Liz wrote about how it pays to be a “jack of all trades” back in January, which inspired me to take on my own “off-the-wall” project: bartering personal finance for free food. Sitting in front of a real live person is much different from zooming thoughts into the blogosphere. There’s an information overload when you talk to one person: from childhood stories about money, to bank statements dug out from a file cabinet, to questions that fly out of nowhere. Over the past six months, one question that I quickly got used to was, “Well, how do you handle it?” I will write more about my lessons on this adventure in later posts.
For now, I’d like to add more details about how I accomplished this project. My goals were simple: I wanted to help my friends and have an excuse to talk about serious things, beyond the “hey, did you see the season finale of [show here] last night?” I realized that I wanted something in return and I settled for a free lunch, worth about $5-15. Even though a free meal may seem trivial for a two-hour consultation, I wanted my “client” to take it seriously. Free things are too easy to overuse or ignore. The nominal fee acknowledged that I wasn’t a pro (whose hourly fees can easily break $100).
In summary, you should try the barter technique when you want to trade expertise in one thing for expertise in another. It’s also great if you want to stay away from money, whether it’s because one party is short on it or because it would harm the exchange. Once I got the hang of it, I asked some of my stylish classmates for fashion advice, including a custom “shop in my closet” consultation (thanks, Carmen!).
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