Money Blue Book

It’s not easy finding the right career path in life. Many of our own perceptions on what makes a good profession is shaped and sometimes even warped by the views of our family, friends, and perhaps most significantly, by the media’s relentless spin. There are many jobs out there that may look attractive and rewarding on TV, but reality often pours cold water over hyped up expectations.

It’s interesting to me how if you asked any little kid what they wanted to be when they grew up, almost all would respond with answers like doctor, lawyer, hip hop rapper, or even President of the United States. Unfortunately for those little kids, the great majority of them will never fulfill their childhood dreams or live up to the great but unrealistic expectations they envisioned due to their personal circumstances. People pick jobs and careers for many reasons, but their choices are often shaped by their own hyped views regarding what is hot and what is not, and frequently fraught with inaccuracies. Unfortunately, during the high school and college years, the media greatly reinforces the naive and misguided mystique that surrounds certain professions to the detriment of future entrants into the work force. Oftentimes the hype of certain careers tend to greatly exceed the lucrativeness and fulfillment potential of reality.

The job market and popular careers choices have changed greatly over the years and what was once perhaps lucrative no longer is. Here’s my list of what I believe are the top 5 most overrated careers and professions. I’m sure there are many people who are happy and content in the following careers and perhaps enjoy professional and personal success, but I think there are also many of those in the following fields that feel they have been misled down the primrose path to frustration and work dissatisfaction. These conclusions are based on my own personal views, and gleaned from views expressed in books, online articles, websites, blogs, and through my interactions with friends from all walks of life and professions. For more relevant input and insight, take a look at U.S. News and World Report’s own list of the most overrated careers. While their list is more comprehensive and generally applicable, mine is more focused on my own personal and unique experiences.

The Five Most Overrated Careers, Jobs, and Professions In My Opinion:

1) Attorney – Don’t get me started about lawyers, law school, and the legal profession. I don’t have too many good things to say about the whole business of becoming a lawyer and the realities of working as one. I’m an attorney myself, but I’m currently trying to get out of the profession completely and enter the work from home online business for myself. I find the whole legal career path to be an unforgiving and personally unfulfilling line of work.

Unfortunately for new legal field entrants, they don’t usually realize the market for lawyers is extremely saturated until it is too late, and are already in too deep. Currently, there are already too many lawyers everywhere and even more on the way. These days it is very, very, very easy to become an attorney. Saddled with poor grades or terrible LSAT standardized test scores? No problem. There are more than 4 whopping tiers of law schools that continue to expand in size every year. There’s a guaranteed spot on the student roster for every wannabe or lackluster student who wants to play the lawyer card. These days, anyone can apply to law school to become a lawyer because there are no strict educational prerequisites involved. As an insider, I can assure you – there is absolutely nothing special about lawyers and the skills and training they allegedly possess – they are a dime a dozen. Unless you graduated from a top ten ranking law school or entered a difficult legal niche field such as tax or patent law, you better get used to a meager and unrewarding professional life. My advice is to stay away from law school and to do anything else but that.

Like many who decided to enter law school, I originally applied out of mere default and lack of educational options at the time. After all, I wasn’t much of a math or science person, and studying business seemed to be too general and broad of a choice at the time. Why not attend law school and become a high priced lawyer and make millions of dollars a year by taking on high profile and exciting celebrity cases, I thought? Why not invest myself into a career that will allow me to not only become rich, but utilize my skills to help uphold justice and assist people who need legal representation? After all, lawyers spend their days honorably debating before judges in prestigious court room settings before trial juries and television crews right? Wrong!

The legal profession is the most grossly distorted career choice in the history of careers. Thanks to the overzealous and over-hyped glory and glitz of Hollywood media productions, most of the public’s view of the legal profession is framed and distorted by entertainment inspired sources such as TV shows of past and present like Ally McBeal, JAG, The Practice, and Law and Order, and popular court room drama filled movies like A Few Good Men. The truth and reality is that the vast majority of lawyers rarely ever see the inside of a court room, working as paper pushing transactional attorneys instead. The ones that do apply their craft in the court room, known as litigation work, still spend the vast bulk of their time and efforts stuffed in their offices before a computer screen, typing away and performing grueling and monotonous research and writing. The work is tedious, stressful, time consuming, and frequently unrewarding.

