Why Is Money So Difficult To Obtain?

Getting Rich

For my third post, I decided to open the discussion regarding money. I have had a very successful career to date, with a few employment peaks and valleys ie., see my first post for a brief bio.

Income
I have at one time or another achieved a higher than average income, trading my time for dollars in the process. These jobs were challenging, and in the balance fun and interesting. Now that I am older and somewhat more seasoned, I am trying to re-purpose myself into new entreprenurial endeavors. As an employee, by the time the check was deposited, the monthly budget had absorbed that same amount. It has been stated that in order to break through the glass ceiling of employment, one would need to become self-employed or start a business.

Expenses
Mortgage, two car payments, two school age kids to feed, clothe and additional expenses for sports and social events, and vet bills for the dog, left very little supplemental income for miscelleanous expenses or even a dinner out. Investing was out of the question, even a small amount could not be saved.

Trying Self Employment
In studying the current marketplace, and trying to springboard into a parallel course with respect to my engineering skillset, the multifaceted issues of income, profit and loss, risk, travel, consulting, obtaining clients, keeping clients, taxes and governmental regulations have been studied out.

At this time it would appear next to impossible to find a marketplace that would support our needs. The success rate for new businesses continues to hover below 50% after one year of operations. The failure of a business can be attributed to not having enough living expenses in the bank to provide for the first one to two years before achieving profitability.

Analyzing The Potential
Taking all of this into consideration, including the current price for a gallon of gas, and all of the associated risks versus rewards, makes me just want to seek another day job, and settle for the consequences.

Opportunities
The current marketplace is competitive, with employers wanting ever more technical skills, but not providing the salary and benefits required for the minimum lifestyle. The geographical area we live in, the San Francisco Bay Area, is one of the most expensive in the State of California.

The freeways and public transportation are full of people working at jobs that are barely providing a sustainable income, and the independent truckers must be losing their shirts trying to justify $5.50 per gallon diesel fuel!

Solutions
A friend has suggested a parallel shift into a related engineering space, given that I have expertise which appears transferable, I have sent my resume forward into the unknown.

For me, the nagging question still remains, "Why is money so hard to obtain?". I welcome your responses to this question.

What's Up With Your Blog Title?

Beginnings

Ok, for my first ever foray into the world of blogging, I wanted to capture some attention. The title is based on the premise that if you tell someone not to read something, they will read it!

So for this initial post, I will establish some dialogue, and hope that you will comment and help me to grow this blog. You can help me here by providing some feedback.


ME
I enjoy raising my two daughters, recording and playing Jazz music, rock and roll, and some bluegrass as well. I play guitar, bass and a bit of piano for my own enjoyment.

I'm pretty heavy into computers, coming from a tv broadcast and post-production systems design background, running a server in my home office for video editing, composing and rendering animations.

PURPOSE
Since it is Friday, and my wedding anniversary as well, I may ramble a bit for fun! In fact I will make friday's posts my 'top of my mind' day, to post general commentary and observations.


SKILLS / BIOGRAPHY
I have been employed in the broadcast television engineering and post-production and systems design space for a long time. I have worked for Sony Electronics, Ascent Media, Compact Video in Burbank, CA and Google in Mountain View CA headquarters, and across the USA on Verizon's Fiber to the premises (FIOs) project.

More recently, I participated in a large scale broadcast and post-production infrastructure renovation at Google Mountain View, CA , as the Senior Project Manager. Google made me fat, actually Charlie's Cafe, with it's legendary buffet and cook to order breakfast, lunch, and dinner caused my weight to skyrocket.

The Google environment is fantastic, very stimulating, and a great place to work. My weight is now back under control with the exercise bike having been dusted off and riding it 15 miles per day, five days per week.


CAREER
I began my career in Los Angeles, by designing and constructing a tv production facility for my college professor, while still attending his classes, then later worked for a cable tv firm, climbing poles during the day, and manning the production facility at night for music videos and talking head interviews, using the RCA TK-41 camera's from Johnny Carson's tonight show bought at auction, with the enormous rack-over four-lens array, and a cable that was seven inches in diameter to drag across.

The pictures these cameras produced were very pastel, and kind of washed-out looking. We installed some solid-state preamplifiers in the video-amplifier output circuitry which improved the color quality greatly.

My observances of the television broadcast industry come from the standpoint of an engineer first, and then a viewer. I cannot tell you how many shows I worked on that never made it to air.

SHOWS
I have personally worked on over one-thousand motion pictures films and broadcast television shows, and I would say that perhaps one of ten ever made it to air. The rest were 'speculative-pilots' which the networks, ABC, CBS, NBC etc could not be convinced to buy. Some of these films or tv shows were later sold to the airlines for in-flight entertainment, or sent overseas for other broadcast purposes.

Some of the tv shows, post-production engineering, I worked on were Max Headroom, DIC Cartoons, ThunderHawks, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Silver Spoons, Gimme a Break, The Smothers Brothers, Sonny and Cher, The Cher Show, The Sonny Show, and many variety specials produced in Canada and the USA.

MOVIES
For movies, 'Meteor', an American International Picture, where the back of my head appears in one brief scene of the rocket platforms turning in space. This scene was produced in our post-production edit suite, made over to look like a 'rocket-launching control room', where I had to re-wire the monitors to display the same image on all 15 video display monitors on the wall. The switcher is visible on the console! The large, Panavision Film Camera and Dolly barely fit into the small client area of the space.

'MotherLode' with Charleton Heston about gold mining. My cousin's wife was visiting one day with her newborn baby, and Charleton Heston walked out of the re-recording stage on a break from editing, and asked her if he could hold her baby. She ran around later telling all of the family, that "Moses held my baby", in reference to Charleton Heston playing that role in "The Ten Commandments" film.

My wife has appeared in numerous tv commercials, and a movie with Isabel Stanford (Weezy on the The Jefferson's), Robert Culp ( I Spy co-star with Bill Cosby), and Phylis Diller (Comedian). This movie, called "TIPS" about the restuarant business and some art student and his benefactor, was post-produced at Compact Video, and I saw my future wife in several scenes, but as I mentioned above, this movie ran out of funds before it could be completed.

FINISHED!
That's it for my first ever post, and please do comment back! Let's grow this blog!