Archive for September, 2008
Jessi is living one of my childhood (adolescent? teenagehood?) dreams: studying art in Italy. Ellen is living another one, using a gap year to do research and take classes at MIT. And then Will is off in India for a year, and Liz is learning SparkE stuff while interning in Germany, and Andrew is becoming insanely good at dancing out in Tennessee, and Eric goes on boats to islands off the coast of California and Other More Different Eric builds things of Awesome in NH and Sa’am sells produce at a farmers’ market and Chris is traveling the world for Appropedia.
And Smari is getting a FabLab off the ground and Joe and Sylvie entered a design competition in Japan. Apparently Brian is also going to Rwanda next week and Dan is off to Ethiopia (and I wonder when I’ll get to see an XO deployment too). And then there’s everyone working back at Olin or IMSA, who I am of course thoroughly jealous of because I miss those two communities of learning awesomeness tremendously (though I also appreciate my newfound ability to Wander City Randomly At Will, which is incompatible with going to an intensely immersive school out in the suburbs).
I’m really lucky to have friends that go off and do cool things and come back and tell me stories about them. I learn a lot that way. I still want to do everything, so hearing what it’s like to do things from my friends is the next best thing, and better in some ways; for one, they see things differently than I would have.
A few years back I thought (and still think) it would be cool to spend a semester each at different engineering colleges comparing and contrasting how they taught the exact same class. From the perspective of a TA, even. Travel the world while helping out with, say, SigSys at 5 or 6 different places. Happy side effect: I get ridiculously good at whatever class I help with half a dozen times. I wonder if this could be finagled into some sort of educational sociology graduate work.
Ah, yes. I’m back in Boston now. I have much shorter hair, a MA license (sweet!) and a Boston library card (more sweetness!) and a blender (much gratitude to parents!) and we have used it to make smoothies, soups, and/or fondues every day since it has arrived so far. Blender, rice cooker, wok, small soup-pot thing – my adult life is basically set in terms of food. Note to self: peel bananas before freezing them. They’re easier to peel when they’re not blocks of ice.
Speaking of interesting things to do, the Dance Complex has an afternoon of free classes this Sunday, and then on Saturday the 27th there’s the Beantown Jazz festival with oodles of free concerts. Mmm, free! I’m going to both, so if you’re coming drop me a line. (Rock climbing with Chandra and Gallimore may happen the morning before the jazz festival; more people super-welcome to this.)
Friday, September 12th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Kinda antsy tonight. Antsy antsy antsy. Oh yeah, my brain has felt like this before! (A lot! Many times! Constantly! Hurrah!) I wonder if (or rather, when) it will be like this again instead… I hope I’ve learned to stabilize a little since, and at the same time I miss it. Exhaustion is addictive.
Hm. So, on my to-do list, among other things:
- Put beneficiaries down for my (given-by-default) life insurance policy
- Apparently at some point I should also make a will or a revocable living trust.
It’s not like I have all that much to leave behind (“To my brother, I give a box of pens; I think I’ve used 3 of them so far but the rest should still be good for writing papers…”) and I sure don’t intend to leave the planet anytime soon, but it is good to plan ahead. The pragmatism far outweighs the weirdness – if you don’t worry about it, it might happen anyway – but it does feel weird having that on my to-do list. My brother, when I told him this: “Ooh, then i could pay for college. And buy a car.” Me: “I think you can find better ways of financing a car than orchestrating my death.”
In any case, I’m sure I could now find better options for the postmortem allocation of my property than I thought of when I was a kid (it went something like “everyone just comes and picks out what they want to keep of mine and it will all work out!”). I also plotted out my funeral when I was little; it involves balloons instead of flowers and nobody wearing all-black suits or dresses and good food and lots of stories and the scattering of ashes rather than lying still in a fancy box for all eternity, which, honestly, to me just sounds like hell). Not that any of these plans are good, mind you; they were insanely naive and uninformed (still are, after well over a decade later) and that kind of stuff is for the people you leave behind in any case, and my family might appreciate a more traditional deal. It’s still the kind of thing I’d like, though.
