I realized a few months ago that one of the reasons I was not writing as much as I would have liked to was that a lot of the things I wanted to write about did not fit into the theme of one of my existing blogs – personal finances, pets, writing. Instead of starting a fourth blog to try and keep up with, I decided to consolidate everything into one general use blog. If youread more…
I have a housing dilemma. We learned in January that our long term (8 years) tenant in our out of state rental property will be moving. She’s been a fabulous tenant, and we are sad to see her go. While we have no problems being landlords, we don’t honestly want to be out of state landlords to a tenant we do not know, especially now that we do not have a built in property manager inread more…
We’re all familiar with the phrase “It’s not what you know, but who you know” when talking about job hunting. In many (maybe even most) cases, people get jobs based on knowing someone in the organization, having someone with influence speaking for them. But a word of advice (at least when it comes to large organizations) – no matter who you know, your resume still matters. Do not neglect your resume. I recently made a hire,read more…
When I last worked at the University, I heard how much the parking pass was for my building (which wasn’t part of the University parking systems) and simply determined I would take the bus. At first I took the light rail into downtown. There’s a light rail station just a couple of minutes from my house, and during commute hours, trains run every eight minutes. I then caught an express bus from downtown to the Universityread more…
With my new job comes many new challenges. One I was not quite expecting was the challenge of deciding what to wear. I am not talking about not liking what I have in my closet or having so many things I like that I am paralyzed by choice (though I do have more things than I probably need and should work on paring myself back down). No, I have the new challenge of setting my ownread more…
Congratulations! You have landed an interview, an in-person, go and meet people face to face interview. This is exciting! It can also be incredibly nerve wracking. Below are a list of tips that can help you make it through the process. It is not exhaustive, as that would be a way longer post than I want to write, let alone what anyone wants to read. But hopefully these will help. If they give you aread more…
I had meant for their to be a post up today with interviewing tips. However, the weekend ended up being busier, with more important things than blog posts to think about, than originally planned. AND today is my first day at the new job. So please bear with me through jut a little bit more sporadic posting, and hopefully we’ll be back on schedule soon.
Phone interviews have been pretty common in my job search history, but I have spoken with people for whom they are not ordinary, and others who get extra nervous about them. So I put together this set of quick tips for shining through the phone interview stage. In my experience, there are two kinds of phone interviews. The first I refer to as a phone screening. It is conducted by HR, not the hiring manager. HRread more…
Now that I once again have a job, a friend asked me to put together some tips based on my 9 months (11 months, if you want to go back to last May) of recent job searching. Here’s the list of tips for job hunting. Come back on Friday for a list of interviewing tips. Tailor your resume to the job. Use phrasing or industry words from the job posting in your bullet points. Almost everyread more…
It’s time for my annual Prosper check in. Like many things in my life, this year was not as good a year when it came to our peer to peer lending. Unlike many other things in my life, I can tell you exactly why- lack of diversity. When you only have 5-6 active loans and two of them default, even if they default at having paid at least 75% back, it makes a big impact. However,read more…
