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Browsing category: Uncategorized

  • July 12, 2014

    Link love (Powered by Subway and antibiotics)

    nzmuse link love roundup

    I’ve had it up to here with winter birthdays. I wasn’t expecting much for my first at home in three years, but I never expected to find myself at the doctor’s that very night – thankfully I didn’t have anything much planned.

    Seriously. I might start marking the occasion on January 6 instead. Or something.

    This June was the warmest on record in years but I find that frankly unbelievable. Every year winter feels colder and longer, and so far this one has been bloody tough for me. After all, we followed summer around the world last year, and now we’re back in a crappy freezing Auckland rental – any single-digit temperature mornings are one too many in my books.

    Being sick also means I haven’t been able to give my present (new running shoes) a whirl yet, so I’m pretty grumpy.

    Upside of being sick: lots of meaty reads for you.

    This week’s links

    I adored Femme Frugality’s guest post on Musical Poem about travel stirring the soul

    And Leslie’s piece on her difficult first year in NYC

    What it’s like to teach English in Japan (through the JET programme for NZers)

    7 signs you haven’t travelled enough, via World of Wanderlust

    Jordann asks: what are your inescapable self-truths? (I have oh-so-many)

    10 things our generation will be the last to see, courtesy of Young Adult Money (also: taping songs off the radio!)

    Ahh New York. I love you so, grimy subways and all, and wish we had public transport a 10th as good as yours

    More and more Americans are embracing extended travel, apparently

    Via FQF: Can money take your passion to the next level?

    So you got the job – now what? Via Life, Etc

    I’ve been trying to keep up with the Hobby Lobby stuff in the US (and failing) but reading lots of good stuff in the process – like this Forbes piece on how insurance is for insuring against calamities and how the US lost sight of that, and the Daily Beast on how the Supreme Court has been skewing pro-gay, anti-women

    How an arranged marriage evolved into honest-to-goodness love, recounted hilariously: “When you’ve grown up with the idea that Indian love leads to a rational, calm, reliable marriage and American love leads to a passionate, fragile marriage, then the fact that your Indian parents have fallen in American love is not good.”

    Finally, appreciated Indra Nooyi’s honesty the other week when interviewed by The Atlantic: “We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all. My husband and I have been married for 34 years. And we have two daughters. And every day you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother, in fact many times during the day you have to make those decisions.”

  • July 11, 2014

    How long will your car last? A fun rule of thumb

    How long will your car last? A fun rule of thumb

    We’ve always paid cash for our cars, with the exception of our second car (a strategy I think we’re going to buck for our next car, which will hopefully last us a minimum of 10 years). Based on our automotive history, I have drawn the conclusion that every $1000 spent = 1 year of life.

    Car 1: Red Mazda 626 sedan, $1500

    I remember the bank teller looking at me all sideways when I said the cash I was withdrawing was for a car. “Half a car,” I hastily lied, to get him off my back. It served us for probably a little over a year before the gearbox totally gave up.

    In between car: We also had a freebie white Corolla hatch worth next to nothing for a few months that helped bridge the gap between the first and second car. I don’t actually remember how it came into our lives/who gave it to us or what specifically happened to it. 

    Car 2: White Toyota Levin coupe, $3000

    This was all T’s car – his chance to fulfill his desire to have a ‘cool’ car, and learn an expensive lesson in the process. Thanks to this car, we also learned how dang useless the police can be sometimes when it comes to car accidents. I’m really proud of T for going to court and coming out with the result we wanted (in a nutshell: the cops at the scene screwed up, basically tried to lay blame on him rather than the other party, and we refused to lie down and let them walk over us). This one didn’t quite make it to 3 years – maybe 2, actually.

    Car 3: White Mazda Familia hatch, $1800

    Left in the lurch and scrambling for a vehicle, we wound up with this little thing – again, all we could afford at the time. It is, I think the only car to break down on the road and actually strand us to date. This also remains the only car we’ve ever had that was in an accident where we actually wound up getting damages fixed at the other party’s expense. Unfortunately the engine and rust issues only got worse and eventually proved too much; we farewelled the car not too long after that incident (shiny new back bumper and all). I’d say this lasted us close to a couple of years.