But hey, I figure at least 80 more years, what with the rising life expectancies and medicine these days – good years, too. On that note, tomorrow is a busy day, and I should sleep, so lights turn off now; fluorescent laptop backlight counts. Go to sleep, brain. Just. Just go. Stop jittering, please.
Now.
Monday, September 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
In the form of a kind of checklist, because I swear I will forget otherwise. The “how long to keep what” is embedded within.
Daily:
- don’t spend money you don’t need to spend
- don’t spend money you don’t need to spend
- don’t spend money you don’t need to spend
- basically, yeah. Save money.
- One book said you could toss phone bills, utility bills, and grocery receipts as soon as they were paid.
Monthly:
- Check your balance statements with your receipts and records
- Put extra Fun Money into Next Big Thing fund
- Toss canceled checks over a year old
- Toss credit card statements and receipts over a year old, unless you need them for taxes, insurance, or a warranty
- Toss bank statements over 3 years old
- Make (read: relabel) new folders as appropriate for upcoming month
Annually:
- Rebalance your investments
- Other stuff I’m sure I should think of here but am not thinking of right now
Stuff to keep forever (yes, in folders! more folders! a lot of them!):
- birth cert
- college transcripts
- credit card agreement (as long as you have the card)
- diplomas
- insurance policies
- loan agreements, if you have any
- home inventory
- passport (current)
- receipts for major purchases (you get to define “major”)
- social security
- retirement plan docs
- tax returns, forms, and docs (can toss receipts in 3 yeras)
- warranties (as long as they last)
- work performance reviews, memos on job performance
- year end pay stubs & bonus statements
- year end transaction statements from mutual fund companies
- your immortal soul (putting it down as collateral for a loan is generally considered to be Not A Good Idea)
Monday, September 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
There are a lot of folders.
Bank statements, one folder per account. This includes ATM records and records of checks you write, but not for things that are tax-deductible (more on this later). I’m also keeping receipts from things I buy with cash here.
Brokerage/investment accounts, one folder per account. Keep statements that show purchases or sales of investments, and stock and bond certificates if you have them. This includes things like IRAs and mutual funds (you should have year-end transaction statements for the latter).
Credit cards, one folder per card. Receipts go here. I have letter-sized envelopes to put receipts into so I can staple one envelope of receipts to each statement once I check them off (after the statement arrives in my inbox). The exception is for tax-deductible stuff, which should go into this folder until you check it against a statement, and then reciepts for those go into the tax-deductible folder (again, more on this later).
Business expenses and things that will get reimbursed in general. This is all going in one folder, because really, how many different people/organizations will I need to get reimbursed by at one time? Receipts and stuff from this stay in this folder until I’m actually reimbursed, then they go to the bank statements folder (if it was a check or cash) or the credit cards folder (if that applies).
Tax deductible items. They all go in this folder after they’ve been checked off from a statement (credit card or bank). Receipts, 8283s (the form you need to itemize donations over $500), and records.
Tax returns, one folder per year. This includes W2s, 1099s, tax returns, tax forms, and “supporting documentation,” whatever that last one means.
Memberships and warranties, as long as they are active. For me, this means IEEE, ACM, and suchlike; other things I can think of are things like gym memberships, cell phone plans, blah blah blah blah. Not really financial, but they cost money and you probably should keep ‘em as long as you have that membership or plan around.
Important documents of life. Again, they’re not financial, but should be filed anyway. This is stuff like…
- Your birth certificate
- College transcripts, if you have them
- Diplomas
- Your current passport
- Social security card
Salary and job docs. Pay stubs, year-end pay stubs, performance reviews and letters, things pertaining to your bonus if you get one, copies of IP agreements, NDAs, and suchlike.
