Sometimes it may be easier said than done when it comes to earning more money and letting someone else do it. I wish that I could go to work and simply request more money if I work overtime, unfortunately I can't. I'm also very stubborn. I if I think I can do something myself I will do my best to do it even if it completely falls to pieces in my lap.
O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen Iphone-toting businessmen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with their untidy mobile-phone toting dysfunctional families,
I have seen their cell-phone induced brain cancer smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly brain-damaged laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they only thought they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.
We did as instructed to see The Dark Knight and were charged the entire price of both matinee tickets and the $2.00 convenience charge for a total of $18.00. With a recent layoff we wouldn't have gone if we'd known we'd have to pay for both tickets. "Good through 8/31" and "limited number" are different things - just wanting to vent.
I didn't write this article to judge "people considered lower class". I just wanted to point out that when it comes to financial aid the middle class kids are probably more disadvantaged. I also think that these kids earned their spots in the schools they wanted to go to. I also don't think a lot of the commenters showed contempt towards the poor. Most of them just related their stories.
@Milehimama
Note that I said they have to submit parental income information if they are classified as a dependent. This is true. Most kids aren't independent by senior year in highschool. Even if you had a job you have to prove that you can support yourself or have kids to be consider "independent". This usually means a full time job.
I read an article a few years ago by someone who advocated hiring people to do all kinds of things - I think he was a consultant who made something like $100-150 an hour, and figured that going to Staples to buy himself some supplies would cost him roughly $70 in income, but he could pay someone else to do it for $20, so it made more sense to outsource his shopping.
The only fault with this reasoning, to my eyes, was that he was assuming that every hour of his day was billable. Most people work an 8-10 hour day in the US, and once the work day is done, so is the pay... so I would assume that going to Staples in the evening wouldn't result in any lost income for anyone, as evening hours are generally not billable, unless you are a workaholic or a lawyer or both.
Same goes for other activities that can be done when I'm NOT working. Painting a house is an example that would clearly require more coordination than I have to offer, so I would certainly consider hiring someone for that. But I hesitate to do it for other endeavors, like yard work, even though I could TECHNICALLY get a second job on my weekends and make more money that way.
That said, I would probably pay half of my paycheck to have someone wash my dishes. I really hate doing dishes.
Just to clarify, everyone who ever filled out a fafsa should qualify for unsubsidized federal stafford loans. They are non-need based, so not as good as need-based subsidized, by they are SO much better than private loans. Plus the limits are increasing for 08-09. So no matter how much money your family makes, you can still get a low-cost federal loan just by completing a fafsa.
I agree that the middle class is given the shaft in terms of financial aid. But I really hate the attitude of contempt some people in this category harbor toward low-income minority students who qualify for more aid and are recruited more heavily. I think only one other commenter made this point, but I have to repeat it - no white, middle class person has any right to judge a person considered lower-class. Kids from families who have barely ever made ends meet, especially non-white and first-generation college, have faced so many obstacles that more privileged Americans can't wrap their brains around. I can't express in words how awful I feel when I hear/see this kind of attitude and I wish people had a more open and forgiving perspective regarding issues like this.
No, this is not true. It does require additional paperwork and an 18 yr old must be living on their own (and have a job) but a student CAN be considered their own person, separate from their parents. I did have to have a lease in my own name (which I did) to prove I was not living at home.
Volt is a national recruiting agency that I have worked for, but it's only in the Seattle area that I have found them to specialize in high tech recruitment. In other areas, they trend towards more blue collar and skilled labor jobs. I honestly can't speak to the rest of the country. What area are you in?
I would have to agree with Michele. As I read through that ariticle I was not impressed with the lack for creditability. The only fact that seemed to appear in the aritcle was that the author can't play squash with the executives... I found Jeremy Goodells article then later blog. Much better written and fact filled, without any bais.
Another neat thing about cards is that many games teach kids to do arithmetic quickly and painlessly. Two friends of mine -- brother & sister -- grew up in a home where the parents loved to play cards with them. Not only did the kids get the outstanding benefits of interacting with adults and other people of all ages, they both are very good at math.
LOL! The brother made a lot of pocket money when he was a young fellow in the Air Force, too...at poker.