    Car 4: Silver Mazda Familia wagon, $4500

    Our most expensive car – and the newest we’d ever bought, only being about 12 years old with barely 100,000km when we got it. Also the only car that ever managed to get through a warrant of fitness with no issues at all – you get what you pay for. It was still a pretty old car though, so that lovely streak didn’t last and after one or two warrants, we were back to the stressful cycle of expensive fixes every  6 months in an effort to get it to pass. It also has a weird ghost problem (to do with the tyres/steering/alignment)  that nobody has ever been able to fix.  Nothing that’s terribly off, just an annoying niggle – the pea to T’s princess, if you like.

    It’s in a sorry state right now – rubber chunk missing from the steering wheel, no handbrake, no power steering, the ongoing tyre issue, and most recent and worrying, dodgy brakes. It’s coming up on four years, and needs to retire.

  • July 9, 2014

    Career tip: Play to your strengths

    One thing that stuck with me from my  recent training session on mentoring high school students was the strengths based approach.

    It seems so logical. Focus on your strengths, rather than solely on tackling your weaknesses. Yet I realised I have not been doing this at all.

    For example, an ongoing goal of mine for, oh, a couple of years now, has been to brush up on my coding skills. Yet every time I dived in, trying to dig into CSS, or even starting the Javascript module in Codecademy, it was a CHORE. I didn’t enjoy it, and I wasn’t particularly good at it. The other day I managed to break my blog thanks to a stray < in one of the PHP files. I used to think the concept of testing was pretty cool – essentially trying to break things on your site – but actually doing it on my own blog and the site I work on is bloody tedious.

    (On that note, there was a great piece on Mother Jones recently about how computational thinking is the new literacy – the ‘learn to code’ movement is great and all, but programmers need to be able to think about WHAT to build, too, in order to meet needs and solve problems. I definitely felt this during my brief brush with Javascript; it was cool to write code that actually DID something active, but realistically when would I use it?)

    I don’t have the patience, I don’t have the natural bent, and I don’t have the desire, since there are no obvious benefits. I’m confident in tweaking code – poking around and figuring out what pieces to change in order to get elements doing what I want them to do. Writing code from scratch – not so much. Getting to the stage where I’d be good enough to do it in my professional life is beyond my capability – and it’s probably not going to be hugely helpful to me. Even if I want to go down the full stack marketing route later on, heavier back end coding skills beyond basic HTML/CSS are not going to be as important as commercial nous and/or analytics. If there is talent besides programmers that we are crying out for in today’s work world, it’s digital analysts! (Seriously, we’re hiring right now.)

    I feel like I’ve gotten a lot of clarity about my immediate career path lately (this is my third job, and I finally feel like I’ve found my ‘story’ – a cue for me to tweak my LinkedIn profile soon, actually) and the way forward is not to try be something I’m not. My strengths are in content, not design or development. Focusing on that – particularly content strategy, building on my production and management base – is the obvious move.

    In the next few weeks I’m going to have to create a development plan as part of annual reviews at work (a totally new process to me), so now I’ve really got to think about what kinds of specific goals to commit to and how I can get there.

    Any tips?

  • July 6, 2014

    5 things I learned while I was 25

    5 lessons learned while I was 25

    Today I turn 26. Here, I present some life truths I learned this past year. They are MY life truths, anyway; some may apply to you, too.

    Thou shalt always wear a bra. You never know when you might have the urge to take a dip in a river.

    Eyeshadow makes the best eyeliner. That’s for ease of applying, specific colours, and staying power.

    Even old dogs can learn new tricks. Who knew my stance on pets would change so dramatically last year? A month hanging out with five dogs on a farm and I’m a goner. Or that I would embrace merino, overcoming my deep-seated aversion to wool. Seriously, merino is the most amazing fabric – despite all the pieces I’ve read (and written my fair share of) about various NZ companies doing amazing things with merino clothing.

    I am probably always going to feel somewhat conflicted about my race. I never know quite how to feel when a shop assistant approaches me and greets me in Mandarin, or a random person (security guard/bus driver/passerby) chucks out a ‘Ni hao’, or an Asian person comes up to me on the street and starts asking me something in a language I don’t understand. Also, in a weird way I’ve finally come full circle; knowing Chinese would definitely be a boon at my job – though even if I’d been interested in learning it as a kid I don’t think I would have been very successful.

    Aspiring to more is what defines me. I’ve been thinking about this (inspired by Natalie’s post) and decided that the one thing that best sums me up is I’m always looking to the future, thinking about what comes next and how to get there. And to that end, I’m also starting to think beyond my own little selfish bubble. With age, I’ve finally begun to truly understand how people become political. My top passions are still words, travel, and personal finance (and food might sneak in there too) but increasingly, urban issues are becoming a real priority for me. So much so I’m starting to wonder how I might be able to work in that space at some point down the line. I aspire to live in a world class city, and I feel like Auckland has made so many strides lately; we just have to start working on transport and housing. What we need are more sustainable choices – investing in transport beyond new roads, and bringing the standard of properties up to a basic humanitarian level.

