Financial Housekeeping

Over the last couple of weeks, I've made some more efforts to streamline my financial life a bit.
I set up auto credit card payment on my cable internet and local phone bills. For some reason, I hadn't realized this was an option before, and was doing manual e-payments each month from my bank, but I much prefer having everything go on my credit card so I can earn frequent flier miles.

I canceled my long distance telephone service. I know this one will seem like a no-brainer to many of you who have long used their cell phones or Skype, etc., but I was still hanging on! One reason is probably that I had paperless billing. I'd get an email each month and say "Oh, OK, there's the AT&T bill and it's only about $15, no big deal." But when I recently bothered to actually go to the website and see what that $15 had bought me, I found that I'd only made one outgoing long distance call and the rest of the bill was fees and taxes. Minute per minute, that call had become way more expensive than I thought it was, and that was the last straw! I don't like relying on my cell phone for all calls, but I'll just use my Zaptel calling card if I really want to make a call on the landline.

And yes, I know I should probably cancel my landline but I'm just not ready to do that yet. It's another pretty moderate cost and for the time I spend making local calls, it is worthwhile, as I'd have to upgrade my cell minutes if I didn't have the landline. But the annoying thing was that a few months ago, I'd finally had to replace an answering machine I had since college. I bought a phone with a digital answering machine built in, for about $30. Unfortunately, this piece of shit stopped working after a few months and recorded nothing but static. Emails to the manufacturer went unanswered and I'd been procrastinating about buying a new one. Then I started to think about how many people call me on my cell phone anyway, since I'm often not home. A lightbulb went off in my head: I ordered call forwarding service. Yes, this actually costs me about $4.00 a month, but now if I don't pick up, my calls go to my cell phone voicemail, so no answering machine needed, and it's cheaper than using Verizon's voicemail service. And though I could use Google Voice, that would mean telling everyone I had a new number-- this way, I don't have to change the phone number I've used for years and my calls will find me wherever I am. A few dollars spent for a convenience is sometimes worth it.

It's good to take a few minutes to stop and think about these little things. And it goes to show that even someone as financially anal as me can easily miss small money leaks if she doesn't pay close attention to every single bill!

Now With Less! (On Twitter.)

For those of you who are interested, I've just joined Twitter. Follow me there @myopenwallet for updates on new blog posts, brief money thoughts, and whatever else I can manage to say in 140 characters.

Big Money

I just found this image on my cellphone, which I took months ago and forgot about. I never actually went into the store to see how much a gigantic dollar bill would cost!

What Ever Happened to Hobos?

Ok, this is totally random, but the other day I was thinking about how I dressed up as a hobo for Halloween when I was a kid. I wore a tweed cap, an old blazer of my dad's which I think I was allowed to tear up a little, and his old, raggedy boots. I also smeared eye shadow on my face to look like beard stubble, and carried a bandanna on a stick, which I used to stash the candy I collected. If you look at the Wikipedia entry for hobo, you'll see exactly the look I was going for. Except I also wore a pair of large plastic ears, I guess just to increase the pathos!

Now, a hobo is not exactly just a poor, homeless person. The term has slightly more romantic connotations, as hobos were known for riding railroad cars all over the country, and they had all these cool slang words and code symbols to help each other out. But still... hobos are poor and homeless.

So do kids still think it's fun to play hobo, or to dress up as one on Halloween? But certainly no kid ever says "hey, I think I'll be a grungy homeless person for Halloween," right? Nowadays it seems like they all want to be something far more glamorous, and the life of a poor, itinerant person is no longer romanticized. But I don't have kids, so I may be wrong... what do you think?

New Postage Rates Go Into Effect May 11

In case you're like me and keep losing track of when the heck this is supposed to happen, and what the price of a stamp is nowadays: as of May 11th, the price of a letter stamp will go up to 44 cents. Stock up on your 42 cent Forever Stamps while you still can! (USPS new price list here.)

Since I'm still using up my 39 cent stamps, that's a lot more of the envelope I'll need to cover with penny stamps... thank goodness they're self-adhesive!

Going Without A Slip: New ATMs

I love the new Chase ATMs where you don't need to use an envelope or a deposit slip-- they make depositing checks, and even cash so easy and fast!

