High-income women get more oral sex. Maybe.

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It is well known in the sex research arena that the more educated a woman is the more often she will receive oral sex.

I have always wondered if this is true for salary as well. For example, if your salary goes up by $50,000, how much more likely are you to receive oral sex?

I cannot find research to support that women who earn more receive more oral sex, which is why I am conducting my own research on this week's poll.

But I have a hunch, based on a string of research that I have cobbled together: Read more

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Figure out how much you should be paid (and three cheers for transparent salaries)

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Do you know the salary of every employee at your company? I think you should.

I mean, who is being protected by secret salaries? Certainly not the employee—the more transparent salaries are, the more accurately an employee can assess his or her value to a company.

You’d think that companies benefit from secret salaries and that’s why they keep them secret, but really, if salaries were 100% accurate—perfectly pegged at the employee’s worth to the company—then the company would have no problem revealing all salaries.

The only people who benefit from secret salaries is the human resources department. If they make an error, they can hide it. No one will know. And then they can make ten errors. Because no one knows if the secret salaries are hiding one error or one hundred.

So large companies keep salaries under wraps in order to hide all the mistakes, making the cost of transparency high. But today smaller companies often make salaries totally transparent.

I haven’t done it quite yet with my own company, but I'm going to. I’ve been giving everyone some data just to get them ready for the big picture. Almost everyone is not happy, because even in my little start-up, I’ve made salary errors.

For example, the person who was underpaid was not so much jubilant about a potential raise, but upset about his current underpayment. The person who's losing the housing allowance mostly for tax purposes does not seem to mind. The person who is making way more than everyone else minds a lot that I’m planning on revealing everyone’s salaries. But honestly, I think that person will work much harder if everyone knows the truth. And it should be that way.

This experience has taught me that you should always try to get to a company that has out-in-the-open salaries, because that means you have more out-in-the-open managers—managers that have so much self-confidence in their ability to value accurately a business contribution that they can set airtight salaries and stand by them.

Of course, most companies are not there yet. Especially the larger ones. Fortunately a bunch of companies have arrived with tricked-out tools for figuring out what you should be getting paid. And what your co-workers should earn as well. Here’s a sampling of the top tier of those companies:

Payscale.com is my favorite. In fact, I like them so much that I was mentioning them in all my speeches and then I asked them to do a sponsorship with me. (And they did.) So, anyway, the reason I like Payscale is that they systematically collect data in very specific categories so you can match your situation—years of experience, geography, education—to get your real value in the market. Bonus: These are the people who bring you statistics on the real cost of corporate meetings.

Salary.com is a good one if you are trying to get a raise. Salary.com is not as thorough as Payscale with its data collection. So employers generally favor Payscale. But Salary.com skews higher than Payscale, so if you have to bring a first number to the negotiating process, use Salary.com. Bonus: These are the people who bring you the statistics on how much a housewife is worth.

But really, if companies are smart, the conversation about salary will go quickly. You tell the company how much you’re worth. You bring very good data to back that up, and the company pays it. Then other factors like company culture become much more important.

That's where Glassdoor comes in. It’s US magazine for the company you are considering—a little gossipy, with first-hand information about companies from the people who suffer in them. Bonus: Glassdoor is a new company and there are not a lot of competing perspectives on the site yet. So if you drop a bomb about the place you work, it’ll hit hard.

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How I started taming my workaholic tendencies

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After my first visit to the farm, I quickly invited myself back. “I’m coming there without my kids,” I told him.

When I got there, he made me hamburger that was shaped a little too much like how it might have looked in the cow’s body, and then he asked me what I wanted.

“I want this to be a date,” I said.

“And then what do you want?”

“Well. I don’t know. I guess we kiss. That’s what you do on a date.”

The farmer laughed. And he asked me if I thought I could live on a farm.

I said no. I said I was thinking this would be a summer fling.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that he is not the summer fling type.

I sat across from him at his kitchen table thinking that he is so simple and stupid for thinking I could be serious about him.

After dinner we walked through his fields, over his creek, and next to his hay, and an hour later I thought that I am so simple and stupid for thinking that just because he is a farmer, I am not serious.

So I went back to the farm three times in one week to negotiate how a date might work. Each time I felt like I was crazy. What am I doing with a farmer? I am already sometimes sleeping only four hours a night. There is no room in my life for anything but kids and work.