Insurance docs. One folder per policy, as you might predict; keep policies, literature, claim copies, and statements of reimbursement here.
Retirement/401(k) stuff. Plan statements, summary descriptions, quarterly statements, employee benefit documents.
Student loans. This (happily – thank you, Olin!) doesn’t apply to me, but might to some of you; keep your loan agreement and monthly statements here. Yep, one folder per loan.
There were some other things relevant to people who had children and/or mortgages; I have neither, so I ignored those bits; I figured this would be enough folders for the time being.
Next: What to keep how long?
Monday, September 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tank just asked about the food tour of Boston that my brother Jason and I (and for a day, our cousin Mark) went on, so here ya go. Criteria for choosing were (1) Things hungry 19-year-old student would like and (2) Things I could afford.
Day 1:
- Santarpio’s Pizza – garlic & sausage pizza, excellent. “Worth walking for,” said Jason. It’s not the best pizza I have ever had, but it’s darn good pizza and it’s in my neighborhood so I would go (indeed, have gone) again and take guests there.
- Sunset Grill & Tap – fiesta nachos, full plate. The eyes-bugging-out-of-head look on the faces of the boys was worth it; this plate is gorgeously huge, and tasty for such a big cheap thing (the cheese, salsa, chili, and stuff is actually distributed throughout the giant mass of chips instead of dumped on top). We finished maybe half of it; leftovers were foisted off on Matt Ritter and Man Hall later that night.
- Blue Ribbon BBQ – supper for 6, which includes ribs, chicken, coleslaw, pulled pork sandwiches, cornbread, and beans. Tasty spicy ribs, gloriously tender pork, okay chicken, and i was too stuffed to eat much of the sides.
Day 2:
- Bartley’s Burgers – gazpacho, Some Big Burger Of A Type I Have Forgotten that came with onion rings, sweet potato fries. Gazpacho good, burger excellent; juicy and full of beef flavor that blended/contrasted nicely with the toppings. Onion rings good but of the thin-sliced variety (I prefer huge chunky onion rings). Sweet potato fries addictive. Jason has wanted to go here for something like 3 or 4 years. He said that it was worth the wait.
- Berryline – we split one with raspberries on top. Good but pricey; I like it because I haven’t had stuff like it before, but Jason didn’t find it particularly special. This may be because he goes to school in California and there are apparently frozen yogurt places like this all over there. Or maybe he’s just picky.
- Crazy Dough – slice of Nutty Tuscan pizza. Jason ate it all as I was recovering from Whoa Boy That Was A Lot Of Food. He said it was very good. I know it’s good because I recommended it to him; it’s my favorite Crazy Dough pizza.
- John Harvard’s Brewhouse – my turn to have something while Jason’s digestive system worked; they brew their own stuff there. I had an ale and it was excellent.
- Finale – chocolate platter for 2, plus scoop of vanilla ice cream (our server’s suggestion, on the house, bless her). Really good. Really, really really really good. Wow. I think that next time we’ll both just go right for the chocolate lava cake (“Magnanimous Molten”) because that was the standout and we were both sad to finish eating it.
Day 3:
- Digestive Systems Returning To Normal Operations Now No Food Today Please.
- Not really. Later in the day we had sweet corn that J had brought from Illinois, plus party food (hummus and pita bread, salsa and chips, cheese and crackers). I don’t think either of us could have eaten more after the previous two days, anyway.
Monday, September 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Whoops. Before I write about my filing system, I decided to excise this long section on what should go into my tax-deductible-o-riffic folder. It’s surprising how much stuff is in there. Here is a partial list.
- Donations to a registered non-profit (duh.)
- Volunteering costs – for instance, if you live in Needham but travel regularly to Cambridge to volunteer, you can deduct commuting costs for your “I Save the World!” work. (People with 1cc office hours take note.) You can claim 14 cents per mile plus parking and tolls, apparently.
