New essay on bingo, debt, finances, freelancing and anxiety

I'm very happy that my essay on why spending $2,000 playing bingo was totally worth it is up now at The Goods in their Best Money I Ever Spent series. It covers my pretty much nonstop anxiety, debt, personal finance, freelance and how bingo plays a role in all of those.



Firstly, I love The Goods and read it every day. Their reporting is super smart and interesting. Secondly, this series has been wonderful, whether it's about a US work visa, the TSA or a rose gold trash can or a vibrator. It's a delight because we all spend money, but we do so differently. I also wrote for The Goods earlier this year about bookstore crawls and Independent Bookstore Day.

I'm also honored that my essay got a custom illustration! Click here to see it. I think that's a career first. Yes, I know: Anyone who plays bingo will easily see that the numbers allocated under B-I-N-G-O are not all accurate to the game. But that's okay. If it gets people to read it, I'm all for it (I didn't see the illustration until the article when live this morning).

Want a free share of stock? Join me on Robinhood

Since I turned 40 in 2015, I've been thinking about retirement and investing and basically trying to get my money in order like an adult. That includes everything from not taking non-paying and low-paying writing gigs to ramping up my erotica writing consulting service and soon-to-launch Teachable online writing classes.

The other component of getting my finances in order the way I imagine everyone else did in their twenties is investing in the stock market. I also have retirement savings but I want to both supplement that and make sure I'm maximizing every opportunity for savings. To that end, I joined the Robinhood app so I can quickly, easily and cheaply buy stocks, especially in small amounts to start out. If you join Robinhood via my link, you'll get a free share of a random stock of their choice, and so will I. So far, I've gotten six free shares, which make up over half my very small portfolio: three shares of Sprint, two shares of Groupon and one share of Zynga. Yes, you get those totally free, I assume because Robinhood wants people to start using the app to see how simple it is.

I'm a complete novice when it comes to investing but I'm studying as much as I can and researching the companies I care about and use, like Stitchfix (that link is also an affiliate link). On the Stitchfix front, I recommend listening to this NPR podcast interview with CEO and founder Katrina Lake. All my favorite clothes of the last year have come from Stitchfix, and I've discovered fashion brands I now adore, like Leota. I'll be blogging more about my favorite Stitchfix looks soon.

So I'm not going to give you any advice because there are umpteen financial advice blogs and websites out there. Good luck playing the market if you do try Robinhood!

Why my dad isn't my financial role model

I wrote my first piece for DailyWorth, an essay titled "I Learned How NOT to Handle Money From My Dad." It's a pretty personal piece, but one I felt was important for me to write as part of my journey in figuring out my money. I'm usually not one to read comments, especially when I'm being vulnerable with my writing, but the comments so far over there have been very interesting and prove my theory that when you share from an intimate, personal place, others will too. Here's the beginning:

For my bat mitzvah, my dad gave me a check for a thousand dollars, a gigantic sum for a suburban teen in the ’80s. It was extravagant, and I was appropriately giddy, plotting exactly what I would use it for. Until it bounced.

That’s one of many examples of the ways my father, while offering me unconditional love, failed me as a financial role model.

Read the whole thing

Money, Guilt, Freelancing and Feminism

All of those topics are wrapped into my new DAME essay, "I Feel Guilty for Not Being the Breadwinner." Freelancing is key here, because a) I never know exactly how much I will earn in a given week/month/year ahead of time and b) don't know when I will receive payment for what I've earned. This makes it very challenging to budget and plan. So it's not so much that I don't make enough money to pay my bills (at least, while the erotica book market is in my favor), it's that that money doesn't always arrive in a timely fashion. I've had weird things lately where places that usually pay me one way suddenly paid in another way, or checks sent to old addresses, or delays, and all of it makes me feel guilty and uncertain. Read more at DAME, where I've got another one coming up related to sex.

My official review of Lost and Found by Geneen Roth

My official review of Lost and Found: Unexpected Revelations About Food and Money by Geneen Roth, which I wrote a more personal take on here.



I'm a longtime Geneen Roth fan, and think this might be her best work yet, or at the very least, right up there, as she untangles the ways we think about money and food and what they represent. She starts with her own major loss--her and her husband's life savings of one million dollars, which had been invested with Bernie Madoff. But what's really at the heart of this book is why and how she came to invest with him and the assumptions she'd made about money--that caring about it was for "other people" (read: men) and that those who felt moved to act for social change "shouldn't" care about money.

I found so many connections to what she wrote about money and my own relationship...with dating and relationships. It was almost eerie, and I think anyone who's felt that they should look to an authority figure who "knows better," whether about money or another topic, who has purposefully avoided looking at the hard things, thinking they'd either go away or magically take care of themselves, who's used money to soothe themselves, will get something out of this book.

At first, especially if you're someone who lives paycheck to paycheck, the idea that someone with such a nest egg could feel worried about money seems a bit audacious, over-the-top, but it's a very clear line from those who are thin but feel fat, and what Roth does best here is describe that feeling, and how the extreme nature of what happened with her savings forced her to reckon with her previous thinking. The stories about her father's treatment of money (tossing it onto the floor and making everyone else literally scramble on the ground to pick it up) are eerie and disturbing, but Roth never asks us to feel sorry for her. She isn't looking at what made Madoff do what he did but rather how her own attitude fosters her ignorance and allowed her to continue to put money into a category outside of her own mind. This is a powerful book that I will certainly be rereading, and Roth masterfully looks deep inside as well as outside, amongst her peers who lost money to Madoff and their varying reactions as well as in a broader sense, to what money does and doesn't signify in our culture.

The night all Nichelle's money disappeared

Nichelle Stephens is one of my best friends. I've known her since April or May 2004, when we did the WYSIWYG reading together, and we have since become fellow cupcake bloggers, traveled together, and gossiped a lot. You can see lots of photos of her in my Flickr stream.

Please read her post, The Night All My Money Disappeared. It's sad and scary, and even if you don't have any advice or a way to help, you can comment and think good thoughts for her. Here's an update.

She's also asking people to donate to RightRides, a New York organization. I'll let them explain themselves:

RightRides offers women, transgender and gender queer individuals a free, safe, late night ride home on Saturday nights from 11:59 PM - 3 AM, early Sunday morning in 35 NYC neighborhoods. To call for a ride, the dispatch number is (718) 964-7781.

Since 2004, RightRides has driven over 1,000 riders safely home, thanks to hundreds of dedicated volunteers and our vehicle sponsor, Zipcar.

Visit the RightRides homepage and donate via Nichelle to get her to her $1,000 fundraising goal.

One of the things I love most about Nichelle is that she has a huge heart. She is always ready to listen (okay, sometimes I know I annoy her with my madness, especially when it's of the romantic kind, but she puts up with that anyway) and has a big heart. She also is the organizer of our NYC Cupcakes Take the Cake Meetup (please join and help me reach my personal goal of 1,000 members, just cause that would sound so cool) and you can hang out with us and Allison on Sunday starting at noon at The Brooklyn Flea eating yummy homemade cupcakes while helping charity! You know it's special cause even I'm gonna bake some banana cupcakes!

Please show Nichelle some love, cause I want to see her smiling again, like this (from the set of The Martha Stewart Show):



Nichelle, I am sending happy thoughts and news your way. And, virtually, this money cupcake from Flickr user heath_bar: