Money Under 30
I subscribe to an email / blog that comes-in every so often called “Money Under 30.” Usually I decide, instantly, that I’m too busy to read the emails and delete them… How could I possibly expect myself to lose quality facebook time for the sake of financial awareness?
Anyways, this one just came-in and got my attention, so I thought I’d share :
Hey, Kelley
If I’ve learned one new thing in six years of blogging about money, it’s this: The most important factor in financial success is not having a budget, meticulously avoiding debt, or choosing the right investments. It is having a system that makes the right financial moves for you. Automatically.
The key is to put your money on autopilot.
Why does something so simple matter so much?
THE BEHAVIOR GAP
Because we’re human, and we do stupid things. In his blog and new book by the same name, doodling financial planner Carl Richards coins this “The Behavior Gap”.
Looking at the long-term returns of investments like the S&P 500 compared to the returns of individual investors, Richards found that theinvestors consistently did worse than the investments. He explains the difference, The Behavior Gap, as humans’ tendency to let emotions influence decisions (for example, to sell off stocks during scary economic times or buy a particular stock based on a tip in the financial media).
Emotions can lead us to make a lot of terrible financial decisions like:
- Making a big purchase you can’t yet afford—perhaps an engagement ring or a wedding dress—on a 19% APR credit card.
- Taking on too big a mortgage because it’s “your dream house”.
- Cashing out your 401(k) because you’ll “feel more secure” with cash in hand.
Putting your money on autopilot can’t stop us from all of the stupid things we do, but it goes a long way in protecting ourselves from two of the most common:
- Ceding to temptation.
- Being lazy.
TEMPTATION
Emotional decision-making is part of the problem; pure temptation is another. If you have ever tried to resist a temptation—to turn down an extra drink, to surf YouTube instead of working, to buy something you shouldn’t—and failed, you know what I mean.
Psychologists have shows that although it is possible to stretch and strengthen our willpower like a muscle, our ability to self-regulate is a consumable resource that depletes. What this means is:
- The more we exercise self-control, the better we become at it in the long-run.
- BUT, the more we use self-control in the short-run, the harder it becomes in the short-run (Muraven and Baumeister, 2000).
So if you focus on not procrastinating every day for a month, you may find it easier to diet next month. But if you’ve had a particularly exhausting, stressful day at the office and you’ve been fighting off distractions to get stuff done, resisting the candy bars in the checkout aisle (or going out to dinner even though you don’t have the money) may be all but impossible.
Although we can work to improve our self-control in the long run, as humans we’ll always be susceptible to moments of weakness when our self-control is depleted. To prepare for this inevitability, we can alter our environments to remove or reduce temptations.
An obvious example is that cliché advice that debtors should cut up their credit cards or put them in a block of ice. The next time your willpower is depleted and you want to charge the Forever Lazy you saw on a late-night infomercial, you may have second thoughts by the time your Visa defrosts.
LAZINESS
Sometime we do stupid stuff because we are emotional or tempted. And sometimes we’re just lazy.
If you currently pay for a monthly subscription that you don’t use—a gym, a magazine, $12 a month for DVR service on cable—and don’t do anything about it, whose fault is it? The recurring-subscription business model that gyms, cable companies, and Netflix use is one of the most stable and profitable in existence. And guess what? It is built on the simple fact that people are lazy. When we stop using something, most people will pay $20 or more each month for many months before making a 10 minute phone call to cancel.
Laziness hurts our wallets in all sorts of ways.
Overspending on credit cards or paying for unused subscriptions are just a couple of ways our behavior sabotages our finances. Other examples include:
- Forgetting to pay bills, incurring late fees and credit penalties
- Depleting savings by comingling them with everyday spending money
- Failing to invest enough for retirement
- Failing to invest in regular intervals
There may be different reasons for making these mistakes, but don’t discount laziness. If you’ve ever thought of cancelling something you don’t use or opening a Roth IRA or increasing your 401(k) contributions and said “I should look into that” but haven’t done it yet, your laziness has already cost you money.
