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How to Become a 401(k) Millionaire
The Pros and Cons of Home Owners Associations (HOAs)
Most new home developments have HOAs (homeowners associations) and covenants. Covenants are rules and guidelines that a homeowner must abide by in a neighborhood. HOAs charge homeowners fees to enforce covenants, maintain parts of the neighborhood or even maintain the houses themselves. HOAs and covenants are almost always attached to condos and townhomes, and many … Read more
Money Talk: Andrew Simonet on Becoming an Artist
Money Girl Laura Adams: When did you decide that you wanted to become an author (or other career)?
Andrew Simonet: I decided to be a choreographer in September 1988, after my first week of dance class at age nineteen. That’s quite old to start dancing, but male dancers get a lot of leeway. It was sudden and complete. Dance was something I had been searching for without knowing it. Dance was my portal.
Writing showed up in my life at age 35. Specifically, a story showed up, an odd bunch of friends who have to protect themselves and their town from a benignly evil corporation. I dictated dialogue into a tape recorder while driving to my dance teaching job. I wrote scenes in spare moments when I traveled. I lost most of it in a computer crash and assumed I would stop, but the characters wouldn’t leave me alone.
I didn’t decide to become an Author; I decided to write. I wanted to dive into sentences and characters and story. For my own mental health, I am very careful about the difference between wanting to write (generative, expansive) and wanting to have written (paralyzing, stressful). The artist life quickly becomes brutal for those who want to have created.
I worked on that first novel for seven years—it has never been published—while running my dance company. The solitude of writing was a reprieve from the social intensity of dance making and collaboration.
I was interested in writing when I was young, but, seen from the present moment, I was not ready. I wrote clever, bloodless things. I had dreadfully linear things to say, restrained and over-rational. I needed twenty years of making dances to bring my body and senses and all the terrible magic of the present moment into my language.
MG: Do you write full-time?
AS: N.B.: Over the past fifteen years, I’ve worked with thousands of artists on these questions: intentions, time and money, making the art and impact that matters to you. That project, Artists U, has an open-source book with principles and tools I gathered from artists. It is how I earn half my income, the other half coming from writing.
I don’t care for the term “full-time writer/artist.” In my experience, most artists spend a similar amount of time actually making their work: between 1/5 and 1/3 of their working hours. Some spend the other hours earning money at an unrelated job; some spend the other hours promoting their art, dealing with agents, clients, galleries, and grants.
When I waited tables to pay the bills as a young choreographer, I was a full-time choreographer: Everything I did with my days was to support my artistic practice. Later, when I made a living from my dance company, I was called a “full-time” choreographer, but I did not have more time in the studio. Rather, my non-rehearsal hours were spent raising money and planning board meetings instead of serving brunch.
MG: Did you study writing (or something else) or has it always come naturally to you?
AS: Very little that I care to do comes naturally to me. Making dances is still the hardest work I’ve ever taken on. I didn’t choose it because it came easily, but because it felt impossible, unimaginable and thus unimaginably exciting.
I studied choreography at university and at an experimental dance school in the Netherlands where we threw our bodies around, and, in one piece, performers threw raw meat at the audience. All of that training in composition is compost in my writing life, and the most delightful kind, since it can’t offer opinions on what to write but rather how a thing is made.
I have not studied writing formally. Growing up, I had great teachers who introduced me to fascinating writers, and I had friends obsessed writing and art and transformation. These days, I listen closely when people talk. I read a lot. I follow other art forms, especially dance and performance. I talk to artists about practice and craft. And I talk with my artist wife constantly about art, about tiny moments of life and pathos, about precisely observed experiences.
MG: When you first started writing (or something else), were there any financial challenges? If so, how did you manage them?
AS: Everyone has financial challenges. Work that capitalism undervalues—art, social work, farming, spiritual practice, activism, community building—has an added challenge: I can’t simply apply for “job of choreographer” and start cashing checks.
If I have a reasonable budget that pays for my life and a reasonable schedule with time for art making, I can make my art.
