What you want in a gym will largely depend on what you want out of it. That being said, there are many general things that mark “good gyms”. I decided to write the guide because I’m tired of seeing articles like “avoid gyms with loud people, huge people, or equipment that will actually help you build muscle”. This article is dedicated to helping you choose a gym that will motivate you to train hard and avoid all the gimmicks that come with fitness.

Price

• You want to negotiate the lowest price possible. A lot gyms try to get you to pay for an extra registration fee, which is often the same price as a month’s membership.

• Monthly memberships range from $20-75, and sign-up fees can be as much as $250.
• If any of the gyms offer to let you sign-up without paying this fee, you can use it as leverage to get other gyms to let you join without paying for registration.
• Look for special seasonal deals, like summer or New Years, when signing up, to lock in the lowest monthly rate. Gyms are sales-oriented businesses. They want to get you to pay as much as possible. Don’t be suckered in. Talk them down.
• Ask them if they charge a fee to cancel the membership, and how much it is.
• Avoid frills. You’re going to pay more at gyms with racquetball courts, group fitness classes, saunas, swimming pools, climbing walls, and so on. If you’re not using these, you need to look for a weight-lifting gym.
• How far is the gym away from your house, school or place of employment? Calculate your miles per gallon rate, multiply it by the distance, and add it to the monthly fee when comparing gyms.
  Location matters. If you’re lazy one day, you’re going to use a 30 minutes commute as an excuse to skip out on training.

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If you are currently a college student, this is probably the most important Melon post you’ll ever read. Why? Because I’m about to tell you something that will save you tens of thousands of dollars when done correctly. Not only that, you’re going to get this money for not doing something. It’s hard to find a better deal than that.

You’re not going to pay back your student loans. Okay, more specifically, you’re only going to pay the minimum amount required on for as long as possible.

“Why?“I’ve been asked countless times when explaining this idea of mine to my fellow students. It sounds crazy, but it works.

If you have student loans, you probably received them at a certain interest rate: Likely 5% for Perkins loans and 6.8% for Stafford loans (which, depending on when you received it, may go down to as far as 3.4% in 2011 according to this site). After college, you should consolidate your loans, if it is prudent to do so. Consolidating costs nothing and can be done for federal loans at this site with no cost. Generally, your repayment period will be extended to 20-30 years, depending on how many total loans you have.

I’ll use myself as an example. I will graduate from The University of Puget Sound in May 2009 with $26,870 in student loan debt from Perkins and Stafford loans. Let’s say I wait until July 2011 and consolidate my loans, locking in an interest rate of between 3.4% and 5%, depending on my loan mix. With an interest rate this low, why would I want to pay my loan off? If I do that, I will effectively be losing money.

Look at it another way. If I gave you a $1000 loan at 5% interest and you turned around and invested that in the stock market at 10% interest, over a year, you just made $100, $50 of that which you now pay to me, so you walk away with  $50 in your pocket. If you managed to pay the loan off right away, you maybe owe me three or four dollars in interest. You might look at this as a good deal, but if you had decided to draw out the contract as long as possible, you would have made $50!

Student loans are basically “free” government money for you to turn around and invest in the stock market.

What about for the doubters that cite our hard financial times as a reason to pay off your debt right away? What about those of you reading this right now and saying “I don’t trust the stock market!” I’ll show you why this will work. Using the Standard and Poor 500, as a benchmark, the stock market has grown 9.4% on average annually from 1871 to December 2005 (Source). This includes the great depression, this includes every financial crisis in the last 130 years of which this current one is just another drop in the bucket. However much I disagree with capitalism, the administration, et cetera, I will bet every single time on the stock market as opposed to keeping my money in a coffee can over the 20-25 year period in which I’m going to be paying off my loan.

Back to me as an example. My 26,870 in student loan debt is going to be invested in the stock market. To account for fees and such, lets say I average a rate of return of 8% annually during my loan payoff period over the next 20 years. Let’s say I am able to consolidate my student loans at 5%. For these 20 years, I steadily plug away at my loan, paying only the bare minimum every month. Meanwhile, my effective interest rate is 3% because I’m turning around and investing the government’s money in the stock market and keeping the interest. My 26,870 just turned into 48,530.21 over that period.

To summarize:

1. Consolidate your loans once you graduate.

2. Invest.

3. Pay off only the minimums on your loans every month.

4. Profit.

Disclaimer: There are a lot more factors at work here, this is just a gross oversimplification because I know my target audience is not that of a finance blog. There is the factor, for example, that student loan interest is tax-deductible, which even further reinforces my argument. This method will also not work if your loan interest rate is over about 8%. In that case, you should pay it off as soon as possible. If anyone has any specific questions, I can address them in the comments section.

image by http://flickr.com/photos/articnomad/

The “American Issues Project”, under the leadership of a paid consultant of John McCain has recently decided to air a negative attack ad condemning Obama’s link to Bill Ayers.

