Note of the Living Deb

I've noticed two strategies for saving money that oppose each other.

On the one hand, you've got stockpiling. This is the one I'm more familiar with where you stock up on things when they are on sale or you buy in bulk to get a lower price. I swear I wrote about this before, but I can't find it.

Advantages to stocking up:

* Very high rate of return. For example, if your favorite cheese is on sale for 10% less than the usual price, then you are earning 10% (actually, more like 11%) on your investment. And if you would have bought that extra package of cheese two weeks later, you earned that 11% in only two weeks, for an annual rate of 286%. If you buy a six-month's supply of cheese, you're still earning a 22% annual rate for the package you eat six months from now.
* Diversification. If you have cash flow problems or transportation problems, some of your future needs are already taken care of.

Risks involved in stocking up:
* The items can go bad (get stale, get attacked by moths, get ruined when there's a flood or blackout, etc.)
* You can change your mind about wanting them (you develop an allergy, you want to support something greener, you want something healthier, etc.)

On the other hand, you can simplify to reduce your overhead. I've talked before about Apartment Therapy's Smallest, Coolest Apartment contest and probably Tumbleweed houses (at least my commenters have). Recently I read No Impact Man's Who Needs Appliances Anyway? He talks about all their appliances and how much they missed each one when they stopped using it during their year-long quest to make no impact on the earth. Some of them they barely missed at all.

For a more extreme perspective, see Sharon Astyk's What To Do with Your Appliances When You Get Over Them. She posits that her kitchen is old-fashioned because it was designed in the olden days of cheap energy, and then she tries to imagine what a kitchen designed in the modern era of expensive energy, might look like. And then she talks about ways to re-use broken appliances. (My favorites are to turn your dead microwave into a solar oven or into a large breadbox.)

My favorite appliance is the refrigerator. So, for me, No Refrigerator for 30 Years seems quite extreme. I read a detective book where one of the detectives has no fridge, so she buys a bag of ice on the way home from work every day and keeps her refrigerable things in a cooler. This article has additional strategies, such as buying fresh food daily and using a higher ratio of pantry goods in your cooking. You could use these techniques to get rid of your extra freezer or to use a smaller refrigerator, not just to get rid of your refrigerator.

Advantages to simplifying:
* You can make permanent reductions in overhead. For example, if you don't have a lot of stuff, you can live somewhere small paying less in rent, electricity, even repairs.
* When you spend less time accumulating stuff, you can have more time for getting a life.

Risks:
* You have to rely more on others and/or be more flexible. You want the store to have just what you need every time you're looking for it (because they are storing it for you). You have less wiggle room.

So, you can reduce your needs for space and other resources, like those folks living in tiny houses and riding their bikes everywhere. Or you can use your space and resources to stock up on things like Amy Dacyczyn, author of The Tightwad Gazette, who bought a large house with attached barn and stores all kinds of interesting things there. Or you can do some of both.

**

No blog buddy update: Yesterday after getting home from dance class, Robin asked if I would like to see a movie. Instead of saying no, I am writing in my journal, I said yes.

I finally got around to reading Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle: a Memoir (2005), recommended to me by fraeuleinchen. I can't remember now why she recommended it; I didn't even remember that it was nonfiction. I do think she recommended it as a book that I, specifically, might like rather than as a book that is so good that everyone should read it.

It's mostly about the author's childhood and in so many ways, she has the coolest parents ever. Even some things that sound like pretty bad parenting at first, once you get the whole story, turn out not to be. I thought she and her siblings are going to turn out to be the greatest grown-ups ever! If they can just live long enough. And not become riddled with neuroses.

The parents were desperately poor, but fun, interesting, adventurous, creative, and caring. And more than with even most fiction, I really never knew what was going to happen next. It's real life and doesn't have to fit our preconceived notions of a good storyline. Are things going to go back and forth between better and worse? Will there come a point when things start getting better and better? Or worse and worse? I really couldn't tell.

This book is exciting, funny, sad, scary, horrifying, everything.

I think one reason I liked this book is that I seem to have a fascination for doing something with nothing. I am fascinated by plants growing from bare rock, for example.

Another reason I got sucked in is the sociologist in me. I love learning about other cultures and subcultures (without actually having to join them). And the family culture in this book has just that combination of familiar and strange that makes it most gripping. Only small differences in one thing can lead to big differences in something else. Some things were done very, very poorly in this family, and how did that happen? I have trouble figuring that out.

