Jennifer Lynn over at Broke-Ass Student tagged me for the blog meme asking the question “why do I blog?”

Blogging has been a long, strange journey for me. Poorer Than You is not yet two months old - a baby compared to other blog, and especially compared to my writing history. I started writing at the tender age of six, when I started my own newspaper for kids, called the Kid’s Gazette (and I still go by the moniker kgazette to this day), which I was the Editor-and-Chief of for seven years, up until the tender age of 13. Yes, I had employees - staff writers who contributed articles for 10% of the issue’s profits. Yes, I had profits. It was my first business and my first foray into “writing for the masses.”

The next year, in the February of 2001, at the age of 14, I started my first blog. That means I’ve been blogging for six years, which makes me feel old, despite my youth. My first blog was actually fictional - I experimented with whether or not I could fool people with a fictional diary, which is something in the vein of LonelyGirl, although I certainly didn’t do it as well. After a few months, I tired of it, and began anew, with a diary that was actually mine. I bounced around for the next couple of years - writing in a blog for about a year, then moving to a different service and password protecting the old one.

In 2003 I started “Green Moths,” my ultimate diary blog. Started the summer before my junior year of high school, it extends into the present day. These days, I don’t write in it more often than every few months, and it’s been pushed into the “password protected” realm while I work on this one.

In this time, I also started a blog at LiveJournal, but I tend not to count that one, as I basically used it to post quiz results and random rants. I kinda hate LiveJournal, to be honest. I only got the account so that I could comment on my friend’s journals.

This little history lesson hasn’t really answered the question of “why” I blog. There must be a reason for me to continue an activity such as this for so long. A lot of it is simply the writer in me. When I was young, I wanted to be a writer when I “grew up.” As I discovered this wasn’t actually a profession in and of itself: you can be a journalist, or a novelist, or a screenwriter, but you can’t really be just a writer - or, at least, that’s what I was told.

As my profession of choice changed (ballerina, to teacher, to writer, to ?, to CSI, to filmmaker, to ?), I continued to always write, and always on my own terms. I always wanted to keep a diary, but I was always insanely slow at writing my hand, and lighting fast at the keyboard. When I discovered so-called “weblogs,” the idea just fit.

Nowadays, blogging isn’t about keeping a diary for me. Sure, all this nostalgia has me hankering for logging back into my diary and writing a post, and maybe I will, but when I discovered personal finance blogs, it was a case of “new interest meets old,” and the pieces fell into place.

In the end, I blog because my fingers will type whenever they get near a keyboard - a blog is just an excellent place to channel that activity, and get my brain involved in the action.

Finance Guy at Money and Sense, Gradgal at Grad Getting Out of Debt, and Living Almost Large, I tag YOU to answer the question… why do you blog?

ISPF over at Grad Money Matters interviewed me, as well as

Golbguru from Money, Matter and More Musings,
and English Major from An English Major’s Money

as part of Ethics, Values & Personal Finance Week.

Yeah, that’s a lot of links all at once, so, here’s the interview. Start there.

Being an affliate doesn’t just help me - it helps you guys! I just got an email from Upromise telling me that if any of you join Upromise (using that link) and add a credit or debit card to your account (these cards will never be charged), Upromise will deposit $2 into your new Upromise account. There was no word on how long this promotion will last, so you might want to snatch it up now!

I have already sung the praises of Upromise, but if that didn’t convince you, maybe two free dollars will!

I think I’ve become an unintentional Compacter! For those of you who don’t know, Compactors are people who strive to reduce their environmental impact and increase their frugality by not buying anything new (except for food and health/safety items). I looked at my Excel document of expenses for 2007, and here’s everything I’ve bought:

• Gas for my car, 3 times (most Compacters try not to drive, but that’s impossible in my area, and I haven’t been driving very much)
• Clothes ($3.00 for the sales tax when I used a gift card)
• Netflix (one month, I signed up for it to get $20.00 back from CashDuck)
• Groceries
• Car payments (on my used car)
• Credit card payments
• Car wash (to keep the salt from the roads from eating my car alive)
• One garbage plate (it’s food… sort of!)