- Work-related expenses up to $17,500 annually. You need documentation that you needed whatever you’re claiming for your job (a letter from your boss or such), and that over 50% of the time you use it is for work. If you have a computer that you work from home on, etc., this counts.
- Work-related educational expenses that pertain directly to your field. If I (for instance) took a RF seminar, this would be deductible, but if I took a cooking class, it wouldn’t be. Yes, everything’s connected, but I don’t think I can persuade the IRS that my engineering work is so interdisciplinary it involves souffles. Not relevant to me and probably most readers, but it also doesn’t count if you are required by law to take the class (so mandatory professional development stuff for nurses and the like can’t be deducted).
- Job-related association dues and subscriptions to trade magazines and journals.
- Tax prep fees are deductible! Financial books and software count for this.
- Medical expenses greater than 7.5% of your adjusted gross income. I hope I never have to take advantage of this one, but just in case, the it’s-deductible list includes insurance, co-payments, transport to and from medical care, and prescriptions.
- Catastrophic loss is tax-deductible. Theft, flood, fire, and the like. I never want to have to use it.
‘Course, this list wouldn’t be complete without a shameless plug for a certain soon-to-be-available-again tax-deductible donation option. It may not be the right laptop for you or your kids if you’re looking for a replacement for a $2k machine, but they’re sure doing students in places like Peru and Nepal and Uruguay a lot of good – you might also consider banding together with a team to sponsor/start/run a local pilot. </shamelessplug>
Now, folders.
Monday, September 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Small fragment of a notes dump from my library sprint the other day on personal finances.
Now, I’m an easily distracted person who knows she falls into the trap of making lofty goals and complicated plans and not sticking to them, so I’m making this ridiculously simple. Four categories: expenses, Next Big Thing, retirement, and giving.
Expenses. This is the big one of day-to-day living, and (after many attempts at perfectionism) I’m coming to realize that neurotic budgeting (“I will spend $5 on milk this month!”) is not for me, and I work best with a “as long as I don’t run out of money, I’m okay” method. This would be an awful idea if I didn’t have all my other categories siphoned off my paychecks first; since I’m already scooting things into retirement, Next Big Thing, and giving accounts, I’m basically making myself a sub-budget which I don’t have to budget within. Basically, it’s my usual “set up walls so I can thrash around within them” methodology as applied to finances.
Expenses are starting out at about 55% of my after-tax paycheck (I’m giving myself a lot of elbow room as I start out, but hope to cut this down to 40% or less eventually). Yes, I’m trying to live cheaply. (Mm, bag lunches.) There are three main kinds of expenses.
- Fixed expenses like rent and health insurance. I know how often I will have to pay them and how much they are going to cost; it’s easy to plan for these.
- Variable but definite expenses like groceries and utilities. I know I have to pay them, but I don’t know how much they’ll cost. I have a maximum number for these that I’m pretty sure I won’t exceed so I know how much I will have at minimum for Fun Money (indeed, whatever I don’t spend on this at the end of the month goes into Fun Money).
- Fun Money – whatever I want. Piano lessons, dinner out with friends, a concert, a camping trip, new sneakers… whatever I don’t spend on the first two, I’m allowed to spend here. Things like “grr, I broke a dish and need to buy a new one” detract from Fun Money. Of course, if I don’t spend all my Fun Money I get to roll it over into…
Next Big Thing. This is something I’ve done for over a decade, and I love it. It’s the portion of my savings (right now, about 5%) that is explicitly not for retirement. I’ve used this to do things like buy my first computer (age 15), travel the world (age 21), and furnish apartment / buy musical instruments (age 22). Basically, large purchases, fun trips, that kind of thing; it’s like my little luxury fund. It’s also why I sometimes look like I’m a big spender for short periods of time; I’m dumping the cash I’d saved up for insert-expensive-thing-here over the months or years.