The first time I used one, I was a bit confused. I'd spent several minutes hunting around the bank lobby for envelopes and was really annoyed that they seemed to have run out. Finally someone from the bank told me the machines had been switched over and that I didn't need one!

All you need to do to make a deposit is endorse the back of your check and feed it into a slot when instructed. Sometimes the ATM uses OCR to recognize the amount of the check and says "The amount you have deposited is $40. Is this correct?" If not, it asks you to enter the deposit amount. You have the option to have your ATM receipt include a miniature scanned image of the deposited check, which I thought was really cool!

Last week, I took these ATMs one step further-- remember how I was talking about having all that money in my wallet? The wad of cash included a $100 bill and a $50 bill. I spend cash very rarely, and only on tiny purchases like buying coffee or lunch. I was inwardly groaning in anticipation of being given a hard time by a cashier when trying to break such a large bill.

(As an aside, why is that? It still seems like no one wants to change anything larger than a $20, but you'd think we'd had enough inflation over the years for $50s and $100s to be more commonly in use. And you'd think they'd get rid of pennies, and perhaps even nickels too, but we Americans seem to just love our small denominations.)

Anyway, while depositing another check at the ATM I decided it might be a good idea to just dump my $100 and $50 bills, since I didn't really need to be carrying so much cash. I stuck the $100 in the slot, and bingo, the machine recognized it as $100. But then I tried to stick the $50 in, and after several attempts, it was not being accepted. It was one of the old $50 bills, and I guess the machines are programmed to accept only the new design. At least I hope that is the case-- I'll be really pissed if I ended up with a counterfeit $50 after putting the dinner bill on my credit card!

And that would be the subject for a whole other post: what do you do if your friend unknowingly pays you with counterfeit money!

The Office Collection

Over the years, I have contributed to many a collection in the office. Whenever the hat is passed for a baby shower, bridal shower, going-away party, charity walk sponsorship, etc., I always pitch in. But until now, I have never been the one responsible for doing the collecting, and I found the experience quite fascinating!

This week I sent out a message about a gift for someone, asking people to chip in if they desired. The person we're collecting for is well-liked, so the donations started rolling in quickly, but I was surprised at some of the amounts. The first few people gave $5 or $10. One of these people was a younger, more junior person, but another $5 contributor was someone quite senior, and I couldn't help thinking she could have afforded to give a lot more! Suddenly I wondered if I'd been going overboard by always giving a $20 bill for these things!
After the first few contributions, other people often gave $20, including some assistants who I know don't make much money, and other people who I've often heard discussing their general tendency to be broke and have credit card debt. There was no rhyme or reason as to who gave more or less, at least not by their probable ability to pay. I think the factor that correlated most to the donation amount was age, but contrary to what you'd think, the younger people were the ones who tended to chip in more.

My conclusion from this was that the younger people in the office have perhaps grown up in a culture that is more inclined to over-spend. They are used to excessiveness in weddings, parties, home sizes, cars, etc. They are used to the idea that everyone spends beyond their means and has credit card debt. They like to live large-- not just in selfish ways, but in generous ways. The older generations are perhaps not quite caught up with inflation, and still remember the days when $5 was a very generous contribution, because most people only gave $1! But also, the older people in the office may just tend to have slightly different values or norms about how money is spent.

Only one person, a guy of about my age who I know must have a six-figure salary (and who used to be the boss of the person who the gift was for), asked "how much are people giving? What's appropriate?" I told him the $5-20 range and he gave $10. Everyone else just handed me money without any question or doubt as to the amount.

How much would you chip in for a co-worker's gift? Have you ever seen how much others tend to give? Does it matter what the occasion is or how popular the recipient is with others in the office?

Overheard About Money

"I don't care if I have to work two jobs, I'm gonna have a nice house and a nice car and I'm gonna look good!"

-Airport car rental agent

What Are You Embarrassed About?

When you put your financial life out there in a blog like this, you have to be prepared to accept lots of criticism. You'll get nice, encouraging comments too, but often people will say "why would you spend so much money on that" or "why don't you donate more money to charity" or "why did you make that stupid investment decision?"

