Give your money to strangers

(photo via progressdaily.com)

Today I gave like 65 cents to some lady on the subway who played what looked like a cross between a bagpipe and a recorder. (It sounded horrible. I like the mariachi guys way better.) It's something I try not to do, because as a hard-working American, I feel like I have the right to determine whether or not people "deserve" the money I've worked so hard for.

My recent unemployment stint has taught me a lot about how much money I really need to get by (answer: not much) and now that I'm working, I suddenly feel like I have all this extra cash laying around. And I want to spend all of it. I realized that I still dress like a college student and I could use a new pair of running shoes and omg I need a $5 latte right now.

So I need to figure out something better to do with my money. My current blog-crush, Jen at Daily Mitzvah, has started a charity piggy bank, which I will be appropriating in short order. I'm also verrry open to other ideas. Can you think of another way for me to do something good with my money?

On privilege

I thought I would hop on the so-called privilege meme floating around these days. When you think about how much farther some people have to go in order to achieve, it's kind of shocking. To be sure, this list works best for people in first world nations. Obviously.

Reminds me of this quote I read somewhere from Barry Switzer: "Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple." (Thanks Will!) Likewise, there are some people born in the dugout who never even get up to bat. I like to think I'm somewhere in the middle.

Bold all that are true for you.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
6. Were the same or higher socioeconomic class than your high school teachers
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
9. Were read children’s books by a parent (Hands down, my favorite childhood memories involve bedtime stories. She always gave in to my pleas of "just one more!")
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively (I'm not sure the media portrays anyone positively anymore...)
    
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school (on scholarship and lots of debt incurred by my mother)
17. Went to summer camp (basketball)
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them (I busted my ass serving pizza and bought my own car thankyouverymuch!)
    
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single family house (after age 11)
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
25. You had your own room as a child (for the most part)
    
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18.
27. Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course (Maybe that's why I didn't even get a 1300. Or maybe it's because I was lazy and didn't study.)
    
28. Had your own TV in your room in High School
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up (The first time I went to a museum was last September when my bf took me to The Met. It was boring.)
    
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family
    

(The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. The exercise developers ask that if you participate in this blog game, you acknowledge their copyright.)

Hmm! I expected to have more than 9 bolded here. I guess I'm snobbier than my upbringing would imply. How many do you have? Leave it in teh commentz!

Update: Will Barratt, one of the creators of this exercise, has a blog on the subject of class where he dissects it all in a typically academic fashion. Sound boring? It's actually really fascinating and worthy of checking out, especially if the list above made you think twice.

I'm rich!

I'm loaded. It's official. I'm the 429,712,644 richest person on earth! How rich are you? >>

And I didn't even know it!

Well, I kind of figured it out, thanks to the Christian Children's Fund commercials when I was a kid.

I stumbled upon this site, the Global Rich List, which showed me just exactly where I stand in the world from an income standpoint. Just put in your annual income and it will tell you how rich you are. I used my old salary and found myself within the top 7% in the world. The top 7% in the whole world. Wow.

Cool right? I lifted this from their "Why are we doing this?" section:

"We are obsessed with wealth. But we gauge how rich we are by looking upwards at those who have more than us. This makes us feel poor.

We wanted to do something which would help people understand, in real terms, where they stand globally. And make us realise that in fact most of us (who are able to view this web page) are in the privileged minority.

We want people to feel rich. And give some of their extra money to a worthwhile charity."

Sounds good to me! Go check it out and see just how loaded you are.

Debt free say wha?

So I'm reading this book, Debt Free by 30. No joke. I'd really like to believe that I can be free and clear of debt in a scant 8 years, but that is an awful long time from now.

How, you ask, does my level of indebtedness have anything to do with being a good human? Well, as I not-so-subtly alluded to before, if, as my Papa would say, I don't have 2 pennies to rub together, there's no way I can make good on all my grand promises and ambitions of good humanity. I can get so bogged down with fear that I'll never pay off my loans that I can't even take action to help myself, let alone anyone else.

(That was some sloppy sentence structure right there. Do me a favor and read it as if I were speaking to you and all those awkward word choices and comma placements will just seem like the charming idiosyncrasies of our conversation.)