The next time I was there, it was time to put the chickens back in the house or pen or whatever it is that they live in. I noticed that the farmer sort of encourages them to go to the house, but really, they could get away at any time. But they go back to the house because he gives them everything they could want there.

One hen will not come in. The farmer waits. He negotiates. Then he walks away. He says the hen is not ready. I worry out loud that she will be eaten by coyotes. He says she will decide to go in before that happens, and he’ll be there. He says it’s timing.

The timing is what gets me, though. This is not a good time in my life to fall for a farmer. Of all the things to invest my time in, this is not one of them. It’s not something that will work out. So moments of doubt turn into time-management panic.

Like, at the end of our second date, the farmer walked me to my car, which was on his front lawn, and he kissed me goodnight. I got in the car and looked behind me, and somehow, in the span of seconds between going from the car back to the house, he started peeing. On the front lawn.

I got out of the car.

“Are you kidding me?!!? Are you peeing on your front lawn? Are you nuts?”

“This is normal.”

“No. This is not normal!”

He laughs.

I laugh.

But I am not sure we are laughing for the same reasons.

“On the farm you pee outside if you’re outside and you pee inside if you’re inside.”

I tell him this is a huge cultural gap and we have a huge problem.

I come back the next day even though the more things are weird with the farmer the more I worry that I am making a poor time management decision by spending time with him.

The next day, he is very tired. He woke up at 4 a.m. because he heard thunder and he knew that the mother who has new twin calves would lose one in the rain. He went out and found the lost one and brought it back to the mom.

He tells me this story while we sit on the sofa on his porch. This is where we do everything. I hope we will make out on the sofa. But he is tired. And I am scared of being rebuffed, so we talk.

“How much would it cost you to lose a calf?”

“About $200.”

“You do all that work for months and months just for $200?”

“It’s not that much work every day for one calf. This is an exception. But bringing the calf back to its mother is not about the money. It’s about taking care of the animal.”

You can see where this is headed, right? We have this conversation 500 times.

Here’s another version, different day, same porch:

“I can’t move to the farm because I have so much more money than you do. I will get into the same situation with my last marriage. I will have all the power and it will be terrible.”

“I don’t think you have more money. I have more money. ”

“You made $15,000 last year. And it was a good year. I made $15,000 for one speech just last week.”

“You make a lot of money, but you spend it. You’re in debt.”

“It’s about cash flow. I have a lot coming in. I could have a lot. If I decided to be good with money.”

“My land is worth $2 million.”

“Really!??! That’s so exciting!”

“I’d never sell it. The land means way more to me than the money. And it’s ridiculous that you spend $200 on a pair of jeans.”

So I do this drive, this three-hour drive, again and again to see the farmer. Because I feel like I am understanding myself better and better as I go farther and farther from where I think I belong. Until I find myself in a tornado, ignoring his phone calls to tell me that a tornado is too dangerous and I should stay home.

I read that people do totally crazy things when they are in love, but how do you explain me driving to the farm in a tornado to negotiate something that is not a summer fling while we sort of start having a summer fling? If I can’t count it toward being in love, then does it just count toward losing my mind?

But I don’t think I’m losing my mind. For example, I know it’s the farmer’s understanding that my children matter most that makes him hard to regard as just a summer fling.

One of the times I had the kids with me, I spent most of my time worrying that they would get into trouble, while the farmer did things like help them climb up onto hay scrunched up into sushi-shaped rolls that were too large for the kids to get down from. And then he said, “Thank you for yelling at the kids for stepping on the corn so I could focus on just having fun on the farm with them.”

For a while the farmer was very careful about the kids only coming on days he could be around, because of things like the electric fence, which he has memories of as a kid that include falling on it while riding a bicycle and getting shocked fifty times.

But then I got an email from him that said, “You are welcome at my house with the boys. I trust your judgment and I think you know most of the dangers. But remind me to take the gun out of the house.”

I never thought I’d get an email about a gun that was so touching.

So I cut back on work. But I still did an interview with a teacher’s publication while sitting on the farmer’s front porch. He laid down next to me with his arm on my leg. He said he likes hearing me work but he also likes that I don’t bring the Blackberry when I go to his fields.

“There’s reception in the field?”

“Yeah. Other people bring it there when they visit.”

I don’t tell him that I would have brought it if I’d have known. Because I don’t want to be that person. But it’s so scary that this might go on too long and be squandered time.

I snuggle up next to him on the porch and I tell him that he makes me nervous because I’m risking so much for him.

