The Designing Justice + Designing Spaces team with co-founders Kyle Rawlins and Deanna Van Buren third and fourth from the left. Photo by Oretola Thomas.

Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS) is an Oakland, California-based architecture and real estate development non-profit that is working to end mass incarceration by "building infrastructure that attacks its root causes: poverty, racism, unequal access to resources, and the criminal justice system itself," according to the firm's website.

DJDSis led by Deanna Van Buren, an architect who "designs spaces for peacemaking, inside and out" that is working to envision a world without prisons, andKyle Rawlins, a real estate developer.The firm's necessary work involves upending America's blatantly unequal and inherently violent criminal justice system by proposing spaces that strive to instead achieve justice, healing, and reconciliation through alternative, human-centered means. The firm's work takes place both within correctional facilities through educational and self-care initiatives that help incarcerated people retain their humanity, as well as outside prisons, by helping recently-incarcerated people rejoin society. The firm also works directly in the communities impacted by the criminal justice system to deliver commercial, housing, educational opportunities, as well as other necessary services.

For this week'sStudio Snapshot, Archinect was able to connect with Van Buren to discuss creating a practice thataligns values, community work, social impact, and work culture.

Where and when did your practice start?

We started the firm in 2013 and we are based in Oakland, California.

How did you come up with your name and company ethos?

The name came from a toolkit we created for facilitating and leading design workshops in high-security settings with incarcerated men and women around the intersection of restorative justice and design.

How many people work at your company?

There are eight of us full-time.

Why did you decide to start an office?

DJDS co-founder Kyle Rawlins and I each had our own offices and were entrepreneurs. We started a new practice together because we felt that traditional architecture and real estate development firms were not practicing in alignment with our values, were not engaging communities in the work, and were not practicing with social impact in mind. They were also extremely white male-dominated and not resonant with the work culture we were interested in being a part of.

What are other offices that you look at for guidance and why?

We love KDI, Greater Good Studio, Love and Magic Company and Colloqate as examples of firms charting a unique path in designand sometimes real estateto solve big social issues. They think differently and challenge the status quo. We sometimes think of ourselves as the IDEO.org of reimagining justice.

What would you want your firm to be known for?

The creation of the first dedicated Center for Restorative Justice in the nation (maybe even the world). We have designed smaller versions of it and a conceptual design, but want to see it become a reality. We also hope to support a city in the United States to become the first Restorative Justice City. That would be incredible.

What was the first 365 days of running your practice like?

Not bad, actually. We got some grants early on. We had space and good people to work with. We werent paying ourselves, but were definitely filled with excitement and possibility.

What were the biggest obstacles along the way?

Figuring out how to work in communities that were really traumatized, and the other complexities that come with doing work directly with and for the community. We love it and believe in it, but it's also complex. Thats why we have a community liaison on staff.

What are you currently working on?

We are working on several adaptive re-uses of prisons and jails, including the Reimagine Atlanta City Detention Center Initiative in Atlanta. The goal is to transform them into something other than prisons and jails. We are also working on re-entry housing and housing for youth transitioning out of foster care who often end up homeless or incarcerated. We have a Pop-up Village project that activates blighted sites; a Womens Mobile Refuge Trailer, which provides a mobile space of refuge for women during the night as they transition from prison and other disparaging environments; and the Mobile Refuge Room to create dignity and privacy in transitional housing.

What other avenues of creative exploration does your office pursue?

We explore creative financing strategies for designing and developing spaces and places that restore and transform communities, as well as creative tools for community engagement. We also have several digital products in development from a video game to a mapping and data collection tool.

What are the benefits of having your own practice? And staying small?

With your own practice, you can do things your way, create your own culture, and curate a community of creatives that works well together. Staying small is helpful for staying fluid and testing out new processes and ideas. We really know each other and care about the whole person. It gives us time to really be with one another and form a tight, close-knit team.

What is the main thesis of your office and has it changed over time?

Our office is rooted in creative strategies that are empathic and always include deep listening to those most impacted by the problems we are seeking to solve. We are in service to those who have had no voice in the built environment. We are a relatively new practice so the thesis hasnt changed much, but has certainly become more refined.

Where do you see the office in 5 years? In 10 Years?

In five years, we will own and have built at least four or five of our prototypes, if not more. Our goal is to own or co-own our projects so that we have assets that provide us with the income to build more stuff. In 10 years, we will have built and evaluated these prototypes and be able to show how to finance them while also exposing the cost-benefit of building these types of places as opposed to prisons and jails. Our processes and products will be in replication and will have changed the landscape and our vision of justice.

How do you look for talent for your office?

We just talk to people who reach out to us. We invite them to try us out and see if we are a good fit. Our office insists on emotional intelligence and that you be culturally competent to work in low-income communities of color. This means having done your racial bias and gender equity work, as well as being a creative and hard-working person. Its not easy to find a good fit for our practice, but we have an amazing team today.

As you know, in many cases, prisons are spaces of institutionalized brutality; What power do architects have to better the living conditions of people who are incarcerated right now?

We dont design prisons and jails, but there are already plenty of architects doing this work. Even architects like Frank Gehry and MASS Design Group are putting efforts in to this aspect of the system. Our view is that more architects should instead help those who are formerly incarcerated so they dont go back to prison, and to support populations who are targeted and at high-risk for incarceration. We also want to support the masses of children and families impacted by incarceration who are living with missing loved ones in communities with no resources. There are a lot more of them than there are people in prison or jail.

Youve said that in terms of spatial justice, space amplifies effects of the process, can you explain how your practice works to push against (or in positive cases, embrace) that idea?

We are only interested in building spaces that amplify values we believe in. We do not believe punishment and retribution is the best way of addressing harm, so we dont design for that. We do not believe that there are members of our society who deserve less than others, so our spaces are of the highest quality, even with a low-budget. We build beautiful spaces that amplify self-care, love, restoration, and respect. We take this seriously.

You designed Restore Oakland, the nations first center that has space dedicated for restorative justice. Can you tell us a bit about what that means for the design of the building?

Restorative justice offers an alternative to punishment and possible imprisonment by bringing together the victim and the perpetrator to resolve the harm caused. For the process to work, it must take place outside of traditional courthouses and government buildings, which are designed to be oppressive, punitive, and windowless.

At Restore Oakland, the Restorative Justice Rooms are painted in a peaceful and calming sky blue, there are multiple large windows, and chairs are arranged in a circle in the tradition of peace circles used by many Native American cultures.