You can sure learn a lot about your beliefs about parenting by reading this book and noticing how you evaluate various incidents. You can also learn about other useful issues such as how to help others, how to help yourself, responsibility, maintaining things, moving to a new town, and how you might have a lot more options than you think you do.

I don't think this is a book I'll buy. I suspect it will stay stuck in my head just fine without ever reading it again. It's quite intense.

Warning: If you like to read books to escape, this may not be the book for you!

Each year I like to list 100 things to do, kind of like these guys. When that group was more active, it seemed like people finished about 1/3 to 1/2 of the items on their lists each year, and this year I'm almost at the 1/3 mark. My favorite things I accomplished were replacing the central heating and air conditioning at home, finally getting rid of my old car, learning to add pictures to this journal and then actually doing it many times, finally rolling over my state pension money into a Roth IRA, and going on a fun trip.

Of course I also put some things on my list that are both fun and easy for me, like going to parties, watching at least 26 movies I haven't seen, and reading at least 12 fiction and 12 nonfiction books. I overachieved on the movies, as usual, watching 65 movies. But I didn't quite make my nonfiction goal, finishing only 11 books. I'm happy with that, though, because some kinds of nonfiction are not the kinds of things I want to read cover-to-cover, so it's good that I didn't make myself, just so I could put it on the list.

As the year went by I added about 40 more things to the list, some of which I admit I had just completed. For example, "Try tie-undyeing" got added to my list right after some folks at a party taught us how to do such a thing and let us try it. Some other added things I accomplished were taking CPR, going to Maker Faire, learning a new knitting pattern, catching up on my charitable contributions, planting a shade tree in the front yard, properly disposing of batteries and lightbulbs, and writing down things I want so I know what to look for when I'm in stores.

I also changed my goals of seeing plays and watching musical performances to include attending other live performances, thus including a roller derby and performance art in the sky (or perhaps a better description is vertical modern dance?).

I'm also pleased with some of the things I didn't finish but made a good effort at, such as trying 12 new recipes (I only tried 5, but I'm happy with three: the oatmeal, tomato soup, and low-fat pudding) and putting a recipe online with pictures (I put up some recipes, and I put up some pictures, but no entry is quite what I wanted to do).

And now I've made a new list for 2008. Once you've done this a few years, there's no problem finding 100 things for a list. You just keep all the things you didn't do last year, plus all the things you did do that you want to do again, plus all your new ideas. If you're not careful, you don't leave room for new ideas, and you end up with just a list of things you've failed to do for several years running, which is depressing. My list for 2007 was too much like that.

So I decided this year to think where I really want to focus next and then I removed a bunch of the old stuff (for now anyway; I can always add it back), brainstormed a bunch of new stuff, and removed some more of the old stuff. So now I have a list of 100 things that I feel pretty motivated to do.

I don't really want to say too much about what the things on my list are, because saying them fools my brain into feeling like it's done something about accomplishing them, and then I'm less likely to make any progress. Stupid brain. But I've focussed on doing stuff, physical improvements, learning Spanish, getting a better job, doing a few of the older things that I'm in the mood to do, doing a few things that have been troublesome but should be easy to check off, and the usual fun things like partying and reading.

Six of us gathered in the party cabin to watch "Premonition" on TV yesterday. I'd heard it wasn't that great because it didn't make any sense and there were plot problems. Actually it made adequate sense and we saw only one plot problem.

One lesson to learn from this movie is not to see a psychiatrist for things the psychiatrist knows nothing about. Your emotions are a little whacked? Maybe. Your reality keeps changing as if you're awakening from dreams all the time? No. In this movie, although of course the psychiatrist had no clue what was going on, he did think that it would be good to prescribe lithium. And then later to use more drastic treatments.

I once read a blog from someone who kept getting institutionalized but it wasn't really helping her. Finally she decided to do whatever was necessary to stay out of the institution so that she could get things done. Feigning sanity was required. And I think that's true sometimes. When the professionals who help or otherwise deal with people who have your problem have no clue, then if possible you might want to try as hard as you can to make it look like you don't have that problem. This is obvious in movies about aliens landing on earth--you really don't want anyone knowing you're an alien if you can help it, at least not until you've scoped out the place and have a strategy.

