WAKE UP TO FRUGALITY!

To Do Lists

2012-02-13T09:33:00.000-05:00

Here's more on the subject of lists: fellow blogger Oil and Garlic quite opened up a can of worms this week with her post, To Do Or Not To Do.

Planning

2012-02-11T18:16:00.001-05:00

“One always has the vague illusion of taking or making one’s own decisions, the illusion itself running in parallel with the awareness that most such calls are made for you by other people, or by circumstances, or just made.” Christopher Hitchens

I've been paying only scant attention to the newspapers this year and snatching the odd glance here and there at the ministrations of my friends in the ether as my life has changed direction, completely on its own without planning of any kind. Frequent twists and turns of fate like this are what make life worth living and a dollop of inspiration came via Oil and Garlic this week from her post on a possible fear of not planning, which made me question my fear of planning.

Oil and Garlic was wondering whether she could dispense with her to do list and survive living "day to day".

When you own your own business, clients and customers come and go of their own volition, so you become accustomed to, and sometimes enjoy, myriad hellos and goodbyes. This year I said hello to about three or four fabulous new business clients and a gang of new corduroyed colleagues at WIOX Radio here in the Catskills because of one prose reading and pot luck dinner I attended last year. I'm now a radio host. Co-incidentally, my biggest business client has found a full-time employee to replace my services, rendering the whole transition seamless and without incident. Although I'm pretty sure my first solo show this month will be a juggling act wherein you may find an entertaining array of accidental miscues, line fudging, dithering, static and possibly a huge fine from the FCC for swearing on air. (There's a list of banned vocabulary from the FCC, but I'm hoping bollocks and wanker don't appear.)

My new radio career began with an interview on The Writer's Voice on January 3rd which included reading of my fictional work, then I appeared on Chris Gaddis' Money Train one day talking about my life in business and this week we hosted the show together. Chris is handing over the reins to me and there are a few working titles of my new show in the works; the one doing the rounds of the station is "The Economy of ______" because there's economy in every subject.

So forgive me ladies and gents when I say I couldn't have planned it any better. I'm simply don't think I'm capable.

Life's Little Luxuries

2012-02-05T15:08:00.001-05:00

It's organic and it's expensive, but as chocolate season is almost upon us, I recommend this little chap for a special occasion: Pacari Chocolate. It's half the size of a bar of Green & Black's and almost twice the price, but the texture is not chalky like other dark chocolate bars and the sweetness is subtle and light. I paid $5.99 for 1.76 ounces or 50g and promptly ate the whole thing which I can't do with a bar of Green & Black's; there's always half a bar languishing about my person somewhere.

Pay The Organic Farmer Or Pay The Doctor

2012-02-04T11:12:00.001-05:00

Yes, organic food is more expensive than industrially produced food. However, as this remarkable eleven year old kid tells us at a TED talk in Asheville, you can either "pay the farmer, or pay the hospital". As far as I can see, nobody has stated the situation quite as neatly and succinctly as this little chap.

Sunday Links

2012-01-22T14:03:00.001-05:00

If you're obsessed with chocolate as much as I am, you will enjoy this article in the Hudson Valley Edible about a local Catskills Chocolate Maker. I'm a contributor to the Winter issue of Edible, but my article on Crop Mob only appears in print.

Genetically Modified Food is a subject close to the heart of this blog. I'm against the idea, not because I've any proof that they are dangerous, but because the main adjustment to the seed enables it to resist the herbicides applied to the crop. Who says we can resist such pesticides when we eat the food? Furthermore, Bt Cotton and Bt Corn are essentially pesticides, such has been the adjustment of their DNA. Stands to reason that when you eat these products you are eating a pesticide. Choose organic wherever possible here in the US, or very soon, we will have no other choice, as this map from The Economist reflects and this one.

I'm a big fan of Alain de Botton, the Swiss philosopher who hypothesizes about a religion for atheists, which sort of misses the point completely. However, my esteem for him endures. De Botton never fails to inspire or amuse, as in this piece at The Daily Dish today: "All of us are on the edge of panic and terror pretty much all the time – and religions recognise this." Enough said.

Quote Of The Day: Andrew Sullivan

2012-01-18T19:04:00.000-05:00

Andrew Sullivan writes in his post concerning Fox News today: "... It's something blogs can do that other more formal formats in journalism cannot: ask questions, air debates, get conversations going that aren't supposed to be the final truth, but a provisional search for it."

On The Radio

2012-01-18T17:29:00.001-05:00

This morning I was honoured to be a guest on Chris Gaddis' radio show Money Train on WIOX Radio in the Catskills where we discussed our thoughts on business, finance and the economy. Chris, an accomplished small business consultant, has interviewed many of the familiar personal finance bloggers from Canada, Europe and all over the States on his show including the extraordinarily successful Baker from Man vs Debt. Go here to see his list of interview subjects.

As I mentioned on the show today, I don't particularly fit into the personal finance blogger category. I don't issue instructions or deal in bullet points. Nor am I necessarily frugal in comparison with my fellow frugal bloggers. I more of a commentator, a chance economist thrown into business by necessity, and a journalist who has been charting the rise and fall of the economy for almost three years.

Andrew Sullivan

2012-01-17T09:13:00.000-05:00

May I take this opportunity to introduce you to the blog of Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, an intellectually political blog housed at The Daily Beast. Sullivan is a conservative, but not right wing: a republican, but not biased. One of his most recent articles entitled Obama's Long Game has just given me the slap around the face that I deserve for doubting our fearless leader. Ironically, it's this conservative who gives us the facts about our Obama's record so far. An essential read.

I'm relying on Sullivan to save us from the obdurate left-right politics that has a stranglehold on America.

A Million Fracking Letters

2012-01-07T13:54:00.000-05:00

Make your voice heard if you're against hydrofacturing for gas recovery in the Catskill Mountains, which is now suspected of causing earthquakes in England and Ohio. Call or write to Governer Cuomo to express your discontent using this handy website, A Million Fracking Letters.

Food, Feminism & The Economy

2012-01-07T13:41:00.000-05:00

A while back, I read fellow blogger ECL's tragic post entitled Thoughts On Life Death and Culture. In it, ECL relates the story of her friend who suddenly died recently from undiagnosed advanced-stage colon cancer. A few months before she died, her friend had mentioned that she was happy that she was "finally able to lose the weight". Unbeknownst to her, the cancer had spread and caused a savage infection resulting in the aforementioned weight loss and, then, death.

The fact that weight loss was welcomed and not cause for concern is an alarming and terrifying symbol for our times. What has happened to feminism?

As a journalist and blogger, I cover burlesque, the slow food movement and the economy: three apparently too disparate subjects for some serious economists, but I vehemently disagree. Food, feminism and money are inextricable aspects in the lives of modern young women.

When we try on a dress, what's the first thing we wonder as we gaze in the mirror? When we hand over the credit card, do we wonder how much we are really paying? When we eat a meal, do we know where our food came from?

The subjects of what we women eat, what we buy and how we spend, now that we have the freedom, are fascinatingly intertwined subjects.

The remarkable rise of burlesque entertainment in New York City over the last ten years is directly linked to equality and the economy and I have been fortunate enough to report it. Why is burlesque so popular these days? Because it makes sex more fun; it brings it out of the closet for those brave enough to enjoy it. With the economy is such dire straits, we are all in desperate need of a laugh these days especially in New York.

Furthermore, body image is a prominent part of burlesque. Real women of all shapes and sizes, in all their feminine glory, are portrayed every evening on New York burlesque stages to packed theatres. Curvy, buxom, athletic, plump, muscular, flat, lithe: not the unattainable, fat free, female of Hollywood or Fashion Week, but fit, gorgeous women with whom we can identify. Men clearly prefer a curvier woman, so it's a wonder why some of us starve ourselves to conform to an ideal that wasn't at all fashionable even as little as fifty years ago. Go here to read my interview with Angie Pontani, a New York burlesque performer about body image. Women love burlesque and make up more than half the audience because it makes them feel good about themselves. Burlesque also caters to those on a budget; it's cheaper than a Broadway show and more inclusive.

So on some nights, I'm at somewhere like The Slipper Room watching Holly Golightly get out of her expensive frock to an operatic version of Ice Ice Baby and the next day, I might be interviewing an exhausted farmer and his contentedly snoozing group of heritage breed piglets. Most journalists specialise, but I couldn't possibly make life that easy for myself.

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T16:03:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year! I'm beginning this new year on a high note by doing a radio interview, which can be heard live online, here in New York to read some of my fictional work and discuss this blog on Tuesday January 3rd at 1 o'clock.

How To Save The Planet With Vodka

2011-12-28T13:22:00.002-05:00

Vodka sold in recyclable stainless steel bottles by Kru in various sizes down to a pint. Not only can you recycle this baby, but you your vodka is now portable. I'll let you know how many of these I have accumulated by this time next year:

Garbage

2011-12-02T12:20:00.000-05:00

Just a wild guess, but this must be the time of year when the most packing and wrapping materials are being consumed. Here are some unhealthy reminders:

Performance artist Gertrude Berg's Waste Carrier: she certainly orders a lot of food for a person who appears to be dining alone, but the statement is important. Or perhaps I'm the only person who can't eat a whole pizza. Anyhow, I was touched by the sight of her putting toast in the bag. In New York, you can get toast with everything.

The Story of Stuff (and The Story of Broke). Everybody should watch this short documentary.

Think Progress on the rubbish GOP counter arguments against raising taxes. This isn't technically garbage, but it surely smells like it.

Please post your links to all manner of absolute rubbish in the comments section below.

Occupy Wall Street Explained

2011-11-07T20:18:00.001-05:00

Weekly I chance upon comments and photographs of people sneering at the those occupying Wall Street, wondering why they don't stop sniveling, "asking for handouts" or urging them to find an honest job and so forth. They are all either Republicans or members of the military. Firstly, I have to say that I would expect something like that from the military because it's a dictatorship and soldiers have to do as their told. If soldiers protested the Iraq war it might never have happened and all the troops would have to be brought back home and... Wait...

Secondly, the Republicans need to switch off their Fox News and listen to me very carefully. Old school left/right politics needs to be consigned to history where it belongs. It's not working. Those participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement are not asking for handouts or whining about having to work. They are seeking a fair wage or a better part of the profits that they worked hard, together, to produce. When we read Charles Dickens' works, we think that's a horrible time in the past, but things like child labour, ghettos and workhouses remain a stark reality for those earning pennies for making your clothing in places like Indonesia. If you think the US is better than that, how do you explain Detroit?

Furthermore, the Wall Street Occupiers are seeking accountability for those responsible for being rewarded with bonuses for halving your pension almost overnight.

The Republicans with whom I have debated this issue today actually believe that the protesters will achieve nothing, but I don't understand. Isn't it a fundamental right to protest in this country, not lay down like sheep and take whatever's thrown in our direction? Voting won't work. Every president who runs for office needs campaign donors and those campaign donors run the country for four years. This year, we're being toyed with by corporations who gamble inconceivable sums of money without incurring any risk. The occupiers are sick of seeing corporations squander the profits achieved through the sweat of their labour and I'm proud that they're there on my behalf.

Here's a comment I read today, which I quote verbatim: "Stop complaining and freeloading and work. It sucks that corporations make all the profits but if the complainers were the corporations they'd feel different. Enough handouts."

Last year the "complainers" this person refers to were, indeed, the corporations and when they complained, they received a $700 billion bailout.

Now THAT'S a handout!

How To Do What You Love?

2011-11-07T11:17:00.000-05:00

RIP Andy Rooney. How remarkable that Mr Rooney continued his career until about one month before his death at 92 years of age. I'm particularly interested in his life, because I'll also be working until the day I die (and from now until then, I look forward to watching my pension trickle into the gutter). My only hope is that I'll be doing something I love full-time as Andy did.

Keep The Banks Occupied

2011-10-31T21:48:00.000-04:00

Quite possibly the most ingenious, funniest response to bank junk mail that I've ever had the privilege of encountering.

FIGHT JUNK MAIL

Please share and share alike...

Eating in The Bahamas

2011-10-29T10:40:00.001-04:00

Last weekend The Bahamas saw their 16th Annual International Cultural Festival in Nassau on Providence Island. Held over two days, the event was absolutely packed to bursting with locals seeking a taste of food from all over the world. Cars were parked for miles and traffic was backed up halfway up Bay Street by Saturday lunchtime. I rode a dusty, rickety bus to the occasion, which had to take a detour because of the traffic and those not privy to the festivities were aflutter at not having been notified.

"What's that?!" Asked a fellow passenger.
"Food Festival," says the bus driver.
"Food festival?!" Complained passenger.
"Yes, food from all over the world!"
"Why did nobody tell me 'bout this?"

In America, we have a great deal of options: spaghetti, sushi, pizza, egg rolls, pad Thai, pieroggi, curry, tacos, burritos, steak and kidney pie, Scotch eggs, paella, peruvian pastries (what are they called?), Cuban pork pasties and so forth. The Bahamians have fish and dumplings. I tried the national delicacy conch and from what I can gather it's an enormous snail whose mother was a squid; it comes about five ways: cracked, in a burger, in a salad, in a creamy bisque and fried in dumplings called fritters. Conch is an acquired taste, slightly tougher than calamari, and according to a barman, something of an aphrodisiac, like oysters, that you're obliged to chew. My barman's two children were "conch babies" as was everyone else on the island, if you know what he means. Furthermore, everything in The Bahamas can come fried in a dumpling if you'd like. Even fruit: I tried the humble guava in a fritter with some tasty sauce. It tasted like an oily, fruity dumpling. Delicious.

After days of fried, baked and grilled fish, I was eager to try some food from all over the world and while on the bus, I felt sorry for my fellow passenger who was indignant that nobody had informed her, but jumped off the bus anyway and left her in the dust.

The festival took places in the Botanical Gardens in Nassau and amongst the waxy palms and enormous, gnarled trees nestled small stands laden with food and bearing the name of the country whence the food derived. Peru, Canada, Italy, Greece, France, England, Spain, Scotland, Cuba, Mexico, Amsterdam, China, Philippines, Indonesia and The Bahamas were all represented. Jazz, flamenco and assorted traditional dance from India and the Far East entertained the crowds as they merrily ate and drank from all over the world.

I've never seen a crowd appreciate food so much. On both days the event was supposed to end at 6pm, but there were still hoards of people keenly milling around the entrances and purchasing food from stalls as the sun began to set. I skipped France as there was no way I was paying $5 for a profiterole and the stand was entirely cheese free which surprised me. Bahamians don't like cheese? Canada offered some sturdy back bacon and creamy maple fudge and I had a Scotch egg at the Scottish stand, but the crisp Tsing Tao beer and an egg roll from China won me over. And just for old times' sake, from the Bahamas, I had a fish taco that was fresh, not too salty with crunchy coleslaw, red onions and just the right amount of sauce. No more sloppy Brooklyn tacos for me.

The Greenhorns

2011-10-24T20:21:00.000-04:00

I attended the Taste of the Catskills event at the exquisitely picturesque Maple Shade Farm in Delhi, NY a couple of weeks ago. It's held every year, but on October 9th and 10th an additional event was held as a fundraiser for farmers devastated by Hurricane Irene. The event raised about $3,000 which was given to the Fire Department to distribute to points of most need in the region. My village was devastated by Irene related flooding: ten houses were swept away and much of the village was underwater causing further structural damage to other homes and buildings.

At the event, they screened a documentary which I caught about half way through called The Greenhorns, an engaging and fascinating documentary exploring and promoting the lives and work of young, contemporary farmers. As the average age of the American farmer is 57, they will be retiring soon and selling their land to the highest bidder in order to live off the proceeds. Young farmers want to be part of a new sustainable, agrarian movement by acquiring this land to ensure it remains farmland. The Greenhorns mission is to "recruit, promote and support young farmers in America".

To watch the trailer for The Greenhorns, hold a screening or donate to their worthy cause go here.

Move Your Money

2011-10-15T13:19:00.000-04:00

Paranoid Asteroid wrote a useful post divulging how much she lost on her 401K this year entitled Just Don't Look. It's fair to say that nobody has escaped the inexorable pension nosedive these past year including myself and plenty of other people I know including the wealthy. However, what most people don't consider is that the managers of your investments, mutual funds, 401k plans and so forth are still getting paid regardless of whether the investments they make for you increase in value.

Shouldn't they be paid nothing if they invest in shares that decrease in value? If they're awarded commission on gains, shouldn't they lose commission on losses?

Part of the reason is that financial advisors are paid commission by companies to bring them investors. Wouldn't this make them biased towards whomever pays them higher commission?

Second, your fund manager gets paid by you to manage your pension fund. Don't only look at how much you've lost this year; look into how much your fund manager got paid to lose that money for you.

This is the reason why there has been a mass demonstration on Wall Street these past weeks which has now spread as far as Rome and Tokyo. Paranoid Asteroid's desire to stop looking at her 401K couldn't be any more advantageous to fund managers in the financial sector and there are millions of people like her who continue to fund their 401K, but not sure whether they're just throwing their money down the plughole. Bankers continue to get paid and rewarded irrespective of their failures. When they fail, we lose; when they win it's as if we're not even in the game.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-08T10:21:00.003-04:00

I'm using my 100th post to draw attention to the importance of Occupy Wall Street which continues this week. The dissenters of Occupy Wall Street are protesting for all of us working and middle classes: the so-named 99% (or 98% depending on who you read) named after the least wealthy portion of America. I thought that mass demonstration had been quashed in America; I'm proud to be proven wrong. However, a friend tells me that police are starting to barricade entry to downtown Manhattan this week. His father lives downtown, but they have to show ID in order to pass certain road blocks.

Daily Kos, a Washington political correspondent and blogger writes here about how JP Morgan Chase donated $4.6 million to the New York Police Department and wonders if they were paid to subdue Occupy Wall Street.

Visit Think Progress the progressive website that is covering all aspects of the demonstration, and the US banking system, closely. Watch Fox News interview an eloquent protester and then not air his views.

The News

2011-10-01T14:40:00.002-04:00

Yet again I have been inspired to write by Consciously Frugal, in particular, on the state of the news and misinformation. In "The God Thing" CF writes about misrepresentation of Christianity in the media, specifically concerning the so-called "Christian Right". She writes to inform us of her faith and how she interprets the bible, which is useful for fraught atheists who think the world is full of religious zealots. Though it's only one voice amidst millions it's authentic information that attracted a record number of comments for the blogger.

I had been hanging on to an old copy of The Economist and meaning to write this post, because it contains a special report on the future of news. It won't tell us bloggers anything we don't already know, but it's satisfying to see it in black and white in the Economist. We bloggers writing about our own reality are the future, if not the present, of news; newspapers are in trouble, citizens report the news more swiftly than news organizations and young people no longer watch television. This last fact is promising because the television is a shrieking, lying interloper in our lives and I'm glad it's being watched less.

I know for a fact and I've seen it first hand that people who can afford publicists, who write press releases, are the ones who make the news. Shifty CEOs of huge corporations, who donate to presidential campaigns and are friends with prime ministers, have been dictating what information reaches us via the media. Nora Ephron, the writer of sentimental romantic comedies like When Harry Met Sally, is even complaining about it, so the situation must be tragically dire. Ephron, a lifetime journalist who started at the New York Post in the sixties, says in her recent book "I Remember Nothing" (in which she remembers everything): "Freedom of the Press belongs to the man that owns one". There's no doubt about the exceptions and decent journalism like the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Times of London, Telegraph, NPR, BBC, Reuters. There's also great magazine journalism like Vanity Fair and Harpers to name a few.

So now the Economist says it's "back to the coffee house" of the late middle ages where news "travelled as people chatted in marketplaces and taverns or exchanged letters with friends". Bloggers are now leading the field by putting themselves in the arena, offering their experiences and opinions online and "news is becoming a social medium again".

Of course, writing for nothing, a subject with which many journalists are now well acquainted, is not easy but a blog is a cathartic outlet and a useful way to practice your craft. Furthermore, following two or three hundred blogs every week is a tiring exercise when you're working full-time, but paying attention is worthwhile. I've been following Consciously Frugal since I began blogging in 2009 the way anyone would with their favourite artists, authors and journalists. However, much of what you read is unedited and "goes to press" without being fact checked. More research is required to find the truth and this is an advantage because it makes the reader more discerning. We're no longer sitting back and absentmindedly absorbing whatever the TV happens to be blurting out.

So without further ado, I will get back to it: not letting months go by between posts.

Galleries Are For Tourists

2011-07-29T13:17:00.003-04:00

When I arrived in New York in 1998, I landed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a dusty, desolate place in which you could still witness the odd car burning on Kent Avenue; where the impoverished, artistic community hung out on deserted piers at dusk to watch the sun set over Manhattan; where you could still find a two-bedroomed apartment for $800. Artists were fleeing the rent hikes in Chelsea and Soho and there were neighbourhoods near the bridge that were only just beginning to be regularly policed.

