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In-Home Photography Studio and Hiring a Maid Service

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I’ve rearranged my dining room to function as a small photography studio. I haven’t had much time, but this metamorphosis should give me more opportunities to practice photography. Since this might involve people visiting my home, I finally stopped procrastinating and called a maid service. Upon some recommendations, I found a local office of Maids.com. They will be sending over a four-person team tomorrow, which also forces me to organize my living space a little bit more today.

The service is a little more expensive than I expected. After tomorrow, though, I’ll have a good indication of whether it will be worthwhile to have a regular cleaning schedule.

Part of the reason for my procrastination is the idea that I should be able to clean the apartment myself, but in reality, I just don’t do it well enough. I have no problem calling in the professionals — and paying for it — as long as they perform better than I would, save me time, and have an affordable service.

Here are some interesting articles I’ve enjoyed recently.

Four Expenses You Must Negotiate. This list by Miranda Marquit includes medical bills. This is one type of negotiation I have not tried — mostly because almost all of my medical bills are simply handled by my insurance company and I have had very few out-of-pocket expenses. The Health Care Blue Book allows people to search for the average price of any medical procedure in the local area, which might be able to help with negotiation the same way the Kelley Blue Book can often aid with car price negotiation.

Will Mac OS X Lion Kill Quicken 2007? Nickel points out that the newest version of the Apple computer operating system will prevent Mac users from running Quicken 2007, the last full version of Quicken for Mac. Quicken Essentials for Mac was released more recently, but the software is missing many features that many Quicken users have come to rely upon. Nickel is looking for replacement software to avoid working around the problem using Parallels, but I think he’ll be disappointed. Without Microsoft Money being developed, there is no serious alternative for those who use the deepest features of Quicken.

How Much Should You Spend on Self-Improvement? J.D. asks his readers this question. Self-improvement is an important piece of living a satisfied life. It is valuable to evaluate yourself and decide what needs to be changed to be the “ideal you.” I think most of self-improvement is based on gimmicky motivational programs. I will spend money for classes to improve my skills, like in photography, but I will not spend money for seminars to improve my sense of self or my productivity.

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Amazon Kindle, Chapter Three

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Amazon’s 3rd-generation Kindle e-reader, set to be released on August 27th, had me worried for a little while. My gadget-y friends and I often wonder aloud about upcoming features and technology advances, and many of them assumed Amazon would try to make it more like an iPad. As a happy owner of a 2nd-generation Kindle, I figured that would be a mistake.

The Kindle is for reading books, and the iPad is a tablet computer. Yes, there is a web browser on the Kindle, but it’s clunkiness relegates it to “emergency browser” status. So, I was scared that Amazon might feel compelled to try to add color to the Kindle, or more applications, or a touch screen, or any number of features that would make it less of a device for reading books. Thankfully, they haven’t.

Instead, they focused on improving the reading-in-sunlight situation, speeding up the page-turning time (which doesn’t currently seem slow to me, it’s always turned pages faster than I would with a paper book), making it lighter and sleeker and introducing crisper fonts. There is a mention of a WebKit-based browser, same as on the iOS devices, but they even went so far as to point out that it’s experimental. Amazon seems committed to making an excellent book reader, and limiting its features so that it does one thing really well, much like Apple started taking over when it committed to making an ideal MP3 player.

In doing so, and by keeping the price of the new device the same or lower than the old device, Amazon is taking the right page out of Apple’s playbook, while simultaneously refusing to compete with their products. That all seems incredibly smart to me. The only thing they haven’t done is created an intensely compelling reason for current Kindle owners to upgrade. The 2nd-gen Kindle is already kind of perfect, and though 1st-gen owners might be tempted, I don’t think they’d feel a need to upgrade, the way I felt a need to upgrade from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4.

I doubt that bothers Amazon. The Kindle apparently has been added to the most Wish Lists, been given as a gift more than anything else, and has the most 5-star reviews of any product that Amazon sells, and Amazon sells iPods.

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How To Combine Finances for Couples

This article was written by in Family and Life, Featured. 10 comments.

When a couple marries or otherwise commits to be in a long-term relationship with each other, the question of whether to combine money usually arises. The debate about whether what could be called “his money” and “her money” should become “our money” is endless. Different arrangements work for different couples, and this article doesn’t address that question.