In the working arena, lawyers often have to deal with the frustrating aspects of working with ungrateful and belligerent clients who refuse to pay or ignore the advice and suggestions of their own counsel. For small law firm attorneys, the average salary almost always falls well short of media inspired dramatization. Most of my friends who graduated from top 50 law schools ended up with massive student loans of more than $100,000 and winded up in mere $50,000 a year lawyer jobs for many years. For those who find themselves working at higher paying big firm positions, the hours are insanely taxing and terribly destructive for those trying to balance a family and social life as well. Being forced to work 80-100 or more hours a week as a big firm associate is not unusual as many are pressed into strict billable hour requirements. The need to pay off massive student loans often force many new attorney recruits into lifelong professional servitude, whereby they are compelled to sacrifice their lives, their health, and their own happiness for an unattainable dream of work and play balance in the legal profession. For every Johnny Cochran, Mark Geragos, or Gloria Allred personalities on cable TV, there are thousands of struggling attorneys out there saddled with massive student loans, wondering why they chose to enter such a saturated and unhappy field to begin with. My advice – go be a dentist or something. There’s a lot of money in that racket and the barriers to entry are much higher, making the health care field a much more prestigious and balanced choice.

2) Real Estate Agent – Thanks to the array of house flipping shows on television that suddenly sprouted in the last few years, everyone and their uncle now thinks they can and should become a real estate agent. During the last few years, I’ve seen nearly all of my friends in some fashion or another try to dabble in the real estate market and try their luck in helping others buy and sell homes. Many went on to take the easy breezy real estate exam and obtain their real estate license.

Unfortunately the ease and simplicity of entering the real estate field is one of the key causes of the real estate profession’s current decline (that, and the real estate housing bubble). Because it’s so easy to become a certified real estate agent, the barriers to entry are very low. As a result, real estate agents are everywhere and there is not enough real estate business to go around. Especially in this real estate downturn, agents are finding themselves faced with dwindling business opportunities and diminishing commission fees. Furthermore, with the growth of online housing listing sites like Zillow and Yahoo Real Estate, and the surging popularity of do it yourself resources, the importance of having a real estate agent will continue to decline and gradually phase out. With the growth of online real estate blogs and finance sites, it’s getting much easier for ordinary people to buy and sell their own house or property without the assistance of a professional real estate agent.

3) Chef – Here’s another overrated career field that has fallen prey to the reckless glamorization committed by television media. Thanks to foreign import culinary shows like Iron Chef, American cooking related programs on the Food Network like Rachel Ray, and the popularity of reality competition shows like Bravo channel’s America’s Top Chef, every aspiring amateur chef out there thinks he or she can strike it big as a future professional chef to the rich and famous.

I used to date this girl who was a pharmacy student. She had a passion for food and was on the verge of dumping her pharmacy school studies to pursue her lofty dream of becoming a famous television cooking personality or working as a future top chef at a five star restaurant somewhere. Fortunately for her, she discovered early on how little entry level chefs really made and abandoned her unrealistic pursuits for a more stable career as a pharmacist. The reality is that most chefs are mere assembly line cooks, churning out the same concoctions over and over, chopping and dicing away in a hot and sweaty kitchen in the back of some restaurant for hours and hours. Frequently, the work hours extend into the weekends and late evenings, depriving them of much of their extracurricular quality of life.

4) Full Time Blogger Or Online Entrepreneur – This is one hits close to home for me, but I have mixed feelings on those that choose to blog as a full time profession. While I personally receive a decent amount of passive income from my finance blog and do pretty well for myself through my efforts to make money online blogging, the vast majority of bloggers out there will probably never fulfill their full time blogging income aspirations. While it’s good to pursue one’s dream of working from home and never having to put on that suit and tie and “work for the man” any longer, the reality is that blogging full time is difficult, time consuming and requires substantial discipline, especially in the early stages when online advertisement and affiliate income motivation are hard to come by. The lack of commentary participation and the lack of traffic and feedback by readers can quickly cause the average aspiring blogger to lose hope early on. It takes a certain focused and dedicated individual to successfully develop his or her web based pipe dream into a full fledged online Internet marketing empire.

The path to future passive income riches definitely crosses through the Internet and through search engines like Google, but the path is fraught with competition and lonely times. It is possible to make some decent side income on the web, but the vast majority will never reach the online income needed to sustain a full time blogging position. That’s just reality. For the masses who think it’s easy to slap up a simple make money online Wordpress blog and generate millions of hits instantly, resulting in substantial Google Adsense revenue, they are wrong. It easy to start out as a part time blogger as the barriers to entry are very low, but it’s hard to make a true full time living out of it.