The only decent restaurants around were Kellogg's Diner, Mario's Pizza and Planet Thai which was a hole in the wall on Bedford Avenue.

I first met my friend, artist Lisa Creagh, at a block party off Kent Avenue in 1999. After a brief introduction, she took me into a basement which had been hastily spruced with white paint and separated into cubicles that were rented to artists. It was there I bought my first piece of art from Lisa for $900 and paid for it in monthly installments directly to her. I later interviewed her for a magazine for which I wrote profiles and features; when I took up photography we both exhibited work at Get Real Art, a progressive art gallery showing affordable art that suffered an untimely demise. Excuse me while I sigh, "ah, those were the days".

Over the subsequent ten years, Williamsburg has had an extreme makeover; Planet Thai is a monstrous, mall version of its former self and the neighbourhood has had a Connecticut college town grafted onto it. Every time I visit now, which is a rarity, I go home with post-ironic stress disorder. Chelsea is now packed with art galleries that only the rich can afford to peruse; most artists fled many years ago, but the art remained: at extortionate prices. The Times recently reported that the reason art galleries survive is because gallery owners had the foresight to buy their properties years ago before the boom.

And so it continues. Artists make an area popular and then it becomes too expensive in which to live. I've said more than my fair share of morose goodbyes to wonderful friends over the years who have fled the post-artist exodus for Europe or the West Coast. One day, Brooklyn artists will be cajoled to the Atlantic ocean and what then? Houseboats in the Gowanus? Refugee camps on the Rockaways?

Enter Welcome to Company, the site for art collectors, which had its debut soiree on Wednesday night at the Company Loft on 20th Street and Fifth Avenue, directly opposite the former site of Get Real Art, my first gallery.

The brainchild of CJ Follini and Renee Ryan, art collectors with exquisite taste, it's not an online gallery, but rather a meeting place for collectors to discuss their work, display their collection and seek artists they admire in a warmer, friendlier setting. The site offers beautiful prints and illustrations for as low as $25. It's an art club for ardent enthusiasts that has a "campfire" around which you're invited to crouch and cogitate over some beautiful new work. Not the dingy basements of my former years, but a cleaner place in which you may approach artists directly and decide for yourself what good art is. Four artists were present at the soiree on Wednesday night, which was packed to the rafters and, in the future, the company will offer regularly scheduled panel discussions for emerging art collectors to meet and discover new, talented artists moderated by art educators and curators. Company will provide free objective advice on emerging art.

Welcome to Company is a brilliant idea for people like me who don't have money to burn on expensive art, but want to invest in gorgeous works when they are at their cheapest and consider developing a relationship with the artist.

To quote the website: "The Emerging Art market is enormous and navigating it on your own can become a full-time job. COMPANY is the ONLY virtual and real community for collectors, by collectors™, without auction markups and expensive intermediaries. It’s completely free and if you want COMPANY to facilitate your sale, we will do that too for only a 9% transaction charge. Unlike other markets, our members are free to directly negotiate with each other."

How To Fill A Hip Flask Without A Funnel

2011-07-04T15:27:00.001-04:00

Should you find yourself desperate and without a funnel for your hip flask this 4th July, use a wooden chopstick. Booze frugally.

Put the chopstick into the hip flask pointed side down. Hold the top of the (alcohol) bottle at the flat end of the chopstick and begin by gently soaking the top of the chopstick, then slowly follow this action through, tipping the bottle gently and pouring slowly.

Ensure that the chopstick doesn't touch the sides of the hip flask when you're pouring or the booze will spill over the side of the hip flask.

I swear it works. Necessity is the mother of invention and even when I've had more than my usual tipple, I can be both frugal and inventive. I attribute it to being married to someone very clever; The physics is rubbing off on me.

Happy 4th!

Blog Love

2011-07-02T19:16:00.000-04:00

I'd like to mention here that there's a lot of love on the internet, perhaps more than in the real world. Although the internet is the real world isn't it? It's literally a brave new world, bustling with people with which we communicate by "letter" instead of face to face. Hundreds of years ago, when travel was expensive and arduous, we all conveyed love via letter. I believe we're returning to that. What's my name, Edith Wharton? Actually, I long to go back in time and saunter down a long-transformed Fifth Avenue with Edith. As travel endangers the planet and mindful citizens focus on reducing their carbon footprint, as skype and conference calls replace the traditional in-person meeting, our community will expand further into the complex, virtual world. Our business community has already begun to expand into the cloud as many business choose to keep their records online. Don't forget, however, that what goes online, stays online. Sow love online and it shall linger there, in the ether, forever like a twinkling star.

I was decisively reminded of Blog Love on an earlier post on this blog about a lump and when I watched Jim Gillian talk last week about his illness and the reaction of his web followers. If you have time, you must watch Jim's moving talk about Web Love.

Here are the links to wonderful stuff I have found this week:

French Skinny
Jim Gilliam
Christopher Hitchens on dying without religion: clever, respectful and funny. His comments on religious people asking him why he won't recant his atheism now that he's dying start on minute 10:08. "You've got one chance now aren't you going to take it?"

Clutter

2011-06-27T11:33:00.001-04:00

First I want to thank everyone again for the well wishes. The lump was a swollen lymph node caused by a ginormous mosquito bite on the back of my head. My doctor asked me if it might have been a tick, but apparently ticks hang on for a few days and get fatter and this wasn't the case with me. She told me that, if you get a tick bite, you have to monitor your health for signs of fatigue and low-grade fever for four weeks and then get tested for Lyme's disease. Your neck is riddled with lymph nodes and whenever an infection occurs above the neck, one or more nodes may swell.

Also, a correction: Badger sunscreen was $13.99 at Wholefoods *not* $30. Where I got that price from I've no idea. This leads me to a sordid admission: I don't use a budget. Sometimes, I don't even look at the receipt or check my change, which is bad because the last time I checked my change the vendor had short changed me. "Uh-huh," said my narrowed eyes as I caught him in the act. He offered an apologetic chuckle and a sheepish shrug. Always check your change when you visit New York City but there's this little extra arbitrary tax for people with funny accents. When they take off 20% just for you, it means they had already added 50% when you walked in the door.

When I arrived in the States in 1998, I brought with me two suitcases of clothing, a camera and a battered notebook. In England, I had possessed such a negligible amount of stuff that I was able to give away one rubbish bag's worth of clothing and books to empty my apartment.

Now, about thirteen years later, I'm appalled at the sheer volume of detritus that I have amassed. Admittedly most of it is in my office as I have a multitude of occupations. However, I vow to clear it out one box at a time, one bag at a time. I'm wondering if in an attempt to clear my mental clutter, I'm throwing out all my possessions but...it's cathartic. I make jewelry; I take photographs using film; I write; I collect books and I have a ridiculous amount of business and tax paperwork which I will get to next week with relish.

Last week, I took two rubbish bags of decent clothing to the thrift store and this week, I'm giving away two boxes of unread books to the library.

Well-Being

2011-06-20T08:19:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, I read a comment by Consciously Frugal on Eco Cat Lady's blog that contained a question; "What would your life look life if it was centered in well-being instead of achievement?"

Coincidentally, it so happened a few days previously that I had discovered a small lump in my neck which had given me pause. A week ago, I got a ginormous mosquito bite above my hairline on the back of my neck and, while fussing over it, found the lump further down the back of my neck. My honest reaction to the lump was: "can I still write and have chemo?" "Perhaps I can get more done while sitting around having chemo?" "Oh I can smoke loads of marijuana while having chemo and finish my book!"

Aside from the obvious brutality that, should I develop a chronic illness I would be more worried about the cost because I have only high deductible health insurance, is the fact that I have no disability insurance either. So now my biggest priority is making even more money and potentially having to run a business while ill. The main focus is not on my well-being, it's on the insurance company, whether the labs are "in network" and how to not blow through meagre savings.

Sometimes, it's small wonder that my life is centered on achievement and fiscal gain instead of my well-being. I feel like I take care of myself, but it's a chore. I mean, who loves broccoli? I do try and stay organic with food and products. If I eat out, I choose a vegetarian dish or fish for its high mercury levels; this allows me to attain my madness quotient. My people, the Brits, are island people and need their mercury. Moreover, I work out vigorously and frequently; I do jumping jacks with weights, so perhaps I've popped a blood vessel! Can your jugular get a hernia?

It's these little health scares that help us to evaluate, however. Of course, nothing is ever done, as Eco Cat Lady points out; we are continually working. I am always doing, so I must evaluate how I do.

Blog and Bee Love

2011-06-12T13:28:00.000-04:00

This is the fourth and final post of the week, so please scroll down to read everything. For some reason an older post has reappeared this week. It's my only hiccup on this Blogspot site, so I can't complain.

Catherine at American Dream Finder has requested that we all pass on her story of garbage. It's a cautionary tale; a word of warning and a request that you consider thoroughly every purchase you make because that plastic bottle you used only once may end up on a river bank somewhere being cleaned up by dedicated volunteers like Catherine herself.

**********

The bees have taken to our hive more successfully than we imagined. They released the queen from her tiny, sugar box and have been industriously attending to her and their duties, building honeycomb in the hive in the last week. They all frequently touch the queen and her pheromones dictate their actions. It's fascinating to watch.

Co-incidentally, we have more wild flowers in our field than ever this year: long stemmed daisies and a strange new red dandelion type to go with the usual purple wild flowers, white baby's breath and golden rod. The berry bushes and fruit trees are also flowering. It's a fine time to be a bee around here.

One tiny plum emerging on our fruit tree sapling in the centre of the image over my ring finger.

Sustainable Cotton T-Shirt Winner

2011-06-12T10:49:00.000-04:00

The winner of the Sustainable Cotton Project t-shirt is Anne, congratulations. Anne please let me have your address so I can mail you the t-shirt.

Go the Sustainable Cotton website to buy a t-shirt and support the growth of organic cotton.

Blog Love

2011-06-11T11:40:00.002-04:00

Continuing the theme of blog love this week: I've found a handful of wonderful blogs about people who are conducting their lives in a more meaningful way plus a useful link to experiencing New York on a budget. I know I should post on a certain day every week too, but I'm just too wild. Ahem. To wit: you will always find something new on a Monday morning.

Eco Cat Lady: A comforting voice in the world of Simple Living.

Growing Things and Making Things: It made me proud to virtually journey back to Wales for a bit as I'm a Londoner and my parents have lived in Wales for about 15 years. GTaMT sold their house and went off the grid.

Mr Money Mustache: A new finance blog with a fresh, friendly yet incisive tone trying to tell people what they should do with their money. Someone needs to get the message across and my money's on this guy.

Chez Loulou: I miss Simple Life in France whose blog about an American living in the south of France has gone offline, but here is a worthy replacement with some appealing photographs all taken by the author.

The Skint: For New York City dwellers and visitors, much useful information about how to enjoy the big Apple on a budget.

And here's a link to explain my distinctly inconsistent spelling. As a British writer who has travelled alot, I apologise. In future, I will try to spell everything the British way to make things as difficult as possible for myself.

Gone In Twenty Years

2011-06-11T11:15:00.001-04:00

I bought these shoes in or around 1993 in London's High Street Kensington branch of Office Shoes for 39.99 pounds sterling which was a lot of money for me at the time. I still adored them until they disintegrated while I was walking down the street two weeks ago. The other one is also cracking a little, not unlike myself.

Is it alright to simply glue them back together? Please advise.

Almost Organic Sunscreen

2011-06-11T10:46:00.002-04:00

I'm pasty white and I'm proud; so the summer months have me reeling in the sunscreen aisle. It's difficult for me to find sunscreen that doesn't sting or cause a rash. Usually, I bring back all my sunscreen from England, but what remains of my stash (Soltan) is not strong enough. I suppose I'm still not accustomed to American chemicals.

Banana Boat was the only sunscreen that didn't irritate my skin, but this year it makes my face sting. Enter: Badger, found innocently lurking in the point-of-sale section in Wholefoods.

Badger is bad ass, as it's a "certified natural product containing organic ingredients" with no harmful chemicals. Badger is also priced like a bad ass, at a whopping $30 for a 2.9 fluid ounces.

The main ingredient is "non nano zinc": what the hell is this? Other ingredients are extra virgin olive oil, beeswax, shea butter, cocoa butter, jojoba oil, lavender oil, natural vitamin E and "CO2 extract of seabuckthorn".

Before I applied it, I wondered if it was wise to put so much oil on the skin and then go outside to fry with abandon, but the Badger works a treat, especially if I cover myself in a thick layer of it in the privacy of my own garden. Zinc or Titanium Dioxide are really the only true sunblocks as they coat the skin, reflecting the sun but they're annoying and need continual attention. Zinc doesn't rub in easily and I've trailed ugly white smears on clothing and the inside of the car.

It's also drying on the skin, so I clean it off every night and slather on the face cream.

Bee All You Can Bee

2011-06-04T20:09:00.002-04:00

Bee a total amateur and save the planet. Einstein said that once the bees disappear, humans will survive only for a further four years thereafter. Their number has diminished by about 30% in the last ten years. As mentioned in previous posts, our bees froze to death last winter and today, we purchased a new package of Italian bees from Better Bee, a bee retailer from upstate New York. We have some hilarious video of Mr Urbanski trying to unpack the bees into the hive while I read him instructions, but Blogger wouldn't let me post them. Instead, here are some images. The first is the most impressive; it shows a spider, who was lurking in the empty hive, grab a new bee and run off with it.

Here's the package in which the bees travel:

The process: paint the hive with simple sugar water to calm them down after their 2.5 hour journey in the car. Remove the queen in her little box and put her in the hive. Upturn the package and tap the bees into their new home.

This year we will insulate the hive at the onset of winter to keep them cosy.

There are a couple of posts this week, as there were last week, so remember to scroll down when you visit.

The Bonds of Debt

2011-06-04T12:31:00.004-04:00

My husband, a student of politics and history, is no stranger to communist literature, but I am. On finding him sitting patiently outside a bar in the West Village, early for our first date, covered in facial hair and corduroy, I noticed him sheepishly close a book with a start. It was Kropotkin's Mutual Aid. I looked at him with a raised eyebrow. Socialism doesn't work, I thought. Come visit my homeland of persistent dole scroungers, I cried. I voted for Tony Blair, but I changed my mind. England wouldn't give me a credit card, so I left that rotten country. I'm here to fully engage with free market capitalism!

Actually, I didn't say any of that. He might have suspected I was deranged and I didn't want him to discover that until much later.

I mention all this because I've just discovered some interesting, radical literature on the philosophy and politics of debt and put it on my reading list. Friends at Verso Books, a radical publishing house based in New York and London, have published a tome that deconstructs the debt equals slavery paradigm: The Bonds of Debt by Richard Dienst.

On the Verso blog, find the author's comments from the recent book launch at the Brecht Forum in New York City:

"to exaggerate a little, you could say that the triumphant capitalism of wealth is always accompanied by an accursed communism of debt. Or we might distinguish, using Randy Martin's terms, between the gang of risk-takers who are empowered by credit, and the vast populations at risk, endangered by debt."

So, not a light read, then:

"...key problems said to be facing contemporary capitalism—waning profitability, over consumption, hegemonic crisis, and contestation over social provision-all revolve around the construction of a regime of indebtedness capable of sustaining the processes of accumulation and forestalling (perhaps) systemic crisis."

The obligatory Marx quotation from the Verso blog actually describes America's predicament today:

"the only part of the so-called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possession of a modern nation is-the national debt." [Capital Volume 1, trans. Fowkes, 919]

Graffiti on a London wall, 2003 Credit: J.N. Urbanski

We are a nation suffering chronic debt and desperately need an economy not based on shopping but on meaningful production and exchange. This sounds like communist thought, but it's actually one of the principles on which America was founded (except that slaves much of the production but that's for another post). Ironically, debt has turned the average American into the proletariat, pacified by fake food and retail therapy, lied to by celebrity culture and "reality" television. We have relinquished our treasured independence in the short space of two hundred years to become capitalist automatons: slaves to convenience and comfort. Let's turn it around.

Organic Cotton

2011-05-30T16:45:00.001-04:00

To continue my current theme of organic vs genetically modified food, I've turned my attention to cotton, one of the most viciously toxic crops in the world. I thought I was doing a good thing for my body by only wearing cotton, but it turns out that I've actually been dicing with death all these years.

A new genetically modified cotton plant has now been produced that requires fewer pesticides. Bt cotton is cotton that's been completely engineered to be a pesticide and when animals like sheep and buffalo have been found eating it they have died shortly thereafter. The World Health Organization describes it thus:

Insect resistance is achieved by incorporating into the food plant the gene for toxin production from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (BT). This toxin is currently used as a conventional insecticide in agriculture and is safe for human consumption. GM crops that permanently produce this toxin have been shown to require lower quantities of insecticides in specific situations, e.g. where pest pressure is high.

Almost all of the cotton grown in India is this kind of cotton and if your t-shirt was made in India there's a good chance it's made with this fabric, which is essentially a pesticide all by itself. I decided to write to J Crew, Banana Republic and American Apparel to ask them where they get there cotton and got a not unexpected replies.

I asked American Apparel this question: "where is the cotton from in the classic "Summer Shirt" been sourced in past years?"

And got this answer:

Our dyeing process is done at a very high temperatures, even in white, and none of the pesticide is left on any garment. We look forward to hearing from you soon, and hope we can improve your shopping experience at American Apparel!

When I asked the same question of Banana Republic, I got this answer:

Although we appreciate your interest in our fabric, we are unable to address your specific inquiry at this time as this information is proprietary and is not currently available for public consumption.

J Crew were more helpful. They informed me that the cotton sourced for their "favorite t-shirt" which I wear, they told me the cotton came from a mill in China.

The Sustainable Cotton Project does tours and have been promoting cleaner cottonTM for years. Find out more information about them here. They help farmers convert their cotton crops to organic. I have one of their t-shirts to give away and will be buying one of their t-shirts to support them this week.

The winner will be randomly selected from comments on this post.

There are more resources in my previous post on GM Foods here.

Organic Fast Food

2011-05-22T09:55:00.001-04:00

I'm a workaholic; I'll freely admit. Regular readers know that I'm oftentimes slumped wearily over my keyboard at night clutching booze and chocolate. TV dinners and snack food have come a long way, however; even though they are still processed, they contain minimal salt and all the ingredients are organic. Here's my personal list of organic fast food for procrastinators, lazybones, workaholics and busy mothers. I have not been paid by any of these companies to promote their products.

Amy's Meals
Annie's Naturals
Green & Blacks
Peak Organic Ale
Dagoba Chocolate
Lara Bar
Go Organics
Applegate Farms
Bread Alone

Many of these superb small companies offering natural or organic products are getting swallowed by Big Food. Colgate bought majority shares in Tom's of Maine and now the toothpaste comes in plastic instead of earth-friendly metal. I used to be able to just throw the empty tube in my garden and watch it decompose, but not any more. Burt's Bees is now owned by Chlorox. However, according to the New York Times: "Clorox, the company promises, is going green". I'm pretty sure bleach is not an organic compound, but as a beekeeper, I can attest that even when you use essential oils in your hive to protect your bees, you've no idea what crops they're feeding on. Bees can travel up to five miles from the hive, so you must do a survey of the crops in your area to try and discern what pesticides they may be coming into contact with.

Kraft now owns Green & Blacks. Big Food wants to buy up its organic competitors because it knows the future is organic and covets that market, so it's in its best interests to retain the integrity of the acquired organic product and its message, but once again, the onus is on the consumer to ensure that quality is not lost because large corporations have been known to lie to us.

For example, Green & Blacks labels their product "Organic Chocolate" and all the ingredients listed are prefixed by the word "organic" except soy lecithin. However, if the whole product is labelled organic then the soy lecithin therein must be organic. True or false? I'm about to write to them to ask and am hopeful because the product is made in Italy and Europeans are anti-GM Food. Watch this space. Dagoba Chocolate, a new potential replacement for my beloved Green & Blacks, which uses "organic soy lecithin" on its ingredients list is owned by Hershey.

I recently wrote to Amy's and asked them if they were family owned and got the following response:

"Thanks for your email. You will be happy to know that we are family owned and have no plans to go public! In fact, the next generation of family members are already on board!"

One final addition: you'd be hard pressed to find a diet product without soy in it and if it doesn't say if it's organic on the packet it's probably genetically modified and loaded with toxins. Amy's does a new lean range that's tasty and if you can spare the calories, stick a slice of cheese on top during the last few minutes of heating in the oven to make a truly tasty, lean snack.

Resisting Genetically Modified Foods

2011-05-20T12:04:00.001-04:00

One of my first exchanges in an American restaurant went like this:

Me: 'What's in season?"
Waitress: "This is America: Everything's in season." (Italics hers.)

I wasn't as surprised by this as I was the portion that arrived at the table shortly thereafter. It was enormous and I marvelled at the abundance. I also ate all of my huge meal because I was raised to eat everything on my plate. ("There are people starving in Africa!")

