Salary discussion

Suppose you are a student now and perhaps your parents are generous and provide you with $100 per week to spend on gas, occasional meals out, movies, and other entertainment.  You live at home and everything else is basically free, if you don't count chores or attendance at family dinner as costs. You might be pretty happy.  What would you need to earn on your own in order to support $100 per week of discretionary spending?  Let's estimate it.

Let's assume the national average savings rate is about 10%*.  This means that after all other expenses are taken care of that people save 10% of their earnings, on average.  If you were average later in life and wanted to have $100 per week spending cash and you DIDN'T want to have any savings, then you could use what you would otherwise have saved for fun.  Sounds like a reasonable trade, right?

Since you are average, you could be saving 10%, but you're spending it instead.  $100 is 10% of $1000, so you need to take home $1000 per week.  Chances are you are working at a legitimate job, so you have taxes taken from your paycheck.  Taxes are withheld at about a 15% rate (no doubt an underestimate of all withholding, since this just accounts for the Federal part) so that means that you need to make about $1175 per week or $61,000 per year.  $61K just to have $100 spending cash each week??!!!!  Yup.  That's the estimate.

Please consider a roommate or two, minimal health insurance, gifts from parents, driving old cars and bikes, eating lots of soup and pasta and other cost-saving measures to help pay for your $100 per week spending cash.  It's not a lost cause: Your investment of time now could lead to better financial success later on, but you shouldn't count on buying a new musical instrument unless you play harmonica. 

This also explains why so many actors are also waiters.

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*http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/PSAVERT/ tells us that the savings rate is currently closer to 5% and reached a nadir of 2.4% in mid 2000s.  One has to go back to the 80s to see a savings rate of 10%.

Thanksgiving lessons learned

It was delicious, but even after a few years of doing this for 15-20 people, I have a few lessons learned:

Don't try to make dressing sufficient to the amount of bread you've prepared.  Just make a 9x13 pan of each type of dressing and don't use all the bread cubes.

Don't forget that if a recipe says "serves 8" that means as part of a normal dinner.  At Thanksgiving there are more sides, so a normal "serves 8" may well suffice for 16 since people tend to take smaller portions of a larger number of dishes.

When your turkey needs to be large (maybe 20+ pounds),  get two smaller ones instead.  Cooking and handling (rotating) get so much easier.

Start the turkey breast down and rotate to sides, then finish breast up.  This is critical, and not mentioned consistently in all recipe directions, making one think that it's optional.

Once again I used a spreadsheet to plan Thanksgiving.  I then abandoned it, proving that planning is essential but plans are not.  I would definitely use a spreadsheet again.

Cornbread dressing was new this year and was a real winner.  I used "Cornbread, Chorizo, Cherry, and Pecan Stuffing Bon Appétit | November 2014 as a basis for improvisation"  and "Skillet Corn Bread Gourmet | November 2008 by Lillian Chou" as the cornbread recipe.

First the menu and associated people:

 Then the days leading to Thanksgiving (this I followed, mostly):

Then Thanksgiving day (which I didn't even look at on Thanksgiving day, but agonized over before):

Endow a library?

You can, with Little Free Library.

What is a Little Free Library?

It’s a “take a book, return a book” gathering place where neighbors share their favorite literature and stories. In its most basic form, a Little Free Library is a box full of books where anyone may stop by and pick up a book (or two) and bring back another book to share. You can, too!

 

 See more here.

Where's the uproar?

Does this First Nations doll look a bit like Mr. T?  I'm pretty sure it doesn't look like any First Nations person that I saw in Canada.  Instead, this seems like the sort of souvenir one might have found in the Jim Crow south.   Canadian border inspectors must not be doing their job.

No photos or spelling PLEASE

Canadians mostly lived up to their stereotype of polite and law abiding, so perhaps it's the American tourists who are causing a spelling uproar. 

My fortune read...

"Look for smiling faces.  They are all around you." 

Confirmed!

Michelle and me

I met Michelle Adams on the 6th wen she was in town for a short meeting.  It was wonderful to visit and catch up.