Those couples who do decide to combine finances often stop at the minimum. They might create a joint checking account for shared expenses like rent or mortgage payments but don’t make an effort to take co-ownership of the complete financial picture. I have not been in a situation that warranted a combination of finances, but I’ve given the issue some thought.

1. Agree on life goals. This isn’t necessarily a pure financial concept, but your money depends on what you want to do with your life. Being wealthy is not a goal because money is nothing but a tool to help you achieve accomplishments that are important to you.

It may be safe to assume that a successful relationship stems from agreement on world views and major life goals, but work out the details. For example, what will retirement look like? What is the philosophy about philanthropy? Will you leave an inheritance? Opening the communication about these larger issues, and finding compromises if necessary, enables a better decision-making process.

2. Combine basic spending and savings accounts. As mentioned above, this is usually the first and last step couples take. This is easy: open a joint checking account at your favorite bank. Even the question of whether each individual in the couple contributes the same dollar amount, the same percentage of income, or some combination, is one of the easiest questions you’ll have to consider when combining finances.

This step is easiest when each side of the couple produces roughly the same amount of income for the same amount of work. Perhaps a better way of looking at this question is considering how much each individual should keep for his or herself, making the shared account the default.

3. View investment portfolios as a whole. More difficult than an income disparity is a risk tolerance disparity. There could exist a couple wherein one individual is comfortable putting most of the family’s long-term wealth in the stock market for a better chance of growth over that period while the other would prefer the funds to be safe and less volatile. This couple will have a more difficult time finding a compromised solution.

My company offers tools to manage the risk of my 401(k) investments, but the facility of tools like these are limited. If my 401(k) was my sole investment, this automated questionnaire-based tool would be sufficient, but it takes neither my other investment accounts nor a theoretical spouse’s investments. Rather than relying on these tools, a couple should manage their risk in total and make sure they asset allocation and diversification is in line with goals and needs.

4. Work together to pay off debt. Like merged assets such as bank accounts, a committed relationship also turns “his debt” and “her debt” into “our debt.” It’s in the couple’s interest to pay off debt as quickly as possible. This can certainly not seem fair, particularly if one side of the couple worked diligently to pay off debt while the other slacked.

As long as trust, honesty, and open communication are a part of the relationship, there should be no surprises.

5. Everyone is involved. I’ve seen couples where one person handles the finances and the other prefers to have nothing to do with the details surrounding money. I understand that not everyone has an interest in personal finance, as much as I wouldn’t like to believe it because fewer people interested means fewer people reading Consumerism Commentary, and so I accept that not everyone wants to deal with the bits, bytes, cents and dollars. Each couple needs only one person in Quicken or Mint tracking finances with that level of detail. Perhaps some of the bill-paying duties, however, should be shared.

A business partnership is different than a life-long committed relationship. In a business, perhaps only one person handles the finances. In a couple, taking care of money is like taking care of children. Both will grow and develop best when everyone is involved.

How have you succeeded in combining your finances — and your life? If you have decided to keep your money separate, why was this the right choice for you? For everyone, combined or not, what obstacles have you encountered?

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What the iPad Is and Is Not

This article was written by in Consumer. 42 comments.

I’m an Apple fan, which I define as being anybody who takes time out from the workday two or three times a year to watch their media events and keynote speeches. I’m happily using a Mac Mini as our entertainment hub at home (Boxee, Front Row and Hulu Desktop? Yes, thanks), I use a MacBook Pro for work, and both my wife and I have an iPhone.

Earlier this week Apple showed off their forthcoming device called the iPad, which they explained is something in between a laptop and an iPhone (or iPod Touch). They pointedly contrasted it with Netbooks, as well they should, since tablets and netbooks serve different purposes. If you sold hardware, and you had to decide which aisle to put the iPad in, you’d put it in the “tablet” aisle.

The rumors and speculation leading up to the reveal were rabid and annoying, as is the resulting disappointment and backlash. I admit I was initially disappointed, too, but I gave myself some time for the information to percolate, and here’s what I’ve concluded.

It’s the User Interface, Stupid

There will always be a kind of person who can’t understand Apple’s appeal. All they see is another computer, but more expensive. My main problem with Apple used to be that you couldn’t buy software for it in the mall, you had to use a catalog, but the Internet fixed all that. I spent more than ten years suffering through Windows before I finally had the resources to switch. And I’m happier for it, since I’ve found that Apple developers think through many more user scenarios than their Windows counterparts do. The interface just makes more sense to me, but it’s clearly not for everyone. You have to unlearn a lot of Windows before you can learn OS X.

