FiLife

The story goes that some folks in a bar asked Ernest Hemingway to write a memoir in six words. His answer:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”

From the legend spawns a book from the folks at Smith magazine, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure. The book, which comes out this week, is a compendium of six-word biographies from celebrities and everyday folks proving that indeed, less can be more.

And since we’re all about poetry and life stories here at FiLife, our editorial team took a stab at writing our own personal- finance biographies using Papa Hemingway’s way. Here are our lives in money, in six words. Not more. Not less. (more…)

Like most people, I imagine my upbringing has a lot to do with how I view money today. You either adopt your parent’s views or you run in the opposite direction. I adopted.

The most valuable lesson I learned at a young age was to save for the future. Save for things you know are going to happen, such as college, but also save for the unknown. For my family, the unknown came when I was in high school and my mother lost her job. As if the financial impact wasn’t enough, my grandmother passed away from a stroke complication several months later.
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Personal finance was never really that important to me growing up. Sure, I had an allowance in middle school and a few after-school and summer jobs in high school, but things like budgeting and investing were never really that important.

When I was a senior in high school, I came across a way around my biggest overhead cost: whenever my gas light came on, I’d trade cars with one of my parents for a day or two. It never failed: next time I hopped in my ride, the needle would be hovering somewhere between three-quarters and a full tank.

Then came last August, when I suddenly found myself stranded on the island of Manhattan, attending a private college with no meal plan (and no mother making sure I had three meals a day) in the busiest and most expensive city in the country.

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My family did not discuss money when I was growing up. We had enough to pay the bills and take the occasional West-Coast ski trip. My parents paid for my sisters’ and my college educations (to this day I don’t know whether they had to borrow to do so.)

After I graduated, a few former Eph teammates recruited me to join their company. At their urging, I followed the path that so many young, clueless English majors at fancy liberal-arts schools do – to investment banking.

Having learned at home not to talk much about money, I thought little of it once I had my own. While working at Robertson Stephens (now defunct), I spent countless late nights analyzing potential clients’ financials but rarely looked at my own bank statement and other important mail.

As a result, I paid bills late and didn’t bother setting up a 401(k). Never having struggled with money much, I just assumed I’d be rich later and retirement would take care of itself.

I became better at managing my own money when my next job required me to offer financial advice to others. At Cambridge Associates, I helped major endowments plan their investment portfolios – and finally set up my own 401(k) using some of the same recommendations.

Saving felt good, capturing a return was fun and I was hooked on investing. All along, I’d been nagged by the desire to write, but it was easier to make a living peddling financial advice. I finally mustered the courage to believe that I could do both and took a flier on Stanford’s journalism program.

There, I quickly felt the pain of living on borrowed money. Splurging translated into treating myself to Campbell’s Chunky instead of the basic, condensed tomato soup mix. As I withered away, my parents took pity and sent frozen steaks (and an occasional check).

Though I achieved my career goal by landing at FiLife this month, the student-loan debt and the journalist’s salary sometimes make my heart race unpleasantly when I type the phrase “personal finance.” At least now I have the tools I need to help others be financially savvier than I was in my younger days. So let’s get going.

Mom and Dad, I know it’s shocking, but we’re talking about money here.

– Kristen Sullivan

I owe much to debt.

Many of the major decisions in my life have revolved around that four-letter word. And I am actually grateful for it. Debt is much maligned, but it shouldn’t be. The willingness to take on debt can indicate faith in a better future. 

Of course, you can believe too much. (more…)

If you haven’t been to Las Vegas recently, get there now! Didn’t you hear, they’re handing out money. Grants at the airport. Franklins at the casinos.

Sadly, it’s not true, unless you are a card sharp. But that delusion alone is what motivates my friend Dave and me for jaunts across the country.

Back to the everyday, there is real free money to be had everywhere you look: cash-back credit cards, high-yield money markets, special offers, coupons, rebates and even good, old-fashioned haggling. I’m not looking for handouts; I’m just heeding advice from my mother. Flush with cash from lifeguarding one summer, I was going to lunch at Bernie’s when my mom offered to pay. I kindly rejected. Here she set me straight: “If someone offers you money, no strings attached, you take it.”

