Accountant by Day

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[caption id=“attachment_609” align=“alignleft” width=“227” caption=“It doesn't take much to make a dog happy”][/caption]

How much would your annual income need to be before you feel “comfortable”? How much would it need to be for you to feel rich?

Ironically, some days I feel more rich than comfortable. I live with roommates that make a lot less money than I do, and I don’t have the money shortages they do. But I think I would need to spend five times more on rent to really feel “comfortable” about where I live.

I could go out tomorrow and pay two times as much for a nice, quiet one-bedroom apartment, still close to work. But I have a dog, and in order to both live without roommates AND have someone to let the dog out, I’d want to rent a house with a yard, plus have enough money to pay for someone to take the dog on an afternoon walk (since busy season requires being away from home for over 12 hours a day quite often.) Being able to afford that would make me feel comfortable.

Don’t miss the Accountant By Day one-year anniversary give away! Your first chance to win $25 is on Monday! Entries for this week close at midnight EST tonight, so check out the contest rules and enter! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I love setting goals. I know a lot of you readers are big goal-setting fans too. There are some key factors in effective goal setting: The goal must be achievable. You never know what you can achieve until you set a nearly impossible goal for yourself.

I have been thrown back into using Yahoo! services lately, since they took over Flickr, which is a favorite site of mine, and also Associated Content (now Yahoo! Contributor Network), which is a website I’ve written a few articles for over the years. Yahoo! has just fired their CEO, who was supposed to revamp the whole company’s image but failed to do so during her 3-year tenure. We all know Yahoo!

We’re half-way into 2011 now (wow, just realized how close election year really is!) and I thought I’d take this chance to look back on everything that’s happened so far. Work Snow outside our client's offices in Boston I made it through my first busy season at work, and now I’m only 3 months away from being able to apply for my CPA certificate! Things are a bit slower now, but I’m excited about my next busy season, when I’ll know a little bit more about what I’m doing!

If accountants set holidays, we definitely wouldn’t have Thanksgiving, Christmas, Fiscal year end, and New Years all in quick succession! We could move Thanksgiving to May, and Christmas to the second half of October. The week after 12⁄31 would be a mandatory work week for anyone in who has to manage or help with preparations for an audit. But, since no one would let us move the holidays, I can at least suggest that if you own your own business, you have a 6⁄30 year end (or 5⁄31, or 4⁄30!

Of the group of new hires I started with at this company, 50% are now gone (one of them was fired during the middle of busy season - we think. No one really knows what happened.). Of those one year ahead of me when I started, 50% have also left the company this year. One of my coworkers just announced this week they are switching to another firm, thus prompting this post.

I just read anNY Times update on the guilty verdict against Raj Rajaratnam, a billionaire investor accused of fraud and conspiracy. Rajaratnam managed a Galleon Group hedge fund, at one point managing more than $7 billion in assets. The article mentions additional defendants identified as involved in insider trading along with Rajaratnam: "The case has led to insider trading charges against 25 defendants – 21 of whom have pleaded guilty – including former executives at I.

Last year I attended a graduate student conference through my university, where we took an extended version of the Myers Briggs test, and then spent the weekend with a psychologist doing some team-building activities and discussing how different outcomes on the Myers-Briggs test affect how people make decisions, and how these differences can show up when working together with other people. I liked the detailed version of Myers-Briggs, because it showed that while I scored as an “introvert” rather than ”extrovert”, I also scored high on “communication.

Disclaimer: I am not a certified financial planner, nor do I claim to be an expert regarding taxes. I am simply an individual sharing my philosophy on investing. Basically - I am not responsible for any decisions you make with your money! Passive income is money that you earn while you’re sleeping. You write a book, it takes you a year, but you earn royalties every time it’s sold without having to do additional work.

In finance class in college, we were taught to assume average inflation of 3% and average stock market returns of 10 - 12%. It’s pretty well known that the average stock market returns of 10 - 12% are a thing of the past. Nine percent is good to hope for. But what if inflation is more than 3%? If actual inflation is greater than the 3% the government says it is, not only is your retirement growing slower than you thought, but your salary increase is lower, the appreciation on your house is lower, and your overall wealth may be shrinking, rather than growing!