Yelp Review from Oxygen Tango

Here is a Yelp Review Posted on 7/12/12 at Yelp-The-Green-Bookkeeper-Oakland:

"I have been Tye Kirk's client, who runs The Green Bookkeeper, for a few years now (I think 3 at least) and it has been a great positive journey. 

Tye is very diligent. He takes care of details very fast and with great precision. He has always looked after what I needed so that all my bookkeeping is in order. He communicates with, and takes care of whatever my accountant needs to do her work, is self ignited, and has an absolutely heartfelt and honest character. 

He has always been totally willing to help me with many things - setting up reminders and reminding me about deadlines and filing details, brainstorming about finding the best categories for items in my monthly income statement (P+L) he helped create a cash variance report and a budget report that I can use on a monthly basis to monitor and read my business. He delivers also a monthly balance sheet. And many more things - long-term thinking, dealing with my bank etc.

As a human being he is a delight to work with. He is easy going and has good advise. This does not take away my responsibility to make sure I know what I want in order to be able to "read" my business in the way I need it. 

If you decide to work with him (or any bookkeeper that is) you'll have to ignite that part. Tye can do it if you deliver on your part. It is a business relationship and I as a client need to feed in equally.

He recently relocated to the Bay area with this number 510.982.6433.

Remote work works well for me with Tye.

Thanks to skype I can communicate with him at ease and directly and every week and every month I know what the numbers are in my business.

So in other words I can only give him a 5 star rating.

Great work Tye. Thank you."

Stefan F.
Oxygen Tango
http://www.oxygentango.com/

A Workplace You Could Love

What do you hate most about your job?

The pay. The patronizing air among the higher-ups. The powerlessness day in and day out. The bureaucratic red tape. The vacuum into which your creative ideas disappear. The politics, double standards, threats, innuendos and misinformation. The discrimination. Executive bonuses during staff layoffs, reduced time, & pay cuts. No say as the plans, handed down to you, change with the wind. The environmental and social responsibility is tweeted lip service for PR and website hits. The known, harmful side-effects of the new product line. The cooked books. The anonymous absentee owners. Your life, friends, wife/husband, children -- drifting ever further away.

What if it could all be different?

Work like you always dreamed it could be... But you’d have to work hard, take total responsibility, fulfill hundreds of continuing educational credits, train tirelessly in communication, mediation and conflict resolution, step up and see your creative ideas through to completion, open your heart to your coworkers, work as a team, take strong stances on your beliefs, values and morals.

Imagine working in a medium sized firm where staff size is capped at 500 to ensure everyone can know each other personally. Each member owns an equal share in the company. Profits are shared equally. Top managers only make 4 x’s what the lowest paid worker makes. Everyone has an equal voice that is heard on every decision that concerns you, made within a transparent one member-one vote structure. Creative input is actively sought and rewarded. Changes are taken in stride as everyone is consulted when dire economic conditions call for prudent decision making.

What is a Cooperative Enterprise? 

This structure, though pretty atypical for the vast majority of jobs and workplaces in the so-called developed and developing countries of the world, has many successful models often times out competing their top-down corporate counterparts in the global marketplace. Democratic governance is commonly are practiced in Cooperative Enterprises around the world from Italy to Japan to India, from Canada to South America. Arguably the most prominent and successful is the Mondragon Cooperative Model located in the Basque States of Spain.

Cooperatives, co-ops for short, are an organization or group of organizations-- for profit or not, that willingly choose to associate together in the spirit of common cause, as well as self-interest for our immediate needs. They could be service or product based factories, housing, credit unions/public banking, agricultural, you name it.

Idealism meets pragmatic 

This is where the rubber hits the road. Cooperatives walk a tightrope, balancing economic realities with their social mission; product development with community values; and hard work with profound moral principles. Furthermore, they embody these values by building them into their organizational structure and decision making. Practicing their values of democracy, mutual self-help and care, makes it that much more tangible and real. I firmly believe that a true democracy at the national level depends on our daily practicing of democratic decision making and honing the 1000 subtle skills required to make democracy work from workplace to home to town hall. Workplace democracy is one of those places we practice under real life circumstances and daily pressures. 

What I am most curious about is how one modality plays a complementary role to the other. The strengths in one compensates for the weak areas. What the corporate top-down model neglects in relating to people as humans, the humanistic model neglects in building competitive advantage and market penetration. And how both models can suppress entrepreneurial ingenuity. We need both. Neither is better-than, neither will ever become obsolete. We can take the good, leave the bad and learn the lessons each offer. This blending approach can not be quickly dismissed and marginalized, because we are both right and have something greater to discover together.

Vote Often Vote Early- Coop Credit Union

If you are a member of the Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union please consider voting for Tim, Mike and Tye. We are running together to bring a focus on local business creation, especially worker cooperatives, which help create stable jobs that won't outsource and leave the community when we need them most.

Going Green- It's More Than You Think

Going green is so much more than just thinking & doing.

The green movement, most of the time, comes off on a very superficial level that does very little good and actually undermines the well-intentioned goal.

Going Green typically means, adopting a set of practices or lifestyle choices that consider the environmental impact of those actions. This includes making better choices of what products to buy, car pooling, and planting a tree. In a nutshell, Do this and that and you can save the Earth.

But what is this really? A new corporate branding, a clever marketing scheme, a naïve idealism, a momentary reprieve of guilt and gluttony, or an oversimplification to make sense of a daunting reality. Well, it can be a lot of things, but none of it is helping.

