I read an article over at Clever Dude about how he won’t pick up a penny that reminded me of all the money that can be made by simply picking up stuff - especially if you can pick up stuff in massive volumes. Now granted, $550 dollars worth of pennies over a nineteen year period is no promise of great wealth, especially when you consider that accumulating even that paltry sum would require you to find 8 of the sexiest presidents ever every day. I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t happen to me - and I look!
So, to a certain extent I can understand how someone might pass up a penny. Yet I also see My Good Cents’ point in the fact that money is money is money. Just because $0.01 is 1/100,000,000 of $1 million doesn’t mean that pennies are bad or worthless. They are just the smallest step you can take towards that sum. Since I think My Good Cents has the more compelling argument I have found something else to help supplement my random change finding on my goal to $1 million in found money - recycling.
In the glorious state of California we charge people to drink most of their favorite beverages. Monster, Coke, Fanta Orange, all varieties of beer, bottled waters, and certain juices all have a very special tax on them, or at least their containers do. The CRV tax stands for California Redemption Value and it adds on $0.05 to $0.10 for every container you buy. Buy a 24 pack of water - you get $1.20 added to your bill. Buy 5 2-liter bottles of Coke - $0.50. You will never see this money again unless you return the container later. Here is the money making scheme - return other people’s containers for them, especially when they choose to leave them on the ground.
Walking by a empty can in California is just like walking past a shinny nickel, it just takes a little effort to get turn that can into a nickel. The state has made this relatively easy by requiring there to be places to redeem your recyclable goods near the places that you purchase them. This amounts to having a recycling outfit near every major supermarket in my area. It does take some time and effort so riches through recycling may not be for everyone.
At its peak in our household, we were finding scores of cans each week and our biweekly trip to the recycling center would net us between $15 and $25. It was like finding 131 pennies a day. What could you do with 131 pennies a day? Well, you could …
- Cover the costs of sponsoring another child through World Vision and be able to contribute an additional $60 to a birthday or holiday gift
- Buy 21 Invisible Children bracelets and help create jobs and change lives in war torn Uganda
- Provide 2% of the funds needed to build a water gravity system in Sierra Leon through the work of the Africa Well Fund, impacting many people for years to come by giving them access to clean, disease free drinking water
A penny really does matter.
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Posted in Poverty ~ 1 Comment
Two of my articles were in carnivals this week. My article on taking advantage of your public library was an editors pick at the Carnival of 20-Something Finances, Haiku Edition over at Dollar Frugal. Brooke’s haiku summed up my entire article in 17 syllables. Here’s her haiku, it will save you from reading my 395 word article:
The other article that got included was the one about hard selling telemarketers from India. It got included over at the Carnival of Personal Finance over at Green Panda Treehouse.
Here are some of the articles I found interesting this week:
Tip Diva offers some useful suggestions for eating on a budget. She reminds us not to be wasteful and that things are not always a screamin’ deal when they have little voice boxes on them that shout out your deepest and darkest personal secrets until you place them in your cart - like that can of Jiffy peanut butter did the other day. My wife swore she couldn’t hear it - I think she was lying.
Change Your Tree reminded me just how brilliant I am for having something like our Regular Expenses Savings as a line item in our budget. His article used a less obtuse name for this category of funds, but I’ll make you click on the link to find out what it is. Oh, I’m such a tease!
The Baglady reminds me why I’ll probably never be a ’somebody’ at a place of employment - because I’d probably use every single one of her Tips for Surviving Meetings even when the meeting is that long, that boring, or that lame. I really need to get my act together … or do I!
I also liked the article over at fabulous finances that taught me how to play hard ball about a raise … like that will ever happen. I especially liked the part where I was encouraged to leverage a potential position outside the company to get a bigger raise. It reminded me about how Michael Scott tried to leverage a raise by threatening to withhold sex from his boss. Threats must be a good idea.
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Posted in Money Misc. ~ 1 Comment
I personally think that work is a very good thing. When I really think about it, it just seems like humanity is designed to be productive. We are made to make. We are partial to production. Wired for work. And yet there is another fact that seems to stand in stark contrast this - work sucks. It can be boring, annoying, frustrating, unforgiving, time consuming, stressful, draining, and unfulfilling. In other words, work as a concept seems good, but work in practice is lame. Work is the good suckiness.
I mean how many people do you know who would still go into their jobs everyday if they didn’t have to make the money to survive, or buy little Timmy braces, or Peggy Sue a Jetta, or Tiberius a legion? I certainly wouldn’t. I go do something else that would seem more fun. Only after a long period of initial ‘relaxing’ - where I’d watch marathon after marathon of Law & Order, Walker Texas Ranger, The Gummy Bears, and Fraggle Rock, relive my childhood by listening to George Harrison’s “I Got My Mind Set On You” time after time, and slept like a madman - only then would I probably tire of that pointless existence and start trying to do something that would actually matter.
If I really had my choice, I would just be a dad. I mean that seems like the best ‘job’ in the entire world to me. You get another chance to love someone unconditionally, and for the most part it is relatively easy to do so. You get to see your child grow into a human being, with a personality all their own. You get to see your child’s mind develop and learn how they think and why they think that way. Everything you do can make a positive and lasting impact on the rest of your child’s life. It will be such an adventure to be a dad.
But part of being a dad is also about providing for the needs of your family, and in my case I will probably experience the cost of fatherhood as well as the joy. If I do not work, my family will not eat. There are no professional fathers. I won’t get paid millions of dollars, or be in any commercials, or make it on any sexiest-man-alive lists by making sure my child’s life is filled with love. So I must work at something other than what I’d ideally like to do in order to make what I really want to do a reality. I think I can handle that. Being a good dad is enough motivation to want to work at something I don’t see as an ultimate good. In fact, I think it is enough for me to even like the sucky job I have, given enough time.
Here are the things I am trying to consciously think to break past the lameness of labor and help make my work more fulfilling:
- My family can’t eat if I don’t earn. I want to express my love for my family by giving of myself for the sake of their well being. My working is ultimately an expression of love for my family - and boy do I love my wife!
- My family can’t grow if I don’t increase my earning power. It costs money to feed two people. I imagine it costs much more to feed eight. If I can’t earn more money then I can’t feed more people. I can work hard and develop my marketable skills in order to make myself more useful to my employer, increasing the amount of money they give me.
- Work is good in theory so work on making the theory a reality. There are different things I could do to accomplish this: change jobs, focus on what I like about my job, ask for more tasks doing things that I enjoy, get training on something I like, etc. The most important thing for me right now in this area is probably learning to focus on the aspects of my job I really like and try to grow in the areas that I don’t. I think that if I abandon my current job now I will loose a quality opportunity at a quality company to learn about what it means to persevere when things are not always enjoyable.
I’d love to hear anyone else’s strategies or ideas for dealing with work. Got comment?
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Posted in Work ~ No Comments
