I Can Has Moneys?

One of the problems with working a day job and then working freelance work is that when I’m done with all that, I’m not terribly enthused about spending any more time in front of a keyboard. So in times of excessive freelance work (like this month) my writing on my blogs suffers. Sorry. So what do I do for extra money, you might ask?

Well, I write. I write for a couple of websites that pay me very well for my scribbling about tournament poker. Poker is a worldwide market, and since I have played poker for several years and written about it on another blog, I managed to hook up with two of the biggest poker sites in the world for freelance work. I write tournament recaps for PokerNews, the largest poker news site in the world, and I write for the PokerStars blog. PokerStars is a site where people play poker for money online.

I know, how am I going to talk about fiscal responsibility when so much of my money comes from gambling and money derived indirectly from gambling? Well, there are a couple of ways I can address this.

First - my writing income is a job, period. There is no gamble there, nor am I taking money from anyone who is gambling. I’m providing a service to an employer, and they are compensating me for it. Just like my primary day job, where I work in a niche construction market.

Secondly - while I do play poker, my poker money does not touch my household money, and vice versa. It’s been a long, long time since I dipped into household money to fund any of my poker play, and more recently my poker money has funded several real-life purchases, like my new (used) MacBook. So while I do play poker and gamble, the money that goes out in those pursuits comes in from those pursuits, and at least my hobbies are self-supporting now, which is more than I can say for when I played golf.

But there have been a ton of tournaments going on around the world, and that’s kept me at the keyboard more and more this month and not as available to write here or on my poker blog. But I’ll work on that, now that some of those freelance gigs are wrapping up and I am limiting the number of people I’m working for in a given month to 2 or 3, rather than the 4 I was working for at the beginning of the month.

I’m happy to say that this little starter blog has been featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #168! Head on over to One Caveman and check it out!

On another note, I was reminded yesterday of just how much I overspend on food. On the way back from the theatre (Job #3, freelance lighting designer) I stopped by Harris Teeter to pick up some lunch, thinking that I should spend $10 on a bucket of chicken for 2-3 meals instead of $6 on one meal at McDonald’s. Good thinking, even though I actually ended up spending $30 at the grocery store. It’s ok, though. Stouffer’s frozen dinners were on sale 4/$10, so I picked up eight frozen dinners for $20, plus a jar of peanuts, a bag of chips, a soda, five yogurts and a meal from the deli. That $28 pretty much covers my meals for the week, as I typically have a yogurt for breakfast, then frozen meals for lunch and dinner.

It’s not that my wife can’t cook, or that I can’t cook. But we have issues with portion control, and a frozen dinner diet actually helps us lose a little weight. We can cook on weekends when we have the time to do so, and through the week we can eat small and cheap with frozen dinners. A couple of Stouffer’s meals and a yogurt make it really easy to keep to a 1,500 calorie diet (as long as I stay away from the sodas and beer), and I can typically eat for about $7-8 per day, as opposed to $20 or so if I eat out both meals. So if I can eat for most of a week on $30, that’s a huge savings, and the biggest leak in our spending.

So it might be that if you lead a busy life, microwave meals could help you trim the waistline and the food budget!