogging Empire? Interesting. Check them out at her weekly round-up, and while you’re there, don’t forget to buy her book.

Nicole&Maggie prepare for the blessed event by cooking up interview questions for the proposed new mother’s helper.  Heh heh heh…one of the charms of old age is being able to say, “Ahhh…I’ll never have to do that again!” 😀

Abigail at I Pick Up Pennies plans a fun birthday celebration, largely financed by Groupon.

At Money Beagle, the Beagle couple have a cleaning frenzy. Wow! Would that I had so much energy. And of course, would that the temperature in the garage were somewhat lower than 110 degrees…

Looks like all that junk food populating the largest part of our supermarket shelves is about to get a lot more expensive as the price of high-fructose corn syrup rises. 101 Centavos entertainingly contemplates the (dis)glories of speculating in corn.

Revanche and PiC took an excursion to Half-Moon Bay. So, so lovely and relaxing. Wonder if the proceeds from kidnapping a neighbor would set me up in business there after the working vacation at the Thos. Moser factory….

Frugal Scholar urges shopping at stores that stand behind their products with unconditional guarantees to accept returns.

At Blue Collar Workman, what goes around comes around. Gratifyingly.

Down under in Auckland, eemusings asks readers to share their first job stories.

Welp, it’s time for me to have my first breakfast of the day. And so…to the kitchen. Happy weekend everyone!

What a depressing week. Yet another madman goes off the deep end; the President of the United States calls for “justice” and all the anti-gun nuts rattle their tambourines again, but not a soul remarks that we need a medical system that includes mental health care and that has the capacity to hospitalize and treat dangerous lunatics. Elsewhere, the Syrians stay busy killing each other, the Arab extremists have reached out to Bulgaria to kill Jewish tourists (or so we’re told…), and a U.S. ambassador opines that Israel has the right to defend itself, presumably countenancing more retaliation. Meanwhile, at least one of the girls who disappeared last week in Iowa is the child of a meth dealer. Lovely.

On the local level, I bombed the interview to get my little enterprise into the two year AAAME program yesterday. Failed to make them understand what we do and why it should matter and ended up with one of them remarking that my business is not a business but a hobby. Right. I get up at 4:30 in the morning six or seven days a week and work all the way through to 10 o’clock at night for a “hobby.”

Oh well. I guess we’ll just have to figure out how to make the thing work on our own.

As a practical matter, we’ve been doing pretty well over the past couple of months. Our biggest challenge now is marketing—getting desirable work to come in steadily—and clearly in that department the issue is to make other businesses understand how much time we can save them, and how having professionals prepare their major documents improves over giving the job to some admin or to a committee of employees who are already fully occupied with the the tasks that fit their own job descriptions.

So…is anything less depressing going on in the world? Surely there must be something…

Donna Freedman is seeking votes for not one but two of her excellent articles in the Financial Olympics. She explains how to cast your vote. If you like Donna’s writing as much as I do, you should follow the links in at her post and vote for her.

A while back, Neale Frankle posted a nice piece titled “Why You Are Broke: Top Ten Reasons.” Some of these are pretty insightful: among them, marrying the wrong person and divorcing. To which I say yup, divorce’ll do it to you! If I had stayed put, I’d still be living with a man whose remarks about me behind my back were so mean-minded one of his acquaintances told me he would have no more to do with the man. But I wouldn’t be trying to get by on $25,000 a year (at best), either: by now he’s making almost three hundred grand.

There’s a very interesting discussion at Invest It Wisely: three articles positing that you could live to 100 and therefore should have an investment portfolio to keep you going that long. The last of these contains links to the first two. It’s an intelligent—and, one might add, unusually conservative—approach to retirement saving and drawdowns.

Nicole&Maggie, nearing Due Day, report that it’s mighty nice to have money to throw at a problem…and how they got to that point.

Teacher Man reflects, with dark humor, on the profitability (for him) of other people’s stupidity when it comes to credit cards.

Over at Brip-Blap, Steve contemplates the things that interfere with creativity.

Eemusings posted photos of the Sydney trip this week. Gosh!

TB has an encounter with one of the Dumb and the Feckless who populate our planet. {sigh} Where do they all come from?…

Good news at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff: Mr. & Mrs. BFS can now actually SEE the outline of their new house! Quite the palace, eh?

Evan explains what is meant by “invoice factoring” and how an entrepreneur can use it to raise cash without going into debt.

