AskDong

Bripblap tagged me (and a few others) to make a public declaration. I believe there’s a great deal of credence to making a public declaration. Telling the world that you’re going to do something makes it much a harder to back away from that commitment. I remember back in middle school I would tell my friends who I planned on asking to dance so I couldn’t just chicken out and not ask that person. I no longer have things quite as nerve racking as school dances anymore, but there are still more than a few things I could stand to do.

So my public declaration is: I will not check my portfolio more than once a week unless I’m trying to execute a trade or creating a specific report. I’m cheating a bit here since I already acknowledged this was bit of a problem for me. Up to this Monday, I probably checked half a dozen times each day on an average day. It’s really dumb and leaves me feeling like a younger, Asian version of Silas Marner. I don’t want to be that guy.

Given that I’ve already talked (not in detail) about my first public declaration in previous post, I should make another. Declaration Two: I will start going to the gym 2 to 3 times a week again. I haven’t regularly gone to the gym since April of this year. My gym membership lapsed last month, but I have $200 available in my preventive health care account that I need to use by the end of the year that I can put towards a new membership. My office also moved over the summer and the Gym that I would be joining is in the building which might help this declaration.

And to further propagate the meme I encourage the following bloggers to make their own public declarations.

• Ms. Money and Politics
• Laura at the Green Panda Treehouse

That’s it for my tags. I was never very good at tag in elementary school.

I’ll be on vacation this week. I’m going on a 5 day cruise with my family to Bermuda. My brother was able to spot a pretty good deal back in July leaving out of New York. Since we won’t need to fly, this keeps the cost of the cruise down to just the cost of the cruise itself. The cruise fare is about $520 a person not including taxes and supplemental charges and a little over $600 with those charges on Royal Caribbean’s Explorer of the Sea, a member of the Voyager series of ships - one of the larger class of cruise ships in service today only topped by the Queen Mary 2 and the Freedom class of ships.

At just over $100/day this represents a fantastic deal for a cruise. One of the reason we were able to get such a great deal is my parents are both are over 55 and qualify for a senior citizen discount. One of the beauty’s of the discount is only one person in the cabin needs to be over 55 for the lower rate to apply to everyone in the cabin. We split the booking of my parents into two rooms, voila we were able to achieve the discount for 5 people. Even without the discount the fare would still have been a good deal at little over $700 a person.

I hope to have my regular schedule of posts, once a day during the weekday and at least one post on the weekend. However, given that I will be on open water most of the time, I can’t guarantee that schedule. I do not expect I’ll be particularly responsive on email or in comments. For that I preemptively apologize.

I didn’t mark it on my calendar, and I wouldn’t have known if I didn’t read some of my favorite blogs such as BripBlap, and Lazy Man And Money. Today is Blog Action Day. Shame on me on forgetting. Personal Finance and Environmental friendly consumption go hand in hand and it would be disservice if I didn’t take a little time to write about our personal responsibility to world we live in.

Here are the things I’m perosnally striving to be better at:

• Shop with reuseable bags. I often forget to bring mine.
• Do a better job of turning off the lights when I leave for work. Energy use during the day is both more expensive, and has a greater impact on the environment as dirtier generators are used to meet that load.
• Eat more vegetables in lieu of high production cost meat. I’m never going vegetarian, but I could probably do with eating more veggies both for my health and the environment.
• Give more money towards environmental causes, especially scientific research.

And most importantly we should take personal responsibility for our actions, and understand there is a very real cost to not only ourselves but the generations yet to be born. The biggest problem with caring for the environment is that as individuals we do not see the direct cost of the damage we cause. Not only is this damage sometimes done far away as in the case of mercury tainted shellfish, but sometimes it takes decades for the effect to be noticed as is the case with global warming. It’s too easy to hide in our shell and pretend that what we personally do has no effect since it’s just a drop in the bucket. Every drop counts.

Trent at Simple Dollar has a great post targeting “Minimum Wage”, a frequent commentator (and some would say Troll - an accusation I’ve made) on many of the personal finance blogs. J.D. at Get Rich Slowly followed it up with another post on escaping minimum wage. Even more interesting than the posts themselves are the comments. One accusation that really stuck was a comment stating that personal finance bloggers are all smug. Even though it’s unlikely any commentator was thinking of me given I’m not popular enough to have enemies, I did feel a tad hurt by it. However, where there’s smoke there’s generally fire. Maybe not a a roaring bonfire, but at least a small barbecue grill.

I personally don’t find popular financial bloggers such as Trent at The Simple Dollar, JD at Get Rich Slowly, or Flexo at Consumerist Commentary to be either arrogant or smug (or at least I haven’t noticed). However, at least in the case of JD and Trent from what I can gather were served humble pie when they were younger. They didn’t start out being good with money, and their blogs are a testament and chronicle of how they’ve reassessed and got their financial lives on track. However there are many other bloggers whom I must be included amongst who’ve never had real financial difficulties. Not only have we not had big trouble, we also do pretty well for ourselves in terms income. For readers to complain that we are out of touch with the rest society is more than fair. It’s not very hard to establish an emergency fund, max out the 401k, and Roth when you’re raking in over 100k a year. Less than 15% of all households make over 100k a year, and 40% make less than 35k. For a family struggling on 35k a year, buying insurance, establishing an emergency fund, pursuing more education, and saving for retirement is hardly a given.  At that range of income, budgets are dominated by basic necessities such as shelter and food.  While I think it’s all well and good for us smug bloggers to share tidbits of knowledge, some of us could do a better job of acknowleding our blessings.

I’m firm believer that both luck and persistence and hardwork play large roles in our personal fortunes, financial and otherwise. Fortunes (other than ones that are inherited) are not made on luck alone, nor does hard work and persistence always pay off. However, even when things haven’t worked out there is still hope. Doing nothing to better your situation guarantees that you won’t improve it. Trying at least give you a chance when combined with a little luck may lead to better days.

My article on wanting less is featured over at Money and Values. I didn’t make the first tier, but was kindly selected as the top (or at least the way it’s listed) runner up.  This is my first Ethics, Values and Personal Finance carnival, and hopefully not my last.  I do think money and personal finances can often be very tied to person’s value system for good and bad.  How we deal with money is often a reflection of other qualities.

Some other excellent articles are:

• Betsy’s rethinking Birthday gift conventions. I’ve never been fan of most gift conventions.  I much rather celebrate a birthday with gathering with friends than receive gifts.
• The baglady explores the financial injustices that immigrants face.  As an immigrant (ableit barely), I’m very sympathetic immigrants.  Immigrants are some of the hardest working people we have in America.  Sure some might not pay taxes, but I don’t really blame immigrants for that as much as the system in place.
• Tiffany talks about how and what we consume should reflect the values we aspire for.  I agree though I don’t think it’s quite as easy as buying locally and avoiding the big box stores.
• Grad Money Matters wonder if the slow and steady approach to wealth accumulation is out of favor, certainly not in the personal finance blogsphere, but it may be elsewhere.