Financial Personality Quiz

Okay, it's not quite as riveting as Cosmo's "How Lindsay Lohan Are You?" quizzes, but who needs riveting? The Independent has the quiz What Is Your Financial Personality?.

Turns out I'm An Analyst, "It is not enough to know how to ensure that your money grows, you have to make the right decisions to allow it to do so in abundance and support you and your interests fully." It is a fair (albeit simple) assessment. It was pretty easy to gravitate toward what my answer would be, but like all quizzes there were moments where I was fractionally between two choices. The best part about the quiz for me wasn't the result, but the multiple answers. It was interesting to see the different ways people could think about money.

Library Fodder Roundup 2007

The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2007 has been out for a week now, and I've been thinking all week that I must have a yen for unnotables. Bringing you PiggyBankBlues 100 Nugatory Books of 2007... Well, see, I can't even remember them because they were so nugatory. Avid readers of this blog (both of you) already know I pillage such lists and click on the catalog of the Brooklyn Public Library (or the NYPL), and request a book of interest to be delivered to my local branch. A lot of libraries let you hold books online, not just NYC's, so check out your local library's website.

But back to the nugatory. Fellow blogging buddy Tenured Radical scanned the list as well to tally up how many hits she had, so I am not the only one keeping track. Like her, I only have read 4 out of 100. Maybe I was reading 2004 notables? Well, okay, so once a month I read a quote unquote fast paced thriller. Not so notable. But other than that I tend to lean towards literary fiction. Anyway, enough about me, my sagging bookshelf is starting to feel insecure.

So here's a roundup of best books of 2007 lists. Save yourself some money, whip out your library card more often than your credit card, and blow hours and hours of 2008 catching up on the best of 2007.

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2007

Publisher's Weekly Best Books of the Year

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Books of 2007

Book Sense 2007 Picks Highlights

The Washington Post Holiday Guide- best books of 2007

The Economist Books for the Year 2007

Paste Magazine Signs of Life 2007: Best Books

Boston Globe Best Fiction and Nonfiction Books of 2007

National Book Critics Circle Best Recommended 2007

Christian Science Monitor The 2007 Books We Liked Best: Fiction

LA Times The Joy of Reading: Favorite Books of 2007

The Village Voice The Best of 2007

photo of NY Public Library by Islãndßoy via flickr

What's A Moderately Priced Restaurant?

Last night some friends were visiting from out of town and we went to Perilla in the West Village for dinner. Our friends, D & L, watched Top Chef winner Harold Dieterle compete through the show's first season, garnering its first Top Chef title.

The food was one of those Christopher Columbus moments, were you're like wow I am the first person to realize that there is such a thing as tasting every ingredient, as though you've discovered flavor itself. The interior was a nice balance between unfettered and elegant. Unfortunately, we sat in the back near a draft that kept us cold throughout the meal, but I didn't let it "ruin" the meal. Definitely, I would request a booth next time. I ordered the seared sea scallops as an appetizer and the jerk grouper as an entree, and I can still taste it in my mouth as I type these words. It was a great evening.

So suffice it to say, I blew my budget big time for going out. A bottle of wine, apps, entree, dessert, came out to $122 per couple. So while it is not Per Se, it sure as heck aint Sri Pra Phai.

During dinner we were talking about what we considered an expensive meal and a cheap meal. Personally, in New York if I can eat under $20 (which includes tax and tip) then I consider that a cheap meal. An entree above $20 is moderate to me (which is what Perilla's price point is), and a non-steak entree above $30 to me is expensive.

The thing that is hard about a moderately priced restaurant is that the food usually is good so I jack up the bill ordering more than just an entree. I'm not really willing to "try out" a moderate meal, I need to know ahead of time that it comes highly recommended because honestly I just don't roll like that. So once I'm eating good food, it's on. I want to try the apps, the desserts, have a nice sip of wine before I break out in hives, the whole works. So a moderately priced meal becomes, for me, expensive. There are exceptions, of course. Nearby Al di Là has moderately priced food and I am capable of only ordering one dish.

But I guess that when it's all said and done, I don't really know what is moderately priced until the bill comes. Do you?

photo by zzzack via flickr

Housing Works Bookstore Sale

Housing Works Bookstore is having a 30% off everything sale. It's going on now through this Sunday, and I just picked up a couple more Christmas gifts. If you are not familiar with Housing Works, 100% of their profits from both the bookstore and the thrift stores are used to provide well needed services to homeless New Yorkers living with AIDS. It's a good cause, and I have to admit that their fiction shelves were well stocked with great reads.

Cringe Reading Series

Tommorrow night I'm going out for some free entertainment. The Cringe Reading Series happens the first Wednesday of every month at a local bar. The readers are ordinary folk who are crazy enough to read from their own high school diary. The place is supposed to be packed, and the entertainment value will be about as funny as John Hughes deep throating are-you-there-god-it's-me-Margaret. I will have to post a follow up review, and who knows, maybe a few too many Brooklyn Lagers and Dear Diary introductions will solve Louis Menand's paradox of representation-

"But (a paradox of representation) we would actually feel that we had a more intimate sense of Virginia Woolf if we read about her in someone else’s diary. Woolf described from the outside by another person is likely to give us a more vivid picture of what Virginia Woolf was really like than Woolf described from the inside by herself. Introspection is not as reliable as observation. (That’s why we have shrinks.)"

