Keys to the Kingdom by Joel Bennet (jaykul on Flickr), released under BY-NC-SA

Some quick rules of thumb for those of you with a website and a website admin (someone you contact when you need something changed or updated on the site), based on my attempts to do some things with those websites:

Is it your domain name, or the website admin’s? This is the realm of the web registrars. When you want a domain name (like my own jhunterj.com, or like amazon.com or whitehouse.gov), a registrar has to get involved. The registrars provide the service that enables the domain owners (registrants) to specify where browsers should go when those names are typed in or clicked on. The registrant has a name & password on the registrar site. If you have those, it’s your domain name. If your web admin has them, it’s their domain name, and you may be renting its use. If you ever want to change web admins, you’ll need that name and password, or you’ll need a new domain name.

Is it your website, or the website admin’s? This is the realm of web hosting providers. You might have the same company providing both registrar services and hosting services, but you don’t have to. The web host is where the files for the content of your web site are stored. These files determine what gets sent to the web browsers when your domain name is typed in or clicked on. The web host customer has a name & password on the web host site. If you have those, it’s your website. If your web admin has them, it’s their website, and you may be renting its use. If you ever want to change web admins, you’ll need that name and password, or you’ll need to build or rebuild your website.

There is nothing wrong with renting a domain name or website, any more than there’s anything wrong with renting office space or fleet vehicles. You do need to know what your business arrangement is, and what your options are as your business needs change. Often, the small business owners I’ve talked to didn’t fully understand their web presence arrangements or know how to make changes.

You might have two domain names pointing to the same website. You might have a single domain name with subdomains, and the subdomains might point to different web hosts. All kinds of complicated mix-n-matching is possible, as long as you have the keys.

So those are the two big things, the two keys to your web kingdom. One more important piece of modern web content is your content management system (CMS). Rather than contacting your web admin, web developer, or other such technical resource, there are several very friendly CMSes out there that can make putting up new content easy even for non-technical users. WordPress is the dominant one (and the one I use), and there are Joomla and Drupal too. The content managed by these CMSes might be blog articles, “static” web pages, galleries, “under construction” placeholders, or anything else. There’s nothing inherently different about a blog website from any other website or about a blog article from any other web page except in the expectations of the speaker and reader—from the perspective of the Internet tubes connecting them, they’re exactly the same. So you don’t need a separate domain for your blog, and your blog articles can be stored on the same web host as your static web pages. Of course, you can divide up your web presences and pages among multiple domain names and hosts as desired.

Taking questions in the comments! Or see WordPress for Beginners for more on that CMS.

—jhunterj

The excellent book Classical Music: The 50 Greatest Composers and Their 1,000 Greatest Works by Phil G. Goulding provided me with a good list: a “master collection” of Sibelius’s most important works. If you get all of the discs listed here, you’ll have that whole collection at the lowest price possible. (If you can find a way to lower the total, please let me know in the comments.)

Sibelius: The Symphonies.  Lorin Maazelconducts the Weiner Philharmoniker.Recorded in Vienna between from September 1963 to April 1968. Three discs, all seven symphonies (Ops. 39, 43, 52, 63, 82, 104, and 105), from London/Decca (2LC3 430-778). $18.94 with Autorip means that it’s cheaper to order the discs and get the MP3 album free, rather than ordering the MP3 album ($28.49). Amazon is full of head-scratchers like that.

Sibelius: Kullervo. Almost a symphony, this is Sibelius’s symphonic poem for soprano, baritone, chorus, and orchestra (Op. 7). Jorma Panulaconducts the Turku Philharmonicand the Laululun Ystävätale Choir with Johana Rusanen (soprano) and Esa Ruutunen (baritone). Recorded at the Turku Concert Hall in June 1996. From Naxos (8-553756). As I write this, slightly cheaper on MP3 album than CD.

Sibelius: Finlandia . Two discs; on the first disc, Vladimir Ashkenazyconducts the London Philharmonia Orchestraon Finlandia (Op. 26), the Karelia Suite (Op. 11), Luonnotar (Op. 70, with Elisabeth Söderströmperforming the soprano part), Tapiola (Op. 112), and En Saga (Op. 9); on the second disc, Horst Steinconducts L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romandeon Nightride & Sunrise (Op. 55), Pohjola’s Daughter (Op. 49), and the Lemminkäinen Suite (Op. 22). From London/Decca Double Decker (2DF2 452-576).

Sibelius & Nielsen: Violin Concertos. Esa-Pekka Salonenconducts the London Philharmonia on Violin Concerto in D minor (Op. 47, featuring Cho-Liang Lin on violin). You get Nielsen’s violin concerto as well, with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra forming the foundation for the two hyphenates. From Sony (92613).

Sibelius: Songs. Hannu Jurmu (tenor) and Juoni Somero (piano). The master collection lists only “songs”, and these are some. From Naxos (8-570019). Again, cheaper on MP3 than CD.

Sibelius: String Quartets  featuring the Jean Sibelius Quartet on the String Quartet in A minor (no Op.#) and the String Quartet in D minor “Voces Intimae” (Op. 56).

That would cover it all, except that somehow none of these discs include “Valse Triste”. Happily, you can buy the MP3 separately to fill your virtual shelf. There’s “Valse Triste” from Pietari Inkinenconducting the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

Total outlay: Under $70. Terveisin!