I’ve extrapolated that to institutions and daily life. If the bank across the street consistently offers better rates than your bank, cross the street. See a better rate with another credit card? Switch — it only hurts once. Even my wife has become a proselyte. Recently, she was in our local supermarket and saw an unwitting consumer about to dump nearly $50 in coins in the Coinstar machine, which takes 8.9% of every dollar. Across the street, at Commerce Bank, coin counting is free. She basically handed the guy $4.45. Wouldn’t you take it?

(Coinstar is working towards fixing this discrepancy by charging no fee if you’re willing to accept Amazon or iTunes gift cards instead of cash. In truth, they are simply shifting the fee to their partners, who pay for access. Then again, Commerce Bank is eating the cost as well.)

Cashback cards are the darlings of my wallet. Discover offers 5% cash back on certain merchants throughout the year. This month, it’s service stations and hotels. I just have to remind myself every time I fill up to grab the red, white and blue card. For a while, Citibank’s cashback card offered 5% on groceries, drug stores and gas stations until they cut that rate to 2% several months ago. Now the 5% cards are an endangered species – only American Express still offers one widely, and only after you spend $6500. All such lucrative cards come with their own fine print.

As with any transaction involving money and profit-striving institutions, obfuscation abounds. Now, FiLife – myself included – is here to shine a light.

– Ari Weinberg

When I was four, my godmother gave me and my big brother piggy banks, with the hopes that between playing with Legos and watching Transformers, we would learn and practice fiscal responsibility. They sat side by side (mine was pink, his was blue) in our living room, staring off into space, gaudily reminding us to feed them with lucre.

Thing was, my brother told me that his blue bank was mine. So for months I eagerly deposited my hard-earned allowance, birthday funds and pennies found on the sidewalk in his bank — gleefully thinking that I was being responsible when, in fact, I was funding my brother’s Pepsi addiction. This continued for several months until my mom spotted me skipping to the blue bank to insert my latest room-cleaning funds. My mother calmly explained how my brother rooked me out of months of cash and to this day, we all joke that my brother owes me back payments-with interest.

Perhaps as a result of getting ripped-off as a wee cherub, I’ve been paranoid about my money ever since. I’ve never had any credit-card debt, I stash away savings regularly, and I’ve written countless scholarship essays to fund my education. I listen with rage as my friends tell me about their ballooning debt, I clench my fists on the phone with financial-aid officers and I shudder when shoes I bought at full price go on sale the next day.

I now report live from the trenches of college. I’m a senior studying journalism and politics (two fields that foster my youngest-child obsession with fairness), and I regularly fight the battles of tuition hikes, inflated textbook prices and the rising cost of a slice of pizza. I’m fairly new to the personal finance beat (I’m used to writing about robotics and wine more than annuities, 401(k) plans and all the other gobbledygook out there), and as much as I occasionally relish reading the works of personal-finance crustwads, most of my money-related issues involve wrinkled dollar bills, post-it notes and credit cards loosely roaming around my purse. Sometimes, when I see my various e-statements all nice and neat (through no effort of my own, of course) on my laptop’s screen, I think I have my crap together. I don’t.

So here I am: less vulnerable than when I was four, but on a feisty crusade to ensure that my frequently manipulated demographic doesn’t unknowingly put their money in the wrong piggy bank. As for my brother? Well, he’s now fighting a raging battle with credit-card debt and loan payments. So there.

–Mary Pilon

Up until about a few years ago, my financial discipline resembled something like this.

It wasn’t that I was rich, mind you, just profligate. Indeed, if I had been rich, it wouldn’t have been much of a problem. Instead, I slapped down the Amex/Visa/Carte Blanche with wild abandon. I made sure I had enough in my bank account to cover the rent, the cable bill and my bar tab, and then promptly stopped thinking about money.

But then, in relatively rapid succession, things happened, as things often do. First was the whole marriage thing, followed by a jump into the wonderful world of home ownership, and culminating (so far) with the birth of a big, bouncing baby girl last year. Within three years, I had gone from being footloose and fancy-free to quasi-responsible.

And during that time, I wound up working as an editor at The Wall Street Journal and Money, which was convenient: I needed a crash course on mortgages, term life insurance, 529 Plans and a ton of other things, and many of the people who work there eat and drink those subjects for a living.

So I got wise. But I’m not a Jedi yet. I’ve only been at this thing (being responsible) for a couple of years now, and there are still issues I need to tackle. I hate my bank, for example, and want to get the hell out of there. I have 401(k) plans and IRAs scattered around like Wilt Chamberlain has children. I’m renovating the bejesus out of a new apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens. Oh, and I’m also trying to play with my kid, go out to dinner with my wife, watch way too much TV and help build a new personal-finance website too.

