I have an old Toshiba Qosmio laptop that I bought about 5 years ago.  Sometime last Winter the screen started fading out, first the upper left corner, and eventually the whole thing.  By Spring I had bought a new computer and retired the Qosmio.  Since then it’s been sitting in the basement for no good reason, except that I paid a lot of money for it.  It doesn’t work and never will again. 

Today I was planning to put it out on the sidewalk, but for some reason I decided to check eBay and see if a broken Qosmio laptop might sell for parts.  Surprise! There is a real market for defunct laptops, and some broken Qosmios have been going for $200+.   Not bad at all; I could use an extra couple hundred dollars.  ]

There are certain laptops that seem to be in even more demand for parts than my Qosmio.  HP laptops and MacBooks do particularly well.

I often see laptops and other computer equipment being sold dirt cheap at stoop sales, or even being left on the sidewalk.  I never thought it would be worth anything.  Hmm, I may be on the verge of a new business opportunity…..

I’m taking a day off from work, and am catching up on my emails and internet browsing.  I’ve got an inbox full of emails for different websites, products and blogs that I’ve been meaning to read and follow up on, so today is my chance to catch up.

Long-time readers know that I became deeply dissatisfied with my job a couple years ago. I work for one of the major Wall Street banks as a business analyst.  Most people outside Wall Street didn’t hear much about banking problems until last Fall, but for those of us in the industry the writing was on the wall by late 2006, and the layoffs and stress began around the Summer of 2007.  By the beginning of 2008, my job was an absolute misery of increased demands and diminished resources, with rats jumping from the sinking ship all around me.

I was actively planning to quit my job no later than February 2009, to work full time on my internet business, and was even planing to volunteer to be laid off.  Then last Fall the shit hit the fan: banks all around me started collapsing, and friends and acquaintances throughout the city were losing their jobs with no notice and no severance.  Scary days.  Mine was one of two investment banks to survive. I decided to put my nose to the grindstone and hold on for another year before leaving.

Well, that year is up, and now other events conspire to keep me at my job.  First of all, the lease for my apartment will be up in February, and my landlord is making noise about moving into my apartment.  I don’t blame her: I have two floors of a brownstone and the back yard. Times are tight, and I pay a lot less than what she pays for her apartment.   But after 22 years, this is inconvenient timing, as to get an apartment in New York, you really need to have a job.

Also, things are picking up at work and I stand a good chance of being promoted.  Currently I earn just under six figures, and am at that cusp where a promotion would bring significantly more money.  The Investment Banking world is not where I want to be, but I have cultivated a special skill over the past few years that not many people have, and I could save a lot of money if the promotion goes through.

On the other hand, there are opportunities that I would pass up if I stay at this job.  My internet business is doing very well, and it is where my passion is.  I have been making good money at it lately and, given the preferred tax treatment for small business owners over salaried employees, I might even be able to make more from the business than from my banking job after a promotion.

I have also learned over the years how to trade securities.  One of the great frustrations of my job is that, because of my insider role, I have to be pre-approved to buy or sell stocks, and if I take a position I have to hold onto it for three months.  Three months is an eternity in this market, and goes against my philosophy of trading rather than investing.

So I’m faced with a decision: do I play it cautious for yet another couple years?  Do I keep a job I don’t like for a while longer instead of taking some risks and doing what I want to do?

Well, for a day anyway, I get to do what I want to do.  And to take a well-deserved break. I’ll deal with business for a couple more hours, and then it’s time to exercise and  enjoy the rest of the day.

btw I came across a thought-provoking  blog this morning called bripblap.  Written by a verbose middle-aged guy who writes frankly and directly, who lost 100 lbs over the past five years, and who is working toward financial freedom (and further along the path than I am!), I found a lot to inspire me there.  If I can ever extract myself from my 60-80 hour per week job, I hope to write a blog like his.

Ever since vaporizing three years of posts a couple months ago when upgrading to Wordpress 2.8, I’ve been planning to change the look of my blog.  I liked the last theme, but i tneeded some work to really make look good and I just don’t have the time to do it.

