I received a reviewers copy of Practical Wisdom For Parents this morning, the guide to raising preschool-aged children penned by the directors of the 92nd Street Y Nursery School. While it certainly looks informative, I suspect there is only one bit of practical information most parents want from these women: How to get a child admitted to the 92nd Street Y’s Nursery School. And, alas, the amount one has to donate to the institution to achieve that result is not enumerated anywhere in the book.
Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category
This charming anecdote from an LA Times article about estate sales reminded me about the time I went to an end-of-life tag sale and found them selling all the non-prescription pharmaceuticals, including a half used tube of toothpaste. There were pictures of what appeared to be grandchildren in frames for sale too, and all I could think was “someone really hated this woman.”
Estate sales are, as a rule, fairly depressing. At best, you are getting the leftover refuse of someones life. At worst, you see signs of absolute tragedy and heartbreak. I recall once attending one where the organizers were selling toys from the 1930s. A neighbor told me the couple who had once owned the house only had one child, who died before the age of ten. I still shake when I think about that.
I’m not the only one sensitive to the sadness that underlies much of the rummage trade. The Onion once parodied such sales excellently with one of my favorite headlines of all time – Garage Sale Reeks of Divorce – and expertly explicated exactly why this was so. Nonetheless, I can’t quite bring myself to give up the thrill of the chase. After all, there are amazing items to be had. The family with the lost child, for example, also had a terrific book collection and I picked up an exceedingly rare copy of the memoirs of Countess Marie Larisch for $2. The countess, by the way, is best known to history as the woman as the woman whose reminiscences inspired the opening stanza of The Waste Land. She also introduced the ill-fated Crown Prince Rudolf of Mayerling fame to Marie Vetsera, a meeting that might well have changed world history.
All this brings me to my triumph of this weekend. In the attic of a Scarsdale church, I found several out-of-print Mary Balogh romances. I purchased the group for 50 cents. I’m now selling them on EBay, where one is listed for more than $20.
I decided to not write about Sue Shellenbarger’s most recent Tuesday column when I first read it. I was sure I was overreacting, my fury was so great. So I waited till today and, guess what? It’s even worse than I thought:
Lots of employers would like to be able to hire cheap, temporary teams of seasoned pros with experience managing $2 billion investment portfolios, running ad campaigns or earning Ph.D.s in neuroscience.
But few know the secret to finding temps of that caliber: Look on playgrounds and at PTA meetings.
The decision among some highly educated women to stay home with children is sparking a countertrend: The rise of the mommy “SWAT team.” The acronym, for “smart women with available time,” is one mother’s label for all-mom teams assembled quickly through networking and staffing firms to handle crash projects.
And, in case the word “cheap” did not tip you off to what is going on here, Shellenbarger chirps on:
The University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School was able to muster an “incredibly talented” team with eight at-home mothers – including a Stanford University Ph.D. in neuroscience, a University of Virginia M.B.A., an attorney and a former news executive – by tapping female staffers’ neighborhood networks, says Mindy Storrie, Kenan-Flagler’s director of leadership.
The team taught leadership skills to 100 M.B.A. candidates last year by role-playing difficult management situations with them and critiquing their performances. The simulation training was so successful that enrollment doubled this spring and Kenan-Flagler made it mandatory for leadership training. Cost to the B-school: $21 an hour per woman.
Still don’t get it? Here’s more:
Michelle Fenton used to manage $2 billion in assets for Invesco AIM. But because the Denver executive quit her job a year ago to care for her two children, she was available to work for far less than one-tenth of her former salary to help tiny TangentWorks, a Web project-integration start-up, write a business plan. Her marketing partner on the project, which was staffed by Flexible Executives of Atlanta: Liz Ward, who used to direct the Levi Strauss, Dockers and Pillsbury brands for the ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding, then ran her own successful ad consultancy for several years.
For TangentWorks, deploying those two “was like having a C-level team” – chief financial and marketing officers – “without the salaries,” says Zaina Ajakie, CEO of the three-employee firm.