While I do want to master my money, I want to do so in a way that doesn’t take over my whole life. Do I know some stuff? Sure. Do I need some help too? You betcha. But I’m figuring that between what I know and what everyone else can bring to the table, we can actually get our respective financial houses in order–so that we can get back to doing the things we really want to be doing.

–Sam Grobart

My husband and I went apartment hunting again this weekend, and we actually found something we could almost afford. It was on a hopelessly ugly commercial avenue in Brooklyn where the air was thick with exhaust, while the building itself was sandwiched between a gas station and a car wash. They were asking more than half a million dollars.

The quest to find our first home has quickly spiraled from a fun Sunday activity to an all-consuming state of being and prism through which I currently view life. I eye other couples at open houses and wonder what they do for a living and how much they’re putting down. As for the women pushing babies in Bugaboos down my tree-lined block in Brooklyn? Of course they own.

There’s a reason we’re a couple steps behind: just as I wiped my slate clean of student loans and credit-card debt, my husband went back to school, which ended up costing us about $75,000.

He decided to get his bachelor’s degree in history after a long and successful career as a model, which he’s been doing since the time he was “discovered” in a San Francisco elevator at 19. He graduated magna cum laude in 2006, which is great, except that it left us in magna cum debt. It’s not quite as bad as it could be – we started paying down his loans while he was still studying and later consolidated at a low interest rate. We owe about $38,000.

Today, we’re saving every penny from his modeling jobs - he books about a job a week - as well as from a hosting gig on a MSNBC.com travel show. We’ve accumulated enough to buy a great place – in Peoria.

As for me, I arrived at FiLife after a stint at CNBC. I spent the better part of my career at Dow Jones Newswires, where, for ten years, I wrote about banks, credit cards, and the oh-so-sexy world of exchange-trade funds – both for the wires and The Wall Street Journal. During my last three years there, I penned a personal finance column, where I wrote a lot of stories geared at helping the super wealthy whittle down their tax bills while I struggled to pay mine. Go figure.

We’re financially responsible and live relatively well – but not nearly as well as we’d like. We make a lot of compromises, though sushi is a consistent theme on our credit-card statements. We’d like to spend our one big vacation a year in Europe or Asia – instead, we spent the past five years at my grandparents’ vacant condo a block from the beach in Florida. I’d like to buy nicer furniture; instead, I live vicariously through my subscription to Elle Décor.

Worrying about spending too much on spicy scallop rolls feels decidedly sophomoric. I mistakenly thought those days would have ended by the time I hit 30.

So here we are. I’m in the same boat as many of you. I hope we can start a dialogue, learn from one another, and have some fun along the way.
–Tara Siegel Bernard

I worship my wife. I adore my daughter. But you never forget your first love, and for me, it was the frequent-flier mile.

It wasn’t love at first sight. The flimsy card from American Airlines arrived during my junior year in college in 1991. I didn’t start going steady with the airline until three years later, when I went to work for Fortune Magazine. There, the travel office let us put the 38% corporate discount towards personal travel, and I was hooked.

For the next eight years, I roamed the U.S. and beyond. There were stories on Mediterranean islands and all over the U.S. I interviewed the subjects of my books in person, wherever they were. Dinner for ten? I charged it to my miles card and collected cash from everybody at the table. By age 27, I had platinum elite status on AA and qualified for permanent elite status a few years later, when I passed one million miles in lifetime earnings. My first love enabled my true love and me to fly first class to Australia for our honeymoon.

Little did I know, however, that the frequent-flier mile would push my career in an entirely new direction. I went to work for The Wall Street Journal in 2002 to help launch the Personal Journal section. I had no particular expertise, except for a finely honed instinct for exploiting loopholes after years of running up my frequent-flier balance. As it turned out, squeezing extra miles from an airline was good training for explaining to readers how they could avoid bank fees and scrutinize college-savings plans.

By 2005, I had taken my act to the Money & Investing section of the Weekend Edition of the paper, where I created a new column called “Green Thumb.” At root, I defined my beat as beating the system, whether it was life insurance or college savings or trying to redeem over $20,000 worth of miles and other loyalty points in a single year.

I love getting this stuff exactly right. I hate when I screw it up. I’ve learned a lot along the way. And now I’m going to use it to help bring FiLife to life.

– Ron Lieber