Minimalist Moving

Tomorrow is the big move. In reality, it’s not so far, about 8 miles altogether, and the move should be completed by dark. There are a few things that make this move more complicated, including the collection of a refrigerator, washer, and dryer (all conveniently found on Craigslist!) into the new house.

As I’ve been packing up my things today, I’ve been thinking about how much I want to be — and am not — a minimalist. While I don’t have a ton of clutter, I’ve definitely downsized living spaces lately. Most recently, I’ve been doing a room-rental situation which really has not worked well at all, in part because I have only a tiny shelf to put all my things on in the kitchen. So you can imagine how glad I’ll be to be in my own house, with an empty kitchen to spread out in, and an empty bedroom for all my stuff. Oh yes, and a garage with storage space.

Ironically, as I was packing things to be moved today, I realized that when I moved my cat to her foster home I had roughly the same amount of junk for her as I did for me. She’s a pretty high-maintenance cat, apparently.

As I’m moving, I’ve been weeding things into three piles:

1) To keep — everyday clothes, towels, family photos, and some books

2) To toss — the old pyjama pants whose butt has turned into a gigantic hole

3) To give away — nice clothes that don’t fit or I don’t wear anymore, some books, etc.

I’ve purchased a few things as well, making use of the Black Friday thanksgiving sales. I got myself a router and a bed-skirt, both of which were needed — my box-spring is a bit torn up from a previous cat, now living in a new home with higher energy parents than I am. The router and bed-skirt will move with me to the new place, but the other cash saving thing I’m doing is getting the roommates to help me move. We plan to sweep across Orange County tomorrow, picking up everything that we need in a couple of friends’ trucks, and deliver it to our sparkly new house by dark.

Anybody else see some ways this could fail?

Dealing with debt: day after Thanksgiving issue

A belated happy Thanksgiving! The pumpkin pies turned out better than the candied yams, but all was edible, and our feast and friendship was fully worth it.

Money has become particularly scarce lately, due in large part to the fact that I am moving (again!), putting down a security deposit, and acquiring kitchen items. It wouldn’t do to have an ill-equipped kitchen.

What all this means is that, though I have enough for the move, my aggressive debt-paying-off scheme has fallen by the wayside for a bit. I am making just over minimum payments on my larger bills, though at least the credit cards have remained free of debt.

The other thing that happens at this time of year is that the sales come out and my love of shopping emerges with them. Luckily, this year I can turn some of that shopping fascination into the acquisition of goods for my new place. There are a few other things that I’m using instead of the stores. These are garage sales and Craigslist. Initially I tried freecycle as well, but had some issues with their Yahoo groups system, which didn’t recognize me as a user. And as someone at work recently pointed out to me, my time is valuable too!

But what am I doing about the debt?

First, I make sure that all of my debt — except for work related reimbursements, which are paid off in full every billing cycle — is on non-interest bearing cards or accounts. Since my major debt is things not paid by my health insurance company, I get 1-2 years with a health care account to pay off the debt myself. While I think that my health insurance should cover some basic services, it doesn’t, and it’s not worth trying to get them to cover it anymore. Plus, buying my own insurance in California would be much pricier than paying off the debt, according to my calculations. Instead, I work with my doctor and dentist to make sure that I get the best deal possible to cover my debt.

After that, my scheme is just to pay as aggressively as possible before things come out of their non-interest period. I pay the minimum on one account and the maximum on the other, figuring that if I don’t pay it off before it starts to accrue interest, I’d rather be paying on one account than on two. I also put some money aside to help my family with anything they need each month, and — please don’t laugh — have a kitty savings account for any necessary vet bills.

So even though I’m moving, I’m doing okay. My debt is still being paid off, not piling up. If I were to go to the big black Friday sales, I’m sure we would begin to see some issues, but as long as I stick to Craigslist and the garage sales, all seems to be working quite well. With luck, we’ll be able to furnish the new house in something other than cheap chic.

How I manage finances

Earlier today, my partner and I were talking about the recent financial meltdowns that have taken place, and what we each do to make sure our money is safe. Since both of us work in finance as well, we’ve had to develop separate systems for how to manage our money, and how to manage our company’s money. I use the following tools at work:

1) A good computer-based accounting system

2) Paper backup for expenses, categorized by date

3) A monthly filing folder system for income

4) Close contact with our bank and investment services

I didn’t start to look at my own finances until I started this job, so I’m still constructing a strategy that works well for me. So far, however, the only things I’ve left behind are the fancy computer-based accounting system — instead I use an excel spreadsheet detailing any planned major expenditures for the next six months, and calculate what I need to pay to make sure that I’m out any credit card debt within six months.

