Please email me at:
![Jason [at] LiveRealNow [dot] net](https://liverealnow.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/email.jpg "Jason [at] LiveRealNow [dot] net"){kind=small}
Or use the form below.
[contact-form 1 “Contact form 1”]
The Things That Bring You Here
I’ve been walking though my analytics data. That is the Big Brother software I use to know everything about each one of my dear readers. It’s all part of my master plan to rule the world. Muwahaha!
Some of the results are interesting.
The single most-used search term to find this site is “slow carb diet“, which is great, because I really enjoyed writing that post. I’ve been slacking on the diet lately, but I’m still down more than 30 pounds. I’m currently ranked #3 in Google for this term. If I move up 2 more spots, I’ll outrank Tim Ferriss for his own product. If I aggregated all of the “slow carb” variations, this post probably accounts for more than half of my traffic from Google.
Many of you come here by searching for “how to have a perfect life“. I’ll do everything I can to help you achieve that, but it’s going to take work on your part. There are no shortcuts.
“Beat the Check” is another popular search term, but a very bad game to play. It’s almost impossible to win it, since the Check 21 Act of 2004.
It’s interesting that “trained husband” brings a few of you each month. My question: are you shopping, or exploring a new fetish? Don’t be shy.
I’m a bit amazed that “zombie wheels” is something people actually search for, but 140 people hit Google looking for that term every month, and a few of them make it over here.
“How to stretch a meal“, “things you should buy online“, and “unsecured loan advice” are some of the top personal finance terms bringing you all in, though “how to make a bunker” and its variation are popular, too.
“Hoe can you force your wife” is a bit disturbing. Most of the results are naturally for sex. I can’t help but hope that I’ve either really disappointed this visitor, or convinced him that force is a bad idea.
“How much did a pound of gold weigh in 1854?” is a search that makes me giggle. To the best of my knowledge, the troy scale has been used to weigh gold for a lot longer than that.
That was a fun little stroll through my statistics. Hopefully the fact that I used “fetish” and “sex” in a post will draw more crazy search terms.
How did you find me? Inquiring minds want to know, so please tell me in the comments.
$1500 Luxury
I’ve got some expensive habits. Not like Charlie Sheen snorting $2500 of blow of a hooker’s boobs, but still expensive.
My latest one is dancing lessons. Linda surprised me on one of weekly date nights a few months ago. She found a Groupon for the dancing studio we used before we got married. It was $69 for a month of unlimited group lessons.
When the month was up, we signed on for their beginner cycle of lessons, which cost another $400.
And now we’re starting the Social Foundation program.
Social Foundation is a series of classes that teach some advanced moves, but also to teach dancers how to lead and follow properly and how to dance socially and look respectable on a dance floor in any number of situations. Leading and following are important because every single dance move out there has specific cues that tell your partner what’s coming next. If she doesn’t know, you both look clumsy.
So we chose the four dances we’re going to learn better and signed up. We’re going to learn the Rumba, Waltz, Tango, and Swing. We’re already pretty good at Rumba and Swing, but we’re going to get better. Personally, I’m hoping to also figure out how to use the Tango on an open dance floor without crashing into people. That way, we can pretend to be Gomez and Morticia, my heroes.
Now, the thing is, dance lessons aren’t cheap. They cost about $100 per hour, where an hour is defined as 45 minutes. We’re rolling the last half of our beginner lessons into our social foundation lessons and paying $1400.
Ouch.
They gave us the option of financing it over 3-4 months, but I didn’t want to pay an extra $200 for the privilege. I think we’ll be tapping the vacation fund to pay for the lessons.
Why am I willing to pay this much?
Dancing is one of the very few things Linda and I both enjoy. We’re pretty good at it, it’s great exercise, it’s fun, and (shhh!) it counts as foreplay. It also doesn’t hurt to have the sidelines of the dance floor lined with people watching us dance, wishing they could do what we’re doing…or wishing their husbands were willing to learn how to dance. This also isn’t just something we’re doing at the studio. We are out on a dance floor dancing to a live band almost every week. That usually comes with about $25 in cover charges and drinks.
Fun, exercise, have sex, and inspire jealousy. That’s a winning combination. And finding things to do that we both love to do is difficult and easily worth the $2000 we’ve paid the dance studio this year.
5 Steps to Save
- Image by BitHead via Flickr
“Saving is too hard.”
“I don’t know where to start.”
“How much should I save?”
“Who the heck are you to tell me what to do with my money?”
“Shut up, Jason.”
These are the things I hear when I start talking about getting a good strategy in place to save some money. Financial matters are intimidating to a lot of people. They’d rather not think about their money any more than they absolutely need to, if that much. Here, I’m breaking it down to some simple steps to make saving easy.
1. Get motivated. Why do you want to save some money? Are you trying to make a secure future, or do you just want to buy a new toy? These are the kind of questions you have to ask yourself. Nobody else can tell you why you want to make changes to your lifestyle, and nobody else’s reasons matter in the least. Saving money is something you have to do for you.
2. Figure out how much you can save. Generally, you’re going to need a budget so you can figure out what you can afford to save, but not always. If you are making ends meet, then you get a raise, you can obviously afford to bank the difference. If you do that, you’ll never even notice the missing money. If you try to save so much your mortgage goes unpaid, you’re plan is doomed to failure.