WHY AUTOMATION IS THE ANSWER
Think about your daily habits.
Most likely, you brush your teeth every day and don’t even think about. It doesn’t take willpower to brush your teeth. It’s automatic.
Now think about something you’d like to do but are struggling with; perhaps it is to quit smoking, lose weight, or spend less.
These things are difficult to do. They take conscious effort—active self-regulation—to achieve. Meanwhile, the corresponding bad habits (smoking, overeating, spending money) have become automatic.
But talk to somebody who has successfully changed a habit—for example, a daily exerciser—and you’ll hear that it’s the good habitthat is now automatic. Getting out of bed to jog becomes as routine as brushing your teeth.
Your brain has an autopilot!
When your can teach your brain to include a habit on autopilot, maintaining it takes much less effort, if any at all. Better yet, seemingly tiny habits can have big ripple effects.
In the book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength
Studies show that little habits like shaving, dressing neatly, and keeping an organized home correlate to more self-control in other areas of life. People who exhibit these behaviors are more likely to exercise, eat less, moderate alcohol, even use condoms more often.
So the more good habits you can put on autopilot, the more success you may have regulating other areas of your life.
And when it comes to putting your money on autopilot, your brain has an ally in technology. Twenty years ago, automated personal finances were impossible. Having your paycheck directly deposited was still cutting edge, and paying bills meant cutting a check every single month. Today, it’s not only possible to have an entirely electronic checking account, it’s becoming the norm to do away with paper checks altogether. And these new financial technologies make it possible to put your money entirely on autopilot.
A SIMPLE APPROACH TO PUTTING YOUR MONEY ON AUTOPILOT
As you get older, your finances will get more complicated whether you want them to or not. So the simpler you can keep your financial system, the better. Two primary accounts—one checking and one savings—should suffice unless you own a business or are married with separate finances.
The Three Steps to Automatic Finances
- Put your savings on autopilot
- Put your bills on autopilot
- Put your investments on autopilot
Here’s what somebody’s basic financial autopilot looks like.
Today we’ll cover setting up your savings and bills, next time we’ll talk about investments.
Put your savings on autopilot.
The first step in putting your money on autopilot is to pay yourself first. This means directing a portion of the money you earn into a savings account as soon as you earn it.
- If you’re still working on your emergency fund, put this money towards that.
- If you’re in high-interest consumer debt, put this money in an account that automatically makes extra payments on your debt each month.
- If you’ve funded your emergency fund, then put this money towards your next life savings goal (e.g., a house, a car, a wedding, or a vacation).
- If you’re set on cash, skip this step and focus on investments instead.
There are two ways to pay yourself first:
- Split your direct deposit between your checking account and savings account (ask your HR manager for the form).
- Set up an automatic transfer between your checking account and savings account on the day after you are paid. Anyonline savings account will make this easy.
Put your bills on autopilot.
In part one of this series, I talked about your “nut”, the fixed monthly expenses like rent, insurance, and student loan payments, that you pay every month in the same amount. Once you have a comfortablebank account buffer in place, the next step in putting your money on autopilot is to setup automatic bill payments to each of these bills. There are different ways to do this, and I rank them in order of my preference.
- Pay with a rewards credit card.
- Pay with your banks online billpay.
- Pay through an automatic bank draft (ACH).
Let’s talk about the options:
Credit Cards. Some billers like insurance, cable, and cell phones let you pay with a credit card. As long as they don’t charge a convenience fee to do so, this is your best bet. For one, you can earn your one or two percent of the bill back in rewards and two, you have a third party in between you and the biller. (Remember one of the best things about paying with a credit card—not cash check or debit card—is your right to dispute the payment with the credit card company and not pay a dime until that dispute is resolved).
