Use this, not that

There's a popular series of books called Eat This, Not That which advocates making small dietary changes without depriving oneself. (For example, instead of the fried chicken patty sandwich, eat a grilled chicken sandwich. And so forth.)

I'm going with the budgetary version of this. There are a lot of popular paid products and services that many of us use regularly which can be found more cheaply elsewhere.

1. Use Hoopla Digital (free), not Audible ($14.95 per month)
Do you love listening to audiobooks? Do you have a library card? Do you hate paying for things? Hoopla Digital is a free alternative to Audible. In partnership with your local library, you can check out audiobooks (and videos, music, and ebooks) for a period of three weeks at a time. If you're not done, you can check it out again. No late fees, and no waiting. You can either stream on your computer, or you can download the mobile app and save the books to your device. When I have long drives through the middle of nowhere to go to court hearings, I download audiobooks to my phone and listen through my car's stereo. The books are regular bestsellers, too, not just old-timey classics in the public domain. (If you want old books, LibriVox is a good source of free audiobooks.) Overdrive is another library-based audiobook option, but I like Hoopla better because there's no waiting and because the app is more user-friendly.

2. Use generic over the counter medicines, not name-brand
Do you know what the difference is between Advil and drugstore-brand ibuprofen? Or between Tylenol and drugstore-brand acetaminophen? About $5. The active ingredients are identical. It's all regulated by the FDA, so you can be confident that you're getting the same medicine for a fraction of the price. I'm allergic to the whole planet, and when I get hives, I reach for my dye-free Wal-dryl from Walgreens to take care of the problem. It works just as well as the hot pink overpriced Benadryl.

3. Use AmazonSmile, not Amazon.com
This one isn't going to save you any money, but if you're shopping at Amazon anyway, shop at AmazonSmile instead. It's the same Amazon store with the same prices and your same account, but Amazon will donate a portion of your sales to a charity of your choice. There are the usual big name charities as well as small local charities. Find a cause that you care about and let your purchases do some good. You can change your charity from time to time if you want to. I started out supporting a large national disaster-relief charity, then I switched to a national digital rights organization, and now I'm supporting a local drug rehab facility in my neighborhood.

Light at the end of the tunnel

As I've mentioned before, my financial situation was pretty dire in the not so distant past. I finally sat down and did my accounting yesterday for the past few months. (My solo practice accounting, not my personal budget. I'm very on top of my personal budget.)

About half of my caseload is on contingency. I do the work, get the good results, and then I get attorney's fees if I win. My clients don't pay me directly; I get a check from the Social Security Administration. Unfortunately, as one might imagine from a large and appallingly inefficient bureaucracy, it takes forever to get paid. One of my colleagues got paid on a case over a year after she won it. That's on the late end, but I have some that I've won that I've been waiting over 6 months to get paid on. And that's not even counting the waiting time before getting the decision.

I just won a bunch of cases last week that I've been waiting for decisions on for months. I checked how many cases I've won and haven't been paid on yet, and the amount that the feds owe me is almost exactly equal to the amount I owe on my credit cards. As soon as I get my checks, I'll be able to pay them all off.

I'll still have my student loans and a loan from my parents, but it's one more milestone toward freedom. I can almost taste it!

Once the credit cards are gone, I'll just have the small parental loan and then six figures of student loans. I might be able to pay this stuff off soon!

Broke Urban Lawyer Refinances

I have one credit card with a high credit limit that I've had for years. (The limit started out low and has been steadily raised over the 15 or so years I've had the card.) Every so often, usually when I start making big payments toward the card, I'll get a low-interest balance transfer offer. I just paid the entire card off yesterday, and today I got an offer of a balance transfer for 2.99% until June 2019.

I decided to take advantage of the offer. My other cards that carry a balance range in interest rate from 10.99% to 13.99%. (I have a few with much higher rates, but I paid them off and no longer carry a balance.) My credit limit isn't quite high enough to knock out the entire balance on my other cards, but I can get most of it. I'll still have a modest balance left on one of the 10.99% cards. However, this refinancing will save me thousands of dollars on interest over the next year and a half.