5) Teacher – Working as a teacher is one of the noblest and most honorable jobs out there, but in terms of financial and perhaps even personal rewards, it is sorely lacking. Like stay at home moms, teachers are grossly underpaid for their efforts and the invaluable influence and steerage they have on the next generation of children and students. The thought of being allowed to take entire summers off as a teacher may be tempting, but the reality is that most teachers work during the off season as well – performing summer school work, tutoring, or volunteering their time for education related endeavors. For those that wind up teaching toddlers or grade school students, working as a teacher is akin to working as a full time babysitter. Not only do you have to teach the students something productive, but you also have to deal with their crazy behaviors, emotional outbursts, rebellious attitudes, and sometimes even violent propensities.

I have quite a few female friends who work as junior high and public high school teachers and they frequently seem worn out and utterly exhausted due to their jobs. While most enjoy their work somewhat, many are frustrated at the bureaucracy and the governmental policies that hinder their ability to truly make a difference in the lives of students as a whole. Many of my female teacher friends frequently gripe and complain about the inefficient aftermath of the No Child Left Behind Act and how the governmental policy has forced many of them to waste their time and limited efforts and resources on so-called “hopeless students”. These teachers want to make a difference and help promising students grow to their full potentials, but many of them find their hands hopelessly bound by standardized guideline requirements and expectations. Instead of being able to help gifted and talented students grow to the best of their abilities by giving them the educational attention they need to advance, much of the No Child Left Behind Act efforts are spent trying to discipline and reform issue prone students who refuse to learn at the same speed and pace as classmates in the same age group. Clearly, it’s a broken policy that demands major reform.

These days I’ve been working from home and enjoying time off from my full time contract legal gig. On some level I miss the daily human interactions and the regular social associations offered by traditional lines of work, but I don’t miss the early morning mandatory work schedules or the need to kiss a supervisor’s butt cheeks for the sake of getting on his or her good graces for promotion purposes or to ensure a steady stream of future work opportunities. The inevitable downside of working as someone else’s employee has always been that you are funneling your own efforts and personal abilities to help someone else grow their business and make them wealthier. In exchange for your services, you are usually offered a set salary or in my case, an unpredictable but very decent wage rate, as well as the occasional health benefit package and transportation related fringe benefits. However, the fact remains that as long as you continue to work for someone else, you never truly own the fruits of your own labor – and I think it’s important to own your own fruits.

Over the last few years, I’ve learned to incorporate blogging and online websites such as my personal finance and frugality blog and a few other attorney based blogs (I prefer not to reveal them here) into my tentative business goal of one day truly working for myself and ending the cycle of exchanging hours for money. While my online sites are certainly growing rapidly and exceeding my own expectations, since none of my non-traditional income streams have yet to fully develop and mature, I still have to rely on traditional employment means to support myself. Thus as much as I’d like to, I still cannot abandon my day job entirely. However, that doesn’t mean I must walk the age-old career oriented path that most people resort to following. With my college and law school degree already in hand, rather than working the law firm path, I’ve chosen to tap into my entrepreneurial spirit and work temporary positions to fund the growth of my home based businesses.

Unless Your Day Time Job Is Working As A Full Time Computer Guy Or Computer Gal, Finding Extra Time To Work On Your Online Side Ventures Is Difficult

While some personal finance and online commentators seem able to juggle their personal full time jobs with their blogging business duties, I’ve found that certain jobs are particularly difficult to juggle, particularly if you are walking the career oriented path. In my case, working as a full time practicing attorney would leave little time left for business blogging projects on the side. The hourly and work pressures (of office hours and take home assignments) would simply be too demanding. It’s certainly not a coincidence that the vast majority of online bloggers, and particularly personal finance bloggers tend to be predominantly computer network administrators, software engineers, or computer programmers – individuals with continuous access to computers and ample blogging time throughout the day while on the job. Unfortunately, most employees of other professions don’t have this same flexibility and luxury of ready-access to the computer that the computer techies have. That’s why for those individuals working in the legal, education, or even health care field, working full time jobs on a contractual, short term basis may be the only manageable way to generate livable income, but still have the vacant time to develop a side business that stands a chance to grow into a viable income replacement project one day.