The ad paints Bill Ayers as a terrorist, rhetoric which has been picked up by conservative pundits and figures. The democratic response to this campaign has left out one key argument. They prefer to point out that Obama does not have a close relationship with Ayers, and that he was eight years old when the attacks occurred, and that he has condemned the attacks. These arguments serve to distance Obama from Ayers, which is fine. However, why is this man so deplorable that one needs to claim he is not friends with him?

The terrorists we are fighting against, and whose hijacked plane is contrasted with Ayers’ deeds in the advert, are conservative Muslims who do not believe in freedom of thought and action. They believe in a theocratic dictatorship without personal rights governed by Sharia law.

Let me tell you a bit about Bill Ayers:

• He comes from a wealthy family in Chicago. Instead of taking the standard corporate route like many of his wealthy peers, he decided to live his life so that it did not become a mockery of his values.
• In 1965, Ayers joined a picket line protesting an Ann Arbor, Michigan, pizzeria for refusing to seat African Americans.
• At the age of 21, Ayers became director of a preschool based on the “free school movement”, encouraging cooperating and communication instead of test scores and grades
• Ayers became militant and participated in several bombings: the New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the United States Capitol building in 1971, and The Pentagon in 1972. No one was killed as a result of this.
• After his radical days, he worked with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley in shaping the city’s school reform program.
• He is a distinguished professor of the University of Illinois at Chicago.
• He believes in the downfall of US imperialism and the achievement of a classless world.

Does this sound like a dishonorable man? Does this sound like a man with intentions to hurt the “American dream”?

Ayers’ mistake was going militant. As a pacifist, I realize that non-violent action is the only way to force meaningful, credible change. Everyone makes mistakes. Ayers is quoted in the advertisement to have said “we didn’t do enough”. This claim is in reference to everyone in America at the time not doing enough to stop the war, not in reference to how many bombs he built.

Bill Ayers questioned America’s government at a time when it most needed to be questioned. Ayers tried to save innocent lives, both of our servicemen in Vietnam and of the Vietnamese people, some of whom were probably unjustly killed in the 23 bombing runs flown by John McCain. Bill Ayers is not a terrorist, at least not in the sense that the attack ads paint him out to be. He is not a Muslim who wants to limit women’s rights and implement Sharia law. Bill Ayers is a freedom fighter, and should be considered an American hero for his exemplification of the founding fathers’ idea of questioning one’s government.

…via thinkprogress.org

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: But she has no national security experience.

CINDY McCAIN: You know, the experience that she comes from is what she’s done in government, and remember, Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia. It’s not as if she doesn’t understand what’s at stake here.

As if this was not ridiculous enough: Sarah Palin has never been to Russia, and did not possess a passport until 2007.

The Coalition against Injustice and Racism has published a response (in the form of a campus-wide e-mail) to some scattered criticism they received as a result of their list of demands aimed at improving diversity at Puget Sound:

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African immigrants to the United States (not to be confused with Black Americans, who are the descendants of former slaves) are the most academically successful social group in the United States, and one of the most prosperous.

According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 48.9% of all African immigrants hold a college diploma. This makes them not only the most successful immigrant group, but the most successful ethnic group overall in the United States. For comparison, this is double the percent of White Americans with a college degree, and quadruple the percent of all Black Americans with a college degree. 19.4% percent of African adult immigrants hold a graduate degree, compared to 8.1% of whites and 3.8% of blacks.

Africans have the highest high school graduation rate of any immigrant population. Only 7.6% of African immigrants, according to the 2000 U.S. Census, were not fluent in English. This is even lower than than immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada, who had an 11.5% non-fluency rate combined.

This does not just apply to immigrants fresh off the boat. Studies show that these results are more or less replicated even in second or third generations.

Self-selective immigration bias aside, what does this tell us about black culture in the United States?

Hillary Clinton has decided to play dirty, and it’s making me very uncomfortable.

At this point in the campaign it seems like the Clintons will do anything to win. Yet it was still surprising to me that yesterday Senator Clinton stated in a press release: “”I will ask my Democratic convention delegates to support seating the delegations from Florida and Michigan”. If you are unfamiliar with the backstory, the Democratic Party declared the Michigan and Florida primaries invalid because they defied a party rule stating that their primaries should not be held before the 5th of February. As a result, the major Democratic candidates agreed to withdraw their names from the ballot in those states… except for Clinton. Because of her refusal to play nice, Clinton won Michigan with 55% of the vote, and currently leads 2-to-1 in the Florida primary, which will take place on February 5th.

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If you are against universal health care or don’t have an opinion on it at all, I urge you to read the following. I will attempt to simply and concisely prove why the United States needs to change its current health care system.

In the United States of America, 44.8 million people are without health insurance. Either they can’t afford it or they are denied coverage because the companies do not think they will be “economical enough”. Even if one does have medical insurance, chances are they will be denied coverage at one point in their life. This is due to the privatized, profit-driven system, which encourages legalese like co-pays, thresholds, limited coverage, and more.

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