Do any of you out there have any possible way to fathom how much money four trillion dollars is?  To give you somewhat of an idea (as I learned yesterday), four trillion dollars is twice the amount that the entire population of the United States spend on credit in a given year.  Still don’t think that’s a ridiculous number?…well consider the fact that that is what our president has spent on the “wars” in the Middle East in his tenure over the past almost eight years.  Does anyone really appreciate what a mess that puts our country in or how unaccountable he is going to be for it come next January when the next president is sworn into office?  With that task nagging in the back of Americans’ minds, I’m surprised that any one of the current bunch of nominees is even willing to give it a try.  I suppose that there has to be some novelty for the nominees who, I have not doubt, think that if and when they take the presidential office, they will be the one to turn America around and save it from the last eight years of unhealthy practices and terrible decisions.  Now that I’m older, I have been trying to think back to what presidents must have been like in the past.  Were they and their administrations possible as corrupt as the current one?  I then wonder how our current president can get away with the atrocities that he has over the last eight years while the president before him was impeached for having an extramarital affair.  Not that either is really all that acceptable, but come on…four trillion dollars that hurt all Americans or someone’s personal business.  It doesn’t seem like much of an argument to me.  Some folks in the news media have compared the situation that the new president will walk into next January as similar to what a college graduate steps into after having completed his or her degree.  Once the college loan payments start rolling in, the choices that recent graduates face as to what kind of careers they can have and how they can live are hampered by considerations about affording their loan payments.  Some financial analysts feel strongly that the effectiveness and ability of the new president (whomever he or she might be) will be similarity hampered by the tremendous debt and the situation that the current president has left our country in, both in the eyes of Americans and in the eyes of the rest of the world.  Not that I’m exactly a financial professional (any more), but I would surely agree with this assessment.  There are so many problems to deal with when walking into the White House door before the new president will even be able to think about a new agenda.  I know that one thing is clear…I would never want to be in those shoes.  Nonetheless, I’m sure that we will get a better idea about the possibilities for recover from this eight year long mess as primaries are held and candidates are chosen.  One way or the other we’ll have at least a hazy idea and a fifty-fifty chance at knowing how things might start out next January.  I think that it is also very important for Americans to recognize that, no matter who the next president is, they are not going to have superhuman strength and are not going to be able to be a miracle worker.  Just as it has taken eight years to dig ourselves into this hole, it might even take twice as long to get ourselves back out of it.  Only time will tell…

I just read a really interesting news article this afternoon that I thought that I should share will all of you since it concerns personal finances.  I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t gotten much of a chance to peruse the news (wow…that rhymes), so now that it’s the weekend, I at least have a little bit of time to sit down and take five minutes to relax and write in my blog.  So, this article that I read was about how using your credit card can put you and your finances in jeopardy.  As it turns out, Americans as a whole spend over two trillion dollars on credit in two thousand seven.  If you aren’t quite sure what that looks like, it’s $2,000,000,000,000 or two million million dollars.  I know, it’s pretty mindboggling to me too, so don’t be embarrassed.  All in all, that is just an absolutely astounding amount of money for one country to be spending, and that’s just the folks with credit cards who are using them to buy things.  Just think of the amount of money that is pouring into our economy in general from the American public if that amount alone is going towards credit card purchases…even more astounding.  So the scary part about this credit card spending, and the part that will put you into jeopardy, is that many Americans spend more than they can afford on credit.  That means that they are using their credit card as a way to purchase things far beyond their means so that if they needed to pay back the amount in one lump sum in an emergency, it wouldn’t be possible.  This is a very scary thought to me, being a person who very rarely uses his credit card.  Although I like to leave a little bit of money out on credit as a good healthy way to build credit, I could never imagine having more money out on credit than I have in my bank account.  That is just no way to build a healthy financial future.  That means that you are working week to week or month to month just to be able to pay your credit card bills…yikes!!!  As it turns out from reading further in this article, a growing number of Americans are now starting to pay their credit card bills later and later, leading to the gradual decline in the average credit score of Americans…another scary thought.  As someone who has never once been late on a credit card payment, I shudder to think of these folks who are knocking their credit score down by notches each month when they continue to pay their bills late.  If I recall correctly, this article stated that just about one -third of Americans are in this particular habit of paying their credit card bills late.  Still more Americans are charging so much that they are only able to pay the minimum payment each month on their bill.  For a lot of people who don’t have great credit in the first place, that means that you are barely making a dent in the actual amount that you owe due to the ungodly interest rates that you are probably paying even just to have a credit card in the first place.  Now, I’m not here to preach, but if any of what I’ve written above sounds like it would apply to you and your credit situation, I would advise you to talk to a financial advisor or professional sooner rather than later to get yourself on the road to a healthy recover for your personal finances.