  • July 3, 2014

    Hitting the financial reset button

    Will we ever NOT be broke?

    Comparing myself to others is always going to be something I struggle with. I’m old enough to realise that this is not a part of myself that’s going to change. And the best way to slay that demon is not to try and squash it, but kill it with reason.

    Mostly, whenever I fall into the pit of comparison, I wind up feeling pretty depressed. Yes, we are mid 20s with no debt, but also no assets to speak of and little hope of escaping the hamster wheel of grim, mouldy rentals anytime soon. I can’t help but feel like we’re never really going to pick up pace.

    When I think about the people our age I know who’ve managed to buy houses, they’ve all had advantages in one form or another. Most have had parental help – parents who paid some or all of their deposit, either using cash or equity in their own houses. Some have lived at home for years rent free. A couple have had cars bought for or given to them. Some have one partner in the relationship who earns significantly more.

    For our situation to change, I think we need two things. One, steady and reasonably-paid employment on T’s part – considering his stints of unemployment add up to a couple years, plus a few more months’ worth of reduced and lost income from injuries on top of that, maybe it’s a wonder we aren’t even further behind. As this Billfold piece wisely observed last month, we really need to start accounting for unemployment in the current environment, and adjust financial advice accordingly.

    Two, a steady and reliable car. Going the cheap secondhand route has not served us well. After so many years and a handful of different cars, we’re still exactly where we were on the car front as when we first started out – treading water with maintenance and repairs, with nothing really saved for a better and newer vehicle. Debt-averse as I am, I’m increasingly open to the idea of borrowing for a decent vehicle that we can drive into the ground (10 years at least?) so depreciation doesn’t matter. Vehicle financing options here are still kind of unappealing, but the other day I saw what might be the best offer I’d ever seen – something like 2 percent on new cars? – so things may be changing on that front. I’d much rather pay 2 percent on a new car than 10 percent on a used car that could have had any kind of history, and T’s experience from his stint in car sales should help us in the negotiation stage.

    But for my own peace of mind, I think I need to scale back on my expectations. In some ways, this year has worked out better than I expected, but in many ways it also worked out much worse. The long term goal remains buying a house and escaping the terrible Auckland rental market for all the reasons I’ve covered on this blog before, like health, stability, pets, kids – but I’m going to refrain from setting a timeline or any hard measures, because I honestly don’t know what the next few years hold for us.

  • July 1, 2014

    In defence of touristy places

    tourist spots i love - in defence of touristy spots

    While I suspect I may lose some cred for admitting to adoring all these destinations, I don’t care. I love them anyway.

    Hoi An

    Hoi An - one of my favourite touristy hotspots - NZMuse

    Basically the definition of a tourist town. Were it not for tourism, I’m not sure it would exist. It’s colourful, with fantastic food, a little bit of a time warp in the middle of the country.  As I wrote last year: “It’s all a show, really, but it doesn’t make it any less magical.”

    Halong Bay

    Halong Bay - one of my favourite touristy hotspots - NZMuse

    Yup, another Vietnamese spot!  I had heard negative things about the rubbish and pollution in the waters here, but it was surprisingly clean overall (note that we went during low season). This is a World Heritage site that will leave you feeling humbled and awed.

    Santorini

    Santorini - one of my favourite touristy hotspots - NZMuse

    The light here is like nothing else. Eat, drink, swim – try to hit the black, red AND white beaches – and be merry. Quite possibly the most romantic spot we visited. Fairly affordable, too.

    Venice

    Venice - one of my favourite touristy spots - NZMuse

    I was prepared for the worst – smelly, grotty, humid canals. But there was absolutely zero stench and while it was rather sweltering in August, I looooved the tiny alleyways, the gelato, and our overpriced gondola ride. ALL OF IT.

    Queenstown

    Queenstown - one of my favourite touristy spots - NZMuse

    Picture-perfect, even if it does get bloody cold down there. (The razor-like winds will cut you almost as deep as Iceland’s gusts.)