The new clothes, the Netflix, and the car wash might not fit exactly into the Compacting mentality, but then again, I wasn’t trying!

I think from now on, I’m going to continue my “loose compacting,” regardless of how much money I have coming in. Not buying anything new reduces my environmental impact and my clutter, and it leaves me more money to pay down my credit card debt. So, I’m going to Compact (sort of) until that debt is gone!

Yes, I love WOWIO even more now. My free iPod shuffle, which I got for referring 10 people to WOWIO, came today. Isn’t it lovely?

Want your own completely free iPod shuffle (that’s right, I didn’t pay shipping or anything)? The promotion is still going on. Check out WOWIO, and sign up. At the end of the registration process, when it asks who referred you, put

vanpattenjames@gmail.com

This is my friend’s email address, and will help him get his iPod shuffle. Why should you bother to credit my friend, you ask? Well, because it will give you good referral karma, which will help you get YOUR ten referrals! So once you’ve signed up, convince ten of your friends that WOWIO is a truly awesome service, and have them sign up, crediting your email address.

It’s very, very easy (I managed to convince 10 people in two days), and WOWIO truly is a great service.

Also, if you sign up under the email address above, feel free to send me an email using my contact form. Once my friend has his 10 referrals, replace his email address on this page with the first person who emailed me, and once they get their ten, I’ll put up the next email address, and so forth. This page, as of June 2007, still gets several hits from search engines every day!

(Number of people I’ve referred who have also gotten their own iPod shuffle: 4)

The war over direct-to-mail DVD rentals continues, even in my own house. My mother has both Blockbuster Online* and Netflix* this month, and she’s torn over which one to keep. On the one hand, she can easily return her Blockbuster DVDs to one of their physical stores, and come home with even more movies - and there’s a store not far from her place of work. Seems like Blockbuster might be the better value, for her.

On the other hand, she doesn’t like the way the categories are on the Blockbuster site, and there still isn’t as good of a selection. And, Netflix introduced a new feature last month: Watch Now. Streaming video, on your desktop, free. You get as many hours as dollars you pay for your plan (my mom is on the $15 plan, so she gets 15 hours of free streaming video a month). The feature isn’t available to all subscribers yet, but it’s being rolled out to everyone over the course of the next 6 months. Looks like my mom got in on the ground floor, because I can access the feature from her account.

So, who’s winning now? Well, I can’t tell you who my mom will pick. She really seems to be taking advantage of the Blockbuster in-store exchange, so we’ll have to see at the end of the month which she chooses. But if it were me? I’m still partial to Netflix. Bigger selection, funding of independent films, and streaming videos are all major pluses to me (I already watch LOST and other shows that are offered free on the network websites). Also, I wouldn’t use the in-store exchange of Blockbuster very often. Not that I have the money for video rentals, but, you know.

*Affiliate Links

*Straps on bonnet and apron* La-de-da, I am just trolling the internet, reading the blog of a friend of mine who is planning her wedding! What is this I have found? Oh my! Adorable custom cake toppers! These are amazing! I shall click this pricing link out of curiosity! WTF?!?!?!??!

$2,300 for a cake topper?!? Oh, and look! You could add other people (the in-laws? the minister? David Bowie? who else would be on the cake topper with you?) for only $1,150 a person!

So… waste of money? I think you already know what I think.

The past few weeks, I’ve been sitting tight, waiting money from different sources that’s owed to me. Not quite a good as getting a job, perhaps, but at least something is coming in. All the money that’s due to come in already has a use tagged onto it. So I got thinking, what would I do with the money if someone handed me $X right now? Well, when X = …

$0.99: To my change jar it would go!

$10.00: Into my wallet, where it would eventually be spent on food (at least that’s what my Excel document titled “Expenses” tells me I usually use cash for)

$100.00: Into my checking account, where it would sit until my next car or credit card payment.

