New Beginnings

This ought to be an interesting year. Why? Because we are in 2020…and that reminds me of hindsight being 20/20 vision. Maybe this time we’ll each get it right the first time. There’ll be no need look to the past to correct errors, because maybe this will be our lucky 20/20 not-much-in-hindsight but rather present year. And also, a little tip for 2020: make sure to write out 2020 in full your important documents/checks. It could turn ugly if the wrong person gets a hold of important documents and decides to add a 1 or a higher digit it could create a lot of trouble for you. With that, let’s raise a glass to 2020! Cheers and have a fantastic year! I can’t wait to see what it brings for all of us. New Beginnings

Let’s Talk About…Finances and the Different Internet Options Available…

Hello everyone! It’s that time of year again, where we are all recovering from the holiday season energy-wise and financially as well. I hope that everyone had a wonderful time celebrating their respective holidays and traditions, as did I! Now for the nitty gritty: what are you going to do to make back the money you spent on the holidays…that can be quite daunting!

Personally, I have several options in mind, 3 of which I am actively engaged in. I’ve told you about Prosper and how you can be your own bank, but what if you don’t have the money to put up to start an account? Well, luckily enough, the online world is buzzing with opportunities to make money in ways many people never dreamed of, whether it’s a few bucks or an entire income.

Option #1: Put that iPhone to good use (other than beating all of the levels of gummy drop, that is, lol). Many folks are making a side income by becoming couriers. At this point delivery services like Instacart, Postmates, Seamless, etc., are so popular and in such high demand that you can literally apply right from your phone, and sign up in minutes. I decided to try this and I signed up with Postmates just to make a few dollars on the side. I’ve only done a few deliveries so far (I usually do one or two after work a couple of times per week), and that has helped solve the post gift buying blues by adding to my bottom line little by little, without much extra effort. It won’t buy me a shiny, new apartment, but it’s helping with the occasional bill, and I certainly appreciate that! Depending on the order size, I’ve averaged about $7-12 dollars per order, and you can do multiple orders at the same time. Different companies have different requirements to be a courier, but with Postmates you can be a walker, a bicyclist, or a driver! Check it out here, click on the link below, and give it a shot if you’d like to make a few dollars and get some exercise at the same time. Plus, you could make money and save it up to invest in Prosper, and then your small earnings turn into more without doing more work! https://fleet.postmates.com/

Unfortunately, my computer battery is now telling me that I have to go…but stay tuned here for more info about my other two ideas as well…Ciao for now and happy reading!

 

Let’s Talk About…Finances and the Different Internet Options Available…

Hello everyone! It’s that time of year again, where we are all recovering from the holiday season energy-wise and financially as well. I hope that everyone had a wonderful time celebrating their respective holidays and traditions, as did I! Now for the nitty gritty: what are you going to do to make back the money you spent on the holidays…that can be quite daunting!

Personally, I have several options in mind, 3 of which I am actively engaged in. I’ve told you about Prosper and how you can be your own bank, but what if you don’t have the money to put up to start an account? Well, luckily enough, the online world is buzzing with opportunities to make money in ways many people never dreamed of, whether it’s a few bucks or an entire income.

Option #1: Put that iPhone to good use (other than beating all of the levels of gummy drop, that is, lol). Many folks are making a side income by becoming couriers. At this point delivery services like Instacart, Postmates, Seamless, etc., are so popular and in such high demand that you can literally apply right from your phone, and sign up in minutes. I decided to try this and I signed up with Postmates just to make a few dollars on the side. I’ve only done a few deliveries so far (I usually do one or two after work a couple of times per week), and that has helped solve the post gift buying blues by adding to my bottom line little by little, without much extra effort. It won’t buy me a shiny, new apartment, but it’s helping with the occasional bill, and I certainly appreciate that! Depending on the order size, I’ve averaged about $7-12 dollars per order, and you can do multiple orders at the same time. Different companies have different requirements to be a courier, but with Postmates you can be a walker, a bicyclist, or a driver! Check it out here, click on the link below, and give it a shot if you’d like to make a few dollars and get some exercise at the same time. Plus, you could make money and save it up to invest in Prosper, and then your small earnings turn into more without doing more work! https://fleet.postmates.com/

Unfortunately, my computer battery is now telling me that I have to go…but stay tuned here for more info about my other two ideas as well…Ciao for now and happy reading!