—jhunterj

House on Money by 401(K) 2013 (CC-SSA-3.0)

I recently read a blog from the Wall Street Journal, “12 Debt Myths That Trip Up Consumers“. It includes many great tips, leading with the best: “Avoid debt.” But then toward the end, it stumbles badly with this one:

Mortgage-interest payments can be deducted on your tax return, which can save you a bundle.

The math here just doesn’t hold up. Yes, if you have mortgage interest, deducting can save you a bundle over not deducting it. But the implication that you should not pay cash for your home because you’ll lose those “savings” is a shell game. Not paying mortgage interest in the first place will save you more than deducting the mortgage interest you have paid as long as your tax rate is less than 100% — that’s the math in question.

• Starting assets $100,000, mortgage interest payments: $1,000, tax rate 50%, tax bill of $2,000 reduced by $500 to $1,500, ending assets $97,500.
• Starting assets $100,000, no mortgage interest, no deduction, tax bill of $2,000, ending assets $98,000.
• $97,500 < $98,000. QED.

You may not be in the position to avoid mortgage interest payments, but if you are, make sure you do the fuller calculation before you pay a lot of money in order to save a little.

—jhunterj

change of heart by josey4628, on Flickr

A few years ago, my wife and I decided to make a Valentine’s Day gift to one of our charities, and the size of the gift was whatever we spent on our Valentine’s Day date. Everyone’s psychological relationship with money is different, but in my own warped mind, this actually makes it easier to enjoy the splurge, knowing the more I say “yes” to at the restaurant, the more generous we’ve decided to be. And it’s also self-regulating; there are some restaurants I can’t afford, so there’s a sanity check on the check, even if we double it.

So maybe you’d like to consider this too (assuming you are celebrating Valentine’s Day, and assuming there are charities you would like to show some love to). Your church might have a benevolence fund for use in your community; maybe at-risk kids, or animals, or soldiers, or the arts are close to your heart; maybe it’s the favorite charity of a cherished relative. Whichever you choose, if you do double down on Valentine’s Day, I’d love to  hear about it in the comments.

And if you don’t happen to have a charity springing to mind, here are some of the causes I’ve given to recently (though not necessarily through this approach):

• ALS Association
• Athletes in Action
• Big Brothers Big Sisters
• CultureWorks
• FAARO Family Programs
• Project Sanctuary
• South America Mission

And have a happy Valentine’s Day!

—jhunterj

But:

Some things can’t be safely skipped. (Image by DaniDF1995 on Wikimedia Commons.)

My credit union, and perhaps many credit unions, have offered me an “opportunity” this holiday: I can skip my next loan payment, either December or January, which is supposed to let me “put more cheer” in my holidays and help a local children’s hospital to boot. What could be more festive?

Let’s break it down:

1. I get to help the hospital by giving them $5. I can do this any time; I don’t need my credit union’s assistance with my charitable giving, although I suppose I’m always ready to hear new options.
2. But this particular $5 is part of the $30 processing fee for skipping the payment. Which they’ll be happy to add to my loan balance if I don’t pay it directly with the request.
3. Then of course there’s the real Scrooge part: interest continues to accrue. Interest always accrues, folks. Every time any store, bank, or other business is going to do anything “for” you that involves extra time for making payments, just assume they’re getting their money’s worth on the accrued interest. No interest for two years on that new furniture suite? I guarantee the minimum payments will not pay it off in two years, and I guarantee the interest will retroactively kick in from the purchase date if you don’t make up the difference before the two years are up.

One of the things I really don’t understand is the processing fee. Oh, sure, I understand that any fee you can get consumers to pay is a good fee, and perhaps the numbers bear this out. Who knows, maybe even borrower psychology is such that we’re more likely to take advantage of this “opportunity” if there’s a fee involved. But my paying you for the privilege of being able to pay more later, well, bah humbug!

Keep those Christmas expenses on a tight leash, so that your normal loan payments and other fixed bills don’t get forgotten in the mad consumerism.

—jhunterj

Whether you’re managing your time, your money, or your calories, the basics come down to:

1. Become conscious and intentional about your “spend” (dollars spent, activities by the quarter-hour, food consumed).
2. Reduce your spend to less than you’re earning (income, “free” time, calories burned). Failing that, increase your earnings to more than you’re spending: get a side job or sell some items you’ve been hoarding, exercise more. We haven’t really found a way to get more hours in the day yet.

This is life’s scoreboard. You can get by without keeping score, and you probably won’t have much fun if you try and keep score of everything, but if there’s an area you want to improve on, keeping score is indispensable.

Before trying to make any non-trivial changes in step 2, take a deep breath and find a way to track your spending. There are websites and mobile apps that will help you log every little spend as it happens, but you do have to make it a habit. You can even start with a generic note-taking app, such as Evernote, before getting lost in the plethora of dedicated app choices out there.

Even the simple act of documenting your activities can highlight easy “wins”, without going much further. And without documentation or some kind of measurement, none of the expert advice is going to do much good—if you don’t know how you’re doing, it’s nearly impossible to figure out how to do better. Or as they say in management, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” Once you have a firm grasp on what you are doing now, you can figure out what you need to do differently to reach your goal, to win. And if you don’t want to do anything differently, it’s time to re-evaluate what you thought was your goal.

—jhunterj