web analytics

JerseySmarts.com

Howard Stern is Not Leaving Satellite Radio

Posted on by

Earlier this month Howard Stern, on his Sirius XM show said that he wasn’t sure what he was going to do when his contract was up with the company. Since that time, rumor mongers and online dirt sheets have taken it upon themselves to suggest that not only will Stern leave satellite radio when his contract is up, but that the future of satellite radio is bleak without his presence. How annoying?

As someone who spends a great deal of time in my car each week because of my job, I can tell you that the benefits of commercial-free music channels far outweigh the benefits of terrestrial radio (which is, essentially, the fact that it is free). I’m willing to spend $13 per month to listen to commercial free music for about two hours every day that I have to commute to and from work or travel around the state. Sure, some other commuters may not need this service and if I traveled a much shorter distance to work, then I might not have Sirius XM installed in my car.

But what bothers me in this situation is the rumor mongering that only takes into account what Stern said on one day. No one mentions that on the very next day he said that if he wasn’t on Sirius XM then he wouldn’t be in radio, period. So as a Sirius XM shareholder please forgive me if I want the full story out there and not just the negative sounding part.

What Keeps You Up At Night?

Posted on by

My Chief Operating Officer (former – she’s moved on to greener pastures) called a meeting last year and during the meeting our Chief Executive Officer asked my coworkers and I about what we saw for our market in the coming year. Specifically he asked, “What keeps you up at night?” I remember the question because I remember both my response and my thoughts about the question itself.

First, I thought that this was a weird question because it is the rare employee that brings their work home with them. Then I immediately thought that this might have been the CEO’s way of asking us about ourselves so he could ascertain what we were like outside of the office. I figured that this was too awkward of a question for him to ask in a personal sense so it must be directly related to the job. I remember my response, given in a typical brash, young, over-confident tone, “Nothing keeps me up at night. Once the day is over I drive the hour back home and either teach at the college, do work for my website company, spend time with friends, or enjoy some down time.”

Dope.

Here we are a year later and I find myself bringing more work home with me, engaging my company in their proposed plan to get us Blackberries (which I supported from the beginning) so that we can be connected on the road, and looking at a calendar that is overstuffed with events. I also find myself not pleased with the potential for upward mobility in my current position and coming to the realization that working for my current company will not help me achieve any of my financial goals in a respectable time frame. Finally, I find myself in a job market where it would be unwise to up and leave one’s current employment to look for a better deal; especially when you really enjoy the job that you currently perform (and I do enjoy my job and the work that I do). In some respects, it’s a paradoxical time to be someone young in their career.

To get back to the point, though, the question was an odd one. What really DOES keep you up at night? What things weigh on your mind so much that you actually miss sleep to ponder the issues? I thought about these questions and came up with an answer or two…

The biggest thing that keeps me up at night is my student loan debt. And frankly, if that’s the biggest thing that keeps me up at night, then I’m in good shape! It’s the sheer size of the loans that keeps me awake. At the end of last year I owed a little more than $110,000; by the end of this year I should owe a little bit more or a little bit less than $105,000. I’m making significant progress, but I need to make much more progress and much quicker progress if I’m ever going to be in a position to be financially free. Related to the student loan debt is my ability to secure a mortgage when I finally buy a house in a few years. My credit rating is through the roof (somewhere between a 750 and an 800), but who knows how long the tightening credit markets will impact the housing industry?

That’s really about it in terms of what keeps me up at night. Sometimes I wish I had more of an ability to slowdown and relax or travel, but I work in the time to do an adequate amount of that stuff. One thing that I am well aware of is that you can’t live above your means and there is nothing more financially disturbing than when people live a credit card lifestyle. You know, the people who need to borrower from one source of capital to pay another source of capital or those who use money from non-permanent sources to pay semi-permanent expenses (constantly asking parents for money to the rent or for groceries, for example). But those people generally get what they have coming to them – you can’t live through a market fluctuation like we’re currently seeing and not expect that you need to personally change your financial habits.

What keeps me up at night? Student loan debt. But I’m working my plan to pay it down and I’m making good progress… I’m hoping that I can kick the repayments into high gear in the next few months!

Movie Review: Jack Frost

Posted on by

The other night I had the unfortunate opportunity to watch Jack Frost, the 1998 Christmas-themed movie about a kid and a snowman. The kicker here is that the snowman is his father reincarnated a year after his death. Intriguing, right? I didn’t think so either, but I sort of watched it anyway.

The movie starts off like any other Christmas movie – a family with its unique ups and downs, a wide-eyed child looking for something more, a parental figure who is too busy to notice some things, etc. You know the drill. Seriously, some of these haphazardly thrown together Christmas movies stick WAY too close to the generic script, but I digress. So there is the standard family that you’ll find in any Christmas movie. Michael Keaton plays the father and does a pretty good job with the role that he’s given: he’s not quite an arrogant jerk, but not quite ready to be the father figure that he needs to be…and eventually he’s the voice of a snowman. Joseph Cross plays the son and I thought he did an exceptional job, as did Kelly Preston in playing the mother.

Again, the movie starts like any other and then Keaton’s band gets a big break and he needs to be somewhere important on Christmas day. Cross gets pissed off, gives him back a magical harmonica (yep), and then Keaton dies trying to rush back to his family before Christmas.

