The gift that keeps on giving

Got my first regift of the season yesterday: A good friend gave me a lovely set of holiday scented candles.

Apparently, she doesn't remember showing them to me when she received them last month.

In the spirit of the season, I passed them on just today: I bought a really nice bottle of champagne for my SO's brother and his partner, so I slipped the candles into the package and handed them off with a big smile.

For the record, I'm fully in favor of regifting. As my regift to you, here are links to two other other articles I've written on the subject.

Are you doing any regifting this season? What are you recycling and why?

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Holiday shakedown

Ye gods, it's holiday tipping season again.

Okay, I suppose I shouldn't be thinking of it as a shakedown, but that's what it feels like sometimes. Back in my college days, I used to be a waitress and I know it's a tough, unrewarding job. Based on that, I'm a pretty good everyday tipper: 20% is my standard unless there's been a real problem with the service, and I have never, ever stiffed anyone. I use the same standard for cabs and haircuts. When holiday tipping season comes around, however, I find that the decision-making is much tougher. The New York Times recently published a series of etiquette blog articles dealing with tipping, and you can find them here, here, and here.

Tipping in New York for building staff is customary and expected, and my building co-op's board distributes a gentle reminder about this ever year along with the names of all the building staff. They don't provide any specific guidance about tips, though, so I was interested to see that the Times recommended the following:

Building personnel should be remembered at holiday time. Tipping amounts vary according to your geographic location and how luxurious the building is. Following are ranges for tips. Superintendent: Cash or gift of $20 to $80. Doorman: Cash or gift of $15 to $80. Whether you see the doorman or not, he is still providing service to you and your building so do plan on $15 or more for each doorman, or a gift of similar value. Elevator operator: Cash or gift of $15 to $40 each. Typically, a concierge is tipped when services are provided. If tips have been given throughout the year for any of the personnel, then a small gift of $20 to $50 value would be appropriate.

Normally, I use the following benchmarks:

Building superintendant: $80
Porter: $100

Why does the porter get more? He's always really, really nice, his job is really the pits (cleaning and hauling garbage), and he's really hard-working, much more so than the super.

Doormen (or women) who are nice to me and helpful when I'm struggling with too much to carry: $50
Doormen (or women) who are standoffish and/or unhelpful: $35

I tipped the same way as a renter as I do as a homeowner, and apparently the Times etiquette columnist agrees that this is appropriate. This year, it's going to cost a total of $400, all cash in Christmas cards.

You'll see from the articles linked above that postal workers should be remembered with non-monetary gifts under $20 in value, and I must admit that I don't do that. Similarly, I always get a card signed "New York Times Paper Guy", but I don't normally tip for that service either. This year, since I only receive Saturday and Sunday delivery and the Saturday paper arrives on average only one time out of three, I definitely won't be tipping.

As far as other tips go, I don't have a regular hair stylist or any other regular professional services people, so my job is done once the holiday tips for the building staff are completed.

On a related note, I don't really bring gift-giving into the workplace during the holidays. Junior people who are especially helpful will occasionally find a case of beer (or whatever else they like) under their desks as a personal gesture of appreciation, but I don't do holiday gift-giving because it seems like it could go wrong in so many ways. The morale has been the pits over the last few months while we've been going through layoffs, though, so I brought homemade cookies into the office last week. They got scarfed all in one day, and that seems like enough holiday cheer this time around.

Are you giving office gifts or holiday tips to anyone this year? Who gets what and how do you decide?

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Daily bread

I don't know if anyone else felt this as much as I did, but I noticed over the course of the year that bread prices in New York have really shot up. Part of the pain is the result of being much pickier about bread than I used to be. When I went on the no-sugar kick last January, I started getting much more assiduous about reading labels. To my dismay, I found that commercially produced bread often contains a shocking amount of sugar in various forms, including molasses, honey, brown sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and other types of sugar that I can't even pronounce, much less remember. A nutritionist friend told me that three grams of sugar (preferably the naturally-occurring kind) per serving is a good benchmark generally to support the larger goal of keeping processed sugar to a minimum, so I set that as my maximum standard for staying within the rules of the no-sugar challenge.

Good luck finding commerically produced bread that fits that standard, by the way. It's not impossible, but it's tough.

In an effort to solve the bread dilemma, I found that many artisan breads contain relatively little sugar. The problem, however, is that they're expensive - often four dollars or more per loaf. Yikes! I shelled out for it, though. I found that once I was over the first three weeks of complete and total misery from sugar cravings, the periods between cravings began to lengthen and I felt a lot better while they lasted.