To say I marvel less now would be a monstrous understatement. Time was when a meal out in Britain was a sordid, limp and entirely unwholesome affair. We were not known for our food tourism and we had the added burden of the Mad Cow. So when I arrived in the US in 1998 I thought I was in gastronomic heaven, but the tables have turned.

GM foods have been steadfastly resisted by Europeans since their advent but America has swallowed them whole. They are almost impossible to avoid, especially if you eat out. They are foods that have had their genetic material altered, usually by splicing said material with genes that resist pesticides. This allows the crop to be completely doused in chemicals and toxins to say nothing of what the genetic manipulation does to one's own genes. It's very troubling that the World Health Organization says these toxins are safe for humans only because we've been eating them all this time:

Insect resistance is achieved by incorporating into the food plant the gene for toxin production from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (BT). This toxin is currently used as a conventional insecticide in agriculture and is safe for human consumption.

Nobody knows how dangerous they are, but until we do here is a list of top genetically modified foods in the United States (with the percentage of the whole of US food quoted). Organic food is expensive, but it may save your life or afford you a few more healthy senior years.

It's ironic that I cannot give blood here in the States because of Britain's Mad Cow Disease, but who's to know what genetically modified foods have done to my blood after almost ten years?

In future posts, I will detail how I weaned myself off genetically modified foods, but it has taken me about two years. It's almost impossible because I like to eat in restaurants and I also exclude animals that may have eaten GM foods. It's particularly heart breaking if you like Mexican food, I've discovered. Food is where I bash the bank account with gay abandon. I spend more on food than anything else apart from my mortgage because I want to eat well. It's unfortunate that healthful food remains a necessary luxury.

Top GM Foods

Soy (91%)
Cotton (88%)
Canola (88%)
Corn (85%)
Sugar Beets (90%)
Hawaiian Papaya (more than 50%)
Zucchini and Yellow Squash (small amount)
Tobacco (Yikes!)

Soy Lecithin is literally everywhere: processed foods, bread, vitamins and diet products. So if you want to lose weight choose organic vegetables.

Canola Oil is easy to avoid with sunflower, safflower, olive and almond oils.

Corn is almost impossible to avoid. It replaces sugar in most products so you have the choice of avoiding sugar or choosing real sugar.

Cotton is the most dangerous because you're wearing it all the time against your skin. Choose cotton products *not made in India* to ease the effects a little. Bt cotton is a registered pesticide and has been proven to kill animals that eat it. The only alternative is organic cotton.

Resources:

The Non-GMO Project
Greenpeace
Food Democracy Now
Non-GMO Shopping Guide

Gas

2011-05-15T17:36:00.003-04:00

Am I the only person who observes the higher gas prices with approval, or at least a chuckle? This week, when I filled up my tank I was charged over $4 per gallon and as I put the pump back, I caught myself smiling.

As soon as the price of a product rises, Americans stop buying it. I don't want to give the impression that I'm a total leftist, but I was listening to NPR yesterday and a roving reporter was interviewing civilians at the pump. The reporter asked a woman what changes she intended to make, considering the new gas prices and her answer was: "I'm not going to go as many places; I'm going to drive the most [fuel efficient] way and use the most [fuel efficient] route. I'm going to go shopping less... spend less on clothing."

Er... hooray?

The high gas price has helped to achieve a result that personal finance consultants have been seeking to encourage for years.

I've never bought a new car in my life, but if I could I would presently be considering a Prius. I wonder how many others are doing the same. My little clunky wreck named Volvolina Jolie, (the most famously protective and sturdy baby carrier in the world with bouncy side impact bars) gets twenty miles to the gallon; I'm ashamed to admit.

My people, the Brits, give a hearty laugh to America's puny gas prices. My sister once had to turn down a job because her salary would have gone straight in the gas tank. Prices in England have reached five pounds sterling a gallon which is eight dollars a gallon.

What would an America with a gas price of $8 per gallon look like?

Sleep When You're Dead

2011-05-07T11:48:00.001-04:00

My consulting business is in a post tax-time lull and I have more time for other things like pitching and writing, which I love; hence the two posts this week. This sort of quiet time allows me to exhale and take stock while my income takes a disconcerting nosedive.

So here's what I've been pondering: I think I'm going to still be working until I'm 90 or dead, whichever comes first as I have hardly any pension. What little I had was slashed violently in half during the last economic fiasco. I shall retire when I'm dead. I'm about to go for a run down to the post office to collect my mail because I'll need to be really fit for the next fifty-odd years while I work myself into the grave. My local grocery store owner perfectly understands: yesterday when I popped in for a bottle of tonic he got quite excited and said: "vodka or gin?"

"Vodka!" I said, smiling.

Then he reached into his display refrigerator, rummaged around amongst the cold cuts, pulled out a half-drunk bottle of vodka and chuckled. "Me, too!!" He beamed and set the bottle down on the counter with a clunk and graciously offered to pour me one. We may be working forever, but at least we still have booze!

I decided when I was a teenager that there was no such thing as job security and that when I reached sixty years old there would be no British state pension. I intended to be my own boss and find something to do that I enjoyed because I'll be doing it for a long, long time. In retrospect it seems I was right on the money! Let's hope America can hang on to her social security and medicare which is presently being demolished by the Republican House.

So I have a few recommendations for down time in case you are between jobs. A fellow business owner once said to me something I'll never forget: "try to be brave: dare to enjoy the downtime because you know it's not going to last. Visit a few museums, ride the bike around town, reconnect with friends."

She was right, so in addition to that I'm offering a few tips:

Take a class: I'm using this time to add a qualification and licence to my resume as it's only going to take a few days.

Write a review of the last six months' worth of your business activity. Highlight areas in which you can improve. When you get mired in 15 hour work days, it's easy to lose perspective.

Do some marketing or barter your services for marketing. Reaching out can be fun and bring in new business. I designed my own website in photoshop and got a developer to put it up for me. I still don't know photoshop very well; it took me twice as long as a graphic designer would have taken and I had to work plenty of late nights, but I learned a useful skill.

Start a side business; nothing immediately enormous: just sew a few seeds for a bit of extra income. Actually, on second thoughts, it could very well become be enormous if you're unemployed for long enough. I am working on an image bank using images from my photography days. All the images on this site and The Chance Economist, I took myself. I take my camera everywhere. Yes, the daffodil on my last post was in a funk and I just happened to be walking by at the time.

Now I really am off for that jog down to the post office.

Apathy

2011-05-06T11:38:00.002-04:00

Another hilarious post from Consciously Frugal this week "Earn or Save? The False Dichotomy". Please read it; it's brilliantly funny. It focuses on Ramit Sethi's recent article in the New York Times telling us that, instead of being frugal, we should concentrate on earning more money.

It's important for me, because it highlights an inherent problem I face continually. I've been consulting on personal finance for ten years now and one of the things I'm challenged by, time after time, is apathy.

People simply don't want to know much they spend. They don't want to balance their cheque book; they don't want to do their own bookkeeping; they don't want to do the filing, or open their mail; leaving growing piles of paperwork unattended until the last minute because they don't want to do it. They bitterly resent having to spend time with a spreadsheet. It's thoroughly disheartening and makes me want to close up my consulting business.

Sethi tells us: "it's no wonder that most Americans simply ignore their finances. We don't want someone constantly lecturing us on what we can't do".

Yes, quite.

Nobody likes being told that they can't afford something or they shouldn't buy something. Most people spend as if they earn about 50% more than they do and don't want to think about the consequences which are myriad (and for another post).

Over the last decade or so, the word want has gradually been replaced with need. We need a cup of coffee, chocolate, therapy, glass of wine. Actually, all we really need is basic food, warmth and shelter. Yes, we would get arrested if we went about our business in our birthday suits, but spending thousands of dollars on clothing is excessive. So why has this happened? Part of me thinks it's political correctness: "what do you want?" became too aggressive: a challenge or an insult. So "do you need anything?" has replaced it, but this has cost us dearly.

Here's where Sethi's article gets it right: he suggests that people raise their income and this is a good idea for one reason only: motivation. It's easy to get stuck in a rut and pursuing your passion for a few hours a week can give you a boost of confidence and bring you out of the doldrums in a far worthier way than the credit card will. However, if you concentrate on earning more money instead of being frugal you will pay more tax and have less free time. If you earn $400, only about 70% of that will go into your bank account. If you save $400, you save all of it and owe none to the IRS. The only way to counter this is to build up your side business; start a new business entity to take advantage of tax deductions like the business use of your home. The chances of being unemployed are almost the same as your business failing so there's no reason not to make an effort if you have a marketable skill and the determination required to run your own business.

This leads me to my third point: having a full-time job prevents us from being able to do all the things our ancestors used to do like grow and preserve our own food, make repairs on our houses or cars and learn other skills that our grandparents acquired. In turn, we stop passing these skills down to our descendants causing them to outsource everything, forcing them to specialise in a full-time job. It's tempting to abdicate responsibility for your life when another company owns you nine-to-five. If you're working an 60-hour work week, you'd much rather someone else clean your house, monitor your finances or cook your own food.

It takes decent effort to be a conscious spender, shopper, eater. It takes enormous discipline to run a business; but it's worth it.

Getting Married On A Budget

2011-05-02T11:04:00.002-04:00

An estimated 24 million people in America tuned in to watch Commoner Kate marry her Prince Charming last Friday and I was one of them. (I sprang out of bed at 5 am to watch it on YouTube's The Royal Channel.) I wonder if she remembers any of it. I hardly remember mine and there were only about 24 people watching me. Kate was the epitome of elegance conjuring memories of Grace Kelly with that splendid dress.

The Royals spent an awful lot more money than I did though; I got married barefoot in the desert in a simple white t-shirt and we ate takeout pizza for dinner. Herein, I provide my tips for a budget wedding that doesn't have to cost a fortune.

Cheapest

The cheapest wedding I've ever heard of was a City Hall wedding followed by a lunch in which everyone paid their own tab. The bride wore an inexpensive dress, but still stood there glowing like a Spring goddess in a lick of mascara and dash of lipstick. A friend took the photographs and digital files were emailed to the guests.

Cheaper

If you get married later in the day, all you're required to provide your guests is an evening meal. Let them know in advance that they should get all their calories at lunch, so there's no whining about rumbling stomachs. I have friends who got married by the Brooklyn Bridge and then hired a modestly priced restaurant in Brooklyn for the reception after which some of the tables were cleared to make way for a dance floor.

Cheap

If your parents don't have a huge home, then rent a house for the weekend and bring in caterers. This is an option that can be thousands of dollars cheaper than a hotel. Friends of mine rented a Catskills house on ten acres for the weekend. They had the ceremony in the grounds and friends were relieved that they weren't obliged to drive home. Have local caterers prepare a simple supper for 20 guests who can pitch tents in the grounds or share bedrooms. Most country homes have a glorious campfire around which you can sit after dinner. Good friends and family will bring extra snacks and treats to share. A guitar, monopoly, scrabble and a couple of decks of cards and you have yourself a truly romantic and relaxing day for everyone.

Top Tips:

Photography

Have a competent friend take the pictures. Digital cameras now take the surprise out of wedding pictures and you can edit your treasured images almost immediately on a laptop. Use the black and white or sepia settings to lend a classic tone. Be mindful of the light and use it to your advantage. I got married at sunset in the desert and my photographer, a college friend of my husband's, didn't have to worry about the light at all. Be wary of the flash as the sun goes down; if you use the flash in the half-light, you will "detach" your subjects from the setting making the background look like a fake backdrop. If the day is overcast with clouds, a simple mirror or large metallic surface focused on the bridal party can provide makeshift lighting.

Food

Wedding cake tastes exactly the same from one wedding to the other. I've been to perhaps one wedding where I thought the cake was extraordinary. Sponge cake is the easiest cake in the world to make. The icing is the most difficult part and there is always somebody you know who can ice a cake proficiently if you can't do it yourself. If you hire a restaurant, offer to provide items that you may be able to get cheaply like linens, tableware, extra mixers and gifts for the guests.

Bartering

Bartering is a way to get what you want for your wedding. If you are a professional, you can barter your services for wedding services. Marketing, printing, advertising, networking, copy writing, editing, bookkeeping, accounting and financial advice are all services that wedding service providers use frequently. Donate your time in advance to get the wedding you want. You can also offer to bring new clients to a wedding service provider in return for discounts. There's absolutely nothing more valuable to a business than a lucrative stream of new clients.

The New WTC

2011-04-27T15:55:00.001-04:00

In case anyone's interested, here's the World Trade Center going up into the foggy New York evening this week. Looks like they're starting to glaze the lower floors. It was taken north of the tower on the West Side Highway and no I wasn't driving.

Gardening

2011-04-25T16:11:00.001-04:00

I'm a city girl, born and bred: a north London chick. A transplanted writer to whom Bebel Gilberto once flashed her boobs in her dressing room backstage at Irving Plaza in New York City. (To be fair, I wasn't the only one there.) So if you had told me that when I hit my thirties I would pack up my typewriter and buy a six-acre country pile, I would have spat out my vodka.

I thought about this when I found myself outside in the pissing rain this Easter weekend raking leaves and clearing out two years' worth of embedded bulbs, roots and grass from my neglected flower beds to prepare for planting a new perennial. Next month, we're getting new bees and I would like them to have plenty of worthy flowers in the vicinity. I need them to eat a lot because come winter they need to be as fat as little piglets in order to survive our withering sub zero temperatures.

I'm planting about 20 or 30 fledgling lavender plants in time for warmer weather and hoping for lavender honey; lavender is a natural analgesic, antidepressant, antiseptic: a great bee stress reliever and they will need all the help they can get because they'll also be organically raised. Lavender is also one of the only plants that the deer won't touch and we have deer wandering through here on a daily basis.

Carnage in the Beehive

2011-04-25T10:08:00.001-04:00

Einstein said that if the world loses its bee population, then humans would have only another four years on the planet. So I take seriously the fact that the bee population has shrunk by 30% in my lifetime.

I'm not doing so well myself, however, as it was carnage in the beehive when we opened it this Spring. We live life at 2500 ft and this past winter was bitterly cold, so they froze to death, even though we buried them in bales of hay. This year, we're going to try a Russian queen who will turn the bees Russian in a short period of time. Sounds rather glamourous, like she'll arrive wearing a fur hat and muff and she will in a sense. She's much hardier than her Italian sisters.

Bees come in "packets" and beekeepers don't sell packets of Russian bees, so you have to buy Italian bees and replace their queen with a Russian.

Versatile Blogger Award

2011-04-19T11:57:00.001-04:00

Today I was honoured to receive this fabulous award from Fresh Green Kim of Our Daily Green, a blogging colleague. I thank her from the bottom of my heart.

We ask anyone receiving the Versatile Blogger Award to pay it forward, if you will.

- Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them in your post

- Tell you readers seven (7) things about yourself.

- Give this award to fifteen (15) recently discovered bloggers.

- Contact those bloggers and let them in on the exciting news.

The award is passed on by peers within the blogging community and by clicking on the donor's link in each post (like Our Daily Green mentioned above), you may follow the winding path to where it began and find some meaningful reading in the process.

So here are seven things about myself:

1. I'm a published writer and will write about anything.

2. I hate shopping.

3. I speak and write "textbook" French; I'm told by someone who lived in Paris for ten years.

4. I am an excellent Scrabble player and love anagrams.

5. I could have regrets but there's no point. I mostly think about whether I should or should not have regrets. I mostly go with the latter.

6. I am English.

7. I was almost killed by a large, flying piece of concrete roof top once. It missed me by about ten feet.

And here are the recipients of my Versatile Blogger Award:

The Greenest Dollar - Green and frugal

Consciously Frugal - I want to see how many times CF gets this award.

Paranoid Asteroid - Even the name is splendid.

Czar Of The Woods Farm A distant family member in upstate New York who went back to the land.

Clean Hippie NY - Trying to live sustainably in New York.

Move To Portugal A fellow Brit saving up to move to Portugal.

Casual Kitchen A Wall Street executive turned cook.

Ten Dollar Drawings Wonderful artist who offers ten dollar drawings on a household item of your choice.

Dean Keim A prolific New York political illustrator friend who now blogs about music.

Sweet Fine Day Confectioners based in Brooklyn.

NY Homesteader A neighbour in the Catskills

Zen Habits Genteel zen offerings.

Oil and Garlic A cooking and lifestyle blog.

The Saved Quarter A money blog.

The Half Assed Housewife A hilarious housewife blog.

Thanks again to Fresh Green Kim.

Alternatives

2011-04-17T16:13:00.003-04:00

Whenever I chance upon one of those sites that judge you on how many of the great works of fiction you've read, I can barely tick off a handful of titles because my heart is firmly in non-fiction. I like facts and those facts are presently more fraught than the best fiction you'll ever read. (Plus I'm a writer and have enough fiction going on in my head.)

First of all, it's a daily Corinthian challenge just to find decent food in this world. Second, our health care system is an abominable behemoth. Third, the bees are dying, including my own organic hive which did not survive our harsh Catskills winter. Fourth, the bad guys are winning. It's all I can do not to smite myself deeply in the eye with my pen, but I'll stick to drinking for the time being. (Scrumptious Peak Organic IPA Ale from Maine and they didn't pay me to say that.)

Organic food is becoming less pricey, but genetically modified food ravages our food chain unabated. Pesticides are almost impossible to escape. American soy, 90% of which is estimated to be genetically modified, is even in vitamins, chocolate (why chocolate?) and most other processed food. Back in the late nineties, the English didn't want American GMO soy, but it was forced upon them and after they took it like troopers to avoid a trade war, allergies went up in England by 50%. It was banned in the British Parliament cafeteria in 1998. I challenge you to go a week without eating soy; it's decent work to avoid it although it has been reported that farmers are planting less of it. The only way to avoid GMO foods is to eat organic food, but proliferation of GMO seeds onto organic crops remains a concern.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, I'll freely and excitedly admit. My aforementioned foodie friend from two blog posts ago, who went to DC to lobby for better food, spent her entire life as an asthmatic until she turned to homeopathy a year ago. Now she doesn't need an inhaler. She takes the medicine pictured above.

Detractors of homeopathy claim it works by the placebo effect, but I don't see the downside to being informed you will get better and then actually getting better, do you? I'd rather take plant based medicine than steroids. The practice has been around for hundreds of years, but the North American Society of Homeopaths is only 20 years old. The practice was not taken seriously by medical associations in England or America probably because it focuses on prevention not cure. Homeopathic treatments take not only your symptoms as indicators of the state of your health, but also your moods. The explanation for it may be confusing: firstly, the word homeopathy is from two Greek words "like" and "suffering". Second, the treatments are minute doses of what would make a well person ill with the same symptoms. So, for example, if you had a runny nose, a homeopath would give you a minute dose of something that would give a very healthy person a runny nose.

Using plants for medicinal purposes is nothing new, but we now have improved access to it. In a post-industrial England, thousands of poor city dwellers like my ancestors, who were more immediately affected by horrors like contaminated food, stone-corroding coal smoke and raw sewage, did not have access to it (because they were working 18-hour days and then passing out). So I suppose I should be thankful.

GMO Food

2011-04-11T16:27:00.002-04:00

Question: what do you get when you insert certain genetic material of an ocean pout, an eel-like fish, into the DNA of a salmon?

This week, while we are being distracted and pacified by mind numbing stupidity on television, there is a company in California quietly seeking approval from the FDA for something quite sinister: transgenic salmon. Genetically modified food is nothing new, but this year a company called AquAdvantage want to splice the ocean pout and the salmon DNA to make an incredibly fast growing type of salmon. It will be the first genetically modified animal to be approved for human consumption.

It's one (freakish) matter to create mutant fish like this, but entirely another to refuse to label it as such, which is why the Institute of Responsible Technology is asking Californians to sign a petition asking the CA Assembly Health Committee to clearly label transgenic salmon.

The effects of GMO food on humans have not been thoroughly researched and GMO food providers complain that there's no evidence to prove that it's dangerous to health. However, most GMO food was developed so that crops could resist pesticides, allowing farmers to spray those crops completely with poisonous chemicals without killing them. (Some GMO corn is now a registered pesticide in itself. Crops such as Bt cotton produce pesticides inside the plant. The plants themselves are toxic.) This means that we eat these pesticides and the GMO food, which means two things. First, you're filling yourself with dangerous toxic substances and second, the freshly created genetic material is proliferating unabated in your body. Who knows what it is doing to you?

Monsanto produces GMO soy that is immune to Roundup, a pesticide commonly used in gardening. How do you feel about popping out to your garden shed every morning and pouring yourself a nice, cold shot of weed killer?

It's nearly impossible to buy any processed product in the US without soy in it, so choose organic. If I have to eat processed food, I'll buy Amy's (and she didn't pay me to write that).

With regard to the aforementioned GMO salmon, the question still remains. When the pout's fast-growing genes are permanently "switched on" in the salmon DNA, how will these runaway genes affect us when we consume the product?