These sets of practices pastiche over the old sets of practices to save paper, cut down less trees and pollute less of the environment. Meanwhile, we continue our hurried, over- scheduled and under-appreciated lives. If we have time we add recycling to our to do list of things we should do. ‘Should’ and there is the rub, the well-intentioned act now becomes an obligation, a busied compulsion. And guilt pops up again polluting our dreams and aspirations, as dirty and murky, as our rivers and seas.

Somewhere deep down inside us is a restless soul haunting our own lives, a ghost in the machine, beckoning for deep fulfillment, wanting nothing less than a cup runneth over, vibrant dynamic life out in the world with people and nature. No compensatory purchases, no coping mechanisms, no sell out. No membership fees or fine print legalese. Not separate and equal, but together intermixing our dreams, raw and open, ripe with potential. This to me is the true Green Movement- embodied and alive- singing and dancing, living out our life’s purpose in touch with all life.

And truth is this fully open living and loving is often paralyzingly scary--true freedom is, otherwise we’d all be living it by now.

But as we give and receive the courage to open our hearts, so too shall the people around us. As we heal, so too shall the planet. If we were fully actualized, living the beautiful life we love, we would leave the job we hated, cut all the needless expenses and penchant prideful indulgences and not allow the clear-cutting of a rainforest. There’d be no need, no room for it. We would come home and love our spouse and kids and undoubtedly shine radiantly for them. The showering of limitless love and tenderness would be enough. Each of our own desperate measures to make a quick buck would cease. Gazing deeply into each other’s eyes we would know. We would stand in our mature paternal instincts and stop these 'kids' from running amok in our world and resolutely declare “ENOUGH.”

Don’t get me wrong, the bulldozing of our rainforests, natural gas fracking, deepwater drilling, outsourced overseas smoke stacks, and the contamination of our precious water supplies are devastations, deluging Mother Earth’s ability to heal Herself. These are systemic problems that require systemic solutions-- Systems Thinking approaches. Just as our own immune system becomes overburdened and overstressed, we too must not suppress the planet's symptoms with teaspoon after teaspoon of cold medicine, but rather respond to the root cause before the recurring coughs and colds crescendo into an incurable disease.

GE Responds to Public Outcry – Will Donate Entire $3.2 Billion Tax Refund to Help offset Cuts and Save American Jobs : Press Releases : News : GE

GE Responds to Public Outcry – Will Donate Entire $3.2 Billion Tax Refund to Help offset Cuts and Save American Jobs : Press Releases : News : GE

Do you need to file an extension for taxes?

Have you been scrambling to get everything else in your life done, but have been putting off filing your taxes?

Below are the links for CA state and federal and a brief explanation of the consequences if you don't apply for an extension.

Links:

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f4868.pdf

http://www.ftb.ca.gov/forms/2010/10_3519.pdf

Fill out the extension form with the pertinent information Name, Address, SSN, etc. This will give you a 6 month extension to file your tax returns. You still need to pay now or you will be charged interest on the amount that you still owe. These forms extend the period you have to file the paper work.

If you know you owe and send the estimated payment in with the form. If you don't pay April 15th you will be charged interest on what you haven't paid.

Hope this explanation helps.

Tye Kirk

info@thegreenbookkeeper.com

www.TheGreenBookkeeper.com

The Money Fast

So, how is it going with starting a budget? and tracking what you spend?

Recently, I've had some huge breakthrough's with my budget and i think sharing them could help all of us.

Last weekend I did what i would call a "Money Fast". My goal was to keep from going over budget for February and since it was the end of the month and i was soooo close (and a little obsessive!), I decided to not spend anything from Friday-Tuesday. It was amazing!!

I cooked at home, read a book, went to a free spiritual talk, meditated, went for a walk, ate what i already had in the fridge, had potluck at a friend's house and watched a netflix.

And it worked.

As always, these excercise are fertile ground for learnings, awareness, and deepening...

• I realized i could go a weekend without spending a dime.
• I realized that there are times when i spend money to make myself feel better and not indulging this reflex weakens its power and actually loving this "devil", hearing it and thanking it seems to be what it needs most.
• I further realized that spending money is not necessary for fun, intimacy or romance.
• I realized more ways to live simply and have BIG fun.

Obviously, if you are in a relationship, this is not something you can do on your own. It does impact the other. Your lives are intertwined in magical wonderful ways and money is a part of it. If you are single I guess you could hide away easily and watch what you spend, but i recommend the opposite. Open up let people in. So what if you don't have much to spend! Guess what, there are a lot of us in that same boat. Through being honest and opening my life up to my friends we are all the more closer. I felt an empowering partnership with my girlfriend when I chose to communicate and enroll her in joining me on the Money Fast.

The biggest gift of all, I realized that being tight with money does not create what psuedo-spiritual, new agers claim "focusing on the problem creates more of the problem". Actually, the Money Fast had the opposite effect. After living on a tight budget for a month at the end of the month I felt rich, abundant or whatever you want to call it. I had money leftover to do what is most important.

I wasn't living in scarcity or feeling like the cup is half empty... afterwards I saw my bank account and it dawned on me WOW! i have all of this leftover for my life goals & dreams- paying down my school debt & saving for a trip abroad!!!

Don't get me wrong, it was challenging throughout the month and this weekend. And many deep-seeded, difficult emotions came up, but it was good to observe them and move through it and really feel what was there.

This is a bit of a paradox: Expansiveness from Contraction... and a buzz kill for people who think that they just focus on making more money to solve their overspending problems. (Under-earning and overspending are two separate issues that require totally different approaches.) Budgeting is a good dose of reality for people who are stuck in magical thinking... no judgment, i have been there too. Sometimes its hard as hell to look at this stuff, but to look at it everyday is soooo vital to moving through the muck.

May we grow and realize we are strength and beauty together...