Facebook Stock

So, did any of you invest in Facebook stock? I have to say, my instinct was that it was over-hyped and couldn't help but go down in the first couple of days. If I was more confident about trading, I would have shorted the stock-- and as things turned out, I could have made some money! But unfortunately I am not that daring an investor...

I'm a Landlady! (For the Next Month)

I've been agonizing over what to do with my apartment for a while. For all intents and purposes, I live with Sweetie, and my apartment had become a place I'd visit to pick up mail, and a storage place for my books and papers, and only very rarely a place we'd spend the night. This of course makes me sad-- it was only a few years ago that I put so much effort into buying my own place, and then got such pleasure out of living there, after all the years I'd spent in my super-tiny rented studio. But life is full of surprises, and here I am.
When I bought my place, I knew I could afford it, and I budgeted my life around having my own apartment. I could pay all the costs and still save money. But of course, the less I actually used it, the more I started to feel like it was crazy to be paying for it. I knew I should try to find a way to make some money from it, but there has just been such a strong force of inertia keeping me from doing it! If I was to just rent the place out unfurnished, I'd have to pack up lots of stuff, throw out lots of stuff, sell lots of stuff and perhaps pay to put stuff in storage-- all in all, a big pain. And then what would I do when my sister's family came to visit? Sweetie's place has a second bedroom but it's not idea to have a family of 4 visiting-- it's been great to just give my sister's family my place while I stay with Sweetie.
I've thought about trying to sell my place and buy a studio somewhere near Sweetie, but the neighborhood is more expensive, so I might end up having to pay even more for a smaller space I'd only use part time.
I realized that the ideal thing, at least during a transition phase, might be to get a roommate or sublet my apartment on a temporary basis. When I was homeless for a few months before being able to close on my condo, I'd had pretty good experiences with a couple of month long sublets--but I know that I am very neat and clean and respectful of people's belongings, and I wasn't sure I could trust other people to be equally neat and clean and respectful of mine. I was nervous about having strangers in my home.
But as soon as I started talking a bit more to friends about this dilemma, guess what? It's not that hard to find a friend of a friend who needs a place in NYC. I had one potential "roommate" situation that fell through because the person's job offer didn't work out, but soon after, a situation came up where someone needed a place for a month, and this time, it worked out. I've handed over my apartment for a month in exchange for $2,000.
We'll see how this works out, but I'm feeling optimistic. Most of my clothes were already at Sweetie's, so all I had to do was bundle up a few more bags of Goodwill donations in order to empty out my whole closet and dresser so I could give the subletter an empty bedroom. I tidied away a lot of my toiletries and personal items but left all my furniture and posters in place. One whole closet is full of stuff, including some boxes of old papers-- I've realized I'm a bit of a hoarder in some ways-- but I moved all my sensitive documents such as tax returns and financial info.
The $2,000 should be a nice little profit for the month-- my out of pocket costs for the place, including utilities, is only around $1850 or so, and much less if you factor in the tax deduction and the fact that a few hundred of that goes towards my equity.
So unless this turns into some nightmare where these people trash my place, I may have crossed the threshold into being able to do this more often and turn my apartment into a real estate investment. I could list it on sublet.com or airbnb.com and probably make even more than the $2,000 I charged this time. (Though I'd rather have trustworthy people and not get too greedy...)
Readers, have any of you had good or bad experience renting out your home on a short term basis? I'd love to hear any recommendations...

Overheard: Puppy Edition

I was walking down the street behind a mom with her two daughters, who were maybe around 8 and 10 years old. I guess they had been begging their mother for a puppy and she'd asked them if they were willing to work hard for the money it would cost. One daughter said yes, she would get a job and work hard for the money. The other shrieked very loudly that she was not going to work hard to get money-- instead she was going to SAVE UP lots of money to pay for the puppy!
It was cute-- it got me thinking about how a kid might hear their parents talking about money coming from a job and coming from "saving up," but not understanding that usually it has to come from one before you can do the other!

The Latest News

Yes, it's been too long since I've posted a net worth update or any other juicy details. And it's not just because I'm in love! I've been really, really busy at work, far more stressed out than I've been in years. One night I came home from work almost feeling like I was having an anxiety attack-- it's times like this that I start to wonder how else I could earn a paycheck...

So with all that going on, I haven't wanted to be on the computer all that much in my downtime. I haven't been blogging much, and hadn't even updated all my financial data in a while. But I did just catch up on some of that a few days ago-- I reconciled all my investment accounts through the end of March and the good news is that after some nice 1st quarter mutual fund results, plus a better than expected bonus, my net worth is currently somewhere around $620,000.

I will post more detail about my spending and account balances soon. I actually pulled together some comparisons of my spending by category from 2003 to the present. It was interesting to see that a lot of my expenses haven't increased that much (and those that have increased did not increase as much as my income has, so the net result is that I've been saving more). It gave me an idea for a future post about a financial tipping point-- in other words, if your current lifestyle, or what you consider a minimum acceptable lifestyle, costs X, at what point in your life did you start making enough to pay for X without going into debt? For me, at least so far, I'm pretty far past that tipping point, but for a lot of people it's not a one-way journey-- losing a job could mean you go back and forth across that line of being able to afford certain things you consider "normal."

Another tidbit of recent news-- this is the first time I've not been able to contribute the maximum to my Roth IRA because my income was too high. I guess that is a milestone to celebrate, in a way, but I couldn't help feeling disappointed!

And I will have to write more about it soon, but I highly recommend the book Thinking, Fast and Slow. There is a lot of interesting stuff in there about financial decision-making, as well as actionable tips that will help you check yourself from making errors of judgment.

So, lots of blogging ideas on my to-do list if I can get back into a rhythm of posting more frequently! Thanks for sticking with me and leaving comments that remind me to fill you in! I'd love to hear more from all of you about what's up in your financial lives lately-- what's on your to-do list? What's keeping you up at night? How are you personally weathering this economy?

Paying for Casual Friday??

Apparently some companies tell employees they can wear jeans on certain Fridays in exchange for a charitable donation. Have you ever heard of something like this? If people in my office had to donate $5 every time they wore jeans, we could probably feed NYC's homeless all year!

Why???

Why did someone give this to me for Christmas? Found it while gathering items to donate to Goodwill...

Overheard in a Restaurant

If you want to keep your money conversations private, don't sit next to me! Though in this case, the person was sitting two tables away and talking loudly enough for half the restaurant to hear.

Scene: a Brooklyn eatery on a Saturday night
Characters: a young woman telling a story to 3 of her friends

Here's more or less what she said:

My mother grew up as one of 6 kids and she actually shared a bed, yeah, one bed, with her two sisters until she was like 15... she went away to college but she dropped out... she came back to New York and got a job on Wall Street and did really well... but her mother, my grandmother, always kept complaining about the money they'd spent on sending her to college and what a waste it was since she dropped out. I mean, she just couldn't let it go and literally every time they saw her she'd say all this stuff over and over again, so finally my dad got so sick of it that he just told her to calculate how much money it was, for tuition, travel, everything, and tell him how much it came to and he'd write her a check for that amount if she'd promise to shut up about it and never mention it again... my father had a very healthy attitude about money...

Once I'd heard the end of that story I didn't pay much more attention to her for awhile, until just before I was leaving the restaurant, when I heard her voice rise again with this interesting remark:

Let's just buy $400 worth of scratch-off tickets and see what happens!

I'd love to fill in the blanks in that conversation!