psykotedy.com

If you read this blog, chances are I sent you an email on this subject. However, if by some miracle this blog has hit any search engines and made it onto someone else’s blog roll, I wanted to post about this.

My hair dresser is doing a half marathon to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and I think that’s a cause worthy of a little donation. So, if you happen to be looking for a place for some spare change that you’d like to write off next year, please stop by and check out Erica’s donation page, and give a little something. Thank you.

I have recently been fascinated with financial data. There’s nothing in particular that’s caught my fancy, but all of it. Things that used to bore the ever-loving shit out of me are now like the tastiest brain-candy ever made to me. I can’t get enough. I am about two-thirds of the way through The Truth About Money, and will start another Ric Edelman book, The New Rules of Money, immediately after I finish The Truth About Money. I am enthralled. So much so, that if I sent you a link to this blog directly, you will most likely be getting copies of both of these books from me at some point.

Maybe patience is finally settling into my character. Or maybe the missing stuff from growing up in a hand-to-mouth household has finally stopped being so important to me. Or maybe the fact that my plan to retire by 40 is quickly slipping away has become too clear to deny any longer; there don’t seem to be enough tomorrows to put off changing my ways. Whatever it is, I think I finally get the financial puzzle that has escaped me for too long.

The old “pay yourself first” saying, I couldn’t figure out what the hell that meant for the longest time. I knew what it meant, but it seemed thoroughly infeasible to me. Pay myself??? Are you crazy? Let me tell you all of the reasons I can’t!

• I have to eat (out every meal…and tip according to how buxom the waitress is)
• I have to pay my credit card (that I use for buying CDs and such that are all necessities)
• I have to pay my car payment (for the car that I don’t really need)
• I have to pay rent (on the apartment that is over-priced)
• I have to smoke (this does hold some validity because I was a real cocksucker for a while after I quit; some might say that quitting didn’t adjust my demeanor at all, but I’ll leave that to the comments)
• I have to drink no less than 10 Starbucks drinks a day
• I have to have a bar tab no less than $200 every Friday and Saturday night

The list could go on, but it boils down to this: I don’t do that crap anymore and I’m still alive. Imagine that.

I don’t mean to sound like I have it all figured out, because I don’t. Far from it. I have, however, figured out a little bit, and I’m going to share that with the world…or at least the minimal readership that this site has. With that said, here’s the first of my financial installments.

Paying Yourself First

This sounds far more difficult than it is. That is to say, that it sounds impossible, but it’s not at all. Every savings plan I would con myself into was foiled by my need for some big ticket item (and I use that term loosely because some of those items wouldn’t make me think twice about laying down the money now, but at the time they were major purchases). I would get going on a savings plan and, four months in, I would see something that I absolutely couldn’t live without. Getting the funds from my savings account to my checking account was a non-issue, so I’d have the current most coveted item in all the land. What a fucking dimwit! (For the record, not everything I did that with was just the bauble of the moment. I’m typing this on one such purchase.) And I say that despite the fact that it’s not ancient history. As few as four months ago, I was behaving like this.

My first step to becoming financially competent was to stop sabotaging myself by draining my savings every time I wanted some shiny thing. I have all the willpower in the world when it comes to a number of things, but not when it comes to resisting the urge to buy things. (The psychology behind this impulsiveness is the topic of another post.) That being the case, I kind of had to trick myself. My friend AJ told me about her ING Direct account, saying that it was pretty cool because she’d set it up to automatically transfer funds out of her checking account into her savings account on the days she got paid. I thought that was pretty cool stuff because I’m about the most forgetful person on the face of the planet, so I looked into it. About the same time, I was reading The Richest Man In Babylon and was seriously pondering the whole “ten percent of your pay should be yours before you pay anybody else” philosophy. This was perfect to do that. I wouldn’t even really see the money in my account before ING Direct pulled it out of there for my benefit. Even more compelling for me was the fact that it takes three business days to transfer funds out of the ING Direct account into my checking account. PERFECT! No more impulse buying for me! (Or so I thought. I have found ways of doing it, but it’s all been games I played with myself. No more.)