     

  • June 29, 2014

    Link love (Powered by lemonade and spring rolls)

    nzmuse blog link love

    I got super excited the other week when I saw my bank was pushing a special June offer for its low-interest Visa, with no fees for the life of the card. Anyone in NZ knows that it’s impossible to find a credit card with no annual fees here (though there is now Kiwibank’s Mastercard Zero – I’m not sure when that launched, because I never heard anything public about it and only learned of its existence through a random Quora thread).

    Alas, you cannot earn rewards with that card.  Even with account fees, and my bank’s irritating tinkering with the rewards scheme, I still come out ahead overall sticking with my current setup. (And come to think of it, what is the life of a card anyway – is that the life of the physical card, or the actual account? Because if it’s the former, then it would only be a couple years before it expired and I’d have to start paying fees on the new one.)

    This week’s links

    Ways to be kind to yourself, via Makeup and Mirtazapine

    Alexis Grant lays out the cold hard truth: No one will pay you just to write

    Kim from So Many Places tries to get her head around returning to the US – and all that entails

    Cassie’s turning 30 and has a bunch of astute lessons to share

    It’s a fine line … Exactly how confident are you allowed to be before it crosses the line? Via Yes and Yes

    Sometimes things happen either all at once or not at all, as Lindsay observes

    Athena shares her ‘why’ of personal finance

    Here is a pretty awesome and free budget cookbook

    A weirdly cool photography project spotlighting mixed race families (though I would consider some of them mixed nationality, not mixed race)

    Finally, there are just so many amazing snippets in this piece about Britney in Vegas I have to share:

    Single-named DJs pump their skinny arms as women in tight tube dresses and Lucite heels they bought online a year ago straddle mouth-breathing men on VIP couches like they just heard there was an asteroid headed toward earth or just took a handful of Ecstasy; platonic girlfriends decide to make out at no urging at all because we’re in Vegas bitchez! One does not have to go far to feel the erection of a stranger in the rear of one’s jeans. It is in these small, handsy hours of the night that Caesars’ hope for Britney was born…

    The first thing you notice when you land in Vegas is all the breasts. Breasts are the shining, veiny centerpiece of the uniforms in Vegas; it’s a city built on the breasts and shoulders of women. The only thing women aren’t in this city are magicians, but they are the people being sawed and made to disappear nightly for the magician’s applause…

    They refer to her not as Brit-Brit, which is her family’s nickname for her, but as an assortment of words to describe her made into portmanteaux with her name: When she’s practicing for her show, they call her Rehearsalney. When she’s caught learning choreography or participating in a new sequence, she’s Dancney. When she goes to Target, which is constantly, she’s Errandney. And when she inspires them or pulls something amazing off, which is practically always, if you ask them, she is Godney…

    And yes, that does make two weeks of Britney links in a row. Not sorry.

  • June 27, 2014

    Friday Five: Around the world in flavours

    Most couples probably reminisce about their travels over photographs.

    We kinda do the same thing … with our tummies.

    I’d love to relive (in no particular order):

    Flan in Paris

    Filo pie in Greece

    Deli subs in New York

    Pho in Vietnam

    All things Italian

    An honourable mention also to a few beverages: watermelon smoothies, sugarcane juice, pink lemonade.




  • June 24, 2014

    Why I love living in the suburbs

    why i love living in the suburbs

    There is a certain local blog I’ve started following very closely (with transport being one of Auckland’s biggest growing pains as the city expands, I’m keen to keep up with what’s happening in that area).

    One thing that does frustrate me is the sometimes excessively ideological stance it takes. City life = good. Suburbia = bad. Walking and biking and of course, public transport = good. Cars = bad.

    Absolutely, we need to reduce car congestion particularly at peak times – and I think that’s our biggest opportunity in regard to public transport. But for the majority of Aucklanders, a car is still going to be almost a necessity for your leisure time. (Even more so for people who don’t work in the CBD and generally need to drive to work.) I don’t ever imagine there being enough demand for a regular bus from, say, town to Bethells beach, and I sure hope there never is, to be quite frank. That would be horrible – I can’t even begin to fathom it.

    Most of us do not live in the CBD, and I’d say very few of us want to. (Not bashing the CBD! Just stating a general truth. The most desirable areas are undoubtedly the immediately surrounding suburbs rather than the CBD itself.)

    Personally, the closest I’ve ever lived to town is Epsom/Mt Eden (about a 15-20 minute bus ride). Here’s why:

    Location/proximity

    We have to balance the ease of getting to work for me AND him. We are probably always going to work in very different parts of Auckland, and he will probably never be in a situation where public transport makes sense for his commute. It’s also ideal for us to live close to friends and family, who are all central-west/west. His side of the family has no car of their own; we always go to them. He also spends a lot of time with friends; the time and petrol costs when we lived over in Epsom sometimes got a bit silly.