Two nonprofits, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) and Community Works West, which have office space at Restore Oakland, are partnering with the Alameda County District Attorneys office to divert cases involving people aged 15 to 24 into the restorative justice program.

How does operating as a non-profit impact the way you practice architecture?

It allows us to pursue our own ideas rather than what a client always wants. It also allows us to use processes that other architects would never be able to use because of the cost and time associated with deeply engaging communities. We love the freedom it gives us to lead, but it can also be challenging to work with philanthropy that changes a lot and [donors] who often dont understand what we are doing. Its also challenging to work within a system that requires us to fundraise instead of doing the work we love.

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Architect Deanna Van Buren on Designing Beautiful Spaces That "Amplify Self-Care, Love, Restoration, and Respect" - Archinect

We asked readers about their college experience, and what they wish they had known sooner both inside and outside the classroom. We heard from hundreds of students and former students across the country and in Canada. The answers have been edited and condensed.

Brittany Collins, Westhampton, Mass., Smith College; Holyoke Community College; Greenfield Community College; University Without Walls, University of Massachusetts Amherst

In the way that my acquiring a disability put into perspective the ways in which perfectionism was guiding my academic path, so do I wish that I had sought balance outside of the classroom in college. When I returned to school after my leave, I found in the peers around me stories and experiences at times more educational than those found in textbooks.

At community colleges, and in an online degree completion program, everyones lives had altered from the path. We were thrown hurdles and had to adapt, find workarounds, wait, try, resolve. Yet there we were, in one classroom a patch-worked bunch of learners committed to sticking out lifes turns in pursuit of education.

Rachel Lo, Oviedo, Fla., University of Florida

I wish I had taken better care of myself my physical and mental health. And prioritized my sleep. I wouldve been healthier, less stressed and more resilient during difficult periods. The sooner you ingrain healthy habits early on, the better.

Angelica Munyao, Rochester, N.Y., St. Lawrence University

Forgive yourself for the many mistakes you may make along the way, and be kind and supportive to yourself; in acknowledging your own imperfections and process, you may find similarities in other people that help you build meaningful relationships.

As for the activities or hobbies you wish to try out, go for it and at least you wouldnt have to wonder about what could have been. Of all the places to explore your interests, college is among the best; look around you, and try opening some of those regular (probably daily) email newsletters once in a while.

Kate ODonnell, Brantford, Ontario, University of Waterloo

Do whatever you can to graduate with as little debt as possible. Take a year here and there to just earn and save, take a co-op program, whatever you can do. Your possibilities on graduation get a lot more interesting if you can hit them without a huge debt-monster riding on your shoulders.

Ben Sickle, New York City, N.Y., Bowdoin College

Dorm living exposes you to more germs than your body has ever seen. Be prepared to be sick. A lot. You wont have a parent right there. Have a plan. Take self-care and hygiene seriously.

Sophie Strassmann, Cambridge, Mass., McGill University

I overestimated, for better or worse, the amount of people in higher education who were there to pursue knowledge and truth. As someone who was driven by these, I began to see my internal compass as an asset.

As I watched intelligent people give up dreams, leave programs, it opened up places and opportunities that I dreamed of being in. For better or worse, I started recognizing my own intelligence to the point where I wasnt even looking at what others were doing.

Zoe Roberts, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University

If you act like youre supposed to be somewhere, people probably wont question you. Dont be afraid to go places by yourself. Take advantage of opportunities that interest you, regardless of what others think whether that be a guest speaker or a party. People admire those who arent afraid to go out by themselves (as long as they let friends know where theyre going and stay safe)

Maxine Seya, Newport Beach, Calif., Northwestern University

Its O.K. if it takes a long time to make friends. Youre comparing the depth of friendships youve had over 12 years at home and new friends youre only making a couple semesters into college. Its normal not to feel as close to anyone at college as at home. Itll come.

Wade Shimoda, Honolulu, M.I.T.

I wish I had known how to study. I did well in high school, but apparently I didnt have to study that much to do well, relative to how much I had to study in college just to do O.K. It took me a while to figure out how to study, and to this day, I dont know if I ever truly figured it out.

Gabriel J. Betancourt, San Diego, University of California, San Diego

Advice-givers arent joking when they tell you to network with professors. The kids who start early see exponential growth in available opportunity. The later you start, the less you reap. Some kids find the prospect easy, others find it difficult.

Worried about being too green and wasting your professors time? Reframe the problem. Their job is to teach, yours is to learn. Do your job.

Sarah Olson, Corvallis, Ore., MiraCosta College and Oregon State University

I wish I had known that its O.K. to not go straight to university. When I graduated high school, I felt lost and alone getting a job and starting community college while all my friends left for their universities and got to live in dorms. I made myself miserable with worry that I was behind and missing out. But community college changed my life for the better, and I want other people to know its O.K. to take a nontraditional path.

Miguel Ovies-Bocanegra, Minneapolis, Southern Utah University

I wish I wouldve known the academic resources on campus that were offered to students. In particular, multicultural students. Sometimes, well, the majority of the times, we fall between the cracks academically. Theres general academic advising and tutoring across the campuses nationwide. However, most campuses dont have a safe haven (academically) for a student who identifies outside the most represented group on campus, white students.

This barrier we face innately projects fear or intimidation to reach out and access services that may or may not be offered on campus.

Brando Asitimbay, Queens, N.Y., Lehman College

I believe it is important for every college student to figure out what their call is in life, whether it be medicine, politics, or business. Once this is determined, everything else will come naturally.

Michelle Garcia, Brooklyn, N.Y., SUNY Oswego

Take some classes to expand your mind, like philosophy, literature, theory. I had a good, practical education within my major and minors, but I wish I used the time and space to just think a little more deeply.

Grace deMeurisse, Bellingham, Wash., Western Washington University

I wish I had known how to separate my learning from my grades. My educational experience became profoundly better and more enriched when I learned how to start learning for the sake of learning, and not for the sake of monotonously turning in an assignment for the grade I would get in return.

Tina Yu, Boston, University of Michigan

I wish I had known to take more leap-of-faith classes classes outside of your comfort zone, or classes that dont have anything to do with your major but sound incredibly interesting. I often think back and wish I had taken more of these quirky classes that intrigued me, because while you generally know what to expect out of Econ 101, can you really say that same thing about a class like DNA Origami, Hula, Practical Botany, or Apocalyptic Media?