And here's another question: did you know that scientists made a bioluminescent puppy a couple of years ago? The puppy glows in the dark like a jellyfish.

The only way we can avoid GMO food is by buying organic food in order to eat real food. Genetic engineering is something we all need to watch.

Funk, then Food

2011-04-07T17:20:00.001-04:00

I've been mostly slumped despondently over my writer's block this week clutching a bottle of Pilsner Urquell, dithering between Green & Black's peanut chocolate and Next Organic goji berries at $4.99: definitely not frugal. Except for a brief but invigorating interlude to visit The Museum of Sex in New York City to write a review on one of their exhibits, I've been doing a lot of hearty sighing, head resting wearily on upturned palm; pondering on why I bother. I'm in a philosophical funk, which is the only funk worth being in, frankly. All other funks pale in comparison.

Apparently, nobody wants to know how much they're worth; nobody wants to think about their debt and definitely nobody cares to balance their cheque book; they've got far too many other scintillating things to do.

I'm hoping that my doldrums will miraculously dissipate on the arrival of two very special friends from the Pacific Northwest, whose caravan is due to trundle into town tomorrow en route back to Washington State from Washington DC, where they have been lobbying with their representatives against GMO foods. Now there's a worthy cause. Apparently, some people want to genetically modify salmon, but more on that at the weekend.

In the post-9/11 economic downtown, post-boyfriend-running-off, post-what-the-hell-is-going-on times of millennial New York City, my friend Teresa came to stay in my apartment in Brooklyn. A unrivaled Epicurean, Teresa was an enthusiastic cook and the kitchen became her territory. She had spent six post-college years living in Europe; Paris was her first love and she had returned with two languages in tow, having developed a Frenchman's intrinsic obsession with coffee, cheese and wine. (I still have her spices in my cupboard to this very day.) She entertained and we blossomed in the neighbourhood which theretofore I had been too afraid to explore.

The wine country of the Pacific Northwest was Teresa's goal and no sooner had she settled in than she set about looking for a large truck to convey her and her enormous kitchen to her destination. She loves road trips. So she found a car for sale on our street and called the number posted on its window. As it turned out, the owner was English and although she didn't buy his car, she invited him out to dinner saying, "my flat mate's English, lonely and she hasn't got any friends and her boyfriend just left her, why don't we all go out for dinner?"

Thereafter is an exceedingly long and fascinating story but suffice it to say, they are now married. Of course they are.

They are the proud purveyors of all things healthful and tasty in Bear Foods in Chelan, Washington and this weekend we'll be taking a culinary tour of Brooklyn just like the old days.

Spot The Difference: Part 2

2011-04-03T13:43:00.003-04:00

This image was taken at my local family owned grocery store yesterday.

The origins of each vegetable aren't really in focus; the orange peppers are from Mexico, the yellow peppers are from Canada and the green are American grown; the price difference is from outer space.

Spot The Difference

2011-04-03T13:23:00.001-04:00

The images were taken at my local, family owned grocery store yesterday.

Seems like a no-brainer..

Move Your Money

2011-03-26T19:55:00.006-04:00

I'm aware that the Move Your Money campaign has been going for a long time and activists like Consciously Frugal and The Huffington Post have been supporting it for a good while. The reason to Move Your Money is simple: let's take the power away from these To Big To Fail corporations and put it in the hands of our local communities instead. Now I'm taking the pledge. I'm moving some of my money to a locally owned bank next month.

I'm not moving it all for a number of reasons. First, even though it's part of an enormous international behemoth, I like my bank. It doesn't charge me any fees and hasn't done since I opened my account seven years ago. Yes, you heard me. I pay no fees. Incidentally, if you don't want to pay fees to your bank, simply call them and say: "if you don't let me off your fees I'm closing my account".

Also, I like my bank for their convenient and protective online banking security features and their exquisite customer service. I'm satisfied that they are working hard for me, so I have been loyal to them. My business also banks with them and I don't pay any fees on that account either.

Most important, my bank was nowhere to be seen during the last Too Big To Fail banking crisis. Although it's British sister affiliate was a minority counterparty to AIG, it did not take government bail out money. Also, although my bank is a foreigner like me, it pays the .15% US bank tax that will ultimately raise $90 billion over ten years to repay TARP, even though it did not fail.

All this is no excuse of course, but I do run an international business and need a certain level of convenience. I may be at an advantage by the fact that I have no credit card debt, so it's possible my bank is merely lying in wait, licking it's lips, waiting for me to go into debt so I can charge me exorbitant fees. Perhaps I'm being rewarded for being a good customer, who knows?

However, the urge to join the Move Your Money campaign shook me violently when I watched the movie Inside Job recently. Now, not only are we still recovering from the Bush years, but we must also suffer being run by major banking corporations.

When the next president takes office, examine his or her roster of donors and lobbyists, for those donors and lobbyists will be running the country next time as they have always done. And that's just the way it is here in free-market capitalist America, folks.

Happy Birthday To WuTF!

2011-03-21T20:33:00.001-04:00

Wake Up to Frugality! turns 2 years old today; I'm not sure if I've helped or entertained that many people, but it's certainly given me a forum to write, which writers appreciate in their ever decreasing market. My first post gave a smidgen of history on where my own sense of frugality originated and subsequent posts detailed how we can take advantage of this continuing recession. Consuming less, conserving our environment, eating locally produced food and managing our immediate economy is something we should have been doing all along and many of us have.

I'm particularly proud of the people of the state of California, because they simply ignored the administration who denied global warming, and seemed to lead the country in conversation, recycling and clean energy.

I fear that capitalists now run this country having taken over from warmongering profiteers. I think I prefer the capitalists because they don't send all their money to China or Iraq: they buy huge mansions in Connecticut and keep New England construction workers in business. (I hope.)

I did abandon my blog last year for a few months, but it was for a worthy cause: to start up my own business. My new website has a new blog which offers tips on personal and business finance for my clients, but it's something you can take advantage of too.

The image above is for one of my oldest buddies in the blogosphere, Consciously Frugal. I know you'll get a good laugh out of it!

Continuing blog love, here's this week's round-up. I've found many bloggers who are attempting and/or succeeding to participate in a consumer revolution and help people out of debt. There are also some great writers out there, one of whom has disappeared; I hope Simple Life in France returns soon. Please feel free to introduce yourself when you visit and I will pay you a visit in return.

Consciously Frugal
The Compact
Clean Hippie
Fresh Green Kim
Man vs Debt
Oil and Garlic
The Saved Quarter
Paranoid Asteroid

Consumer Revolution Part 2

2011-03-20T15:46:00.001-04:00

Last week, I gained a local New York City Twitter follower called Clean Hippie who, as the name suggests, is trying to live sustainably in New York. Last week, she encouraged us to spend a whole day not buying plastic and I readily joined in. I bagged my lunch; headed into the city for a long work day during which I didn't buy any plastic.

That evening, I found myself standing wearily in a grocery store, staring fondly at the beer (glass, paper) selection, when I realized I had forgotten my shopping (cloth) bags. Stubborn as I am, I put all my pending (glass, paper) purchases back on the shelf and left the store. Wandering home, faced with the prospect of an empty fridge, I hesitated outside a Brooklyn gastro-pub and called a friend. We then went inside wherein I had a mushroom and jalapeno quesadilla with three (Russian) vodka tonics. No plastic in sight!

It occurred to me, while my friend and I mused thoughtfully about beer, men and war that we don't think enough about plastic. So, in addition to buying consciously, I'm also going to try and avoid plastic, but it's going to be tough because everything comes wrapped in it.

Last week, I decided to stop buying books online and frequent my local bookstore instead. They never have what I want, but I ask them to order for me. Although Amazon books do now come in cardboard encasements, I still would rather put money back into my community.

Three products purchased today for Sunday brunch: eggs in a new environmentally friendly paper case and cheese (Irish) in a kind of waxy paper/plastic wrapper.

Starting tomorrow, I'm going to see how many times I can use my plastic subway card before it wears so thin I can floss my teeth with it.

Blog Love

2011-03-15T11:52:00.001-04:00

It's tax season, so I'm out there, fighting the good fight; roving around New York City, saving books and receipts. All I need is a cape and a tight spandex t-shirt with a gold adding machine emblazoned on the front. I'm able to blog this fine Tuesday morning, because artists can't get up early. I'm waiting for a client to call me back and I'm pretty sure he's still in bed.

Most artists I've met are nocturnal creatures and I empathize. There's nothing better than musing over your work late at night in a comfortable chair, knowing that the rest of your time zone is in bed. My accountant works until 2am during tax season and he works in a NYC skyscraper, tapping away at the keyboard while midtown sparkles at him in the darkness. It lends a remarkable sense of peace to proceedings. I like my sleep, however, and I'm not alone. A recent blogger If It's a Hero blogged about sleep and she immediately got six comments of agreement. I could sleep all day and all night. I could work from my bed in my pyjamas. I'm working on a master plan that requires me to never leave my house during daylight hours. One day I won't even need shoes, which is good because I'm not a big shopper.

I'm starting blog love this week, so here it is. I'm attracted to blogs mainly for entertainment value and their writing. (I miss Simple Life in France, where is she?) I also like to keep appraised of literary, conservation, green and environmental issues.

Here's what I've been perusing this morning, in addition to my blog roll to the right:

http://movetoportugal.org/ bright sunny blog
http://frugalforlife.blogspot.com/ food safety - at the weekend I defrosted some meat by leaving it overnight on the mantel above the fire. Apparently, this sort of practice might kill me.
http://singlemomrichmom.com/ well-written, funny blog by an accountant
http://ourdailygreenlife.blogspot.com/ super greenness; get on your bike
http://www.itsahero.com/ sleep, general good vibes

Consumer Revolution

2011-03-12T18:08:00.002-05:00

Since Christmas, we've been observing something of an overhaul sweep across the Arab nations of the Middle East, to put it mildly. Disaffected Tunisian youth got very fed up with the government and ousted their leader. Encouraged by their success, Egypt removed the chief of their 40-year dictatorship. Uprisings flourished and continue in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Libya.

We can start a much-needed revolution over here: a consumer revolution. If they can do it, so can we and all we need to do is stay at home. While the poor Libyan rebels get bombed to smithereens by their own government in a North African no-fly zone, we can conduct our lazy ass revolution by sitting in our armchairs with a good book; the only resulting violence being some spirited wrestling over the family credit cards.

We complain about the shoddy state of our food, without realizing we have the power to change it. Imagine what would happen if we all decided to stop buying mass produced sugary beverages and only drank water. In very short order, they would disappear from the shelves.

We complain about the dwindling domestic job market while buying foreign made goods in bulk. Most clothing is made in the Far East, it's true. Instead of racking up debt on yet another pair of jeans made in Macau, why not stay at home and play Scrabble? I wonder if anyone remembers the phrase "Sunday Best" denoting that a good pair of shoes would be saved for special occasions and another pair of shoes would be worn daily. Somehow over the years it has become normal to own fifty pairs of shoes. Clothing made in America is more expensive, but if everyone buys it the price will come down over time. Organic food is a great deal cheaper than it used to be.

A couple of days ago the New York Times offered the opinion that by supporting despots like Mubarak, who allegedly kept peace in the region for many years, the US fostered jihadist rage against the West.

Similarly, by supporting community ravagers like big box retailers, we have killed Main Street and its corner stores (fostering much working class rage... you get my drift). Your erstwhile Mom and Pop business owners and their descendants now work in an enormous faceless retailer and are unable to control the profits of their local community, which flow to foreign lands like China. It's not Walmart's fault though. They're only supplying what we have demanded: very cheap goods.

We've been sending our money to China since the 17th century, when my people, the Brits, consumed millions of pounds of Chinese tea a year, but we got our money back by selling them Indian opium in a balancing trade. Now, however, they are stock piling our currency.

It's a revolutionary idea: think seriously about your expenditure. Capitalists run this country the way that religious crackpots run Syria or Saudi Arabia, let's show them what we really want.

With every dollar you spend, you're casting a vote for the world you want to live in.

Save and Close

2011-03-08T22:04:00.001-05:00

I'm obviously a big fan of writing things down and if you're a struggling business owner who's thinking of throwing in the towel, please read this and despair not.

Tax-time can cause insomnia. If you spent a sleepless night or two worrying these past weeks, I have a fresh tip. Next time you find yourself crunching numbers or fretting over problems at 4 am, get up out of bed and write it out.

And I'm not talking about simply jotting a few notes either. Sit down at the computer, turn on a light and write a solid 3000 words on your predicament. Edit and re-edit as if it were a speech you were giving the next day: or write as if you were explaining your story in detail from start to finish to a colleague or friend.

It's never been a more stressful time to own a business, especially if you have employees. Use insomnia to your advantage; write it down, or print it out and put it on your TO DO list as a task to solve.

If you're not slumped over your keyboard snoozing within an hour of starting, at least you will have put your time musing in the darkness to good use.

Save and close.

The TO DO List

2011-02-25T15:42:00.002-05:00

My dear friend, a mother of three, on the board of the local school in rural England, recently told me that her husband came home one day and complained at length about a chronically difficult colleague.

"Really?" she answered him, wearily. "Does he perform all these hateful transgressions while he and his evil twin yell MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY MUMMY, while rolling around on the floor, tugging at your trouser leg?"

Mothers have one thousand and one things to do every day, but sadly don't have the peace of a quiet office to do perform their tasks. They are the world's largest contingent (of) economists, but they do it all without necessarily having the knowledge or experience before they get the job. During their 18-year tenure in the home, they grow eyes in the back of their head and make more life-and-death split second decisions than a CEO during a stock market crash.

It occurs to me that most businesses do far better if they had a mother of three on retainer, if only she had the time. Perhaps that's why most small businesses fail: because mothers-of-three aren't available to keep them on the straight and narrow.

Most home economists have one thing in common: the TO DO list. Right there on the fridge with a sharpie attached by velcro (or in their head like my mother-in-law). Like the shopping list, the TO DO list is continually scanned and revised throughout the day.

I have one very artistic client who has taken the TO DO list to a new level. She runs an open plan office with many projects on the go at once and a core staff who are rarely present concurrently. She maintains a running TO DO list on the wall for each project in two-feet high sheets of paper. Employees routinely grab the sharpie and cross a task off the list, so that everyone else can see when something has been done.

It's especially useful for small business owners who are doing everything themselves after having to reduce staff. (No, you don't have ADD; you're just incredibly busy.)

The list is also useful for chronic worriers. What to do when you are roused by your troubles at 3 am? Add your worry to the list and if you still cannot sleep, write a synopsis of the cause of each worriment - making it as detailed as possible - then go back to sleep and promise yourself you will attend to it in the morning.

Introducing The Chance Economist

2011-02-14T14:43:00.002-05:00

Crikey, two posts in one day. Well, it's Valentine's Day, so how better to let my readers know I love them?

First of all, I abandon you for eight months, then I tease you with one measly post at Christmas, then I leave again without even a goodbye note. Lest you wonder if I'm going to stagger back into your life with a cigarette in one hand, a bottle of tequila in the other, wearing socks with sandals and reeking of Mexican food, here's what happened.

My hiatus has not been for naught; Last May, I set up a new business entity called Back of the Envelope LLC, an operation providing personal finance counseling, bookkeeping, coaching and business services in London and New York City. This week I started a new blog for the customers of that business in addition to my regular readers. It's a chance to give more serious thought to the world of personal finance.

It's called The Chance Economist and a new website is in the works.

I am an economist by chance, through the evolution of my career: 15 years' worth of business experience derived from a broad and diverse range of sources on two continents. I have worked as a photographer, writer, editor, producer and bookkeeper. Clients have included musicians, magazines, newspapers, artists, artisans, producers, directors, designers, architects, lawyers, investment managers, editors, marketing executives and eminent thinkers.

The fact is that we are all economists by chance and necessity because we must all balance our cheque book and monitor our cash flow and investments.

The new blog will be filled with tips, tools and real case studies to help you manage your money.

Please support the new blog; I hope you become a regular reader as I go about my business and show you how I use my eclectic knowledge to empower you to take control of your finances.

Welcome!

Get A Receipt

2011-02-14T13:58:00.003-05:00

The other day I dug around in my closet for a more suitable bag to use in the interminably messy New York snowstorms and I unearthed my precious Manhattan Portage (since 1983) messenger bag. It's almost as good as new and it's over ten years old.

And I know this because I still have the receipt.

*Gasp*

I'm not suggesting that anybody needs to go this far apart from myself because I'm a geek like that, but when I arrived in New York over ten years ago my accountant told me to keep my receipts but refused to tell me when to throw them away. I think it was fear of litigation. I still have my first American tax return and simply can't bring myself to put the thing in the shredder.

According to modern accounting gossip, you must keep all the receipts for your deductions and indeed any other business related paperwork for seven years. You are ordinarily required to keep your documents for five years only, but the IRS are two years behind with their au... aud... au.. a-words.

Anyhow, let me tell you how fun it is to realize you still have your receipts from the nineties, go digging around in the cabinets, spread all the paperwork out on the office floor and sit there wide-eyed with amazement at all the funky things you used to do when you were younger. Like go and see Chick Corea at the Blue Note in New York City on October 19th, 1999; pay for a Virgin airline ticket with cash!; watch the city slowly grumble to life at dawn outside Dizzy Izzy's All Night Bagels.

How unnerving, though, to be instantly transported back to the time I saw the atrociously shocking Fight Club on the big screen on Sunday November 21st 1999 for $9.50, before staggering out of the theatre after almost dying of fright during the closing credits. It should have been called Fright Club.

Also shocking is the fact that I bought a copy of Catch A Fire: The Life of Bob Marley on October 5th 1999 and I still haven't read it. There it is on the bookshelf.

There's the Bodum receipt from 2003. I bought a coffee with a colleague from the Bodum store late one evening and Bodum had just thrown out a batch of wooden bar stools that were in near perfect condition. I hailed a NYC taxi and piled four of them into the trunk. They are now gracing my breakfast bar and no, I still haven't painted them.

Back to the bag: I still remember wandering down Canal Street and buying the messenger bag on the recommendation of a fashion stylist friend as a young hack and it, and its receipt, bring back fond memories.

So, people, think of the endless fun you could have.

Get a receipt.

Live and Unplugged

2010-12-21T17:05:00.001-05:00

When I was a little girl in England my father, an adamant do-it-yourself die hard who did everything around the house including the wiring, was continually getting projected by force out of the cupboard under the stairs with smoking fingers and hair aloft, for that was where the "electrics" were housed. Back in the olden days, you didn't have nifty gadgets like those little screwdrivers with lights on the end to test whether a wire was live or not and my people like their voltage. American parents cover their measly 110 volt plug sockets with those little plastic childproof plugs, but your child gets more voltage from your nylon carpet. In Blighty, we put the fuse right in the plug and we deliver it at a hair-raising 240 volts.

I've thought much about unplugging in the past few months, because if you're a regular you'll notice that I've been absent.

Much was made in the media about switching off earlier this year. Consciously Frugal had also written a piece entitled "half-assed unplugging" that was quite inspiring. I don't have a television and nobody ever calls me, so disconnecting was easier for me; my only problem was the internet where I get all my news and write a column in an online newspaper. In compromise, I decided to have a hiatus from my unpaid weekly blog, so I wrote a summary blog post and pressed the pause button.

Well, here's what I discovered: if you stop Twittering you may lose a few followers. If you stop blogging for six months, you will lose regular readers. However, if you leave something meaningful on your last page, it's still useful and interesting to newcomers. Furthermore, if your last post contains back links, it encourages readers to go back and read your old postings which, after consulting Google Analytics, almost never happened to me when I blogged more frequently. My percentage of new visitors who also read more than one page rose and has remained steady for the last two months. Moreover, my readership, which had been slowly but steadily declining at first, began to increase after almost six months of absence.

I was almost afraid to resume. However, my simple white shirt tip or my camping recommendations will simply not work for the winter, so it's time to update.

A Year's Worth of Tips

2010-04-10T18:56:00.004-04:00

Last week, my blog turned a year old so, in this post, I'm offering ten popular tips from the last year, in no particular order:

1. The Great White Shirt: if you're trying to be frugal, nothing beats a fresh, white t-shirt to make you feel great at an affordable price. Team a new, classic, white t-shirt with a beautiful necklace; it'll illuminate your complexion and make an old pantsuit feel wearable again.

2. Eat less; eat more vegetables. One of the simplest things you can do to change your life is eat less. Last year I told the story of my first time in an American restaurant: Me: "What's in season?" Waitress: "This is America. Everything's in season." (Italics hers.) Enough said madam!

3. Spend one week a month paying only with cash. I use a bookkeeping program for all my expenditure so I know exactly where my money goes. Unfortunately. Still, I did this experiment a few times last year to keep me on my toes and questioned everything I bought until I broke down while wrestling with a packet of smoked salmon in Gristede's.