As a student, I don’t have a lot of money coming in. More often there’s money going out, what with tuition and books. So I’ve also dropped most of step #4, keeping in close contact with banks and investment companies. Because I don’t have an investment analyst for my paltry $350 in savings. To compensate, I use the online banking programs — my savings and checking are at the same bank — to keep track of what I’m spending and saving each month.

Tourist Towns: Moving Research Sites

Today I went to talk to the director of the center who sponsors my research. Overall, it was a productive conversation. I was able to talk about some of my fears related to the project, and got what I felt was some great advice on professional development. The upshot is that Tourist Town’s Nonprofit is (most likely) no longer my client, as the project has had interest from other, more planning-centered clients.

This is an odd professional moment: I am a planner. And I am trying to decide what kind of planner I want to be. In some ways, this is an easy question to answer. I am a planner concerned with the environment and with equity, a planner who wants to make the world a better place.

But I am also a person who is slowly realizing that you can’t save everything, and that splitting resources sometimes makes nobody better off. I am a person coming to terms with the fact that sometimes, to make one person better off, sometimes somebody else has to become worse off. This is the Pareto principle.

So now I am navigating this transition, as a planner and a person: I am concerned with equity but my concern with equity will make somebody else worse off. My concern with equity (I hope) will eventually make me better off, in that it will get me a job, a good job, that I love and will make money from. So who does it make worse off?

A difficult question. But the upshot is that Tourist Town’s Nonprofit will most likely no longer be my client, as there is a planner in Nearby Tourist Town who is interested in the research.

When you have a job… and your loved ones don’t

You may have noticed that the U.S. is in a bit of financial turmoil these days. Over the past three days, the stock market has fallen by 661 points. While I don’t know much about stocks, I do know that these are big numbers.

But what makes our financial problems even more evident is the number of unemployed individuals in our country, and the way that this number keeps climbing. Every week there is information about new companies shutting down.

This week it was a DHL hub.

Now, there’s a lot more to be said here than I have time for before I run to a budget meeting, but I was thinking…and thinking…about what to write about here — all my best words are being used by my final papers — and I realized that I haven’t really talked about my own family situation. So here it is:

About six months ago, my mother, not realizing the state of the job market in our county, left a job as an administrator at a small school. She’d worked there for years, so it was understandable that she would want a change of pace. What was unforeseen (don’t ask me how) was that her choice to leave this job brought the number of unemployed/barely employed members of our family to four: four out of the five of us in the Waleno household had no jobs as of June 2008. I was the lucky member with a job.

How does one cope with being the primary employee in a family?

I had it easier than most; our family is splintered by immigration, education (mine), divorce, and new partners, so we don’t all live under one roof. Still, there have been problems. If somebody is sick, who gets health insurance for them? If somebody wants to go on vacation and can’t afford it, do you say no or do you let them rack up debt? What do you do about cell phone bills, groceries, and gas? There are a number of questions that come up when not everybody in the family is working or, at some point, can work.

The best answer I can give you, and this is an answer very much in progress and being tested, is to draw boundaries. Don’t give up your life for your family members. As much as it hurts to draw the boundary between what I will help out with and where I can’t help, I believe that it will hurt less than years of resentment and debt for helping too much.

Be an aid, not an enabler. If someone in your family needs health insurance or a GED to get a job, find resources with them, not for them. My sister recently confessed to me that she hasn’t been able to get health insurance, so we sat down over the phone — with 3000 miles between us, thank god — and went through the low-income health insurance that’s sometimes available in our home state, question by question. She gave me the answers, I filled them in, and sent it to her to sign with a pre-addressed, stamped envelope to the insurance company. She needs to do the rest, but I’ll hold her hand.

Know where you are in life. I’m a student who doesn’t have a whole lot of resources. I have massive health insurance  debt not covered by my school’s health insurance company, some student loan debt, and in the next six months to a year, will switch jobs in a rather bleak job market. I can’t help my family too much, or I won’t be able to help them in the future. This isn’t an either-or predicament, but a continuum one — how much can you give without bankrupting your future?

Figure out how much you want to help. This is probably the hardest, most personal question anybody with unemployed family members will have to answer. It is difficult — sometimes heartbreaking — to realize that you simply don’t want to help someone in your family. It is equally difficult to realize that you do want to, and don’t have the resources to. I’m pretty sure there’s no permanent answer to this question, since it changes with the relationships.

Two perspectives on failure

The other day in a law class I had a brilliant idea for a post; then it faded. Now I am left with the glimmer of a brilliant idea, but nothing like the excitement I had in the middle of law class last week. I am sure that if I try to get it back again, I shall fail, but this brings up an equally decent topic:

What is failure?

Sometimes I suspect that I am one of those people who keeps going out of sheer spite — I want to see the next moment. As a result, I constantly live on the brink of failure, but never quite plunging into it, and lately, more often than not, have pulled off some pretty miraculous successes.