“It’s just a huge iPod Touch.”

There’s only one positive hardware difference between the iPad and the iPod Touch: it’s much bigger. But I’ve never had trouble reading anything on my iPhone. When something is too small, I just zoom in. So at first, the iPad was looking nearly useless.

At the Apple event, they made one huge mistake, which was that they didn’t show off any third-party apps which took advantage of the bigger screen. (Gaming might be enough for some audiences, but not yours truly.) They showed off some existing apps, but zoomed them in. Whoops. It wasn’t until the next day that I started imagining special iPad-sized apps for, say, Nurses, or engineers on oil drilling platforms, or cruise directors, or stage managers at fashion shows, maybe. You know, people that you often imagine holding a clipboard. People that need to see a lot of information at a glance.

Is It an E-reader?

Apple talked about the iPad being great for books, newspapers and magazines. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried reading an entire book off of a normal computer screen, versus something that uses electronic ink like Amazon’s Kindle. I have, and I failed each time. It simply hurts the eyes. I tried the Kindle app on my iPhone, and had the same problem. I will reserve official judgment until after it starts shipping and I get some reviews from normal folks, but my suspicion is that it’s not good for reading books.

Is It an iPhone Replacement?

I would say that if you already have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you won’t be replacing that with an iPad, if only for this reason: it doesn’t fit in your pocket. That means you can’t plug in some headphones and take it outside to go rake the leaves.

“That keyboard looks weird to type on.”

I agree. Especially in the preview video, when typing with both hands, it looks awkward. But then I remember that I had the same doubts when the iPhone was new. In fact, the software keyboard was, in my opinion, going to make or break the iPhone’s success. Then I taught myself to type on it, and it’s fine. I’m hoping that with the iPad, you’ll still be able to reach around with your thumbs and type that way. I’ve gotten pretty fast.

“What’s this about no multi-tasking?”

While I haven’t personally found much need to run simultaneous apps on my iPhone, I can understand the usefulness. Contrary to some reports you may have heard, you can listen to music while using other apps. That is unless Apple has grown more stupid since the success of the iPhone, because I can do that on my iPhone.

What It Does Well

To summarize, I think the iPad will be good for:

  • People who often carry clipboards
  • People who spend too much time on airplanes (because of the battery life)
  • People who sell books, magazines and newspapers. If you’re in this group, please consider choosing just one business model instead of insulting your subscribers with advertising.
  • People in the entertainment industry. It’s likely more effective to show off your demo reel on a tablet screen as opposed to a mobile phone screen.
  • Helpless early-adopters and interminable show-offs. (Not judging, I swear. I love you guys. You let me play with the shiny toys before I decide if I want to buy one.)

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Still Having Problems With TIAA-Cref? Tell Us Now

by Luke Landes

On July 20, TIAA-Cref will be holding its annual participant meeting. There is an effort underway to encourage the company to be more socially responsible and accountable to its customers, and representatives will be attending the meeting to bring any common problems directly to the board’s attention. Are you having customer service problems with TIAA-Cref? ... Continue reading this article…

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Weekly Blog Roundup: Psychology of Credit Cards, Vanguard, and Freezers

by Luke Landes

Here are some interesting articles from the MoneyBlogNetwork and beyond. I enjoyed these posts and I believe others will as well. The Psychology of Credit Cards? Get Rich Slowly shares the story of a reader who has switched from debit card to credit card but has lost the ability to keep track of his spending ... Continue reading this article…

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Thrasher Funds on Today Show and Weekly Blog Roundup

by Luke Landes

As I write this roundup, the anchors of The Today Show mentioned they will soon present the founder of Thrasher Funds, an expensive mutual fund company designed to attract younger people towards investing, to offer financial advice for teenagers. I’ve noted before that the concept is good, but the execution is out of touch. It’ll ... Continue reading this article…

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More ING Direct Bonus Codes and Weekend Blog Roundup

by Luke Landes

This week, I blasted through the remaining ING Direct Orange Savings Account $25 bonus codes and thanks to Consumerism Commentary readers, I have many more to give away. I sent out emails to everyone on the waiting list and I’m posting links in the order I receive them, two from every volunteer at first. These ... Continue reading this article…

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