OK, so I’ve been slacking a little bit on keeping up with my daily-ish blog posts, but it’s just that time of the semester again where things like that are just going to happen.  It always happens without fail that things start off pretty slowly in any given semester, but once the one month mark is past, professors start to kick things into high gear and subsequently want to know what you will be doing to prove yourself for the semester with a final project or paper.  When you end up taking four classes a semester as I have each semester for the past two years, having four different professors gang up on you asking about how you’re going to spend your life from the next three months is a little bit scary and often very intense.  What is usually ends up meaning is that I will be spending the next two months (at least) locked in my bedroom staring at a computer screen trying to write.  I will no doubt forget to eat, forget to sleep, and pretty much forget to do a lot of things that most normal people do on a regular basis…like leave the house.  If I’m not stuck in my room, you’ll likely be able to find me at one of about five different coffee shops around town, once again in front of a computer screen attempting to do work.  The advantage of the coffee shops is the coffee of course!  Caffeine is the drug that most graduate students and even some undergraduates run on all day (and perhaps all night).  I can’t imagine how I possible made my way through undergrad with two majors and three minors without ever drinking coffee.  It just doesn’t seem right, especially since these days I can barely live without the stuff.  One of these days, I’d really like to take an afternoon off and go and do something “normal”.  I’d like to walk around the mall, buy myself something nice, or even just go out for lunch or dinner at a half-way decent restaurant that I don’t always eat at…just to do something outside of my normal routine.  Because school is getting so crazy again, routine is something that I always find myself falling into…mostly because it’s the only way to stay somewhat sane.  Too many things moving in too many different directions yields far too many distractions for me to be able to handle on any one given day.  That’s why I need to plan distractions for myself to keep things moving smoothly.  Either way, I’m sure that there are plenty of interesting financially-related things going on in the news over the past few days, but I simply haven’t had the chance to read about them.  My biggest exposure to the news media over the past week or so has been the RSS feed that shows up in my computer screen alongside the weather forecast and my clock that keep me somewhat in touch with the world outside of my office.  I think that life will calm down at some point, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it isn’t going to be any time soon.

I sure hope that none of you out there has had to deal with finding false charges show up on your credit card billing statement.  From what I have heard, it is a very unpleasant situation to deal with, mainly because the charge will end up sitting in your account and interest will be charged on it until the dispute is settled between the credit card company and the business that charged you incorrectly.  I can think of only one time in the past ten years or so that I’ve had a credit card where I noticed an odd discrepancy in my statement that necessitated that I call and figure out what the story behind the charge actually was.  As it turned it, because I was using my bank debit card, which although it had a Visa logo, was not a “real” credit card, it was pretty easy to resolve the problem.  I had gone somewhere for dinner and used my debit card to pay for my meal, and apparently the card didn’t end up swiping correctly the first time around (or so the waitress thought), and so she swiped it again.  As it turns out, the card worked just fine the first time, and when she swiped it to try again, she ended up charging me double for my three chicken soft tacos and diet coke.  My bank saw the duplicate charges just a few minutes from one another and immediately recredited my account for the second charge, and the situation was resolved amicably in just a few moments.  Other times though if you are really dealing with a credit situation, the process can be a lot more trying for everyone involved.  Case in point, I heard from my father not too long ago that he had used his credit card to purchase something somewhere, and as it turns out the clerk had written down his number and accidentally used it for the next customer’s order as well.  It was an odd amount on the statement, and so he didn’t catch the extra charge right away.  At some point he realized that his receipts weren’t matching his credit card statement, and so he looked into the matter further only to recognize that there was a problem.  It came back to two purchases made a short while from one another on the same day from the same store.  Of course when he called the store, the folks there were very apologetic and willing to take the charge off, but because it had gone through the credit card company, they had to wait for the charges to go through a dispute process.  Long story short, it took almost a month for the charges to be taken off his card, and I don’t think that he ever got the interest on the charge paid back to him.  While I’m sure that he probably could have worked something out to get those charges paid back, I would imagine that he was just so sick of dealing with the situation by that time that he let the negligible charge slide by without too much fuss.