He says, “What exactly are you risking?” And he points out that he has agreed to allow his very private life to be the subject of very public blog posts, which makes him nervous.

I am silent. I feel awkward because I’m supposed to be the queen of work life balance. But I tell him that cutting back on work seems like a huge risk to me.

I know that people who are workaholics are scared of two things: Not being great at work, and having to face an empty personal life. And I’m worried about both. It’s so hard to cut back on work that I adore to see a guy who is a complete wild card in my life. But I see now that the farmer doesn’t need to be THE ONE. And there’s value for me to just stop working so hard. That’s the first step. I’m just lucky I found someone who makes me want to try that.

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Career Lessons from Eliot Spitzer's Call Girl, Ashley Dupre

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In the train wreck of Eliot Spitzer's political career, there are many workplace lessons. And lots of people are talking about Spitzer's career. But what about the call girl?

Ashley Dupre, who was Kristen in bed, was no slouch in the career management department. Sure, her breasts are plastered all over the Internet, but don't be so ignorant as to think you can't learn from someone like her. Here are three lessons.

1. Invest money in your career.
I write a lot about how when you don't have disposable income, you still need to spend money on your career so you can earn more money. I have paid for career coaching with my last dollar. I have bought clothes on credit to look like I belong in the position I was interviewing for. All good investments.

But when I wrote about how I got my teeth whitened for TV even though I was unemployed, so many money mavens complained to me that it was irresponsible spending. People constantly undervalue the return on investment you get from taking risks to invest in your own career.

So, Ashley goes to New York with basically no money, and the first big money she makes, what does she do with it? Breast implants! How smart of her! The implants cost about $3000, but after that, she can make $4000 an hour from guys like Spitzer. She made back her investment in an hour, everything else is profit.

2. Know what you are really selling.
You know why most people have terrible resumes? They can't figure out what they really bring to the table. If you really know what you are selling, then most of your resume is not going to be relevant. But people get mixed up about what they are selling. And they start just selling what they think they should be selling that second instead of analyzing the situation.

So Ashley figured out that she was having sex with the Governor of New York. In fact, a few women in her prostitution ring knew. They could have sold their story to the New York Post, but you know what? They make more money as call girls. It's not uncommon for a call girl to bring in $200,000 a year, and the perks are great—trips to Paris with billionaires, for example.

Once a call girl tells on a client, her career is over. Because, as Melissa Gira Grant points out, call girls aren't selling sex, they are selling discretion. Of course a guy like Spitzer could get a mistress, no problem. He's not great looking, but being the Governor of New York makes up for that. But the mistress is dangerous—she could talk. In a call girl, you buy discretion.

3. If you have two careers, make sure they have synergy.
A lot of people have two careers. It's a way to earn money and do what you love. It's a way to hedge your bets. It's just that you need two careers that somehow make sense together. If you want to be a lawyer, side work as a hooker is not a good idea. But Dupre wants to be a singer. And it's expensive to live in New York to build a singing career. So the hooker/singer combination is a decent idea just on that alone.

But look at the synergy after the Spitzer fallout: everyone goes to her MySpace page to see what she looks like, and then they notice she has music. More than four million people have heard her singing. And at this point, she's earned $200,000 in a month from downloads.

So look, it's not great that Dupre is stuck in court right now. But she did a lot of things right when it came to her career, and to be honest, Spitzer's political aspirations will tank from the call-girl-brouhaha. But Dupre's dreams of a singing career will probably be fine. If she had any talent to begin with.

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How to deal with getting fired (from Yahoo)

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I just got fired from Yahoo Finance.

The long road to my quick termination started in the spring, when I grew friendly with one of the higher-ups in engineering at Yahoo. When he became my boss’s boss’s boss at Yahoo, he suggested that we meet if we were ever both in New York at the same time.

It turned out that we would both be there in December, so I asked him if he wanted to get together, and he said yes. His secretary said she’d email me the venue when the date was closer.

The week before, the venue turned out to be the Yahoo offices in New York. I thought that was weird for a casual meeting with a guy who did not even have his own office at that building. That is when I should have called to find out if we had a specific topic for the meeting.

When I got to the meeting my boss’s boss was there as well, so I knew there was a big topic. I told myself to never ever walk into another meeting in my life without knowing who is coming and why I am there. I told myself to stay calm and start looking for clues about our topic so I could mentally prepare.

They went on and on about some sort of technical problem that was happening that day. Of the three of us, two were nontechnical, so I realized this topic was selected due to nervous energy: A clue that this meeting would be really bad.

