Queercents

For my articles at The Advocate, I’m always looking for interesting sites or services to write about that are related to personal finance. So when I learned about ShortTask.com through this post at Gay List Daily, I decided to take a look:

The newest tool in the fight against unemployment is ShortTask.com… All jobs listed on the site are short term, temporary positions or tasks that pay in small amounts, but can really add up if you’ve got a knack for freelancing. Some are rather menial (adding websites to search engines) and some perhaps unethical (adding positive reviews to product list sites), but, as most sites we frequent, there are a few diamonds in the buff.

With a little extra money from the random data entry or research gig, we can once again rev up our engines with that debilitating and fiscally draining vice – our daily Starbucks addiction.

Sounds interesting, right? That is until you start looking at what the “tasks” pay. Many of the listings I observed pay a whopping $0.05 to $0.20 per task. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re still looking for a new vlogger to take over where Clint left off. In the meantime, here is a video about how to find cheap airfare from my new favorite how-to site, Howcast.com.

Video credit: Howcast.com.

I’ve been to China several times with my day job and every time I go, I’m amazed at how increasingly relevant the country is becoming. I keep telling Jeanine that we should make sure Sam learns Mandarin as a child because will certainly help him as an adult.

There was an article a couple of weeks ago in The New York Times about American graduates finding jobs in China. It profiled a number of adventurous twentysomethings to show why it’s better to be there than here:

Shanghai and Beijing are becoming new lands of opportunity for recent American college graduates who face unemployment nearing double digits at home.

The article is good, but Xin Lu at Wise Bread wrote a post taking it a step further by offering 6 tips for those who are really interested in working in China: Read the rest of this entry »

Sam is nearing his nine month mark and Jeanine is already thinking about his first birthday party. Based on this, I can tell she’s going to be the better mommy when it comes to holidays and milestones like the first day of kindergarten or losing a tooth. Fairy, I’m not.

If it were up to me, we’d be doing it on the cheap and without much fuss… after all, he’s not going to remember any of it, so as long as we have a couple of key photographs, he won’t look back and say we were being chinchy.

Let’s be honest, the first birthday party is more for the parents. So what’s the right amount to spend? Babycenter reports and suggests:

According to our poll of more than 5,000 parents, the amount spent on a baby’s first birthday party is all over the map, from less than $50 to more than $500. A majority — 61 percent — of parents spent $200 or less, 25 percent spent between $200 and $500, and 11 percent dished out more than $500. Read the rest of this entry »

Plenty has been written about Annie Leibovitz and her financial woes, but after the latest exposé ran in The New York Times, Jean Chatsky used it to deconstruct the behavior of creative types and I thought her analysis was interesting.

She likens it to a couple of findings in her latest book, The Difference, where she looked at factors that held people back from financial success. Two of the traits were stubbornness and creativity:

People who defined themselves as completely creative — not just very creative, or somewhat creative — but completely creative, were not likely to attain great wealth.  Why is that?

… Sometimes very creative people seem to feel they are above all that.  Above all the minutia of bill-paying and record-keeping.  Above the tedious tasks like checkbook balancing that are necessary to get through life with ones credit score in tact.  They– not all but some of them —  think they should be given a free pass as if they’ve given their art to the world and the world should be grateful and not bug them above the little things. Read the rest of this entry »

Gideon Alper publishes the Gay Couples Law Blog. The blog discusses new developments in same sex family law and estate planning. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and you can email him at gideon@galperlaw.com or follow him on twitter. These are his words…

When paying federal taxes, it can pay to be gay.

The IRS doesn’t recognize gay marriage because of the Defense of Marriage Act. Even if you’re officially married in one of the states that allows it, you still have to file as single for your federal taxes.

This unequal treatment, however, lets gay couples take advantage of their single-filer status by using tax-avoidance techniques that married straight couples, who have to file jointly, can’t use.

Today I’m going to focus on just one of these techniques: deferring the recognition of gain on the sale of your property. Read the rest of this entry »

I believe my money personality was influence by factors from my childhood. I grew up in a home where I felt the stress of my parent’s financial problems. As an adult, I suffer from bag-lady syndrome at times and it’s often hard for me to spend money on big-ticket items. For me personally, money has always been about feeling secure and less about the material things it can buy.

That said, I never thought there was anything wrong with achieving or having wealth. But I know a few people who were conditioned to think that money isn’t good and this idea affects their ability to be successful.

Did your parents say things that made you think that having money was bad or that it was hard to come by? “Rich people are seldom happy,” or “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” Perhaps these thoughts took hold through other forms of socialization like listening to church teachings or participating in a spiritual community that promoted poverty like this author writes:

Poverty is not pious. There’s nothing sacred, honorable or even particularly spiritual about being broke. In fact, as I’ll explain here in more detail, creating and redistributing mindful wealth is a far higher spiritual calling than being broke and lacking the financial resources necessary to accomplish important things (like planting a hundred tropical fruit trees). Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent post about credit card interest rates, Philip Brewer at Wise Bread explained:

I use credit cards for transactions, not to borrow money.

One of the smartest things you can do for your financial health is to pay off the total balance each month on your credit card. Whenever we use a credit card, we’re borrowing money. Interest gets added to the balance if we don’t pay off the total amount we owe each month.

The big money-maker for credit card companies is consumer interest. They want us to carry a balance. But they don’t make us. A lot of people just do. Why?

Please don’t say it has to do with how much money one makes. At the age of twenty-two, I never carried a balance; nor do I now at forty-two. Just because I have an available credit limit doesn’t mean it’s my money to spend.

What makes some people get this concept and others don’t? Behavior and money… sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Photo credit: stock.xchng.

My second column for The Advocate appears in the Sept Issue.

You can also check it out online to learn:

1. How the new Income-Based Repayment (IBR) program can help make student loan payments more manageable.
2. How StockTwits can help you build a better portfolio in 140 characters or less.
3. Why charity loves company: gays and lesbians take up giving circles.

Image credit: Advocate.com.

For various reasons (just one being economic), Jeanine and I have been talking lately about whether we will have a second child. I think the decision to add to our family is just as important as the decision was to start one… perhaps, even more important. The expectation is that if you have one child, then you’ll likely have another. It’s almost a given. But should it be?

A report (PDF) by the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion released last week indicates a middle-income family with a child born last year will spend about $221,000 raising that child through age 17. This averages out to $13,000 per year although annual expenditures typically increase with the age of the child. Housing is identified as the largest single expense, followed by food and child care/education costs.

Children are expensive. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. But people put so much emphasis on other factors that finances often lose some weight in the decision process. The one we hear the most is the case against being an only child. Of course, we’re considering the pros and cons of Sam being our one and only. Read the rest of this entry »