$1,000.00: Hmm… as the numbers go up, I have to think longer. I’d pay the $400.00 I still owe the school (argh), then put $200.00 towards my credit card debt, then put the rest in my checking account for future car/credit card payments.

$10,000.00: First I’d make this sound: “SQUEE!” Then I’d pay the school the $400.00, pay off my credit card debt completely, pay the interest from my unsubsidized student loan, take my car to the mechanic, buy a bunch of shirts from mondonation and give them away, and then put what’s left (~$7,000.00 depending on how much my car costs to fix) in my high yield savings account for school expenses.

$100,000.00: Buy a trampoline. I’m serious, I’ve always wanted one. Then, I would pay the school, pay off my credit card, pay OFF my student loans, take my car to the mechanic (yes, even with $100,000, I wouldn’t replace my 1996 Oldsmobile - I mean, it’s only got 47,000 miles on it!), loan my mom about $10,000 to fix certain things with the house that will make it sell for more, max out a Roth IRA for the year, give $10,000 to a charity (haven’t decided which one, yet) and put the rest in my high yield savings account for school expenses.

$1,000,000.00: Faint.

Yep, I’ve been reading a lot of Suze Orman lately. It’s not entirely on purpose, however. This particular book, The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, I read because it was free. Not even “trip to the library” free, but free free. It was sitting on the bookshelf outside my bedroom door - my mother had purchased it way back in 1997, and judging from the placement of the bookmark, didn’t get very far through it.

Which is a shame, because she really should have.

While reading this book, I have to compare it to her other book, The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous & Broke. My brain won’t let me not compare them. I’d like to keep this review very short, so here goes:

This book is meant for adults (older than the YF&B crowd) who are in some sort of minor financial trouble. “Minor” meaning still living paycheck-to-paycheck, no matter what your income, or having a fair amount of debt that you don’t know what to do with, or just having general clueless-ness about finances (”major” would be complete bankruptcy and poverty, I imagine, and this book would not be helpful if you had no resources at all). Obviously, if you fall into the “young and broke” category, then her other book would suit you better. But if you know someone who’s a bit older and struggling with their money, you might want to read it and recommend that they do so as well, so that the two of you can begin to talk. It’s obviously also a good read if you yourself feel you are in such a situation.

I enjoyed reading this book, because I did learn a lot of things that weren’t covered in YF&B, and I liked the anecdotal nature of the book (almost every topic is discussed within the framework of a story from one of Suze’s clients, or Suze herself). I’m really hoping to get my mother to finally read all the way though this, so that she and I can begin talking about finances. It will be nice to have read the same book and literally be on the same page.

A quick aside: some of the information was outdated, because I was reading the original edition, but the book has since been updated. However, the last edition seems to have been printed in 2000, so you might want to double-check any specific information from the book before acting upon it - then again, you should double-check any financial information, regardless of when it was published!

After reading on My Money Blog about how easy (and free!) Pear Budget is, I downloaded it and gave it a look-over. I was impressed - because it runs in Excel, the document size is practically nothing. It’s well thought-out, and easy to use. Unfortunately, I could also tell it wasn’t for me. I have two monthly expenses right now: my car and my credit card payment. Besides that, all I really buy is gas for my car. I keep track of all my money’s comings and goings in a Excel document that I wrote myself, and although I was in love with Pear Budget, I knew our time had not come yet.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t find someone else to thrust it upon! While I was in LA, I set it up for The Fella. I uploaded it into Google Docs and Spreadsheets, because The Fella works from two different computers, and I wanted him to be able to access it from either. Some of the features (such as the red triangles) don’t work in Google Docs, and some of it looks a little funny, but all of the basics of the program still work.

The reason Pear Budget is good for The Fella and not for me is that he has actual expenses and income, living on his own and having real jobs and the sort. Basically, this program might not be useful for anyone college-aged or younger, but once you’re living on your own, I highly recommend it. It’s free, it’s super easy, and because of Google Docs, you can decide whether you want it to be online or offline.

I like it!