values

Marie Kondo minimalists: Don’t give away the store.

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GetAttachmentThumbnail(Happy Throwback Thursday! This article originally ran on April 11, 2016, but its subject – Marie Kondo –  is hotter than ever, what with her new book and her Netflix series. The piece has been slightly updated to reflect those facts, but its basic theme remains the same.)

Over at the Budgets Are Sexy blog, host J. Money shared a startling fact: He almost gave away his coin collection.

The mohawked numismatist is known throughout the personal finance blogosphere to be someone completely devoted to what he calls “tiny pieces of metal.” Yet he’s reflecting on whether such attachments are entirely healthy.

“That’s right – the guy who only has one main hobby left, and created an entire blog dedicated to these historic beauties, almost gave up collecting entirely,” he wrote in a post called “When it’s time to detach yourself from your things.”

The collection was “the last remaining ‘thing’ I owned that I was still overly attached to and didn’t want to be anymore.”

I get it. Marie Kondo and her “Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” is all the rage right now. The underlying theory is good: Get rid of what you don’t use/may never use/no longer matters.

But allow me to point out that fads come and fads go. Minimalism may be one of them, and joining in could mean shooting yourself in the frugals.


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About my daughter’s divorce.

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In a post on Nov. 14, I apologized for having maintained radio silence for so long and suggested that at some point I’d explain why.

That point is now. As the headline indicates, my daughter (whose blog some of you follow) was recently divorced. When I wrote the Nov. 14 post, I’d been back in Anchorage for only three days. Prior to that I’d been in Phoenix – for nearly three months.

Those were pretty awful months. Abby’s trio of posts on the process will give you some idea of why:

I’m divorced

I’m divorced, part 2

I’m divorced, part 3 (and the end)

It will take a bit of time to scan these, but I hope you will – because I can’t do justice to her side of the story. One reason that it’s taken me so long to tell my own is that processing it took time. The other reason is that I couldn’t think of a way to explain what happened without making it all about me.

But the experience did take a toll, so I’ve decided to present some of my own recollections the way a book gets a preface or an afterword.

 

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Found money, food money.

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All year long, I find money: on the sidewalk, on the floor in the checkout lane, in the Coinstar return bin. And every year I count it, round it up and donate it to the food bank.

This year’s take is $10.25: a dollar bill, 12 quarters, 45 dimes, seven nickels and 140 pennies. This adds up to $10.25.

Picking up found coins is one of the tactics I suggest in the “Challenge Yourself to Save” chapter* of my first book. The reason? It works. Despite my not walking nearly as much in Alaska as I did in Seattle, and despite my mostly staying out of the stores, I still managed to glean a little over 10 bucks.

 

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Charity overload.

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I’m drowning in end-of-the-year charity solicitations. Social causes, political action groups, health-care organizations, educational advocacy agencies…Some I’ve never heard of, some I’ve helped in the past. All of them worthy.

Thanks to texting, social media and e-mail lists, marketing departments have more ways than ever to reach out to us. “They know that we have a tendency toward (giving) at this time of year, and they really double down on it,” says behavioral finance expert Dr. Ted Klontz, co-author of books like Mind Over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health.

You’re aware that need exists, and would like to help. But giving without a plan could potentially turn you into a charity case.

“If you harm yourself financially, you’re creating the same kind of problems you’re trying to solve,” says Manisha Thakor, vice president of financial education for Brighton Jones and author of On My Own Two Feet: A Modern Girl’s Guide to Personal Finance.

I talked with Manisha and several other money experts for an article on a new website, Considerable.com. All of them told me pretty much the same thing:

 

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Christmas creep.

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It begins. For the past couple of weeks, at least, I’ve seen lights and ornaments, singing holiday trees, and even a life-sized Santa Claus at a Home Depot entrance.

Yeah, it was kind of cute that he wore an orange HD apron over his red suit, and that the words “St. Nick” were written on the “Hi, I’m…” tag. But for heaven’s sake, it’s not even Halloween yet. What’s with the Christmas creep?

Rhetorical question. The “rush” is that retailers need to make a certain amount of money or they become ex-retailers.

An excellent way to do that is to get people thinking ahead to the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. Specifically, to get people thinking about this way ahead of time.

I admit it: Although I’m mostly horrified by the specter of Christmas creep, part of me does derive a certain frisson from those blinky lights on the periphery of the store. Does that mean that dark marketing forces have trained me to think that way? Good grief, I hope not. I much prefer to think it’s because Christmas was quite wonderful when I was a kid.