Working A Temp Job Makes Devoting Time To Developing Home Based Businesses Possible

Since working as a full time temp worker in the contract attorney field, I’ve noticed that the working lifestyle, the flexible hours, and the non-stressful schedule of the temping profession absolutely compliments and suits individuals like me who want the ample time after work to devote to side projects. The fact of the matter is that blogging and working as a contract employee on a temporary, non permanent basis actually go quite well together. Trying to build several online and real life businesses takes substantial amounts of extra curricular time – the type of extra time outside of one’s job that those not in the computer field are usually unable to set aside. At the same time, it is not that I want to end up temping for the rest of my life, but I see it as a currently necessary and convenient way to support myself temporarily while building up the core of my side businesses while I am still relatively young in the grand scheme of things.

For those looking to build passive income streams through creating an online website business or running a self employment operation, you may want to give short term and long term temping some serious consideration. I know many would argue that that there is no future in performing temporary work, but personally, I see the same bleakness in permanent jobs that purport to offer job stability, and professional growth prospects. I have seen too many of my friends and acquaintances get badly burned in their professional careers and family life due to complete and over-reliance on their employer’s good graces and whims.

Plus, with self employment and having your own home business, there are a wealth of self employment tax deductions and tax deferred investment options at your disposal – not available to full time employees working for someone else. A few of them include the option to deduct the home office part of your home rental used in the regular course of your trade or business, as well as the ability to capitalize and reduce your taxable income of the portion pertaining to business assets, such as the cost of a business laptop notebook computer. I will discuss the wide variety of self employment tax deductions and financial benefits in a future post.

As I may have mentioned before, I’m a recovering attorney – and a fairly young one at that (I’m in my late 20’s). Right now I’m in the process of working at home on my online blog and business ventures for a few months before returning back to my full time work as a contract attorney.

So how did I end up doing this type of work instead of using my law degree to pursue a so-called real legal career? Sometimes I ponder about what my dream job might have been had I not gone to law school, since it wasn’t my passion in life to begin with. My decision to attend graduate school was more due to process of elimination. I started out college on the pre-med track to become a doctor, did well in my studies, got bored with chemistry and biology, and eventually shifted gears into computer science. I loved taking programming theory and practice courses and did very well, but after a few semesters, I decided that I couldn’t see myself stuck as a computer programming nerd – so I moved on (how ironic, now that I’ve come full circle again). So then I decided to go the business route and major in finance. After a few more semesters during which I did pretty well, I pondered what else was out there. However, by then I had enough college credits to graduate and my parents were beginning to wave the tuition baton, “encouraging” me to move onto bigger and better things. After looking around, I decided I wasn’t ready to financially support myself just yet. So I took the LSAT exam and sent in my application to a few top tier law schools. Before I knew it, I was attending the state law school and working my way through civil procedure, contracts, and criminal law classes.

Going The Law School Route – But Still Not Sure Where I Wanted To Go Professionally

One thing that I noticed during law school was how incredibly math-adverse law students are. I suppose that’s why they all chose to attend law school to begin with – to avoid having to deal with mathematics or anything related to numbers. However, it just so happened most of my law school friends were of the opposite persuasion – they were mostly into tax law, a legal field riddled with numbers and statistics. I wasn’t particularly fond of all the math involved, but I went with the herd and ended up taking most of the tax law courses available – everything from individual tax planning and corporate tax, to the most difficult law school course I ever took – partnership tax.

After law school I worked for a trial judge and later when on to work for the federal government as an associate attorney for a year or two. After another very short stint working for a crazy female cougar attorney (I’ll share that story one day, as it was a very eye opening experience, but for all the wrong reasons), I ended up choosing to work for myself. After starting up a few profitable blogs such as the personal finance blog you are reading right now and another law related one, I now work as a contract attorney on the side when I’m not working from home. I receive most of my contract attorney assignments from staffing agencies that place me on legal projects that last anywhere from a few weeks to several months. The job description usually entails very simple duties such as legal document review and mindless legal tag coding. Many dread performing contract lawyer work, but the work provides very lucrative pay without the heavy responsibilities (I often refer to it as my “stripper pay”). It’s perfect for my lifestyle at the moment since I don’t want my full time job to hinder the time and effort I devote to my personal small business operations.