My partner is the opposite. He is petrified of failure, and so never quite gets started. He has talked about going to grad school for the two and a half years that we’ve been together, but is afraid of failing the GMAT and so hasn’t taken it yet. I don’t mean to sound uncompassionate; I am hopeful that he will persevere and do what he loves.

I can’t really pin down the difference between the two of us, but I suspect that a great many people in the world fall into one of the two categories I just described. On one hand there are people who are so curmudgeonly, or perverse, that they keep going and pull off successes. On the other hand, there are people who desperately want to, but are afraid to fly for fear of falling.

Perhaps it is unfair to categorize people in this way, but deep down I suspect that people are categorizable. We’re trained to go into the girl’s restroom or the boy’s restroom, and I must admit that being at the gas station where the restrooms are not clearly marked makes me very nervous. I see myself in one category, and even when it is a simple misplaced or grafittied sign, I continue to see myself as a member of that group and am made uncomfortable by not being labeled properly.

As you can probably tell, I see myself here as a member of the curmudgeon’s club. I’m happiest when I have the chance to see what’s around the corner, when spitefulness lets me win out. For me, failure would be the stalling of this streak of stubbornness — it would be an inability to be curious about what comes next. But for my partner, failure is probably more like the difficulty in being able to predict his own behavior effectively.

I think this is what the personality types come down to: curiosity about versus prediction of our own possibilities.

Why I Blog

It’s Saturday morning at the beginning of November, the air here in Southern California is getting foggy and cloudy, and I’ve been thinking about this blog and what I want to accomplish with it. I’ll be the first to admit it, it’s an odd interest. As you can tell from the first few stories that have been posted on here, it’s a bit of a hybrid — it’s a research blog and a personal blog. In my mind, good research comes with compelling stories. I opened this blog for a multitude of reasons, not least that I used to blog and missed being in the habit of writing something every day (as you can tell, I didn’t miss it enough in October).

I opened this blog…

…because I saw something that not enough other people were talking about. My belief is that if enough people get together to talk about something, we build a critical mass of interest, interest that other people start to listen and respond to.

…to remind me of our common interests. I’m a researcher. That’s what I do. While nothing that people comment on here will show up in my research, it will influence it. That’s what I want. I want my work to speak to people’s needs and evolve out of our common interests.

…to keep me on track. Writing is one part text and five parts dedication. By blogging, I’m reminding myself of where I’ve been and where I plan to go. Do I worry about putting this on the internet? Sure. Lots of what I write is hidden away when it deals with sensitive topics and personal responses, and my clients will always be anonymous if I talk about them at all, but it’s a public topic and I want public accountability for the main ideas.

I’m still thinking about where I want this blog to go, but let ask a favor of my readers. If you stumble across this site, tell me about your job. You can comment or email me at eha.research@gmail.com. Tell me how you found it, what you like or dislike. Will you stay? How long? What’s the first thing you do in the morning? What’s your dream job?

4 Things I’ve Learned Doing Community Research

On Tuesday, I go to the local Chamber of Commerce to administer a survey for a research project that I am working on. I am also a graduate student, you see; I spend a few days of the week at work and a few days at school, and generally have very little time for myself. This is all right. If obsession is a component of good work, I expect my research to be excellent.

But what I was going to say is that one of my roles as a graduate student is as a community scholar, and my current client is Nearby Tourist City’s Chamber of Commerce, which wants to develop environmentally sustainable best practices, outreach, and employee training programs for member businesses.
I am so excited about this — it is my first time working with a Chamber, and the first time that I have done surveys, so in more ways than one it’s a learning experience for me. The following four points are what I’ve learned about community research so far:

1. Find a mentor. My mentor is an older student in our program who has been through my part of the program (a masters degree), and the community research and outreach that I’m currently doing, though he hasn’t worked specifically with the clients and audience I’m working with. We come from very different academic backgrounds, and so I can bounce ideas off him and get a new perspective in return.

2. Never assume that the client knows about the quality they could get. My client, whose members are generally delightful, friendly, and compassionate individuals, have little familiarity with this kind of research research, so have accepted some sample products (from me) that really weren’t ready to be produced yet. This doesn’t mean not to bow to the client in terms of the subject of the work; it does mean that I’m not ready to put my work out into the world until it’s the best it can be.

3. Produce something — every week. I make sure to produce some piece of writing, a graph, or an analysis every week for my project, which is how I keep on track. For the last few weeks, I’ve been producing drafts of the survey that will go out on Tuesday, coupled with cover letters and motivations for the project. The repetition is a little exhausting, but each week I come back with a survey and a purpose that’s more clearly honed than the week before.