I always pay my accountant every year to do the taxes for my small business ventures. She has saved me thousands of dollars each year and I spend a few hundred. It would cost me a lot more in time, effort and energy to do my own accounting than what she charges. Invaluable in my opinion.
i'm curious to know what agencies you've worked for. i've worked for temp agencies in the past when i was between things, but i never got the indication that they did anything more high-level than secretarial work. are they national agencies or local seattle ones?
Kids can apply for loans but very few I know take that option without parental approval. Even if they do , they have to submit their parents' income statements if they are still a dependent. My friend didn't take this option because her MIT interviewer told her that he has been trying to pay off the loan for 20 years and is almost done.
Plus, I'm not sure what you mean by financial aid is light years ahead. There was a time when you didn't need financial aid to attend even MIT. My neighbor went to MIT a very very long time ago (he is almost 90 so I'm not sure which year he attended) and he said that the fees were so minimal that pretty much anyone who could get in could afford it.
This is *exactly* what I do every time I think about spending money. I didn't know I was treating myself like a child, but I go through this logic. I also ask if I really need the thing I want. Very often the answer is no. It seems restrictive at first, but eventually it becomes a fun little game. It's personally satisfying to resist the urge to spend. And exercising self-control is a rush!
I graduated at the head of my class in a country town and tried to go to school. Financial aid was turned down because my Dad made just over the limit even though for seven years before, we were on food stamps and welfare due to Dad's chronic unemployment.
I fled home as soon as I turned 18 because it was a terribly abusive environment and ended up going to a community school. I worked my way through until my car broke and the bank repossessed it.
With no car and no financial assistance, I quit school. I never worked for an employer that provided assistance and could only find minimum wage jobs within bus routes until school became a distant dream.
I've worked hard and studied on my own to become a programmer but still have a very tough time getting an interview without that diploma.
In America, college is a privilege for those with somewhat stable homes with parents who encourage their children, those poor enough to qualify for aid or those rich enough to pay for it. Some kids need more than finances to make it. Unfortunately, some kids still have the odds stacked against them from the start.
Maybe someday, college recruiters will go into the hills of Kentucky and the inner cities of Chicago to find bright kids and help them.
I stopped taking a Sunday paper for this very reason! What little I was saving in coupons was offset by the dozens of store inserts flashing the latest tech gadgets, clothing and more. I have a lot of will-power, but no sense going out of my way to test it!
My wife and I would love to buy a house with cash, but unfortunately we don't have a big pile of it sitting around at the moment! Still, it is a stretch goal for us.
Any tax advantages missed could be made up by simply making a deductible gift to charity--the net effect is the same.
Federally backed student loans are still only made available to "qualifying" families as well. My father made too much money for me to qualify all but one semester of my schooling. I had to take out almost all of the balance of my tuition in private student loans. With a 3/4 merit scholarship at a private university, that still left me with almost $50,000 in personal student loans...which I will be paying off for most of my life.
This is a great post. I ask myself these questions all the time. In fact I am in the middle of writing a post about questions to ask yourself before buying a product right now. So this post was really helpful for me. Thank you very much
to those wondering about throwing away the head... I've just been doing some reading on the net, and this is what I've found:
what I've read is that yeast *does* produce *some* methanol (wood alcohol, the stuff that will make you blind). if you search around on the net, you'll find plenty of brewers claiming that it does. sucrose+yeast+water=ethanol+co2 is just a simplification. There is other stuff produced.
beer doesn't have much wood alcohol, but as far as I know it does have a tiny bit.
any kind of spirits (vodka, whiskey, rum) are distilled, and if you search around on the net, you'll find most recipes calling for pouring off the first part of the distillate. The reason for this is usually cited as pouring off poisonous things like methanol which have lower boiling points.
if you search around on the net, you'll find plenty of sites explaining hangovers. There are obviously many factors to a hangover, like dehydration, bad stuff in your stomach, etc, ... but one major factor is methanol.
your liver preferentially processes ethanol, ... and when all the ethanol is processed it starts processing methanol. when it processes methanol it produces painful, nauseating toxins. Fermentation produces some methanol. The preferential processing of ethanol is why you can't really be incredibly hung over until you stop consuming more ethanol.