To his credit, the guy I thought I was friendly with got right down to the point: “We are not renewing your contract.”

The first thought I had was: When is my contract up?

And then I realized: Oh. Now.

The next thought I had was: Be poised. Do not break down right now.

I have been fired a lot. Sometimes it has not mattered, like when my grandma fired me from her bookstore because I kept reading on the job. Sometimes it has been a bad scene with me shaking because I was so scared – like when I was fired at Ingram Micro for using the computer for non-work-related stuff (Yes, people got fired for that in 1995.)

But I checked in with myself at Yahoo and realized that I was fine. I was not going to cry. I was actually in problem-solving mode.

So I asked why I was being fired.

Maybe you are thinking it’s because every week, 400 people leave comments on Yahoo saying how stupid I am. (And surely today’s final column at Yahoo Finance will break records for she-is-so-stupid comments.) But that’s not the reason my column was cancelled; Yahoo is about traffic, and according to Wikipedia, my column has some of the highest traffic on all of Yahoo.

It turns out that financial content gets a higher CPM (advertising rate) than career content. So while my column has a lot of traffic, Yahoo sells my career column to advertisers as part of the Yahoo Finance package, and I bring down the CPM of the whole package.

That’s a fair reason to cancel the column. And actually, if it were not resulting in a huge financial hit for me, it would be an interesting reason.

Here’s what a career advisor does when she is being fired: She tries to remember the advice she gives to everyone else when they are getting fired.

I asked if there’s another place I can write at Yahoo. This tactic is straight out of the book: Use your last moments to network, even if you are getting fired.

Here’s what my boss’s boss’s boss said: “You should write for Lifestyles. That is more women oriented.”

Immediately I was reminded of when my column was cancelled at Business 2.0 magazine. After I had recently announced that I was pregnant and said I did not plan to take any time off from writing the column.

My editor told me, as he was firing me, “Now that you’re going to be a mom you should try writing someplace like Working Mother.”

This advice from ex-bosses makes me question my own advice about getting help from people who are firing you. But still, discussions progressed at Yahoo to HotJobs, which is a Yahoo channel, and I could end up writing for them.

Also, a big trade publication called me last week to see if I want to write a column for them. The editor said that she sees me as such a huge risk taker, and she expects that the column will be a lot about that – how to take risks.

The thing is, I don’t think I’m a huge risk taker. I just choose the lifestyle I want first, before I choose my work. Lifestyle first means that I turned down entry-level bullshit jobs in favor of playing professional beach volleyball. Not because I was dying to have all my friends think I was a lunatic, but because I couldn’t believe people expect you to do mindless work after earning a college degree.

And the same is true now. I am a freelance writer because if I worked nine-to-five I wouldn’t see my kids. That’s my bottom line. There have been so many times when I’ve told myself that I can’t stand the instability of a freelancer’s life. But more than that, I can’t stand the idea that I would only see my kids on the weekends.

People ask me all the time how can they get this life that I have where I do something I love, get to make my own hours, and support a family. Seems great, right? But that life also comes with this: having no idea how I’ll get paid next. And it happens all the time.

Soon, I hope, I’ll be able to draw a salary from my startup. And my speaking career is going well enough that getting fired from Yahoo won’t kill me. But I am worried, and I think about not telling people that I feel worried because everyone who is negotiating with me now knows that money is super important to me, and I’m probably not going to walk away from an offer.

But more important than preserving an edge negotiating money is somehow documenting how hard it is to be true to yourself, how hard it is to be at risk all the time. It’s a tradeoff. Sometimes my life looks glamorous. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s all the same life though.

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How to decide if your commute is too long

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The average daily commute in the U.S. is about 25 minutes. The shortest average daily commute is about 15 minutes for people living in Midwest cities like Witchita, Omaha, and Tulsa. New Yorkers have the longest commute — 38 minutes, which is six minutes longer than the average commute time in Chicago. The average commute is increasing across the board, including the number of people who have extreme commutes – 90 minutes or more.

A lot of people try to justify their outrageously long commute. I think this is delusional, and I would know, because I used to have one: Two hours each way between Los Angeles and San Diego. Two hours, that is, if I left home at 5 a.m. and went home at 8 p.m. I thought it would be okay because the money was so good, but actually, I nearly lost my mind.

