The Amateur Financier

Since I’ve read Baker’s Unautomate Your Life, I’ve been meaning to take some serious steps toward simplification and making my life less stressful.  In a possibly ironic twist, it seems that since reading it and dedicating myself to that goal, my life has gotten even busier.  Between my recent trip and the fact that finals are steadily approaching for Sondra (leaving her with less time at home and more chores for me), it seems to be all I can do to keep up with everything, let alone getting far enough ahead to actually take a break.

Still, one of my favorite suggestions in the e-book was to make a list of everything you own (or everything in one room) and then to get rid of half of it.  The idea of cutting down on my stuff and getting rid of some of the dead weight sounded rather good.  So this weekend I finally got started on my own plan to reduce the amount of stuff I own, beginning with one of the biggest collections I have: my books.

The Plan

The basic plan is pretty simple: create a list of all the books I own, divide them into different groups, and then handle them accordingly.  I’m planning to be a bit more elaborate than Baker, though; I’m not content with just selling or keeping my books.  The four groups I intended to use are as follows:

1) Keep: The books I most want to keep go in this category.  My goal is to keep it to one third to one half of the total number of books I own; otherwise, it starts to defeat the whole purpose of trying to sort through my books.  I’ll have to fight the urge to keep all of them.

2) Sell: One of the major goals of this whole experiment is to cut down the number of books that I own.  Selling several of them would help to clear out the old bookcase AND raise a few bucks as well.  My plan is to use the Selling on Amazon to clear out between one quarter and one third of the books I own.  The only possible problem is resisting the urge to spend all the money I earn on more books… (The books I’m giving away for my contest are in this category; speaking of which, there’s still plenty of time to enter.)

3) Trade: While we’re on the subject of getting more books, I intend to trade one third to one half for even more books.  I intend to use PaperBackSwap to trade some of the books I haven’t read in years (heck, there might be a few I haven’t read since last millenium, for that matter).  It is a bit opposed to the grand plan of cutting down on the number of books I own, but since there’s no way I’m going to stop acquiring new books, at the very least I can cut down on my costs.

4) Unread: The last category consists of all the books I purchased, and haven’t yet had a chance to read.  It’s not really a permanent category like the rest of them, but more of a ‘To-Do List’.  Sadly, it’s nearly a quarter of the books that I currently own; on the plus side, that means there’s plenty of things that I have yet to read.

The Progress

Well, I’ve managed achieve my goal with the books in category one, keeping them all.  I’m currently working on setting things up on Amazon and PaperBackSwap; I made a list of (almost) all the books I currently own, but never having used those services before, I wasn’t sure just how much information I needed.  I’ll need to go back and gather the ISDN numbers from all my books in order to use those services (well, I don’t need to for Amazon, but since I’m doing it for PaperBackSwap, I might as well do it for all the books).

Once I have things up and running, I’ll have to let you know where you can find the books I’m selling (although most of the books I’ll be selling will be humor and fantasy, rather than economics or money-related, so I’m not sure how many of you my readers will be interested).  Here’s hoping I can cut down my book collection, get some more books, and maybe make a little money, to boot!

• The Complete Yachtmaster: Sailing, Seamanship, and Navigation for the Modern Yacht Skipper by Tom Cunliffe
• Book Recommendation: The Raw Food Detox Diet
• Lehman Brothers, AIG and Now Maybe WaMu - What Do You Do?
• Try Out To Develop A Investing System Which Suits You And Is Lucrative Then Stick With The Trading System. This Could Be Based Towards Habits, Price Level, Trend Lines Or Whatsoever You Experience Works For An Individual.
• Are You Ready for Life After College?