Online Billpay. The next best option is setting up a recurring payment through your bank’s online billpay service. I like this option because you have control over multiple bills in one place (your bank’s online login). You can stop or change payments to more than one bill instantly in one place.
Autodraft/ACH. Traditionally, if you wanted to pay a recurring bill automatically, you have to sign up with the biller, give them your checking account and routing number, and let them automatically withdraw the bill amount from your checking account each month. This is fine, but there are some concerns:
- Redundant Maintenance. You must maintain your autopay with each biller individually. If you change banks, for example, you have to remember to change the accounts at each biller.
- Less Control. Let’s say you accidentally rack up $3,000 of data roaming charges on your phone while travelling abroad. Since you’re travelling, you forget to check your bill before the autodraft goes through. Your cell provider withdraws the $3k from your checking account and overdraws the account. Not only are you out that money and responsible for overdraft fees, you may lose your ability to negotiate the charges down (after all, the cell company already has your money).
- Returned Payments. If you have your checking account to reject overdrafts, your auto payment will be returned if you don’t have enough money in the bank at the time it’s processed. This may trigger a returned payment fee in addition to late fees from the biller. (Also, be sure to enter your checking account numbers correctly when you enroll at the biller’s Website. You payment will be returned if you make a typo, too.)
Put your investments on autopilot.
Once you have your savings and bills on autopilot, the last (but I would argue most important) step is to set up automatic investing. We will cover this in detail in part four of this series.
RECAP
We humans are emotional, easily tempted, and lazy. We do stupid stuff with money. Therefore, it’s my opinion that the single most important thing you can do for your finances is to put your money on autopilot. Start by transferring a percentage of your income to a savings account as soon as you get paid. Then, setup all of your bills to be paid automatically by their due date either by credit card, bank bill pay, or ACH autodraft. Next time, we’ll talk about the final piece of the puzzle, establishing automatic investments.
ACTION ITEMS
- Pay yourself first. If you haven’t already, open a separate high-yield savings account and set up an automatic transfer or split direct deposit to correspond with every payday. Do this even if you can only afford to save $20 a paycheck. You can increase the amount later. Having the system in place is what matters.
- Ensure you have a bank account buffer. Do not proceed to action item three until you have this in place.
- Put your bills on autopilot. With a bank account buffer in place, put all of your monthly bills on autopay. Set aside an hour to set this up tonight and you’ll easily save an hour a month for the rest of your life.
Join The Discussion: How do you put your money on autopilot? What’s your system? Let us know in a comment.
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Money Under 30, 44 Crossing Brook Road, Cumberland Center, ME 04021, USA
Crabby Patty.
This is going to sound like one of the whinier posts I’ve ever written.
Without getting into a whole lot of detail, the past year and a half has been really, really tough. I’ve lost both grandparents and have felt like I’ve had to grow-up really, really fast. A lot of that process relating to my finances.
I think part of the reason I’m having such a hard time with all of this is that I know how incredibly spoiled it makes me sound. Here I am, gainfully employed, healthy, fortunate enough not to have lost any of my best friends or immediate family, and I’m complaining because I can’t figure out what to do with what portion of the thousands of dollars I’m inheriting, let alone how to plan for my future. I’m 27 and the idea that the decisions I make now will drastically affect the rest of my life is hitting me like a ton of bricks.
I’m envious of the people I know that have stable husbands with whom to plan for their collective future, envious of the people who understand this world enough to handle themselves and not get this overwhelmed, and desperate for some way to catch-up.
My How-To Guide
I realized just now that my post about paying-off the last bit of my credit cards seemed a bit distracted. As this blog was started as a self-help guide (and by that, I mean helping MYself…) and as a record of how I went about pulling myself out of personal debt, I wanted to touch on that a bit before signing-off for the day (and probably month).
How did it start?