Well it turns out that going to the cruise medical facility when you have diarrhea is a similarly bad idea. What happens is that the nurse does test your dehydration and electrolyte level and does give you an antidiarrhetic, but then she doesn't give you an antibiotic and she confines you to your room for 36 hours. And she has your cabin steward leave you bottles of water which you get charged for if you drink them. And then you wonder if she has access to computers and can tell that you're leaving your room. And then when you try to buy something and your card has been blocked, things look a bit scary. The next day when the ask nurses if you're feeling better, if you are wise, you will say yes. Oh, yes, much better now.

[It turns out that the card was blocked because when it was lost, the purser blocked the old card and created a new card which was really just a copy of the old card (same folio number) rather than a new card. Oops. We discovered this several days later. Fortunately for us (and bad guys who steal these cards), they still let us in and out of the room and on and off the ship.]

**

This was the first formal night and everyone looked smashing. Is it rude to stare at your friends when they are extra gorgeous?

It was also fun to watch medium and little girls running around in little black dresses.

Food lesson - we discovered the chilled fruit soup which was probably made of cream, sugar, and just enough fruit to give it a pastel color. Today we had strawberry.

Also, yams, which is different from sweet potatoes, taste a lot like regular potatoes. What we call yams in the US are really sweet potatoes. Yams from the Caribbean are different, which I'd heard many times, but I never really had a sense of what they were like. Today I had yam soup and it was like potato soup. Yum.

Quote of the day - "Forward is behind you."

I think I have an irrational fear of becoming involved in large all-encompassing groups.

Cults, obviously.

Jobs requiring sixty-plus hours a week.

And social groups that have activities seven days a week. They aren't exactly exclusive, but if you do something one day, they want you to do something two days, then three, then every day. Then if you miss a day, when you return they might ask, "Where are your priorities?" At least I saw one folk dancer ask that of another (who replied, "Right where they belong, thanks").

Then there's the mentality that hey, if you have any interest in this activity, you must want to become a world expert, practicing daily and trying to win competitions and going to seminars and giving talks and giving back and what not.

You're supposed to dedicate your life to one career and one hobby. It's hard to be a respectable dilettante when you've got people trying to make you an expert dancer, juggler, volleyball player, ultimate frisbee player, medieval re-enactor, calligrapher, and probably any other hobby you can imagine.

I'm overreacting, of course. What better place to expand your skills than a place full of exciting, resource-heavy groups? These are hardly the mafia. Surely there's a better response than running away to take a nap.

I quite enjoyed the following explanation as I was walking behind two students today during lunch while I was working on getting my 10,000 steps for the day. (The following is mostly paraphrased; my memory is not great.)

Hey, I have not skipped a single class this semester, so don't even start. This is the first class I've missed. There are more important things than class, you know. And shopping is one of them.

There's a famous quote, I think by Tom Petty, who is very smart by the way: "You won't remember a day you spent in class. But you will remember a day you spent with friends."

Networking is very important. Which do you think is more important? Networking or classes? It's not what you know; it's who you know.

She is more right than I ever would have guessed when I was in college.

Her friend's response? "I want you for my lawyer."

I just read one of those things you would tell your high school self entries at Lazy Man and Money (which I found via My Two Dollars' related post) as well as a bunch of other people's who commented. That was fun. Some of the advice was just "buy this investment at this time and sell it at that time," but some of it was more interesting, and some of it obviously had some long and scary stories behind it. Here are some of my favorite ones:

* No, you are not going to be a rock star, so stop spending so much money on music stuff. You do not need a $1,000 guitar, an $800 amp nor all those foot pedals ... it is not going to happen. Oh, and cut your hair you look ridiculous.

* The Internet company that gave you a raise to 90K at age 24 will end up laying off the entire department within a year … so you probably shouldn't buy that new sports car convertible, even if it is under 30K. Plus it won't impress that girl nearly as much as you thought it might.

* Save your money. The records you buy now will end up in the closet under the stairs later. Put money in a savings account.

* When you burn a hole in the carpet, don't blame your cousin; learn to take responsibility and own up to your mistakes.

* Start talking louder, now. This way you won't be annoyed to no end by people thinking you're "shy." They are just confused, and they can't hear you!