There are a number of poisonous substances in the mash (probably in small quantities), and by distilling you are concentrating them. methanol boils at 65 C. don't start collecting your distillate until you're well over that temperature. Carefully raise the temperature slowly. ethanol boils at 78.3 degrees C, so you probably really shouldn't collect anything until you're solidly at that temperature. Carefully keep the mash at 78.3 degrees C, and if it goes much higher, stop collecting distillate. this would be better than the taste-test method.
Higher quality alcohol is less hangover-inducing because it has less of the nasties like methanol.
Spread out over a lot of beer, a little methanol won't kill you... but think of it this way: If you collect a lot of distillate one bottle at a time, and you don't throw away "the head," .. the first bottle would mostly be concentrated methanol. That first bottle will still get you drunk, .... but.... i wouldn't want to drink it.
Methanol boils at a lower temperature than Ethanol, and it's boiling point is closer to that of Ethanol than the other nasties, ... so throwing away the head is more important than ditching the tail. There are nasties that boil at higher temperatures too though, so throwing away both is a good idea. Besides, if you collect the head and tail, you're collecting stuff that is not alcohol, and so inherently are distilling a weaker booze.
Drinking plain methanol is extremely bad for you, can make you blind, and can even kill you. Even if you don't drink enough of it to kill you, ... it will make your drinking experiences much less pleasant, and will taste bad.
also, as someone else suggested, you do get less methanol by fermenting sugar or grains than you get by fermenting berries and fruits and such that are higher in "pectins" (wine hangover? ...along with the sulphates).
also, ... i wouldn't be surprised if you could get nasty poisons like methanol and acetone from accidentally destructively-distilling some of the sediment in your boiler. I mean, destructive distillation of sugar can produce acetone, and there's certainly a chance of a bit of sugar settling in the bottom of the still, right? I don't know if you can actually do that in water during alcohol distillation, but, ... I'm not convinced that it can't happen.
Sometimes it may be easier said than done when it comes to earning more money and letting someone else do it. I wish that I could go to work and simply request more money if I work overtime, unfortunately I can't. I'm also very stubborn. I if I think I can do something myself I will do my best to do it even if it completely falls to pieces in my lap.
Maybe they enjoy chopping wood.
To paraphrase Ezra Pound:
O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen Iphone-toting businessmen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with their untidy mobile-phone toting dysfunctional families,
I have seen their cell-phone induced brain cancer smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly brain-damaged laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they only thought they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.
We did as instructed to see The Dark Knight and were charged the entire price of both matinee tickets and the $2.00 convenience charge for a total of $18.00. With a recent layoff we wouldn't have gone if we'd known we'd have to pay for both tickets. "Good through 8/31" and "limited number" are different things - just wanting to vent.
@finaidgirl
I didn't write this article to judge "people considered lower class". I just wanted to point out that when it comes to financial aid the middle class kids are probably more disadvantaged. I also think that these kids earned their spots in the schools they wanted to go to. I also don't think a lot of the commenters showed contempt towards the poor. Most of them just related their stories.
@Milehimama
Note that I said they have to submit parental income information if they are classified as a dependent. This is true. Most kids aren't independent by senior year in highschool. Even if you had a job you have to prove that you can support yourself or have kids to be consider "independent". This usually means a full time job.
I read an article a few years ago by someone who advocated hiring people to do all kinds of things - I think he was a consultant who made something like $100-150 an hour, and figured that going to Staples to buy himself some supplies would cost him roughly $70 in income, but he could pay someone else to do it for $20, so it made more sense to outsource his shopping.
The only fault with this reasoning, to my eyes, was that he was assuming that every hour of his day was billable. Most people work an 8-10 hour day in the US, and once the work day is done, so is the pay... so I would assume that going to Staples in the evening wouldn't result in any lost income for anyone, as evening hours are generally not billable, unless you are a workaholic or a lawyer or both.
Same goes for other activities that can be done when I'm NOT working. Painting a house is an example that would clearly require more coordination than I have to offer, so I would certainly consider hiring someone for that. But I hesitate to do it for other endeavors, like yard work, even though I could TECHNICALLY get a second job on my weekends and make more money that way.
That said, I would probably pay half of my paycheck to have someone wash my dishes. I really hate doing dishes.