4. Sell your dryer. Use an outdoor clothes line. You'll save thousands of dollars a year on your electricity bill. Use a fold up drying frame for the winter months or put wet towels directly onto the radiator to make a cheap humidifier.

5. Set up a side business: turn a hobby or other skill into a side business for extra cash.

6. Go camping this summer. I've been extraordinarily impressed by the nation's camping facilities. America has some of the worlds most sensational national parks and sites can be as low as ten dollars a night. Plus, park rangers are the sexiest government workers ever with their masterful, outdoorsy wisdom, louche cool, those fantastic outfits and their insistence on signing in for hikes. Daddy!

7. Drop the gym membership. Use the summer months to create an exercise regimen you can do at home, especially if you drive to the gym. What would happen if you ran to the gym, stayed outside, did 100 jumping jacks, 100 press ups, jumped rope for 20 minutes and then ran home again?

8. Take frequent short breaks from work instead of one long vacation every year. Take a long vacation over two weeks and you'll only enjoy half of it. For the three days, you'll be decompressing from work - possibly still sweating over an unfinished report - and then you'll spend the last three days of the vacation fretting about having to go back to work.

9. Take frequent, short breaks throughout the work day to concentrate on a hobby or something completely different. If you work a 12-hour day, always take a lunch hour or half an hour to walk, write, sketch or run, run like the wind until you reach city limits! Kidding.

10. Stop exporting all your capital and buy locally as much as you can. Buy more locally grown produce to put more of your money back into your own community. Pay a little more to your local producers for good, natural or organic food, grass-fed meat and cage-free chickens. You don't need to go without sugar, either. Honey, maple syrup, cheese, booze, meat, vegetables: you can get all this stuff right in your own back yard.

My Life in the Ether

2010-04-03T18:27:00.004-04:00

On Monday, my blog turned one year old and although this is one grain of sand in the hour glass that is the blogosphere, it feels like a million.

A virtual rookie, I seem to have more friends in the ether than I have in my real life. New Yorkers are an incredibly busy bunch and even the most intimate, beloved friendships are stretched thinly by huge distances when New Yorkers disperse to the far reaches of the globe.

When I first arrived in New York from London, it was possible to buy a dime bag in a sweet shop on the corner, smoke in a bar, find an illegal rave somewhere, have a party in a disused Chelsea warehouse and set fire to cars with impunity on the unpoliced streets in Williamsburg. (Now the street kids have been replaced with students who wear Care Bear backpacks and gold stilettos with socks and I've developed post-ironic stress disorder.) I made disparate friends and acquaintances: all real, fleshy people whom I could touch and smell. I wrote and was rejected on real paper; featured on an album cover and in a book; went on tour across Europe with a band; wrote for a magazine; interviewed subjects in person with a dictaphone; took pictures with real film; drank too much and smoked late into the night with strangers.

Now every day I go to work in a parallel universe where I engage with people I've never met. I can write blog posts, email strangers at all times of the day and I receive comments in return. Kim sends me links to jobs. Consciously Frugal lends interminable encouragement and Fiona in Minnesota offers words of writerly wisdom. I met Casual Kitchen, who corrected the mainstream media reports on the Chilean earthquake, through the Frugal Bachelor who has completely disappeared; did he get a real life? More recently, The Lean Times, Oil & Garlic and Paranoid Asteroid (excellent name) have commented and offered words of support. Liquid Artsy Stuff, who "loves jumping" thanked me for posting the letter from my mother about the British health system; Simple Life in France thanked me for my open rant to the republican who threw me off her blog for my liberal views, which was my high point. Only the other day, one of my followers told me that there's no such thing as organic. Sandy Apuzzo won the t-shirt competition then didn't claim it.

I have other followers, whom I used to know in the real world, but with whom I now convene online.

How did this happen? How am I now virtual? Do I exist in the real world? I wonder if I'm fading from existence like that photo of Michael J Fox and his siblings that's stuck into his guitar at the end of Back To The Future.

A year ago, it was just my hard drive and me in a corner of my house writing furiously. Now I have Russian and Australian followers; French socialists read my blog. There are exceedingly clever marketing people in Boston - Economist readers no less - who have labelled me a protectionist and dumped me in disgust for promoting American products. They sternly stated that people in China need jobs too, as if I had no idea. I can imagine the latest edition of the Economist's annual summary mounted, with hallowed reverence, behind glass in their office; their business is the free market after all. I mentioned that we should only fit our oxygen mask before helping others economically, but it fell on stubbornly deaf ears.

Bostongate was swiftly forgotten after C-span started following me on Twitter and companies began to approach me and ask me to advertise their products. Through Google Analytics I noticed that most readers don't feel like commenting.

Americans are intrigued that I come to this country and tell them to buy American. "I" don't live here, though. I live in the ether.

Sustainable Cotton Project T-shirt Giveaway Winner & Cotton Tours

2010-03-27T12:10:00.001-04:00

This week I got much more traffic due to my t-shirt giveaway; many of you read the post but only a few of you commented, which tells me something. Not sure what exactly, though. Perhaps many of you like to remain anonymous...

I put all the commenters into a hat and the winner is Sandy Apuzzo: send me an email with your address and I'll pop the t-shirt in the post.

Right now in California, the Sustainable Cotton Project is running tours of the San Joaquin Valley called California Cotton Tours for farmers, manufacturers and consumers. Their intention is to challenge perceptions about what agriculture is and what it could become. Their tours have helped inform dozens of companies that have made the switch to organic or Cleaner Cotton. The tour serves as a great tool for educating employees and management about the importance of reducing chemical use in cotton cultivation.

As I mentioned in my last post, cotton production uses some of the harshest chemicals and more of them than any other crop. And we wonder why the bees are dropping dead. (Speaking of which, we took delivery of our first hive this week.)

When I'm next on the west coast, I intend to do the tour.

To do the tour yourself, contact Marcia Gibbs of the Sustainable Cotton Project.

Free Giveaway: The Sustainable Cotton Project

2010-03-20T17:37:00.004-04:00

To continue my theme of buying more products and services from American companies to improve our economy, I'm giving away a free cleaner cotton(TM) t-shirt from The Sustainable Cotton Project. This project is dedicated to all the farmers, manufacturers, activists, retailers and others who are devoting their energies to making sustainable and organic cotton a viable agricultural and economic alternative. Aside from being made in the USA, this t-shirt is made from cleaner cotton(TM), which uses only one quarter of the chemical inputs of conventional cotton and directly benefits the local environment.

Cotton is one of the oldest traded commodities in the world and I choose cotton over synthetic fabrics like polyester because I want to wear natural clothing. However, cotton is considered one of the most hazardous crops in the world because of the acute toxicity and abundance of the pesticides used: most certainly not natural at all.

Furthermore, if you decide to choose the more fashionable Egyptian cotton, know that according to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 1 million children between the ages of 7 and 12 help with cotton pest management in that country, exposing them to pesticides. It's recommended by the WHO that the entire body of cotton sprayers be protected, as the many pesticides they spray can be absorbed through the skin, but because of the heat and humidity and the nature of their equipment, they don't.

The Sustainable Cotton Project (SCP) was founded in 1996 to expand and disseminate knowledge about alternatives to chemical farming systems in cotton and to promote its use in the textile and apparel industry. As a private non-profit 501(c) 3 organization working under the direction of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, SCP is dedicated to building bridges among cotton farmers, manufacturers and consumers.

The Community Alliance with Family Farmers which is building a movement of rural and urban people to foster family-scale agriculture that cares for the land, sustains local economies and promotes social justice.

If demand for organic cotton rises, so will supply. If supply rises, it'll become cheaper to produce. I know t-shirts are supposed to be cheap, but by spending a little more you can make a great difference to the environment by choosing organic cotton. If you simply can't afford to, it might be an idea to wash your cotton a couple of times before you wear it.

Leave a comment on this blog post and I'll put your name in a hat. The first name picked out will receive the shirt!

Disclaimer: I have received nothing in return from the SCP. The benefit goes directly to the reader.

Write On

2010-03-13T15:28:00.003-05:00

I read a news clip a while back about full-time writing possibly becoming a thing of the past and I pondered all the great writers who also had to do a day job: Charles Bukowski worked at the post office; Isaac Asimov was professor of biochemistry at Boston University and obviously an insomniac; Kafka worked in insurance; Hunter Thompson was a full-time lunatic; Ernest Hemingway married a variety of superb, adventurous dames and did a bit of fishing. Yes, life was rather tough for Ernest. Many journalists think that journalism is their day job, removing them from their life's work of writing their novel, but for me, it's the reverse. Sobbing quietly into my keyboard over my unwritten novel removes me from my life's work of being a journalist. I artfully dodge the looming tornado of disappointment by writing short stories.

Writing part-time lends you a frazzled air of quiet desperation combined with the unique quality of mostly always wanting to be elsewhere. Often times, you'll find me searching pockets for a pen and, if I don't find one, I mumble quietly to myself while staring into the middle distance, repeating lines over and over again, so I don't forget them. I also do this on the subway, but it's a useful way to avoid the intimidating lunatics. Plus, it stops me from yelling at people who push me on the train. Actually, I haven't done that for a long time. Also, if you ever need a pen...

Writers always have to wrestle with the urge. Someone bought me a book called "Be Here Now", which I think about reading. I've been accused of daydreaming. Occasionally, I stop listening to people halfway through their monologues and manage to stir myself just before the end to get a general gist of what they were saying. That's why I want to go into farming like some writers from the Mid West: goats and seedlings don't mind if you ignore them. (The green house arrived a couple of weeks ago.)

Living itself, however, is a practical way to hone your craft. By keeping one foot in the real world, you expose yourself to unique experiences and perspectives that you wouldn't get by sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea or lounging on the couch in your pyjamas all day. Part-time jobs give us characters, challenges, explanations and perspectives on the human condition. They are an aid to recording the current zeitgeist for posterity. I would go so far as to say that part-time work is essential to being a writer. Especially when you need to eat.

Edith Wharton was born into a moneyed class, which served her well, but she also served soldiers at the front in France during World War I later on in her life; Winston Churchill was a soldier-correspondent in South Africa during the war, although he had a monthly stipend from the family coffers. He was also captured by the enemy but managed to escape. As Francois Sagan, who was born rich and most definitely lived her life, wrote:

"I shall live badly if I do not write; I shall write badly if I do not live."

Advertising, Again

2010-03-13T14:36:00.007-05:00

Yet another inspiring post from Consciously Frugal about pressure from the world of advertising to conform to a set standard "because you're worth it".

I've worked in advertising and, as I've been writing for a long time, it's powered by the consumer. Last year, when we stopped buying stuff, I saw first hand how this affected the industry. 2009 was a dire year and thousands were laid off. Advertising is now radically altered, with campaigns espousing frugality all over the place. Salaries have dropped and budgets have been slashed. It was gratifying to watch first hand, but much more difficult to get the message out.

First of all, many of us seem to like looking at editorial images of beautiful women in magazines and I think we know they're not real. They have no pores. There are two types of commercial photography: advertising and editorial. Editorials are fashion layouts in Vogue Magazine, Elle, and Allure etc. Advertising is highly lucrative, product-based marketing. Photographers make a lot of money from advertising and not very much from editorial: some just about cover their costs if they're lucky. Most photographers pay money to produce an editorial layout because it helps their portfolio.

Second: digital technology has evolved drastically in the last ten years and now physical film is not used at all in the photographic industry. There are some cameras on the market that can take a crystal clear image of your retina from about ten feet away and they cost about $20,000 - $40,000. So now when you take a photograph, you can see every single blemish on a face and you wouldn't want that on the billboard in Times Square, so you remove it in post-production. It's called retouching.

Technology, which also helps us save countless lives in the medical field, has turned Vogue magazine into something unrecognizable from what it was 25 years ago. Like electronic music, it's not real. It's highly stylized and processed; an image created from scratch (out of a very wan looking model who hasn't eaten for a few days) by an art director. Most models look like a praying mantis, but by the time they've finished in post-production they've got boobs, long glossy hair and colour in their cheeks.

Like any other art form, Vogue magazine can be appreciated for its own sake and contains some stunning imagery. I like to flick through it myself and I'm impressed. I love Irving Penn's work. Anna Wintour does a marvelous job. Somehow, however, we're all taking it seriously but it's not because of the images.

Do you look at a Picasso and want to be all cubic? Do you go to the plastic surgeon and say: "I don't want botox. I've just been to the Met and I want to look like the weird lady in Dora Maar au Chat. I want three noses!"

The editorial images have seeped into the advertising industry and set a standard that we have accepted. If we stopped buying the magazines, they would simply disappear along with all the products. Vogue magazine would become an art form only available for viewing in a gallery, like other art, and would cost about $1500 an issue without any product-based advertising. Haute couture would, once again, be only available to the rich, thin and those living in Monaco who marry princes.

Companies who make a living telling us we're ugly would go out of business. We would be happy with our healthy bodies.

Consumer Power

2010-03-02T07:39:00.003-05:00

There's been a lot of negative speculation recently in the media; Washington politics is more vulgar than ever and there's talk of "frugality fatigue" and some pessimism from The Harvard Crimson and The New York Times over how long the "new frugality" will last. The Wall Street journal is worried about the slight lowering of the household savings rate.

One Business Week news clip stands out from all the rest and disproves the frugality fatigue theory: Gap "has fought falling sales by cutting its inventory and repositioning Old Navy to attract frugal moms." Gap has improved its fourth quarter earnings by 45% by focusing directly on frugal consumers. Gap is reportedly the largest mall-based clothing chain in America and if it's bending to frugality we are indeed seeing a sea change in consumer spending.

Frugality has always been a core American value. However, easy debt, the gradual lowering of income taxes and the desire for cheaper goods changed all that over the last forty-odd years. Forty years ago, mortgage rates and income tax were astronomical in comparison to today. Unfortunately, instead of investing our gains in our discretionary income into our community, consumers have sent all their money out of their local economy: we've essentially bankrupted ourselves. We did this by demanding cheap goods, food and services, so we can get even more for our money into the bargain. No pun intended. Manufacturing was moved off-shore so companies could sell their goods at even cheaper prices. We've paid for this with our health (cheap, bad food) and our economy. It's no wonder that health care is the biggest growth industry in America today. We've got some detoxing to do.  And a lot of stuff to throw out: plastic crap from China.

Use your power and spend wisely.

Eat your greens. Buy locally grown, natural food to support your local producers and your local economy: local cheese, booze, meat, fruit, vegetables, honey. Pay more for quality food. It will be cheaper in thelong run. Even though it will take US manufacturing a while tobounce back, we can do something about agriculture now. (A couple of months ago a dairy farmer in New York killed himself because he couldn't make his business work.)

Consumer spending accounts for 70% of our GDP. If youconsider all this, that's a lot of power in the possession of theconsumer. We're making this change with our habits; Walmart now stocksorganic produce because of consumer demand which is only good news. (I only hope they're payinga fair price to the producer for it.)

For those of you who insist on shopping in Walmart, they are now making efforts in trying to stock locally grown and organic food as Corby Kummer, writing in the Atlantic, said: "they are getting harder and harder to hate".

That Was Easy!

2010-02-25T09:51:00.004-05:00

This week Consciously Frugal mentioned that she was recently forced to "to check my worship of convenience at the door" and it struck a chord. America is the land of convenience: valet parking, rush delivery, fast food, cheap takeout. Of course, now, the bagel has dropped and it's butter side down. We're in a pickle. I've only been here ten years and one of the first things I noticed about the country is how imperative modern conveniences are here. Everything has to be easy and, if it's not, someone's going to hear about it. I wasn't complaining, however, because everything in England is incredibly difficult and slow. So it was a wonderful change to take a train that departed as scheduled and buy furniture that didn't take fifteen weeks to arrive. In addition, I quickly realised that everything has to be dirt cheap and, ironically, we've all paid a hefty price for this. There's no such thing as cheap in England unless you steal it. One latest example is gas prices, which some economists anticipate may rise to $3 per gallon this coming year.

Excuse me, but three dollars? This is still incredibly cheap and even if it wasn't, why not try walking? What price would gas have to be before you decided it was too much and you walked half an hour to pick up your kids like my mother did when I was young? It seems the staunch refusal, of the able-bodied, to walk has made us quiver over gas prices like the sweaty trader in the oil pit down on Wall Street.

When I was little we walked an hour and back to the grocery store when my father worked late. My sister and I used to go with her and carry back the shopping. (My baby sister had a little bag which she sullenly dragged behind her on the street as she walked.) Who does this now? Nobody. Everyone has to have a car: some families I know have as many as three cars.

I've been advocating the cancellation of gym memberships for years now, because I think it's ridiculous that people drive to the gym. If they just walked to the gym, did fifty press-ups, fifty star jumps and sprinted back, they wouldn't need a gym membership, saving hundreds of dollars a year. When I mention this to people they chuckle at me like I'm the amusing foreigner who doesn't get it.

How much would a gallon of gas have to be before you started thinking about leaving the car at home and walking places?

Net Worth Statement

2010-02-06T15:32:00.010-05:00

Lately, I've been stealing moments from my hectic life to write. Check emails, add olive oil, fry onions, read links, boil water, update schedule, add client to the boiling water, add pasta to schedule, chop 1099s, write half a premise of children's book for illustrator, send net worth reports, write blog in real time, respond to emails...

It's about this time of year that I get inundated with offers of bookkeeping work. As I write, I'm instructing someone how to make a back-up copy of their Quickbooks file. January and February are my busiest months for bookkeeping because December 31st is the end of the US fiscal year and either the clients have done no bookkeeping all year, or have grown too busy to do their own bookkeeping, or they just want me to check on their books before they file their tax returns. It's the most interesting time of the year for bookkeeping in New York, because I get to break from my part-time routine and work in various new parts of the city. And I always, without fail, chance upon spectacular bargains on winter clothing.

Two years ago, I got a one-off three-day job around Grand Central Station. Not only was the commute breathtaking, but Banana Republic was offering a huge amount of stunning knitwear for rock bottom prices. I spent $200 and came away with over 20 items, including a gray, silk and cashmere work shift for $15. My dentist's receptionist seethed slightly when we turned up with matching sweaters and she discovered what I had paid for mine.

This year I have a new client in Battery Park City and get to see Ground Zero and the New York Stock Exchange once a week; watch Lady Liberty while I work; visit the historical center on State Street at lunchtime. They're great perks, but they still take me away from the writing, more so now that I'm bookkeeping full-time.

I decided to integrate over ten year's worth of bookkeeping experience into my blog this week, by offering a freebie on this post. Five years ago, I created a net worth statement with one of my clients for his business and still use a revised version of it to this day. To all those readers who comment on this post this week, I'm giving it away free.

A net worth statement is basically a statement that tells you how much you are worth. In the top section, it shows what you are owed and what you own: your assets. On the bottom section it shows how much you owe: your liabilities. As you may know, your "bottom line" is the difference between the two: how much you have when all aspects of your finances are considered. It's what you would have if you collected all monies you were owed and paid off every bill you owed, including credit cards, and added the figure to your non-liquid assets like house, car or investments. It's like a balance sheet without the retained earnings. (Only your accountant needs to know your retained earnings.) Your bottom line is a useful number to know. Are you solvent?

My net worth statement is for businesses, but over the next week, between jobs, I'll be adapting it for personal use. So by the time everyone has commented, it will be available in excel spreadsheet form, with blank spaces for you to fill in with your numbers. I'll even tell you how to use it if you get stuck, you can email me with questions. (I will post the answers in a later post if there are too many questions!) I'd be especially happy to help returning veterans from the Middle East with their finances if you know of such a person. This is something I've been meaning to do to give back to the community for some time. It's abhorrent to me that serving soldiers should return from Iraq to a mountain of debt or bankruptcy.

Also available in forthcoming weeks will be a cash flow forecast, which tells you if you are earning enough to cover your overheads. The cash flow forecast is especially useful if you're a freelancer; it will tell you if you need to raise your hourly rate or cut spending in some areas of your life. I use the cash flow forecast every month for my business.

We can all apply bookkeeping principles to our life and it's easier than you would imagine. Take the bull by the horns...

Marriage Finances

2010-01-30T15:05:00.001-05:00

A few wise words from Kahlil Gibran: "Fill each other's cup, but drink not from one cup".

This quotation was written into my marriage vows and, after almost seven years of marriage, this is the line that I remember mostly frequently. If you're starting a marriage on financially equal terms, keeping your finances mostly separate is the best anti-aging remedy for the union in my experience.

The most important thing is to know how your intended spouse treats money. Has he been wearing the same corduroy jacket for five years? Does she sew the under wire back into her bra? Does he take a set amount of cash to the bar? Does she have three hundred pairs of shoes? (A telltale sign, this last one.)

If you know these facts before you marry and keep your finances separate, I'll bet you that you'll argue much less than other married couples.

