Christmas gifts: Making Money Opportunities

In my senior year I made a drastic decision, dropping out of my double major of Journalism and Writing Intensive English, quitting my job on the school newspaper, and deciding to not go to grad school the next fall. I needed something different. Something that made me excited, instead of making me dread the next step in my life.

My parents were less than thrilled with my decision. I had such a promising path! How could I just give up on everything I’ve worked for?! Like everyone else in my family, they didn’t understand why I started applying for Teach for America and researching programs for teaching English overseas. They were constantly questioning me (“What are you going to do once you graduate?” and “What are you going to be when you grow up?”) but I honestly had no idea and I didn’t want to jump into a graduate program and spend all that time and money when I couldn’t answer those most basic questions.

So I researched. And researched some more. And along the way, I started reading blogs about volunteering after college and found myself intrigued. Volunteering was something I did infrequently in college and when I did, it was either for a class I was taking or part of my job. So I took the plunge and became an AmeriCorps*VISTA when I graduated in May.

I had a cousin who did AmeriCorps*VISTA several years ago and he suggested that I look into it. When I started my research I felt a connection to what VISTA stands for: Volunteers In Service To America. VISTAs are different from other volunteers because we work the administration side of different nonprofits or government agencies that fight against poverty. In return for our work, we do not receive an income but a living stipend (which ironically puts us on the same level of those we serve: poverty).

While making the decision and joining VISTA was easy, it was deciding on where I would serve to be the problem. Would I stay in Milwaukee and be around my friends and the boyfriend I had? Or would I do the smarter decision and move in with my parents and save money? The flip side of moving in with my parents involved me having to move across the country to New Hampshire, a state in which I knew no one and had no friends. I knew I would only be making a very, very small amount of money and I knew I couldn’t afford the rent and utilities in Milwaukee, so I moved in with my parents. Now here, I’m working at both a private school with a huge emphasis on volunteering and a nonprofit that helps keeps students in the public school system on track for college.

But while my experience is very focused on the work that I do, it’s so much more. My placement is part of an umbrella program, so I am connected with other VISTAs in the area. Over the past months I have gotten to know quite a few of them and we’ve become good friends. We have a lot in common off the bat, they know what I’m going through on a daily basis and they’re generally wonderful people. So much so that when my relationship ended (the distance due to my move was just too much) and I missed my friends from college, my new VISTA friends were there for me and got me back on track.

As for the day to day, it differs; I can be busy working on activities for tutoring or meeting with students. Some days I sit at my desk and just work on a database, calling nonprofits about their volunteer opportunities. And, like any job, there are days that I just sit and dink around online.

Moving away from where I had lived for four years was really hard. Losing my relationship in the first couple months was harder, and not having my girlfriends around made it worse. But the friends I have made through VISTA are some of the greatest people I have ever met. We have been put in a situation where we make little to no money and are sometimes doing very tedious work. We make the most of it and with these friends I am doing so much more with my life than I would have if I had stayed in Milwaukee on my original path. I may have had to make some sacrifices and I may be about as far off the beaten career path as humanly possible, but I love what I do and I feel good doing it.

It’s all even made me reevaluate what I want for my life and figure out just where I want to be when this whole thing is over. Will I continue working in nonprofits? Maybe. Continue on to grad school and get a Masters in Education? Possibly. Follow my dream of seeing the world and teaching abroad? Most definitely.

Being an AmeriCorps*VISTA has pushed me out of my comfort zone and changed who I am for the better. For all of you college seniors who are unsure of where you want to be next year, I seriously recommend looking into giving back. (Editor’s Note: And here are a few more reasons why!) I know that this is where I am supposed to be for a year and I am so grateful to have the opportunity to find my passion and give back to those who aren’t as fortunate as I have been.

[A special thanks to reader Allison Keough for sharing her story with us. You got a story to share? Email us!]

Photo courtesy of AmeriCorps.gov.

That was quick! Barely had my NYT op-ed on the decline of public stock exchanges hit the web this evening than Ira Stoll was ready with a trenchant reply.

Stoll is sanguine about the fact that the number of companies listed on U.S. exchanges has declined from 7,000 in 1997 to 4,000 today. “Suppose that the number went to 4,000 from 7,000 because many of the 7,000 companies merged with each other to become even larger and more dominant,” he writes, “and that the current 4,000 listed companies have three times the sales and three times the market capitalization they did in 1997.”

Actually, let’s not suppose that and instead let’s look at some numbers. I don’t have sales numbers, but I do have market capitalization numbers, from the World Federation of Exchanges. At the end of 1997, U.S. exchanges had a total market capitalization of $13 trillion; by the end of 2010, that had risen by about 24% to $17 trillion. Which in real terms actually works out as a slight decline in market cap. Meanwhile, GDP grew from $8.3 trillion in 1997 to $14.7 trillion in 2010 — that’s an increase of 76% in nominal terms, three times the rate of growth of U.S. stock market capitalization.

But more broadly, Stoll is making my point for me — that the U.S. stock market is increasingly made up of enormous and dominant companies and features ever fewer of the smaller, fast-growing companies which really drive the economy. When public companies are acquired or delisted or go bankrupt, there’s not nearly enough in the IPO pipeline to replace them. The result is a market of dinosaurs.

I also claim that the market is doing a bad job at allocating capital efficiently — after all, the market hasn’t allocated any capital to Apple since 1981. I don’t for a minute think I have a better idea than Steve Jobs what to do with Apple’s cash pile and in fact have said quite explicitly that it shouldn’t be paid out in dividends. But when investors buy Apple stock, their money doesn’t go to Apple, but rather to the other investors that they’re buying the stock from. The stock market becomes a money-go-round for speculators, rather than a way of directing capital at companies.

Finally, the “ultra-rich elite” I’m talking about is not the broad universe of people who are considered accredited investors by the SEC, but rather the tiny group of individuals who are given the opportunity to invest in private companies. If you’re well connected in Silicon Valley — if your name is Ron Conway or Vinod Khosla — then you have loads of such opportunities. But the rest of us don’t, whether we’re formally accredited investors or not.

I’m not making any policy recommendations in this piece — I don’t think that the rules about accredited investors should be weakened further, or that all Americans have some kind of automatic right to be able to buy a piece of Facebook. But I do think that the public stock market is less important now than it was in the past and that its decline is going to continue in future decades just as it has done since 1997.

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Christmas gifts

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Making Money Opportunities

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