Waffle

And then, after nearly three months, there were two new comic episodes within a week. I am going to try to pull this comic out of hiatus and back to some sort of regular schedule. I miss doing regular art and want to get back to it. At the same time, I still have a LOT to do to prepare for my wedding and emigration and I'm nowhere near being on track for it all.

But if I can combine the spiritual need for art with earning a little extra money for emigration, I can probably give the comic more of my attention. The current situation is as follows: during the last three months of hiatus since my return from Tennessee, the viewer numbers have finally plummeted as people gave up on following Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. I am surprised they stayed as high as they were for a long as they did, to be honest. I'm not complaining: through these months I've found that even if I do nothing, there will still be a couple of dollars a month coming in from one ad provider. My Project Wonderful ads are dead in the water, but the ones delivered through Comicspace's network perform very steadily if at a low level.

As I'm also a paying member of Comicspace, which eats up those earnings, the site overall operates at a modest loss due to the cost of website hosting, drawing materials, hard disk storage and the annualized cost of computers and scanners. A quick estimate would be that the net loss per year is about € 400 - not budget-neutral but also not the most expensive hobby in the world.

So a reasonable first-step goal would be to earn those € 400 a year back. Increasing the revenue from both my ad providers would help, and that simply requires getting the pageview numbers back up, preferably without investing any more money myself. My strategy should be to rely mostly on free publicity. Over the years, I have spent more on Project Wonderful advertising than I have made, so that is right out. I am, however, paying more attention right now to websites like The Belfry, which have served me a steady stream of readers over the years at no cost to me.

I can also go back to selling more originals. Just three or four would get me a long way towards that goal of making the comic budget-neutral.

The next step would be making a profit - any profit would go straight into my pockets and help me save for my future in Tennessee. Apart from building out the ad revenues and original art sales even more, I could get there by building another tried and tested revenue stream like donation-supported e-books. Unfortunately all the work I did on that last summer was destroyed in one of the many hard drive crashes that have plagued me over the past 9 months, so the Headsmen e-book as already published is al I have to show for that work. The DTP masters were lost as was the master-quality PDF file for that, so I don't even have a printable version. But it may be a good summer project for me to try this again, if I can get a steady stream of new pages going first. That has to be the first priority; I have found that if I spend all my time re-editing old work, I get very frustrated and discouraged.

That's the state of the comic: I will try very hard to get the production up again, as long as this does not interfere with my other plans.

Before I forget: Grocery expenses on Saturday totaled €23 - more than in the past month but I decided to relax the standards a little. Which is just as well because I found out on Sunday that I'd lost 4 pounds in a week. The good news there is that I'm now back at the weight at which I ran the 4 Mijl van Groningen last year in time for this year's event. The bad news is that 4 pounds in 7 days, without any fresh changes to my diet (and indeed with less training than last week in order to recover from my latest running/walking adventure, is a scary amount of weight for me to lose in one week and may have had something to do with why I hadn't been feeling that great last week.

I didn't know that on Saturday but I let myself spend a bit more because on Friday, I had looked at my bank account and realised that I'd become a tenthousandaire for the first time in my life. my assets (cash only - nothing else I own is worth much of anything) exceeded ten thousand Euro. And me at only 38! Clearly I have a bright future ahead of me. Of course, on Saturday afternoon came a notice from the rebates division of the tax authority informing me that yes, now that I'd mentioned it, they do really want those rental subsidies paid out over the year 2009 back, and they want them within the month. That's a thousand Euro, putting my assets back into the four-figure category and making my membership of the upper crust very short-lived indeed. But at least, thanks in part to a month of enforced frugality, that repayment will be relatively painless.

Drawing that just popped up in my head the other day, after talking to Aggie about the economic crisis. Of course, after the drawing pops up in one's head, one has to do the hard work of drawing it - including research for things like wheelbarrows full of money.

When I googled for "Wheelbarrow full of money", I noticed something interesting. I expected to get only images of the German hyperinflation of 1923, but instead got a whole bunch of stock photos and illustrations showing succesful, wealthy, smiling people pushing wheelbarrows full of cash. I guess because the US has never experienced hyperinflation (yet), they associate wheelbarrows full of cash with wealth rather than with the collapse of a financial system resulting in poverty for large sections of the population. I have never personally experienced hyperinflation (yet) but to me as a somewhat historically educated European, the image of a wheelbarrow full of cash is not a happy one. Thinking about this has made me want to do more art relating to money, the lack or oversupply of it, and the different cultural assumptions and constructs surrounding it. There'll be more nekkid people in it, either to sugarcoat the theme, or because they've just lost their shirts.

Update: This drawing is now for sale through my Comicspace galleries. You will need to sign up with Comicspace to be able to see it (to certify that you are old enough to look at nipples) but the process is easy and does not result in you getting spammed. If you don't want to buy it that way, though, you can also e-mail me and buy from me directly. Price is set at $100 - not exactly a bucketload of money.

I have also made it available as a Print via DeviantArt, in a range of formats and at the default prices. There, too, you'll have to sign up to view and order.

Is it too much of an exaggeration to claim that the Bush presidency is over, and that President Bush hasn't been succeeded by Dick Cheney or any of the four people on the Presidential election ticket, but by an unelected Chancellor? From Naked Capitalism:

This is a financial coup d'etat, with the only limitation the $700 billion balance sheet figure. The measure already gives the Treasury the authority not simply to buy dud mortgage paper but other assets as it deems fit. There is no accountability beyond a report (contents undefined) to Congress three months into the program and semiannually thereafter. The Treasury could via incompetence or venality grossly overpay for assets and advisory services, and fail to exclude consultants with conflicts of interest, and there would be no recourse. Given the truly appalling track record of this Administration in its outsourcing, this is not an idle worry.