When I was in college I had this common idea that I’d be making plenty when I got a job. I’d have enough to pay for all of these little things later, as well as my student loans AND any living expenses involved in being just as glamorous as I anticipated. When I graduated, my student loans were over $130,000 (5 years of out-of-state college, kids… do the math), I was making $32,000 / year, and my payments each month were more than my income. I was in deep trouble. My grandparents saved me - they refinanced my loans into one big line of credit, in their names, and my student loan payments dropped by 75%. Then, living in Charlotte with my best friends, I let the good times roll again. I spent more money I didn’t have trying to keep up with the Jones’, figured that eventually it’d all work out… I buried my head in the sand and pretended it wasn’t happening.
Fast forward a couple years, knock me over with a lay-off and a recession, hit me over the head with 4 months of unemployment, and drag me through a brutal move to the windy city. At that point I was working so much (getting just as much in paid overtime) that I thought I’d finally made it. These were the good times - I ate lunch out everyday, had no trouble paying bills, and felt justified in spending my minimal time-off shopping. Then when that faded away with our deadlines, I realized what my salary REALLY meant in this city. By January I realized that I’d accumulated over $12,000 in credit card debt spread over 4 different cards.
How to get rid of it:
My sister was engaged and on the fast track out of personal debt. She was growing-up via some tough love and lots of advice from her (now) husband. Vicariously and inevitably, every story of another spreadsheet or budget hit home. Once I decided to get rid of this dead weight, all bets were off. I came up with a plan to pour as much money into that balance as I could each month :
- Cable? Gone.
- Text messaging? Cut WAY down.
- Groceries? $20 / week. Hellooooo Aldi.
- Eating out? Gone.
- GOING out? Gone.
- New clothes? Gone.
- Social life? Gone.
I was thankful to have a one-bedroom apartment, because I felt like someone in rehab going through all of the withdrawal by herself throughout the 48 hours of a weekend. I’d get the urges to go out and spend money, the pity party of not having any, question my discipline NOT to spend any, and basically shut myself off from any temptation. I’d literally pick-up groceries on Friday night with the anticipation of not leaving until Monday morning. It was lonely but worked!
When I spent money, if I spent $5 on a latte, the first thing I thought was “this is 1/4 of your grocery budget.” It got really annoying for the people around me, but it worked. I took the long way home to avoid the tolls ($23 each way, people), I made excuses to get out of social activities when I knew they’d cost anything at all, I lived via netflix and online streaming, and when I couldn’t get any signal at all in my apartment I talked into a speaker on my computer using Skype vs. a more glamorous landline. When I got money or giftcards as gifts I’d apply it to my credit card or save them to re-gift to save myself money later. I sold anything I could on eBay, from shirts to cameras to purses. Anything someone might see as valuable, I sold. Every bonus, tax return or unexpected lump of money went straight to the goal. Trips to see my best friends in the south? No. Gifts to my friends? Homemade. One year I bought cheap sets of blank cards and sketched / watercolored sets of 10 for 4 different women in my family. It took me hours but cost close to nothing. I learned to cook one crockpot of chili for a week for under $10 and make it last for all five lunches. I didn’t buy meat for months because I couldn’t afford it. I started stealing packets of Splenda from the cafe downstairs / McDonalds / whoever for coffee at home. I rarely bought fresh produce because if it went bad, it was money lost. I started scouring craigslist for tiny freelance gigs I could do that would work around my schedule but could help little by little to chip-away at this debt. I was relentless with Bank of America at lowering my APR from it’s former 22.99% down to 11.99%. I read blog after blog, listened to tons of podcasts, and spent hours at work streaming from sites like Dave Ramsey, Planet Money, and Suze Orman. I did several balance transfers to set goals for myself and dig my way out of interest payments. I NEVER ate lunch out, and when I did grab a dinner, I splurged once a month or so with something under $10. If there was free food at work, I shamelessly took it home. Free box of bagels? I made bagel chips for weeks. Free sandwiches? I froze them to take out during a poor week. I set up spreadsheets and charts and goals for myself - the more excited I was about being done with this, the harder I worked to speed up the process.