Time and money are my—I might say the—structural challenges as an artist. There are other challenges to making art, some of them beautiful and spiritual, but the things I see stop artists, myself included, are time and money. The positive way of saying that is: If I have a reasonable budget that pays for my life and a reasonable schedule with time for art making, I can make my art. Forever. I focus on those two numbers: the dollars I need to earn and the hours I need to spend making art each month. There are many, many ways I have gotten to those numbers in the last thirty years, but always by treating it as a math puzzle, not as a question of my value or success.
MG: What advice would you give someone who's creative or wants to change their lifestyle about balancing passion for their art and earning an income?
AS: Definitely make art. It is a powerful addition to life, a form of devotion that feeds the artist and feeds the world.
Set up your life so you can keep creating. Think in decades, not years. Art is a long, gorgeous arc.
Making art and earning money can overlap differently at different times. I have earned 0% of my income from art and 100% from art. Both were great revenue models; both helped me make work that was important to me and to my community.
Being creative and strategic about revenue can help, staying alert to unexpected ways you can generate income.
Being nonjudgmental helps, too. Earning money from my art does not make me a real artist. My commitment to my practice is what makes me a real artist. Period. A dollar earned waiting tables is worth exactly the same as a dollar earned making art.
MG: What productivity tips have helped you achieve success?
AS: Knowing myself. Tips from other artists help me when I am grounded in my practice, my life, and my community. Otherwise, I’m chasing someone else’s work and intentions, and I end up thinking something must be wrong with me because their productivity tips don’t help.
I collect tools and tactics artists use to make their work and lives. Some are directly useful, some are useful by contrast, and all provoke my thinking.
That said, I do collect tools and tactics artists use to make their work and lives. Some are directly useful (the Pomodoro method), some are useful by contrast (I could never work on five projects at a time, but I know artists who thrive that way), and all provoke my thinking.
I often steal not the idea but the thinking behind the idea. An artist told me, “I wake up at 5:00 am and go to the studio before eating breakfast.” That’s not my rhythm. But it made me think about my entry into the day, the connection between waking and creating which, it turns out, has been crucial for my writing.
MG: What do you like to spend money on that some people might consider a splurge or luxury?
AS: Time. I always look for ways to spend more time making art, thinking about art, connecting with community, doing nothing, swimming, traveling. Some of that might look to an outsider like wasted time. My life and my art are not focused around maximizing productivity. There are so many crap myths that artists must sacrifice everything for their art or their success. I find that toxic and extractive, directly opposed to the values I strive to put in my dances and my writing. I see a lot of art and think: That was made by a stressed out artist.
MG: What’s the best thing you’ve bought in the last few months?
AS: I bought a guitar from a guy in Vermont. We stood in his cold barn, I played one chord and knew it was right. To pay for it, I sold a difficult-to-play guitar given me by a former stepfather, a complicated figure in my life. I’d spent years struggling to play and to fix this awkward instrument. It was exactly like my relationship with my ex-stepfather. If you wrote this guitar into a novel, it would be a painfully obvious symbol.
MG: What’s the biggest money mistake you’ve ever made?
AS: Not buying a house in Philadelphia when I was in my twenties, preferably a multi-unit house. I could have lived in one apartment and rented out the others. Best way for artists to build assets.
MG: Tell me a financial rule that you never break.
AS: Only buy used cars, only from individuals, and always get it looked at by a trusted mechanic. No new cars, no dealers, no loans.
Know the difference between depreciating assets (cars, computers) and appreciating assets (real estate, investments.)
I am shocked to see artists struggling to pay their rent while making monthly payments on a car that loses value every day.
When You Should and Shouldnât Purchase Mortgage Points
While not a solution for everyone, understanding mortgage points may save you thousands of dollars over the life of a loan. Here’s what you should know!
The post When You Should and Shouldnât Purchase Mortgage Points appeared first on Homes.com.
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How to Make Your Life Effortless
Essentialism is the discipline of choosing the right things to focus on – the things most vital to your success. Effortlessness is the art of doing those things well – simply and efficiently “so that you can sustain the effort and not just achieve success, but to be able to be successful at success.”
So began my conversation with Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less and Effortless: Make it Easier to Do What Matters Most, and host of the What’s Essential podcast. Greg has dedicated his career to discovering why some people break through to the next level—and others don’t. He is an author, a speaker, and an active social innovator, having worked with clients such as Adobe, Apple, Google, Facebook, Pixar, Salesforce.com and more. In this conversation he shared his wisdom around why we tend to get in our own way, and how we can better focus on identifying what’s essential and making it effortless.