Well Mister Menand, I beg to differ. The high schooler of us all is another person (just ask our moms), and the high school diary is all observation with some shallow-as-a-puddle-in-the-Sahara introspection. An alien and a lost cause. And for one raucous evening, a celebrity. Who says you can't have fun in the city with no money?

The Economic Cost of Political Apathy

The other evening I was at a dinner with someone we'll call Ramona. Ramona is an old friend of mine who just had a baby, lives in Connecticut in a McMansion, husband is a partner at a midtown law firm, and she is by all accounts, not the least of which my own, a really nice person. She is fun, kind, and down to earth. I like Ramona a lot. The after-dinner conversation turned to the next Presidential election. Ramona is a lively conversationalist, so her sudden silence was noticeable. Afterwards, M was commenting that Ramona, for all of her good intentions and glowing reports of purging her closets every season for clothes that would fit the starving folks in Africa, was probably going to vote Republican. M couldn't understand it, and wished she could connect the dots for Ramona.

I come from an Upstate NY blue collar lifelong Republican family, so I understood it only too well. Connecting the dots for the self-interested voter is virtually impossible. And voting for your own self-interest is, I think, a debilitating casualty of political apathy. For the record, I like to declare myself a Social Capitalist, though M insists that such a thing doesn't exist and how could I even put those two words together. I think she's coming around, though :) So yes, once in my short-ish lifetime I voted Republican (a local election). That would be the time I didn't vote for my self-interest, but for the long term benefit of the city I live in. While it has meant that I haven't been happy regarding a lot of stuff, it also means that my city is solvent post September 11th, 2001. I divulge this info just to be clear that, despite my left wing name tag, I'm not a thoughtless partisan that mechanically votes.

This is what I think: If you live in a leafy suburb where there is no class diversity, no cultural diversity, nothing but a mirror of your very own lifestyle, class, and more often than not, color, then political apathy becomes tantamount to blindness. Throwing more money at the problem of public schools seems unnecessary (despite the amount of school tax your wealthy enclave pays), because, quite frankly, your schools work great(!) under No Child Left Behind. When you go and vote at your nearby public school, you aren't reminded of the architecture of a federal prison, nor are your children targeted to end up in one. Your neighbor is financially stable, as is your neighbor's neighbor, and subprime mortgages were never even thrust upon you when you bought your home. Nobody from your town is in Iraq or Afghanistan, but you have a yellow ribbon magnet on all three of your cars. Being patriotic is in and of itself concern for others. And since you own three cars for two drivers, the federal funding for public transportation seems just fine to you. You are a good person, so poverty is most assuredly not your fault, and therefore not your problem. America is safe and great, just look around you. And boy would it hurt if your tax cut was reversed.

The cruel starkness of wealth and poverty in New York City is hard to ignore, but people do. Connecting the dots for people is hard no matter where or how they live. I love my family, their Republicaness and all, and I grew up at a dinner table where three generations (I grew up in my grandparents home) would disagree with me. What is most striking is that my family is the opposite of Ramona. They were, until quite recently (thank god for pensions), the working poor. Everytime Reagan announced the new poverty line, my mom would quip, "Well, we missed it again!" And yet, like Ramona, they believe in The American Dream, whose power seems to hold sway to those who are living it and those who aren't. I learned very early on that I am not smart enough or articulate enough to help them see that who they vote for is hurting their very own self-interest. Because really, if I cannot pin national interest unto the lapel of self-interest, then I have lost their attention.

Speaking of attention, I've gone and probably lost yours! So I brought you this long-ass-never-ending post because I just read a great article that just might help me the next time I sit down with my family for tuna fish casserole. Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist and best selling author of Making Globalization Work and Globalization and its Discontents, wrote a piece in the latest Vanity Fair- The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush. It is a little long, and one may or may not get it all, but if ever there was a time to connect the dots, this would be it.

photo by QXZ via flickr

November Net Worth Update

After a month of blogging about the economy being one big toilet flush, I tallied up my net worth for November and my jaw dropped. My November net worth is $28,570, a loss of $442. My chart looks like the black diamond side of Aspen Snowmass. Thank god I saved money for Christmas gifts. There are rumors the Fed is looking to lower interest rates again. I'm going to move most of M and our savings into 6 month CDs just in case.

Okay, so even though every month like clockwork I put a dinky amount of money into my Roth, and pay down my student loan, until last month when I started posting my net worth I never really paid attention to it. All I knew was that I saved the annual max for my Roth, I paid X amount on my student loan to pay it off in half the time, I saved for a rainy day (and sure enough it poured), and I knew I paid off my credit cards in full every month. Which is why I felt like I didn't need to do a net worth in the first place. I was doing all I could, and frankly I didn't want to see how low my net worth was after all that.

But as I said last month, it makes sense to track my progress. Or my retreat, as it turns out. Because you see the real effects of the bigger picture. For example, my Roth IRA lost $805 in one month! I thought that was kind of staggering given that there's only sixteen grand and change in there. But then my ING gained over a hundred dollars in interest alone, and my student loan shrank by over 8%, so jaw dropping aside, the overall damage was minimized to a loss of 1.52% this past month. It puts perspective on the headlines, and the panic, and the depressed interest rate on my savings account, and it re-enforces the multiplicity of financial health. Save, invest, pay off debt. Here's to hoping for a December rebound to push me over the $30K mark!