Take out the word “mommy” and replace it with “retirees.” Would Shellenbarger have the nerve to write that old-timers should work cheap because they have the temerity to no longer work full-time in the American workforce? I doubt it very much.
Well, we had about twenty children in the house (if you count siblings) to celebrate Luke’s birthday and seem to have survived the experience. A few lessons learned:
- If there is a way to host a birthday party for under $600 and not MC it yourself, I’ve yet to discover it. We did not save a dime by having the fete in our home. On the plus side, our money did not go to some disgusting basement kiddy gym. And we didn’t spend $100,000 like Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Instead, we hired the wondrous Gina Mascali of Little Cooks to run the event, who really deserves much more than the $450 she and her assistant billed for their services.
- I need to make my peace with the fact that I inherited the Jewish gene that gives its recipients a mortal fear of running out of food at large gatherings, causing them to buy such ridiculous amounts of groceries that entire bags of unopened victuals are discovered after the guests have gone home. We’ll be eating bagels for breakfast, lunch and dinner here for at least the next three days. On the plus side, several parents thanked me profusely for the spread, which also included cheese, bread, lox, chips and wine.
- When you replace a coffee maker that you lost in a bizarre kitchen accident (The cord got singed by a flame on the stove. Don’t ask how.), do not buy a used replacement for $6 at a Scarsdale church rummage sale. It will end very badly with hard to clean coffee granules all over the kitchen.
- Do not let children other than your own near the presents for at least 48 hours. It took exactly one hour for the birthday boy to accuse the four-year-old next door of stealing a new Power Ranger. As of presstime, the toy has not been found but the mother of the presumed guilty party believes it likely her son is indeed responsible and has offered to reimburse us for the cost of replacing the gift.
I really, really wish I could buy this New York Times article about how the Facebook generation is turning out to be more open about their personal finances than their predecessors, as I am one of those folks who believes that the American tradition of silence about our incomes and personal finances is one of the main contributors to our bogus belief that we are a classless society.
Unfortunately, however, I think any talk of greater financial frankness about the young ‘uns falls into the bogus trend story category of journalism. See, I too recall a great openness about money matters when I was in my twenties. It all seemed to end when my friends and I all reached our early thirties, and the cost of different financial decisions or fiscal luck began to manifest as we began to buy houses, have children and the like. I suspect the same will be true of Generation Y, Facebook or no. There are some things that don’t change.
This gets handed out to a fellow mom at my younger son’s nursery school who must remain anonymous. We were sitting next to one another last night at the annual fundraising auction for our forever financially challenged play program. The item up for a bid was an evening with an extremely connected media personage who covers the world of celebrities. Our auctioneer (a fellow dad) was making promises that the person who ponied up for this fantastic item would get the latest gossip about “the people we always talk about.” My fellow mom looked up with a very quizzical expression and asked with pitch perfect faux bemusement, “Who? My neighbors?”
The question I posed in my last post might well have an answer. ABC News is reporting on a new survey claiming that nearly half of all families will cut back on or curtail vacation and travel plans for the upcoming spring break.
Despite what our President thinks, it’s pretty clear to me that the United States is in a recession. Now, yes, I could follow the official indicators and come to that conclusion (retail sales and consumer sentiment, anyone?) but the fact is after forty years of life as a certified practicing materialist in New York City and Los Angeles, I’ve developed the Helaine Olen official recession indicator, which is an idiosyncratic but fairly accurate take on life as it is lived amongst the upper middle classes. My indicator has not failed me during several economic downturns and, needless to say, almost all signals are flashing yellow or red. To whit:
Sign #1: Ease of getting an appointment with overpriced hair stylists and other beauty consultants. The proof? In November, I literally had to beg for a last-minute appointment with the amazing Sharon Dorram, who also takes on … well, I don’t like to name-drop so I won’t. When I had a similar emergency at the end of January, no such force was needed. Moreover, there was barely a client on the premises when I showed up. A likely contributor: the day of my appointment, the stock market dropped around 300 points.
