Spending Your Life

May Day

2008-04-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

May 1st used to be fun. We danced, we took the day off and went on picnics. Schools had May Day celebrations. This photo was taken by my father when he was teaching in 1958. To me, this looks like a better way to spend a spring afternoon than studying math. Now what do we do? Work? Laundry? May Day was always celebrated in my house while I was growing up. My mother would have us pick

Where the heck is my money?

2008-04-29T01:54:00.001-07:00

About four years ago, I got a job that paid quite a bit of money. For some reason, I still ended up with zero at the the end of the month. I took the advice of every television financial advisor--I started tracking my finances; I began using Quicken. I diligently downloaded and classified each transaction then I ran a report. It looked something like this:This was useful. I could now

Introduction

2008-04-21T09:40:00.001-07:00

I used to be poor. Not truly poor, I mean, but student poor. The kind of poor where you have to choose between paying your tuition and paying your power bill. The kind of poor where you rely on the patience and pity of the apartment rental office to keep a roof over your mattress on the floor. The kind of poor where you buy the 10 lb. bag of rice and some spices and