 

Designing Your Money

Piggybacking on my last blog entry about how you compartmentalize your money…how do you design your money to work FOR you? There are so many ways you can get the most out of your dollar. I don’t mean to sound like a penny pincher, but how you use your money and where you place it can have a big impact in the long-term on whether it makes money for you or whether it stays the same amount. Think about it: do you really want to continue to trade your time for money for your whole life? Or do you want to put your money to work while you work, or while you’re on vacation, or while you’re at your kids’ baseball game, etc.? I like making money while I sleep. Soooo….that begs the question…how do you do that? There are a multitude of ways!

Banks have designed a system that really works for them. They loan you money or give you credit to use, and you get the assistance you need to pay whatever bill it is that you owe with that money, whether it’s groceries, school loans, you name it. They also must fund their own business, so they make it work for them by giving you the money in return for extra money on top, aka interest. If you’re able to pay your bill back in a super timely manner, the interest you pay would be lower than if you take a long time to pay back the money. Now that’s a smart transaction for them. You get something from them, and they get something from you. They’re making money in their sleep. They’re not spending time working for the interest, but they’re making money regardless. You can use that model, too. You can, in a way, be your own bank! It’s called peer to peer lending.

I had no idea about peer to peer lending until about a year ago. There are many platforms that you can choose from, but the two most popular ones are Lending Club and Prosper. As an investor with peer to peer lending you can log on to the platform and search through the available loans. They are graded in slightly different fashions on each site, but mostly some form of A,B,C,D,E, and HR, with A being the lowest interest rates but the customers with the best concoction of information (credit score, income, percentage of credit used, rating, etc.) and HR being the highest interest, but considered the more risky loans to invest in. In my next blog I will go into more detail about how this process works and what strategy (so far) has worked for me.

This is what I consider designing your money. Instead of simply earning it, you’re creating a system in which your earnings make you more earnings without trading your time. It’s a gradual process, but it’s interesting. I highly encourage you to think about how YOU think about your money, and how you utilize it to its full value. Keep following my blog for more information weekly, and enjoy your day!

Ciao for now, and as always, please consult a certified financial professional for all of your big financial decisions. I’m simply here to enlighten and help, but I’m not a financial advisor.

Designing Your Money

Piggybacking on my last blog entry about how you compartmentalize your money…how do you design your money to work FOR you? There are so many ways you can get the most out of your dollar. I don’t mean to sound like a penny pincher, but how you use your money and where you place it can have a big impact in the long-term on whether it makes money for you or whether it stays the same amount. Think about it: do you really want to continue to trade your time for money for your whole life? Or do you want to put your money to work while you work, or while you’re on vacation, or while you’re at your kids’ baseball game, etc.? I like making money while I sleep. Soooo….that begs the question…how do you do that? There are a multitude of ways!

Banks have designed a system that really works for them. They loan you money or give you credit to use, and you get the assistance you need to pay whatever bill it is that you owe with that money, whether it’s groceries, school loans, you name it. They also must fund their own business, so they make it work for them by giving you the money in return for extra money on top, aka interest. If you’re able to pay your bill back in a super timely manner, the interest you pay would be lower than if you take a long time to pay back the money. Now that’s a smart transaction for them. You get something from them, and they get something from you. They’re making money in their sleep. They’re not spending time working for the interest, but they’re making money regardless. You can use that model, too. You can, in a way, be your own bank! It’s called peer to peer lending.

I had no idea about peer to peer lending until about a year ago. There are many platforms that you can choose from, but the two most popular ones are Lending Club and Prosper. As an investor with peer to peer lending you can log on to the platform and search through the available loans. They are graded in slightly different fashions on each site, but mostly some form of A,B,C,D,E, and HR, with A being the lowest interest rates but the customers with the best concoction of information (credit score, income, percentage of credit used, rating, etc.) and HR being the highest interest, but considered the more risky loans to invest in. In my next blog I will go into more detail about how this process works and what strategy (so far) has worked for me.

This is what I consider designing your money. Instead of simply earning it, you’re creating a system in which your earnings make you more earnings without trading your time. It’s a gradual process, but it’s interesting. I highly encourage you to think about how YOU think about your money, and how you utilize it to its full value. Keep following my blog for more information weekly, and enjoy your day!

Ciao for now, and as always, please consult a certified financial professional for all of your big financial decisions. I’m simply here to enlighten and help, but I’m not a financial advisor.

Who Owns Your Money?

