Baby Finances

This is the third start-up I've worked at. One has become rather successful, another was a complete flop - more of a flop for me than in terms of the business..., and the third one is going well. I imagine it's a very different environment than large corporate offices. I don't have a well defined job description. I don't have a lot of perks like vision insurance or corporate sponsored retreats. I don't have a set budget - as it varies with how well we sell things. Plans change on a monthly, if not weekly, if not daily basis. We are pretty 'tight' at work. We don't get yelled at for being a couple minutes late, or having to leave a couple hours early. We regularly go out for beers together. We are fast-paced and agile in the market, easily making and enacting changes based on the changes in the market. We get to do a lot more than what our job title implies. We get to make big decisions that will be lasting and far reaching in terms of the compa...

It was a long day at work. Finally got stuff out the door. I was very happy to be home. To get through the day, I listed to Nickelbacks "Animals" about 80 times. I love dirty songs. Gives me that special tingle. Got home. Took off my clothes and climbed into bed to a fine night of laying here, phone calls, and potentially some hulu. At about 8:30 tonight I get a knock on the door. I put on pants and a sweatshirt to go outside, and the hallway is full of fucking smoke. I walk into the kitchen where the smoke is coming from, and it's so dense that you can't see across the room. For some reason the smoke alarm didn't go off. No clue why. It went off last week went I burnt toast. How come it goes off for toast but not when the entire kitchen was full of black smoke???? It turned out that one of my roommates put something in the microwave. She thought it was in for 6 minutes, but she really set it for 60. There were still 27 minutes left on the microwave ...

Cambridge weather today has been more difficult than anticipated. It started this morning with some snow. Nothing too bad, maybe like 3-5 inches. Then, weather retardedness started. It decides to start getting warmer, and raining buckets of rain. BUCKETS! So, now the snow is melting in the rain, and it's raining. It's melting & raining so fast that it's not draining properly. Plus the snow is blocking the water from getting to the drains. So, now there are slush puddles. That are the size of Texas. TEXAS SLUSH PUDDLES!! I had a hat on, my winter hat, which is wool. So, it's raining, and it's getting caught in the ribbing of the wool and staying on my forehead. And it starts dripping down my face between my eyes. Ice cold water. Dripping down my face == Chinese water torture. It was difficult.

bThis is the first 401K rollover I've ever had to do. When I moved to Boston, my first company didn't contribute to my 401K, so I just opened an IRA and contributed to that. I was a little lazy and didn't immediately rollover my old 401K and Roth 401K into my new IRA account. So lalala I finally figure out this fall that I should stop being lazy and try to start the process. And what a process it was. It took me like an hour of phone calls to figure out how to get the form to fill out. Then another couple days to get in contact with either the account place, or the account manager in order to figure out how to fill out the form. Because you could check two boxes - IRA or Roth IRA rollover. I had both. Like a week later someone gets back to me and tells me to just check both boxes. I turn the paperwork in, and expect things to happen. Well they didn't happen. Nor did they contact me. So a month goes by, and I'm like, where is my f*** ing money? I call the...

So here's the current debate. Weigh in. I've been taking piano lessons for a couple months. Probably since about Oct/Nov of 2008. So not long. But, I played the clarinet in high school and was rather good at it. So I pick things up quickly. To start out I bought a really cheap, I feel like not having a real piano is starting to hurt my development. By not having the same feel, it's kind of difficult to practice and get the same/right sound out b/c I'm not developing the motor skills really required to play. So, I've been looking at getting a digital piano. One with weighted keys so that it feels like a piano, but digitally sampled sound. The problem is that they are really freaking expensive. I mean like the very bottom on the line I'm looking at about $500. I've looked at ebay - but to tell you the truth the deals aren't all that great after shipping. At most I could save about $50-75 off the ticket price of a model that is three or four year...

For a long time I'd been lusting after this gigantic textbook/cookbook by the CIA (Culinary Institute of America... not that whole Central Intelligence Agency... anyways...). It's this Signals and Systems Engineering Textbook sized cookbook / howto / basic of hot cooking. Instead of telling you that you should take a salmon fillet of 6 oz and use this kind of poaching water for this amount of time. It's more a a general here's how you do something. Take 2 parts of stock or water, with some spices like one of these, and then heat the water to this temperature and cook until salmon is done. I LOVE these kinds of books. I know the basics of cooking. I've been helping my mother in the kitchen since I was in diapers; and been successfully feeding myself for close to a decade. (OMG has it really been close to a decade already...) And if any of you actually know me in real life - you know I'm a starving ethopian child. It's awesome and horrible all at the sa...

At work I use outlook. It's a terrible program. It is very difficult to use. I refuse to come up with a filing system so I'm constantly searching for things. I lose things in my email, not literally, but figuratively. Like it's actually in there. I just don't see it or something. Gmail is my friend. It makes things easier. There are tags, and it groups conversations together automatically. But it can't have two different signatures - and it's annoying to attach things using GMail . There is a major fix though. Xobni . Get it. Now. It groups your conversations together. Gives you a list of recent attachments that were sent between you and the other person, links up their other contact info from linkedin & facebook , graphs what time of day that they typically respond to their emails along with giving you information about how fast they typically respond. It is literally the next best thing since GMail . It's such a huge improvement in usab...

I learned a lot of stuff in college, a lot. Amazing amounts. I truly value the education I earned (not at all like that 20/20 report ). It really is useful, and has gotten me pretty far. There is one thing that I will always take away from university - and that is something my academic adviser told me. "If it was easy, everyone one would do it. It's the hard that makes it worth doing." It really carries over into every part of life. Everyone needs to stop being scared and start working on the hard. It's not enough to talk about it. You actually have to start acting on it; and keep trying even when you start failing. Because if you don't even have any failures, it means you aren't doing something hard enough. Do something difficult, do something good, and complete it. Don't try, do.