Dawn over at Frugal for Life recommended eblogtemplates.com, which has some great themes. My favorite is the Lightbreaker Template, which is what I I am now using.

I will be  doing some customization (and getting rid of most of the advertisments — which came with the theme!) over the next day or so as I try to figure out how this theme works.  Hopefully I won’t delete my posts this time ; -)

Another dreary, rainy day here in Brooklyn.  I have taken advantage of the weather by staying in and catching up on my finances.  I don’t know about other people, but I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time at the computer tracking my finances.  I use Quicken 2007, and track just about everything I spend.  it takes 1-2 hours each week to enter all my receipts, and then another half hour or so to pay all my bills.  That adds up to about eight hours per month, or 96 hours per year.  It’s depressing to think about it that way.  Then there are days like today where I spend several hours going through and filing the stack of papers, receipts and bills that I’ve stuffed into the middle drawer of my desk, and it starts to feel like a second job.

But the good side of it is that now I can click a button in Quicken and see exactly where my money has gone over the past six months.  And at the beginning of next year I’ll be able to print out a few reports and have everything ready that I need to pay my taxes.  There are pros and cons to everything.

I’ve been doing well financially for the past several months.  My book business is thriving.  I had another great find last weekend — a trove of architecture books, and the person I got them from will be selling more soon. And I’ve been relatively frugal, which is beginning to pay off.  In two weeks I will pay off my 401k account loan, which will free up another $460 per month to pay off other things.

It’s the middle of October in NYC, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.  It’s been in the low 40’s for the past three days, with a cold, raw Northeast wind.  Winter doesn’t usually start here until after Thanksgiving, but we’re getting an early dose.

I took advantage of a couple rain-free hours this morning to buy the ingredients for a pot roast, the perfect meal for a day like today.  Every once in a while I get some time to watch TV in the evening, and this week I happened across the Barefoot Contessa, who was doing a show on Pot Roast with baked potatoes.  I have always liked her elegant but simple recipes, and the pot roast sounded like a perfect dish for the weekend, so I wrote out the ingredients and put everything together this morning.  The great thing about a pot roast is that you do all the work at the beginning and then just let it sit in the slow cooker for a few hours, filling the apartment with a mouthwatering smell.

The best thing is, I’ll have leftovers for about three more meals.

Anyway, click here for the recipe — it’s delicious.

About a month ago I wrote a post lamenting how hard it has become to find inventory for my Amazon book sales.  Well, about two weeks ago I was at a dinner where the person next to me knew someone who had a friend who was cleaning out her apartment and was complaining about all the books she had to get rid of.  My ears perked up immediately and by the end of the conversation I had the woman’s phone number.  I called the next morning, made an appointment to stop by in the afternoon, and found someone who was cleaning out her office of about five hundred recently published books about business and finance, almost all of them best sellers that go for over $10.  I’ve been listing, packing and shipping pretty much constantly ever since.  No complaints here though — the money is very much needed.  At this point I’ve sold three quarters of the books, and will be getting a nice big check from Amazon in a week or so.  I’ve had some great finds before, but this was by far the best one so far.

And it shows me that I need to change my tactics. I used to find most of my inventory in thrifts stores, but there are a lot of people who visit NYC thrift stores every day looking for used books that they can sell online, and those stores are pretty much stripped bare.  I’ve had a couple good finds in addition to last month’s by word-of-mouth, which is making me realize that, like any other business, networking is very important.

I’m glad that I’ve sold most of the books and plan to take a bit of a break from online selling.  I have had a lot on my mind to blog about lately, and am looking forward to spending some time writing.

For now I’m going to take a break from everything though.  It’s Open House New York weekend.  All kinds of places that are usually closed to the public open their doors.  On my agenda are the Grand Lodge of the Freemasons on Sixth Avenue, and the Newton Creek Sewage Treatment Center.   Open House New York happens both today and tomorrow, and there are hundreds of fascinating things to see.

