A bazillion things going on so I'll just chat quick. :)
Matt Parrott came over last night and we hung out, congrats to him for finishing up his Grad School!!!!!!! Awesome times. So anyway I was up until 4:30am last night just reading stuff, and generally thinking about financial planning (seriously). My buddy Joel in New York recommend Mint.com which is a new financial aggregator service. It's pretty sweet - collects all your banking, 401k, savings, credit card info in one location, and then makes automatic spending charts, bar graphs, pie charts etc to show you where you spend your money every month. It's pretty cool, you can see very clearly "How much do I spend on restaurants per month", and then "drill down" more into the question, for example, "How much do I spend at Starbucks every month". Pretty sweet. So I am clearly going to find out I am spending too much on Indian Food and Pizza for delivery... I know that's gonna be the case. How much? I don't know. But last month was probably pushing $100 or $120 easily for delivered food. What an expensive habit. So I am gonna try to "curb" this (haha), but seriously I am going to focus on what I spend the most money on and see where I can tighten things up. Also I don't get ANY rewards on my current MasterCard, so if I switch it up I can probably get at least $250 per year just in a cashback rewards Visa card. Crazy. So I should obviously be doing this.
Why all the focus on financial planning? Well, cost of living is insane in San Francisco, and now that I am paying for rent and not in the gloriously free Pixar Intern Housing anymore (as was the case in 2005 and 2006), I have a LOT more costs and bills and rent is expensive living on my own too. So I need to be a bit more careful than just a free-for-all with my expenses so that I can save faster. I am rockin' my savings account again with automatic weekly payments, but I am sure I can do even better than this. I made a general goal for the year back on Dec 28th to be smarter financially. Quoting myself, "Save, save, save: stop spending on stuff I don't need, delay those purchases until later." This was mainly so that I could afford my recent trip to South Africa, and that went well but still I need to continue on this trend (and improve on it). Ideally I still could be saving a lot more than I am right now, and I want to work on that.
After chatting with Matt Parrott and over-analyzing my knowledge of the world compared to him and some of my other insanely brilliant and successful genius homeboys, I've decided that I am doing a good job in the "current news" department, and I've been working hard to keep up on politics, world issues, and the like. This is great, but I am spending SO much time on this (along with other "current news" stuff: Box Office results, upcoming film news, movies in the works, etc) that I am not spending NEARLY enough time just... reading. I have bought a few books over the past few months from Amazon, and it's literally taking forever for me just to get through Barack Obama's book. It's awesome, but man I am a slow reader. And given the opportunity, I'd rather spend 8 hrs on the computer at night (after spending 10 hrs on the computer at work all day) :) Crazy. So I need more balance in that aspect. And I have some books on the queue, I just need to put some more time in, specifically, to read them.
This blog is getting too long... splitting it into 2 posts.
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