So I set up my ING Direct account and hit a wall while signing up. How much could I afford to siphon off every paycheck? According to The Richest Man In Babylon, I was supposed to pay ten percent to myself before I paid anybody else. That rule applied to taxes, too. So I got out my pencil, paper, brain, and a recent pay stub, and started working the figures. Without going into much detail, I figured out that it was absolutely possible to survive without ten percent of my gross income in my account every paycheck. It wasn’t comfortable by and stretch of the imagination, but it wasn’t unbearable. And it was all for the greater good, right?

Now I had an automatic savings account. I was off to the races. Yeah, not really. I had another hurdle to get over: fake money.

Fake Money

Fake money is the term I use to talk about all types of borrowed funds except mortgages. There are far too many benefits to having a mortgage to consider it “fake money,” so don’t go on a tirade about how mortgages are awesome debt because I’m not talking about them in this section.

Fake money comes in all different forms, but the worst of the bunch, and the most common, is credit cards. I loathe those little plastic devils. Something that it’s taken me a long time to learn is to not buy something unless I have the funds for it on hand. Using a credit card to facilitate the transaction isn’t the end of the world. Not sending a payment for the amount of the transaction is puckering up and blowing the horn of Armageddon. Why in the hell would anybody do this? I know the answer to this from experience: instant gratification.

I had heard all of the arguments against this kind of behavior and nodded at its wisdom as it was issued forth from whatever source. And then I would promptly go charge something without having the liquid funds to cover the purchase. What a fucking moron!

Don’t beat yourself up too much about doing this. I beat myself up, but I don’t condone that mentality (I’m a moron, remember). Fake money is fake money because it’s like spending Monopoly money. You don’t give it a second thought. It’s all a game, so what’s the harm? That’s why it’s evil. It’s so tempting to charge it and let it ride until you have sufficient funds to cover it. It’s getting to have that something you put on lay-away without having to wait until you’ve paid for it. It caters to the part of most Americans that needs instant gratification (I need to get started on that post because this seems to be a recurring theme), which is a weakness we don’t really even see, much less admit to.

So we’ve figured out that its natural for Americans to have impulse control issues, and that problem is preyed upon by credit card companies. Vicious, i’n’t it? Once you know this, you’re ready to make a break from the behavior. It’s not that easy (there’s no automatic transfer type of deal to fix this problem), but it’s possible. The bad news is that breaking the habit of spending fake money is only the first step in getting out of it. The next step is paying off all of your prior mistakes.

The wisest plan I’ve ever heard is what my mom called the “snowball scheme” of paying off debt. The scheme basically is that you pay the minimum on all of your cards while sending a little extra to one of them. Once that first one is paid off, you take everything you were sending to it (i.e., the minimum and the extra), and start sending it to the next one in line. This is a brilliantly easy scheme. But it’s missing a crucial piece: what order should you be paying off your cards? My thought on the matter, for years, was that you pay of the lowest balance so you can get that snowball rolling as quickly as possible. That’s a fine approach if the balance on that lowest card is no greater than a minimum payment plus whatever extra you can muster. If it’s more than that, as it likely is, Ric Edelman has the greatest answer: the priority of paying off your cards should be in descending order from the highest interest rate to the lowest.

I have to admit that both of these pearls of wisdom seem quite obvious, and I can’t say that I didn’t utter (even if under my breath) a “no duh” upon hearing/reading them. That being said, it’s taken me fourteen years to actually implement them successfully. Either I’m just a total idiot (which is a topic indirectly covered by all of my posts), or it’s not as obvious as it sounds. I’m leaning toward me not being that bright, but the answer to every riddle seems obvious once you hear it.