    Food

    The best Asian food is found in the suburbs. None of my regular favourite restaurants are in town. YMMV depending on your tastes. Also, grocery shopping is wayyy better in the suburbs, both in terms of supermarkets and cheap grocers/butchers. When T’s sister lived way out west we’d bundle visits with a trip to the massive Lincoln Rd Pak’n’Save, the supermarket to end all supermarkets.

    Room to breathe

    This might sound a little weird … and I completely understand if you don’t get it. Having grown up in a suburban area, these are the kinds of surroundings I’m used to. We spent about a year living in an apartment building when I was still a student and it just didn’t feel right. It’s not about raw floor space; after all our current one-bedroom flat (which is kinda like a big sleepout between two real houses in front and back) is probably about the same size as that apartment. It’s about little things like stepping out your front door and being outside. A little garden. Not having neighbours literally on the other side of the wall/floor/ceiling. That’s what feels right to me, probably because that’s how I was raised. And while we’re on that note … the beach and bush that we like are an easy drive away. I love that.

    I was also actually going to say that it’s cheaper out here, but that’s not necessarily true. There’s always a glut of tiny shoebox apartments available for rent in town, but again for that breathing room/lifestyle aspect, we’d pick the suburbs any day. Caveat: I don’t mean the sprawly, soulless type of suburbia where you have to drive for ages to get anywhere – that end of the spectrum sucks – but the good kind, that’s near transport links and shops and parks.

    It’s all about balancing and tradeoffs. Commuting is a bit of a pain, but it’s not like I’m not used to it, like every other Aucklander. We’re not after bar hopping, shows, and going to trendy places. Out of the years that I spent working in the suburbs, I can probably count on my fingers the number of times we ventured into town in our own time. CBD living doesn’t interest us (at least not with the CBD in its current state, for all the progress it’s made in the last decade). I love working in town, but am happy to go home to suburbia.

  • June 21, 2014

    Link love (Powered by stops and starts)

    nzmuse link love roundup

    Have I ever mentioned how much I love you guys? Because I do. I really do.

    Remember my refried beans dilemma? Well, who knew a little bit of fat could make so much difference? Lard was indeed the magic ingredient. Now we just need to play around with the spices.

    Blogging has brought me so many things, but this ranks up there among the best.

    Blast from the past

    This time last year we were arriving in London (which I found a lot more to my liking than I’d anticipated), having made our way south to north in Vietnam and returning briefly to Bangkok where we couchsurfed (floorsurfed) for the first time.

    This week’s links

    A million times yes to this: Adjusting today’s financial advice to include unemployment

    Maybe one day… How to travel the Maldives on $60 a day

    It’s true – even us introverts can cherish those fleeting travel friendships struck up on the road

    A lovely tribute to the late Gerry Goffin, half of the Carole King songwriting powerhouse

    The Toast brilliantly analyses Baby One More Time, which is still my favourite Britney song ever  (never figured out the ‘hit me’ part – is it like blackjack – ie let’s go one more round?)

    The Atlantic examines why we sleep together. Fascinating. (I think I do tend to sleep better alone but I’m a snuggler and hate falling asleep/waking up alone)

    Proof that I live in quite possibly the most beautiful country on earth

    And my weekly Auckland housing-related link (via economist Tony Alexander)

    There is talk that the Reserve Bank could consider putting extra credit controls in place in order to try and stem inflation sourced from the housing market… limiting how much someone could borrow to a multiple of their household income…

    If the restrictions were harsh enough house prices could even be pushed lower, though that is not highly likely given that the overwhelming impact of credit restrictions will be felt by the group of people who have already been shut out of the market to a big degree by the maximum loan to value rules – young first home buyers.

    Is this something about which we in the lower, middle, and upper middle classes, and those silly enough to self-identify in New Zealand as in the upper classes, will feel greatly worried about? Heck no. We have already bought lots of investment properties over the past few years …

    While we will tut tut about how difficult it is for a young person to buy a property these days our incomes will rise and we will, yet again, feel happy that we ignored the many doomsters and kept buying properties the past two decades.

    Sorry young folk, but much as you may feel the future belongs to you and your smartphone tapping ways, for now the wealth and the power belongs to us – the Baby Boomers.

     

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