I have never tried to portray myself as some kind of financial expert on this blog. I am not perfect, I am not always particularly frugal, I am not well-informed about many aspects of investing. I make good decisions and bad ones. The one thing I know I do well is to live within my means, but even that doesn't necessarily mean I am saving as much as I'd really like to for a secure retirement.

In the context of the personal finance blogosphere, I often feel a bit abashed about revealing certain things I've done. It's not like I'm writing some kind of trainwreck blog where I spend like a madwoman and laugh all the way to debtor's prison, but sometimes I read other people's blogs and I think, wow, they are much better at pinching pennies than I am, or wow, they really seem to have a very informed strategy for picking mutual funds. Meanwhile, I'm just bumbling along trying to make things work while still spending over $20 a month just for a storage locker at my gym so I won't have to carry certain items with me each time I go, or blowing thousands of dollars on a vacation trip. Maybe "blowing" is the wrong word to describe spending money in order to have a wonderful, memorable experience, but some people will surely disagree with prioritizing that over an equal amount spent on charitable donations, or directing the money to extra retirement savings given what the market is doing to my 401k lately. I sometimes think it was crazy myself!

When you think about finances as much as I do, it's easy to second-guess yourself and question your own decisions, and when criticism is aired in this public forum, it can raise the level of doubt, leading to a certain level of embarrassment. But you don't have to blog to feel that way-- do you ever feel embarrassed about your financial actions and decisions?

Publishing Deals (and a Sneak Peek at My Future Book Projects)

Many people in the publishing industry regularly read an email newsletter called Publishers Lunch, written by Michael Cader. It comes in two versions, one full of general industry news, and the other specifically covering book deals. The deals are categorized in the following way:

"nice deal" $1 - $49,000
"very nice deal" $50,000 - $99,000
"good deal" $100,000 - $250,000
"significant deal" $251,000 - $499,000
"major deal" $500,000 and up

One of the things about publishing that can be frustrating, for those who work in publishing houses, is that sometimes authors, or their agents, demand such high advances that a book can seem doomed to be unprofitable even if it sells quite well. On the other hand, I'm sure a lot of writers out there think it sucks to get a tiny advance on a book and then not have their publisher spend much money on marketing it-- most of those books are probably unprofitable too. Actually I'm not sure how this business makes any money at all... but in the meantime, I thought it would be interesting to see how many of each level of deal was reported in recent editions of Publishers Lunch. For about the past month, here's the breakdown:



This is, of course, a totally unscientific way to look at what's going on in the book industry. A lot of deals were reported without any estimated dollar level at all, and some of the deals were for 2 or 3 books. And I'm not sure what the criteria are for deals being reported to Publishers Lunch in the first place. You'd think people would be more likely to toot their horn about a "major" deal than a merely "nice" one, but "nice" ones are surely more common.

In any case, reading all the deal news has given me some good ideas for future book projects that I think would be slam dunks for major deals, not to mention a long-term presence on the New York Times bestseller lists:

Mötley and Me: A former heavy-metal guitarist describes how the life and death of his beloved dog taught him heart-warming lessons about how to live green, stay thin, and be competitive in today's global marketplace.

The Starstalkers of Pradablahnik: A mythical fantasy adventure in which a tribe of vampire private-school girls are guided by the spirit of their dead dog as they undertake a ritual quest to steal a magic handbag from within the stronghold of a celebrity's towering penthouse. (Volume 1 of a trilogy.)

Cafés "They" Don't Want You To Know About: After using insiders' secrets to profitably cash out of her real estate investments even in a buyers' market, a white, upper-middle class American endures the trials and tribulations of moving to a picturesque village in southern France, where she bludgeons her quirky new neighbors into accepting her friendship by using The Secret. Along the way, she discovers that the community is still haunted by the shadowy legacy of a forbidden wartime romance between a handsome Nazi soldier and a beautiful French woman who learned to stay slender despite eating pastries and chocolate by following the inspiring example of her naughty yet adorable dog, which later died under mysterious circumstances.

Step right up, agents and editors! You know you want these!

Bridesmaids on eBay???

Here's the weirdest money story of the week, from yesterday's New York Times:

Bride-to-Be Takes a Chance on eBay for a Bidding Bridesmaid

Being a bridesmaid can be expensive, as any woman who has been fitted for a dress she did not pick out, or spent hundreds of dollars for a plane ticket, can attest. But, then again, most bridesmaids know the bride.

