CK Blog

I checked my 401K online and so far this year, I am down 10.7%! Yikes! What is really killing me is the company stock that they provide as my match, which is now down over 63%. I usually move everything out of it during my rebalancing, but it still builds up. My other funds are International down 5.8%, Institutional Index down 4.6%, Large Cap Growth down 0.2% and Intermediate Term Bond is up1.3%.

I did give some thought to stopping my 401K for the moment to have some extra money to build my emergency fund and pay off some stuff, but hated the thought of missing the match and so forth. I know some people would just consider not doing the 401k unthinkable, and part of me agrees, but in certain cases I think you can justify it.

Note: This following post is sponsored.

There is an increasing focus on the environment and reducing the impacts on the planet through actions such as recycling. For instance if you walk into many grocery stores such as Wal-Mart and you will see a big collection bin for recycling your plastic grocery bags that seem to multiply all around you. What happens after you recycle your items? Companies such as Raw Polymers Ltd. purchase plastic, recycle it and sell it as raw materials to others.

High Density Polyethylene is the type of plastic commonly used in your milk jugs and similar items and can be easily recycled. According to HDPE Scrap, over 60 million tons a year is produced and then just thrown away! Imagine how much landfill space could be saved if just 20% (12,000,000 tons!) were recycled and reused in the manufacturing process as raw materials. Regrind HDPE explains the process of how material goes from being big bales of plastic into HDPE regrind that can be reused into their new lives as items such as bottles and pallets.

Later this week, I get to go on a road trip to help setup a new site for work. It is my first one with this company and probably the last one as well. They are getting new (to them at least) equipment, so myself and another person will be going to train them on the equipment and keep the work flow going so our processing deadlines will be maintained.

A good part is the company is advancing the money for the trip since employees in general pay for the hotel, meals and car rental and then get reimbursed later. The trick will be finding meals within our budget since the other people who have made this type of trip before have said the costs are a lot higher than my quaint midwestern city is.

Do you ever feel like you have reached this page? The Internet for its vast amount of information and data can seem overwhelming in its ability to suck up time and yet sometimes feels so small. Think about it for a second, I am willing to bet if you looked at your Internet usage over time, you mostly tend to stick to a really small group of regular sites and subject areas.

I know there have been times I have checked my RSS feeds, hit a few other favorite sites, and hit the what now point. On the one hand, you feel like surely there must be something else to read or check, its the Internet after all, but it also feels like okay I’m bored there is nothing else here to do why am I even trying.

I try listening to that little voice as much as possible and just shut the computer down at that point and do something else. I usually have a nice stack of books from the library I am working through and projects that needs a little time on even if they never seems quite finished. It comes down to priorities in life and I am trying to get better at how I make use of my time. I do not always select the right option, but I am working on it!

In an unpacked box somewhere in my apartment, sits two little pieces of paper that confers onto me degrees from an institution of higher education. I took a bunch of classes in subjects related to the degree’s subject and got a lot of student loan debt to prove I was there. Thanks to my current workplace making a few “changes”, I now get to spent plenty of time deciding the Quo Vadimus (where are we going) question about my life and career.

My current job is not related to either of my degrees, I could easily do this job without ever stepping foot at college. In fact, I did the job during the last part of getting my masters degree. It paid decent thanks to lots of overtime and gave my some breathing room to pay my student loan bills while I applied for areas in my degree field. It was a little bit of a curse though career wise, it was easy to get a little comfortable and not rush as much about looking for a “better” job thanks to the pay and mindless ease of the job.

I guess my biggest problem (I know I am rationalizing so hang with me) is facing the question of meaning vs. pay. In my degree field, the jobs are not known for being exactly high paying until you really start getting up the organizational ladder and even that is no guarantee. The upside though would be having a lot less trouble telling people what I do for a living. One classmate of mine is doing fundraising at Yale, another got a little write-up in the local newspaper and so on, and I know several have gone onto nice jobs or promotions since we graduated. In my case though, I get the “…you have those degrees, so what are you still doing in that job” question. I rationalize the pay aspect, but it only holds so much water.

I can think of so many things I wish I had done differently career wise so far, maybe I will learn from a few going forward.

Checking my email tonight includes a “Important Service Notice” from Peerflix letting me know that they are discontinuing their Marketplace and DVD buy/sell/trade aspects of their website. Peerflix had been a website where you could list DVD’s that you owned for trade with others. If you were buying, you would pay a small transaction fee and the marketplace price set by Peerflix. If you were selling, you could sell for the marketplace price with the postage paid by the buyer.

It was one of those seemingly good ideas that just did not take off in the end. There were complaints from sellers about the marketplace prices being too low. Some movies were priced a lot lower than what you could buy them from places like eBay, Half.com or Amazon.com. Halfway through their existence, Peerflix did a big upgrade and switched from a credit based system to a dollar based system that caused issues within the trading community.