You don't lose your individuality when you get married, or suddenly start going to the same job, or begin sharing the same clothing. So why should you pool your money? If there's one of you who works harder, or one of you who's a bit lazy (we are but human), or one of you who loves their job and puts more effort into it, but still puts all his dosh into the family pot, it's only understandable that resentment will follow. Bickering over your new spouse's well-established creature comforts is undermining, as is being told what to spend your money on.

Of course, those who have told me that married earnings "all goes into a pot, anyway" are the ones who earn less than their spouses and that's fine for those people earning considerably less. In addition to this, there are some people who decide to live on one spouse's earnings and save the other's for good reason. My advice is for spouses who were able to live comfortably on their own earnings before they married.

There's no room to get lazy if you can't sponge off your partner and this is one of the biggest problems in marriage: complacency. Two in three marriages end in divorce, so our unions are in a terrible state and it doesn't have to be that complicated. All you need is one joint savings account into which equal monthly deposits are made, and one joint credit card from which shared purchases like bills and mortgage are taken. Simplify your finances and you simplify your marriage.

Spouses should be free to save money and then support themselves with that savings while they quit their job or make a career change. Plus, it keeps your spouse interesting if they're free to consider hobbies and other interests without having to get permission from the management beforehand. And who are we without our dreams?

Free Giveaway from CSN Stores

2010-01-23T12:50:00.004-05:00

To continue the theme of buying homemade goods, in my first-ever giveaway, I have selected an American-made product to giveaway free on this site. The product comes from cookware.com and is worth about $35 including shipping.

CSN Stores, who also make living room furniture, donated the product.

The pot will be shipped directly from CSN Stores, to a reader picked out randomly from the comments section in this post, so get writing! In your comment, please include the names of a few of your favourite products that are American-made.

Disclaimer: I have received nothing in return from CSN Stores. The benefit goes directly to the lucky reader. Let me know how the pot stands up in your kitchen!

Back to Basics

2010-01-10T13:14:00.001-05:00

While in England over Christmas, I visited the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth for some perspective on life in general and found it incredibly useful, spending three hours roving its galleries and halls, stocking up on information that is as pertinent today if not more so.

The brilliantly presented holocaust exhibition was subtle yet informative (all present agreed it could have been so much more gruesome): history was gently admonished and we were duly informed that ordinary people acted in an atrocious manner. "It could have been you," they warned, pointing to the perpetrators. Er, thanks. I recommend it above anything else I visited and not only because admission is free for everyone. With considered stoicism, the museum offered scenes of life immediately before during and after the Second World War in England. It provided a glimpse into an era of civilian restraint, sacrifice and courage, the likes of which we could adopt today to our benefit. Frugality was the norm in wartime England (and during the fifties). Food rationing was enforced, which is where carrot cake came from: carrots replaced sugar.

I'm not sure about eating less bread, but eating less certainly makes sense. When you come face to face with a WW2 ration book, it dawns on you that life on a small island is that much different. Gardens and small allotments of land, rented from the government at nominal rates on which people can grow their own food, have dotted the landscape for years. The BBC website offers comprehensive information to encourage people to grow their vegetables. Frugality abounds in Britain; it has been in the mainstream media for years, with television programmes promoting "greenness" and showing us how to save money.

Brits are never routinely offered long-term fixed-rate mortgages. Everyone I spoke to got a fixed rate for a limited number of years, like three or five, after which their mortgage reverted to a variable rate, at which point they had to suffer the variable rate or negotiate for a new fixed rate. Or their mortgage was fixed for a number of years and then reverted to a variable rate, which was linked to the Bank of England base rate. With such strict lending practices, it was hardly surprising to hear that Gordon Brown announced he was taxing the bankers' bonuses at a higher rate last year.

In tandem with my visit to the museum, I read a couple of American news articles, which complemented my English experience. "American people are back" in the Chicago Tribune about how we are being shaped by the current economic recession and "how the new frugality will shape a generation" in the Washington Post, both asking whether we are, indeed, returning to our fifties' ideals. We're not talking about people who have always been frugal; those types are still gently fuming over the concept of "New Frugality" when they've been so all their lives. No, we're seeing it go mainstream and that's important because we are adopting the habits of the fifties when everyone recycled, darned socks and fixed what was broken. In the year-end news in 2009 I read over a hundred articles containing predictions and tips on how to be frugal. There was a handful of deniers, but their voices were drowned out.

People (especially Republicans) tend to forget the past. The mortgage rate suffered by some home owners in the seventies was as high as 17%. Even the rich suffered a high 69% tax bracket under Ronald Reagan, who was a conservative, but had still only reduced it to 50% after five years in office. (Think about this when you hear criticism, from the right, of Obama's taxation policies.) When credit cards appeared, people were able to simply and easily buy what they could not afford and worry about it later or never. For the same reason that not everyone should go to college, not everyone can own a house.

Because millions of us seem to value celebrity over achievement and youth over wisdom, many of us no longer revere our grandparents or look to their experience for lessons. I'm obviously not advocating rationing, but paying off your credit card debt, living within your means or even saving up for that Prada handbag if you need it, would be a good start.

Early Bird Specials

2010-01-09T09:49:00.002-05:00

As reported in the New York Times yesterday, it's not only seniors who are taking advantage of early bird specials in bars and restaurants. More young people are taking advantage of restaurant dining which is radically discounted at non-peak hours. Go for dinner at 5pm and if you must meet friends or colleagues later on in the evening, have only drinks or nibble on a cheap snack at that time.

Doing this allows struggling restaurants to remain in business during these hard times when boarded up retail units pepper your community. Plus, it's a well-known fact that eating nothing, or eating lightly, after 5pm prevents you from piling on pounds. Even stopping by your local bar at 4pm for a quick Saturday afternoon beer makes a difference. And if you think you can't afford it, think about this: if your local bar owner is forced to apply for unemployment, that's taxing to the economy and ultimately comes out of your paycheck in the form of raised taxes.

So, do you want to give your money to the government or get a tasty meal?

Air Travel

2010-01-08T18:21:00.004-05:00

For the modern, consciously living citizen there's no more confounding dilemma than air travel. Devastating to the environment, rough on communities like the long suffering residents of the burgeoning Heathrow Airport and taxing (literally) to the traveller, mile high conveyance is an utter nuisance. Airports are not what they used to be. Comparable to small cities, they offer all the amenities required for a fulfilling life: hotels, comprehensive conference and business services, restaurants, hairdressers, jobs, shops, banks, car parks, trains, bars, gas stations; you could literally live in some modern airports.

They can be welcoming or not. Newark Airport is about as inviting as Tony Soprano, waving you into his SUV with his New Jersey turnpike ticket, offering his priceless come-hither grin, with his trousers unbuttoned. I have yet to see New Jersey in its entirety, but of what I have seen - labyrinthine roadways emerging from brown-field sludge, looping like ribbons over an industrial quagmire, all enveloped by a smoky haze - none is what the exhausted traveller might imagine a "garden state" would greet him on arrival. And if said tourist ever gets out of Newark with his rental car, using the current road signage, it's nothing short of a miracle. Driving around Newark, for the freshman, is like doing a 100 metre sprint with the finishing line having been removed. For those living there, may I offer that some parts of London are equally as hideous; the A10 in Tottenham at peak rush hour makes even the most loyal, steadfast Volvo feel like putting sugar in its own petrol tank.

Millions of travellers pass through airports every year and these travellers are the physical embodiment of as many tonnes of carbon necessarily expended into the atmosphere in order that they can sit on a bench in Rome and eat pasta when they could have happily done the same in Dallas (if only they had just stepped away from the spreadsheet for a half hour of their working day). Personally, I'm completely in love with the sight of the earth from 30,000 feet.

How does one see the world without destroying it? And if the answer is that we all stay at home and communicate remotely then in, say, one hundred years will recreational travel be as rare as the days during which the indomitable Freya Stark toured Arabia with one guide and a donkey? In today's electronic age, there is really no need for human conveyance of any kind really; I'm not the first person to speculate on whether physical proximity could well become a thing of the past for humans. Skype allows me to convene regularly with friends whom I have not seen for many years, to whom I am as close as I was ten years ago. One of life's conundrums is whether technology is taking us backwards as a community.

It might be just as well because being a tourist is the worst way to get to know a city. Knowing someone in the destination country, or at least having a trusty guide, is vital to its understanding. (Although it rather highlights how much you know about your country when guests ask questions you cannot answer. "What's up the House of Lords? What's with peerage in a socialist country? Err.. pass".) Nothing beats living and working in a foreign city for the modern nomad. Even the first visit to the supermarket (during which one gets overly excited about butter in the shape of a column, which is named liked a bar of soap and coffee beans in industrial canisters that one must open with a can opener, which are named like a snack) is overwhelmingly exciting and never gets tired. The foreigner never takes the little things for granted, like permission to stay or obtaining a driver's licence, which is why we often become our adopted homeland's fiercest protector.

And air travel is becoming more expensive in certain parts of the world, like London, because the taxes attached to a plane ticket are extraordinarily high. Of the $744 I spent on my ticket to England, almost $400 were taxes, fees and surcharges. The actual ticket was $339. The days where one could get from London to New York for $300 are long gone. I suppose one could become a corporate courier and secure free airfare by carrying express packages at short notice. However, it would rather defeat the purpose when the question: "did anybody give you anything to carry on this flight?" is posed by the check-in staff, to which the answer would be "yes", which would invite lengthy and excessive scrutiny, during which time I would miss my flight while officious and powerful strangers become closely acquainted with my rectum.

It's an indicator of how expensive life is outside the United States. When Americans whined when their petrol prices rose about $2 per gallon, I wondered if they considered just how much foreigners pay for theirs. Brits are now paying 1.11 pounds per litre for petrol (about four pounds per gallon), which with current exchange rates is $6.65 per gallon. Using the exchange rates of five years ago, it was $8.30 per gallon. This makes the modern Brit think first about driving anywhere. I know people who have turned down jobs because it would be too expensive to drive there and the petrol costs would negate any salary they received.

Some airlines now offer carbon credits with an airline ticket and you can join organizations like the Arbor Day Foundation who will send you free trees to offset your carbon footprint, which I have done. In the future, perhaps we will all be legally required to offset our carbon footprint before we travel, so that we can replenish the world's oxygen with foliage. We're presently only morally obliged, but is that enough?

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T13:38:00.002-05:00

Happy New Year from Britain. Busy with endless cups of tea, pubs and investigating over 2,000 years of history, while tripping over sheep left, right and centre (mind how ewe go...) and random castles, big and small...

Bath.

Windy west coast.

Corporate Meat

2009-12-16T22:43:00.002-05:00

Last weekend, I stocked up on grass fed beef from Jack Doig's Lanark Farm on Route 28 in Andes, New York, which has been owned by his family since 1850. He breeds Hereford and Angus cows; a small crowd of red, woolly, stocky Herefords had gathered in a pasture close to the barn and paid attention to us when we arrived, stopping what they were doing, mid-chew, and did not take their eyes off us until we disappeared into the barn: engaged and interested. I felt like I could approach them and chat about the weather or unload my problems; they would nod and listen while they chewed, expressing their discontent at the soggy state of the paddock. It has been raining a lot in New York this year and I could have told them that I did not get one single edible blueberry because of the frequent rains. They would gently mock me amongst themselves using cow code.

Instead, I waved; they stared. "There goes the remains of Bill in that cooler," they might have been thinking. "I liked Bill. He was always nice to me."

I bought bones, ribs, minced, chops and steaks. Farmer Jack commented that flank steak was all the rage this year. "That's the new cut," he said "everyone wants it". I spent $65, most cuts were about $4.95 per pound and the soup bones were $1.95.

At the beginning of the week I boiled the soup bones for six hours and had stock that we have only just finished today. So that was hearty, gelatinous vegetable stew for two, every day for a week. I yielded about half a pound of fat off the top and froze it. I'm open to suggestions as to what I should do with the fat though. Fry with it?

The difference with my meals is that I eat very little compared to people I know; I still remember being poor. I'll have a light breakfast and one meal and a lorry load of organic chocolate. I'm just kidding: half a bar.

This week I was inspired to comment on Casual Kitchen's post "How to Whine About Big Food" and, later on, when I was browsing for a movie to watch I chanced upon "Food, Inc" and watched it in horror. So I'm late to the game in viewing all the recent food documentaries and reading books like The Omnivore's Dilemma; I had only previously watched Supersize Me. Food, Inc was duly disturbing fodder. Now I'm eating even less. Today I went out and bought some organic oats to see if I can just live on porridge and grass fed beef for as long as I can. I spend a high percentage of my net income on food, but I know how to pare down to the basics if I money's tight.

A friend of mine, who stays abreast of all the food information out there, recently made a bold statement; he said he would no longer eat meat if he didn't know where it had come from. It took him a long time to decide because it's incredibly difficult. He can no longer eat meat in restaurants because he can't rest assured that the animal wasn't raised in an industrial shed and died knee deep in its own excrement, pumped full of antibiotics. Last night, my post-documentary queasy stomach urged me to take that pledge.

In Food Inc we see a family of four who can only afford to eat from a fast food chain because the father's income is low and he has diabetes which costs a fortune. We see them rejecting three potatoes in the supermarket because they're too expensive and they despair over where their next vegetable is coming from. I wondered how the family could afford their nice car, but It has to be said that if you can't afford three potatoes, you're in serious trouble. My old car is making quite antagonizing squeaking and dragging noises; I'm sewing the under wire back into my bra, but I only eat fast food if there's really no other option, or I'm dying.

We see a doctor swilling his hand around in a living cow's open stomach, the cow has not been fed grass so it's ill, but still standing. Chicken breasts are so popular that chickens are raised, in double the time, in complete darkness, to have huge breasts and can't stand up and we wonder why one third of us will get breast cancer in our lifetimes.

Food Inc basically told us that because most Americans need really cheap food, in order for a profit to be made, it has to be very cheaply produced. This is a prime example of the power of the consumer. Our demand fueled this type of supply. Cheap food is not cheap, however. Prices are kept artificially low by subsidies from the government, which is lobbied by food conglomerates. Workers are poorly paid and burgers are cleansed with ammonia to prevent E-coli outbreaks and still my blood is rejected at the US blood bank because I'm a mad cow. I mean, European.

We should all know what we are eating, but some people prefer not to know. Over the centuries people have abdicated responsibility for their lives and health to doctors and priests thinking that the doctor will fix whatever god bestows upon them. Now we have diabetes and obesity at their zenith.

It may be so that god provides for you. If so, help him to provide you with good health and stop drinking litres of the stuff that the army uses to clean their engines because it's cheap. Water comes out of the tap. If we stop buying these unhealthy products, the food industry will change; it will supply whatever we demand. We should demand better food.

'Tis the Squeeze-on...

2009-12-09T22:37:00.005-05:00

With approximately three weeks to go before Christmas Day, the pressure is on for many of us. How much should we spend? Will we keep our job? Will we ever get work again? Do we like our brother-in-law that much anyway? The temptation to abscond comes a close second to the day I eloped and it'll be much easier this year because I'm spending Christmas in Blighty. In England, gift giving is a notoriously muted affair, especially in my family, unless you've "got money" or you're bringing food. When I informed a friend in England that I was coming to visit him, after many years' absence, the prospect of the leg of lamb I promised was so exciting, it got an exclamation mark. My mother has assured me firmly that I can buy a present for her, but it's definitely not necessary for anyone else in the family. For us, Christmas Day is about eating, arguing, taking cheap shots from Scottish Grandma about our shortcomings and harsh competition over board games, in which Dad will cheat shamelessly while wondering why his kids are such rigid sticklers. Actually, there will also be a duty free bottle of gin for Scottish Grandma, but no cigarettes, I just can't condone it given her condition; she's just going to have to burn through my inheritance at over ten dollars a pack.

Is America moving in this direction? It's difficult to say even with the torrential reporting on the subject of frugality every week, but it seems for every four optimistic "we're spending again" reports, we get one "we're not spending enough" report. Black Friday was less of a scrum than usual, the New York Times reported. Although, Joe Queenan of the Wall Street Journal recently said, "asking Americans to tighten their purse strings is like asking the French to lay off the bouillabaisse". Not so, Joe. In fact, the whole first paragraph of the article was disagreeable. "We make stuff, we sell stuff and we buy stuff." He wrote, then went on to reel off a long list of popular items purchased on Black Friday; ironically many of these items, if not all, were made in China. Actually, sir, China makes stuff, sells stuff and we buy it. Then I read his closing paragraph and wept: "as our enemies have learned, to their anguish, again and again, a nation prepared to kill is no match for a nation prepared to shop".

There are many things wrong with this statement, but the foremost is that the US is a nation prepared to kill and shop without equanimity, occasionally at the same time, especially when we're buying oil. The second is that they don't quite want to kill us because we shop. They want to kill us because we're greedy, ya? K? They want to kill us because we squeal like piglets when our gas goes above $2 a gallon, when they can't even find clean drinking water. Not changed the Wall Street Journal much at all since you bought it then, Mr Murdoch? This is a fine example of seriously irresponsible reporting slash opinion from one of the country's most prominent periodicals. I'm confident that we can overcome this kind of egotistical thinking though. In my research on frugality, I've found hundreds of websites on the subject and if Americans could embrace frugality like the Californians did with their green movement, whose members decided that they would just take care of the environment themselves if nobody would listen to them, it will do very well. I could be wrong but I think the US green movement started in LA, whose dwellers, in the interests of "doing it for themselves", shook their fist at the federal government in Washington during the Bush years and said: "we've got stink in a bowl here! We can't see anything! We're going to take matters into our own hands."

Today I had a thoughtful conversation with an ad man who expressed a desire to start an ethical advertising agency that's sustainable and would advertise solid, high quality working class brands like jeans and hand-made leather work boots. He worried that jumping on the frugal bandwagon now would be too late, but I reminded him that if it's advertising meaningful products, then he will garner a lot of support which will assist in the company's longevity. I've been promoting American made brands for a while and, although people are cutting me off left and right and calling me an isolationist, I believe we need to bolster the American economy by buying locally, if only for a while. I'm not saying let's buy only American; let's buy mostly American and some foreign made goods. Let's fit our own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs. I buy local honey, grass-fed beef and Frye boots which I've been wearing for seven years and they still look as good as new - not the beef or honey: I've eaten that. What happened to the time where we had one pair of good shoes and one pair of everyday shoes? Companies that manufacture high quality goods have loyal customers for a lifetime who trust their vendor. The Ad man mentioned that Levi jeans are now made in Japan and, if that's true, it's because it costs too much to make them here because, as the consumer, we've got used to, and expect, very low prices. Again, something that the consumer needs to change.

We live in a cheap, disposable culture where nothing advertised is what it seems, everything is retouched and brand image is more important than style or quality. Almost nothing you see in fashion magazines is presented in its real state. As I write, there are three people in the kitchen icing large, cake-shaped chunks of polystyrene; you've never seen the real skin, hair or body of any woman in a fashion magazine for quite some time. Retouching is now ubiquitous, when ten years ago, it was because the model had been up all night at a party in the Chelsea Hotel.

So, a sustainable ad agency? An ad agency that won't go broke and fire everyone when there's a dip in consumer spending? It's a no-brainer. He could call it Meaningful Advertising or Advertising Meaningfully and when the company gets too big to fail and he invests in his first politician and considers conquering the world, he should resist the urge and pick a handful of local, ailing American companies, who sell good sturdy, well-made, life-time guaranteed products and award them a year's worth of free advertising in order to invest back into the local community.

Filing & Back Up

2009-12-05T21:06:00.002-05:00

Those of you who keep the last year's worth of unopened mail in the form of receipts, bills and statements in a box in the cupboard will ignore what you're about to read because of the title. In fact, your mind is now wandering down an alternate path, in a few seconds you'll be hungry and thinking about braised ribs or the great lobster bisque you could pick up at Wholefoods, if it's still open. You need to start your year-end organizing by opening that mail, but of course, you're not listening...

To those of you still reading I say, invest in some sturdy file folders or a few concertina files and take some time to file this year's paperwork. Don't return from Christmas holidays to piles. It'll be painful.

Also remember that filing and organizing isn't limited to paperwork only. Take this quick test: think about how you will find the file you just recently saved on your computer, in a year's time. If you think you'll probably need a few days to dig through the trash bin and a year's worth of indistinguishable word documents then you should do some electronic clean up:

- make desktop folders for all current projects;
- add a date to your document names (taxlist_120509.xls) so you know when you saved them; - if many people make similar files in your business add your initials to your file before you forward it (jnu_amex_120509.xls) so the recipient can see who created the file; 
- file electronic copies of bills in folders by month.

Most important, what would you do if your computer crashed? If it's not backed up to an external hard drive or burned onto CDs, I wonder how you'd feel if you lost it all tomorrow. Don't wait until your computer dies before you back up your files. If you are able, invest in two good external hard drives, back up your computer onto both of them and leave one hard drive at work and the other at home.

It's boring but essential.