Then, there is Kelly Gray and her fifth bridesmaid.

Ms. Gray, a Virginia Beach hairdresser, auctioned off the chance to be a bridesmaid in her April 2009 wedding on eBay. The winning bid on Wednesday was $5,700.

Today, the story got even weirder:

On eBay, Bride Finds Sponsor for a Wedding

The eBay auction to be a bridesmaid in Kelly Gray’s wedding is officially over, but the surprises keep coming.

The winning bid of $5,700 was by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group.

“We heard about the contest and thought it was an amazing thing she came up with,” said Nick Rangone, a spokesman for the beverage company who introduced himself to Ms. Gray on the phone as “Nick from New Jersey.”

Initially shocked that a beverage company had won the right to march down the aisle with her, Ms. Gray, 23, a Virginia Beach hairdresser, received another surprise when the company decided to give her $10,000, rather than the $5,700 it had bid.

How will the blushing bride be spending the money?

Ms. Gray said her wedding to Karl Gau would still be a simple affair.

“I don’t want it to be extravagant, but now I can get that wonderful D.J. who has the lights; I can do that,” she said. “Now I’m thinking of a honeymoon.”

Maybe she'll get to serve free Dr. Pepper at the reception too.

It's funny-- I enjoyed being a bridesmaid at my sister's wedding, but like many other women, I would be more likely to pay someone NOT to have to be a bridesmaid at her wedding! (Unless, of course, the happy couple meets through my Money Match personal ads!)

Little Things

The last few days have been happy ones, as far as finances go. It's not like anything all that fabulous has happened, just little things to feel good about.
First of all, I finally got around to filing an expense report at work, and was reimbursed for over $1,600. I often lose track of how much I have outstanding for reimbursement, so I never count it towards my net worth at the end of the month. Realizing I hadn't actually spent that money on myself kind of feels like winning the lottery!

Then, there was a little shopping expedition I did with a friend in the suburbs. We went to the local Sports Authority, thinking we'd buy her a pair of swimming goggles and both of us a pair of surf shoes so we wouldn't be skeeved out by swimming in a lake near her house. Lo and behold, the Sports Authority was having a sidewalk sale with big discounts, and one of the items featured was surf shoes, at $6 a pair! I was so happy to check that off my list, I was ready to quit right there but my friend wanted to look at the other tables, one of which turned out to have a pile of my favorite kind of flip flops. I'd been thinking I could use a new pair, but it has always bothered me to pay over $20 for flip flops-- it just seems wrong! But at the Sports Authority that day, it was all right: they were marked down to $11 on the table, and then when I paid for the two pairs I grabbed, the cashier marked them down a further 40%! I love it when things like that happen!!

And I also love it when you can kill two birds with one stone. My recent discovery that I have high cholesterol has had me eating a lot less meat, which has made meals a bit cheaper. It's also inspired me to try to exercise more. In order to make it easier to fit exercise into my day, I've been starting to go to the gym in the morning, instead of after work. This is something I never thought I could do. I am totally not a morning person and the idea of exercising in the morning was just incomprehensible to me. But now that I've been seeing someone who lives in the same country as me, who I can actually spend time with, it's harder to go to the gym in the evenings, and once I started to force myself to go in the morning, I discovered that I actually love it. It's really refreshing to start my day with a nice swim, and if I eat just a yogurt or a granola bar or a banana before I get on the subway, my energy level is fine. So this means I'm not buying breakfast in the deli as much. I stock up on breakfast items to eat at home, and then just buy coffee and make instant oatmeal in the office. I think I might even have lost a teensy bit of weight already but I may just be thinking over-optimistically about that... and that would be a third dead bird, which begins to seem cruel.

Anyway, don't you love it when the little things in life work out? It makes the big things seem less daunting...

Charreadas y Dinero

“It’s different than going shopping at Nordstrom’s, going to the movies and being constantly broke, like my friends.”