On a similar note, the snooty personal buyer at Saks — the one who tried very hard to turn down my pathetic business in November — called in January to check up on me and see how I was doing. Since this was the same woman who had raced me through an appointment, loudly sighing and informing me that women who wanted to spend under $5,000 were not really worth her time, I took great pleasure in not returning her call.
Sign #2 At my younger son’s co-op nursery school, my husband and I are in charge of the Scholastic book orders. In January, they fell off a cliff. Scholastic Books are usually the easiest thing to guilt-trip upper middle class parents into buying, so I took this as a very bad sign.
Sign #3 Small stores are beginning to close, especially ones that sell what could be politely termed unnecessary stuff. These are often my favorite shops so this hits me hard. The past few months has seen retail carnage here in the Hudson Valley. Of particular note: the sob inducing closing of the late Marshall’s Cheese of Dobbs Ferry. But many of my many former neighborhoods are suffering too. In Park Slope, I hear Romp, the purveyor of excessively expensive wooden toys that parents love and kids hate, has closed its security gate for the last time.
Sign #4 I’m winning EBay auctions with minimum bids. This almost never happens. Well, it’s now happening so often I’ve put a moratorium on EBay purchases for everything except absolute necessities.
Sign #5. Commuter trains into NYC are packed. This is an intriguing indicator. When a recession really picks up, the numbers of folks on the train will fall, because people won’t need to go into the city. But in the early stages, folks are just concerned with saving money. And, yes, it is much cheaper to take the train than drive and pay for weekday parking in midtown.
So there you have it. A few notes: Restaurants reservations are also a great recession indicator but since I now have two children, I don’t get out enough to really comment intelligently on this one. I would have liked to have seen what was up at the Barney’s Warehouse Sale (lots of cashmere sweaters in small sizes is always a bad sign) but between work committments and my own financial constraints, I decided to skip it.
And I do have one contradicting fact to report: People are still taking expensive and unnecessary vacations. I’m one of the few people I know who did not leave New York for at least part of the February school break. It will be interesting to see how things develop over the summer.
Cali Williams Yost, the work/life blogger for Fast Company, thinks a recession could be good for the cause of balance. Sure, there will be a few companies that turn to the tried and true method of firing as many people as they can get away with and forcing the survivors to work 60 hour weeks. But they are so unenlightened! As Ms. Yost posits:
• In a recession, more needs to be done with fewer resources. It’s even more critical that your employees are at their most productive and your work-flow and communication management is at its most efficient. Studies show that flexibility to help employees manage their work+life fit results in increased productivity, more efficiency, and better communication.
• Finally, companies that need to cutback will use flex to creatively downsize. By offering to reduce schedules or a transition people to project-based, consulting work, employees who otherwise would lose their tie to the organization can stay. When business turns around, those companies then have the option of offering those employees a return to a full-time schedule.
Methinks Ms. Yost has been drinking a wee bit too much corporate Kool-Aid. Wherever she got this delightful idea from, it’s not from working in an actual office during a recession. In my experience, they always come for the part-timers first no matter how short-sighted that approach might well be. The folks who survive the purges are expected to put in 10 to 12 hour days. And while I’ve known a few people desperate enough to work for their former employers (you know, the people who used to offer them benefits) on a contract basis, I’ve never known one who went back to them when the economy improved. Frankly, I know more who opted out of the paid workforce entirely.
Could it be different this time? Hey, anything is possible. But given that most companies are already asking their employees to give them their lives (remember, 40% of American employees work 50 hours a week and up and that’s in a good economic climate), I wouldn’t bet on it.
Apparently McMansions can inspire more than just lust for a new home. Demographers are now speculating that the formerly gangbusters housing market was the cause of the baby boom of 2006, the first year in more than three decades that the United States birth rate reached population replacement levels.
The argument goes something like this: When housing is hard to get, we delay or don’t have children. When it’s relatively cheap to set up a domicile, we are fruitful and multiply. That’s why Europeans, despite all their wonderful maternal and family benefits, barely reproduce.
It sounds great, but there is only one problem. The birth rate for teenagers increased in 2006 too. Somehow, I don’t think that many 18 year olds are out buying homes. Even Countrywide didn’t get that creative when it came to handing out loans.