4. Be confident in dealing with clients. This has been the hardest lesson for me to learn so far. I struggle not to let my Nearby Tourist City’s businesses overrule me, because majority rule only works if everybody’s on the same page. A big part of community research is educating community members to think in more logical, as well as more marketable, ways, and to look at the big picture and how they do — and can — fit into it.

The Next Step

My interest in workforce issues began the day I was told I couldn’t have a job because I was a local. Jobs, you see, go to people from other places, people who are better educated and have nicer accents and stand up straight and don’t steal… you see the stereotypes that are made here. Why, I wondered, was I none of those things because of where I had been born. It seemed a flawed system.

Moving to the mainland, I discovered that others felt that people were stealing their jobs too, not because of superiority but because they were willing to work for less. This is the immigration spectre: that we will have no jobs left, that they will be all used up, if we continue to let people come into our homelands. And yes, I understand this fear, though it shames me to admit it, because I have been the one without a job because the company wanted somebody just a little more American for it.

So here is where it began, for me, with this xenophobia of mainlanders taking jobs that we could have used and would have worked hard for. There are some complicated issues here for me, things about workforce development and community investment by businesses, but I shall put them aside in order to continue this story without too many parentheses.

Later, I went to work for a labor union, learned how to manage a budget, learned that nonprofits act like corporations or suck you dry sometimes, and that collective bargaining is a beneficial thing, among others. I am a big proponent of collective bargaining and managing a budget, but most of the other things I learned fall by the wayside and are picked up and dusted off every so often. I swallowed my pride and became a union rep.

Here, I should take a brief detour to explain that, once I did get a job, I got it at a hotel, and that unions and hotels do not necessarily get along. However, collective bargaining converted me, and I now believe that workers can and should be invested in the success of their organization, and that one of the best ways to create this investment is to give workers an equal say: let us sit down with you and discuss, rationally (and irrationally, at times), the ways that we can improve working conditions, retention, and profit.

Perhaps it is because my microecon courses have not sunk in yet, but I do not believe that short-term profit needs to be the ultimate bottom line. We need a triple bottom line: profits, people, and planet. The first time someone used this phrase with me, I began to understand what I wanted to do, and that moment of swallowing my pride to work for a union became much more meaningful.

My mother’s story

My mother works at Wal-Mart. She stocks magazines for Wal-Mart, and sometimes Lowes, everything from Oprah to Home Design to Time. Our communities no longer have the money to go to Wal-Mart though, so they’re cutting back her hours. She told me this the other day in a phone conversation, because I no longer live in the state. There were no jobs there for me. I cannot begin what will ultimately be a manifesto without telling this story of my mother and her Wal-Mart career. I am writing for my mother, for my sister, for her boyfriend, for my best friend, none of whom can get a job.

My mother began her Wal-Mart career almost six months ago, after a stint on unemployment. Previously, she had worked at a preschool which rehired staff from the mainland. She got the Wal-Mart job through a friend who also stocked magazines at major stores, but has since gone on to do some backyard childcare, making more money (and using less gas) than she had while stocking magazines. As far as I can determine, my mother works at the Wal-Mart on the dry side of the island, and drives an hour and a half to work each day that she goes, often for less than three hours of work.

Still, this job shows the office of employment that she’s making an effort, and they’re more willing to work with her when she drives to the coast to stock magazines for a few hours. My mother has not told me how much she makes at this job. She won’t. But I know that health care is thin, debt is plentiful, and she’s scared of the bank failing. The last time I went to pay part of her phone bill, it was past due. Again.

How did we arrive here? Was there a moment? Or was it a trajectory?

I cannot answer, but I can tell you that I am here, along with my family and friends, faced with an undeniable sense of urgency about the job market in America. Unlike my family, I am lucky: I have a job, an education, health insurance, and so I am the one writing the blog about jobs about change and about the urgency I feel every time my mother calls and she’s on the road to another dead-end part-time low-wage job.

I work for a labor union. As such, I am intimately involved in solving job problems every day, from answering new employees’ questions about how many hours they should be working, to determining whether people are being paid according to their contracts, to doing outreach and advocacy work with other groups talking about jobs. At my job, the word we use for this is solidarity. Usually, solidarity happens within the group, not between advocacy groups nor within coalition building. However, like so many of us, I stand between groups: my family, who live in an area that is so poor that there are literally no jobs, and my work, where people have precarious jobs, threatened by budget cuts, earmarks, occasionally inadequate skill-sets, and by a profit-driven bottom line.

We need solidarity between the unemployed sector and those of us who have jobs, between the environmental contingent and businesses, between every advocacy group and base-builder. We need solutions. We need to make sure that people can find jobs and keep them and work for above minimum wages without bankrupting their businesses or their environment. We need a new economy. We need the urgency to push us toward this economy, that slow, steady, pressure that makes us change the world.

So here we are, at the crossroads.