Personal Finance: Year-End Tips

2009-12-05T20:20:00.005-05:00

There is less than a month remaining of the American fiscal year and if you're a freelancer and don't know how much tax you owe, then you need to download the latest federal tax tables and work it out before you spend any more money. Remember that in addition to federal tax, you'll be paying social security, medicare and state taxes. If you didn't owe any taxes in 2008, then you won't have been obliged to pay any estimated taxes this year and this will make it especially difficult if you haven't done the calculations.

By crunching the numbers now, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to pay the taxes owed now; if you don't have the money, this will be the jolt you need to stop yourself from going beserk with the credit card over Christmas. It's been widely reported that spending has increased ever so slightly in the last month and that's because we've had a hard year and feel like treating ourselves. Don't get caught in that trap if you owe taxes.

Take your gross income and take away any deductions like mortgage interest and standard or itemized deductions, then multiply the net income by the percentages according to the instructions in the tables. By doing this, you'll calculate an approximate amount and if you have the money, put it aside and breath a sigh of relief. If you can spare the funds, invest in a consultation with an accountant and find out exactly how much you owe. If you've bought a new car or a house in the last few months certain fees and taxes are deductible under the stimulus package.

Banks are not loaning money in today's climate and that may not change for another six months, so don't assume you will be able to get a bank loan to pay your tax liability come tax time next year. You have about four months until April 15th but there's nothing on this earth that will encourage you to spend more wisely than finding out just how much you owe currently.

'Tis the Season...

2009-11-23T21:31:00.005-05:00

I want to say it's almost Christmas, but it's not. Once your firmly into your thirties, "ten years' time" or "next Winter" just suddenly appear like crow's feet, mammograms and turning into your mother; pages of your schedule flicker in a blur, like cartoon flip-books, from month to month before your very eyes. Therefore, Christmas has come and gone and tomorrow morning, I'll wake up slumped over the table of Greek restaurant in London at 2am on New Year's Day, and it'll be 2010. Bugger.

And I'd like to wake up having spent hardly any money. However, I'll be in England for two weeks over the holidays, whence I'll be reporting a "UK frugal special", in which I try to navigate Blighty on a budget; see all my friends and family, get drunk, eat cake, drive a gear shift on the left again and mumble really quickly without anybody saying: "huh? huh?" I also want to sit in a building that's over 2,000 years old, plug something into 240 volts and eat a sausage sandwich without feeling guilty.

It's fair to say that I spend a large percentage of my discretionary income on travel and all the associated expenses, like alcohol. Every month, when I consult my faithful credit card bill, there's always mild hand wringing when I spot yet another flight: a wedding or birthday here, a dirty weekend, there. Airline tickets are getting more and more expensive; my Christmas ticket from New York to London was the most expensive it has ever been; almost double the cost it was ten years ago, just to spend time with my people, who still find it amazing that I have an intern who responds: "you gaht it!" in an New York accent whenever I ask him for something. My husband gets ruthlessly mocked in England. His nickname is "Yo, coffee, bagel!", which is always rendered in a ridiculously exaggerated New York accent and accompanied by fitful giggling, but he takes it like a champ, if somewhat bemused.

Travel is one of those things that is becoming very unfashionable in terms of the burgeoning environmental catastrophe, but with Virgin Atlantic you can now buy carbon credits. I haven't done that because we've planted sixteen trees in the last two years and have about three acres of trees; I compost my non-animal leftovers and get my heat from a wood stove using wood from our three acres, chopped down by Mr Urbanski. He is trying to regenerate our forest floor by putting up fences, so the deer can't eat our saplings. In November, one of us with a licence was supposed to have shot a deer, but didn't entirely trust himself not to wound the animal and have it run off and suffer. This is a crying shame because our field is covered in deer every dusk and dawn and all I see is cash wandering around in our yard. I like meat but don't eat very much of it, so hunting would be my answer to those who tell me that meat production facilities like pig farms are the bane of our environment and that you must work very hard indeed to find a genuinely free range chicken. Pork, ah. Pork, hm... I remember lard: fish and chips have never been the same.

I'll be interviewing real English people about their mortgage, savings, credit card debt, prices, state of the union and politics and return with that information, so we can share and compare. It's always good to get a fresh perspective and not just by passing out, face first, into a plate of shepherd's pie instead of pizza the size of a wagon wheel. (Also, Americans don't seem to eat lamb: why not? Is there a US lamb deficit?) For starters: Americans should all be lucky that they are able to get a fixed-rate mortgage for thirty years and not only five. Many English people are at the mercy of a future interest rate that they won't be able to calculate unless they've got a degree in Economics from LSE. A variable interest rate is the norm in the UK, which is partly why hardly anyone is buying. The English have embraced frugality in a big way and adopted it as a lifestyle change rather than something to endure for the next few months; it has become incredibly fashionable. More later.

Reuters and the Washington Post report that frugal-fatigue may be setting in here in the US, but I'm not convinced. The reason I'm not so optimistic is because there's fear and loathing in the air here in New York City, or maybe it's just me. Court orders, eviction notices and marching papers are flying around like Harry Potter telegrams, work is drying up and Craig's List is as thin as Kate Moss in a corset. Those who are working freelancers, like myself, are in a race to the finishing line, cramming in as much work as possible to try and put some extra money in the bank, as if there will be no work at all when we return from the holidays.

However, a smidgen of desperation is good for the wallet, especially around this time. Seeing the streets lined with lost shirts makes one tighten the purse strings and hurry home to a TV dinner in front of streaming Netflix for eight dollars. Autumnal dinner parties at home, with lots of buttery pasta or hearty peasant stew, transport me back to my impoverished English days where half-pints of lager cost 80 pence. My English family has never been big on presents: "just bring yourself!"

"And something for your mother!"

The Week in Frugality

2009-11-07T13:02:00.002-05:00

Throughout this week, the national media was ablaze with frugal reporting like never before. Tales of frugality were all over the newspapers like coupons.

The Financial Times reported that impulse buying has given way to frugality and that only sales of cake seem to be on the rise, no pun intended. It makes sense; when your job is hanging in the balance how is a cheese sandwich going to make you feel better unless you're in Paris? Give me syrup sponge pudding with custard, thank you.

Talking of eating, Convenience Store News, which rather sounds like the sort of news you get from right wing news aggregators, but is in fact an industry magazine, tells us that this year, 4000 restaurants closed because we are eating more evening meals at home. The average guest check plunged 8%.

The LA Times tells us that frugality is a given during the forthcoming holiday season. As does the San Francisco Chronicle and the Hartford Courant, who says that frugality is the new black. The Wall Street Journal informed us that Office Max swung back into profit and that's a relief because I've been thinking a lot about staplers and file folders lately, as my net worth plummets while the Wall Street fat cats' net-worth-girth expands like a TARP bailout.

Ordinarily, I like to avoid reading about Tim Geitner, because he talks about "reforming the social security system" which scares me because I give it a lot of money and it's a pyramid scheme, but the Chicago Tribune reported that he's not worried that people are saving more and spending less. He's also not worried about a real estate collapse and not because he's paid off his mortgage already, I presume. Geitner reportedly said that the nation must "convince the world" that the country "will go back to living within our means". Most important, he doffed his cap to consumer power by saying that, although more frugal behavior "will slow the recovery, more saving by Americans will allow the country to borrow less from foreign investors -- a long-term positive for the country". Indeed.

This didn't stop the Tampa Tribune from encouraging people to spend, spend, spend because everything is half-off. Why wait for Black Friday? Shop, shop, shop right now. It's even better if you're salary hasn't halved over the last year because now you can get twice as much brightly coloured plastic crap from China! More brightly coloured plastic crap from China than you can carry!

Reuters reported that US consumers are failing to spend: "total U.S. consumer credit dropped by a bigger-than-expected $14.80 billion in September, Federal Reserve data showed on Friday, indicating households prefer to reduce debt and are still reluctant to spend".

The New York Times decided to be optimistic about the recovery, telling us that we've been through this before and we'll be just fine. Thanks, guys. Personally, I think this recession has been great for the economy because we needed to stop spending money like it was burning a hole in our pocket.

Finally, when I finished feverishly bashing away on my laptop, up sprang the Washington Post to burst my bubble at 5pm on Friday. I wondered if it had had an afternoon drink at its lunch meeting or if it was a warped joke via The Onion. No, however, WashPo, reported that retail sales were up, but performance among chain stores were even. "It's not the same degree of fear that we saw last year," said Chandi Neubauer, an analyst with Majestic Research. How reassuring.

Wartime Frugality

2009-11-06T16:17:00.003-05:00

In the New York Times this week, Maureen Dowd wrote: "The founding fathers designated a civilian as commander in chief for a reason." And I wondered to myself why I haven't read this anywhere else recently, as the republicans obediently rally behind Cheney's accusation that Obama is "dithering" over Afghanistan. Dowd quoted Rush Limbaugh in the piece: “... so I trust the experts, and to me they’re the people in the U.S. military.”

In recent weeks, as pundits ask indignantly why McChrystal isn't immediately receiving more troops for Afghanistan, I've been pondering if republicans would like a military general instead of a president. Why else would they want the commander of a battalion to be calling the shots, like it's Star Wars?

There's strident opposition to the proposed healthcare bill for being too expensive, but none against the war. Almost a year ago, Reuters reported that both wars had cost $904 billion since 2001 and could top $1.7 trillion by 2018. In no way, shape or form could this sort of expenditure be described as conservative or frugal, yet it's universally supported by republicans. I've watched plenty of video of republican congress members carefully explaining how the national debt is as big as the Sears Tower, but I've never seen them compare it to the war budget.

The Afghanistan war is not a war of necessity, it's the occupation of a foreign country. If we have a strong border patrol, coast guard and homeland security, there should be no reason to spend unreasonable amounts of money chasing the enemy around the world when citizens are dying at home for lack of medical care.

This is a gaping chasm in the GOP ethos that makes them look like complete hypocrites. They want a smaller government but a larger, more aggressive, army; they insist on unquestionable loyalty to a general's budget, but query every dollar of the proposed health care bill, picking the bill apart like a post-Thanksgiving turkey, and that can only mean one thing.

Partisanship

2009-11-03T15:57:00.005-05:00

Yet another inspirational post from Consciously Frugal concerned with "finding Common Ground" or civility, in society's religious discourse. CF says that we are all "in this broken boat together" and that it's necessary to find common ground to discuss our differences in opinion. The post references the time during Bush's office when we were called unpatriotic for expressing any dissent whatsoever and that this repression got us two wars and a massive national debt.

Conversely now, especially for republicans, it's suddenly not unpatriotic to dissent at all. Isn't that a convenient?

Ever since Obama took office, I've been dismayed at how little he is able to do without being ruthlessly challenged, ridiculed or obstructed by republicans. Even the simple suggestion that kids do their best in school was received with horror. He has even been compared to Hitler, which boggles the mind. Now facing growing criticism by Cheney and his followers for "dithering" in Afghanistan, it seems that Republicans don't mind excessive governmental expenditure as long as it's spent on war, not education or health care. Aside from speculating if it's not a president that republicans want in their leadership, but a military general, I'm flabbergasted at the persistent pessimism of the opposition. Nothing Obama has done, or attempted to do, has pleased a conservative to date this year, to my knowledge. Simply being a democrat and being the Chief Executive are reasons to oppose him at every turn. There is no middle ground. A prominent radio personality even went so far as to wish aloud, on air, that he hoped all Obama's policies failed. Had such a notion been aired by a democrat during Bush's eight years, I cannot imagine what a shrill outcry that would have invoked from the right. Perhaps he might also have been accused of "siding with the terrorists".

In addition to this, Obama appears to be getting blamed for everything from abortion to corruption within ACORN. (When Palin next breaks a nail, it'll be Obama's fault.) Nobody loves abortion; we are supporting a woman's right to choose. It's the law. Change it, and it's back to the coat hanger for millions.

So Consciously Frugal's post is especially poignant as we enter the winter of Obama's presidency and partisanship looks likely to stall the country more than any error made by the administration.

In the interests of finding the middle ground, I want to introduce two writers who are doing more than I can see presently to correct partisanship than other Christian republicans. Lifted on Eagle's Wings was started to introduce respectful discourse between Christian liberals and Christian republicans to find common ground. Although I'm not religious in the slightest, I can appreciate what the authors are trying to do; they're trying to understand each other and accommodate each other's differences. Instead of being politically divided by religion or opinion, it might be an idea to converge in spite of it, instead.

A scary word for Halloween: deplane

2009-10-31T14:27:00.006-04:00

I've been doing more travelling this year, so I've had to hear the word deplane quite often and wonder if I'm the only one who winces when I hear it.

What's wrong with alight or disembark? Would the extra syllable be too taxing to utter (especially when so many of us are really busy and only have time for acronyms or short words)? The prefix de - like dis, un, mis and mal - is incredibly useful. Disrobe, undo, mistreat, malnourish are all nice, pretty words and mean what they say, as are demoralise and detoxify. But deplane does not mean what it thinks it does. Derail means to fall off the rails. Detoxify means to remove all toxic substances or qualities from and demystify means to remove the mystery from. Delineate means to outline a plan or area – to draw a line around it, which is a whole other angle. Therefore, taking all the above into consideration, deplane should technically mean either "to remove a plane from oneself" (painful) or "fall off the top of the plane" (only stunt people are ever on top of a plane). Finally, it’s just a boring word, like intern or table.

It's the same with detrain. How can someone detrain: with a hypnotist? ("When I snap my fingers you will forget everything you've been taught!") We definitely did not detrain when I was growing up. Life was bad enough and the trains were always late, so we were allowed to alight from a train: happily skip off the trains with our skirts billowing like carefree children. We absolutely never, ever detrained.

Debunk is another one: It means to expose or uncover [a sentiment] as false. Bunk is an abbreviation of bunkum meaning nonsense. So why would you want to debunk a myth you believed was false? Surely you would enbunk it or embunk the myth? To debunk it would be to remove the bunk from it somehow and then after you did that, it wouldn’t be bunkum anymore.

Let's dedictionary it along with disconnect used as a noun. What's wrong with disparity or disjunction? Disconnect is a verb. I disconnect; you disconnect; we have all been disconnected from (the dictionary). I know we've been turning nouns into verbs, and vice versa, for years but that's no excuse to make up ugly words when we've got some really gorgeous ones already.

De End.

Love and Work in Barbados

2009-10-28T21:02:00.003-04:00

When I was about nineteen, I had a meeting with a recruiter, during which she ask me where I would like to be in five years' time. "On an island in the Caribbean sipping cocktails," I replied. She threw back her head, laughed and then composed herself and said: "no, really". This episode of my youth sprang to the front of my mind for the first time in years, as I sat down at a beach bar on a Caribbean island last week. Faced with a lifetime of uncertainty ahead of me as a teenager, I had considered the possibility of acquiring a one-way ticket to the tropics to live out my days mixing cocktails on a beach. I know a few people who have since come to a full stop in places like Thailand, become scuba dive masters and thrown their ID into the sea. I almost got the opportunity later on in Guadalupe, when my flatmate and I got stranded in paradise by a rather ferocious hurricane and missed our flight. When we approached the English consulate for assistance, we discovered his wife clearing out his desk; he had just died. Fortunately, or unfortunately, our neighbour back in England had recently sold his fledgling internet company, had put 25,000 British pounds on his credit card and was leisurely touring the world for sport and relaxation. As we sat, dazed, on our luggage and despaired at our luck, the neighbour sauntered casually into distant view, pushing a luggage trolley. To say we were surprised was an understatement. My flatmate thought he was a mirage for a second and then took off at a sprint, yelling and waving. When he learned of our predicament, bought us two tickets back to England on American Airlines, via Puerto Rico and New York. I quickly perceived this as being one of life's extraordinary coincidences, so I took it as a sign and did as I was told.

Last week, however, I pondered what it would have been like in retrospect, with an excellent, Bajan bartender I nicknamed "The Boss" on the white sands of Coconut Court Beach in Barbados. Antonio, an impeccably groomed young man with an easy manner and a sunny disposition, insisted on introducing me to Doorly's, a eight year-old sipping rum.

"This is what your future father-in-law offers you after dinner when your girlfriend first takes you home," he said nodding slowly, eyebrows raised; pushing the cork back in and monitoring my reaction as I sipped. It wasn't as bad as Wray and Nephew, which is so strong half of it has evaporated before it lands on your tongue.

When my husband asked for a Jameson, Antonio chided him nonchalantly: "you don't come all the way to Barbados to drink Irish whisky."
My husband responded quietly that he'd come all the way to Barbados to drink what he bloody felt like drinking ("that was the whole point"), but Antonio stood firm and my husband was given Bajan rum and ginger ale with a lime twist.
"You have to twist the lime over it," he urged, professorially. "It's nothing without the lime."
"Do you have the best job in the world?" I asked Antonio.
"Yes, I do." He replied, adding after a brief pause, "but my mother doesn't think so."
We discussed why his mother didn't think so. Did she want him to be a lawyer, labouring in dull office, long into the night over files full of depositions, judgments and civil suits? Is it the attire? Perhaps she would like him to wear a suit every day and carry a briefcase. It turned out that his mother thought bar tending lowly work, but Antonio was happy, relaxed and looking forward to the impending birth of his first child without sweating daily over a calculator, crunching numbers, speculating how long he will have to grind away in his job until his son leaves college. Bar tending is not poorly paid work and much less stressful especially in tropical paradise. Bar tending requires intricate skills and attributes: patience, kindness, therapy, philosophy and diplomacy are all required of a good barman whose wisdom costs nothing more than a few rounds and a generous tip. If Antonio spawned a extended line of descendants, who owned or worked a bar on the beach, he would be spreading knowledge and happiness far into the future, to all corners of the earth whence visitors came. That's more than I could say for some lawyers.

The next morning was spent on the beach under a modest eighty-degree sun with scattered showers; I hunkered down under a shady palm tree and read.

There were fisherman who worked the beaches with hand-held weighted nets and rods. As the taxi driver had informed us on the way from the airport, there are no private beaches in Barbados and surely enough, our beach had two or three roving fishermen daily, one of whom looked about 115 years old. Looking for food is the world's oldest profession (no, it's not prostitution!). And it's real work. These men don't need to go to the gym.

Also on the beach was a woman with two small children who had two stalls selling beachwear, jewelry, sarongs and scarves. It was a permanent post for her and it struck me as the perfect job for a young mother. I couldn't remember the last time I saw happier children running free on the beach, swimming, smiling, laughing while their mother watched them from her stand.

As I sit here now, sipping my Wray and Nephew Coco Mania rum (which I paid $11 in Duty Free, FTC people), wringing my hands over my declining pension fund for the second year, I can't help but think that these fishermen are the most content members of this world. For all the financial preparation I have made for my future, all the paperwork that I have safely filed and organized, my future is no more secure. There's no such thing as job security for people like me in the country where I live, but for those fisherman, as long as there are fish in the sea they will eat tomorrow.

Consumer Power

2009-10-27T08:01:00.002-04:00

This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that, in London, "frugal consumer habits have forced retailers to change their ways". Frugality has been normality for everybody in Britain for a long time because credit card interest rates are higher, mortgage choices are restrictive and it's always been quite hard to get a grip of the first rung of that ladder. In the nineties, astronomical housing prices prevented hundreds of thousands of young people from buying their first home. I know, because I was one of them; there was no bubble at all for me and my contemporaries. Even earning a reasonable salary, I couldn't get a credit card when I lived in England. Many of my friends in London still do not own their own home as goods and services are still incredibly expensive. Colleagues and acquaintances who were able to buy a house did so with extraordinarily generous donations from their parents. House prices have lowered considerably in the last year, in tandem with the economic decline and certain "key workers" like teachers, nurses, fireman and policemen are incentives by the government, like financial assistance with their first mortgage, to live and serve within England's great metropolis.

In the last few years, a multitude of books and television programmes have been produced on how to save money in these even more trying times. On the day that HM Hennes launched Kate Moss' new cheap and cheerful clothing line, the queues went around the block for hours.

I believe the latest report in the UK's Financial Times of middle-class frugality being on the wane to be a little optimistic. The fact that people are spending more on expensive food only leads me to believe that people are finding simpler pleasures in smaller luxuries like good quality chocolate and prepared meals: foregoing other expenditure on clothing and electronic items.