Retirement: Because It’s Just A Good Idea (TM). I’m starting with saving/investing 30% of what I make, but trying to move that percentage up (taking it from the Expenses category) as soon as possible. Again, this is allocated amongst various things (right now, this basically means “yay, Roth IRA”), but they all get funded from the same portion-of-my-paycheck stream.
Giving Back. Important, but something I haven’t formalized ’till now. I’m starting off at 10%, which seems to be the standard tithe. Some people give this money straight-up to charities, some people keep it in a fund to appreciate in value so they can donate a lot of money later on in life (rather than a little bit now). I volunteer a lot and mostly plan on giving to the projects that I work with, keeping the funding very close to what I do for them, sort of the “I’ll do this for you and I’ll pay for the expenses” method.
Total and taxes: Expenses 55%, Next Big Thing 5%, Retirement 30%, Giving Back 10%. Add them all up and you get everything. I’m setting my tax withholdings so that the government will owe me money rather than the other way around each tax season, so everything I get is mine to keep (and when I get a tax refund, guess what? Retirement or Next Big Thing!) Yeah, I know I won’t be able to earn interest on the money when they withhold it, but hopefully my guesstimate will be good enough that I’ll withhold as little as possible above what taxes I’ll actually owe, and the difference won’t be so bad. Better than scrabbling to come up with the money every tax season.
Things that might change: The percentage allocations will shift as time goes by and I learn how much I need to happily live (I hope it’s less than I’m allotting now). At some point, Next Big Thing might split into Next Big Thing – Whatever and Next Big Thing – Down Payment On Some Kind Of Domicile. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, at least a year from now, because I sure can’t think about it now.
The most important thing is that this is all automatic; I’m setting things up so that stuff gets automagically direct-deposited into the appropriate accounts for all these categories, so all I ever see is the “ooh, this is for expenses” stuff that I’ve decided I can spend anyway. Mmm, online banking and direct deposit.
Next up: files.
Monday, September 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Whoo. I’m glad Jason talked me out of doing the Komen Race for the Cure this year (“It’ll be great!” I said. “We’ll run 5k and then drive halfway across the country!” I said. “We won’t be tired!” I said.) I dislike being so out of shape. It’s cold in Illinois; I crave hot soup.
The road in front of our house is newly paved and shiny. It almost turns into a mirror when it’s wet with rain. The house itself feels less empty today than it did yesterday (I’ve also spent less time in it – I’ve read about 8 books so far in the library this afternoon). It’s fascinating how quickly one adapts to things; of course my desk is in the corner by the whiteboard, not a mattress that’s sitting in East Boston now, on my new bed with the captain drawers.
Great quote, courtesy Liz Kneen:
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books. –Thomas Carlyle
To that I’d add “and people to talk about them with.” This is the thing I miss most about being out of school. I can read books and find old problem sets on my own, but having classmates to collaborate and complain and struggle with is an awesome thing. You see many different kinds of thinking on the same thing. You also see what can be learned by rote (and shouldn’t be – just look it up!) what can be learned as skill, what has to sink into your intuition, and what things are innate talent that would be – I won’t say impossible, but highly difficult, at least – for anybody else but the person you see it in to grasp. You know; the kid who has a knack for threading together elegant proofs, the one who can charm external visitors into supporting any project, the one who can casually figure out how to make a mechanism that has that movement, the one who sees little blips and snags in breadboards or circuit diagrams or code and can debug (or when testing, break) them just like that – the stuff they can’t teach, the ones who say “I don’t know, I just do it.”
I don’ t think it’s impossible to teach that stuff, by the way. I think it’s just hard, and therefore not too often tried, to break it down. I haven’t been able to break down some of the thing I do, though – overthinking ruins things sometimes, and I’ve been scared to lose (more) of my speed-reading abilities through overanalysis. I shouldn’t let that stop me, though. Open question to anybody reading this: is there anything I do that you don’t understand, or that you’d like to do as well? I can try to figure out how I do it, and break it down, and see if it’s something that can be taught somehow.
