Back home

Training is over.  Vacation isn't, but I'm back in my fortress of solitude.  Updates?   Dunno.   Back to work on Monday, so I've got a few days before anything major happens.  

Not really a vacation

I'm currently in Addison (Dallas/Ft. Worth area) for training.  Traffic sucks.  Though I have to admit, the people here drive decently.  I think the speed of traffic generally weeds out the failures better than it does in small towns. 

Maybe there will me more later.  I'm on vacation until November 2nd, so we'll see.  

Things I'll only say once.

The entire government debacle is humorous.  I’m not getting in to my side of it all.  Just saying it is humorous.   I know I’ve spent a lot of time working to get myself away from any sort of government assistance.  I know how tough it can be.  But frankly, I don’t give a damn.  You want government assistance?  Jump through their ridiculous hoops.  Let some person half way across the globe that doesn’t understand your situation and doesn’t even try tell you what you should and shouldn’t do. 

I don’t think so.

I don’t advocate violence.  What I advocate is working until you have worked yourself out of the need of government assistance.  Because their kind of assistance is debilitating and doesn’t help.  I’ve worked 80 hours a week, and I did it for more than a year.  I worked countless hours of unpaid overtime.  And in the end, I got raises because I was better at my job than everyone else was.  Because my company got to the point of fearing losing me. 

Government assistance?  I don’t think so. 

Make a plan and sacrifice.  Learn what it’s like to live without a TV and how to read a book for entertainment.  Make a budget and stick to it.  Try things, and if those don’t work, try other things.  Work like an animal.  Be better than the next guy.  Get a lesson in how to be a rhinoceros.  Learn the lost art of self sufficiency and self determination.

If anything, all of this should make a lot of people mad.  And mad people do things to change their lives.

C#

So I’ve recently started messing with C#.  I think I like it.  It seems more robust than VB without the need to do absolutely everything that comes with C++.  Don’t get me wrong, I still like both languages.  It’s just that a drag and drop editor is a great and awesome thing.  There is no longer a need to spend six hours trying to do something ridiculously simple.  Plus, C++ has been jacked with so much in the last few years I can’t even seem to get a simple console program to compile anymore.

Anyways, I think with learning any language, the real goal is to find something to do with the language.  Learning something is much easier if you have a problem to solve.  So for work, I had a problem to solve and that facilitated learning C#.  I’ve got backups to that run here and there.  That works great, but really, if you aren’t sure your backups are running and up to date, then what good is the automated system?  So I needed a checks and balance system for the automation I put in. 

I ended up writing a console application that checks for the existence of all the backup files, and then checks the age of those files to see if they have been updated in the time frame I expect them to be updated in.  After all that is done, I send myself an email to let me know how the backup went.  Now, all I need to do is fix the formatting, and set it up as an automated Windows task.

While writing this post, I decided I only wanted a negative response.  Meaning, I only want to know about things I have to take action on.  So I changed the info to do just that.

The other thing I want to say is exercise caution with the MSDN forums.  Sometimes, they are quite useful.  Other times, they are a filled with snarky jerks trying to put people down.  It basically sounds like “you don’t know how to do that?  You’re so stupid!”.  I called out the last idiot that decided to do that.  So yeah, be prepared for jerks.  Don’t take it personal.  It’s a forum, and people on forums are naturally jerks. It’s well documented.  

$110,346

$110,346

In my non-intelligent phase, I’ve looked and griped about how little I’ve made.  I’ve been frustrated, annoyed, and hateful at times.  For a long time, it was always someone else’ causing me to not make much of anything.

History has a tendency to kick us in the butt and tell us how stupid we’re being.  Despite my gripes and definite gaps in time, I’ve made $110,346 in income since August 2010.  See, in judging amounts, I look way too short term.  Just a blind grasp at what is really happening, and no ability to see the big picture.  It’s rather sickening when thrown against the spectrum of time. 

Really, I was doing this as a way to see how much my gas reimbursement has been for the year.  I was doing this in response to the idea espoused by a previous blog post and follow up.  10% isn’t that much in the scope of the entire amount, but it has taken a couple of weeks to build up the gas account to the point where it can stand on its own so it doesn’t get completely drained during the week. 

Of course, that point the brain starts planning on how it can spend that money, even though technically it’s for car repair, gas, and maintenance.  The amount will never be enough to pay the car payment and insurance consistently, but it could cover it every once in a while.  But the real thing is the lack of movement on my debt.  And that is the thing that concerns me the most.  Money comes in.  Money goes out.  It’s basically going to take every single debt the maximum amount of time to hit payoff and leave me.  And I don’t like that.  I want to accelerate that in any way I can.

Income wise, the gas reimbursement sits as both a high amount and a high expenditure.  As long as the amount keeps increasing on a weekly basis, then things are going well.  It has been, and the stress of keeping my vehicle in fuel has left.  So now I’m thinking of what I can do to get out of debt.  Any little bit helps, and I have no problems running nickel and dime.  Because nickel and dime is what most people do to themselves and end up broke.  Twenty bucks here, twenty bucks there.  Do the same thing against debt, and the debt slowly but surely falls away. 

Circular questions

Contemplating why is a very circular question.  When thinking about “why” something should be done, I often end up back at results of the why and not the “why” itself.  Let me give you an example. 

Say you want to start a new business.  The result of starting that business is money.  But that isn’t why you started the business in the first place.  Because money isn’t enough of a motivating factor to keep you going through horrendous times and the growing pains of starting a business.  And, as Simon Sinek said “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it”.   So if you are just doing it for money, what happens when you lose a lot of money?  Then you quit.  But if your “why” is something greater and grander, then you continue regardless of whether the money is flowing in or flowing out. 

The second reason of the why is to use WHY to figure out HOW.  If you know WHY you should do something, you can then determine the best HOW to accomplish the WHY.  Is the solution or business you have created best equipped to solve your problem?  Very likely it is not if you didn’t start with WHY.

But back to the original idea.  Unless there is a WHY, everything else is pointless.  And finding a good “why” is complicated.  But then, once the why is figured out, everything else falls into place.

The $20 in your pocket (part 3)

I still haven’t answered the question I asked yesterday.  I think the problem is still relevant, but I don’t know the answer.  It’s a problem that requires us to look at the whole scope of what our life is doing now in order to formulate a plan on what we should be doing.  The end result of that “should” is something we need to create a life that will sustain while we do other things.  Money without work, as you were.  And that really, is the goal. 

I’m not talking about free money.  I’m talking about money earning more money, and providing the end user with enough money so work isn’t a requirement.  It’s the point at which you can enjoy a semi-permanent retirement that I want.  The goal is not to retire.  The goal is to get to the point where you don’t need a job you don’t like to make money and pay the bills.  Once that position is reached, then one has to spend time doing what they feel they really want to do, as opposed to what makes the most money. 

And I think I figured out the answer while taking a shower this morning.  The answer is to pay off debt.  Paying off debt yields the best rate of return (so long as you don’t charge that debt back up again).  Now, unless your investments are great and awesome, more than likely you are getting between 6 and 9% annual rate of return.  Which is about the same rate of increase as all the debt you happen to have.  Unless you have credit cards, and then it’s like 14%..  But think about this.  If I pay off an extra $20 on debt, then that is less debt to accumulate interest so the debt gets paid off faster. 

Now, the psychological part of the game is convincing yourself of the math that you already know is correct.  Because paying off debt really doesn’t seem like investing or getting a rate of return.  Maybe that’s the next question to answer.