In the end, learning what I HAD to have vs. what I wanted to have (ie: if the money wasn’t there, I dealt with it : I ate pasta… with olive oil, salt and pepper ONLY for two weeks once) was what made the difference.
Now, planning ahead is what has saved me. I pay all of my bills on the 1st of the month. I look at the calendar and estimate what busy weekends will cost me and set that money aside. I write it all down and go from there - $30 / week for groceries, $100 / rt trip to Ohio, etc. If I don’t have money for it, I don’t spend it. I put as much as I can into savings each month knowing that if I see it in checking, I’ll spend it as fast as I can, leaving nothing to pocket at the end of it all. I make bad decisions sometimes but try to keep them pretty minimal / easy to recover from. I am definitely still learning, but will never EVER do that to myself again.
3 Years in the Making.
Once upon a time I cancelled a credit card - with CapitalOne, actually - and was so proud of it that I cut-up the card in some ceremonious attempt at revenge. I would never use the card again, never look at it, never deal with that company and their unwarranted fees, never listen to a sob story about the government’s regulations and what they were costing the credit card companies as to a reason for my ridiculously high APR… None of it.
Well, here I am, three years after starting my journey towards freeing myself of personal debt - a mountain of it totaling more than $12,000 in January of 2009 - and I’m less than a week away from being done with it. I feel excited, nervous, and lost. Do I have any idea of where to spend that “extra” money each month now? Yes. Do I worry that thoughts like that are what landed me in such a terrifying position three years ago? Yes. Once you open the door to everything you want / need to spend money on, the flood-gates seem impossible to close / reign-in.
At the same time, if my priority for the last three years - the majority of my post-collegiate life - has been digging my way out from under this mound of plastic and red numbers, what priority do I pour my heart into now? Travel? Savings? Clothing? Student loans?
I’m 27, as single as they come, and free of any mortgage payments or children, and gratefully employed doing work I never dreamed I’d be involved in. But what now? Do I want to get married and buy a house someday? Yes. Do I want to quit my job and travel for a year, photographing it and writing a book about it someday? Yes. Do I want to finally wear the clothes that I used to point at and say “when I grow up, I’ll wear that.” Yes. Do I want to max-out my 401K contribution and focus my efforts on my retirement? Yes.
I feel like one big “first world pain” with my outpouring of spoiled, WASP-y complaints, on the verge of making really great decisions that’ll make my life even better than it is now, or making really big mistakes that I’ll regret for the rest of my life. Dramatic, I know. I’m still a girl.
At this point, closing the door to personal debt and establishing a solid foundation of a budget as an adult, I am in a crash course on “planning ahead.” These are the days I wish I had a husband who was personally invested in the decisions I’m making, who would talk-through options and collectively we’d decide on a direction and game-plan, collectively reacting to them in the future. Instead, it feels like a total crap-shoot, like I’m winging it, and like I’m a bit stuck in that post-college time where you make sloppy decisions knowing you’ll just deal with it later, good or bad. Don’t you like how I can ramble on for hundreds of words turning something so awesome like paying-off my credit cards into a cynical post about a quarter-life-crisis?
C’est la vie (is that how you spell that?). Something big I’m focusing on in 2012 is the fact that my personal situation, specifically financial, is unlike anyone else’s. I have a REALLY hard time not comparing myself, in all facets, to other people…. especially those in my family. My twin and her husband are in a completely different place in their lives than I am, with completely different circumstances and goals, and from this point on, we will never be in the same position. I cannot continue to compare myself to them. Same goes for my younger sister (who will most likely get married BEFORE me..), best friends, and cousins. Even friends I work with, who are (on the surface) in the same boat : once you look at student loans, inheritances, debt, plans for the future, expectations from family…. we’re completely different. Kind of crazy.