So think twice about accepting an outrageous commute in order to make outrageous amounts of money. Especially if your extreme commute means that the time outside of work for family and friends is gone – to the car ride. Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London published research to show that if you are going to take a job where you will give up seeing family and friends on a regular basis, you would need to earn $133,000 just to make up for the lack of happiness you feel from being away from those people.

The idea that you move deep into the suburbs to get a huge house is pretty much over. Gen X and Y don’t believe in McMansions, which is why there’s a glut of them on the market right now. But Gen X and Y do believe in maintaining nimble, flexible careers, so it’s surprising that this trend isn’t the nail in the coffin of deep suburbia. Because Brendan, at The Where Blog, points out that the values we hold highest – marriage, community, and extra time with the family – are falling apart in the face of a long commute as we are in our cars commuting for so long and spending days far away from our communities during the day.

And, if the city is too far to justify driving in for a part-time job, then your commute limits the way you can structure your family. For example, polls show most mothers would rather work part-time than be at home full-time with their children, but Wendy Waters points out, in her blog All About Cities, that the possibilities for part-time work are severely limited if home is a long commute from the city. For both spouses.

But even if you are not killing your spouse’s career potential with your choices for a commute, the amount of stress a commute brings on is bigger than you could imagine and it’s uncontainable.

This is because a bad commute is bad in a different way every day, and you can’t predict it. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains (video) that the human mind is great at adapting to things that won’t change: we convince ourselves we will be fine, and then it becomes basically true that we will be. But if things change all the time, we cannot use that adaptive part of our brain. In this way, having a bad commute is worse than losing a limb.

So if you have a bad commute, you are probably not very happy. And you should know that a bad commute spills over into all aspects of your life. Raymond Novaco, a psychologist and professor at the University of California, Irvine, found that bad traffic on the way home makes for a bad mood in the evening. This is true regardless of age, gender, income, and job satisfaction.

A lot of managing your daily commute comes down to making compromises in terms of limiting where you can take a job, what kind of job you can take, and how big a yard your kids can have to run in. For most of us, a long commute is about getting a better job in exchange for less personal time. But the decision about how far to commute is like most career decision points in that you must consider that your biggest problems will not be solved by getting a better job or more money, they will be solved by spending more time with friends and family, or getting to know yourself better.

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Twentysomething: Preparing for life without health insurance

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By Ryan Healy – About a month ago, my brother, Dan, was in the hospital. Originally, the doctors told him he had a small cut, and he should use some Neosporin to prevent infection. A couple of days later, they told him he had a staph infection. Staph infections are bad, but for my brother they are especially bad.

Dan was born with congenital heart disease, and any type of infection could be life-threatening. My parents hopped in the car and made the 10-hour drive from Connecticut to Columbus, OH. According to my parents, the three days in the Columbus hospital were like a bad episode of House. Nobody knew exactly what was wrong. The infectious disease doctors were in and out of his room every day.

Eventually, Dan was released from the hospital. The antibiotics killed the infection before it could spread. Regardless, the whole experience was incredibly scary for all of us. And it really made me nervous to ditch my corporate job with benefits to work at a startup with no health insurance.

But my mind was made up and sticking with my job was not an option. So the first thing I did was schedule a physical. I crossed my fingers and went into the doctors office, hoping there was nothing wrong. At first glance I was fine.

The doctor than asked if I wanted to have some blood tests done to test for HIV, hepatitis and whatever else they test. It sounded like a good idea at the time, so I strapped in and gave some blood. I regretted the decision immediately. If I tested positive for anything, private health insurance would go from expensive to completely unaffordable.

Luckily, everything turned out fine. But you know there is something wrong with the health care system when putting off being tested for a life-threatening disease for a few months is a “smart” financial option.

After the blood tests, the doctor asked if I wanted to have my cholesterol checked. Despite my mother constantly reminding me of my family’s high cholesterol, I declined for fear of an unusually high test and in turn, higher future health care costs. Finally, before leaving, I requested a tetanus shot even though I was 99 percent positive that it wasn’t necessary.

Buying fitted running shoes was next on my list. I try to run four to five times per week and my legs were beginning to bother me. It was definitely time for a new pair of shoes. But a week before you quit your job to pursue something with no immediate stream of income is not a great time to drop $100 on shoes.

After some thought, I realized that $100 now could be the only thing saving me from a stress fracture or another common running injury, which could end up saving me thousands in future uninsured medical costs.

