My sister once told me that I was extremely well rounded, and no one could take that away from me. With that, I like to use Second Thoughts to display this wide range of expertise, from the ridiculous to real, from tacos to design, from technical to personal.
In this article, I’m going to outline briefly how I managed to purchase my around the world trip ticket 100% on miles (+ a fee for airport taxes) with Continental Airlines. It took just over a year and a half, at least two long flights for vacation and multiple cross country flights, but I pulled it off. Here’s how:
Pick an airline alliance and always fly with that alliance. I chose Continental Airlines in the Winter of 2007. At that time Continental was part of the Sky Team Alliance, but as of October 2009 it is part of the Star Alliance. It included Delta, Northwest, Air France, Korean Air, and Copa, to name a few. (As a backup to #1, make sure you have an account with each alliance. Continental is now with the Star Alliance. I opened up a Delta SkyMiles account just in case I continued to fly with Sky Team partners. )
With #1, remember to give the airline your account # for every flight. That’s how you collect the miles in the first place! You only need one account number per alliance. With the SkyTeam, if I fly Air France, I give them my Delta SkyMiles account, with Star Alliance, if I fly US Airways, I give them my Continental One Pass number.
If you forget to give your account # for the flight, keep the boarding pass to redeem the points/miles later. As long as you have your boarding pass, the process to redeem your points/miles is quite simple. Just send in your boarding pass (make a copy for your records) to your airline (in my case Continental) with a note explaining the situation and including your account information.
Apply for a credit card with the primary airline with whom you are collecting miles. Again, my primary airline was (and still is) Continental Airlines. I took out my first credit card with them and Chase in December 2007. You earn bonus miles for opening a credit card, and in some cases, for making your first purchase. Most airline cards have a yearly fee (ex: $85) and a fairly high APR (ex: 13.89%), so only charge each month what you can pay off by your payment due date. The point here is to charge as much of your normal expenses as possible, paying off the balance in full each month to avoid fees. This way you maximize the amount of miles you earn each month.
Use your airline credit card to purchase flights for double miles. Very simple rule.
Take advantage of opportunities to earn miles from partner programs. My previous employer and client had me stay at Sheraton’s whenever I was on -site and conveniently, Continental had a partnership with Starwood Resorts, whereby my Starwood Points converted to Continental Miles. I lost out on points with the hotel system, but gained big in airline miles, which was what I wanted.
Most people ask how many miles the flight cost – 140,000 – and how much the flight would have cost in dollars – roughly $3500. The general rule of thumb is to hack off the last two zeros of miles quote to get an idea of how much the ticket would cost in dollars. There’s a $1 for every 100 miles. Not a great ratio, but with that conversion, I was able to travel around the world for $1400 while my traveling partner traveled for ~$3500.
I was a funny little person when I was younger, and the internet is a funny little thing right now. On the internet, in one corner, we have plenty of places to put our opinions, stories and content; this is “user-generated”. In another corner, we have search engines and hungry info-vores trying to make sense of the world; and they struggle to determine the quality of what they find, and assess their trustworthiness in the answer. You can take whole courses with people like this to figure out the answer to those questions.
I grew up in a family of women that believed you didn’t wear white after Labor Day, stockings or socks with sandals, or navy blue or brown with black. I was always told “You have to look nice when you go in public, you never know who you will see or meet!” So it is no surprise that, back in Spring of 2007, when my friends Christo, Mariano and Jeff launched the First Time Project, that I had some funnystories to contribute to their site.
The information you put into the internet, like this blog post right here, has an interesting way of sneaking up on you later in life. Whether it be a few days later, or a few years, you can never be sure what will be taken seriously and what will be taken out of context. In this situation, someone posted on ChaCha.com, a mobile answers text service, the question:
“Does black match with blue?”
to which he got an answer:
“As long as the shade of blue is lighter than navy blue, blue/black look great together. Try wearing blue jeans with a black top!”
and if you look at the fine-print, the answer’s source is none other than this story, that my parents will not let me live down for the rest of my life. Now you can join them:
I befriended Adam when he was dating a girl a year younger at our sleepover camp in connecticut. I was always the “friend” but then Adam surprised me one day and dumped his girl and asked me out. On our second night of dating we had our first kiss, it was underneath a tree between girls’ camp and guys’ camp. You may be thinking that kissing on the 2nd night of dating is too fast for 12 or 13 year olds, but we were at camp, and one day at camp was the equivalent of at least a week.
I had one problem with my first boyfriend, he wore navy blue sweats and a black tshirt to breakfast in the morning, and he wore that color combination again at night. Like I said, even though it was only in 1 day, it’s camp, and it’s the equivalent of a week of navy blue and black.
We only had 1 kiss because I quickly dumped him on our 3rd day. My parents won’t let me live down the fact that I dumped my first bf because he wore navy blue and black; I guess the moral of the story is that I’m as shallow as they come (see my next sentence). He started dating this girl Amanda shortly after, but she had a really bad hair dye job and a hairy upper lip. total downgrade Adam from toronto, total downgrade.
What we learn from this situation is two-fold:
The correct information was taken seriously, and now I am the apparent authoritative source on matching navy blue and black
In the past two posts (1, 2) I’ve described HAMB SF and alluded to the fact that the idea has stopped just short of execution. I wanted to use this posting to explain why I believe I’m not in the right position to move forward with HAMB.
Lets first start with the Legal Implications. While no state *requires* that you have your personal training certification, you should be certified by AFAA, ACSM or NBFE. Since this type of business involves potential injury, you need to purchase personal training insurance, as well as issue waivers of liability to your clients. I also wanted to form my business under an LLC; this is a prudent way of protecting your assets in the case of a negligence suit with any of your clients.