I’ll try to make a list of things I’d lke to learn from people, too. Over the next… okay, few years, perhaps – some of you might get emails, or maybe I’ll just post a list.
A note on shininess: there are so many spiffy dev platforms I’d like to play with. The beagleboard, the iDuino, the StickDuino, the Sanguino (there are many nifty Arduino boards out there; it looks like one of the most active hotbeds of open hardware activity). You could learn a lot just by studying their designs. So much to study! Oh, and OpenEmbedded. And a two-week time-out between New Things seems so long… but it’s good for me. I also want to get back into looking at open-source accessibility (more precisely: open-source universal design and the idea of getting more disabled people to invent and share tools that will work for them). But one thing at a time.
Monday, September 8th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Matt made a lolcat on Icanhascheezburger!
I may have explained this before, but I’m starting new things with a 2-week timer; that is, when I begin something new, I’m not allowed to start another something-new until at least 2 weeks have passed. This is a counter to my tendency to jump into many new things with unbridled optimism and then shortly thereafter choke and stagger under workdeath; it doesn’t mean I can’t do anything else, just that I have to drop other things if needed so I can finish starting my New Thing properly. I’m cheating a bit for this month: “New Apartment” was from Aug. 23 – Sep. 5, but “Yay For Piano Lessons” only gets 10 days to start before “First Job” comes up on the 15th.
Since I couldn’t sleep more than 6 hours this morning (yes, after driving straight from Boston in a 20 hour push) I spent 2 hours at the library today reading through the 11 personal finance books in the library that pertained to people under 30. They mostly boiled down to “Debt is bad,” “Save a lot as early as you can,” and “Compound interest is mathemagical” – not much I hadn’t heard before, but I took notes on specific things to do this time, and the next few days will see them implemented. (This is like my attempts to manage email, my calendar, my to-do list, etc – never works out perfectly or at least hasn’t yet, but every iteration gets a little better.)
It was fun, actually; I haven’t done that kind of research skim-sprint for a while; I should fold it into the “Pretend You’re Still A Student And Study Stuff That You Should Have Learned In Classes” New Thing when I start that up eventually. I want to do that soon, maybe next month, depending on how I feel about “I Can Has Wardrobe?” and “Maybe I Should Actually Exercise On A Non-Random Basis” after my “New Job” 2-week timer is up. I swear that I will have a life outside of work somehow. It’s good for me. It’s good for me.
Also, taxes. Did some calculations today on those. GAAAAAAAH SO MUCH. I also sorted through health insurance stuff today. It was… informative, if not particularly fun. On the up side, I had gumbo for dinner, and my parents are giving me a blender as an apartment-warming gift (read: refunding me the purchase price of the blender I had already bought). My arms and shoulders hurt from driving still, but I’m relaxing them – on that note, I should put away the keyboard now.
Yep. Happiness. Can has.
Sunday, September 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Housewarming was The Awesome. Lots of people, roofdeck, root beer keg, friends, cheese. The next day Jason and I drove back to Glenview, IL. We took 3 hour shifts and got in at 4am this morning; my brother is occasionally just as masochistic as I am.
It was strange to walk into the house and see a basement with the futon folded up and the bed with no sheets on it pushed back to the wall and nobody playing pool. My bedroom has one bed in it and no mattress on the floor, and I didn’t have to sneak in so as to not wake people up. The house is too big for 4 people (soon 2).
Last bits of packing and appointments here and figuring out how to ship books to Boston, and then I fly back into Logan on the 10th (this Wednesday) and become a MA resident. First piano lesson Saturday*. Start work at OLPC on Monday. When I get back to Yavin IV my (working) drumset and our blender will be here, which makes me happy.
*WOOOO! WOOOOOOOOOOO! YAY! OhgodIhavetopractice!
Sunday, September 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