These are the words of Elizabeth Solis, a college sophomore of Mexican descent, who is quoted in the New York Times discussing her participation in an escaramuza charra team, female precision riders who perform in Mexican rodeos, or charreadas. Not that Elizabeth is necessarily making a lot of money from this pursuit:

The charreadas are mostly home-grown, paid for through the charros’ out-of-the-ring salaries as contractors, welders, night grocery store managers and janitors. The sport does not come cheap: a sombrero alone can cost $200 to $2,500.

Anyway, I just thought it was an interesting article, and you know me, I'll sniff out the financial aspect of almost anything!

On Keeping a Lot of Notebooks

With apologies to Joan Didion...

Many readers will know that I am a die-hard user of Palm OS PDAs. I've probably spent between $5,000-6,000 on assorted devices, software and accessories over the past 10 years or so, (some of which was later recouped by selling old Palms on ebay) and I feel like most if not all of that money was pretty much worthwhile. I love to carry around lots of information, and I am now so addicted to electronic reminders that I find it impossible to remember tasks and meetings without little beepers going off.

But despite my adoration of electronic gadgetry, I am also a notebook person. My infatuation with notebooks started when I was a child: a family member would give me the little pocket sized diaries that she received each year as a member of the Harvard Coop. They were great little notebooks, with a week at a view, and lots of extra pages with space for addresses, measurement conversions, lists of holidays, etc. I would carry one of these with me everywhere, writing down whatever little things I could think of to write. (Since I was, after all, a kid, I was often frustrated at my lack of important things to write down-- I didn't go to any meetings, I didn't have many expenses to track, and spying on the neighbors didn't really result in clues to any mysteries that I might be required to solve.)

Beyond those little diaries, I've probably spent thousands of dollars on hundreds of notebooks over the years, from little wire-bound notebooks to clothbound sketchbooks to expensive leather Filofaxes. When I moved almost two years ago, I packed at least 3 or 4 shoeboxes full of small notebooks in varying degrees of jotted-ness. I just loved notebooks so much I would often want a new one just for the feel of it, whether or not I really needed any more space to write things down. I was always looking for one that would be a little closer to being THE PERFECT NOTEBOOK, my definition of which shifted over time. When I got into the Filofax stage of the addiction, it got much more expensive, and I bought a few things I really shouldn't have spent so much money on. I was seriously addicted.

When my obsession with information-carrying 3" x 5" objects morphed from paper to electronics, I kind of took a break from buying notebooks. But I still liked to keep a journal, and that is something I can't do in a PDA. For at least the last 5 years or so, the only notebooks I've used for this purpose are Moleskines. The pocket sketchbook became my notebook of choice-- it's got nice heavy unlined paper, good for writing and drawing, but also even for the occasional watercolor painting. I have about 12 of these notebooks, full of all sorts of things: memories, musings, lists, numbers, sketches of Venice and floorplans of apartments. I also have 3 of these notebooks that are brand new and still in the wrapper: spares, since I don't like the idea of running out.


I had to go to a stationery store a couple of weeks ago to find a gift for someone, and for some reason, I found my old notebook lust re-awakening. I bought a Moleskine-ish sketchbook that I thought would be good for drawings-- the paper is rougher than the Moleskine, and I liked the thicker, bulkier feel. But of course I still gazed at the Moleskine display too, and discovered a new kind of Moleskine that I'd never seen before: the soft cover Moleskine, with graph paper inside. It looked nice, it felt nice, it smelled nice: I had to have it. And the minute I took it home and started writing in it, I wanted another one with plain unlined paper too.

The store I'd been to didn't have any soft cover ones with unlined paper. I went into a few more stationery stores who didn't have that kind either. In the process I noticed that different stores charge very different prices for Moleskines. The $12 I just paid for a pocket size Moleskine seems to be about the minimum retail price, but places like Kate's Paperie on 57th street charge up to $15.
Then I looked on Amazon, where the prices vary quite a bit-- sometimes they are the standard $12 retail, some models are discounted 20% or so, and of course you get the other "Used & New" sellers sometimes offering prices as low as $3 or 4 plus shipping. I also found a site called Moleskines.com which offers lower prices and discounts for buying in bulk. The thought of having a dozen pristine Moleskines delivered to my doorstep is disturbingly pleasant.