I get excited every time I go to deposit money in the bank. That may sound a little too much, and maybe it is, but it’s the truth. I like seeing the numbers go up. For a moment I forget that very soon those numbers will go dooooooowwwwnnnn. Rent, health insurance, credit card bills, medical bills, school bills, voice lessons, acting classes, they all take so much money. It can be very overwhelming sometimes. There’s a sense of pride when we see the numbers going up in our accounts, and rightfully so! We’ve worked hard! You know, this is kind of an uncomfortable thought, though…if you think about it, that money’s not really ours. It may be for just a moment (and enjoy it), but in the end, it’s not ours to own. It comes and goes. It’s frightening at the end of the day once you realize that the actual amount of that money that you’ll get to enjoy for YOU is very minimal. Money, in some part, can be compartmentalized in our lives. I’ll explain.

I have struggled with money for a long time. It seems that my bills are always higher than what I make. I decided to try an experiment recently. I dedicated every shift at my job to paying off specific bills. Rent came first, then school loans, etc. I began to think of the money that I was making as not my money, but the landlords’ money, the loan organizations’ money, and so on and so forth. It was a harsh way to think about it, but it really opened my eyes to just how much was MY money. Compartmentalizing my money helped me take care of the essentials first, and then I could see how much I had left for anything else. Someday I hope to not have to do that, but in reality I’ve come to realize that money is very much based on a mindset: how we think about it has a lot to do with how we handle it. How do you think about the money you make? Is it yours? How do you compartmentalize? I’m very curious and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section. Happy reading!

Who Owns Your Money?

I get excited every time I go to deposit money in the bank. That may sound a little too much, and maybe it is, but it’s the truth. I like seeing the numbers go up. For a moment I forget that very soon those numbers will go dooooooowwwwnnnn. Rent, health insurance, credit card bills, medical bills, school bills, voice lessons, acting classes, they all take so much money. It can be very overwhelming sometimes. There’s a sense of pride when we see the numbers going up in our accounts, and rightfully so! We’ve worked hard! You know, this is kind of an uncomfortable thought, though…if you think about it, that money’s not really ours. It may be for just a moment (and enjoy it), but in the end, it’s not ours to own. It comes and goes. It’s frightening at the end of the day once you realize that the actual amount of that money that you’ll get to enjoy for YOU is very minimal. Money, in some part, can be compartmentalized in our lives. I’ll explain.

I have struggled with money for a long time. It seems that my bills are always higher than what I make. I decided to try an experiment recently. I dedicated every shift at my job to paying off specific bills. Rent came first, then school loans, etc. I began to think of the money that I was making as not my money, but the landlords’ money, the loan organizations’ money, and so on and so forth. It was a harsh way to think about it, but it really opened my eyes to just how much was MY money. Compartmentalizing my money helped me take care of the essentials first, and then I could see how much I had left for anything else. Someday I hope to not have to do that, but in reality I’ve come to realize that money is very much based on a mindset: how we think about it has a lot to do with how we handle it. How do you think about the money you make? Is it yours? How do you compartmentalize? I’m very curious and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section. Happy reading!

The city’s gorgeous late at night, when it’s just you, the lights, and the buildings that bustle by day…

I’ve found that ambition has a price, so I’m trying to revel in the beauty of the moment while working to make my dreams happen. 🙂

My Current View…

It’s currently 12:45 am on the East Coast. I’d love to be in bed. This is my current view. At first glance, you might think “why would she bother to post that?” It’s just a random, blurry building. Well, I had this thought on the way home from my job: this is what I do to make my dreams a reality. I should document this. These moments are part of what makes me who I am. When I first started this blog, I told you it would be about my adventures in this crazy city. Well, sometimes adventure isn’t always a fun thing. Dreams take work. They take sweat, and, as Debbie Allen put it in Fame “and right here’s where you start paying.” This is my view after working a very hot, sweaty, tough night shift that ended quite late. I’ll be back tomorrow. And the next day. And countless days/nights after that. It’s what we do as artists to survive (and not only artists do this, I’m sure). It’s hard. We work til all hours to pay for those lessons, make those auditions, get those head shots, put food on the table…and you know what? It’s all worth it. It builds tough, strong people. It builds a lot of character. So cheers to random sights at odd hours of the day. They’re good reminders that you’re following your dreams, you’re making the sacrifices, and you’re living with passion. For that you should feel good. Sleep well. You deserve it, dream followers.

Working On Making My Dreams A Reality