The great thing about contract attorney work is that it is extremely stress-free and unlike a traditional lawyer job, my responsibilities and duties end at the end of the day. I never have to run into the office after work or cut a weekend short to file a legal brief or prepare a memo. However there are long term drawbacks to this line of short term work. The biggest downside is that the work is only temporary and isn’t career track oriented. With temping, while meals and transportation are frequently reimbursed, you usually don’t receive any health benefits or job security. But then again, in this day and age as well as economy, do any of us truly have solid job security anymore, or even guaranteed health benefits? The other downside with legal temping is the lack of professional development. However, I simply cannot see myself pursuing the traditional attorney path anyway. Lawyers notoriously burn out fast and work tremendous hours that ultimately take a terrible toll on their health, family wellbeing, and lifespan. Plus, legal employment prospects for attorneys isn’t what it used to be as the market has become extremely saturated. Almost anyone with half a functioning brain can go to law school these days as there are no significant barriers to entry or pre-requisites that need to be overcome to apply. Especially in a major city like Washington DC, you can’t walk in any direction without bumping into a lawyer. It’s utter and complete saturation.

Looking To the Future – Sacrificing Some Income Now To Build Up My Online Blog Businesses and Incubate My Other Real World Ventures

Thus, I’ve come to realize that the key to building wealth and reaching financial prosperity is to build up multiple streams of alternative and passive income, apart from your primary full time employment. Otherwise, you simply run the risk of living your entire life trading hours for dollars. Passive income generation through methods such as blog income or stock market investing help to get around the finite time problem by allowing you to generate income even when you are not actively sitting and working at your office desk.

However, I don’t regret going to law school at all. I was prudent to have attended a state school with relatively lower in-state tuition, and I was very fortunate to have been able to consolidate my student loans at a very low fixed interest rate. My college loans are all paid up and my graduate school loan payments are thankfully quite manageable. Other than tuition issues, law school prepared me for the future by teaching me how to more aggressively and confidently combat conflicts in the legal and business world. Overall my finance, tax, and legal background has helped me to better improve my personal finance blogging tasks, as well as enhance my non traditional legal pursuits. I knew after law school that I didn’t want to pursue the traditional law firm job path since I had a passion for entrepreneurship and running my own business. When I discovered how to make money blogging and developed the ability to tap into the limitless potential of online business income, I knew I had found my calling. It’s a key component part of my solution to end the 9-5 workweek cycle, and the reason why I’m currently sitting at home right now tinkering on the computer instead of collecting a steady paycheck at a stressful full time lawyer position or even at a contract attorney gig.

For now, I plan to only take a short time off to work on my ventures full time as I currently am not yet able to live off of my online income alone. Perhaps that day will someday come, but for now, I plan to return to my legal contracting job after a month or two off. Obviously I don’t see contract attorney work as the future for me since the profession is inherently unstable, unpredictable, and projects do tend to dry up during recessions and slow economic periods. I merely see it as a necessary means to an end for now. Meanwhile, I also realize that by taking a few months off I am forfeiting a substantial amount of contract attorney pay to spend time building my passive income businesses, but I think in the long run and even in a few years from now, the short term financial sacrifice will pay off. The amount of money I am losing by not working full time is quite substantial however. Contract attorneys in my area get top wage rates of $35 an hour with time and a half of $52.50 per overtime hour worked past 40 hours. My contract projects usually require that I bill around 50 or so hours, which comes to a weekly income of $1925.00. I’ve worked at least one extremely time demanding project before in the recent past, during which I worked and billed 96 hours a week for a span of one month. The work was a simple breeze, but the hours were brutal. Of course during that time, I earned $4,340.00 per week before tax. I guess it speaks highly of how much potential I see in online and passive income businesses that I would forsake that wage income now.

Comparing financial networth can be tricky since you aren’t always comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. Married individuals that combine the incomes and assets of both spouses will clearly have much higher networths and much lower expenses than single individuals.

With that in mind, here is some background information to help you know where I stand. I am currently in my late 20’s, not married, currently renting, and working a contract job that pays reasonably well. I graduated from law school a few years ago and am still trying to figure out exactly what is it that I want to do professionally. I took things easy after graduate school, choosing to enjoy life and neglected the importance of saving early. I did not start tracking my finances and focus on saving until the start of 2007 last year. All of my savings and investments were initiated one year ago on January 2007. Here is the summary of my 2007 financial progression and where I stand now.

Tracking My Financial Progress Using Networth IQ

Investment and Retirement

The bulk of my investments are in emerging market mutual funds, including the Fidelity South East Asia Fund (FSEAX), and in a few speculative stock positions, including Superconductor Technologies (scon). I know my investment approach is extremely aggressive, but I don’t mind taking on tremendous risk as I am investing for the long duration (25+ years). Despite the recent downturn in the stock market, my investment portfolio still gained 25%, primarily due to my fortunate timing earlier in the year as well as the continued growth of my target markets.

