99 Cents

Top 10 things you can buy with 99 cents.

10. Three fourths of one item at any 99cent store in the city, since for some reason nothing is really 99 cents.

9. A 6 month CD at ING earning 5.00%. And then you can be like Look, two extra pennies!

8. A lovely oil painting on eBay, kind of like felt art but without the felt...

7. Homemade lollipops on Craigslist.

6. A bag of glass globs to make, um, stained glass globs windows.

5. Several attempts at trying to use a public payphone because you forgot your cell at home. Of couse, the pay phone eats your quarters without making the call, and you probably have a staph infection despite your best efforts to levitate the earpiece.

4. Food-in-quotations at various fast food joints off their 99cent menu.

3. Something you probably don't need but simply can't pass up at a stoop sale that, yes, is still going on in October because Al Gore warned us there'd be days like this.

2. A US dollar with 99 cents Canadian.

And last but not least, numero uno, you can download Alicia Keys' latest song, No One on iTunes and become near deaf. Like me. Because I've been playing it on repeat for the past hour while trying to figure out if it was possible to write about Alicia Keys on a personal finance blog...

My Free Haircut

I have been cutting my own hair for years. It began when I realized a long time ago that not a whole lot of people know how to cut thick, straight, asian hair without making it look like you're wearing the tectonic shelf of California. Or if they did, it cost two hundred bucks. So I just got done cutting my hair, and I can honestly tell you that it looks good from the front. Problem is, I couldn't find another mirror to check out the back, and was like Helen Keller with the scissors trying to make it even. So now I am going to trail at my (hopefully) new job. I think I better ask the neighbor if I'm presentable for the public yet...

Debtor City Map

Men's Health has a fun interactive map titled, Is Your City a Debt Trap. They used US Census data on "the percentage of people being squeezed by high housing and rental costs" (whatever that means), FDIC's recent personal bankruptcy rates, and Experian's reports on average credit scores, credit card debt levels, and credit to debt ratios. It's Men's Health, whose "science" is better equipped to explain how to bench 25% more, but the map is still intriguing.

City with the highest debt? Ten to one you know the answer. Las Vegas. City with the least debt? Billings, MT. Apparently not a whole lot of shopping to do in Billings. NYC only made the top ten in one category, cities with the lowest balance-to-limit ratio, clocking in at number 3. They ranked a hundred cities, so there's a good chance you're on there.

On a separate note, I got my credit score yesterday. It's 764, which they ranked as "excellent". Under negative factors that went against my score it's noted I have opened 5 accounts in the past 24 months. I just closed two of them (my irritating Chase cards which had no grace period, plus their ATMs are littering the neighborhood), which showed up and is reflected in the score. I wondered how much closing accounts affected your score, so far so good. I still want to close three more and just keep two Amex cards, a B of A Mastercard (oldest card, lowest rate, highest limit), and my REI Visa. I put everything on the Amex for points, use the Visa if Amex is not accepted, never touch the Mastercard, and pay off my balances in full every month. All I can say is, thank god I don't live near a casino...

College Costs Skyrocket

Here's something too many of us already know, tuition and fees for both public and private colleges/universities skyrocketed two times the rate of inflation.

The increases in the cost of higher education continue to drive up the amount that students and families borrow, with the greatest increase coming in private loans, according to a separate College Board report also released this morning.

The cost goes up, grants go down, loans go through the roof, and the basic financial education of a college graduate revolves around debt, the enormity of which precedes saving for retirement, a house, a car, an emergency fund, a secure financial future. A friend recently requested a post on juggling student loan debt in relation to credit card debt, etc., and I thought it was a great idea. But seeing that it's afternoon and another dealine looms, that will be for tommorrow. Plus, I have to go get a job to pay my student loan...

Thanks, But No Thanks

Well, after a long weekend of too much thought, I declined the job. In the end, I realized that my writing was going just too well to jeopardize. Plus, there are some other freelance type opportunities cooking on the backburner that are far more rewarding than the service industry, albeit less paid. I will have to get a couple shifts a week at a restuarant in the meantime, but it is not the responsibility or soul suck of actually running the place. Thanks for all the advice, on and offline!

Job Interview

Yesterday I had a job interview. It is a General Manager position at a well known restaurant with an upper echelon Zagat rating. The problem is that it is 5 days a week and 10 hour days. I would get home at 3am some nights, and work directly under self-professed "anal retentive stubborn control freaks."

M works days, Monday through Friday, so we would go back to our lives of not really spending a whole lot of time together. My writer's group meets bi-weekly during the work week, and I would have to negotiate that evening off. They have never had a manager, and admit that they do things "not exactly the right way." But they seem anything but eager beaver to change their ways.

They are owner/chefs. Some of the best food in restaurants comes from chef-owned establishments, but some of the worst places to work are the exact same places. Before owning this restaurant, they have never worked, let alone run, the front of the house (the dining area, ie waitstaff. The back of the house is obviously the kitchen). They have the stereotypical back of the house disdain for the waitstaff and have a high turnover. It pretty much looks like they run their waitstaff to the ground.

The restaurant has been open for a while and they cook every single day. To say they are overworked is an understatement. But they have to pay for a better quality of life and I am unsure if they realize was the going market rate is for that. Hell, I had to ring up a friend and ask him myself. The restaurant is a definite advancement from my last job. I'm supposed to think it over this weekend and call them on Monday. It is not a given that I will get the job, but if I said yes I think they would give it a whirl. I think I will run a couple of my suggestions by them, see how they react to advice from another, and let them know that I won't do it for under $70,000. It's an $80,000 a year job, and if I'm still around by year 2 that's what I want to make.

If they say yes, which there is a good change they won't, then I feel like I can't so no to the money. Especially right now. But I will be eliminating my life- my social life, my writing life... I just don't know. It will be a long weekend.

Analog TVs Kicked to the Curb

Yesterday Best Buy announced that it pulled its analog TVs off the floor. This is in anticipation of February 18th, 2009, when broadcasters will end analog transmissions.

Non-digital television sets that are not attached to a cable or satellite service and not equipped with special converter boxes will no longer work.

Best Buy is the first consumer-electronics retailer to report an exit from the analog-TV business. More than 60 million U.S. households currently rely on an antennas or analog cable, and cable operators are required to guarantee their customers will receive broadcast channels until February 2012.

I'm pretty sure our TV is analog. Just the other day we had to get another little machine to connect a "new" hand-me-down DVD player to the TV because the TV connection was so Roman Empire era. I'm big on secondhand TVs off of craigslist, tend to inherit them from friends upgrading, and don't have cable, so before this article the only thing I cared about was that my TV wasn't black and white and it had a remote. But no more signal? Maybe by 2009 there will be a fire sale on flat screens.