I’ve implemented the Snowball Scheme to pay off my credit cards, and I’m running like hell toward being debt free for the first time since I was seventeen. I’m set. Retiring at 40 looks plausible now…except for that little problem of an income without a job. Wait, what?

Income Without A Job

Pipe dream. Those are the words that come to mind when most folks hear that. Either those words or the simple one that fits in so many contexts: “bullshit.” I, however, believe it’s absolutely viable.

Notice that the section is not entitled Income Without Work, it’s Income Without A Job. There’s a distinct difference. We are trained from a very early age to believe that working is how to create wealth. It’s a reasonable conclusion, and the argument is quite well backed. I don’t like that, though. The fact of the matter is that nobody who is truly wealthy worked a nine-to-five to get there. They might have started off that way, but they didn’t break out until they left the rat race. So, it seems logical to me that outside the rat race is where I’ll find the key to generating a ridiculous amount of wealth…or at least enough to live on while I’m sitting on my ass.

As easy as all of that sounds, it’s not. I haven’t done it (yet), so who am I to jump on a pulpit and start thumping a book about it? I’m nobody of consequence. Neither was anybody who did anything extraordinary before they performed their extraordinary feat. Albert Einstein couldn’t make it through algebra class. I’m not saying that I’m anywhere near the intelligence of Al, but his feat was performed with his brain, I don’t have such grandiose aspirations.

Since I haven’t achieved “independent wealth” (which is a misnomer, but since I don’t have a better universally accepted term, I’m going to use it), I can only outline for you what I plan to do and/or what I’m doing. (I guess I’ll make subsequent posts to keep everybody up to date on the success or failure of my attempts, as well as any tuning I do on the plan.)

The first thing I’m working on is eliminating debt. That one is straightforward enough, I think; I’m using the “snowball technique” I was told about so many years ago. I am building my safety fund (i.e., six months worth of bill payments in cash that I will not touch).

I am also investing in income generating no load mutual funds. The technique I’ve chosen for this is rather brainless, using a subscription NoLoad FundX (I’m not endorsing that service at this time, but simply letting you know what I’m doing). This generates some cashflow without taking too much of my time (a few hours every month is what I expect to spend managing my portfolio when it has enough assets to generate an income large enough to replace my current paycheck). Oddly, this investment strategy is much like the debt payment “snowball technique” in that I don’t need the income generated by the investments right now, so they are invested right back into themselves, compounding to generate even more wealth. It’s a rather exciting kind of monetary perpetual motion.

Once I have enough income being generated by the mutual funds in which I’m investing, I’m free. I won’t stop there, but at that point, my time becomes mine which allows me to venture in new directions. More importantly, it allows me to pursue those ventures from the comfort of a hammock on a remote beach in the Carribbean. Or maybe I’ll go to college. Who knows? I don’t. It’ll be fun finding out, though.

Living The Dream

I have a plan (that happens to evolve daily), and I’m acting on it. I haven’t time-lined it, so I don’t know how long it’s going to take me to reach independence, but it will happen eventually. For now, I’m living the dream.

I guess the worst case scenario is that, at 65 when I’m ready to retire the “right way,” I’ll have a helluva portfolio to allow me to live pretty well. If I’m not able to hammock work until 65, oh well. I’ve had fun getting to a point where I truly don’t have to worry about the next generation keeping me afloat financially (since social security won’t be there for me). It seems like a healthy recreational activity to me, healthier than most other recreational activities I’ve taken up over the years, anyway.

Despite my not really thinking about it, it seems that folks actually read the posts here. That being the case, my vanity has kicked in and I’ve decided to approach making posts differently. I recently read a post on Steve Yegge’s blog about the length of his posts. He basically states that he purposely writes long posts, writing essays rather than the standard blog fare of “these are my cats” blurbs. (Stevey even goes so far as to cite Paul Graham’s essays, which happen to be some of my favorite web reading, as an examples.) I pondered Stevey’s post for a while, and finally came to the conclusion that I liked that style, although for a completely different reason. Up to now, I haven’t been putting a whole lot of refining into my posts, and only slightly more thought than refinement. That’s changing. I’m sure that I’ll have the one-off blurb about nothing much, but for the most part my posts from now on will have some substance…and probably a fairly high word count (ironically, the high word count will make them much like phone conversations with me).

