Money Tips Network

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This week's topic: Job Interviews!

Student loan debt has become an absolute disaster for many Americans who chose higher education with the goal of improving their lives.

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When I graduated from college, a thoughtful relative of mine gave me a letter she had typed out on her computer. It was about twenty pages of material that she had typed out over the course of a number of years, and she printed out a version of it for every relative of hers who graduated from college or trade school or high school, given at the point where it was clear that they were about to enter the workforce.

The letter mostly contained a ton of different practical life advice and suggestions about how to navigate life as an adult. I don’t have it any more – it was wiped out when my apartment flooded at some point in the mid-2000s – but I do remember much of the advice.

Join our Tweetchat this Thursday at 12:00 pm Pacific for lively conversation and a chance to win one of two $10 Amazon GCs! Use #WBChat to participate.

This week's topic: Job Hunting!

For a long time, I found myself frustrated by the sentiment of “living for today” or “living each day like it was your last.”

If today was my last day on earth, I’d eat my favorite meals and spend pure leisure time with the core people that I love the most. If today was the only thing that mattered, I wouldn’t do things like clean the house or do my job or anything like that.

In short, I viewed statements like that as encouragement to lead a purely short-term hedonistic lifestyle, which is great if the world was going to end tomorrow. Just do whatever feels good because the consequences don’t matter. However, in the real world, there are a lot of consequences for living like that. You can’t sustain an income, for starters. Your health will probably fall apart, depending on what you choose to do. Your living areas will fall into a pretty bad state before long. If you live solely for today, then tomorrow will end up being pretty terrible.

Let’s start off by clarifying exactly what I mean by “investing in yourself,” because it is a term that has somewhat nebulous meaning that can vary a little from place to place.

For the purposes of this article, investing in yourself means applying resources you have to improving personal traits and skills and improving your resume. You are taking things you have – money, time, energy, and so on – and using them to make yourself better, with “make yourself better” usually meaning some measurable or discernible improvement in a particular trait that’s important to you and/or your career.

Here’s the catch: improving yourself is great, but it is not a direct recipe for career success and greater income. Almost always, investing in yourself merely increases the likelihood of career success or of the success you want in other areas, but it does not guarantee it.

After twenty-four days on the road, I'm back home in Portland. It feels good.

In mid-August, Kim and I flew to Italy. For the first week, we visited Florence and Rome on our own. We rode trains, drank wine, toured museums, ate gelato, and explored ancient Roman ruins. We also got sunburned. And we sweated from dawn to dusk.

Next, we boarded a small (680 passenger) cruise ship for a ten-day tour of the eastern Mediterranean. We spent a day on Corfu, visited a Turkish resort town, and wandered the walled city core of Dubrovnik (where Game of Thrones' King's Landing was filmed). Mostly, though, we saw more of Italy.

After a final two nights in Venice, we flew from Italy to Washington, D.C. for FinCon, the annual conference about money and media.

The Delta SkyMiles program moved away from fixed award charts several years ago, and it appears most of the other major U.S. players are following suit.

One of the most powerful books I’ve ever read was Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. The book’s focus is on how, in the last fifty years, people in America have become increasingly disconnected from one another and how many social structures, from bowling leagues and bridge clubs to the PTA and churches, have disintegrated, leaving much less social structure in their place.