After doing everything I could think of to prepare for life without insurance, a buddy of mine told me about a program that covers 80 percent of all medical expenses after a $500 deductible for “healthy” 23-year-old guys. It’s certainly not free, but all things considered, it’s a really good deal. (I plan to actually purchase the plan this week, so if anyone knows of a better deal, please let me know!)

Still, I’m lucky that I don’t have any preexisting medical conditions. I’m lucky I am not on any prescription drugs and I’m lucky to have tested negative for any diseases. Not everyone will be able to get such a good deal, and that’s a big problem.

My brother has full intentions of continuing his own business and starting companies for years to come, but he is going to have to take some major risks once he is off of my parents’ insurance policy.

Whether this means purchasing a catastrophic plan, borrowing money or completely going off of insurance, he will figure it out and I will help however I can. Because dropping everything to chase a dream might sound risky, but in my book, working a dead-end job for fear of not having health coverage is much riskier.

Ryan Healy’s blog is Employee Evolution.

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Yahoo column: Five financial tools you shouldn’t use

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One of the ways I got my nearly disastrous financial life back on track was by reading a lot of economic advice online. It helps to be part of a community of people thinking hard about their values and their money and the alignment of the two. And it helps to read a wide range of opinions.

I also experimented with various online financial tools, and while some were helpful, I realized that there are five common ones to use only with caution:

1. Salary comparison tool
The reason salary comparison tools exist is so people can make sure they’re getting paid enough. If you need to use such a tool, however, your career is in trouble.

First of all, most comparison tools give you an average salary within a 25 percent margin of error. If you don’t know what you’re worth within a 25 percent margin of error, that’s a problem.

Why not just compare salaries with friends who are in your field? If you’re in a business in which you have no contacts, you’re not worth the average amount anyway, because you’re so ineffective at connecting with people around you that you’re compromising your ability to add value to a company.

Finally, these tools presume an outdated notion that people work only for the money. Sure, money is good, but people rank other things as way more important. So until there’s a salary comparison tool that takes flexibility, opportunities for personal growth, and available health care providers into account, they’re not worth your time.

2. Cost of living calculator
The problem with this kind of tool is that it gives you information you can’t use. You need to know which city will make you happy, not which city will save you $20,000 in housing costs.

Let’s say you’re thinking of moving from San Francisco to New York City. They’re both really expensive to live in, so the difference in your salary isn’t going to matter. You should probably think harder about their respective cultures than about money; very few people fit in well in both cities, and most feel like they belong in one or the other. A calculator can’t tell you that.

Now let’s say you’re moving from New York City to Los Angeles. You’ll save money on housing, of course, but you’ll need a really good car.

In L.A., a BMW is totally reasonable. You’ll end up spending more time there than in your apartment. In NYC, however, owning a BMW is commonplace only among millionaires. For most New Yorkers, having such a car is absurd — they just don’t drive enough. But online cost of living calculators don’t have a “BMW: yes or no” option.

And what if you’re moving from Chicago to, say, Kankakee, Ill.? You can compare home prices and taxes, but here’s something a calculator won’t tell you: Whether there’s a Nordstrom store there. If you have to drive 100 miles to shop anywhere besides Target, then the cost of living calculator is pretty much irrelevant — the parameters of “living” change significantly depending on the services available where you end up.

Read the rest at Yahoo Finance.

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5 steps to taming materialism, from an accidental expert

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When I was a kid, there was money everywhere. My great grandpa was a lawyer for the Chicago mob in the 1920s, and today, my dad’s generation is still living off that money. Sometimes I wonder if the key to being able to squash materialism is to have a lot of it as a kid. I’m not sure. But let me tell you this: I grew up with a laundress and a housekeeper and unlimited cash from a drawer in the dining room.

When I went to college my parents cut off my money. I think this might have been normal at the time. I remember crying. Really. Crying over the fact that I’d never be able to shop at Lord & Taylor. But it didn’t take long for me to see that people don’t wear Lord & Taylor skirts to class. In fact, I realized that most people don’t wear Lord & Taylor skirts anywhere because some of those skirts could feed a family for a month.

1. Test the meaning of money by doing stuff that’s scary.
One of the first things I did after college was sell three strings of pearls to get myself to Los Angeles. I was really scared when I did it, but in fact, the only time I missed those pearls was when my mom asked where they were.