So there are a couple hurdles to forming an LLC for this type of business. First, forming an LLC costs $80 in California, and mandates a minimum tax of $800 per year. This makes it difficult to keep costs low for the client. Second, from case People v. Pacific Landmark, LLC, 129 Cal. App. 4th 1203 (2005), we learn that an LLC consists of a at least two members who own membership interest. This means, without a partner, you can’t form an LLC. Finally, the PT insurance mandates that you must be an independent contractor, or operating as a sole proprietor. So all together, I couldn’t form an LLC, regardless of whether I could find a silent partner or whether this legal construct could protect me and my assets in a tortious suit.
After I came to this realization, I called AFAA and spoke to a representative about how trainers conduct their business in this state. While my notes are confined to a single page in a small notebook, the implications are huge The major rule is you must document everything to support your case in the event that you are taken to court. After getting all the proper tax permits, establishing your business with the city, purchasing liability insurance and issuing client waivers, you must collect as much paperwork as possible. Add in your clients’ informed consent, policy forms, documents of the time and details of each workout, as well as invoicing and payments, the task became much larger than I had anticipated. You cannot let anything remain as verbal agreement.
When I told her that I was interested in doing the workouts outside, she said that it would take extra work. I needed to check with the city about what I can and cannot do in the parks, and she questioned whether the insurance would cover outside workouts, especially when the equipment (park benchs, play sets and gyms) could not be certifiably safe.
All in all, there was a lot more work to do than I had anticipated. Two workouts a week might turn into hours and hours of preparation; not just preparing for the workout plan, but for documenting the entire workout. And, in the end, all of this extra legwork can’t guarantee that you won’t be taken to court or found guilty. Obviously, the real question is “What is the likeliness someone will sue you?” The answer might be slim to none, but that’s not a risk I want to take right now.
So rather than give myself a hard time for backing away from this challenge, I decided to learn from it. First, as I mentioned previously, I don’t need to make money from my certification to benefit from what is has provided me. Second, because I did the due diligence needed to decide on the viability of this idea, I’ve learned leaps and bounds about incorporation in the state of California and about how trainers do run full-time businesses. In the event that I do want to come back to this idea, I will be fully aware of the work that must go into making this a successful venture.
Over the past four months I have been working on my recertifcation with the Aerobics & Fitness Association of America. For 4 years now I have been a certified Group Exercise Instructor, and for the past two years I have been a certified Personal Trainer. While I was in college and graduate school, I taught step aerobics, body toning and a mix of floor and athletic training called 20-20-10 (for the number of minutes spent on each activitiy). In 2007, I decided I wanted to get my PT certification so that I could work 1-on-1 with clients. But, with my Masters Project well under way, traveling, starting 1-job and then starting another, I never made the time to put my certification to good use and pick up clients part time.
Last November, as AFAA notified me that my PT certification was expiring, I realized that I needed to make my investment in money and time worth something in dollars. I didn’t realize the education had paid off in intangibles, like what I know, how I workout, eat better and lead a healthier life.
I decided that I wanted to create a small workout group in Russian and Nob Hill neighborhoods. The basic premise of the idea was that there were many other women my age who paid for gyms every month but didn’t want to add to the already steep cost to hire a personal trainer. Boot camps in the city are targeted at older men and women, and are also very expensive per month. They start at 6 am, which is just too early for someone in their 20′s, who still wants to go out at night. Waking up at 5:XX anything is miserable! If I could teach outdoor workouts twice a week, charge a nominal fee of $5 per workout, I could break even on my costs to take all the recertification courses (approximately ~$300+).
While I did home studies and took practical classes to earn my continuing education units (CEUs), I enlisted my friends to help me with a name. We played around with a lot, they ranged from serious workout names to ridiculous puns. Some included:
Bust Your Butt Outdoors
Three Hills You’re Out
Sweatin’ the Hills
Run for the Hills!
Head for the Hills
Shape Your Booty
I ultimately settled on HAMB SF: Hills are My Bitch, because this is what I say whenever I’m running and get to the bottom of a big hill. I thought it was fun, catchy, and would attract other people my age. I was definitely right on that one because when I began to build the website, and show it to friends, everyone had a smile on their face.
So as the technophile that I am, I spent way too much time building the website and playing around with different layouts(here, here and here)…the programming bug bit me and I was obsessed for a couple weeks in January. Some of the designs, if you look, needed a tag line “Just like our bodies, a little resizing of the browser always helps!” It was fun, entertaining, and I got to really play around in photoshop, so I don’t see this as wasted time at all.
My final version is up at HAMB SF – It’s only the About page. I never finished it, and there’s good reason why – Legal Complications. To be talked about in a follow up post…
Without the internet on my flight back from DC this weekend, I was forced to just make something up in Flash to see if I could learn something new. Compared to the last project, I can say that my significant accomplishments and growth in this skill are astounding, but I’ll let you judge for yourself:
You know this video is as fly as these shoes I bought this weekend:
I’ve been in bed now for about 5 hours. I read 20 pages of my book, wrote a blog posting, upgraded word press, installed google analytics on my blog, and now I’m changing the theme. I’m trying an out-of-the-box theme for this month before I go and write my own CSS. I think I should focus on my dev sandbox and portfolio for the month of January.
I finally took the first step towards developing my own blog by installing WordPress on my site. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now, and yesterday I took the plunge. I ran into some problems because I didn’t have the host named correctly in my config file. Ultimately, it was this tutorial that helped me figure this all out.
In retrospect, the process of installing wordpress was not that difficult, but it was something I had never done before. Recognizing small accomplishments can be important : )
My sister once told me that I was extremely well rounded, and no one could take that away from me. With that, I like to use Second Thoughts to display this wide range of expertise, from the ridiculous to real, from tacos to design, from technical to personal.
Recent Comments