I don't plan to carry a balance that long; my goal is still to have them all paid off by summer, but this gives me some breathing room in the interim and will allow more of my payments to go toward principal instead of interest.

My credit card payoff was originally planned for March, but I did some more calculations when I did my budget, and I realized I didn't set aside enough money for taxes. Being self-employed is expensive, and I'll have to write the IRS a huge check in April, so the credit cards will take a bit longer than planned. It's still nice to see the end in sight, though.

Broke Urban Lawyer Gets Less Broke

I've been living entirely off of my income at my solo law practice for two months now, and it's been working out really well. Not only is my quality of life higher, but I'm making more money than I thought possible. Document review was really holding me back.

Every time a check rolls in, I'm still in awe that people keep paying me. I've set it up so that I pay myself a "paycheck" twice a month from my business bank account, and whenever I have enough extra to make me feel comfortable doing it, I'll give myself a bonus. The paychecks are modest and go toward my living expenses, and the bonuses go toward my credit cards.

Since I last wrote, I've paid off my car and about half my credit card balances. In a few weeks, I'll be refinancing my credit cards to a really low rate to accelerate the payoff. I should have them paid off in 4-6 months. Considering that just a year ago, I was very seriously considering bankruptcy, this is nothing short of remarkable.

I know I've been kind of abstract here about actual numbers, but we're not talking a small amount of debt. My student loans are in the six figures, and my credit cards were in the mid five figures when I started and are now in the low five figures. Part of why I didn't lead off with that when I started the blog is because I was embarrassed about it.

The student loans don't really embarrass me; that's just what law school costs. But the credit cards were embarrassing. The debt came about because I suffered a series of misfortunes that exhausted and exceeded my emergency savings, and the misfortunes kept coming faster than I could deal with it. Once I got back on my feet, I balanced my budget and started digging out. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel!

I owe some money to my parents as well. They helped me out when I suffered some of those misfortunes. Mathematically, it makes more sense to pay the student loans before my parents because my parents aren't charging interest, but emotionally, I want to pay my parents first because they were being very generous to me, and I don't want to take undue advantage of that generosity. My goal is to have them paid back by next summer.

Then I'll start saving for retirement and tackling my student loans. The end is in sight.

Broke Urban Lawyer Gets a Life

Happy update time!

My solo practice has been growing. Over the past few months, I've paid off four credit cards. I still have a lot to go, but I'm seeing progress. I'm now doing more like 20-25 hearings per month, and some of them are appearance-only hearings, which means that someone else does the case development and pays me to show up. So, I get paid either way on those ones.

I still do more contingency hearings, but I have a good mix. I'm getting enough appearance-only work to replace my doc review income, so I gave my two weeks' notice last week. Next Friday and I'm solely working for myself. No more two job shuffle and 16 hour days. I'll have time to have a personal life again.

It's frankly terrifying to quit the security of a steady(ish) paycheck, but one of the project managers has said that I can come back anytime I want, so I at least have that backup if things fall south.

I'm really excited about this new development. Things are looking up. Maybe I'll have to change the name of the blog to "not so broke urban lawyer" sometime soon!

Four credit cards down, four credit cards, a car loan, and all of my student loans to go!

How to Win the Lottery

Who hasn't dreamed of winning the lottery? I don't even play it, and I dream of it from time to time. My coworkers at doc review pool together every week to buy some tickets. The guy who runs it jokingly calls it the company retirement plan. Anyone who wants to play drops in $2, and then someone goes and buys however many tickets that will buy. In all the time I've been working there, they've never gotten more than $5 back in winnings. Since $5 is kind of hard to divide between 17 people, they just rolled it back in and bought some extra tickets the next week.

I'm devoutly Christian, but I don't think there's anything morally wrong with gambling. The reason I don't do it is because I think it's foolish. I call the lottery the tax on people who don't understand math.

Instead, today I'm going to show you the better way to "win the lottery". Meet our friend compound interest.

Let's say you decide you want to play the lottery every week. That's $2 per week, or $104 per year. We can round down to $100 to account for the occasional $5 win.