I've been using a couple of different online budgeting/financial programs. Probably since about last October or so. I've been extremely happy with the performance that Mint.com offers me. I have two small beefs with it. 1) If it doesn't automatically pull your interest rate it is almost impossible to change it in a timely fashion. 2) You can't set up savings goals or programs to track your overall goal progress. You kind of can on a month by month basis if you set up an individual budget for that item. But I don't want to track and view that the same way that I want to track if I'm over budget on eating out this month. 3) It is really wrong about the purchase prices on my investments and therefore when it looks at how much money I've made or lost - it's wrong. Really wrong. Then when you compare it to the NASDAQ or whatever - it says I'm way lower - when in reality if it tracked it properly - I'd be way higher. Super annoying. I will be ho...

I forgot my chapstick earlier this week, Thursday probably. Living all day without it at work was super annoying, and by the end of the day my lips were truly suffering. Now, days later, after extensive chapstick usage my lips are just as annoying and dry. Sub-optimal. Sub-optimal. At some point I had ridiculous numbers of tubes of chapstick . Now, no clue what happened to them. I can only find one and it is almost completely out. It's chapstick . I usually have like three sitting in my purse. I have no idea what happened to them all. How could I lose them when I literally had three in my purse last week. Sub-optimal. Sub-optimal. I volunteered at this place today. I have been thinking for a long time about volunteering somewhere. I haven't really volunteered anywhere since high school. I keep thinking about it but either I wasn't really dedicated to their cause, thought their organization was crap, was way too inconvenient , or timing didn't work out ...

My family has their issues, but they can be absolutely hilarious at times. Unintentionally so. Like two days before Christmas there was a ginormous ice storm in northwest Ohio. It was pretty bad. On top of that it would warm up enough so that during the day the snow on top of the ice would melt - and freeze over at night creating more ice. So as a dutiful daughter and grandchildren we went over to my grandparents house to help them clean the ice off their driveway. They live in an old farm house. They used to farm when I was a little kid. So their house is set off of the street a bit and they have a pretty long driveway. I'm just glad it's paved now because when we were little it was all gravel. I don't think there is a way to clean ice off gravel. Ice it and wait for it to melt essentially. So we went out with shovels, hoes (the old spikey ones worked really well - like an ice pick) and whatever else we could get to break up the ice a bit. Unfortunately they didn...

People's perception of what constitutes "clean" is extremely different. You talk to my best friend's mom - and it would definitely include sanatizing - IE covering everything in bleach. Mom mother's version of clean was a bid different - slightly cluttered but no visible dirt. Other people assume "clean" means picked-up with no piles of stuff. Personally I like to differentiate between "clean" and organized. Things can be clean without being organize and vice versa. I have to admit that I like some organization - but not too much. With too much organization I feel like I'm spending more time on the organization than I am on the work at hand. That makes me angry. I hate wasting time. The whole point of organization for me is to minimize the time it takes me to do a given task. Therefore if the time it takes to organize is larger than the time the organization saves - the organization is worthless. This works in theory. However, be...

I think this is going to be the year of setting goals one by one and attempting to achieve them. I think in the past when I've set goals I've set overwhelmingly large goals that no one could possibly achieve. As I was practicing piano tonight I realized that I don't learn something like the piano by setting a goal of playing Mozart - but rather start learning the basics and slowly moving forward. I think that this is a much better way to learn and achieve in the long term. I've found that by writing things down I also tend to do them because I want to check them off my list. Even doing simple things like laundry seem to get done faster when it's on a list. I just like checking things off. I wouldn't say that it stops me from procrastinating - but I feel more guilty when I do procrastinate and the probability that I will get the unappealing task done significantly increases. It's strange. I think it dates back to when my mom used to leave each of us k...

John Steward really put it best how I feel about the Israeli/Palestanian conflict. The whole things makes me really mad; being over there less than a year ago and talking to the people who lived there really gave me a very different view of the conflict. It is really just a hate war of the Israelis vs anyone that they think does not fully support them and won't give them carte blanche for whatever they feel like doing. If you don't fully support them you are against them. Whenever you make comments about the fact that it seems wrong some of the stuff that they are doing; everyone always just defended themselves by saying - "well, but the Palestianians have done crappy things for a lot longer than us." Let me just say right now, I call 'bullshit' on that one. It takes two to be in a conflict. Neither group is right. Each time one side does something to piss off the other side - it's like they don't expect to have a major push back. I really feel ...

My bread is rising awesomely. Just really good. I think I got the temperature right and the consistency of the bread right in order to get it to rise properly. It doubled in only about 35 minutes. Working with microbes is really kind of cool. I'm still deathly afraid of maggots though. They super gross me out. They are traumatic .

I got this great chef book "The Professional Chef" by the CIA (Culinary Institute of America) for Christmas. It's pretty amazing. It is really designed as a textbook for professional chefs. It's been pretty amazing so far. We made delicious corn chowder using their recipe. We did have to cut it down a bit b/c the recipe is designed to make a gallon of soup and therefore uses ridiculous amounts of stock, cream, and milk. It also has salt pork - we just substituted bacon. Delicious. We also made jew bread - challah. My little brother and I pronounce the CH just to annoy my mom. Everytime she corrects us and tells us that it starts with an H sound. So we just pronounce it like we grew up in the midwest and say the CH - she just laughs and shakes her head. We really have nothing to do here. It's a bit of a joke how little we have to do. Home is aweful for other reasons as well. Namely having to hang out at home around my father who tries to make everyone e...