What can I say... for people like me, Moleskines seem to be one of those things where any sense of financial reason just flies out the window. And I'm not alone-- throughout this post, the word Moleskine links to different sites where these notebooks are artfully used and appreciated, but I particularly enjoyed this writer's summation, at the Cranking Widgets blog:

So, since we’re neat, organized people - here’s a list of what Moleskine’s really are:

1. Paper Notebooks - This is first and foremost. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, these things are just pads of paper. You write things in them just like you would a $.59 spiral-bound notebook from the drugstore or on the back of a cocktail napkin.
2. Expensive - A single large (5.5″ x 8.5″) Moleskine notebook will set you back anywhere from $15-$20, depending on where you buy it. If you were to tell me 5 years ago that one day I would drop that kind of cheddar on a book of blank pages, I would’ve laughed in your face. But, i did it...

I should also point out here, and I feel like a commenter may have mentioned it in the past, that Moleskines can help with expense tracking if you want to do it manually. The pocket on the inside back cover is a great place to store receipts!

Do we have any other Moleskine fans in the peanut gallery?

It's Spring, Do You Know Where Your Wallet Is?

I obviously don't. For the 2nd time, I've gone out to lunch on a nice warm day intending to spend a full hour out and about, enjoying the sun, doing errands, etc. But then it turns out that I've forgotten to bring my wallet with me!
I have a small wallet where I keep my cash and most-used cards. (See "what's in my wallet" details in this post.) It tends to be in my jacket pocket, and when I went out to lunch today, I didn't bother to bring my jacket! I did have my bag with me at least, in which I keep another small card holder which has a couple back-up credit cards and less-used things such as insurance cards and mini subway maps. I was at least able to buy my lunch with a credit card, but I couldn't do the errand I'd wanted to, as that involved filling prescriptions which were in the wallet I'd left behind.
It was annoying to have to use that alternate credit card-- I usually only use it when I order something from LL Bean, as it gets me free shipping. If I was going to charge lunch, I'd rather have done it on the card where I'm racking up frequent flyer miles. On the flip side, I now know that the favorite deli where I usually pay cash for my salad is happy to accept a credit card, so maybe I'll start using one on a regular basis!

Anyway, now that the weather is getting nicer, I'll have to make myself a little lunchtime checklist:
Sunglasses?
Water bottle? (so I don't have to buy a drink)
Bag with book, notebook and/or crossword puzzles?
Wallet??????

More Money Music

Here's another list of money music from my iPod. Like my first list of money songs, these are not all explicitly about money but they all have lyrics that have something to do with money, consumerism, greed, aspirations, and dreams of the good life, or at least sound like they do when taken out of context!

U don't have 2 be rich 2 be my girl
--Prince, "Kiss"


Of all the things that money can buy
Freedom's never cheap
--Style Council, "How She Threw it All Away"


But I've got to have the car I need it for the weekend.
I've got to have the stereo, And a couple of deletions
I've got to have the freezer Put some fun back in my eating
I've got to have it all until I'm complete!
I want a New Toy, to keep my head expanding...
-- Lene Lovich, "New Toy"


And I won't be sorry if you won't be
And I don't want your pity or sympathy
But with just a few dollars I can make it, just you wait and see
--"Conversation on a Barstool," as performed by Annie Ross, Short Cuts Soundtrack


The kind of freedom that you can buy
My bank won't lend me yet
--Neneh Cherry, "Ain't Gone Under Yet"


You've been reading some old letters
You smile and think how much you've changed
All the money in the world couldn't buy back those days.
--The The, "This is the Day"


Rockets, moon shots
Spend it on the have nots
Money, we make it
'Fore we see it you take it
--Marvin Gaye, "Make Me Wanna Holler"


It's always better on holiday
So much better on holiday
That's why we only work when
We need the money
-- Franz Ferdinand, "Jacqueline"


Paid off our house and then it fell into the ocean
--The Dandy Warhols, "Smoke It"


Folks say Papa would beg, borrow, steal to pay his bills.
--The Temptations, "Papa was a Rolling Stone"


Spend all my money on absolutely nothing
Need no man to pay for anything
--Imani Coppola, "Legend of a Cowgirl"


Everything is good because I'm living and I'm healthy
I'm not too concerned 'bout being poor or being wealthy
--Mary J. Blige, "Beautiful Day"


When you f*** it up later, Do I get my money back?
--Aimee Mann, "How Am I Different"
(also as performed by Bettye LaVette)


Treat me like your money
Love me, need me, want me
Take me wherever you go
Worship me your whole life
Pray for me at night
Treat me better than anyone you know
--Macy Gray, "Treat Me Like Your Money"


Whats the matter with your life?
Is the poverty bringing u down?
Is the mailman jerking u round?
Did he put your million dollar check
In someone else's box?
--Prince, "Pop Life"


Try dancing that mess around!