It is going to take me a while to build up enough material to be able to post once a week with any substance, which is to say that I’ll most likely throw away more essays than I post, so please bear with me while I muster up full-blown essays, and if they’re anything like my phone conversations, you’ll be thrilled that they don’t show up more than once a month, assuming you read them to the end.

Okay, I’ve decided to start using Tumblr, and I’ve added the resulting tumblelog to my sidebar. We’ll see how long it lasts.

It seems that we’ve all decided to stop calling shoes shoes because someone was upset about sandals being left out, so now we have to refer to anything that goes on our feet as “footwear,” as speaking otherwise is intolerable. Sounds silly, right?

Well, Merry Christmas to you, then because you know that when I say that I don’t mean that you’re Christian nor that I think any religious holiday that you might observe is bad, but I generally mean “tidings of joy to you!” So don’t freak out on me and start explaining to me in detail the practices of Kwanzaa or Hanukkah or Squidmas, just smile and wave and know that I’m too stupid to know any better, but my heart is in the right place. If you can’t do that, fuck off and die.

It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I’ll not exert any more tolerance for your ways than you exert for mine. And who the hell really thinks that Christmas is about anything other than the great American religion of Capitalism, anyway?

I saw Beowulf and I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed. I don’t know what I went in looking for – maybe a deeper story, maybe more convincing acting, maybe a happy ending – but whatever I was looking for in it, it wasn’t there. Which was further deflating because I was so looking forward to the movie being great. Here’s a list of the good and bad:

• My first bitch is that it was animated. The style used was really cool back when Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within came out, but leaves me feeling like I should’ve saved my money and waited for video now, six years later. Also, it seemed to detract from the ability of the actors to convey emotions, which leads me to…
• The acting. The depth of the characters was lacking to put it mildly. I know Beowulf was a badass, but I know nothing of the other characters in his tale, and the movie left me feeling like they are all as flat as the pages on which the poem was originally written 1500 years ago. I expect more from the likes of Anthony Hopkins and John Malkovich. To top it off, the voicing was not only bad, but the accents were inconsistent, which brings me to my final complaint…
• Crispin Glover’s speaking as Grendel. Now, I thought that there was no way I would be unable to understand an actor after The Usual Suspects , but boy was I wrong. Grendel’s voice is a mix of Gollum and Fenster with a little Germanic-based something-or-other mixed in there for good measure. What it all adds up to is a character that you can’t fucking understand!!!! Hello! Who thought up that great trick? I mean, at least with Fenster, you didn’t need to understand him to figure out what important information was being passed to certain major players about events! I respect Crispin Glover as an actor and artist, but there’s certain things you don’t do in a major role in a movie, and one of them is speak unintelligibly.
• On the flip side of all of that, the action scenes were second to none. I don’t want to put any spoilers in this review (and I hope I haven’t screwed up on that count during my little rants above), but the action scenes are amazing. There is just the right amount of gore to be real enough (with much more elluded to, which might be worse to people with vivid imaginations and weak stomachs) without going overboard.

I haven’t read the poem yet (it’s on my reading list, and I’ve even excavated the Seamus Heaney version out of one of my book boxes), so I can’t say how closely it follows the traditional story. I will say that the movie was missing something. I don’t know if it was the script trying to stick with the original story and not translating to the screen well, or if it was Neil Gaiman’s early habit of writing characters with which readers don’t connect rearing its ugly head, or if it was Roger Avary sucking (which wouldn’t surprise me since he’s climbing his way out of the pit of despair that was Silent Hill), but whatever it was, it cause a gaping hole in the movie.