You should know that I'm not a personal finance expert by any means. Take nothing I say as sound advice, except for the part when I say that you should ask someone else. I put bar tabs on my credit card in college. Drunken calzone binges, too. I shackled myself to a 6.75% fixed student loan interest rate to save $150 off my monthly payment but added thousands over the long run. I'm dumb as hell.

I'm about 1/3 through Debt Free by 30. Right now I'm lurching through a section on investing that I'm not prepared to handle yet. But the first section, that was really helpful. Would you believe that in all my "Just put these car bombs on my tab!" financial experience, I never really thought about looking at what I spend my money on? Shocking.

This book gives a thorough list of all possible expenses, including fixed bills like rent and cell phone to flexible spending like groceries, going out, and cable. All I had to do was open up my checking and credit statements for the past 3 months and add up what went where. I used the calculator on my phone for the hard stuff.

Now here's why I'm so evangelical about it: because of all this financial evaluation, I found a way to save over $300/month without significantly changing my lifestyle. That means no extra roommate, no getting rid of my cell, no passing up an invitation to go out. With an extra $300, I can eliminate the credit card debt in like a second, make a bigger dent in the student loans, and support causes I care about. I do love winning, especially if that means that Bank of America loses.

Maybe this won't help you. Probably because you're not a dumbass like me and you already keep pretty good track of your spending. In that case, do a blog search of "personal finance" and good luck to you with the results. There are some pretty smart people out there who aren't making nearly enough money on AdSense.

Fiscally responsible charity

A while back, I lamented on my lack of knowledge of charities, namely which ones are worth giving to. Jean Chatzky wrote an informative piece in Money Magazine with some answers from a dry, financial perspective. She says, "Fiscally sound groups are more likely to be effective." So right. Now if only I understood WTF else she's talking about.

You can't give away what you don't have

I'm trying to be a good human. I'm really trying to be nicer to people, volunteer my time, give notice to worthy causes, be less of wastoid, etc. I wrote last month about the things that inhibit me the most in my quest, but I left out the giant elephant in the room: money. I'm going to deviate from my normal blogging topics because money is an overarching theme in the lives of those who don't have it.

I don't have a lot of money. My boyfriend and I live in a very expensive city and almost 1/2 of our income goes directly to rent. We also have a combined $50k in student loan debt, of which I carry the majority. That's a lot.

Last year the bf consolidated his $20k student loan debt and chose a graduated repayment plan. Big mistake. Sure, his payments for the first 2 years are about $100 cheaper than they would be if he just chose a level repayment, but his payments are pretty much all interest, as in, he's making almost no dent in the principal balance. It kind of feels like treading water, he keeps paying, but the balance doesn't ever seem to go down.

Now on my end, I just consolidated my loans, something I really didn't want to do. I didn't want to stretch out the repayment term because I know that doing so adds thousands more in interest. Plus, the interest rates are astronomical right now! But I really didn't have a choice because I can't afford the monthly payments otherwise. So I consolidated at 6.75%, and now I'm stuck with it. Even though as the economy continues to tank, the rates will drop, but I won't be able to re-consolidate at a lower rate. This is one serious flaw with the Federal student loan system and it shackles so many college grads with unnecessary interest debt. Not cool!

In the end, I decided to go with Bank of America over Sallie Mae for my consolidation. I guess there was some change in the law (of course I'm fuzzy on the details, I'm only one of thousands being affected by it!) so that many lenders are no longer offering a 1% interest rate reduction after 36 consecutive on-time payments. B of A still offers this, along with .25% interest rate reduction for enrolling in direct deposit, both of which I'm going to take advantage to the fullest. And yet, I'll be 42 at the end of my loan term.

I know in the greater context of the world, my student loan debt isn't such an atrocity. However, shelling out $300+/month to pay for my admittedly mediocre state school education when I could be putting that to better use at the food kitchen or sponsoring some kid in Africa or sending presents to brighten my little sister's day, well it really kind of sucks. If there were ever a topic to get this generation off their keisters and write their representatives in Congress, this just might be it.

Here are some things I could do with $300/month instead of pay back this damn loan:
1) Donate a laptop.
2) Save for 3 or 4 months and get a damn couch.
3) Sponsor 12 poor kids.
4) Leave a HUGE tip the next time I get my nails done.
5) Save it, so my little sister won't have the same headaches later on.