A year goes by, life is miserable for the young kid, he builds a snowman to remind him of the one he and his Dad built a year before, he blows on the magical harmonica, the snowman is infused with his Dad’s spirit. Simple story, right? Cross finds out the snowman is his Dad and he spends the rest of the movie trying to hide this fact from the world – including his mother who now thinks that her son is nuts. If your kid was walking around talking to snowmen, you may think the same thing!

The folks who put this one together attempted to include a bunch of touching scenes throughout the movie, but most of them come off as just awkward. Even through the final scene of the movie (which I won’t be wretched enough to share here) this viewer received more of an awkward feeling than anything else. There is even one moment towards the end of the movie where the bully antagonist (because these awkwardly thrown together Christmas movies always have a bully antagonist) and the young, bright-minded protagonist become friends. Awww… I almost threw up.

If you’re a freak for Christmas and Christmas movies, then you can go ahead and watch this one, but everyone else should run away from this movie.

Building a Third Party Base at the Local Level

Posted on by

Over the last few days I’ve posted some information about a third party in the 2008 election – the Constitution Party. I’m just putting this information out there because I really believe that third parties are railroaded by the mainstream media and that America needs a strong third party to challenge the Democrats and Republicans. But as I look at these parties, I begin to wonder why they don’t start smaller and use more aggressive tactics.

For example, I’ve been looking at the voter results in my hometown of Mount Arlington (obsessively so). The Constitution Party received 2 votes in my hometown out of a total of 2,536 votes case. Repeat: they received 2 votes. Honestly, that’s not too bad! Mount Arlington isn’t too big and for a third party to pull any votes is impressive. Write-ins received 14 votes, Ralph Nader had 13, the Libertarians had 5 votes, the list goes on. In total, third parties received 41 votes or 1.6% of the vote.

Again, that’s not totally bad in this type of election, but if the third parties want to do better then they should be building a stronger base at the local level. For example, there were 4,387 votes cast for the Mount Arlington Borough Council (you get to cast two votes, which means a total of 5,072 votes could have been cast – some voters obviously chose not to vote for Borough Council or only cast one vote). I have to imagine that if a third party really wants to make an impact, they would spend a good deal of time and money at the lowest level of government and try to win these smaller elections. You win the local election for Mayor or Town Council or whatever, prove that your policies work at the local level, then try to expand to other local municipalities or to the county level (depending where you are in the United States).

The Republicans won in Mount Arlington and from what I can see, they’ve done a fine job of leading. They were handed the short end of the stick thanks to Governor Money Bags’ new anti-small town policies, but they’re managing. That said, their leading candidate received 24.34% of the votes cast. A third party should be able to meet that percentage if they wage a good campaign.

Or maybe there are other reasons why third parties aren’t making it in America. If I were running a third party, I’d choose a few small towns across America and use them as examples for why my party should be elected to higher offices. Hell, I’d even look at taking in disenfranchised members of the Republicans or Democrats and use them as the candidates for my party! Why not use those folks who already have name recognition and some type of rapport with the public?

But I would do more. I would hold voter registration drives and be sure to get those people who have never registered or never thought of registering. Go door to door if necessary and have unregistered voters fill out a voter registration form at the same time as they fill out an absentee ballot request. Put them on that perpetual absentee ballot program and tell them that it means they can literally vote from home – so long as they drop the ballot in the mail in time. If it’s legal (and I don’t know if it is), drop them some simple, uncomplicated campaign propaganda. Get them a button or a bumper sticker or something.

It just seems to me that third parties aren’t utilizing these very simple tactics in order to take a foothold at the smallest levels of American society. Again, maybe they are doing these things in places other than New Jersey and I don’t see it, but I have to think that third parties could be doing a better job of getting the word out about their existence and their platforms.

“Significant” Progress on My Student Loans

Posted on by

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am in some major student loan debt. As detailed in my front page USA Today article from June 2006, I graduated from Rutgers University with a Master of the Arts in Public Policy…and over $116,000 in student loan debt. For a young guy (I was 25 at the time that I graduated), this was almost like being handed a financial death sentence just as I was getting access into new doors of opportunity by virtue of my degree. Well, I’m here to report some type of “significant” progress on paying back my student loans.

When I graduated, I had some $49,000+ in NJHESAA loans (a private organization), $59,000+ in Direct Loans (loans from the US Department of Education), and more than $8,000 in a private student loan from CitiBank. Since graduation, I’ve completely paid back the CitiBank student loan and I’ve lowered my total outstanding loan balance to slightly more than $107,000. I’m not sure if someone would call this “significant” progress on paying back the student loans, but I think bringing down my overall balance by about $10,000 in two and a half years isn’t so bad! If I didn’t have to pay any of my other expenses, I could have had more than half of the loans paid off by now, but I’m satisfied with my progress.

My short-term goal is to break below $100,000 by March or April of 2009. I think this is completely doable so long as I continue to not have major automobile problems. If I have to buy a new car, then my goal will be to break $100,000 by the end of 2009. Getting below the six figure range will be a great mental victory in paying back these loans and I’m looking forward to it!

In any event, though, there’s a progress report on my student loan repayments. I’m doing a pretty good job of putting all of my available extra cash into paying down my student loan and not squandering it on unnecessary expenses. I win!