Love and Work

2009-10-13T09:53:00.007-04:00

I recently picked up a copy of philosopher Alain de Botton's non-fiction book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and was enthralled after the first page. It was one of the those rare moments when, after having finished page three, I realized what I had in my possession and froze in wonderment with the book poised between my hands. I gazed gobsmacked into the middle distance for a few minutes, contemplating the impact of the opening paragraphs. Then I looked around to see if anyone had noticed my excitement. I wanted to consume the book, bury my face in its open pages, or rub it against my cheek like something furry.
The tome is concerned with "what makes work both one of the most exciting and most painful of all our activities". The first chapter, which had the biggest effect on me, dealt with logistics: Alain visited ports and warehouse facilities and reported on the enormity and anonymity of cargo. I don't believe many of us think about cargo that much, but it's literally everywhere around us, being transported hither and thither like blood through veins and arteries. De Botton quietly observed the steadfast guardians of a London port receiving ships on gray, misty mornings, clipboards in hand; followed tuna from where it was caught and beaten to death by fishermen in a small boat the Maldives, to where it was consumed by a young English boy in his home.
For the first ten years of my life, I grew up adjacent to a railway line, picking wild blackberries at the end of our back garden. We used to wave at the trains when they passed. We were so close we could see hats, hair, sometimes-sleepy eyes placidly returning our stares with bemusement as they flashed by. Immediately behind the railway line was an imposing, windowless brick warehouse and I would stare at it blankly every day, never thinking to ask what went on inside. This backdrop of my formative years affected me in ways that I had never realized before. I've never been on a plane without peering out of the window and speculating on what those baggage handlers might have had for breakfast or whether they were nursing a hangover and how fit they must be, nonchalantly tossing suitcases from cart to cargo hold.
I must be the only person I know who loves airports, trains, planes and journeying in general. I have thousands of photographic images of runways, planes, bridges, buses, cars: photographs taken through windows of all kinds, within and without. I'm obsessed with civil engineering and regularly consult with my treasured 25 year-old polaroid of Stonehenge. Now that was life's work.

Although, now that we have terrorists sticking bombs in their rectums in order to blow up planes, I'm seriously reconsidering whether I need to travel as much as I do. De Botton asks us to consider, when we buy something, how far it has come and this is a relevant subject for our times. How often do we think about the lives of the people manning our ports and borders? In a later chapter, he observes that it takes five thousand people in one famous English biscuit company all their working lives to make biscuits from initial concept to final marketing: the sort of snacks that we could bake ourselves in one afternoon. I pondered, as de Botton may have intended, that if we all baked our own biscuits on a lazy Sunday, where would these people work?
In the other chapters of the book, de Botton follows an electricity power line from a nuclear power station to London on foot with a pylon enthusiast; meets an artist who has devoted five years of his life to painting the same 250 year old tree in hundreds of settings; witnesses a satellite burst from the jungle into orbit, juxtaposing the very old with the very new; follows an accountant from bed to desk and beyond. It's a fascinating exploration of work in all its forms and, essentially ten windows into other worlds.
Then, co-incidentally, over at Consciously Frugal last week, I chanced upon an inspirational blog post called Product Human which touches on the fundamental nature of work by describing the epidemic of self-branding. This current epidemic, mostly these days called "networking" or "pushing my home-made jewelry on my friends", is an attempt to regain control of one's direction and purpose instead of relinquishing it to a large faceless corporation. CF's "product human" is not dissimilar to the concept of bartering. Back in the ancient day, we would support our families and communities by trading and exchanging goods and services. The "regular ol' job" as CF puts it is a concept which fundamentally stops us from being able to take care of ourselves in the traditional sense. A regular job stops us from having time to grow our own food, pickle, can, make jam, keep bees and animals, make our own clothing or ply an independent trade. In the course of my research into the economy these days, I've noted that many of us are getting back to basics in order to regain some control over our lives in a time when business that are "too big to fail" seem to be the only winners in a game we no longer want to play. It's never been so fashionable in New York to be a farmer! Forget entertainment, we have people keeping bees, small farms and animals on their roofs in New York City. Friends have agreed that in ten years' time every building here will have a garden of some sort.
If I can buy something from a friend to support them during these times, I'll do it. Let's mix love and work! I've read that in the last year more small businesses have been started as more of us become unemployed and I can't help but think this is a great thing that is happening to us: a pivotal moment.
As we pass the first birthday of Bush's economic "recovery" plan when he effectively nationalized his first corporation, my original fears for the economy have been smothered by the emergence of the online frugal community: good people plugging into a network to assist others in their community to get out of debt free or keep their job or start a business. The frugal community, as I call it, is doing what the green movement did ten years ago, when it realized that the government still did not believe in global warming. Its members are acting upon the downturn themselves, by being wiser with their earnings and eschewing unnecessary consumption. I believe that in the future more of us will work part-time or have our own businesses and grow our own food in an effort to gain autonomy of purpose instead of specializing in a full-time job. There is no such thing as job security and to put all your eggs in one basket by devoting all your time to one employer is more of a risk now than it ever has been.

FTC Rules

2009-10-06T16:55:00.013-04:00

The Washington Post reported today that the Federal Trade Commission has set a few rules for bloggers like me concerning endorsements, in the interests of consumer protection. It occurred to me that in the course of my six-month-old blog that I've promoted a few products here and there.

May I take this opportunity to say that I've never been paid to endorse any of the products I've written about here on these pages. I have never received a discount or been given any product for free in return for a favorable review of that product.(Although, I certainly wouldn't be averse to the idea of being paid to promote something in which I believed.) Even if I had been paid, I seriously doubt that anybody has taken my advice and bought the exercise DVDs that I recommended during the summer. Everywhere I go throughout the city, I hear excuse after excuse about why people can't exercise. "I haven't got time." A twenty minute DVD is too much? Oh, come on!

I've also never been paid, for the purposes of this blog, by Catskills farmers, the Cabbage lobby, the National Park Service or its rangers, any airline, novelist, newspaper, magazine, marketers or PR people. I don't even have advertising on my blog, as you can see. Gasp!

Everything I've hated, adored or generally marveled at on this blog has been hated, adored and marveled at after having been purchased with my own hard earned cash.

Actually, wait! I do indeed get my vegetables free from my husband's farm, but technically what's his is mine no?

Let's Stop Exporting Our Capital

2009-09-24T21:47:00.011-04:00

My father, who lives in England, put a boycott on French goods years ago, mainly because they strike all the time and he's a Thatcherite, but also because their epic strikes would affect the price of goods all over Europe. French lorry drivers would block French trade routes for weeks at a time until their demands were met and other non-participating haulers carrying international goods would be prevented from traversing the picket lines. Dad almost spits out his tea (yes, China) when relaying how the European Union puts a restriction on the quantity of fish that English fishermen may catch in their own waters. Although my mother tortures him with Evian and Brie ("I'll buy what I want to bloody buy!"), he stands firm and buys English goods wherever he can. Although certain right-wing bloggers are currently painting England as a post-industrial dystopian welfare state, in which the elderly line up in the streets for new organs, England actually produces some good food: apples, spring water, lamb, blood sausage, beer, all the good stuff. This is a temporary fix that the US would benefit from right now. US Consumer spending was 70% of our economy before the recession; I can’t imagine what sort of wonder it would do for us, if we consciously decided to spend some or all of that money on American goods and services even though they're more expensive. And before I hear people blurting out "protectionism!" or "isolationism": I'm not suggesting that we buy only American. I'm suggesting that we buy some American. Let's support our own community first and foremost in order to keep it ticking over for the time being.

So with that in mind, I posed the following question to about 100 friends and colleagues this week:

"Would you pay more money for your basic goods that are produced in the USA?"

Then I immediately responded to my own question: "what, including health care? I don’t think so, mate!" Let’s put that aside for a minute and come back to it. I think we’ve all got a bit to say about that. 100% of my respondents said they would pay more for better quality. One person expressed concern: “if only we could produce quality goods and services,” he said. But of course we are able. The issue lies with competition; big box stores are able to sell goods for exceedingly low prices and it's tempting to shop at these places in the current economic climate. The question is, would consumers be prepared to sacrifice shopping for cheap stuff we don’t need to save our economy?

Some responses:

"I wouldn't have a problem paying more for everything across the board, even four times more, if it were quality and if it were made in the USA. I just saw a pillow for $5! Five bucks for a pillow! That’s ridiculous. I would have paid twenty dollars."

“Tax me thrice over if it means I don’t have to worry about my health insurance coverage, dental care, reliable infrastructure, etc. This country needs to start looking after its inhabitants more."

"I think people are ready to start factoring that into their buying decisions. It is a lot easier to do if you are simultaneously scaling back your overall expenditure. If you cut your spending on unnecessary goods by 30%, then when you do purchase something you can afford to pay the extra 10-15% for something of better quality made right here in the USA.”

I’ve just starting flicking through my galley copy of "Cheap", in which the author, Ellen Ruppel Shell, details the Machiavellian machinations that discount retailers engage in to lure shoppers who think they’re getting a bargain, but this is something that my mother warned me about years ago so I put the book down. "Oh, don’t go to that sale,” she would say, “they drag out all their old tat twice a year and you wouldn’t clean your toilet with it.” And that's all you need to know about that.

My mother is like a shopping hawk in stores and boutiques that sell quality clothing: she circles, circles, circles while it’s priced at 100%. Then when it’s down to 20% she dives in and scoops up the discarded sale items. I sometimes wonder if she pays full price for anything. It takes a lot of energy and sometimes this dedication means she has to shop for five hours and come back with nothing. I buy only in the sales too, but I buy winter clothes in February and summer clothes in August, so I have to put away what I buy until the appropriate season comes along. I get some serious bargains though.

The problem with big box and discount stores is that they destroy the competition by charging only a fraction above wholesale price. They have huge distribution networks, so they are able to buy in vast quantities and make a profit with only slim margins. That's not inherently a problem; that's capitalism, an amalgamation of resources and industry. The larger issue is that we are sending our money to the investors of these big box stores, who are in turn spending their money in other communities. Our money is not staying within our community. Local economies need to produce and reinvest in themselves. My suggestion is that we regenerate our own communities and make them strong so we can invest in foreign goods when we are a little more flush further down the road. Our sweat equity is being shipped out with those minimum wage workers causing harsh decline in our communities.

As consumers we can save our economy by shopping correctly. At the beginning of this year, I witnessed the advertising industry take a steep nose-dive that was caused directly by the consumer. Those in the industry are making half the money they did a year ago if they still have their jobs. So I know we have the power. Let's use it.

Keeping a Sense of Humor

2009-09-21T18:56:00.006-04:00

The New York Times ran a piece this week entitled: Humor In Hard Times. My English readers will no doubt be exercising their sense of humor when they see the way I've spelled it. I've already suffered criticisms over my New York State drivers' "license". ("They've spelt licence wrong." "But I have a drivers' license!" I say, delicately holding the tiny permit aloft to my webcam with both hands like it's the Holy Grail. "But they've spelt it wrong.")

Humour (hereinafter called "humor"), like spelling, has always been a mainstay of British life. When one gets a boyfriend, the first question asked is: "does he make you laugh?" It's that important. Not "is he solvent?" because nobody is solvent where I'm from.

It's cloudy most of the time in Britain, so if we're not down the pub then we're a bit gloomy and this is reflected in our penchant for sarcasm. Sarcasm is a slender shard of brightness in the shadows of our lives that allows us to make each other feel rotten in a very clever way. Nobody can make you feel quite as awful as the Englishman and it's partly the accent, I think.

The economy is also very gloomy at present: in the last week or so there has been panic in the media over the decline in shopping. People are quite literally putting their credit cards on ice lest they be tempted to mortgage their future with an extra pair of Manolo Blahniks. This is simply nothing short of a disaster in United States of Super Retail. Instead of shopping, the Times' article reports, in these tough times we are turning to humor. In my view, this is fine progress. I don't particularly think Letterman, Leno or Conan O'Brien are that funny, but the fact that 18 million people tuned in to watch the premiere of the new Leno show is a telling sign. In Thatcher's Britain - a mightily depressing time for half of us - its television was the best in the world (barring those extraordinary Japanese game shows) and you can see the quality of US entertainment rising with every series on HBO; they're excellent. True Blood, which has just finished, is my current favourite (hereinafter called "favorite"). The writing is utterly brilliant and reflects the political and social zeitgeist in every episode.

Of course, in frugal circles I would be heartily scoffed at if I were to suggest that you invest in cable TV to relieve the doldrums. Why pay for cable when you can crochet for free? For $15.16 per month - even less for new customers who are getting offers of $8 per month in some states - Netflix will allow me to watch streaming video on my laptop of many good TV series. It's included in my monthly fee for three DVDs per month. I just watched Series 1 and 2 of 30Rock last week and now I'm wondering what Liz Lemon had for breakfast this morning. I can't remember the last time I heard such a classic line as "who ordered the veal?" spoken by the smooth-talking Jenna when she spots the new young male interns in the office.

I'm also in full agreement with Jeffrey P. Jones when he says that we need more satire in this country. John Stewart, Bill Maher and Steven Colbert are minority satirists in today's comedy entertainment world. And they have so cornered the market that they satirize both sides of the political aisle. Where are the funny right-wingers in this country? Do they only have Ann Coulter? Isn't she a lawyer, though? America desperately needs a laugh right now. Actually, I'm having a good laugh watching Republicans try to claim this country is veering uncontrollably towards socialism. HA! Now that's funny. We've never been more controlled by big corporations: bailing them out when instructed and firing the employees left and right. CEOs are still getting gargantuan bonuses while the unemployment rate approaches 10%. We are enduring a warped version of capitalism that is rather like socialism because the little man is putting into the big pot, but unlike socialism he's not getting anything at all in return. The working everyman is paying dearly for upper management mistakes. It's exceedingly difficult to justify bailing out huge banking corporations with our tax dollars and we may have to do it again in the future. Socialism might be better because then at least everybody receives something!

Of course, humor will not solve our problems but it has a subtle power and there's a reason why they say laughter is the best medicine. It's a secret weapon; your opposition would rather be hated than laughed at, as laughter dampens their fire rather than fuels it, thus discrediting their message more successfully. Most people have appreciated a fight or an argument in which they've been wrong, but nobody enjoys being completely humiliated. What would have happened if we had merely laughed at the "Birthers", who think Obama was born in Kenya, instead of giving them credit in the media by listening to them? Who didn't squirm while watching John Stewart roast the errant investment analyst Jim Cramer on The Daily Show, speaking truth to power with a wink and a smile? Another high point was watching Stewart interrogate Republican constitutional historian Betsey McCaughey as she fumbled ineptly with a copy of the proposed health care bill trying desperately to prove it says the government will euthanize old and sick people instead of treating them (the so-called "death panel"). "It doesn't say [death panel], but it means it, believe me" she said, half-apologetically, explaining that laymen like us wouldn't get the mysterious legal jargon of a senate bill. "Maybe you should have marked the page with a yellow sticky note," quipped Stewart as she flicked through it.

We are indeed in hard times and if we can keep our sense of humor it'll lighten the load. Obama has never had a tougher job but he is steadfast and still smiling. Al Franken, a former comedian and radio show host, who wrote the book "Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot" is now a democratic Minnesotan senator. A couple of weeks ago, he calmed angry "tea party" protesters using reasoned debate. It's comedians who occupy the cutting edge in the fight against today's political injustices and we need to support them.

Zen & The Art of Low Maintenance

2009-09-19T19:24:00.013-04:00

I like to consider myself low maintenance; I could be wrong. I got married barefoot in Las Vegas wearing a gap shirt. The idea of forking out many thousands of dollars for a wedding seemed like an incredible waste of money. We forked out hundreds of dollars on a trip to Las Vegas instead, which was much more worthwhile. Family members who accompanied our elopement to the western city of degradation also had a remarkably good time. Uncle Chris had theretofore been too scared to get on a plane and, in the appropriate fashion, arrived in Vegas doped up to the eyeballs. After we had wrestled 80 year-old grandmother from the slots at the MGM Grand, we hopped in a car to Red Rock Canyon, kicked off our shoes and got married. It was my first trip to America's playground and one trip is all you need frankly. Go there any more than that and you just end up taking it for granted. As we banked over Nevada in the plane, I wondered how much the electricity bill was. It wasn't until later than I realized that people died building the Hoover dam so that we could play blackjack and watch naked people. Oh, and I forgot the wretched tigers and those poor bastards dressed up as Caesar.

Musing later on the event, my mother observed me as so happy, "I could have set fire to your skirt and you wouldn't have been bothered". You see it's all about the bloke. I married someone with whom I could quite happily be destitute. Yes, he's got an extraordinary IQ but, as someone with a much lower IQ protested to me when I mentioned it, that doesn't matter one iota. Although it certainly helped with the mortgage application. I believe people tend to deny their gut instincts in this modern era. As I read blogs whose writers insist that one "has to ask the ten important questions" before you get married or take a job, I feel like all the mystery gets sucked out of a thing. If you're about to get married and you ask yourself one question, let it be this: "could you be dirt poor with this person and not want to kill him?" Anyway, I'm digressing again.

Low maintenance is the key to frugality. If you insist on having the ten thousand dollar engagement ring, you're old-fashioned and need to get thyself back to the nunnery whence you came. The engagement ring is an outdated concept, whose only real purpose in this day and age is as a status symbol. "Look how much money my husband [no longer] has"!

It's interesting to experience men often mistaking me for unmarried because they see no diamond and assume I'm single. Years ago, engagement rings were insurance policies for married women in case they lost their husband somehow: they could sell the ring and support themselves with the proceeds. These days you would be lucky to recover half the value of a store-bought ring if you sold it. Now we have life insurance, but if you want to get about town like a London Eastender who keeps his life savings around his neck and on his fingers in case he has to take off in a hurry, then go for it.

I have a fat life insurance policy on my husband; it's a gamble and a ticket I hope I never have to cash in, but it's still a better investment than an engagement ring.

As the loud preacher man on the New York City subway once yelled at me "material po-sessions, no mean nuttin'!! Some else will be driving yo' car to yo' funeral!"

Open Letter to Conservative Republican Housewife, Who Kicked Me Off Her Political Blog for My Liberal Opinions,

2009-09-19T14:08:00.022-04:00

After perusing your political blog and attempting to have thoughtful two-way debate with a conservative Republican, it appears that I merely stumbled upon a right wing, small-scale news *aggregator*. I could be wrong, but I could not find any other sources in your glossaries other than those of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Glen Beck, Ann Coulter, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, in addition to others that I didn’t immediately recognize; I’m pretty certain the New York Times wasn’t in there.

In the typical style of a right-wing fanatic, you labeled me a “manipulative liar” for informing you that, in England, we call the Daily Telegraph the “Torygraph”. All I was suggesting was that you might read other British media to get a less outrageous point of view. What do you mean the BBC is just as biased? When I told you that you know absolutely nothing about the UK’s health care system and that you need to shut up about it, I meant to say that not all British mothers give birth on the floor in the toilets. I was born in a Victorian loony bin, but I turned out perfectly decently thank you very much. One could not possibly fathom how furious you must have been to hear the rest of the world slander President Bush for the eight years that he was in office (after all he was the best President history has offered so far, wasn’t he?); so you should be able to sympathize when it irks me that you malign the system that kept me alive with my bank account intact for over 20 years. France's healthcare system is the best in the world: it's your insurance system that is broken, liebe Frau.

Then you examined my IP address, saw that I was writing from the “US east coast” and told me that I was a liar for saying I’m British, which I found jolly unsporting of you. Despite your views on immigration, some of us filthy foreigners slip through the net via your Northern outposts *and* pay into the US social security system: with no hope of ever collecting it, might I add.

Finally, you called me a “silly pest” and then had the temerity to ban me for abusive posting, which strikes me as somewhat hypocritical.

It was remarkable to be so barred when just a few posts previously, you had been complaining about the lack of free speech in Obama’s America.

Admittedly, it wasn’t a shining moment of glory for me; I should have known my attempt to correct you would come to naught. Your only desire is to point your finger at the world outside the US and yell: "we could end up like them!" As if England is some kind of Orwellian dystopia in which hospital patients writhe around on the floor in their own blood a la Dante's Inferno. I think it was the moment you refused to concede that Cheney ever lied which tipped me over the edge into upper case. Even Karl Rove has since admitted that Cheney had lied.

May I take this opportunity to remind you again that guns are not legal in England, so your argument that the ban on the traditional sport of fox hunting - during which event, no gun is ever brandished - was somehow linked to the rise in UK crime is utter rubbish.

I like to consider myself unbiased; I have seen both Karl Rove and Ann Coulter speak live in New York City. Conversely, you admitted that when Obama visited your neck of the woods, you took you “son to the mall” to avoid all Obama proceedings. “Yeah, I’m whining,” you said. No shit, Sherlock Bloody Holmes. Put a sock in it.

Actually, it's too late now. Joe Wilson has shown the rest of the world that the US right wing is a motley array of wizened lunatics who enjoy heckling their President like he's a Las Vegas early-bird special comedy act. If you've watched the British Parliament in progress, you will see that the US is a lot more like the UK now than they'd care to admit. But what am I saying? Even if you had popped into chambers during Prime Minister's Question Time, you'll only have heard the Conservatives talking.

As a footnote, I think it would be pertinent to add that I heard Ann Coulter speak at length in New York City on the ubiquity of “being easily offended” in politics and presently, I wholeheartedly agree with her on this point.

Sincerely yours,

Farm To Table...

2009-09-04T20:21:00.003-04:00