Tuesday, January 30, 2007

ON SELLING MY CAR

I'm trying to sell my car and the whole process feels like I'm chewing on broken glass.

OK, I admit, chewing broken glass would hurt considerably more than selling my beloved car. However, this experience has re-affirmed for me how little preparation school has given me for one of the most important skills I will ever need in life: negotiation.

It is a skill I will need to draw upon when making the most important financial decisions of my life. Accepting a job offer, buying a mortgage, making a car purchase and, yes, getting out of cleaning the kitty litter; they all require the effective use of negotiation.

The sale of my car should go through tomorrow. If it goes through, or even if it doesn't, I will make my first series of entries on what I have learned on negotiation.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

YHAT THE GEEK

I'm an utter geek when it comes to finances. I download my expenditures to excel every month, categorize each item, and build a monthly pivot table report to measure how much I spend on groceries, gas, beverages, etc. I recently used last year's expenditures to build a monthly budget. You can download the Google spreadsheet here. It allows me to track my actual to expected expenses.

As an aside, I'm still trying to figure out all the functionality behind blogger (e.g. how to post, change the look of the page, etc). I managed to add a menu with the Google spreadsheet link and I hope that people are able to download it.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

INTRODUCTION

Here we go: we're starting her up. What will follow is a personal blog on my various interests: personal finance, statistics, literature, and how to keep the cats' litter in that damned box. It goes everywhere, you see (i.e. the blog and the litter). The blog will hopefully help me practice my writing skills. But it's main purpose, I believe, will be to balance my consumption patterns; to counteract life's skewness towards consumption, not production.

Here is how I hope it will work. Entries will be made bi-weekly and will concentrate on subjects relating to personal finance. Ideally they will be data oriented. The goal is to see how quickly one can get 500 people to read this. On second thought the number will be reduced to 100, just in case it turns out I hate blogging -or, more likely, until I figure out that I really hate writing.

WHY HAT?

B equals: x-prime x(to the inverse), x-prime, and y.