Amanda Starkey, Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich., Ferris State University and University of Detroit Mercy

I am a first-generation college grad. When I was in my early years at college, I assumed everyone else was so much smarter than me, and that for whatever reason I wasnt good enough to reach for the program I really wanted.

Now, Im excelling at my career with a B.S. and M.A. under my belt. I wish I would have had more faith in my ability to achieve great things. I would have gone to medical school like I always dreamed.

Caitlin Sherry, Mississauga, Ontario, McMaster University

Understand that you can only do so much work in a given day and its O.K. to fall behind when you need a break. SLEEP!

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Going to College? Take Their Advice - The New York Times

More News10 Oct 2019 | 11:14 PM

Nashik, Oct 10 (UNI) President Ram Nath Kovind on Thursday inaugurated the Rudranath, a historical museum, on the centenary of the Deolali Artillery School, near here.

Latur, Oct 10 (UNI) Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) president Balasaheb Thorat on Thursday urged the people of Ausa to stand behind Congress nominee Basavaraj Patil in the coming state Assembly elections, for the well-being of Ausa.

Latur/Osmanabad, Oct 10 (UNI) Union Home Minister and BJP national president Amit Shah on Thursday credited the ruling Devendra Fadnavis-led government of BJP for having undertaken far more developmental works in its five-year rule than the Congress-led government over last 50 years in the state and claimed that the Congress-NCP combine has no issue in this Assembly election.

Rajkot, Oct 10 (UNI) At least 10 people, including seven employees of the Fire department of RMC, were injured during a fire fighting operation in a chemical factory, here on Thursday.

Mumbai, Oct 10 (UNI) Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) President Raj Thackeray on Thursday appealed to the people of the state to make his party 'a strong Opposition' in the legislature, after the October 21 Assembly elections.

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Kamat demands clearance of pending dues to Women Self Help Groups - United News of India

The one-time Minnesotan played her first of two sold-out shows at the Armory on Wednesday night. Shell be back on that stage Friday. In between, well endure a very different spectacle just a few blocks away.

Look, I dont want to talk about the guy either, but theres no avoiding the elephant in the Target Center. A president whose thuggish cruelty only endears him further to a fanbase powered by rancid white resentment is here to lie about our community. We can at least be grateful that this invasion will be bookended by a force for good celebrating her pop breakthrough moment.

At the Armory last night, groups of women enjoyed moving their bodies on their own terms, LGBTQ folks celebrated a spectrum of sexuality and gender, and a successful African-American woman onstage declared, both explicitly and in how she carried herself, that life offers pleasures of infinite variety and the complexity of your identity is an asset to be shared and cherished. We should give that America a try.

Lizzo first appeared last night in a pulpit elevated above the stage, the backdrop behind her depicting a church interior, complete with stained glass, and she began with two songs that fit the conceit: Heaven Help Me and Worship. Soon she yielded that perch to her DJ, Sophia Eris, and joined her dancers onstage, glamorously draped in a fringy gold outfit and holding the stage with innate charisma.

The crowd was particularly rapturous. Theres so much Lizzo in the air around here, and local coverage can verge on fawning, so its possible to get jaded, but this music inspires a vibe of real liberation in a room. During Cuz I Love You, women fell to their knees as they belted the over-the-top soul ballad to their pals, reveling in a kind of performative joy that was self-aware but not self-conscious.

In keeping with the church theme, Lizzo preached. Jerome was preceded with a disquisition on the fuckboy (though Lizzo, ever inclusive, reminded us that fuckgirls and fucktheys also lurk out there), as the singer celebrated her fuckboy-free status and contended that these sexually and romantically troublesome nuisances need to learn to love themselves.

Politics was an unavoidable topic. We live in an interesting world, Lizzo beganand if you doubt that at least some part of her is still Minnesotan, why else would she use our states most beloved euphemistic adjective like that? She continued in this generalized vein. A lot of people dont have good intentions. Im not gonna be more specificbut some of you know what I mean.

Still, as she shouted out Ilhan Omar and said the country looks a lot different than the people running things while urging black, brown, queer, and gender-non-conforming young people to get involved in politics, her sympathies were hardly hidden. Eventually she lowered the boom: Clap so hard they can hear it at the Trump rally.

Another extended speech introduced Good As Hell, to the backing of soft piano. Some concerts leave you wanting to be the star you just watched, Lizzo said, but she intended this to be different. Youre gonna leave this concert wanting to be yourself.

I dont know how that reads to you, but in the moment it was well, a moment. And thats the thing with Lizzo: She flirts with the sort of therapeutic self-help clichs that have kept womens magazines in business for decades. But whether tossing hydration into a list of buzzwords like self-care, self-love, and body positivity that we should embrace, or inviting each of us to consider ourselves thicc bitches for the nighteven the undeniably unthicc non-bitchesshe does it with a sexy good humor that yanks kernels of basic truth out of the commodified muck.

Lizzos rise to fame has seemed at times inevitable and at others so steady yet slow that you could never be sure she wouldnt stall somewhere along the way, stranding her at the status of a viral phenomenon with a handful of extremely well-licensed songs. But a lots changed since she was in the Twin Cities last May to play the Palace Theatre in St. Paul. The biggest development is that Truth Hurts has been number one for six weeks so far, smashing the record for longest time atop the charts by a solo female rapper. With that wobbly piano part that sounds like its being played by an animatronic otter in a saloon-themed novelty restaurant for children, and a swerving vocal suggesting just maybe Lizzos had a few, its an ideal set closer, perfect for swaying and singing along.

Lizzos beloved Sasha Flute made its appearance as she played an instrumental prelude to Juice, which honestly felt a mite anticlimactic. But we can hope its vibrant afterglow will help us endure whatever slander were forced to hear dribble out at the Sportpalast tonight. If hate is a virus, Lizzos concert was a vaccination. Lets hope that Friday night she can pull off an exorcism.

Check out our full photo gallery from last night's show here

SetlistHeaven Help MeWorshipCuz I Love YouExactly How I FeelScuse MeWater MeJeromeIt's My Party/CrybabyTempoBoysGigolo Game/Like a GirlSoulmateLingerieGood as HellTruth Hurts

EncoreJuice

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Lizzo at Minneapolis' Armory: Gets political and basks in sold-out adoration - City Pages

Did you know everything is figureoutable? Yes, even those impossible things that plague you every day are figureoutable. At least thats what one of Oprahs favorite thought leaders, TV and podcast host, and life coach,Marie Forleo says in her new book. And considering she started her own business at 23,B-School, a business training program, which was named one of Inc.s 500 fastest growing companies and is now a multi-million dollar company and is now a New York Times best-selling author with her new book Everything is Figureoutable you may not want to write this off as yet another throw away self-help book.

