Some couples choose to go to one income: to have a baby, to go back to school, to start a business. For others the change is involuntary and terrifying: layoff, illness, a business going under.
Those who seek change have the option of preparing for it. Those who have change thrust upon them can only scramble to minimize the damage.
Over at CBS MoneyWatch, Stacey Bradford describes hearing a stranger boast that he has too much money and not enough time to spend it.
Anyone besides me want to smack that guy two or three times?
J. Money has started a “Million Dollar Club” at his site, Budgets Are Sexy. Nicoleandmaggie from Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured isn’t rushing to join.
(I’m not really sure which of the two bloggers wrote this, so I’m going to guess that it was Nicole. I have a 50% chance of being right.)
Nicole and her spouse are making some smart choices, such as paying the mortgage off early, being canny about retirement funds and living on less than one salary. In this post she noted that throwing every extra dime and spare minute toward millionaire-hood would get them there faster.
But.
A relative has told me that the only way to secure our border is to allow the Border Patrol to shoot to kill. He honestly believes this is OK. He also honestly believes he is a Christian.
I’ve heard of prosperity gospel. Perhaps his church teaches hostility gospel. My church doesn’t.
Talk about immigration generally ceases to be talk and quickly descends into rhetoric. Porous borders! Welfare cheats! Low riders! Constantly pregnant Latinas! It’s easy to whip up hysteria and to present a convenient scapegoat: the Mexican drywaller who took away an “American” job, rather than the millionaire developer who hired him – and who even now is lobbying your congressman not to pass stricter immigration standards.
Becky Blanton wrote introductory letters to women who answered a dating ad. Kerri Hopkins analyzes names. Dimitri LaBarge shoots videos with titles like “How to Start a Glee Club” and “How to Play Bingo.” Stefanie Strobel will sells personalized messages drawn on the beach.
The one thing they have in common: All four found and/or deliver these gigs online.
Selling yourself on the Internet is the topic of my most recent Living With Less column on MSN Money. “Need cash? Make extra money online” is a peek at some, uh, unusual jobs as well as the usual writing and editing freelance gigs. (Edited to add: Those old MSN Money articles are no longer available online. Sorry about that.)
“Freelance” is often construed to mean “writing,” but it ain’t necessarily so. For example, Web design is a very hot skill right now. But you probably have something to offer even if you’re not familiar with Strunk & White or HTML. Somebody will pay you to translate a document from Danish to English, knit a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, act as a virtual assistant or roll around in public screaming his name.
If there’s even a hint of impending layoffs at your workplace, get a copy of your credit report. That’s the advice of Gail Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit National Foundation for Credit Counseling.
Why? Because potential employers may want a look at it. If there are any errors or delinquencies on your report, the time to deal with them is before you need to make a good impression.
In my late 40s, with about $130 to my name, I returned to college to get the degree that eluded me as a teenager. Frankly, that terrified me. But my life was already turned upside down: I’d left a long-term marriage and run through most of my savings to support myself and my disabled adult daughter. If I didn’t go then, I knew I’d never go.
That first year I survived on a crazy-quilt of gigs: babysitter, apartment house manager/handyma’am, work-study grunt, freelance writer, paid medical research volunteer, mystery shopper, oldest living cub reporter on the college paper. And I sank slowly into debt because divorce lawyers get paid by the minute.
An old acquaintance, now an editor with MSN Money, invited me to write an essay. “Surviving (and Thriving) on $12,000 a Year” appeared on Jan. 10, 2007. I figured it would be like any other article I’d ever written for newspapers or magazines: Some people would read it and agree, some would read it and get irritated, and the next day they’d all be thinking about something else.
Wrong. Thousands of readers e-mailed their reactions to the piece. Many others, especially personal-finance bloggers, discussed the article online. The folks at MSN Money realized this was a demographic that wasn’t getting heard: Folks living paycheck to paycheck, who couldn’t even think about retirement because day-to-day survival took all their financial and emotional resources.