Whenever I hear about someone collecting coins, whether for saving money or for a hobby, it always makes me think of my grandfather.  My grandfather and I were always very close, maybe because I was the oldest of the six grandchildren, or maybe just ‘because’.  He passed away about a year and a half ago, and everyone in my family is surely still feeling the effects of him not being around.  I really started thinking about him today as I was reading the news since I came across a particular post about a coin collection of just about three hundred pennies that was sold recently for nearly eleven million dollars at an auction.  My grandfather always was collecting coins for one reason or another, and even now there are jugs and boxes of coins in random places around my grandparent’s house that my grandmother will not likely ever get rid of…and I can’t blame her.  My grandfather collected odd coins throughout the years like wheat pennies, buffalo nickels, Susan B. Anthony dollars, Sacagewea dollars, gold dollar coins, and the state quarters.  Even now, my grandmother has my grandfather’s state quarter collection that she adds to every time a new coin comes out.  My grandfather and I collected quarters when I was very young, and I ended up getting two generations worth of Voltron toys out of the collection.  I never really realized it, but even now, I have my own jug of coins that I collect in my living room since I never really keep change in my pockets.  Of course I cash in the coins from time to time, but mostly they just collect.  So this article that I read was actually pretty interesting seeing as though just over three dollars worth of coins ended up fetching eleven million dollars at auction.  That really kinda gives a person the incentive to pick up a hobby like collecting coins or collecting stamps…that’s neumismatics, right?!  I can never remember.  Just by saving some change and taking care of it, you could end up with some really important items later in life that you can pass down to your children or your grandchildren.  I remember that my grandfather gave me some of his coins when I was a kid because I thought that I was going to start collecting coins.  I didn’t realize at the time the importance of the coins, particularly in relation to my grandfather, because of course it never occurred to me that out of my four grandparents that I would lose him first.  He seemed like the strongest most active of the four, but unbeknowst to all of us, cancer doesn’t really consider things like that.  I’m very regretful at this point that I gave my entire set of coins away to my best friend’s little brother when he decided that he was going to start a coin collection.  I’m sure that those particular coins gave him a lot of joy when he was into coin collecting, but I can’t help but wonder where they are now.  My best guess is that they are sitting somewhere in the basement of his parents’ house.  I can only hope that he didn’t give them away or sell them…but even it he did, someone out there is surely enjoying having them.

The sad reality for many students, and particularly graduate students, is that we are always wondering if our funding is going to come through for the next period of time.  Some of us have teaching assistanceships, graduate assistanceships, or even a lucky few have fellowship that help us to make it through from semester to semester.  Depending on the particularly discipline and the availability of funding, some graduate students even have to find themselves jobs to hold down, working in the evenings and on the weekends, trying to make ends meet.  It is often easier to nail down a source for funding one way or another for the academic year, but the Summer months tend to be more up in the air.  Once again, depending on the field, a lot of professor leave the campus to do field work, vacation, travel, work on their research, or teach at various clinics, workshops, or conferences over the Summer.  That means that a lot of departments don’t offer classes and don’t give students a lot of opportunity to progress in classwork over the Summer.  The Summer months are usually spent brushing up on other kinds of work and research that never got around to being finished over the rest of the year.  One advantage to this Summer lack of activity is that a lot of students get the opportunity to try their hands at teaching undergraduates and other inexperienced graduate students who are desperately trying to get ahead in their degree programs by taking intense Summer session classes for one half of the Summer or the other.  It is generally the case, at least in my department, that the faculty allow one or two graduate students to teach introductory level classes over the Summer sessions in an unsupervised manner.  While some graduate students shudder at such a thought, other jump at the opportunity to run a classroom for themselves.  I am one of those kinds of jumpers, and when I heard that a teaching position was available for half the Summer, I made sure to apply for it…never thinking that I would actually receive the position.  Much to my surprise, I learned this afternoon that my department was offering me the position.  I was shocked, exciting, anxious, and honestly a little bit scared at the prospect of teaching a class for the first time in an unsupervised environment.  Of course I immediately accepted the position, and then subsequently I was thrown into a discussion about curriculum, the proper textbook, and preparing a potential syllabus timeline to plan out the class.  While the class isn’t taught for another four months, I’m sure that it won’t hurt to get things started.  On the other hand, I have a ton of things that I need to accomplish between now and the end of the current semester, so I’m thinking that saving a lot of my real lesson planning until the first six weeks of the Summer before I will actually be teaching won’t be such a bad idea.