Things have been dark at Midlife Beginnings for three weeks now.  I’ve been out of town and off the grid.  Well, not quite off the grid, but off the Internet, that’s for sure.  My partner M. and I took a nice long vacation in rural New Brunswick Canada, of all places.  My parents have a place on the Bay of Fundy, just over the border from Maine (and not far from the rocky shoreline in the picture to the left of this paragraph), so we spent a few days with them, and then camped in the Fundy Provincial Park.  I had thought that I would do some blogging, but after trying a few times to hook my laptop up to the internet without success, I decided an Internet vacation would be a good thing, and the laptop sat in the trunk of the car.  I didn’t even think about any entrepreneurial opportunities.  I really needed the break.

We got back last Sunday, but work has been the usual whirlwind that it is after a vacation, and it’s only now that I’m getting a chance to catch up on my personal life here in Brooklyn.

I’m also catching up on my finances, and the news is not good.  I put my book-selling business on vacation for almost a month.  And even though we camped / stayed with relatives, our vacation cost a LOT more than I expected it to.  Three weeks on the road is expensive no matter how frugal you try to be.

The cost of my vacation, along with the Vespa I bought in July, has caused my debt to rise above $30,000 again.  This is only half of what it was at the peak a couple years ago, but is almost $10k more than it was in July.  Not the direction I want to be going in.  Two steps forward and one step back, as they say, but for the first time in a while I’m feeling the pressure of my debts again.

M. came back home a week before I did, and is now in Brazil.  He doesn’t make much money, but damn does he ever get good benefits: 8 weeks vacation per year.  What I would give for that!  Long-time readers of my blog (before I managed to delete a couple years history) will remember that the last time I wrote about our relationship things were not going well at all.  Well, he’s done a lot to make up for the money issues he caused between us last Winter, and I’m happy to say that our relationship is one area of my life that has improved immensely over the past year.

But I am not happy wtih the direction of my debt over the past three months.  It is time to re-double my spending discipline.  I’ve missed blogging and have looked forward to getting back into the habit.  This blog did a lot to help me confront my debt and keep myself honest. I guess now I have a reason to put some focus back on it again.

After a Summer of working hard, I’m finally taking my annual Summer vacation. It feels great to kick back in my garden and just watch the breeze stirring the trees, silhouetted against a bright blue sky. It’s been unusually chilly in Brooklyn for the past few days, a welcome treat in August.

In fact, I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit in front of the computer for four days now, not even to write a post on my blog.  My break from all things electronic has felt good, but the creative urge is beginning to stir again.  That’s the way it always works for me — I take a vacaiton and after 3-4 days I have begun to decompress.  Then I get some good, creative days where I get a lot done.  But the next thing I know I’m back at my day job and I don’t get time to execute my ideas.

I had been thinking about quitting my job and living on my income from book sales.  I’ve written in the past (before Wordpress did a number on my blog) about how I find and sell books online in my spare time.  There was good money in this a couple years ago.  Even last year I’d find several hundred dollars worth of books per weekend with not much effort.

Since the stock market melted down last Fall though and layoffs hit New Yor City, things have been different.  Books still sell online, as well as they ever did, but it is much harder to find inventory than it used to be.  Yesterday I decided to head into Manhattan and hit the thrift stores. I started around 10am, and hit every single thrift I know of south of 96th Street.  I came home with a grand total of 12 books, worth about $90.  In the past I would have found at least $500 worth of inventory on the same trip.  This means I earned about$8 per hour of work, before the government takes their taxes and Amazon takes their fees.  All Summer it has been like this.  I don’t know if it is because the thrifts are selling online now, or if it is because the number of people scouting has increased, but it is getting really tough out there.

