Funding My Unemployment

More easy listening.

Deciding to take a few months off work takes some planning, and some foresight. Which means before I resigned I probably should have ran some numbers to see if I had the funds to pull it off. Better late than never, I suppose. My objective is to determine my allowable discretionary cash burn rate.

·         I know how much I’m going to have to pay for my cell phone and car insurance.

·         My parents say I have to get health insurance so I've gotten pricing just for some basic high-deductible catastrophic insurance.

·         I've roughly mapped out road trips so I can calculate my gas.

·         I've gotten a sublet in Ann Arbor which will be $320 a month, and I’m going to pay my roommate here $50 a month to store my stuff. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do for September and October. Since I’ll be in Europe for a portion of September I might bum around that month. Hopefully by October I’ll be starting a new job, but right now it is kind of a guess.

·         I've factored in lodging for campgrounds and $1,500 for a trip to Europe. That would be more but I’m getting free flights to and from the continent.

So I subtracted all that from my starting funds, and found out how much is left and then divided that evenly over the 6 months to determine how much I discretionary spending I will have.  It worked out to $900 a month or $30 a day for food, drink and necessities. Luckily from my college days I’ve found out that $20 split between Taco Bell and Malt Liquor can go a long way, leaving $10 a day for toilet paper from all that Taco Bell and Malt Liquor.

I know what you’re thinking. What happens at the end of October when you have no money? The story there is that my starting amount is just what I budgeted for this endeavor. I have a reserve fund that could last me another 6 months without a job, but by that point I would probably find something to do even if it was menial. Otherwise I can use my reserve fund to set up in a new city once I figure out what I want to do.

Brian Accidentily Makes $28

The University often sends me emails asking me to participate in research experiments. But because they need a certain number of people to show up they usually double book the sessions to ensure there are enough participants. For those who show up after the session is full they give them $5 for showing up and send them on their way. I have come to learn that it is much more lucrative to show up near the start time and get the $5 then to actually spend an hour on the experiment for the $15.

So today I was working up near north campus and my shift ended at 6:50 and there was an experiment that started at 7. I decided it would be perfect. I could stop on the way home and pick up a fiver and then use that to drink for free all night. That $5 would mean that I could have two $2 pitchers and Mitch's and even have enough for a dollar tip. Those are 60oz pitchers so I could have a great night out on the $5 from stopping on the way home.

When I got to the lab it turned out that they weren't full so I actually had to participate. The basis of the experiment was to study decision making where you sat at a computer and were put into random groups of 6 students. You then had to rank letters based on certain payouts depending on which particpants had the highest priority which changed often. It was a little too complicated to explain on here but the basic premise was that the better you were at ranking things with high payouts the more money you got for the experiment. I quickly realized that this was just game theory and with a little bit of strategy I was able to find the Nash Equilibrium. I was able to consistently get a high number of points. They said at the beginning that the average payout was about $15. I made $28. Too bad that because I am a university employee it will come in my next paycheck (with taxes removed). Unlike the $5 cash that I could have gotten.

So my scheme of taking the $5 by showing up late might not be as good as my scheme to dominate choice experiments.

Fooled by the campus legend

I've been selling some of my belongings for beer money. I recently sold a few textbooks I've had lying around at the student book exchange but never got around to getting the chips in my pocket. So I sent them an email and they told me when I could collect. When I got there she told me how she had added me to the email list but since she couldn't read my unique name she tried to look me up in the directory and didn't think I was the Campus Legend.

If only she would have lurked moar.