If I walked out of a restaurant and got hit by a bus, this is the one idea Id want to leave behind. If people could just get a fraction of the benefits from this idea, I would feel like my time on earth was well spent, Forleo told Ladders of her new book.

Forleo spoke with Ladders about why she wanted to write this book, dismantling perfectionism and the three things that get her through her day.

Forleo has been labeled as a multi-passionate entrepreneur meaning she has pursued a lot of different things. From building a media empire to being a life coach to starting a dance career in her late 20s (perhaps the most daunting task of them all.) Many of us can relate to having a side passion or even several apart from our regular 9 to 5 job. Perhaps we want to start a small business or write a book but there never seems to be enough time for any of that. Forleo says that the dilemma is figureoutable:

All of us individually and collectively have a lot of stuff to figure out. Three-hundredmillion people suffer from depression suicide rates, we are in this super volatile economic and political environment. So we have some challenges on a broader scale and I feel that this mindset really does help us tap into the innate wisdom that each of us has to solve some of our biggest challenges.

We wake up and look at our phones, we go to the bathroom and we look at our phones. We are unaware of how much time and energy we are frittering away. Whether you want to create a stronger healthier body, or its a novel you want to write. If you prioritize creating before you consume I think that most of us can carve out 20, 35, 45 minutes, maybe even an hour, to make the changes we want to make to so our lives go in the right direction.

As someone who wanted to pursue multiple avenues, Forleo supports others doing the same though she says our structures arent always built for that:

A lot of our models when it comes to careers and professions are archaic and outdated. You chose one thing to be when you were 18 and you stuck with that thing for 30 or 40 years and you got a gold watch and then you retired. And we dont really have a framework for young people out of college that aligns with things that really fire you up or you have some type of innate attraction to. You need to not worry that you dont have a set career path.

For many of us, theres a point of convergence that happens in your late 20s or 30s, or even 40s, and you cannot predict it from the onset but if you keep on developing your skills and relationships and paying attention to where your strengths lie you will find or create a dream job. It may not be out there, you may not be able to identify it in an example. I had to create it for myself and I think thats becoming true and true even more.

For people that are multi-passionate you may have a day job that pays the bills and give it your very best, but also give yourself permission to take classes or do projects on the side and engage in your other passions as well even if you arent getting paid for it so you can discover what most lights you up.

In the book, Forleo talks about her struggles with becoming a boss for the first time and hiring an assistant. It didnt go very well. She was so used to doing everything herself that she found it hard to delegate or even justify spending the money on an assistant but looking back she learned to be a little less tough on her self:

Be kind and gentle with yourself. Youre not gonna be great at it at first. All of us suck when we become a boss. To have that self-compassion is crucial. She says the way she figured out how to be a better boss was by writing down what she was bad at. I love writing in journals because when you write things down you can identify a solution, for example, Im really terrible at communicating and delegating.

Im not really good at setting deadlines but when you see all that on the page you have your action list for what to work on. You may know intuitively what to work on but who do I know thats a really good delegator? Or is there a podcast on that I can listen to? Make a punch list for yourself from your journaling and taking those little micro-actions for yourself each day can help improve your own skillset as a boss is how you get better.

Forleo is a huge proponent of writing things down in order to provide life clarity:

There is something incredibly profound that happens when you put actual pen to paper rather than typing digitally. Studies show that we actually retain information better when we write with our hands. And on a broader skill writing with our hands slows us down. We usually think more concretely and think deeper truths. You dont slow down when you are typing to get to the root of the issue. The exercise in and of itself of putting pen to paper can be quite enlightening

As for what gets her through the day, the list is rather simple but quite innovative:

This one for me is pretty essential because I have a very active mind. Its very hard to get that thing to shut off. Meditation is a lifesaver for me. There are so many different forms out there and just finding a practice that works for you and clearing my mental cache and helping me feel more rooted clearly and calmly and effectively.

Physical movement is huge for me because I do spend a lot of time in front of screens running a digital business. Apps that have 7-minute workouts work wonders if I cant get to the gym or a class. Ill do a workout right in my kitchen in my normal clothes with my body. Movement is crucial.

I need to have connection time with people I love. Whether its my partner, Josh, of 16 years or jumping on Skype with a friend. I need an emotional relational connection.

In the book, Forleo writes a lot about why our overwhelming need to be perfect can be a real downfall. It needs to be viewed in a different way:

Perfectionism can take you off track. Did I make progress and by progress did you learn something? Did you move the needle and in the process did you discover something thats useful to you? Did you move the project ahead even by an inch?

When we measure by progress instead of making something perfect, which doesnt even really exist because weve all got our opinions on what something perfect is, all youre going for is just a little bit of progress then a lot more joy will come in. The other piece is the fear of failure.

Generally speaking, failure is an incredibly short-sighted concept. Its like going to the movies, youre halfway through and the characters hit this main point of conflict and then you get up and walk out. Oh, they failed, they were horrible. You have no idea where that story went. This is absolutely true for most of us in our lives. If we cut ourselves off and declare ourselves a failure midway through the story, its not gonna work.

Something to think about. Dont give up on your story at the halfway point.

Originally posted here:
Self-made millionaire CEO Marie Forleo on the 3 things that get her through the day - Ladders

Payments firm GoCardless is driving the use of business intelligence (BI) across its business through self-service software. The fintech firm will use software from Looker which Googleannounced it was acquiring in June 2019 to give its workforce of about 350 access to self-service BI report generation.

London-headquartered GoCardless was founded in 2011, andcollects direct debits for businessesranging from very large organisations, such as accounting software supplier Xero, right down to small window-cleaning businesses. It sets up direct debits for customers, does things like know your customer (KYC) checks, and works with the bank to receive payments.

Jon Palmer, head of business intelligence at GoCardless, says that before using Looker, staff would use either a combination of legacy tools for self-services which he said was often inaccurate, hard to scale and difficult to keep within obligations or they would raise tickets with the business intelligence team, made up of 20 people, to have their questions answered.

We would get requests from all across the business, says Palmer. We are a very data-driven company from the CEO down, and there is enormous interest in what is happening across all functions, whether that is risk analysis or revenue drivers.