Just to clarify, everyone who ever filled out a fafsa should qualify for unsubsidized federal stafford loans. They are non-need based, so not as good as need-based subsidized, by they are SO much better than private loans. Plus the limits are increasing for 08-09. So no matter how much money your family makes, you can still get a low-cost federal loan just by completing a fafsa.
I agree that the middle class is given the shaft in terms of financial aid. But I really hate the attitude of contempt some people in this category harbor toward low-income minority students who qualify for more aid and are recruited more heavily. I think only one other commenter made this point, but I have to repeat it - no white, middle class person has any right to judge a person considered lower-class. Kids from families who have barely ever made ends meet, especially non-white and first-generation college, have faced so many obstacles that more privileged Americans can't wrap their brains around. I can't express in words how awful I feel when I hear/see this kind of attitude and I wish people had a more open and forgiving perspective regarding issues like this.
No, this is not true. It does require additional paperwork and an 18 yr old must be living on their own (and have a job) but a student CAN be considered their own person, separate from their parents. I did have to have a lease in my own name (which I did) to prove I was not living at home.
Volt is a national recruiting agency that I have worked for, but it's only in the Seattle area that I have found them to specialize in high tech recruitment. In other areas, they trend towards more blue collar and skilled labor jobs. I honestly can't speak to the rest of the country. What area are you in?
I would have to agree with Michele. As I read through that ariticle I was not impressed with the lack for creditability. The only fact that seemed to appear in the aritcle was that the author can't play squash with the executives... I found Jeremy Goodells article then later blog. Much better written and fact filled, without any bais.
Another neat thing about cards is that many games teach kids to do arithmetic quickly and painlessly. Two friends of mine -- brother & sister -- grew up in a home where the parents loved to play cards with them. Not only did the kids get the outstanding benefits of interacting with adults and other people of all ages, they both are very good at math.
LOL! The brother made a lot of pocket money when he was a young fellow in the Air Force, too...at poker.
Thanks for the list. I've struggled with that notion of what's in season. Your list as well as the other suggestions are greatly appreciated!
I always pay my accountant every year to do the taxes for my small business ventures. She has saved me thousands of dollars each year and I spend a few hundred. It would cost me a lot more in time, effort and energy to do my own accounting than what she charges. Invaluable in my opinion.
i'm curious to know what agencies you've worked for. i've worked for temp agencies in the past when i was between things, but i never got the indication that they did anything more high-level than secretarial work. are they national agencies or local seattle ones?
@Dogatemyfinances
Kids can apply for loans but very few I know take that option without parental approval. Even if they do , they have to submit their parents' income statements if they are still a dependent. My friend didn't take this option because her MIT interviewer told her that he has been trying to pay off the loan for 20 years and is almost done.
Plus, I'm not sure what you mean by financial aid is light years ahead. There was a time when you didn't need financial aid to attend even MIT. My neighbor went to MIT a very very long time ago (he is almost 90 so I'm not sure which year he attended) and he said that the fees were so minimal that pretty much anyone who could get in could afford it.
This is *exactly* what I do every time I think about spending money. I didn't know I was treating myself like a child, but I go through this logic. I also ask if I really need the thing I want. Very often the answer is no. It seems restrictive at first, but eventually it becomes a fun little game. It's personally satisfying to resist the urge to spend. And exercising self-control is a rush!
I graduated at the head of my class in a country town and tried to go to school. Financial aid was turned down because my Dad made just over the limit even though for seven years before, we were on food stamps and welfare due to Dad's chronic unemployment.
I fled home as soon as I turned 18 because it was a terribly abusive environment and ended up going to a community school. I worked my way through until my car broke and the bank repossessed it.
With no car and no financial assistance, I quit school. I never worked for an employer that provided assistance and could only find minimum wage jobs within bus routes until school became a distant dream.
I've worked hard and studied on my own to become a programmer but still have a very tough time getting an interview without that diploma.
In America, college is a privilege for those with somewhat stable homes with parents who encourage their children, those poor enough to qualify for aid or those rich enough to pay for it. Some kids need more than finances to make it. Unfortunately, some kids still have the odds stacked against them from the start.
Maybe someday, college recruiters will go into the hills of Kentucky and the inner cities of Chicago to find bright kids and help them.