The Cost of Curiosity: Online Genealogy

Here's the weirdest thing I've spent money on lately: I paid $32 for a month's worth of access to Ancestry.com.

This started out rather innocuously. A friend was telling me about her family's small business and I tried to Google it. This led to a couple of results popping up that were from old New York Times articles about her relatives. It turns out that they had an interesting history and were prominent enough at one time to have made the papers, back when they used to publish lists of who'd just come in on ocean liners from Europe and who'd been tapped for secret societies at Yale. The family name was unusual enough that I started to see a chain of relationships, with deaths and marriages, and I sketched out a little family tree.

I told my friend what I'd discovered, and she was fascinated, and knew her other relatives would be interested too, especially her mother. She told me a bit more about their family, but said the traces wouldn't go too far back, as her great-grandfather had supposedly emigrated from Scotland and changed his name when he arrived. But I discovered someone else with his name who I suspected might be his father, and started to be even more curious. I moved beyond the NY Times results and began to look at genealogy sites, and with the limited results brought up by ancestry.com's free search, I thought I'd discovered something. I couldn't stand the suspense, so I registered myself for a free trial membership-- within minutes, boom, I was staring at a passport application from 1920 that proved that my friend's great-grandfather was born in the USA, and that the other man I'd seen references to was his father! Then I wanted to trace the family back even further, but to get access to census records from Scotland, I had to actually pay up front for the world membership. I was gritting my teeth about doing it, but I was dying to find out more, so I went for it, and sure enough I found connections to the family back as far as the 1841 census in Scotland.

I feel like I have a whole new hobby now! I wish I'd been a historian, or a detective or something, as I seem to have an obsessive curiosity and patience for digging through records and searching out possible misspellings of names, etc. I've printed out pages and pages of old newspaper articles, letters to the editor, passport applications, census records, passenger lists for Ellis Island arrivals, old phone directory pages, etc. It is amazing what you can find! My friend and I are going to put everything together in a binder and give it to her mom for her birthday, who I think will be amazed to discover that she had a great grandfather who was here in the USA doing interesting things, rather than being some long lost anonymous person in Scotland.

If you're wondering why I'd do all this for someone else's family, well, it's just because they were way more interesting and easier to trace than mine! And guess what, that's largely because they had more money! I have names of my own ancestors going back a few generations, but when you're looking for people with very common names who had 8 brothers on one side of the family, and 16 siblings on the other (!), it gets difficult, and kind of boring! No one in my family had the money to do any international travel and their social activities weren't noted in the papers, so there just isn't as much of a historical record beyond census data. But it was cool to see my grandparents listed on census sheets when they were little kids, almost 100 years ago!

As for the money I paid to dig into all this? There are some free sources of genealogical data, I guess, but I had a hard time finding any that were actually useful at all. Most are horrible to look at, full of broken links, and very limited in terms of what information they cover, or they just refer you to brick and mortar libraries where you can look at microfilm. Ancestry.com is a piece of cake-- it has a great search tool, and lots of data is aggregated there, with very clear images of the original documents. The $30 was well worth it. If you've ever wanted to know more about your family tree, give it a try!

A Weird Dream

I woke up this morning and couldn't wait to blog about a dream I'd just had! I think it was inspired by a piece of art I saw hanging in a restaurant last night. I mentioned to my dinner companion that the colors might look good in my bedroom. We then had a conversation about whether it was any good as art-- I didn't think it was anything really special, but my friend kind of scoffed at it and said I could just paint something myself that would be much better. I kind of agreed, since it was a really abstract piece that was basically just two big areas of flat color! But I guess I went to sleep with art on my brain.

