Finding Freedom

My girlfriend’s roommate has a bit of a debt problem.  I can obviously emphathize with her, but based on how frustrated she is making my girlfriend, I find my empathy shrinking every day.

Here’s the story.  The roommate has asthma, and it is serious enough that she, about once a year or so, has to go and stay in the hospital overnight because she just can’t breathe.  Unfortunately for her, overnight hospital stays are quite expensive.  What is also unfortunate for her is that she has chosen not to purchase insurance, and she doesn’t get benefits through her employer.  Because of this, she has accummulated about $60,000 in hospital bills.

She works with a drama group that visits local schools, and provides instructional presentations on aspects of American history, which I both think is a kind of cool and worthwhile job.  However, she only takes home, after taxes, about $300 a week.

Further, a few months ago, her boyfriend was driving her car, and got into an accident.  He was fine, but the car was totalled.  Rather then doing what I think just about anybody would think was prudent based on her situation, that is, try to purchase a used, reliable car for a few thousand dollars, she applied and was accepted for a car loan so that she could buy a brand new Nissan X-Terra.  While it is certainly cool to have a brand new car, this choice added another $30,000 in debt.

On the positive side, she doesn’t have very much credit card debt.  On the negative side, this is probably due to the fact that her credit score is probably very low because she hasn’t really made efforts to pay off her hospital debt.  I remember that she once talked her boyfriend into getting a Best Buy credit card, because she had been denied, so that they could purchase some things from the store.

The only reason I know these things is that she asked my girfriend to look through her finances, and try to figure out a way that she could fix them.  My girlfriend spent a month looking through the finances, and concluded that the roommate should sell her new car, get a used one, and get a second, and possibly, a third job.  This is due to the fact that she brings home $1200 a month, $500 goes to car payments, $500 goes to rent, $100 goes to insurance, and $100 goes to gas every month, which leaves her no money to either live on or to make efforts at paying the hospitals.  Because of this, she overdrafts her checking account frequently, which puts her deeper and deeper in debt.

The roommate’s response has been to do nothing differently.

While I feel badly for the roommate both in that she owes so much money, which can be daunting, and that getting rid of a new car would be a serious admittance of a problem, I feel like there are going to be definiate consequences to her inaction.  While I certainly have no moral authority to throw stones based on my own debt situation, both my girlfriend and I are worried about her because she seems to be lacking any kind of responsibility for her actions.

Have any of you ever been in similar situations, where someone that you care about is living seemlessly recklessly?  Unfortunately, my girlfriend has loaned her about $1500 in rent money, which is money that she is starting to suspect that she won’t ever get back.  Does she have any recourse?  What do you think? 

The longer that my show runs, the more I consider the viability and volatility of acting as a career.  After one show ends, one finds oneself essentially unemployed unless you have another show directly lined up, which is potentially difficult, even if you are auditioning all the time.  In addition, just because you get a pretty good contract at one theatre doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll receive another pretty good contract at another theatre, particularly for actors like myself who are currently not a member of the actors union.  Theatres can pay non-equity actors horrible wages, and the actor is generally forced to take it knowing that if they don’t, they just won’t have a job.

I am very happy that my boss at my “regular” job has been pretty flexible with the amount of time that I have missed at work because he knows that I make sure to provide excellent service to my customers.  However, in the long run, a traditional 9 to 5 job in conjunction with working in professional theatre isn’t really going to be an option, I don’t think, because the combination of working two essentially full-time jobs, no matter how fulfilling one of them is, is a huge drain on both my sanity and my relationships.

I am therefore forced to think about supplementary income.  I have a bit of that from this site and a few others that I run in the form of advertising revenue, but a hundred bucks every couple of months, while nice, isn’t exactly going to pay the rent and keep food on the table. 

As a musician, I could also give lessons, but I would need to be careful to ensure both that my lessons didn’t interfere with commitments for rehearsals and auditions, and that my students were getting a fair value for their money.  I know that this is potentially lucrative as I taught voice lessons for two years, and the rate that I charged, which was actually a bit low for the area considering that other teachers charged, in some cases, nearly twice as much, was $80 a month for four or five half-hour lessons, depending on how many times our lesson day fell on any given month.  This would average out to around $40 an hour, which is a pretty sweet gig.  However, the issue with this is that you need to have at least 15 or 20 students to be able to make a living wage out of this.

I sometimes wish that I would have been given a love for business, so that I would be fulfilled by working for a large company like I work for now and have the potential to live comfortably up until retirement.  Dreams are a funny thing.

I was browsing around today, and I came across this article over on Yahoo! that shows a definite link betwen people who have a healthy lifestyle and people who are fortunate enough to be financially well off.  While the article speaks mostly in macroeconomic terms about how third world countries that have a rising health standards are the ones to show the highest economic growth, there is certainly the implication that personal health contributes to a person’s own individual capacity to work better and, sometimes, more than the unhealthy person, and that is the kind of work that is more apt to receive promotions and raises.

 The idea of the article is intuitive enough; it’s just good to see studies backing up what makes sense.

This is a Jackson Pollock painting entitled ‘No. 5, 1948.’  Though people are apparently reluctant to speak about it, the painting was recently sold for $140 million dollars, making it the most expensive piece of art ever purchased.

Now, maybe it’s just because I don’t have that kind of money, but I can’t imagine liking this, or any other painting well enough to want to spend that kind of money on it, especially, from an economic standpoint, with art being as just about the most subjective type of investment there is.