The Final Countdown to the Final Countdown
I’m not going to lie : once again, I’ve gotten a tad bit caught-up in the glamorous life that is Chicago. And by glamorous, I mean daily coffees and groupon lunches with my roommate. Somehow, I’ve managed to rack-up $100 of a step backwards on my credit card, and its just enough to make me irritated with myself.
The app I mentioned before? Balance? It’s awesome. I use it like it’s my job now - I enter every tiny purchase into it and voila! It’s November 10th, 20 days away from my next budget / spending re-do, and I’m already $2.84 over budget for the month. Amazing. That means I’ll try my best to balance it out ASAP from my grocery budget, but I have $0 for wiggle room.
Okay, deep breath : I just ran the numbers and IF I can stay on-track for the next 6-7 months, I could be out of debt by June. Can you even imagine how amazing that would be? Plus, my car will be officially paid-off in June, meaning I’ll have a sweet $800 total (car + CC’s) each month free to put into savings or clothes or much-neglected-oil changes or trips to visit my best friends or whatever I want.
And that doesn’t even include a potential Christmas bonus! Woo hoo!
This morning my sister sent me a clip from the Today show about a yellow lab who’d been given mouth-to-snout CPR by some firefighters after being caught in a housefire. She mentioned how much it hit home and how emotional she was while watching it.
How pathetic is it that I had that same reaction while reading through this article? There are so many great points within it - from mention of how little schools warn students about borrowing excessively, to the numbers of what an actual student loan payment looks like (ex : $160,000 = $1200 / month). One person actually talks about dreams of fleeing to Canada or Europe (I’d go with Europe..) and becoming some debt-dodger on the run. Must be nice to even have that dream! If I were to “flee,” because of the way my student loan debt is currently financed, I’d leave my family - first my mom, and then outliving her, my two sisters, with my entire burden. Its complicated… but something I take incredibly seriously.
My dad made some comment recently about my generation - Gen Y? Gen X? - and how our collective student loans will provide OUR recession or depression crisis. The baby boomers may have thrown caution to the wind when it comes to mortgages, but leave it to us to turn the other cheek all in the name of education.
I’m not going to provide the actual numbers behind my debt, but you can do the math : 5 years of college on out-of-state tuition… Its not pretty. That said, had someone ever told me that this ISN’T NORMAL and other people don’t graduate with debt in the 6 digits, maybe I would’ve stayed in-state. (probably not..) Maybe I would’ve asked a question or two if someone told me that interest rates between 9 - 13% were going to break me.
If there were an advocacy group for incorporating personal finance into every student’s freshman year, or a pro bono project putting together some kind of aid to explain all of this, I would gladly pledge my time. At this point, it’ll take an act of God to get me back to ground zero before I’m 40.
Confession : my tried and true method of breaking-up my spending money into envelopes of cash for each week is failing. Here’s the issue : there are A LOT of things that exclusively take credit / debit. You think I’m lying? Lets look at yesterday :
- $6 Groupon
- $8 Lunch (express kiosk = credit / debit only)
- $30 on tickets for Ferris Bueller @ Wrigley field (online)
So lets say I had $44 in cash. Well that does me no good if I can’t use it!
Realization : I’m going to have to get better about spending money and keeping record of it. I’m not going to be that girl that holds up a line of people at a store because she’s got to record her purchase in her transaction register right then and there, but maybe, just like everything else, using technology in this instance will help.
Enter, Balance. This is a (FREE) App I just downloaded - “Balance is an app designed to help you keep track of the balances of all of your accounts. Intended to replace paper-based checkbook registers, Balance maintains a list of credit and debits to each of your accounts. When you enter a new transaction, Balance automatically recalculates that account’s balances.”
Here’s what I like : it lets you enter the information. I know BofA or Mint have apps that show you transactions. But what if I write a check or pay a bill that doesn’t clear for three weeks? Mint doesn’t show me that check until it clears. Here, I can mentally set money aside.
We’ll see how it goes.