Palmer says that from the day he started at the company, about 18 months ago, the process of replacing the legacy process began. I was brought in to find a different way of doing this, he says.

The options available to the company were to persist with legacy tools and processes, scale the team with the business, or look for another technology. It chose Looker, which provides self-service BI functionality. This was the main attraction for Palmer, who had used the software in the past.

Everyone is asking us for a lot of stuff, and that is now available through Looker, says Palmer. We wanted to deliver a single truth across the company not just to people but to applications.

The software is hosted by GoCardless, although there is an option for it to be hosted by Looker. Its used across the business, and being a tech-driven company, the IT department is a major user, with access to services to test websites, monitor DevOps processes and test the effects of using machine learning models.

A year after its introduction, 95% of staff are using Looker, with 75% using the service in a meaningful way on a monthly basis. The company is seeing 7,500 Looker queries on average every day. Less than a third of staff would have had access to any kind of service like this, says Palmer.

The companys financial planning and analysis team saved four days per month by using Looker to automate the process of data analysis at the executive and board level. This freed up time for the team and data analysts supporting this process on a regular basis.

At the top of the company, GoCardless executives can pose questions about the take-up of its services when services or regions of operation are launched.

Training was provided by looker to ensure staff take-up levels were high. The Looker team has been integral in on-boarding and training our employees to enable a self-help culture across the company, he says.The levels of engagement testify to its ease of use.

Palmer says many BI tools are not user friendly for most workers because they focus on dashboards that require the staff to find all answers. With Looker, you ask a question and the answer leads to another question, he says. It enables users to drill down and bring in more ingredients.

The high take-up has freed up the analysts to focus on business strategy. Separately, the company recently moved from an IBM infrastructure as a service to Googles cloud platform. Its infrastructure handles about 850m in payments per month, and more than 42,000 merchants worldwide use the service. Most of these (40,000) are in the UK, but GoCardless is targeting international expansion.

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I spent my adolescence in a terrible hurry to read all the books, see all the movies, listen to all the music, look at everything in all the museums. That pursuit required more effort back then, when nothing was streaming and everything had to be hunted down, bought or borrowed. But those changes arent what this essay is about. Culturally ravenous young people have always been insufferable and never unusual, even though they tend to invest a lot in being different in aspiring (or pretending) to something deeper, higher than the common run. Viewed with the chastened hindsight of adulthood, their seriousness shows its ridiculous side, but the longing that drives it is no joke. Its a hunger not so much for knowledge as for experience of a particular kind. Two kinds, really: the specific experience of encountering a book or work of art and also the future experience, the state of perfectly cultivated being, that awaits you at the end of the search. Once youve read everything, then at last you can begin.

2 Furious consumption is often described as indiscriminate, but the point of it is always discrimination. It was on my parents bookshelves, amid other emblems of midcentury, middle-class American literary taste and intellectual curiosity, that I found a book with a title that seemed to offer something I desperately needed, even if (or precisely because) it went completely over my head. Against Interpretation. No subtitle, no how-to promise or self-help come-on. A 95-cent Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of the author, Susan Sontag.

There is no doubt that the picture was part of the books allure the angled, dark-eyed gaze, the knowing smile, the bobbed hair and buttoned-up coat but the charisma of the title shouldnt be underestimated. It was a statement of opposition, though I couldnt say what exactly was being opposed. Whatever interpretation turned out to be, I was ready to enlist in the fight against it. I still am, even if interpretation, in one form or another, has been the main way Ive made my living as an adult. Its not fair to blame Susan Sontag for that, though I do.

3 Against Interpretation, a collection of articles from the 1960s reprinted from various journals and magazines, mainly devoted to of-the-moment texts and artifacts (Jean-Paul Sartres Saint Genet, Jean-Luc Godards Vivre Sa Vie, Jack Smiths Flaming Creatures), modestly presents itself as case studies for an aesthetic, a theory of Sontags own sensibility. Really, though, it is the episodic chronicle of a mind in passionate struggle with the world and itself.

Sontags signature is ambivalence. Against Interpretation (the essay), which declares that to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world in order to set up a shadow world of meanings, is clearly the work of a relentlessly analytical, meaning-driven intelligence. In a little more than 10 pages, she advances an appeal to the ecstasy of surrender rather than the protocols of exegesis, made in unstintingly cerebral terms. Her final, mic-drop declaration In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art deploys abstraction in the service of carnality.

4 Its hard for me, after so many years, to account for the impact Against Interpretation had on me. It was first published in 1966, the year of my birth, which struck me as terribly portentous. It brought news about books I hadnt hadnt yet! read and movies I hadnt heard about and challenged pieties I had only begun to comprehend. It breathed the air of the 60s, a momentous time I had unforgivably missed.

But I kept reading Against Interpretation following it with Styles of Radical Will, On Photography and Under the Sign of Saturn, books Sontag would later deprecate as juvenilia for something else. For the style, you could say (she wrote an essay called On Style). For the voice, I guess, but thats a tame, trite word. It was because I craved the drama of her ambivalence, the tenacity of her enthusiasm, the sting of her doubt. I read those books because I needed to be with her. Is it too much to say that I was in love with her? Who was she, anyway?

5 Years after I plucked Against Interpretation from the living-room shelf, I came across a short story of Sontags called Pilgrimage. One of the very few overtly autobiographical pieces Sontag ever wrote, this lightly fictionalized memoir, set in Southern California in 1947, recalls an adolescence that I somehow suspect myself of having plagiarized a third of a century later. I felt I was slumming in my own life, Sontag writes, gently mocking and also proudly affirming the serious, voracious girl she used to be. The pilgrimage in question, undertaken with a friend named Merrill, was to Thomas Manns house in Pacific Palisades, where that venerable giant of German Kultur had been incongruously living while in exile from Nazi Germany.

The funniest and truest part of the story is young Susans shame and dread at the prospect of paying the call. Oh, Merrill, how could you? she melodramatically exclaims when she learns he has arranged for a teatime visit to the Mann residence. The second-funniest and truest part of the story is the disappointment Susan tries to fight off in the presence of a literary idol who talks like a book review. The encounter makes a charming anecdote with 40 years of hindsight, but it also proves that the youthful instincts were correct. Why would I want to meet him? she wondered. I had his books.