In the end what seemed to kill it was the marketplace though, you had lots of buyers with no trade cash or sellers refusing to sell at the prices set by Peerflix. I know personally I would go through looking for a movie and see lots of haves (people with the movie and willing to send it out) with little wants (people with trade cash (TC) to buy). In my case, I have 38 movies listed in my Peerflix account, only 1 movie (Seabuscuit at 3 dollars) has a “want” with trade cash.

A market economy can only survive if there is a balance in the system of buyers and sellers.
Here is a example from my own account of the problem:
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: 51 haves (15 ready to send) vs 4 wants (0 with TC)
Men in Black II: 71 haves (32 ready to send) vs 6 wants (0 with TC)
Lollilove: 1 haves (0 ready to send) vs 7 wants (0 with TC)
The Beatles – A Celebration: 8 haves (2 ready to send) vs 0 wants (0 with TC)
Trapped in Paradise: 32 haves (16 ready to send) vs 0 wants (0 with TC)

Trapped in Paradise is a particular sore spot with me thanks to the Peerflix upgrade. I had built a few credits up in my account. For some reason, I had added this movie somewhere in my account even though its not exactly on my must have right now list. No big deal, I had not recieved any movies from the system anyways. Then Peerflix made the big switchover with their upgrade and suddenly they send me that movie along with a couple other movies that were in some list I had, but not exactly DVDs I were craving. Now I’m stuck with some movies I couldn’t unload if I tried even though its my fault for having not removed them completely from my lists.

Bye Peerflix, you were a nice little experiment into a trade economy, better luck next time.

All over the news lately are stories about consumers facing more and more credit card debt problems. I wonder why that is…

Then I checked my mailbox when I got home tonight. Inside I found, a catalog from some company that I will never buy anything from, junk mail from Comcast, a HIPPA notice from my health insurance company, and …

• American Express Preferred Rewards Green Card
• American Express Cash Rewards Card
• Disney Rewards Visa Card
• Debt Conslidation Loan offer
• and of course a credit card bill.

I recently saw a post by The Frugal Guy that presented the Financial Risk Advisory System, a parody of the government’s terror alert system. While it is meant in part as a tongue-in-cheek system, it does help you consider where you are at in your personal finances and what steps you might consider to improve your situation.

In the not so distant past, I could consider myself in the Blue zone, making ends meet and doing okay but had room for improvement. Lately I have been slipping down the scale into the solid yellow and dipping my toes into the orange zone. It was a two part cause, first I was not as disciplined as I should have been and I had a change in living arrangements that increased my expenses. I do not believe I was ever overly excessive in my spending on discretionary items, but could have tightened the strings a bit more. A larger part of my problem was boundary and enabling issues, otherwise known as a big problem saying no to certain people who “borrowed” money, which diverted money that could have paid down debt or gone towards a bigger emergency fund.

I have been pretty lucky to get a good deal of overtime in my current job which has kept me mostly in the yellow zone now. I do not have cable TV nor do I go on vacations to far away lands. I still have some fluff I could squeeze out of my expenses, but it is not so big and horrible that I can’t survive with them in my life. I have been getting less overtime at my job though and I’m seeing some of the consequences of my past problems with boundary and enabling issues which I have made some improvements on, but still is not perfect.

I’m facing a possible red zone though as my job is going away in less than two months as the company moves my department to a new city. I will get some severance so that will help a bit, but need to clamp down more and solidify plans in place to deal with the issue and move myself back to better threat level.

Warren Buffet has issued his annual report to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway. It is always a good read full of information not only about his companies, but also investing and the economy in general. There are archives of his letters going back to 1977, be sure to check them out as well.

Have you heard about Payperpost? It is a service for bloggers to make money with sponsored articles on various topics. The sponsored topics available of course will vary depending on your blog’s category I have to thank Krystal from Give Me Back My Five Bucks blog for pointing me into learning more about Payperpost. I had read some news stories and various blogs postings over time about Payperpost, but Kystal’s site provided a real life example of someone successfully using the system with their blog. It has seemed to work out really well for her and I would hope to have a similar successful experience with Payperpost.

Briefly, you look through their opportunities; pick topics that are relevant to you. Then you write about it based on the guidelines provided, the post gets reviewed and approved, you get paid…easy!. It is free to join and provides some extra money that can help pay for your hosting fees or even more depending on the amount of your traffic and opportunities. I do not have some grand plan yet of what I might do with the earnings from Payperpost, but I am sure I could figure out a few ideas when the time comes.

Have you gone already and checked out their website yet? If not, hurry up and click! =)