Work examples


WalletPop.com is a personal finance blog and Web site run by AOL. I try to write one or two posts for it each day, so for daily updates on what I’m writing there, you can search for Aaron Crowe and all my posts will pop up. I’ll put links to the best of them here as they run daily.

  • I’m doing a lot of top-10 lists and feeling like I work for David Letterman, although these are serious (mostly) and about saving money. Topics include products to always buy generic,  home improvement projects for $50 or less, overrated things, most costly appliances, and gadgets worth waiting to buy.
  • How are celebrity deaths faked so easily online? I found out how easy it is and even faked my own death. And no, I’m not related to Russell Crowe, which is good since both of us were wrongly reported dead on the Internet.
  • Less money going into 529 college savings plans. This was an interesting story to report after seeing that company compared quarter to quarter, showing only a 3% drop, and I found that the year-to-year drop in contributions was 21%.
  • Tennessee Legislature is looking into capping lottery winnings for welfare recipients at $600. This story is getting a lot of traffic and comments, so I’ll follow it to the end.
  • I noticed the words “stimulus plan” everywhere as ways to get shoppers inside, and think they’re the new buzzwords of the recession, so naturally, I wrote about it.
  • The Web site GreenSherpa.com is interesting because as a personal finance tracking site, it not only helps track where money has been spent, but how the future looks for your budget. This was an fun story to write because it’s a new product I hadn’t heard of before that could be useful to a lot of people.
  • The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics always has interesting news if you dig enough, and even if you don’t dig. I turned some recent news into a post about tiny Rhode Island having the second highest unemployment rate in the nation in 2008.
  • What do unemployed do all day? Not much: I found a research paper while looking around on the Internet about  what the unemployed do with all their free time since they’re not working anymore. Researchers found that they spend it on leisure and personal maintenance, and during a recession they spend a lot of it doing household chores. As someone who is still looking for a full-time job, I found it outrageous that they didn’t discuss all of the hours spent each day looking for work. It’s a rant worth reading.
  • How BofA overcharged customers: This was fun to write because just the night before on HBO’s “Flight of the Conchords” the two main characters dealt with bank overdraft charges after Bret bought a coffee mug for $2.79 and their checking account didn’t have enough to cover it.

AOL Find a Job

This is a career website run by, of course, AOL. I write for it on various career issues. Find all of my stories or read some of the highlights:

AOL Housing Watch and Rented Spaces

These are two other AOL websites that I write for.  I’m a homeowner, so I mostly write for Housing Watch.  Here are a few stories:

  • Tips for finding a rental apartment. Another evergreen.
  • Green sites such as Earth Aid paying people to save energy.

learnvestI started writing on Aug. 11, 2010, at LearnVest, a personal finance website aimed at women.Find all of my stories by clicking on my byline on the site. Check back often because I hope to write for it a few times a week.

My first story was about odd jobs to make extra money.

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Spot.us is a community funded Web site where donations pay for journalists to do stories. I constantly have at least one story in the works for Spot.us, a site run by David Cohn.

  • Spot.us story on Bay spill: A follo to the Cosco Busan oil spill in the San Francisco Bay in November 2007. I was an assistant city editor at the Contra Costa Times when the spill happened, and a year later I wrote this story as a freelancer for Spot.us.

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SEO writing for shopping.aol.com, which is obviously a shopping site for AOL. SEO is Search Engine Optimization, which helps search engines find key words, and thus shoppers, find these items I’m writing about. The site is being retooled by AOL and the  articles I write will become easier to find on the site. Here are some of the SEO articles I’ve written for AOL’s shopping Web site, with the SEO words linked as the titles:

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City Newsletters. I write and edit the quarterly city newsletter for San Ramon, CA.

  • San Ramon City Report, Winter 2009. Topics include an online program to respond to residents’ questions, satisfaction with the police department and winterization preparation in the city.

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RedwoodAge.com is a Web site aimed at Baby Boomers where I worked as a volunteer writer. It’s run by Tom Murphy.

  • Henderson: This is a story about Rickey Henderson, my favorite baseball player growing up. I thought it would be neat to write about how everyone needs a hero, and Henderson, always hustling around the bases, is a good example and worthy of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

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Press releases for Moving Arts Dance, a non-profit dance company in Concord, CA.

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