In early 2007 I opened and made my first Roth IRA contribution for 2006. I have yet to contribute for 2007 and 2008 but will certainly do so by the April 15 deadline. Although I am currently performing contract work, I do also get a small matching 401k plan through my employer. However, I didn’t fully take advantage of this in 2007. In 2008 I hope to contribute enough to get the maximum match.

Spending, Credit Cards, and Balance Transfer Arbitrage

Currently, I use a combination of reward credit cards to pay for everything – using a different credit card for different types of purchases to get the maximum reward benefit possible. I rarely lug around cash, although I do keep about $100 cash on my person for emergency use. In 2007, I racked up the equivalent of nearly $850 worth of credit card rewards and cash back that I have yet to redeem. Most are in the form of Citi Thank You Points that I will be converting to a credit balance soon. As for credit card debt, I have none because I always pay off my balances in full every month.

In 2008, despite lower yielding bank interest rates, I still plan on starting the 0% balance transfer credit card process, also known as the App-O-Rama. Despite it’s silly name, for those who are responsible with credit card usage and have good financial sense, it’s a good way to earn extra interest income by depositing the balance transfer amount into high yield savings account. I pulled my most recent free credit report and checked my free credit score – my FICO’s a very healthy 745 so I’m good to go.

Checking and Savings

My most actively used checking account is an E-Z Checking Account handled by Citibank that earns no interest. I keep the deposited balance very low as a result. Excess funds not needed immediately are transfered into an attached E-Savings Citibank account. Currently the yield is only 3.75% APY. In 2008 I have plan to chase better savings interest rates through online banks like E-trade Bank and EverBank.

I also have plans to migrate my primary checking account into one that offers a reasonable interest rate without requiring too high of a minimum balance. Is there such a thing? I also plan on opening a business checking account for my side business one of these days. Currently, I can’t open a business account using my fictitious business name until my trade name application has been process – but it’s taking longer than expected.

Expenses

Most of my regular expenses is made up of my apartment rent and food. My rent is currently $1,425 for a one bedroom condo, an expense I gladly pay since it gets me away from the roach infested dump I used to live at (I’ll write more about my past scary housing experiences sometime). My commute to work is by Metro subway trains, so I don’t pay much in the way of gasoline and other transportation costs. Looking at my monthly expenditures, I notice that I eat out way too often. Luckily I use restaurant reward credit cards and basic frugality sense to lower costs. Being a bad cook and trying not to eat out so often is difficult. My solution is to make sure that I marry a girl one day who is an exceptional cook and loves to cook for her man. Hehe

Real Estate and Housing

I do not currently own a home, nor do I have any plans in the near future to subject myself to the mercy of the collapsing housing market. I am hoping that housing prices continue their plunge for several more years and shed at least 25% of their value before I will seriously consider buying. I am perfectly happy renting an apartment in the meantime and anticipate continued Fed rate cuts. I guess I am looking to time my entrance with bottomed-out housing prices and low interest rates.

The majority of the networth of many people out there is due to the home equity they have in their homes. As I am not currently a homeowner, I do not have home equity to list as my asset. However, what I do have is flexibility in where I invest as I am not stuck with an unfavorable long term mortgage commitment.

Student Loans

My students loans are the primary drags on my overall networth, however they don’t hinder me financially at all. For someone who graduated from law school not too long ago, my $30,000 worth of student loans are very tame compared to the more than $100,000 that many law students frequently graduate with.

Fortunately, I was able to consolidate my student loans at a very low fixed interest rate in 2004. I was also able to take advantage of all Sallie Mae borrower benefits to further reduce my interest rate to a very low fixed 2.25%. My monthly payments are only $199, a piece of cake in the grand scheme of things. Because my student loan interest rate is so low, I have little incentive to pay it back quickly, and prefer to leave the amount in high yield savings to earn interest income.

Side Business

In my personal quest to one day stop trading hours for dollars, other than working my full time day job I also run a few other side ventures as well. They are growing but I plan to spend more time on them in the new year. I hope I can devote the needed time to keep them growing as they are quite time consuming – sometimes it feels like I’m working a second or even third job. But I am excited for the new year and hope 2008 will bring forth bigger and better things for everyone. I know it!