From what I see, quite a few unemplolyed professionals have been trying to make some money at selling books online, and they are beginning to look ragged and hungry. Many people have enough saved up to get by for a few months, but after unemployment and savings run out people get desperate.  And there are a lot of desperate people out there, with more and more joining their ranks each day.  It makes sense that I’m seeing this now, about a year after the layoffs really began in earnest.  There are not many layoffs now, but there are also not many companies hiring, so I expect things to get worse over the next few months.  This makes me thankful I have a day job.   I feel for the people I see in the thrifts who have spent money to start an online book selling business, buying expensive book scanners and listing software.  You can still make beer money scouting for books in Manhattan but unlike last year, you will not find enough books to make a living, not even a very frugal living.

This tells me that I am going to need to figure out how to create another stream of income.  I have a cultivated  connections that keep my book business going, but if something were to happen to them, it would not be good.  As is usual, I’ll have all kinds of ideas over the next several days, and may even begin executing on a couple of them.  But then my vacation will be over and I’ll be back at my banking job, and won’t have time to bring any of them to fruition.

There has been one thing that has been bothering me tremendously this Summer.  And that is the price of renting a car.  I live in Brooklyn, and owning a car here is incredibly expensive.  Between maintenance (city streets are rough on a car), insurance (easily $2500 a year, even if you have an excellent driving record) and parking (if you don’t spend $300 a month for a parking space you’ll spend a nice chunk of change on parking tickets), a car can really drain the budget.

So I choose to take mass transit most of the time, occasionally renting a car for a long weekend. Generally I spent $40-60 per day to rent a car, and renting one for a weekend each month has always cost far less than owning a car would.

Something has happened this year though; car rental costs have gone through the roof!  Avis in Stamford has been charging $120 per weekend day.  Add in tax, insurance and other fees, and two weekends at this price cost almost as much as owning a car.

Now I love Brooklyn, but I do like my  occasional weekend escape in the country in the Summer,  so these car rental prices have really bothered me.  In fact, since I am trying to save money, I have only rented a car once this Summer.   But I don’t like to be confined here, so over the past several weeks I have really given some thought to buying a car.  But then I think about the hassles, the parking, the cost to insure, and I back away from the idea.

A couple weeks ago I rode on the back of a friend’s motorcycle.  I’ve never owned a motorcycle, and in fact,  never cared much for them after a couple different friends back in high school were badly injured in motorcycle accidents.  But riding out in the open air was really nice.  And so was paying about $8 for enough gas to go 200 miles.  So I began to consider this, and to do some research.  A motorcycle isn’t quite me, but then I started to think about the Vespa motor scooters that I see more and more often in Brooklyn.  When I started to pay attention to easily people are able to park them, and how easy it is to maneuver around and through city traffic I really became interested.  When I read accounts of people driving them to the Hamptons, New England and even across the United States, I became totally enamored of the idea.

So two weeks ago I became the owner of a sky blue 250 GTS Vespa.  It was expensive, but it drives beautifully.  I can park it just about anywhere.  I took it into Manhattan last Saturday and hit about a dozen thrift stores, something that I could never have done foot or via mass transit.   Yesterday I convinced M. to get on the back and we drove out to Jones Beach in Long Island, about 30 miles away.  This morning I even commuted to work on it!

My monthly payment, insurance and gas will add up to about $270, which is half of what a compact car would cost me here in Brooklyn.  And the Vespa is so much more practical.  Rather than cursing the traffic, I am actually having fun driving around.  Enough fun to explain why I haven’t posted in a couple weeks……tonight I brought my laptop with me to a park by New York Harbor where there is internet access, and where I am writing this post. btw I’m going on vacation next week, so expect the posting frequency to increase.

I spent money that I hadn’t planned to spend, but I don’t regret it in the least.  Maybe this is a sign of a midlife crisis, but I sure am enjoying that Vespa! I cannot figure out why I let 20 years go by in this city without owning one before.

The weather has warmed up over the past week, and it finally feels like Summer here in New York City. I walked out into the heat of Midtown Manhattan after work around 5pm a couple days ago, and made the spontaneous decision that it was time to finally go out to the ocean for the Summer’s first swim. Being that I’m in full-scale frugal mode,  renting a car was out, so I called up M, and said “let’s take the subway out to the beach for a swim.”