6 I never met Susan Sontag. Once when I was working late answering phones and manning the fax machine in the offices of The New York Review of Books, I took a message for Robert Silvers, one of the magazines editors. Tell him Susan Sontag called. Hell know why. (Because it was his birthday.) Another time I caught a glimpse of her sweeping, swanning, promenading or maybe just walking through the galleries of the Frick.

Much later, I was commissioned by this magazine to write a profile of her. She was about to publish Regarding the Pain of Others, a sequel and corrective to her 1977 book On Photography. The furor she sparked with a few paragraphs written for The New Yorker after the Sept. 11 attacks words that seemed obnoxiously rational at a time of horror and grief had not yet died down. I felt I had a lot to say to her, but the one thing I could not bring myself to do was pick up the phone. Mostly I was terrified of disappointment, mine and hers. I didnt want to fail to impress her; I didnt want to have to try. The terror of seeking her approval, and the certainty that in spite of my journalistic pose I would be doing just that, were paralyzing. Instead of a profile, I wrote a short text that accompanied a portrait by Chuck Close. I didnt want to risk knowing her in any way that might undermine or complicate the relationship we already had, which was plenty fraught. I had her books.

7 After Sontag died in 2004, the focus of attention began to drift away from her work and toward her person. Not her life so much as her self, her photographic image, her way of being at home and at parties anywhere but on the page. Her son, David Rieff, wrote a piercing memoir about his mothers illness and death. Annie Leibovitz, Sontags partner, off and on, from 1989 until her death, released a portfolio of photographs unsparing in their depiction of her cancer-ravaged, 70-year-old body. There were ruminations by Wayne Koestenbaum, Phillip Lopate and Terry Castle about her daunting reputation and the awe, envy and inadequacy she inspired in them. Sempre Susan, a short memoir by Sigrid Nunez, who lived with Sontag and Rieff for a while in the 1970s, is the masterpiece of the I knew Susan minigenre and a funhouse-mirror companion to Sontags own Pilgrimage. Its about what can happen when you really get to know a writer, which is that you lose all sense of what or who it is you really know, including yourself.

8 In 2008, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sontags longtime publisher, issued Reborn, the first of two volumes so far culled from nearly 100 notebooks Sontag filled from early adolescence into late middle age. Because of their fragmentary nature, these journal entries arent intimidating in the way her more formal nonfiction prose could be, or abstruse in the manner of most of her pre-1990s fiction. They seem to offer an unobstructed window into her mind, documenting her intellectual anxieties, existential worries and emotional upheavals, along with everyday ephemera that proves to be almost as captivating. Lists of books to be read and films to be seen sit alongside quotations, aphorisms, observations and story ideas. Lovers are tantalizingly represented by a single letter (I.; H; C.). You wonder if Sontag hoped, if she knew, that you would be reading this someday the intimate journal as a literary form is a recurring theme in her essays and you wonder whether that possibility undermines the guilty intimacy of reading these pages or, on the contrary, accounts for it.

9 A new biography by Benjamin Moser Sontag: Her Life and Work, published last month shrinks Sontag down to life size, even as it also insists on her significance. What mattered about Susan Sontag was what she symbolized, he concludes, having studiously documented her love affairs, her petty cruelties and her lapses in personal hygiene.

I must say I find the notion horrifying. A woman whose great accomplishments were writing millions of words and reading who knows how many millions more no exercise in Sontagiana can fail to mention the 15,000-book library in her Chelsea apartment has at last been decisively captured by what she called the image-world, the counterfeit reality that threatens to destroy our apprehension of the actual world.

You can argue about the philosophical coherence, the political implications or the present-day relevance of this idea (one of the central claims of On Photography), but its hard to deny that Sontag currently belongs more to images than to words. Maybe its inevitable that after Sontags death, the literary persona she spent a lifetime constructing that rigorous, serious, impersonal self has been peeled away, revealing the person hiding behind the words. The unhappy daughter. The mercurial mother. The variously needy and domineering lover. The loyal, sometimes impossible friend. In the era of prestige TV, we may have lost our appetite for difficult books, but we relish difficult characters, and the biographical Sontag brave and imperious, insecure and unpredictable surely fits the bill.

10 Interpretation, according to Sontag, is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. And biography, by the same measure, is the revenge of research upon the intellect. The life of the mind is turned into the life, a coffin full of rattling facts and spectral suppositions, less an invitation to read or reread than a handy, bulky excuse not to.

The point of this essay, which turns out not to be as simple as I thought it would be, is to resist that tendency. I cant deny the reality of the image or the symbolic cachet of the name. I dont want to devalue the ways Sontag serves as a talisman and a culture hero. All I really want to say is that Susan Sontag mattered because of what she wrote.

11 Or maybe I should just say thats why she matters to me. In Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nunez describes Sontag as:

... the opposite of Thomas Bernhards comic possessive thinker, who feeds on the fantasy that every book or painting or piece of music he loves has been created solely for and belongs solely to him, and whose art selfishness makes the thought of anyone else enjoying or appreciating the works of genius he reveres intolerable. She wanted her passions to be shared by all, and to respond with equal intensity to any work she loved was to give her one of her biggest pleasures.

Im the opposite of that. I dont like to share my passions, even if the job of movie critic forces me to do it. I cling to an immature (and maybe also a typically male), proprietary investment in the work I care about most. My devotion to Sontag has often felt like a secret. She was never assigned in any course I took in college, and if her name ever came up while I was in graduate school, it was with a certain condescension. She wasnt a theorist or a scholar but an essayist and a popularizer, and as such a bad fit with the desperate careerism that dominated the academy at the time. In the world of cultural journalism, shes often dismissed as an egghead and a snob. Not really worth talking about, and so I mostly didnt talk about her.

12 Nonetheless, I kept reading, with an ambivalence that mirrored hers. Perhaps her most famous essay certainly among the most controversial is Notes on Camp, which scrutinizes a phenomenon defined by the spirit of extravagance with scrupulous sobriety. The inquiry proceeds from mixed feelings I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it that are heightened rather than resolved, and that curl through the 58 numbered sections of the Notes like tendrils in an Art Nouveau print. In writing about a mode of expression that is overwrought, artificial, frivolous and theatrical, Sontag adopts a style that is the antithesis of all those things.

If some kinds of camp represent a seriousness that fails, then Notes on Camp enacts a seriousness that succeeds. The essay is dedicated to Oscar Wilde, whose most tongue-in-cheek utterances gave voice to his deepest thoughts. Sontag reverses that Wildean current, so that her grave pronouncements sparkle with an almost invisible mischief. The essay is delightful because it seems to betray no sense of fun at all, because its jokes are buried so deep that they are, in effect, secrets.