Which brings us back to one of the topics I began with and reminds me I am wayyy too depressed to keep writing this morning. And so, to breakfast…

Once again, here we are in the dead of July and it’s cool enough to shut off the A.C.! A miracle! Well…a fairly steamy miracle for most of the day. A fairly flamboyant rain storm passed to the south of us—probably dropped a fair amount of rain and hail on Mr. and Mrs. Accountability, who live off in that direction. All day long the rain was trying to work itself up into a storm, despite 90-degree temperatures. By midafternoon the air was so wet it felt like it was going to start raining inside the house!

Each day I’ve been trying to to an hour or so of physical work in the yard. One has to get started very, very early to pull that off without expiring of heat stroke, so it was up at 5:30 to start pruning the Texas sage whose limbs have grown down into the pool.

It’s been slowly going off the deep end (heh! literally), but I’ve let it grow because it’s kind of pretty, with its blossom-laden branches curving into the water. But as a practical matter, it’s not good for the pool water. So it was past time to trim it up.

And that was quite a job. The problem was, I couldn’t reach all its branches from the deck. To get the whole job done, I had to get into the pool with the big nippers in hand and cut limbs from beneath…a trick when your feet don’t reach the bottom and you can’t get any purchase.

Cut out a wheelbarrow full of feral growth. I was worried that it would wreck the plant, but as it developed, the Texas sage has a pretty branch structure that was now visible once all the overgrowth and deadwood were gone. It actually turned out looking pretty good.

Later in the day, I came across this interesting post at Forbes, suggesting that one can assess (practically at a glance) whether a  new business enterprise will succeed. So far we’re scoring four out of five, and the fifth sign of success is one we’re definitely working on.

Speaking of success, over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal has published her first e-book, one with a tantalizing title: How I Make Money Blogging. Buy it here, and maybe you, too, can quit your day job! 😉

Abstract Aucklander’s eemusings is back from Sydney and working so hard she hasn’t had enough time to take a deep breath.

Evan ruminates on getting started early on building a retirement income stream. Now all we need to do is get all the other 20- and 30-somethings in America to plug into that idea!

Speaking of working your tuchus off, TB has been in the thick of the storm cleanup, hauling trees and dodging electric lines in 100-degree heat. I expect we’ll be seeing guys doing the same here tomorrow: a freeway flooded, cars were washed off roads, and a gigantic mess was had by all.

Money Beagle’s toddler has developed a passion to strike fear into a frugal parent’s heart!

Have you noticed that more and more young people seem to be suffering from shingles? A vaccine exists—it’s not guaranteed to prevent the excruciating resurgence of childhood chickenpox, but they say it does at least make for a milder case and faster recovery. Poor Girl Eats Well describes the effects of this ailment in vivid detail, and then she points out that the FDA has approved the shot only for people over 55. That’s something that needs to change.

On that note, it’s time to move along.

 

Money Beagle holds forth on life insurance. It’s an interesting post and something to think about, especially if you have a young family, a disabled child who will need care through adulthood, or a spouse whose earning power would not suffice to pay the mortgage or maintain a comfortable lifestyle.

And as if by mental telepathy, SVB discusses whole and term life insurance at The Digerati Life.

At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche takes up the ongoing national conversation on women, the workplace, and the quality of women’s lives. This subject has been in the national media for the past few weeks, with articles in the Atlantic and the New York Times dominating the stage. Revanche’s thoughtful post reflects not only on the general state of affairs but on her own growing sense of frustration and burn-out…and she clearly hits a nerve with the many 20- and 30-something professionals among her readers.

At Prairie Ecothrifter, staff writer “Happy Homeowner” addresses the same issue with advice on managing “the third shift.”

Frugal Scholar is vacating, more or less, but still taking advantage of the sales, which wax large over the summer. The links in this post, BTW, take you to places to die for.

Speaking of vacations, eemusings is on the wing from Auckland to another destination that will make you green with envy.

Five Cent Nickel does a nice analysis comparing the costs of driving and flying to your vacation destination.

Don’t know whether the Centavos are back from Italy yet; last I heard, 101 Centavos was speculating on why Europeans are so much thinner than Americans.

Crystal and Mr. BFS, as you may know, are having a brand-new home built. And over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, they’re becoming acquainted with the concept of “contractor standard time.”

Over at Blue Collar Workman, TB is thinking about starting his own business. I think a lot of skilled craftsmen do OK on their own, if they can master the art of finding customers.

Free Money Finance posts an interesting cautionary tale about life in the social media.

In the runaround department, nicoleandmaggie received a masterful one from Equifax the other day.

Speaking of rants, Evan has some great fun with his latest moment of bemused outrage over at My Journey to Millions.

At Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability reflects on her youngest son’s recent flight from the coop.

Manwhile, Donna Freedman has returned to her roost, but she’s still very much in motion.

And on that note, I need to get into motion myself. Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

Image: Small American Flags. Lipton Sale. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.