Many people who don’t live in New York City don’t realize that the ocean is reachable by subway.  Far Rockaway in Queens actually has  surf and sand dunes — there are places out toward Fort Tilden at the western end of Far Rockaway where you would think you were on Cape Cod. The wind blows in from the ocean over the dune grass and there are no buildings in sight.

Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Image from Lornagrl via Flickr

But it’s an hour and a half on the A train from Manhattan to Far Rockaway, and then a long subway ride home to Brooklyn, so M. suggested that we head out to Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn.  Great idea!  Brighton Beach is a mostly Russian neighborhood on the southern edge of Brooklyn, just one neighborhood over from Coney Island.  I don’t much care for the raucousness of Coney Island, but Brighton Beach is the perfect place to unwind after a long day of work.

We took the N train, out over Manhattan Bridge.  I watched the evening sun glisten on New York Harbor and started craving a good long swim.  The train went back underground where it stayed for the next half hour or so, until the subway turned into an elevated train and we came up above the ground somewhere in Bensonhurst.

It’s funny how I can always tell when I’m near the ocean, even when I am in Brooklyn.  The sky became brighter and the light became clearer.  The sun was still strong at 6pm, and the white stucco backs of the tenaments of Brooklyn took on a tone almost like those brilliant white buildings I have seen pictures of on Greek Islands in the Aegean. After another 20 minutes, we came around a corner, and the train finally pulled into the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island.

Arriving in Coney Island. Image from Lornagrl via Flickr

It’s been a while since I went to Coney Island.  The train station has been redone and is impressive — about 4 different subway lines terminate there and the station is built to accommodate masses of people.

Stillwell Avenue Station, Coney Island, Brooklyn. Image from kodama_atpl via Flickr

As I said earlier, Coney Island isn’t my favorite place.  It’s noisy, it’s tacky, the food is expensive and not very good. We did get some fried clams at Nathan’s Hot Dogs, then walked past all the freak shows and noisy rides, out to the Boardwalk, and onward to Brighton Beach.

Brighton Beach is a mostly Russian neighborhood. They call it Odessa by the Sea. It is definitely not bucolic like Far Rockaway.  Crowded tenaments back right up onto the Boardwalk, and elevated trains thunder by, just a block or two away from the sand.  The Boardwalk is crowded with Russians promenading and taking in the sea air.  They really do promenade, just like people do in Europe. The place has a very old world feeling.  You hear Russian all around, with the occasional thick, nasally Brooklyn accent thrown in for good measure, just to remind you of where you are.

Brighton Beach Boardwalk. Image from WallyG via Flickr

M. and I stopped at a Russian deli and bought some borscht, some sausages, cabbage salad, dark peasant bread and a couple Russian beers.  As the sun was getting low, we went for our swim before we ate (luckily we both had swimsuits with us to use at the gym), and I paddled around until it was almost dark.  The water was a bit chilly but refreshing, and full of Russians.  Those Russians do love to swim.  Afterward we wrapped towels around ourselves and slid back into our regular clothes right there on the beach, found ourselves a bench and ate our dinner.

Tatias on the Brighton Beach Boardwalk. Image from WallyG via Flickr

It was getting late by the time we finished, but it was enchanting on the boardwalk looking out at the water, and I felt like having one more beer, so we stopped at Tatias, a Russian restaurant on the boardwalk, staffed by friendly waiters, and sipped our way through several more mugs of an excellent Russian beer.  Tatias has an extensive menu of Russian and Continental food.  Prices are steep though; you could easily spend $100 each for dinner.  The setting is special — not fancy, but very genuine somehow, very Brooklyn — but as we did not eat there I can’t say whether the food is worth the price.  It is a good place to sip a beer and watch the world go by.  Our beers were about $5 each.

All in all, it was an excellent way to spend a New York evening.  Total price for us, $16 for dinner and beers at a Russian deli, and then another $20 plus a $5 tip for beers at Tatias.