Once the job situation began to look unpleasant a couple of months ago, I took a long, hard look at everything I was spending and started making cutbacks so I could pump up my emergency fund. At that point, I decided that I could no longer justify really expensive bread. At the same time, however, I didn't want to go back to the stuff with all the sweeteners in it.

Well, what do you do when you're between a rock and a hard place?

Thanks to the internets, I started learning how to bake.

The first five tries were dismal failures. They came out somewhere between sponges and bricks, and they were in no way delicious. I've always been one to eat my kitchen mistakes, though, on the grounds that I hate wasting food, and that figuring out what went wrong through eating my mistakes might help me learn what not to do next time.

I kept refining as I went, and the sixth try turned out to be the charm: For once, the bread turned out to be genuinely good.

So did the sevenh.

So did the eighth.

By the eighth, I was experimenting with throwing in things like garlic and rosemary, or pumpkin and sunflower seeds. I've also found that making bread is a wonderful way of connecting with the memory of my grandmothers, who I'm sure would have laughed themselves silly at my first few attempts. Now I'm baking once a week or once every two weeks. Aside from the fact that it's a real pleasure to be able to produce bread at about a quarter of the price of artisan bread in the grocery store, I can't help feeling a stupid sense of real accomplishment every time I do it and it doesn't suck.

A few things I learned by doing:

--Bread does take time, but most of that time goes towards waiting for it to rise. If you plan your time well, it fits in nicely with other things.
--As long as you have strong hands, you don't need a breadmaker.
--A tablespoon of honey is plenty to activate a packet of yeast, and it works out to far less than three grams of sugar per slice.
--Yeast is cheaper when bought in jars instead of packets.
--One way to keep bread from sticking to loaf pans is to coat the pans with olive oil and then a layer of flour.
--Don't try the bread when it's just out of the oven, unless you planned to chow down on half a loaf all along. (Yes, I've done this. More than once.)
--Recommended baking temperatures don't seem to work well in my oven. I put it up to 375 instead of 350, with much better results.
--Bread goes stale in about three days. I cut each loaf in half and keep half in the freezer until I want to use it.
--You can't use all whole wheat flour without something called dough starter. I haven't graduated to dough starter yet, so I'm sticking to a roughly 50-50 mixture bewteen white and whole wheat.

Does anyone else bake their own bread here? Why or why not? Do you have any other recent culinary adventures to share?

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Types of mortgages: which one is right for you?

This is a sponsored post.

So, you are planning to buy your perfect house or commercial property but don’t know what your options are in the mortgage department.

Well, there are tons to choose from and they are all tailored to your specific needs. If you have a great job and money isn’t an issue, you can make higher payments and possibly pay off your loan in as little as 10 to 15 years.

For many people though, they don’t have great jobs and need to best plan for their budget.

Most mortgages differ in just a few ways. They may require balloon payments up front or toward the end of the loan period or they might be influenced monthly by ever changing interest rates.

Fixed rate loans are very popular because you are guaranteed to have the same bill every month regardless of interest rates. If you are on a budget, this is a great option.

Adjustable rate loans differ from fixed rate as they fluctuate with current interest rates. Don’t worry though, they usually have a cap so you won’t be paying twice as much as the month before. The cap is usually just a couple percent.

These are just a couple of popular types of home loans. If you plan on getting a commercial loan, you will have many more mortgage types available.

Some of these have very low payments for the first year until your business is established and they they increase so you can pay them off quickly.

The best bet is to research the different types of loan you are interested in and discuss them with your broker.

Mortgages @

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Winter bites

Winter suddenly set in this past weekend, and I don't like it. Everything seems to get more difficult at this time of year because I don't want to go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. I don't want to go out in the cold to exercise, especially since I'm still dealing with heavy fatigue from the marathon. I don't really want to do anything much: I just want to stay inside and be warm with the newspaper and a cup of hot chocolate.

Oops, eleven months without sweets. Guess the hot chocolate isn't happening.

Between entertaining, Christmas presents for the SO's kids and a raft of birthdays that hit all at once, it's also an expensive time of year. SO's out of work, my homeowner's insurance is due, and I'm getting a crown (YAY!) in two weeks.

I'm also prone to a mild touch of seasonal depression, and that doesn't help either.