3. Open an account at a new bank. The biggest problem I used to have when I was trying to save was that it was too easy to get the money. Every time I checked the balance of my checking account, I saw the balance in the savings account. Worse, it took seconds to transfer that money from my savings account to my attached checking account. Every time I wanted to see if I could afford whatever toy I was looking at, I’d see money that wasn’t earmarked for anything in particular. Naturally, that money got spent more often that it was ignored and allowed to grow. Now, I can completely forget about the money.
4. Automate. I’ve automated everything I can. All of my bills are paid automatically, except for one company that insists on quarterly paper invoices. I’ve got $665(neighbor of the beast!) automatically transferred to my INGDirect account, to get divided between my various savings goals, including a fund for my semi-annual property tax payments and a fund to pay for the braces we haven’t actually had to buy yet, but will in a couple of years. The money disappears into a bank I don’t use for my day-to-day expenses and grows completely out of sight. Every once in a while, I look at the account and get surprised by how much has accumulated.
5. Get rich. Once you’ve got the other four steps in place, all you’ve got to do is let it work. Over time, you will build wealth in a way that may surprise you. Your goal at this point is to do nothing new. Every once in a while, you can pull out some money and tuck it into an investment account to get some real growth going for you.
“Thank you.”
“You’re the best.”
“What would I do without you?”
“How can I show you my appreciation? <wink><wink>”
“What the heck are you doing with my wife?”
These are the things I always hope to hear after sharing my strategies to save money.
ING Rocks
I just got an email from INGDirect. To celebrate Independence Day, they are having a sweet, sweet sale.
You can:
- Open a checking account and get between $50 and $126 for doing so.
- Open a Sharebuilder account and get $76 to start buying stocks.
- Get $1776 knocked off the closing costs of a mortgage.
- Get $76 in a new IRA, to give you a little boost for retirement.
Take advantage of all of that and you’ll get $2054 in cash or discounts.
Seriously, this deal rocks. If you don’t have an INGDirect account, get one. There are no overdraft fees and no monthly fees.
The sale ends tomorrow at midnight, so hurry.
Money Problems: Day 12 – Paying for College by Doing Without
Today, I am continuing the series, Money Problems: 30 Days to Perfect Finances. The series will consist of 30 things you can do in one setting to perfect your finances. It’s not a system to magically make your debt disappear. Instead, it is a path to understanding where you are, where you want to be, and–most importantly–how to bridge the gap.
I’m not running the series in 30 consecutive days. That’s not my schedule. Also, I think that talking about the same thing for 30 days straight will bore both of us. Instead, it will run roughly once a week. To make sure you don’t miss a post, please take a moment to subscribe, either by email or rss.
On this, Day 11, we’re going to talk about one method of paying for college.
I have a secret to share. Are you listening? Lean in close: College is expensive.
You’re shocked, I can tell.
The fact is, college prices are rising entirely out of proportion to operation costs, salaries, or inflation. The only thing college prices seem to be pegged to is demand. Demand has gotten thoroughly out of whack. The government forces down the interest rates on student loans, then adds some ridiculous forgiveness as long as you make payments for some arbitrary number of years, creating an artificial demand that wouldn’t be there if the iron fist of government weren’t forcing it into place.
Somebody in Washington has decided that the American dream consists of home ownership and a college education. Everything is a failure. He’s an idiot.
College isn’t for everybody.
Read that again. Not everyone should go to college. Not everyone can thrive in college.
Fewer than half of students who start college graduate. The greater-than-half who drop out still have to repay their loans. Do you think college was a good choice for them?
Then you get the people who major in art history and minor in philosophy. Do you know what that degree qualifies you for? Burger flipping.
Yes, I know. Just having a degree qualifies you for a number of jobs. It’s not because the degree matters, it’s because HR departments set a series of fairly arbitrary requirements just to filter a 6 foot stack of resumes. The only thing they care about is that having a degree proves that you were able to stick college out for 4 years. That HR requirement matters less as time goes on and you develop relevant work experience.
A liberal arts education also—properly done—trains your mind in the skill of learning. First, not everyone is capable of learning new things. Second, not everyone is willing to learn new things. Third, a passion for learning can be fed without college. If you don’t have that passion, college won’t create it. Most of the most learned people throughout history managed without college, or even formal education. Even if you want to feed that passion in a formal classroom, you’re assuming the professors are interested in training your mind instead of indoctrinating it with their views.
Now there are some pursuits that outright require a college education. The sciences like engineering, physics, astronomy, and psychiatry all require college. You know what doesn’t require college? Managing a cube farm. Data entry. Sales. I’m not saying those are bad professions, but they can certainly be done without dropping $50,000 on college.
Some careers require an education, but don’t require a 4 year degree, like nursing(in most states), computer programming(it’s not required, but it makes it a lot easier to break into) and others. Do you need to hit a 4 year school and get a Bachelor’s degree, or can you hold yourself to a 2 year program at a technical college and save yourself 40,000 or more?
That should be an easy choice. Don’t go to college just because you think you should or because somebody said you should, or to get really drunk. College isn’t for everybody and it’s possible it’s not for you.
