Financial Lessons Learned from a Night in the ER

Financial Lessons Learned from a Night in the ER

I have always been accident prone. Like a real-life heroine in a YA novel featuring vampires and forbidden romance, my most benign character flaw is that I’m clumsy as fuck.

I guess I just never grew out of that stage of puberty where you walk smack into walls that have been there for your whole life and end up with bruises of mysterious origin all over your legs. I just don’t know where my ends are! I’m missing whatever survival instinct informs the human body not to grievously injure itself on a regular basis.

So I guess it was just a matter of time before I ended up in the emergency room, writhing and blinded by the worst pain I have ever experienced in my life.

You guys. I hurt myself really, really badly. And I’m going to be paying for it for a long time.

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Woke at Work: How to Inject Your Values into Your Boring, Lame-Ass Job

Woke at Work: How to Inject Your Values into Your Boring, Lame-Ass Job

I generally don’t find it hard to live my values in my personal life. I vote. I’m conscious of where I spend my money, which is another kind of voting. My primary hobbies are fostering rescue dogs and writing this blog. I do these things because I am a bitter old crone who thinks that most people are trash, yet hasn’t fully abdicated her responsibilities as a member of the human race. Go figure.

Where I struggle is in my working life. Like lots of folks, I work in a white collar job that doesn’t have anything to do with any kind of social issues. My background is graphic design, and my past clients have mostly been super lame and boring. Think commercial real estate databases, catering associations, paper shredding companies.

Nevertheless, over the years, I have managed to find unexpected opportunities to live my values at work. I started out as an SJW ninja, finding sneaky ways to slip in and shift the culture. Since then, I’ve graduated to bigger and bolder actions that are getting me a lot more traction.

If you want to be a good ally in the workplace, I believe that the first and most powerful thing you can do is to be solid and cool to your fellow workers. Be kind and respectful. Don’t be a shitty, judgmental, gossipy, mean coworker. Don’t work unpaid overtime. Take your vacations. Share salary information. Support unions. Expose harassment. Use your privilege for good.

But today we’re going to focus more on what you can do in your job roles.

… Job rolls?!

............BACK ROLLS?!
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How to Shop for Groceries like a Boss

How to Shop for Groceries like a Boss

It’s happened. That thing countless rom coms and heteronormative popcorn flicks from the 90s warned me about. The thing I swore at the tender age of sixteen would never, ever happen to me.

Dear readers, I have become… my mother.

My fate is sealed and I’ve got proof! At the grocery store, I haughtily wave my cloth bags at the bagger and proclaim, “I prefer to bag for myself.”

It’s not that I hate baggers and seek to force their entire profession out of employment. It’s just that they don’t do it right, with “right” defined as “according to my very particular and neurotic specifications.”

The one time I was in a hurry and neglected to bag for myself, I lost a bag to the straining weight of all the most heavy items on my grocery list. It burst right there on my front stoop, ripped apart by the carelessness of a bagger who clearly had not trained for extreme grocery bagging at the feet of the expert: my mother.

All of which is to say: I take every step of the grocery-shopping process extremely seriously. And if it is also your goal to save money, eat well, and become my mother, then settle in.

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My Secret Weapon for Preparing for Awkward Boss Confrontations

My Secret Weapon for Preparing for Awkward Boss Confrontations

I’ve had a lot of uncomfortable discussions with bosses. A few things I’ve told them that come to mind…

“You deliberately humiliated another employee on a group call, and that level of immaturity and pettiness is professionally unacceptable.”

Or…

“Your administrative assistant, whom you love like a son, says casually and openly racist things whenever you’re not in the room.”

Or…

“You need to pay me $20,000 more dollars.”

To be fair, I said that last one nicer. And I had some great PowerPoint slides to go along with it!

Unlike a lot of people, I am actually very comfortable with conflict. I would even say I thrive on it. (There’s no way to say that and not sound like an asshole, but I am what God made me: an ENTJ.) Of all people, I probably go into a confrontational situation with the least possible amount of anxiety.