I stopped taking a Sunday paper for this very reason! What little I was saving in coupons was offset by the dozens of store inserts flashing the latest tech gadgets, clothing and more. I have a lot of will-power, but no sense going out of my way to test it!
This list will certainly come in handy during my trips to the grocery store (and the farmers market). Thanks for putting it together!
My wife and I would love to buy a house with cash, but unfortunately we don't have a big pile of it sitting around at the moment! Still, it is a stretch goal for us.
Any tax advantages missed could be made up by simply making a deductible gift to charity--the net effect is the same.
Any one of those kids could take out student loans like everyone else. That's what I did for my super-expensive school.
Besides, financial aid now is light-years from where it was even five years ago. It's not even a fair comparison.
my previous post was in reply to Aaron above, forgot to say that.
Federally backed student loans are still only made available to "qualifying" families as well. My father made too much money for me to qualify all but one semester of my schooling. I had to take out almost all of the balance of my tuition in private student loans. With a 3/4 merit scholarship at a private university, that still left me with almost $50,000 in personal student loans...which I will be paying off for most of my life.
This is a great post. I ask myself these questions all the time. In fact I am in the middle of writing a post about questions to ask yourself before buying a product right now. So this post was really helpful for me. Thank you very much
to those wondering about throwing away the head... I've just been doing some reading on the net, and this is what I've found:
what I've read is that yeast *does* produce *some* methanol (wood alcohol, the stuff that will make you blind). if you search around on the net, you'll find plenty of brewers claiming that it does. sucrose+yeast+water=ethanol+co2 is just a simplification. There is other stuff produced.
beer doesn't have much wood alcohol, but as far as I know it does have a tiny bit.
any kind of spirits (vodka, whiskey, rum) are distilled, and if you search around on the net, you'll find most recipes calling for pouring off the first part of the distillate. The reason for this is usually cited as pouring off poisonous things like methanol which have lower boiling points.
if you search around on the net, you'll find plenty of sites explaining hangovers. There are obviously many factors to a hangover, like dehydration, bad stuff in your stomach, etc, ... but one major factor is methanol.
your liver preferentially processes ethanol, ... and when all the ethanol is processed it starts processing methanol. when it processes methanol it produces painful, nauseating toxins. Fermentation produces some methanol. The preferential processing of ethanol is why you can't really be incredibly hung over until you stop consuming more ethanol.
There are a number of poisonous substances in the mash (probably in small quantities), and by distilling you are concentrating them. methanol boils at 65 C. don't start collecting your distillate until you're well over that temperature. Carefully raise the temperature slowly. ethanol boils at 78.3 degrees C, so you probably really shouldn't collect anything until you're solidly at that temperature. Carefully keep the mash at 78.3 degrees C, and if it goes much higher, stop collecting distillate. this would be better than the taste-test method.
Higher quality alcohol is less hangover-inducing because it has less of the nasties like methanol.
Spread out over a lot of beer, a little methanol won't kill you... but think of it this way: If you collect a lot of distillate one bottle at a time, and you don't throw away "the head," .. the first bottle would mostly be concentrated methanol. That first bottle will still get you drunk, .... but.... i wouldn't want to drink it.
Methanol boils at a lower temperature than Ethanol, and it's boiling point is closer to that of Ethanol than the other nasties, ... so throwing away the head is more important than ditching the tail. There are nasties that boil at higher temperatures too though, so throwing away both is a good idea. Besides, if you collect the head and tail, you're collecting stuff that is not alcohol, and so inherently are distilling a weaker booze.
Drinking plain methanol is extremely bad for you, can make you blind, and can even kill you. Even if you don't drink enough of it to kill you, ... it will make your drinking experiences much less pleasant, and will taste bad.
also, as someone else suggested, you do get less methanol by fermenting sugar or grains than you get by fermenting berries and fruits and such that are higher in "pectins" (wine hangover? ...along with the sulphates).
also, ... i wouldn't be surprised if you could get nasty poisons like methanol and acetone from accidentally destructively-distilling some of the sediment in your boiler. I mean, destructive distillation of sugar can produce acetone, and there's certainly a chance of a bit of sugar settling in the bottom of the still, right? I don't know if you can actually do that in water during alcohol distillation, but, ... I'm not convinced that it can't happen.