I didn’t realize until I just read my last comment from EmCee that it’s really been almost two weeks since my mysterious ankle injury started messing with my life.  I still have no idea what I could have possibly done to it, but I’m at least somewhat glad now to see that it is bruised and swollen.  You see, for the first week or so that I was in pain and could hardly walk, I think that most of the people who knew about my injury just thought that I was crazy.  Sure, my ankle was a little swollen, but it didn’t seem like it would be that bad.  Now that I’ve figured out that I have Achilles tendonitis, things make a lot more sense, and it surely makes sense that I’m still swollen.  With injuries like these, it’s often not worth going to the doctor’s office and spending a ton of money for xrays, pain pills, and crutches, because after all, there isn’t much that they can do for you other than tell you stay off of it as best as possible until it heals itself.  I had a friend of mine’s wife who is a doctor take a look at it off the clock, and she confirmed the diagnosis that I had already given myself and basically told me that it would take some time to heal.  As I’m sure that some of you are aware who have had similar injuries to heels, ankles, feet, or knees, these types of injuries take a long time to heal since we are constantly exercising the injury and prolonging the healing time.  One thing that I didn’t realize about these types of injuries is that people need to keep their painkiller/analgesic level high enough because that will keep the swelling down and therefore speed along the process.  Swelling attract blood cells to the injury, and that inflames nerve cells, and therefore that leads to the pain.  By taking painkillers, you are not only fighting pain and keeping the swelling down, but you are also speeding along the process…just don’t overdo it!  So, here I am at day number twelve, and while my heel/ankle feel a lot better and I can get around pretty well without too much pain, I still am not at one hundred percent.  I still have a little bit of a limp that I can’t seem to get rid of quite yet, but I’m working on it day to day.  I think that within another day or two, I will be back to normal for the most part.  It surely doesn’t help that the temperatures have been so low and that the weather has been so nasty around here the past couple of days.  I’m afraid that the ice storm that we are currently experiencing is going to cause me to slip and make the problem all that much worse and start me back from step one.  I’m also trying to do my best to heal up nicely because it’s only about three weeks away from my Spring break trip up to New York City.  Since I’ve already spent the money for the trip, I need to make sure that I’m ready to walk around and see the city since I don’t get up there very often these days.  I’ve got to be able to make the most of the five short days that I’m getting up there!

Pretty soon, if things keep going the way they have been, it’s going to be cheaper to walk a letter to where it needs to go instead of sending it in the mail.  OK, so maybe that is a gross exaggeration, but I’m just reeling slightly after learning that the United States Postal Service will once again raise the price of stamps.  Sure, the increase is only another penny, but I can surely remember when the price of stamps was ten cents cheaper…which really wasn’t more than a few years ago.  What is the story with all of these increases?  Has it really become more expensive to the postal service in general to send a letter?  I understand that they now have a lot of fancy equipment to make things run more smoothly, but at a penny per letter…they’ve got to be making a killing.  I think that this really irritates me because it means a lot of extra work for me personally.  I work at a publishing company that sends it orders all through US mail.  Because of this increase once again, I’m going to have to generate reports that reveal what the increase in postage is doing to our profits to spending ratio, and then re-evaluate the shipping prices that we charge, as well as the prices of our books…all because the US postal service decides they want another penny.  Well, not exactly…since with the penny increase in first-class stamps, we will no doubt have an increase in other types of postage…that is if we can take as any indication the situation last time the price of stamps was increased.  If that is the case, I’m to have to re-adjust our company website to reflect the new prices, change the shipping prices on our order forms, and of course worry about getting a whole slew of one-cent stamps to add to the forty-one cents stamps that I bought not too long ago.  It’s no wonder to me why people are always so upset when they have to go to the post office, and likewise why postal workers are traditionally known to be the craziest and grouchiest folks around.  Wow, I was right…I just looked it up, and the price of stamps increased by a penny not even a year ago in two thousand seven.  I’m a little bit jealous of those folks who were smart enough to purchase the Forever stamps back in April of last year for forty-one cents, because the deal was that no matter what price increases might occur, that stamp will always be valid for mailing one-ounce first-class materials.  What a mess this is going to end up being once again for a lot of people, particularly those who run or are employed by small businesses.  While one penny might not seem to be like a lot of money, in the long run it can really make a dent in monthly profits and general overhead, particularly if your business operates with a lot of snail-mailing, rather than e-mailing.