Nevertheless, I need extra deodorant on those days. My hands shake. My voice trembles. Which I really, truly hate. It makes people think I’m nervous, when it’s more of an under-exercized-border-collie-looking-at-a-fat-city-pigeon-and-trembling-with-overwhelming-herding-instinct situation.

YA DAG CAUGHT MAH

Having a difficult conversation with your boss is really hard. They’re often terribly high-stakes. Depending on the nature of the conversation, you may feel like you’re ambushing your boss with new and unpleasant information. Your life and livelihood may feel like they hang in the balance. It is not easy to stay chill.

That’s why I have a secret weapon for going into such conversations.

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5 Easy Things You Can Do Right Fucking Now to Help Your Finances

5 Easy Things You Can Do Right Fucking Now to Help Your Finances

When you wake up from the capitalist, consumerist nightmare that is our socioeconomic system (#SJW #eattherich), the thought of getting your financial shit together can be daunting. Where do you begin? What can you do right away to make an improvement in your financial prospects? How do you avoid fucking everything up even further?

It can all be a bit overwhelming.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Here are five easy, lightning-fast things you can do right fucking now to help your financial situation. Do them.

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Our Single Best Piece of Advice for Women (and Men) on International Women’s Day

Our Single Best Piece of Advice for Women (and Men) on International Women’s Day

This post is part of the #WomenRockMoney Movement, a group of female personal finance bloggers who have come together to inspire more women to own their finances. Thanks to Chelsea for putting together this collaboration and the amazing homepage for the movement!

As part of International Women’s Day, we’ve partnered with other personal finance bloggers under the hashtag #WomenRockMoney. Our task was to:

“Write your one most important piece of advice you wish all women know. This is your ‘shout from the mountaintops,’ inspirational speech for women. It can be something you wish you knew when you were younger, something you’ve learned from experience, or something you are still working on mastering today.”

This is an overwhelming question. We started this blog because we’re a bottomless pit of unsolicited opinions! How the hell are we supposed to boil it all down into one single piece of solicited advice?

But all right, all right. There is one piece of advice that ticks all of those boxes. Our shout-from-the-mountaintops, inspirational speech for women—and men! It’s something we wish we knew when we were younger. Something we’ve learned from experience. And it’s something we’re still working on mastering today.

Conveniently, this advice fits neatly into a single word:

Radicalize.

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A Little Princess: Intersectional Feminist Masterpiece?

A Little Princess: Intersectional Feminist Masterpiece?

People really don’t like to be called “privileged.” We’ve had a small number of readers who’ve felt compelled to leave comments rejecting the term. Most of these fit into one of three categories:

  1. “I am really offended that you would assume I’m a racist, because I’m not.”
  2. “I am really offended that you would assume that I am rich, because I’m not.”
  3. Or “I am really offended that you would assume that my life has always been easy, because it hasn’t.”

These comments speak to three of the most common misconceptions/misinterpretations of the meaning of the concept of privilege. Namely:

  1. Having privilege implies bad moral character.
  2. Having privilege implies some degree of monetary wealth.
  3. Or having privilege implies that you have never known struggle, and that nothing bad or unfair has ever happened to you.

These three things are categorically untrue. But it’s hard for some people to see a more nuanced vision of the word’s meaning. It conjures up visions of sneering 1980s rich-jock villains with cashmere sweaters tied around their necks. The kind of people named ~ C h e t ~ or ~ T i n s l e y ~. That is an idea with which, very understandably, no one wishes to align themselves!

Both history and fiction are filled with privileged people of strong moral character who undergo extreme setbacks and losses. And privileged characters can make amazing heroes. There’s nothing at all about their privileges that excludes them from being admirably brave, loyal, clever, compassionate, fearsome, ambitious, or generally fascinating.

Now, this is Bitches Get Riches. If we need an example of an awesome intersectional-yet-privileged hero, we’ll obviously go straight to a G-rated 90s film that no one remembers.

God, this cinematography...
THIS MOVIE ROCKS.
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