On Dec. 30, 2009, I took the 15 minute walk from my home in Fishtown to the Penn Treaty Park complex near the Delaware River and into the station’s third floor studio, as another show closed before 7 p.m.
After a meeting of the most influential media leaders in the region made clear no drastic foundational investment would be made into niche news anytime soon, I knew I needed to secure my finances — as a new homeowner, especially — and take a more cautioned approach toward building News Inkubator, Technically Philly and NEast Philly.
A funny thing happened not a week or two after I made this decision. A friend made me aware of a job opportunity I actually wanted.
On Mon. Jan. 18, I walked into a Locust Street building in Center City Philadelphia and began defining what a media director should do for homeless advocacy nonprofit Back on My Feet.
I find I get mostly two responses from established reporters when they’re forced to respond to me and my generation of journalists. It’s something I’ve touched on after events before.
The first comes teary-eyed.
Some seem to offer despondent pity and sympathy for me, for the times and power and success I missed out on, for the dark, post-journalistic-apocalyptic world I’ve entered — a sentiment that often reaches a fever pitch when we discuss my attempt to freelance full-time while starting out.
The historic, 145-year-old Union League of Philadelphia located on the Avenue of the Arts.
A tidy and frail little old man asked me to direct him to the coat rack. To walk him around the corner from the long and elegant main corridor of the nearly 150-year-old Union League of Philadelphia was my first deed.
If nothing else, it made for interesting conversation when I made it to the elaborate second-floor President’s Ballroom, featuring thirty foot ceilings, a spectacular chandelier and portraits of dour looking old white men. For an half-hour or so after 5:30 p.m., I handled a rum and coke and ambled about the pre-event cocktail reception of the Sunday Breakfast Club, a not-quite cloak-and-dagger, invitation-only private society for organization executives.
Perhaps nearly 200 members and guests of the seven decades young group patronized the open bar, chatted and nibbled appetizers. I did the same, more than a handful of times being approached by some degree of interest in the 20-something with a broken brown belt with black shoes.
No ma’am, I’m not lost. I’m on the panel to which you’re here to pay audience.
If you can’t go out to eat with friends without referencing something you learned or experienced from some travel experience you had, then I think you’re doing it wrong.
Great travel writers, I think, tend to have always done so for a personal love for travel — not primarily to be a travel writer or to tell someone else about what you did.
Of late, I was reminded.
There are nearly a dozen different, conflicting things I believe strongly about travel:
A crazy thing happened on Dec. 2. I closed on my first home, quite an end to a decade of transition from childhood to adulthood. Something worthy enough to update a bit on.
I’m in the heart of the Fishtown neighborhood of the riverward section of Philadelphia, once a place exclusively for working-class (white) families that has the hipster and artistic communities now that often lead to gentrifying. It’s two El stops, a 15-minute bicycle ride or a 40-minute walk from Old City, full of Dietz and Watson delis, modest rowhomes and pickup trucks with ladders. Now I’m there, too.
For the second year in a row, I aimed to both write and publish month-by-month resolutions. I find it’s a great way to create smaller goals that are easier to track, hold accountable and complete.
JANUARY: Sustainable income
FEBRUARY: Get a housemate
MARCH: Get over my bicycle being stolen and prepare another, flat-tired and dirty bicycle for riding.
APRIL: Move furniture and other extra materials from dad’s house to mine
Suppose, you pulled in roughly $2,800 a month from independent contractor work — $700 weekly of income that doesn’t have taxes taken out from an employer and works out to be $36,400, a small fortune for some. A good rule of thumb is to put aside 30 percent of monthly income for taxes, so you don’t get yourself caught when paying quarterly or annual taxes.
$2,800 minus $840 (the 30 percent reserved for taxes) equals $1,960.
Now how do you break that down, according to the CNBC suggestions? See the graph and details below. (Above is the total for making $44,200, or $850 pre-tax weekly)
But first: yesterday I shared my best read posts of 2009. Because ultimately I’m a freelancer, I thought I ought to share my best clips of the year, if only to satisfy my concern that 2009 was all for naught.