Has anyone noticed the major change in television over the past two months since the writers strike has been going on?  Sure, we’ve been missing some of our favorite prime time shows on the popular networks, but at least for me, I hardly even remember what was happening on them in the first place.  This fact has made it all the easier to forget the shows and some of my interest in them altogether.  It seems to be the way that most Americans are heading due to this situation, and the rise of a ton of new reality television shows are fueling the move.  It’s a really odd situation as far as I’m concerned, because, while I side with the writers in that they need to be compensated accordingly and fairly, I also know that they are likely facing a losing battle since everyone knows that Americans are going to watch television no matter what.  That is where these reality shows come in and do well.  They don’t have writers, they don’t have scripts, and they have story lines, characters, and drama just like the regular shows.  Then you have other shows like Jon Stewart’s for example, where the show is going on anyway with new material even though there are no writers involved.  Sure, he sort of changed the name of the show for one reason or another, but the show is still on with him, and it’s still entertaining…even without the writers contributions.  The thing that I wonder is if any progress is being made in the writers strike.  I remember not too long ago reading something in the news where one of the awards ceremonies was running into a bind because they could not hire writers to script the event.  No amount of twisting and bending the rules could get things to work out.  It just seems to be that the writers went on strike to drive the popular shows down thereby making the networks realize how much they really need the writers…makes sense somewhat.  However, this just hasn’t happened, and I haven’t seen or heard of a Plan B thus far.  I have never really watched a lot of television in the first place, and the shows that I did like to watch like Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives have trailed off into the same plot lines and garbage over and over again for seasons, so I’ve trailed off accordingly.  I am becoming a fan of the popular specialty reality shows, like those that you find on Bravo TV…like Top Chef, Project Runway…on VH1, like American’s Next Top Model…or even on the Food Network…like the Next Iron Chef, and Iron Chef America.  These shows are totally entertaining, and it’s easy to get hooked on content that has the ability to affect you….we all wear clothes and we all have to eat, right?  While I’m not missing “regular” television all that badly, I do hope that the financial negotiations start to progress in a positive direction for the writers, because it’s very apparent that they need to feed themselves and their families and pay their bills just like the rest of us.

Groundhog’s day…what is there to say about it?  I honestly have no idea where the holiday came from or why we even bother observing it.  It’s certainly not one of those Hallmark holidays like Valentine’s Day or Grandparent’s Day.  It’s not a “service” holiday like Labor Day or Secretary’s Day.  It’s certainly not a religious holiday like Christmas or even I suppose Halloween (depending on what you define as religion).  It’s just a very odd holiday that really doesn’t have a comparable day anywhere else throughout the year.  While I was growing up, I began to wonder about the whole Puxsatawny Phil groundhog little critter.  I’m sure that someone has had to do some kind of statistical study about how accurate the little guy’s “predictions” (if you want to call them that) have been over the years.  Suppose it’s a beautiful sunny day in Pennsylvania on February second and the groundhog happens to come out as a single cloud is passing by causing him to see his shadow…does that mean six more weeks of Winter?  It’s just really goofy, but it seems that it’s one of those things that some Americans go nuts for every year.  The only thing that I’m concerned about, whether or not the groundhog and his shadow have anything to do with it, is how much longer my heating bill is going to be elevated because of the frosty midwest Winter months.  With the mild temperatures of the rest of the year, I suppose that a little bit of an extended Winter is all that bad, but I would rather save the money and help out Mother Nature at the same time by opening up the windows and airing out the house with some warm Spring breezes with sunshine as an added bonus.  My favorite days since I’ve lived up in the midwest have been those days when I can grab a journal article or book that I need to read for class and plop myself outside on my back porch with a cool drink and enjoy and the smells and sounds of springtime.  That was really something that I was never really able to do when I lived in the Florida panhandle.  The days where it is not too cold but not too warm to sit outside and relax are few and far between in that neck of the woods.  I will admit that I’m a little bit bummed that the old groundhog saw his shadow today, since I suppose that that means that we are in for another six weeks of grey wintry weather.  I’ve actually looked up the “groundhog stats” for this year, and out of the fourteen “famous” groundhogs around the United States and Canada (the two countries who observe Groundhog Day), ten of the fourteen predicted an early Spring, while the other four predicted six more weeks of Winter.  I think that I like those odds.