I'm trying to reorient my thoughts towards the good things that are happening right now, because that both makes me feel better and also helps me stay away from non-productive compensating behaviors like overeating and retail therapy. In no particular order, here are a few of the things that are cause for celebration:

--The job seems stable for a while longer.
--SO has already had one interview that went really well, and he has another one scheduled for this week. I'm cautiously optimistic that he'll be employed again in the next couple of months.
--The horrible, horrible sugar cravings that hung around for eight months after I stopped eating sweets suddenly departed at the beginning of October, and they haven't been a problem since. I even baked cookies on Saturday with absolutely no desire to sample - and I love me some cookie dough.
--I got a bunch of nice emails after the little get-together I had on Saturday. It looks like my friends really did enjoy it.
--I'm going to see my mom for a ten day vacation in less than two weeks.
--My emergency fund is at 90% of goal, and in a worst-case scenario, goal will allow me to be out of work for two and a half years without unemployment or severance.
--I will NEVER regret paying off my mortgage early. It may not be the right financial choice for everyone, but if there's one thing I've felt genuine, overwhelming gratitude for more than anything else during this dreary economic year, that's it right there.

That's how I'm coping with the winter blues. Are you feeling joy during this holiday season, or is it more of a struggle? If it's a struggle, how are you dealing with it? (Suggestions appreciated.)

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When the nest is best

Sorry for the slowdown around here. It was a busy week, and yesterday was cocktail party night. I think everyone enjoyed it. I know I did, and I have the brain fog today to prove it.

CNN published an interesting article last week about an emerging trend in real estate: Instead of trading up to new homes, more people are apparently staying put and improving what they have.

I was interested to see in the article that the improvement seems to largely be taking shape in the form of remodeling and renovating. I did that myself earlier this year with the new bathroom cabinetry, paint job, and new recessed lighting and the satisfaction it gave me as a homeowner is off the charts. According to the article, however, the main reason driving the renovations seems to be a desire for more space.

I have some reservations about renovating for more space. Of course, there are certain circumstances (i.e., growing families or taking in elderly relatives) that sometimes make expansion an absolute necessity for staying in the same location without living on top of each other. If it's just more space for the sake of more space, though, the extra cost to heat, cool, and generally maintain the new space can add significant cost over time. In those cases, I think people are better off first taking a careful look at the amount of stuff they have and doing a decluttering exercise if it's warranted. Just getting clutter out of the house and getting into a regular decluttering maintenance routine can help reclaim significant square footage for little to no cost.

If there's still not enough space for everyone to live comfortably after reducing clutter, then maybe home expansion makes sense. If there's enough space but expansion will add to the overall quality of life and renovation and subsequent upkeep are affordable, then that's also reason to move ahead. Given how quickly home expansion racks up cost and can increase the cost of ownership on an ongoing basis, however, I don't think it's something most people can afford to enter into lightly.

If you're interested in reading about a renovation story as it happens, I'd suggest checking out the lovely Moneyapolis, who is knee-deep into turning a wreck of a mansion into a showplace.

Do you have any home renovation and/or expansion plans in the works? What are you doing, and why?

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Profiting from your passions

Today, CNN posted an interesting article about how seasonal jobs are helping unemployed or otherwise financially stretched people get through the holidays without a big hit to their wallets. I have often toyed with the idea of trying to score a weekend-only job at Crate and Barrel or Williams and Sonoma to make a few extra bucks during the holidays (and also to indulge my homemaking jones with a whopping discount and very ilttle guilt). I do know one person who does this quite successfully, but I ultimately decided against it because I think my greatest income potential lies with my real job. By that logic, anything that makes me take the eye off the ball in that area is counterproductive in the long run.

As far as other sources of income go, however, I do freelance projects from time to time. I've mostly priced myself out of the market because I don't have a tremendous amount of spare time and it takes more than most people are willing to pay in this economy to motivate me to give much of it up. I also make a couple of bucks from the blog every once in a while, but that's much more amenable because I like blogging and count it as entertainment.

A reader wrote in the other day to ask if I've ever considered tutoring for extra income, and I had to admit that the idea had never crossed my mind. It's not something I really see myself pursing right now, but it seems like it wouldn't be a bad way to bring in some cash if something happened to my job. If I became really committed to the idea of supplementing my existing salary with some part-time work on the side, however, I think I'd probably opt for earning a low-level personal training and/or coaching certification and then try to pick up some private clients on the grounds that it's much more in harmony with things I already enjoy doing.

I think that's the key right there: If you're going to work part time to supplement an existing income or fill in an income gap, the best way to go about it is to look at the things you already enjoy doing and find a way to turn a profit by doing them. For several people I know, following this path resulted in incredibly fulfilling and profitable second careers.

I don't have the confidence that I could or should start down this road right now, but with my SO out of work and my own job situation not being as stable as I'd like, it's something that I've been considering. . . and the more I think about it, the more attractive the idea becomes.

Do you have any interests that you could leverage to make money on the side? If so, what are they? Do you see any of these interests resulting in a change of career someday?

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