After a good 14 hours in the car, alone, of pop, country, and NPR, I couldn’t help but feel slightly caught off-guard by all of this talk of a “global depression.” I take a couple weeks off of paying attention, and everything goes to hell! Europe’s in the garbage, employment is stalled, the banks are being sued, and everyone hates Obama. My goodness, CNN sure left a few things out in my daily 5 minute check-up.
Lets be honest : I had big dreams of joining Erin in her around-the-world adventure next year to live somewhere down under or somewhere in the UK, where I could maybe put my wannabe-British wit to use. However. Who quits a job on the verge of a double-dip recession? I’ve worked at this job, officially, longer than anywhere else to-date. Over 2 years! I’m finally living in an apartment I love, with parking, and finally able to handle this budget - my credit card balances (and APRs!) are getting lower, my savings is getting higher, and I’m finally starting to feel like I might be able to handle being a grown-up in this city for a bit.
Epiphany : I might need to stay-put for a while. It could be worse, right? The firm I work for is somewhere in the top 5 in the US and puts me in touch with awesome side projects like fundraisers for the schools in Joplin, MO and the Healthy Schools Campaign.
So, I guess the theme of this post is to hold on tight, hunker down, and prepare for another storm. I’d like to see the statistics on my generation, those of us who learned from the beginning that the working world = job INsecurity, in terms of savings and planning ahead vs. other generations… because I feel like almost everyday I get a slap in the face with finances / careers / planning ahead / debt / assets / etc.
Money doesn’t buy happiness?
In a brief moment of pause from my pity party up here on floor 35, let me entertain you with these thoughts :
“The best things in life are free.”
Thoughts?
Here are mine : bs. Here’s why : even the free stuff isn’t free. Here, let me provide you with an example. Running in the mornings. Okay, so lets pretend that as a 27 year old girl I resist the temptation to buy new clothes for said exercising, and I continue to wear the running shoes I bought three years ago, the inappropriate sorority t-shirts I should’ve left in college with my poor eating habits and carefree spending, and it actually IS free : me, the open sidewalk, and lots of sweat.
What about time?
Remember work? When I was overloaded with deadlines and work I used to just come-in early. So now here’s my cost : do I run and finally do something to promote my personal health, “spending” my time, if you will, on me vs. work, or do I throw fitness to the wind and haul my fat ass into the office.
For those of you telling me to get up an hour earlier, you can stop right there - rising before the sun, ie before 5:45, is not going to happen.
Another example while I stall from doing work? Sure. How about sketching. In this size firm, sketching has its place - it’s for about two days at the start of a big project, and then it’s tossed-aside like yesterday’s news for the glitz and glam of the digital world. I’m as big of an Adobe fan as the next geeky, four-eyed, plaid-wearing designer, but sometimes I miss the lost art-form that is hand drawing.
Remember the days when “rendering” involved smelly markers or expensive colored pencils? I used to draw almost daily - proof = kelleybozarth.blogspot.com. Now? Well, if I’m at work until 6, then taking work home with me, then going to bed, then getting up (maybe running… see above), then going back to work, etc, when is there time to draw a silly cartoon of my coworker potentially throwing-up on our set of drawings? These doodles might not be museum-worthy, but they’re kind of like a combination of therapy and continuing education… that I haven’t been continuing much lately.
Enough ranting - back to work until I figure out the answers to the above questions and charge out of here, sketchbook in-hand.
My love for this : cheap cheap cheap. My dislike for this : so unhealthy. Eggs? Ok. The rest of it is pretty terrible, though… pasta, beans, rice, bread, and maybe a veggie if it’s on sale.
Maybe I’m becoming a snob, but eating pasta everyday is for Italians. They have a special kind of metabolism that Americans left on that side of the pond.
I might not be living beneath the poverty line, but I'm poor enough to budget, to clip coupons, to drive to three different grocery stores looking for the best deals, and to write a blog with some of the tips of my trade, from a 20-something living in the city trying to pay for the fun she had in college without missing out today.