If you’re looking for really well-animated graphic battle scenes, this is it. If you’re looking for something deep and fulfilling, skip it and go see P.S. I Love You or something.

I have received a few feature requests for this blog, and the only two I remember at this time are an email notification of updates (which should be arriving shortly, as soon as I devise a way to collect a legitimate subscription from the page) and a LiveJournal simulcast (which I haven’t to foggiest clue how I’m going to pull off). If anybody has any other requests, I’d love to hear them (please save the “take a fucking English class, asshole” and “stop posting book and movie reviews” requests for personal meetings because “up yours” just doesn’t have the same gravity – or satisfaction – via written word).

I just finished reading Fish! which was a delight to read. As the description on Amazon states, it’s the tale of a manager who has to pull a department out of the dregs of low morale and lack of energy. Frankly, this book holds some huge tools in its mere 115 pages, covering everything that a manager of any level needs to promote and coach employees to perpetuate an environment that is great to work in.

Now, I have recently found out that a happy work environment does not always equal higher productivity, but I, personally would rather go to work somewhere I like to work than somewhere I can’t stand not that I haven’t kept jobs despite loathing the work environment, but we all need paychecks, right?).

All in all, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has to work for a living. It unveils tools to make workplaces better, tools that are at the disposal of anybody and everybody.

I just finished reading The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton, and I was impressed. It is among the top ten business books I have ever read, and the only topic it covers is assholes. As funny as that sounds, it’s no laughing matter. It’s a dilemma faced by a number of people in life is that of dealing with assholes.

Dealing with assholes is not something anybody likes to do, but it’s something we all have to do. Much to my shame, I’m guilty of being one of those asshole with whom people have been forced to deal. It not only opened my eyes to how big an asshole I had been, but also taught me how to deal with other assholes when I face them. I highly recommend this book for all readers, be they assholes ready to realize the error of their ways or be they the victims or innocent bystanders of asshole attacks.

The one thing that struck me the most in the text was the phenomenon that Bob Sutton termed “asshole poisoning.” This is the contagion of asshole-ness, where exposure to assholes causes otherwise nice people to become assholes themselves. The reason this struck me so is because the book not only introduces asshole poisoning, but also goes over how to avoid it. That is especially important for anybody trying not to turn into what they despise.

All in all, I think that everybody should read The No Asshole Rule, whether they’re surrounded by assholes or not (because the people surrounding you might not be the problem). I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

I’ve been waiting to send out notification of my blog going up because it’s not perfect. This is a trait I need to change am changing. In that vein, I’m going to let go of the wait-till-it’s-perfect mentality and send off notification of this place while acknowledging what is yet to be done (for all of the Paul Graham that I read, I should already have the iterative product mentality).

Without further babbling, the to-do list for this blog really only consists of two items at this point (though, I’m certain others will arise quickly): getting an RSS feed working, and getting a sidebar working

As far as other projects, I have a few floating around in my head:

• Web-based catalog of my CDs (Pete’s been waiting for this one for a while…and the wait will soon be over)
• Get PARC up to Java 5 compliance and re-weave it with Spring (another one on my list of threats to Pete)
• Web-based catalog of my DVDs
• Web-based to-do software
• Gmail-like email client for the desktop (this is shooting way high, but what the hell, eh?)

Getting this blog up and running is really inspirational to me, and I see myself blowing through these projects (with the probable exception of the email client). The inspiration to finally get this blog running, though, came from Phil, and I can’t think him enough for helping me to make the time to do it.

Anyway, I think I’ve babbled enough for one post—maybe even enough for two!

I’ve finally gotten off of my lazy butt and got this site up. It’s not how I want it to look, nor does it function like I would like it to, but it functions. Getting off my ass was step one, and now that I’ve taken that step, it’s all downhill from here.

I am only committing to one post a week at this point, but I expect that to increase as I get better at writing posts.