Link Roundup #50: 10 Things to Know This Week
Accelerate your personal finance knowledge with this regular feature on Ringgit Oh Ringgit – the Link Roundup! I promise you’ll find these 10 links informational 🙂
1. COVID-19: My Money Plan – Figuringgitout.com
LOVED this article by personal finance blogger Figuringgitout (DOPE NAME), covering her 10 (ten!) strategies she’ll take, factoring in the pandemic situation. It’s so thoughtful and self-reflective and focused on taking action. Highly recommend you to read.
After you read that, go follow her on Facebook. More followers = more motivation for her to write = more stuff for me us to read muahahaha
2. I bought everything I saw in Instagram ads for a month – Wired
… This is my dream article to write. I love the ‘Buy everything that was advertised to me’ angle. It’s so fun – almost voyeuristic – to find out about the ads targeted to an individual. The writer tried out 18 products that were advertised on Instagram.
(and in the conclusion section, he admitted to liking some of the stuff but needing exactly zero of them)
3. 9 Well-Intentioned Efforts That Actually Aren’t Environmentally Friendly – Discover Magazine
‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’, indeed.
Sharing for these lines:
- As it turns out, it takes exponentially more resources to make a tote bag compared with the cheap polyethylene… Paper bags and plastic-based reusable totes required between 35 and 84 re-uses. A cotton tote, though, had to be used 7,100 times. Organic cotton? 20,000 times. If you used your organic cotton bag twice a week for the rest of your life, it’d be worth it after 192 years.
- Buying new, more sustainable versions of what you already have. Even cars…. Instead of buying new mason jars, reuse the glass jars that your pickles and jam came in. And if you already have 10 water bottles, maybe don’t get an 11th, even if it’s labeled “eco-friendly.
With those kinds of headlines, obviously this particular media outlet did NOT like her opinion. But the thing is, I kind of… agree with her? She has free content, the sub(scription) is access to PREMIUM materials. That is completely acceptable.
I liked what she said to people who ask for premium content but didn’t want to pay for it – “(If you say you can’t afford $5,) What you mean to say is, ‘I’m so irresponsible with my money, I can’t support the entertainment that I enjoy.'”
Watch and decide for yourself.
5. Post-coronavirus, ‘normal’ travel may not resume until 2023 – Executive Traveleer
What is the estimated recovery timeline for the travel industry, assuming that coronavirus pandemic is under control by the end of 2020? Read on to find out. If you’re an avid budget traveler (I am), this article might be a bit depressing.
I hope I can outlive all of this so I can add on more travels in my lifetime 🙁 It’s one of the few splurges I make amid my fairly frugal lifestyle.
6. Putting A Gender Lens On COVID-19: Thought Leaders Weigh In – Forbes
Yeah, the pandemic is hard, but it is harder for some. Women, especially, ‘comprise about 70% of the global health care workforce and carry out at least two-and-a-half times more unpaid household and care work than men. That means they are caring for sick patients at health care facilities during the day and then caring for their parents, spouses, and children at home at night.’
This part of the article is TRUTH
Carework is relentless—it does not let up, and all other work depends on it, as we are learning from this crisis. Essential workers are not billionaire CEOs—they are janitors, nurses, home health care aides, domestic workers, teachers, teacher aides, childcare workers, nannies, maids and others.
Without them, nothing else can happen. The world needs care, and women and girls provide it, often for free, but even when it is paid, it is paid poorly and inadequately.
7. Faded Desire for Fashion Leaves Global Garment Workers Destitute – Bloomberg
As if that’s not enough, let’s think of the fate of the thousands of garment workers – majority of which are women. I read a statistic saying that in Malaysia alone, we have cut our spending on clothes by 95%.
(It is UNDERSTANDABLE why we cut that expense category much. But the outcome is still sad.)
Quickly promoting my sisters’ online boutiques, Marquise.my (regular size) and Plus Size Malaysia (plus size). They told me sales are slow, and I’m trying to be a good older sister and promote where I can.
8. Job Seeking During COVID-19: 5 Tips to Writing an Effective Cover Letter – Syafiqah Othman
More and more people are losing their jobs amid this pandemic, how can I not share resources that’ll help in the new job application process?
If this is you (or soon to be you), I’m truly sorry of your predicament. It sucks, and I can’t imagine the stress. Keep going. Praying for your success.
9. Cartels are scrambling’: Virus snarls global drug trade – AP News
What are the effects of the pandemic to the global drug trade? How are the drug cartels pivoting*? Fascinating reporting by AP News.
*Too good to not share: “Cartels are increasingly shifting away from drugs that require planting and growing seasons, like heroin and marijuana, in favor of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, which can be cooked 24/7 throughout the year, are up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and produce a greater profit margin.”
10. Signature Market Review & Unboxing – Ringgit Oh Ringgit YouTube Channel
And last but not least, sharing with you a video that I recorded and edited all on my own*! Without exaggeration, I’ve been wanting to explore YouTube monetisation for years already, but never had the guts to do it. Until now, that is!
Now that I’ve uploaded one video, I’m keep to do more! Quite excited to improve on my video-editing skills, too. What kind of videos do you want to watch? Collecting ideas.
(*minus the intro/outro – that one I hired someone from Fiverr)
Please do subscribe 🙂
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That’s it for this round, catch you next time! Want to submit a link you thought was great? Reach out to me on FB or Twitter.
To read past link roundups, please click here.