If you started at age 18 and stopped at age 68, that's 50 years of lottery tickets, or $5000. Not a bad jackpot, but we can do better.

If you put that $2 in a savings account every week at 1% interest, you'll end up with $6751.

The average stock market rate of return is 7%, so if you invest your $2 instead of just stashing it in the bank, you'll end up with $47,800. That's a pretty nice deal.

How many lottery ticket purchasers really only buy just one ticket, though? What would happen if you bought 5 tickets a week? If you took the $10 and invested it in the stock market, you would end up with $239,004 at the end of your 50 years. Congratulations. You just won the lottery.

Broke Urban Lawyer Returns

Hi everyone! I'm back. I've been working a lot lately, which is a double-edged sword.

I've scaled back at document review - I'm now working 20-25 hours per week because my solo practice is picking up. I'm doing about 15 hearings per month plus all of the case development that goes with that. I feel like I spend so much time on the phone.

And...I have some good news to share! I paid off two credit cards this month, and I'm really close to paying off a third. It's so empowering to see the balances drop each month.

There are two philosophies on debt reduction - the snowball and the avalanche. Each one consists of making the minimum payment on all but the "target account" and then directing everything you can to the target account. The snowball method involves paying off debts from smallest to largest. The avalanche method involves paying off debts from highest interest rate to lowest interest rate. The snowball method has a lot of supporters, but I do the avalanche method because it's so blindingly obvious that it's the better way. By going after higher interest rates first, you'll get out of debt faster and spend less money over time. Math doesn't lie.

So far it hasn't mattered because my highest interest rates have also been my smallest balances, so the avalanche and the snowball have been the same. But now my next highest interest rate card is my largest balance, so it will be a while before I get that one down to zero.

The income at my solo law practice is highly variable because I work on contingency and there's a very long lag time between doing the hearing and getting a decision. I'm usually paid (if I get paid at all) about 9 months after I do the work, so I can't really ever count on it. I've structured my budget so that I can live off of what I make at document review, and then I use the earnings from my solo practice to pay off my credit card debt. If everything goes according to plan, I should have all of my non-student-loan debt paid off in 9-12 months. This is nothing short of a miraculous turnaround because just a year ago, I was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy to get out from under the mess I'm in. I decided to hang on, and I'll get out of my problem without trashing my credit or stiffing my creditors.

Once the credit cards are paid off, I'm going to set aside several months of living expenses to see me through lean times and then quit at doc review. My next step after that will be to buy a house and then attack my student loans.

I'm still broke, but I see the faint glimmer of the chance of non-brokeness on the horizon.

Broke Urban Lawyer Travels

I used to think that I needed to get completely out of debt before doing things I viewed as frivolous, like traveling. Then I did the math.

I'm going to be in debt for anywhere from 7 years (if I suddenly start earning money beyond my wildest dreams) to 25 years (if things continue to go the way they are). Basically, if I wait until I'm debt-free before traveling, I'll never get to do it.

I took a budget vacation, and mathematically, it will only push out my debt payoff by one month. I have an experience that I can hold onto for the rest of my life. It's so worth it. Obviously, if I take several vacations like this every year, that's an irresponsible choice, but taking one every couple of years is restorative and refreshing and can help keep morale up during the long slog out of the pit of indebtedness.

I was able to keep my costs down in several ways.