13 In the chapter of Against Interpretation called Camus Notebooks originally published in The New York Review of Books Sontag divides great writers into husbands and lovers, a sly, sexy updating of older dichotomies (e.g., between Apollonian and Dionysian, Classical and Romantic, paleface and redskin). Albert Camus, at the time beginning his posthumous descent from Nobel laureate and existentialist martyr into the high school curriculum (which is where I found him), is named the ideal husband of contemporary letters. It isnt really a compliment:

Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness. Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover moodiness, selfishness, unreliability, brutality that they would never countenance in a husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling. In the same way, readers put up with unintelligibility, obsessiveness, painful truths, lies, bad grammar if, in compensation, the writer allows them to savor rare emotions and dangerous sensations.

The sexual politics of this formulation are quite something. Reading is female, writing male. The lady reader exists to be seduced or provided for, ravished or served, by a man who is either a scamp or a solid citizen. Camus, in spite of his movie-star good looks (like Sontag, he photographed well), is condemned to husband status. Hes the guy the reader will settle for, who wont ask too many questions when she returns from her flings with Kafka, Cline or Gide. Hes also the one who, more than any of them, inspires love.

14 After her marriage to the sociologist Philip Rieff ended in 1959, most of Sontags serious romantic relationships were with women. The writers whose company she kept on the page were overwhelmingly male (and almost exclusively European). Except for a short piece about Simone Weil and another about Nathalie Sarraute in Against Interpretation and an extensive takedown of Leni Riefenstahl in Under the Sign of Saturn, Sontags major criticism is all about men.

She herself was kind of a husband. Her writing is conscientious, thorough, patient and useful. Authoritative but not scolding. Rigorous, orderly and lucid even when venturing into landscapes of wildness, disruption and revolt. She begins her inquiry into The Pornographic Imagination with the warning that No one should undertake a discussion of pornography before acknowledging the pornographies there are at least three and before pledging to take them on one at a time.

The extravagant, self-subverting seriousness of this sentence makes it a perfect camp gesture. There is also something kinky about the setting of rules and procedures, an implied scenario of transgression and punishment that is unmistakably erotic. Should I be ashamed of myself for thinking that? Of course! Humiliation is one of the most intense and pleasurable effects of Sontags masterful prose. Shes the one in charge.

15 But the rules of the game dont simply dictate silence or obedience on the readers part. What sustains the bond the bondage, if youll allow it is its volatility. The dominant party is always vulnerable, the submissive party always capable of rebellion, resistance or outright refusal.

I often read her work in a spirit of defiance, of disobedience, as if hoping to provoke a reaction. For a while, I thought she was wrong about everything. Against Interpretation was a sentimental and self-defeating polemic against criticism, the very thing she had taught me to believe in. On Photography was a sentimental defense of a shopworn aesthetic ideology wrapped around a superstitious horror at technology. And who cared about Elias Canetti and Walter Benjamin anyway? Or about E.M. Cioran or Antonin Artaud or any of the other Euro-weirdos in her pantheon?

Not me! And yet. ... Over the years Ive purchased at least three copies of Under the Sign of Saturn if pressed to choose a favorite Sontag volume, Id pick that one and in each the essay on Canetti, Mind as Passion, is the most dog-eared. Why? Not so I could recommend it to someone eager to learn about the first native Bulgarian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, because Ive never met such a person. Mind as Passion is the best thing Ive ever read about the emotional dynamics of literary admiration, about the way a great writer teaches us how to breathe, about how readerly surrender is a form of self-creation.

16 In a very few cases, the people Sontag wrote about were people she knew: Roland Barthes and Paul Goodman, for example, whose deaths inspired brief appreciations reprinted in Under the Sign of Saturn. Even in those elegies, the primary intimacy recorded is the one between writer and reader, and the reader who is also, of course, a writer is commemorating and pursuing a form of knowledge that lies somewhere between the cerebral and the biblical.

Because the intimacy is extended to Sontags reader, the love story becomes an implicit mnage trois. Each essay enacts the effort the dialectic of struggle, doubt, ecstasy and letdown to know another writer, and to make you know him, too. And, more deeply though also more discreetly, to know her.

17 The version of this essay that I least want to write the one that keeps pushing against my resistance to it is the one that uses Sontag as a cudgel against the intellectual deficiencies and the deficient intellectuals of the present. Its almost comically easy to plot a vector of decline from then to now. Why arent the kids reading Canetti? Why dont trade publishers print collections of essays about European writers and avant-garde filmmakers? Sontag herself was not immune to such laments. In 1995, she mourned the death of cinema. In 1996, she worried that the very idea of the serious (and the honorable) seems quaint, unrealistic to most people.

Worse, there are ideas and assumptions abroad in the digital land that look like debased, parodic versions of positions she staked out half a century ago. The new sensibility she heralded in the 60s, dedicated both to an excruciating seriousness and to fun and wit and nostalgia, survives in the form of a frantic, algorithm-fueled eclecticism. The popular meme admonishing critics and other designated haters to shut up and let people enjoy things looks like an emoji-friendly update of Against Interpretation, with enjoy things a safer formulation than Sontags erotics of art.

That isnt what she meant, any more than her prickly, nuanced Notes on Camp had much to do with the Instagram-ready insouciance of this years Met Gala, which borrowed the title for its theme. And speaking of the Gram, its ascendance seems to confirm the direst prophecies of On Photography, which saw the unchecked spread of visual media as a kind of ecological catastrophe for human consciousness.

18 In other ways, the Sontag of the 60s and 70s can strike current sensibilities as problematic or outlandish. She wrote almost exclusively about white men. She believed in fixed hierarchies and absolute standards. She wrote at daunting length with the kind of unapologetic erudition that makes people feel bad. Even at her most polemical, she never trafficked in contrarian hot takes. Her name will never be the answer to the standard, time-killing social-media query What classic writer would be awesome on Twitter? The tl;dr of any Sontag essay could only be every word of it.

Sontag was a queer, Jewish woman writer who disdained the rhetoric of identity. She was diffident about disclosing her sexuality. Moser criticizes her for not coming out in the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, when doing so might have been a powerful political statement. The political statements that she did make tended to get her into trouble. In 1966, she wrote that the white race is the cancer of human history. In 1982, in a speech at Town Hall in Manhattan, she called communism fascism with a human face. After Sept. 11, she cautioned against letting emotion cloud political judgment. Lets by all means grieve together, but lets not be stupid together.

