My Life

I just gave myself a $18,642.80 Raise

Aug 13

People don’t always directly associate expenses and income, and very seldom calculate taxes when they do. Here’s how I gave myself a $18,642.80 raise with a few phone calls and a craigslist ad. Your mileage may vary.

I called Comcast and asked them to cancel my landline phone and cable TV (retaining Internet). They offered to cut my rate to let me retain all three services. I declined. They offered an even lower rate. I accepted.
Total Savings: $1080 per year.
Total amount I’d have to earn at a 33% tax rate to earn that money: $1436.40
I called the Seattle Sailing Club and canceled my membership. I love sailing, but at $200/month I wasn’t using the boats enough to justify it. There are hopefully places around town where I can rent boats from time to time, but I’ve also got a few friends with boats who invite me from time to time, so I’ll likely get my sailing fix there.
Total Savings: $2400 per year.
Total amount I’d have to earn at a 33% tax rate to earn that money: $3192.00
My wife and I made a commitment to eat out more at our cheap favorites and limit our extravagant favorites to once a month. Our favorite cheap-eats places have outstanding meals and we’re always delighted to go there. Also on the plus side, this make the extravagant favorites a slightly more special experience.
Total Savings: $2160 per year (replacing 3 $100 meals with 3 $40 meals per month)
Total amount I’d have to earn at a 33% tax rate to earn that money: $2872.00
I’m selling my sportscar. I’ve got a bit of cash in it and have been paying $600 a month (to pay down the principal faster). I don’t get a ton of joy from cars, and can’t find a way to justify owning an expensive one. I’ll be buying a cheap 4-door sedan with the cash that I get from selling the car. While most people don’t have a $600 car payment, most people DO pay monthly payments for a nicer car than they could afford with cash. There are plenty of reliable vehicles for sale– why pay a monthly premium just to have a shinier and newer vehicle? If you get a lot of joy from cars, of course, this might be worth it. But how many great family vacations could you buy with this money?
Total Savings: $8377.44 per year (payment plus estimated insurance for comprehensive coverage and a more expensive vehicle)
Total amount I’d have to earn at a 33% tax rate to earn that money: $11,142.00

As I said before, your mileage may vary. The point of the exercise (for me) was to look at all optional recurring expenses and do an honest analysis of just how much happiness and satisfaction they generate when compared to the cheaper alternatives. The changes above don’t substantively change the quality of my life and bring me that much closer to my goal of having my passive income (from real estate, investments, etc) cover my life-expenses. It also, as an entrepreneur, frees my money up to invest in more interesting (and potentially lucrative) things.

Life News – So Long Jobster!

Jul 11

I generally don’t use this blog for life news. I figure if you know me well enough to care about what’s going on in my life, you probably would already know anything I could mention. But, given that this particular tidbit has professional ramifications, I figured I’d throw out a short post.

At day 366 of my tenure at Jobster, I submitted my resignation. For those of you who haven’t been keeping score at home, Brian Fioca and I had sold a small web startup to Jobster about a year ago. Working at Jobster was a pretty amazing learning experience in a lot of ways, but it became clear to me that I am better suited for smaller and more early-stage companies.

My current professional plans are to keep my eyes peeled for the “next big thing”, preferably a very early-stage startup with considerable equity opportunities.

In the meantime, I’m doing a bit of consulting work and working on RescueTime (which has some potential to be the aforementioned big thing). I’ve already taken on two short term consulting gigs (both with startups) that are pretty darn interesting. Given that I was gone from Jobster for all of a week (the week of July 4th at that), I’m pretty comfortable saying that there is a fairly endless supply of consulting work to be had.

Nonetheless, I’m always keeping my eyes peeled for more. So if you bump into an opportunity that seems like it might be a good fit for me, let me know!

RescueTime Blog

Jul 05

Brief note to let my dear readers know that we’ve set up a blog for RescueTime. Right not it’s not that active, but will eventually contain lots of interesting things that we can learn from our anonymous users. By asking them a few questions, we’ll be able to look at how productivity differs by gender, age, industry, and more.

For now, we’ll tide you over with a long-n-wordy case study on our permissions marketing campaign and a link to my appearance on Dave Mason’s syndicated radio show. Good fun!

People read this stuff?

Jun 27

Most of my personal hosting sites are hosted at a shared hosting company called Dreamhost. They’ve had some growing pains and certainly can’t handle any significant traffic, but they are a great host for dabbling (if I’m doing anything serious, like Jobby– now sold and gone– or RescueTime). They also have the benefit of hosting as many different domains as I want under my plan.

Dreamhost had some sort of hiccup after midnight last night, resulting in TonyWright.com being functionally dead in the water.

By the time I got in front of a computer this morning (9 hours later) I had 4 emails letter me know (3 from complete strangers). It’s heartening as hell to know that perfect strangers are trying to read my blog and making noise when it’s not available. Cool!

This charges me up to get back into blogging a bit, so stay tuned.

Oh No! Children are killing the planet!

Jun 13

(this is totally unrelated to anything I’ve blogged about before)

A friend sent me a link to an old article on SFGate.com about the environmental impacts of having children.

Two delightful excerpts:

“Hall and his colleagues found that a single new American born in the 1990s will be responsible, over his or her life, for 22 million pounds of liquid waste and 2.2 million pounds each of solid waste and atmospheric waste. He or she will have a lifetime consumption of 4,000 barrels of oil, 1.5 million pounds of minerals and 62,000 pounds of animal products that will entail the slaughter of 2,000 animals.”

Wow.

Another gem:

“In terms of energy usage alone, [which is] a convenient measure of environmental impact,” Knight says, “the average Ethiopian uses one 310th of what we use. So when an American couple stops at two kids it’s like an Ethiopian couple stopping at 620.”

This makes me wonder at the irony of passionate environmentalists driving around a couple of kids in their Prius’. It also makes me wonder if every single dollar we spend on environmentalist causes oughtn’t be redirected to things like birth control education, birth control research, and free vasectomies.

The right to freely reproduce is so sacrosanct in this world (and especially in the US) that people get REALLY uncomfortable when discussing (or even thinking about) the relative immorality of reproduction.

RELATIVE. I’m not going to go so far as goofiness like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. I’m all for continuation of the species. But can we set aside our love of sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood and think about the consequences of our actions?

One parting thought. When I talk a bit about the fact that my wife and I don’t have any plans to have children, most parents sadly shake their heads. “You don’t know the joy that you’re missing” or “You’re going to be so lonely when you’re old,” are common responses. From what I can tell from this article, there is no apparent relationship between having children and happiness/contentment/satisfaction (the only exception being if you WANT to have children but cannot).

(for the record, I eat meat, drink from paper cups, drive when I feel like it, and occasionally don’t recycle. So I’m throwing stones from a bit of a glass house, here)