In my dream, I was in a place sort of like the Strand Bookstore, except that there were various big old paintings hanging on the wall. I noticed one that was up near the ceiling-- it seemed to be painted directly on a piece of ragged plywood that was covering some sort of attic door. The painting was of a man sitting at a table, with his hands on an open book. He was leaning down so that his chin was below the level of the table edge and his eyes were staring out over the edge of the book. His hands seems unnaturally large, and they were painted very beautifully, with light and shadows across the fingers. The background of the painting was a room with dark blue walls.
For some reason, I decided I really liked this painting and wanted to buy it. The store seemed to be having a going-out-of-business sale, so I thought they might sell it to me even though it seemed to be part of the building itself, not a free-hanging piece. An old lady came by who I guessed must be the owner of the store, and I asked her if the painting was for sale. She said, "Oh sure, but I'm not sure how it costs, maybe $120 or $130 dollars." Hearing that, I was thrilled, as I'd been thinking I might offer $200 or so! Then the old lady told me that the painting came with a small black chalkboard hung on the back of it-- she pointed to other paintings with similar chalkboards near them, covered with columns of numbers, and said that the numbers represented the history of the auction bids on the paintings. I thought the little chalkboard was almost as cool as the painting itself, so I rather breathlessly said "Great, I want to buy it!"
The old lady set someone to work on taking down my painting, and we went to a cash register. She then handed me a bill with the price scrawled across it in huge numbers: $1,000! I was stunned, as I'd thought I was getting the painting for $130! I stood there wondering what to do-- had my obvious excitement over the painting made her think she could charge more for it? Should I try to negotiate a lowball price? How much did I love the painting? Was it worth spending $1,000 or should I just walk away if she wouldn't lower the price?

And that's when I woke up. I hate it when dreams are left unresolved like that!

The Color of Money

Is it just me, or is anyone else starting to get confused by all these redesigns of our currency? They're designed to foil counterfeiters, but with all these changes, I personally can't keep track of what REAL money is supposed to look like any more! Okay, the new security enhancements may be easily detectable by machines, and may make it harder to make a $5 bill into a fake $100 bill, but if money doesn't look the way we think it's supposed to, doesn't it make it much easier for the average person to be fooled by counterfeit bills?

And "greenbacks" aren't even going to be green: the whole thing that got me thinking about this was this Gawker story about the new $5 bill being rather purple...

More Recent News: Cost of Prison, Expensive Placebos, and Payments for Good Grades

More recent news items of interest, all from the New York Times:

1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.
....

Now, with fewer resources available, the report said, “prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets.” On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation.

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.

It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana.

The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate as the prison population ages.

More Expensive Placebos Bring More Relief

The investigators had 82 men and women rate the pain caused by electric shocks applied to their wrist, before and after taking a pill. Half the participants had read that the pill, described as a newly approved prescription pain reliever, was regularly priced at $2.50 per dose. The other half read that it had been discounted to 10 cents. In fact, both were dummy pills.

The pills had a strong placebo effect in both groups. But 85 percent of those using the expensive pills reported significant pain relief, compared with 61 percent on the cheaper pills. The investigators corrected for each person’s individual level of pain tolerance.

“It’s a great finding,” said Guy H. Montgomery, an associate professor of cancer prevention at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine who was not involved in the research. “Their manipulation of price affected expectancies of drug benefit, and pain is the ultimate mind-body phenomenon.”

Next Question: Can Students Be Paid to Excel?

The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

At Junior High School 123 in the Bronx, Jerome Johnson, a seventh-grade math student, also received cash awards.

When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.

The children were unaware that their teacher, Ruth Lopez, also stood to gain financially from their achievement. If students show marked improvement on state tests during the school year, each teacher at Public School 188 could receive a bonus of as much as $3,000.

School districts nationwide have seized on the idea that a key to improving schools is to pay for performance, whether through bonuses for teachers and principals, or rewards like cash prizes for students. New York City, with the largest public school system in the country, is in the forefront of this movement, with more than 200 schools experimenting with one incentive or another. In more than a dozen schools, students, teachers and principals are all eligible for extra money, based on students’ performance on standardized tests.