That doesnt sound so unreasonable now, but the bulk of Sontags writing served no overt or implicit ideological agenda. Her agenda a list of problems to be tackled rather than a roster of positions to be taken was stubbornly aesthetic. And that may be the most unfashionable, the most shocking, the most infuriating thing about her.

19 Right now, at what can feel like a time of moral and political emergency, we cling to sentimental bromides about the importance of art. We treat it as an escape, a balm, a vague set of values that exist beyond the ugliness and venality of the market and the state. Or we look to art for affirmation of our pieties and prejudices. It splits the difference between resistance and complicity.

Sontag was also aware of living in emergency conditions, in a world menaced by violence, environmental disaster, political polarization and corruption. But the art she valued most didnt soothe the anguish of modern life so much as refract and magnify its agonies. She didnt read or go to movies, plays, museums or dance performances to retreat from that world but to bring herself closer to it. What art does, she says again and again, is confront the nature of human consciousness at a time of historical crisis, to unmake and redefine its own terms and procedures. It confers a solemn obligation: From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art.

20 Consciousness is one of her keywords, and she uses it in a way that may have an odd ring to 21st-century ears. Its sometimes invoked now, in a weak sense, as a synonym for the moral awareness of injustice. Its status as a philosophical problem, meanwhile, has been diminished by the rise of cognitive science, which subordinates the mysteries of the human mind to the chemical and physical operations of the brain.

But consciousness as Sontag understands it has hardly vanished, because it names a phenomenon that belongs in ways that escape scientific analysis to both the individual and the species. Consciousness inheres in a single persons private, incommunicable experience, but it also lives in groups, in cultures and populations and historical epochs. Its closest synonym is thought, which similarly dwells both within the walls of a solitary skull and out in the collective sphere.

If Sontags great theme was consciousness, her great achievement was as a thinker. Usually that label is reserved for theorists and system-builders Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud but Sontag doesnt quite belong in that company. Instead, she wrote in a way that dramatized how thinking happens. The essays are exciting not just because of the ideas they impart but because you feel within them the rhythms and pulsations of a living intelligence; they bring you as close to another person as it is possible to be.

21 Under the Sign of Saturn opens in a tiny room in Paris where she has been living for the previous year small bare quarters that answer some need to strip down, to close off for a while, to make a new start with as little as possible to fall back on. Even though, according to Sigrid Nunez, Sontag preferred to have other people around her when she was working, I tend to picture her in the solitude of that Paris room, which I suppose is a kind of physical manifestation, a symbol, of her solitary consciousness. A consciousness that was animated by the products of other minds, just as mine is activated by hers. If shes alone in there, I can claim the privilege of being her only company.

Which is a fantasy, of course. She has had better readers, and I have loved other writers. The metaphors of marriage and possession, of pleasure and power, can be carried only so far. There is no real harm in reading casually, promiscuously, abusively or selfishly. The page is a safe space; every word is a safe word. Your lover might be my husband.

Its only reading. By which I mean: Its everything.

Read more:
How Susan Sontag Taught Me to Think - The New York Times

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Resist the Urge to Access: the Impact of the Stored Communications Act on Employer Self-Help Tactics - JD Supra

Most Americans will either have to or want to retire one day. With the massive population of baby boomers out there, millions of them already have started their retirement and millions more will be retiring every year for the next decade or more. To have a good retirement generally requires a lifetime of planning, but for millions of Americans there just is not going to be enough in Social Security and basic retirement funds to make those golden years all that golden.

24/7 Wall St. frequently has looked at long-term planning issues around investing and retirement. The good news is that if you are set to retire in the immediate years ahead, there is effectively zero risk that your Social Security benefits will not be there for another decade or two. The bad news for the majority of the population is that most people will not be able to live very well only on Social Security alone. Even adding in retirement funds may not make those golden years all that pleasant without some additional self-help. You need to take action and make an effort to help boost your income and cash available immediately and in the years ahead.

While Social Security is safe for the boomers and elderly, younger generations have very low expectations. Their expectation is that Social Security will not be there for them at all, or if it is there the benefits might be greatly reduced. All this makes it imperative for people of all ages to begin thinking about how to supplement their retirement as early as possible.

Investment advisers commonly tell clients to have saved $1 million, $2 million or more to be able to enjoy retirement. Even if you arent working any longer, those pesky costs from food, insurance, medicine, transportation, clothing, shelter, utilities, bills, vacations and entertainment all will keep adding up every month. We previously provided a basic plan for most ages on how to save that $1 million for retirement, and that is very attainable, but the reality is that most people just arent anywhere close to having saved that much money.

There are some basic issues that need to be considered about funding a proper retirement and taking a reality check about just how golden your future golden years will be. It is assumed that you are going to have some Social Security, if you are already near retirement, but the statistics from government and independent researchers show that an additional retirement account or other savings have to be in place. Here are some basic stats on Social Security, retirement income and so on:

Add all this up and here is what it means ahead for Joe Retiree. Even the maximum monthly Social Security benefit is unlikely to go very far in your retirement, and the average 401(K) and IRA accounts are likely to add only a few thousand dollars per year in income.

Here are 10 simple efforts that can boost your income and give you extra cash to make your retirement really feel like they are the golden years.

Knowing how to time your Social Security payments is a critical part of retirement for most Americans. Your mandated retirement age of 65 to 67 depends on what year you were born, and the SSA website shows a table of scheduled benefits. Some people choose to start taking their Social Security benefits at 62 years of age, while others choose to delay their benefits until age 70.

That SSA table shows a breakdown of how much more you get per month for delaying or how much less you receive for starting early. For anyone born 1960 or later, the full retirement age is 67 years old. Taking Social Security for those born 1960 or later at age 62 reduces monthly payments by 30% (to $700 for each $1,000 eligible at full age), and delaying Social Security until age 70 turns a $1,000 benefit into roughly $1,280. Taking money sooner or later depends on needs, lifestyle, how long each person reasonably expects to live and many other factors.

Dont forget: if you start taking Social Security before the mandatory age of 70, you can always choose to interrupt the benefits and let those monthly benefits grow.

Originally posted here:
10 Easy Steps to Boost Your Income and Cash in Retirement - 24/7 Wall St.