 

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Newspaper is magic.

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I spent a few hours at the public library yesterday, researching an upcoming article and working on a preliminary outline. Being me, I brought along a snack (peanuts from a giant Costco can) and a soft drink* that I’d partially frozen and wrapped in newspaper (diet sodas taste better very, very cold).

When I unwrapped the drink my eye fell on the newspaper’s date: June 20, 2016.

Aside from a little fraying around the edges the section was as readable as it ever was, although I’ve been using it fairly often for more than two years now.

Oh, newsprint: I will miss you when you’re gone.

 

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College is optional. Education is not.

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(FinCon and the Center for Financial Services Innovation are sponsoring the #FinHealthMatters writing/podcasting contest. Here’s my entry.)

A recent Facebook post about college featured a couple of 20-somethings. One was a slacker dude lamenting, “I spent $60,000 on a worthless degree and no one will hire me.”

The other was a clean-cut young man happily announcing, “I spent $6,000 at a trade school and make $85,000 a year.”

Obviously things aren’t that simple. Some high-cost degrees immediately lead to high-paying jobs, and not every skilled tradesperson automatically rakes in the bucks.

But its core message is one I’ve been espousing for years:

There is more than one road to postsecondary education.

If you’re unsure what you want to do with your life, college might not be a good fit. And even if higher education is in your future, it might not look the way you imagined.

 

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April is the cruelest month.

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What the poet says, but for different reasons. For me, April is the month with the most unpleasant associations.

Tax day, for sure; I always panic come IRS time, even though I haven’t done anything wrong. (My tax guy at Block Solutions says his experience is that the honest people are the most nervous, whereas the push-the-envelope or outright sleazy types are completely fine with the annual forms.)

But April is also the month of my ex’s birthday and also our wedding anniversary. His birthday is April 1 – insert your own punchline here. (I certainly have.)

Our anniversary is much more troubling. That was the day I entered into what would become 23 years of gradually unfolding torment. As I was getting dressed for the wedding, my sisters and my mom joked that there was still time: They had fast cars and could sweep me and my daughter out of there.

Now I think maybe they weren’t joking.

On the other hand, if I hadn’t married him I would never have made it to Alaska – which changed my life on several levels.

 

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15 things I like to do.

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My blogging buddy and former* Get Rich Slowly boss J.D. Roth recently posted an article called “How to find purpose in your life: 12 powerful exercises to help you discover purpose and passion.”

Among those exercises was one called “20 things you like to do,” which is just what it sounds like: Make a list of 20 things – and it must be 20 – that you like to do.

With those items you’re supposed to create a chart with columns like “when did you last do this thing,” “is it free or is there a monetary cost,” “solitary or social,” “planned or spontaneous” and several other descriptors.

J.D. admits he could list only 16 things he likes to do. Even better: “Playing computer games” was the first one he thought of, whereas “sex” was the second thing to come up (as it were).

Not only does he admit it (not sure I would have!), J.D. pokes fun at himself before the readers had a chance: “Kind of sad (and hilarious) to note that this list is in the order I thought of things.”

I decided to bounce off his post and give a list of 20 things I like to do. Trouble is, I couldn’t make it to 20 things either. Maybe that means my tastes are refined, or maybe it means that I’m a pretty boring person.

Note: These are in no particular order. In fact, one of the most important things I like to do is found at the end.

 

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Hey, Josh Radnor: You’re frugal.

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The other day I read an article about Josh Radnor, the actor who played Ted Mosby on the television series “How I Met Your Mother.” Now 43, he talked about staying in his $750-a-month sublet for the first two years of the show, even though it was a megahit.

“You don’t know, as an actor, how sustainable things are going to be, how long things are going to last,” he told CNBC.

Finally he bought a house – the last person in the cast to do so – and by the end of the series he’d made the Forbes list of the highest-paid television actors, earning $10 million (salary plus syndication bucks).

Normally I don’t write about celebs, but I want to highlight something Radnor said in the article:

“It’s not that I’m frugal. I don’t mind spending money if I believe in the thing. (But) there’s not a lot of stuff I look at in the world and say ‘Oh, man, I gotta have that’.”

As long as we’re doing TV today, I’m going to paraphrase Eleanor Shellstrop* from “The Good Place”: Josh Radnor…Ya frugal!

 

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