Listen to the full conversation on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform, or just click the audio player above.
Essential things aren’t always the most difficult
“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are burned out and those who know they’re burned out," Greg shared. Some of this comes from our collective instinct that for something to be essential, it must be difficult.
“There is this assumption that the more essential a thing is, the harder it's going to be. And there is a kind of Puritan type logic that reinforces that…It’s like a distrust of the easy. If something’s easy it must be trivial.”
“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are burned out and those who know they’re burned out."
So, he explains, we fall into the traps of perfectionism and overachieving – but often we’re just making things harder than they need to be. The essential thing may be as simple as taking a moment of silence to process what you’ve learned. It may be sitting with someone important to you as they experience a challenge.
Sometimes what’s essential is the simplest thing we can do.
But sometimes essential things are difficult or complex – and our job is to make them as effortless as possible.
Effortlessness calls for asking better questions
Greg shared a story about Kim – a university manager he was coaching. She carried the mindset of “If I’m not exhausted, I’m not doing enough.” Her boss called one day and asked that she film a series of classes.
Being a proud overachiever, Kim immediately went into action – researching production equipment, recruiting staff to help record, readying her sound engineers. This was going to be the best darn recording the university had ever produced.
But when Greg asked her what the intended purpose of this recording was, she realized she had no idea. So she asked her boss and discovered that a student was going to be absent for a few days, and simply needed some footage of the lectures so he could catch up on his homework.
“She had this turnaround moment,” Greg says. Instead of asking “How can I achieve the best results by pushing harder?” she needed – we all need to be asking “How can I achieve better results by making it effortless? How can we make it easier?”
Ultimately, Kim asked one of the student’s classmates to record the lectures on his phone and share them. The solution was so simple. But it required Kim to pause before moving into overdrive.
Effortlessness calls for reframing the problem
Greg also shared the story of Henry Kramer, a British industrialist whose ability to reframe a problem contributed to innovation and progress in human-powered flight. Following the unmanned flight achieved by the Wright Brothers in Kitty Hawk in 1903, the aviation industry was trying to solve the problem of how to make flight safe for people.
For years, aviation experts would develop hypotheses, invest heavily in building prototypes, test them, experience failure, and head back to the drawing board. These experts were essentially asking – and trying to answer – the question of “What’s the ideal flying apparatus to achieve human flight?”
Seeing this play out for years, Kramer decided to ask a different question. “Why,” he wondered “can’t anyone seem to solve this?” And the answer came to him. The real problem wasn’t the absence of the right answer – because right answers often follow a series of wrong ones. “Everyone’s trying to solve the wrong problem. Everyone is trying to build the ultimate machine, the sophisticated, elegant, usable machine… And that's the wrong problem. The right problem is – can we build a machine that can crash and be fixed again, cheaply?”
And with this reframe, Kramer discovered the solution required an ability to test and experiment again and again at a low cost. So he and his team ultimately developed what looked like a broom stick with some tape on it – and it allowed for iterative testing that ultimately led to the desired solution.
How to make the difficult, effortless?
Greg recommends we begin with two key practices:
1. Replace your “to-do” list with your “done today” list. Instead of a perpetual, endless list of things you’ll never complete, try spending a few moments every day jotting down a list of accomplishments you’re proud to celebrate.
2. Choose and stick with an end-of-the-day. Now that so many of us are working and living all in one place, Greg says we all need an official end to our day. State the time upfront, make sure clients or team members know what it is, and be intentional about shutting down when the hour strikes.
Jim Cramer Thinks the Super Low Mortgage Rates Are Going Bye Bye
The other day, Jim Cramer was talking mortgage rates, even though heâs a self-described âstock person.â The backdrop was the better than expected jobs report, which jolted the bond market and sent mortgage rates higher. In short, more jobs and less unemployment equates to a recovering economy, which ushers in inflation and forces the Fed… Read More »Jim Cramer Thinks the Super Low Mortgage Rates Are Going Bye Bye
The post Jim Cramer Thinks the Super Low Mortgage Rates Are Going Bye Bye appeared first on The Truth About Mortgage.