My hesitation to purchase would not stem from the painting’s abstract nature; I would be hard pressed to pay that much for Red Canna, which is one of my very favorite paintings.  Even as a self-professed art lover, I couldn’t bring myself to spend that much money.

I wonder what the buyer sees in it that I don’t.  It must be something pretty enduring to spend that much money on it.  I hope that I can appreciate something so much some day to make that price worth it.

After essentially falling of the face of the personal finance earth the last couple of months, I am back with this, my own dot com (thanks to Flexo’s offer a few months back).

Part of the time has been spent on other projects as well as being quite busy at work.  With the busyness that I have had, and the trials, toils, and snares I will likely be subjected to over the next couple of months, I offer to those of you who have come here a veritable relaunch with an asterix.

While I will certainly be posting more frequently than I had been, I’m going to shoot for posting a couple of times a week, as opposed to the daily posting that I had shot for for a while over at the old site.  I hope that this keeps me inspired enough to produce engaging and informative content, while not being too drained to want to go on.

For those of you who will still come here and read what my financially unsavvy mind has to say about things, thanks for sticking with me.

I know that this is silly, but I have a confession to make: I love the library.

For someone who enjoys reading as much as I do, I have found that reading can be a very costly habit. Though I normally wait for books to go to softcover, there are certain books that I want to read right away. And, even when I do wait for softcover, I still find myself shelling out ten to twelve bucks a pop.

Although the duration of enjoyment is perhaps commisserate with the price, if you buy too many books, you’re going to find yourself in the poorhouse pretty quickly.

And so, yesterday, as I ventured back to the library after a long time spent away, I remembered how nice it is to be able to read what you want for free.

Recommendation for the Day: Read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. It gives fascinating insight into how we know things intuitively even before we can prove them empirically.

Disney has made over a million bucks in the last week from selling digital copies of some of its movies on itunes. Because of how well this went, the company is expecting to make over fifty million big ones by the end of the year.

What did they find out about the process? They found that the results of selling movies online made a negligible difference in their dvd sales.

I always knew that Disney was a source of innovative entertainment, but what didn’t really strike me until I read this article is the fact that they really are an innovative company. Companies have to be willing to adapt in order to continually achieve profits, and Disney has found and developed a new trend in entertainment moneymaking.

Good for them.

According to this article at CNN.com, the average gas price for a gallon of the precious, precious liquid in America is $2.50. However, where I live, gas is, on average, about $2.85.

Therefore, somewhere in America, gas must logically be $2.15 per gallon.

My question? Where is this gas, and why don’t I live there?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

The Arizona Diamondbacks are disappointed with how much money they’re making.

Do they,

A) Do nothing and hope things get better on their own,
B) Spend money on trying to get some better players,
C) Spend more money on scouting out the best college players, or
D) Change the team’s colors.

If you guessed D, you’d be right.

I have to say that I agree with the analysis in the article above, especially the lines, “Attention Diamondbacks: Fans will buy your merchandise and go to your games if your team does well. I don’t care if your team colors were baby pink and eggshell, if you made it to the World Series, you would have plenty of rabid fans eager to spend money on everything from Diamonbacks hats to Diamondbacks breast pumps.”

This is an issue that holds particular interest for me because I went through a situation that I think is very similar.

For my B.A., I went to a very small, accredited Christian college. The year after I graduated, the school, like the Diamondbacks, was finding it difficult to make ends meet. So, the administration decided that the best course of action to get new students was not to implement long lasting changes so that the course structure was better or seek out professors that may have been a little bit better at what they did, but instead, to change the school’s name.

And it makes perfect sense, when you think about it. Implementing lasting change is difficult; who wants to do that? Besides, when you’re going to college, you don’t want a name that you can recognize; you want something flashy, like, “A Legitimate College” or “President So and So’s Party Fun Time University.”

I just don’t get it. I don’t get why people will go for a gimmick when the obvious answer is staring them right in the face. Perhaps one day, the answer will come to me.

I saw a similar post over at Financial Freedumb, and I thought that I would post my own story over here.

I woke up mid morning. Still being in college and not having class until eleven, I was afforded such luxuries.

After taking my shower, I went back to my room to get dressed. I turned on KPBS to listen to while I was going over some homework for my class. I overheard words and phrases like “planes” and “safety issues.” Figuring that this was just another round table discussion about something that didn’t really impact me, I clicked the off button as I grabbed my stuff and headed off for class.

As I was walking, a friend came up to me and said, “So, what do you think of all the craziness?”

Not knowing what she was talking about, I said, “What do you mean?”

She replied, “Our country is being attacked right now. What do you think about that?”

I laughed out loud. I said, “What? Are you serious? That’s the most ridiculous thing that I’ve ever heard.”

She asserted that she was telling the truth, but before we had the opportunity to talk further, we realized class was about to start, so we each went our separate ways.

When I got to my class, the teacher looked grave. Once class started, he told what he knew about what was going on, which, to be fair, was not much. We didn’t know at the time whether planes would keep flying into buildings, or if other terrorist acts would occur.

Shoot, we didn’t even know that it was terrorists that had done the attacking.

Being in San Diego, we were all mildly concerned about our health due to our proximity to the large military community in surrounding area. Would they be attacked next?

The teacher decided that we should continue with class. I’ve got to say, not a lot was learned about that subject that day. After class, I rushed back to a common area on campus that had a tv, and I watched the replays of the planes hitting the WTC. Over and over and over the news showed the same surreal scene, which was almost necessary in that even when I had seen it several times, I still had a hard time believing that it had happened.

I still do.