When I was making a lot of money, I had great work clothes and a BMW (hey, I lived in LA), but that was about it, in terms of splurging. I kept an inexpensive apartment, and people used to tell me I was nuts to live there when I had so much money. They told me I was uncomfortable with success, and I worried they were right, but I stayed there. In hindsight, I realize it felt safe to live somewhere I could afford if my company went bankrupt. Which it did.

2. Put a bunch of stuff in storage to see what it’s like.
When I moved from Los Angeles to New York City my husband and I rented a 500-square-foot apartment. We told ourselves we’d only be there for a year, until we got more settled in the city. So we put all our books in storage, most of our furniture, clothes that were not in season and everything we wouldn’t be using in the next three or four months.

The only way I could put the stuff in storage was to tell myself I could go back and forth every week getting stuff I missed. We ended up staying there six years. We took almost nothing out of storage.

I quote Daniel Gilbert all the time about how we can adapt to anything. Gilbert says that we think some changes will be terrible – like losing a limb – but in fact we are great at adapting to circumstances that don’t change. This is true of putting stuff in storage. You quickly learn to live without it.

3. Understand the concept of aspirational clutter. Get reality and throw stuff out.
When we had a baby, we thought we would move for sure, but 9/11 was too traumatic. It didn’t feel like the right time to move. So we threw stuff out, and we learned a lot about how what you keep in your small apartment is a statement about your values.

So much of what we hold on to is what we wish we were using — objects that commemorate a life we aspire to but do not have. The six books we bought a year ago and haven’t read, for example. We don’t want to admit that we’re not making time to read, so we save them. The treadmill is another object that is loaded because if you throw it out you’re admitting to yourself that you’re never going to use it. Keeping it, even unused, maintains your dream of getting into shape.

In fact, we had to think very hard about every single thing we let into the apartment, and we instituted a rule that if you brought something in, you had to take something out. Maybe other New Yorkers in small spaces had this rule, too, because there is always really good stuff left on doorsteps in New York City.

Then we had another baby. And that was it. With four people living in 500 square feet, I started having recurring dreams about living in a bigger space and I’d wake up to be disappointed that it was only a dream. I decided the small space was driving me crazy, and I started compiling research about where to move.

4. Know this: You could dump everything if you had to.
And then we got bed bugs. We didn’t know that much about them but we captured a bug and checked it on the Internet. When I left the landlord a message to tell him we had bed bugs, our usually completely inaccessible landlord called me ten times in one day. I should have known we were in big trouble.

In fact, our whole building had bed bugs, and maybe the whole city. There is a lot written about bed bugs. There is an epidemic in the United States at all levels of the economic spectrum. (Our bed bug expert said that the worst clients he had were up and down Park Avenue because they felt they had been assaulted by the dirty underclass.)

Bed bugs bite you in your sleep. We had two kids under four years old, and I started staying up all night keeping the bugs off them. Finally the landlord paid for a hotel (about $300 a night in NYC) while we negotiated with him about what to do.

The bugs and their eggs could be in anything in the apartment made of fabric or wood. Here’s how long the bugs can live without food: eighteen months. There is no way we could starve them. We had to poison them. And the only way to do that is to get them to come out of hiding and walk through the poison. The only thing they’ll come out for is human blood.

How would they get human blood? We had to live in the apartment. What do people on Park Avenue do? The staff lives there while the family goes to the summer home or a hotel. What do the not-rich people do? Use themselves as bait. That’s what our neighbors did.

We tried using ourselves as bait for one night, and every bug (by now there were forty or fifty a night) went for the kids. I developed near complete insomnia, always fearing that the kids were getting bitten as soon as I shut my eyes, even in broad daylight when the bugs are asleep.

The bed bug expert said that the most common thing he sees is that people move, but they won’t give up their stuff, so they take the bedbugs with them. We had two kids bitten everywhere. We took no chances and we took with us only things that could be boiled in hot water or thrown in a hot dryer – to ensure no bugs. We took from that apartment less than half of the size of a small U-Haul truck. We left almost everything.

5. Throwing stuff out is not wasteful.
In Madison, we started with just about nothing. Sort of like college kids. You think that throwing everything out is so costly and such a waste of money. But in fact it taught us how little we needed most of the stuff we had, which made us buy much less going forward.

While we have bought a lot since we got here, the years in New York City taught us about living in a small footprint (we still have one of the smallest two bedrooms around) and losing all our stuff to the bed bugs taught us that we didn’t really need much after all.