1. I chose a destination where the dollar is much stronger against the local currency than it has been. That kept the cost of my meals, activities, and souvenirs down.
2. I kept my lodging cost low by booking on AirBnB. It was a fraction of the cost of a hotel, and I got a front row seat to local life because I was staying with a local host in her own home. I had a private room with a lock on the door, so it was just as secure as a hotel but with a hostel price. If you use my referral link, you can get $35 off of your first booking of $70 or more.
3. I traveled in the off-season. Everyone wants to travel in the summer, over spring break, or around Christmas. I traveled in late January. Things cost less and are less crowded. The downside is that it was a bit cold. A few extra layers took care of that.
4. I shopped around for the best price on flights. I used Kiwi to book my airfare. I had to take a slightly out of the way route (two stops instead of one), but I got a great deal. I was able to get to Europe for less money than my parents spent to go across the US.
5. I traveled light. Airlines charge for checked bags, and some of the budget airlines charge for carry-on bags, too. Pack less, and you'll save. I took everything I needed in a laptop messenger bag and my purse. I packed enough clothes for half my trip and did laundry in the middle. I also wore my coat, hat, and scarf on the airplane so I didn't have to pack them. (I took them off after getting seated - the limit on bags only applies to what you walk through the door with. Once you're on, your stuff can consist of as many items as needed.) By not being overly encumbered, I saved myself about $100. I also got through customs faster because I didn't have to wait for luggage.
6. I walked a lot. Rental cars are expensive (and in most places outside the US, gas is about 4 times what it is here). Taxis can add up, too. Public transit is usually pretty cheap, but walking is free. I did take a taxi to/from the airport and church, one time when I was lost in the rain, and one time when I overslept and would have missed my tour bus, but other than that, I walked. It was great exercise, too. I lost two pounds on vacation without changing my eating habits.
7. Instead of kenneling my cats, I got a friend to come look in on them. The cats were happier being at home instead of in kitty jail, and I was happier, too. A souvenir is much cheaper than a week in the kennel.
8. Speaking of souvenirs, I waited until halfway through before buying any. On day one, I wanted everything. By day three, I had a better sense of what would be a good way to represent and remember my destination. I also had a better sense of what a fair price would be.
9. Instead of buying a travel guide, I checked one out from the library. I picked up free maps of the area from the local tourism bureau.

I'm glad I went. Even if it was a somewhat indulgent expense, it really helped my morale. I feel restored, refreshed, and ready to get back to fighting the dragon that is my debt load.

Broke Urban Lawyer Does CLE

Being a lawyer is expensive, and I'm not just talking about the six figures of student loan debt we end up with after graduation.

There are bar dues, fees for those dull networking events where we stand around with mediocre hors d'oeuvres listening to some bloviator prattle on about something or other, and, of course, CLE.

For people fortunate enough to work for a firm that pays for or provides CLE for its attorneys, the only cost is the time. For the rest of us, it's a hit to the wallet, too.

In Arizona, we have to do 15 hours per year. That kind of adds up. A half-day seminar sponsored by the bar can run about $250 or more. A breakfast or lunch meeting sponsored by a bar section can be as little as $20, but even that can be a bit much for the broke. I'm on a rice and beans budget over here!

I come from Silicon Valley, where information wants to be free. CLE is a form of information, and it wants to be free, too.

Truly free CLE:

• Depending on your state, you can get some CLE hours for providing certain kinds of pro bono service.
• Also depending on your state, you can get some CLE hours for writing law review articles or presenting CLE seminars.
• The blog 4FreeCLE lists free CLE seminars. Some of them are in-person, but most of them are online.
• Fastcase, the provider of a cheaper Westlaw alternative (provided as part of bar dues in some states), conducts free training webinars that qualify for credit in some states.

Cheap CLE:

• MCLEZ offers state packages of CLE for a reduced rate. A whole year's worth of webinars, including ethics, can be as low as $40 with a coupon code. (Check retailmenot.com for a code.) You don't get to pick your courses, but it's a good deal if you don't have the time/energy to cobble together stuff on your own.
• LexVid offers the first CLE webinar for free, and then the others range in price. I did the free course a few years ago because I was one hour short and didn't want to pay anything. It was fine; it got the job done.
• If you're a member of the American Bar Association, you can attend a free webinar once per month, and there are some paid ones at a reduced rate as well. I did this when I got my first year of ABA membership for free after I got licensed, but I dropped my membership when the free year expired. The webinars I attended were timely and interesting.
• Your state or local bar association may have occasional CLE events at a reduced rate.

I did once pay for a full-on two day bar-sponsored seminar called "New Lawyer Boot Camp", which was geared toward new solo practitioners. It was useful and worth every penny I paid for it. I learned a lot and made some great connections with other lawyers in the area. Beyond that, however, I see CLE as another hurdle I have to jump through to keep my license, so I'm going to get through it in the cheapest, most painless way possible.