(read the rest for context)

For the record? Driving is awesome.

I just had my first driving lesson and I'm really glad I finally got started on that. It's a lot of fun. I must not be completely hopeless at it, because I was allowed to drive (slowly and awkwardly, and with the instructor keeping close to his shotgun seat pedals at all time, but still), to the drop-off place, over about a kilometer of road used by other vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians. At the end of the lesson, the instructor said that while it was clear I wasn't eighteen anymore and I wasn't picking it up as fast as a person at that age would, I was doing some things surprisingly well. For the record, steering is going well, gear switching (it's a manual transmission, because automatics are considered bad for moral fiber on the European continent) about average for a first try, and the pedal work really needs work - and different shoes. The instructor recommended that I took frequent classes, two a week or more, which I agree with. I need to get everything into body memory.

American readers, friends and especially friends of Aggie's, are often surprised to hear that, at age 36, I can't drive, but that's actually pretty normal in the Netherlands. Several other people at the office don't have a driver's license, though most of them gave up on the idea after a number of lessons or failed exams - the standards are pretty strict here, and the lessons don't come cheap (mine is &eur; 38/hour). That is the reason, though, why I want to do it here, rather than in the US - because I'm not eighteen anymore, I want a certified instructor and an exam I can walk away from knowing that I've learned what I needed to learn to drive safely. If I get mad manual transmission skillz thrown in, I'm not complaining.

The cost is the one factor that bothers me though. That's going to have to come out of my savings, or rather, my ability to save in the next few months, or until I've got that license. Both my tax refund and the windfall from quitting the studio will take a few months to arrive. So until then, I'll likely be spending all the money that I would otherwise have have saved up for my emergency fund on those classes. It'll be worth it in the long run - even in a country where it's normal not to drive, a driver's license will make you more marketable, and it's an often convenient skill to have. But I'm still not happy about that immediate effect. I'd like the money to come from somewhere else. So increasing my income is once again on the agenda.

While discussing this post privately, Aggie pointed me to the Tightwad Gazette's website, which hasn't updated since the time when the earth was still cooling, and the blog The Simple Dollar, which, it turned out, is good enough to keep me reading for hours on end (though I'd like some higher ratio of meaty to brief postings - but I'm probably in the minority among blog readers). The Simple Dollar has the kind of strictly-finance stuff that always makes my eyes glaze over, but also lots of practical tips for reducing debt, budgeting and how to live frugally and enjoy it. I'll be studying it a lot in the next few weeks.

Last February, I got very interested in the blog of the You Need A Budget website. Their product is a range of personal budgeting tools ranging from well-designed spreadsheet templates to a fully-fledged application for Mac and Windows. I followed the blog for a while, subscribed to the course, kept detailed financial records for a few weeks, then decided that I probably didn't need a budget anyway. I need to reconsider that, considering how I managed to overspend this month compared to the targets I set for myself.

Both The Simple Dollar and YNAB are aimed at mainly American readers whose main goal is to live debt free. The Simple Dollar's main author has a life story involving a financial meltdown; I can't readily find the backgrounder on the YNAB site anymore (something about it began rubbing me the wrong way back in February/March, so I stopped going), but if I recall correctly, the author has always been concerned about avoiding debt. In any case, I'm not a perfect match to the sites' target audience. I've always been debt-free , and while I did have my own financial crisis last year, it resulted from my income drying up while I didn't have an emergency fund. So I could solve it by first going on the dole, then getting a job as fast as I could. Within three months, I was financially healthy and saving money.

The reason I'm now getting more interested in personal finance/frugality sites is that I have my own set of goals that involve having a lot more money than I have right now. My (modest) translator's salary allows me to live well, but leaves little space for what I really want, which is to travel and eventually emigrate. Before that, I want to take driving lessons, which in this country don't come cheap at all, and learning to drive after the age of 35 is probably going to take me a lot longer than it would have done when I was younger. I also have a few ticking time bombs in the form of rebates that I will no longer qualify for in the near future, replacement costs for household items such as my 20-year-old fridge and my computer equipment - stuff like that. Right now, I try to save 300 Euro a month at the start of each salary cycle, plus whatever I took out of savings again during the last salary cycle — so if I come up short during July and take € 150 out of savings, I put € 450 into savings as soon as my July salary comes in.

This month, that's kind of gone to hell. After stashing away that 300 Euro, I only have another 300 in disposable funds each month, and I kind of depleted that with the cost of a trip to Utrecht for a wedding, a gift for the bride and groom, dress footwear for the occasion (which I was going to buy anyway, but if it hadn't been for the wedding, I'd have held off for another couple of months), the new hosting plan for my website and a few other, smaller things that I'll need to track down. I'm not hurting, but a bit more clarity and restraint in my spending would help me a lot, especially in the area of not having to unexpectedly eat lentils for a week. I like lentils, but not every day.

There's one step I'll be taking this month; after a year of only being able to use it evenings and weekends, I'm giving up the studio I share with (as of August 1) four other artists. That's going to save me € 50 a month, and I'd done that immediately after signing on the dotted line for my current day job, that would have put € 600 in my pocket by now. That's one discount plane ticket to the US if I book early!

I'm also looking at the income side of things. I've decided that a second job is out, for the time being, and while selling my originals can deliver a nice bonus from time to time, it's not structural so I can't count on it. That's something I'm going to have to figure out.

Update: More from Aggie on socioeconomics and tightwaddery