People often ask me how was I able to switch careers so many times (professional volleyball, corporate marketing, entrepreneurship…) And how have I been able to do so many high risk things (for example take a 70% pay cut and start new as a freelance writer when I had my first baby and was supporting the family.) The answer is that I had very little to lose.

It’s a cliche for a reason. If you have a very low-cost lifestyle and very few physical things that you treasure, you cannot really imagine a rug being pulled out from under you because you don’t own that great a rug anyway.

People think that what’s holding them back from taking risk is some big financial idea of stability and well being, but it’s really fear of losing your comfortable material life, whatever that is. Mine is so spare that I can easily replace it, even if we got bed bugs again.

Which we won’t. Because we had our new house treated before we moved in; even big risk takers draw the line somewhere.

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New research reveals some new ways to buy happiness, sort of

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It turns out that money actually can buy happiness, but not a lot of it. At some point, well under $100,000, the happiness value of a dollar starts to plummet, according to Richard Easterlin, economics professor at University of Southern California. This is because social interactions impact happiness more than money does.

But here’s a new way to look at the money and happiness equation, from a new study by Nattavudh Powdthavee of the University of London: If you make sure to see a friend or relative in person almost every day, that is like increasing your salary by $180,000 a year.

However buying incremental happiness with a six-figure income is very costly. For example, Powdthavee says if you are going to relocate from a city where your family and friends live to a city where you have no family or friends, you would need to earn $133,000 just to make up for the lack of happiness you feel from being far from those people.

Powdthavee drives home the importance of making a conscious choice about your time when he writes, “Since it normally requires both time and effort to achieve either higher income or a stable social relationship with someone, the weight attached to each individual’s investment decision thus depends upon the type of possession — money or friendship — that he or she believes will yield a larger impact on happiness than the other.”

It’s great that Powdthavee does the money vs. relationship math for us, because as humans we are absolutely terrible at predicting what will make us happy and maybe shouldn’t even bother. For one thing, we are all likely to tell ourselves we’re happy, whatever we are doing, in order to justify what we’re doing. This is a fine predisposition for maintaining our sanity, but it’s not a great attitude to have if you are trying to figure out how to change your life to be happier. Our judgment about our own happiness is so bad that Andrew Oswald, economist at the Warwick University has written a paper that to calls for researchers to stop drawing conclusions based on asking people if they are happy.

So I recommend believing that the research is right and your personal predictions are wrong. But the caveat with all this money research is that when we ditch our relatives to take a high paying job, we’re not actually interested in the money, per se. It’s something else.

In a study where people make decisions about sharing money, Harvard University economist Terry Bernham showed that when it comes to money, we don’t strive for some idea we have of what is “enough” but rather to have a little more than our friends. The Economist describes Burnham’s study and reports, “What people really strive for is relative rather than absolute prosperity. And this is likely to be particularly true in individuals with high testosterone levels.”

The Economist concludes that this is totally rational behavior, because while more money has not been shown to get more sex, more money does buy the social status to have more choices for sex partners. So money isn’t an end in itself, but social status is, whether we like it our not, because it has been our means to preserve our DNA.

This explains the study that blogger Gautam Ghosh quotes showing that someone who is a gatekeeper for a hospital can be happier in their work than a doctor based on their perceived contribution to the community. And it also explains the drive to forgo a big salary to make art: If your art hangs in the Guggenheim, you get your choice of girls to go home with, even if your home is sort of shoddy.

So what can we do?

1. Recognize that you should make relationships your top priority. Really. Most of us say we do this, but many of us could not actually point to a time when we took a big hit in the money department just so we could preserve regular date night with our significant other.

2.Admit it’s an uphill battle to care less about social standing. But it’s worth it. The more you care about where you stand in relation to others, the less happy you’ll be. Social standing can take so many forms. Instead of patting yourself on the back for not buying a McMansion, be honest about the fact that you didn’t want one anyway. Understand how you measure your social rank, and try to tame it. For my part, I tell myself that if I check compete.com fewer times a week, I’ll be a happier person. (Maybe true. But look, I still linked to it.)

3. Trust the research when you are faced with a tough decision. Yes, all research is like diet research — one decade cheese is bad, next decade cheese is good. But just because the research is not perfect doesn’t mean you should go off and do whatever your gut tells you. Your gut tells you pizza is great and so is grilled cheese. But duh, it isn’t. And your gut tells you that you will be happier with a little more money, and you could relocate from family if you make sure to visit a lot. But you know what? Duh. You know the truth.

Hat tip: Senia Maymin

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