* Like yourself. Everything you dream of will come true in your 20s. Life will get a whole bunch more interesting. So stop lying around listening to Nirvana and feeling tragic. Get out of the house. Take up more hobbies.

* One day the opportunity will arise to buy a cheap bike with dodgy brakes and crooked handlebars. Don't buy it.

* Demand that your mother introduces you to your biological father. All the leads will be dead ends if you wait too long.

* That job you'll take in a restaurant while still in high school? No, they CANNOT pay you less than minimum wage unless you are actually getting tips. Report them, or demand the tips. Or better yet, get a job somewhere else quicker, because there's a reason you'll feel very uncomfortable standing in the walk-in freezer at a certain point. If your head and your gut are telling you different things, always go with your gut.

* Don't do vodka shots with Russian mafiosos while out for a fancy dinner with your at-the-time-girlfriend and her friends. That will not end well on many, many levels. Oh, and make sure your visa paperwork is correct before you travel to remote Siberian cities. They don't like it when foreigners show up with the wrong paperwork.

And here is the point where I tell you my own list. I did try to brainstorm such a list for myself. The good news is that I like most of what I've done since I was in high school and really don't feel I could give myself advice that would have helped me do a better job. The bad news is that this is partly because whatever I didn't understand then and didn't figure out as quickly as I wanted to, I still haven't figured out. In fact, some of the good-sounding advice I have, I still don't want to follow. Oh, well.

Here is some advice that I feel pretty confident about and that I would actually listen to.

1. When people say to think about whether you want to work with people, things, or data, those all sound fine to you. But what they really mean is to think about whether you want to work with problem people, problem things, or problem data. Your answer is data. Any quiz you see will make that sound really boring (at a restaurant, would you rather take inventory, help customers, or prepare salads?) but trust me on this. You like explaining complicated things to laypersons. You like taking seemingly disparate data and thinking of a way it could all be true. Teaching is a people job, and no one is going to buy you as a disciplinarian anyway. Start thinking about that now.

2. Your plan to only do fun jobs is excellent, but don't forget that if you earn a big pile of money, you can retire early. Remember this especially around 1998-1999 when MK offers to teach you some COBOL for that purpose.

3. Don't take shortcuts when buying new stuff if it's something important--do the research, no matter how much of a pain it is. That includes proper inspections.

4. Friends come and go, but family stays forever, or at least as long as they live. Try to make better friends with those people.

5. Wear sunscreen every day. (I'm only your 44-year-old future self; I don't know if you'll get skin cancer. But, duh, just look at yourself!) See if there are some spray-on sunscreens or at least fragrance-free ones that aren't so annoying. At least put some on your face, neck and the backs of your hands.

6. Your plan to never be bored again is totally going to work. It's going to work so well that you are going to have start prioritizing at some point. Use some of your spare time now for learning something time-consuming like Spanish or ASL or programming or playing an instrument or sewing or how to write better. Embroidery is a fine hobby, but try to find a few more things to become expert at. It really is amazing what you can learn from a book (MB learned fly fishing of all things)--check out the nonfiction part of the library.

7. Ask Mom to let you watch her cook more, even if she doesn't want any help. That list of recipes you got for that home ec class in eighth grade is an excellent start, but every time you taste something new you like, get the recipe if you can and add it to your collection. In fact, any time you notice that someone knows how to do something you wish you could do, ask them to teach you. A shocking number of people actually will.

Yesterday I went to a new friend's house to see his latest project.

Maybe it's secret, I don't know. I don't feel like it's that appropriate to write about other people (who are not already in the public purview) here, except for the problem that I am often affected by other people.

Basically it's an invention that is fun rather than useful and that has required a lot of tweaking not to mention pipes, electricity, and keeping a fire extinguisher handy.

The guy who's making it said that last year he didn't do any projects. He merely took an inordinate amount of classes. I reminded him that he had also learned quite a bit of ballroom dancing. Plus, there was also some very convincing evidence of garden projects. Apparently he's the kind of guy who doesn't consider classwork, physical skills or gardening to count as projects.

Have you ever met someone who is better than you at virtually everything that you're good at, plus several things that you suck at? I have. It's disconcerting. Deflating.

After a while I realized that you can become good at more things if you spend your childhood making stuff and doing stuff than if you spend your childhood playing board games, watching TV, and saying "I'm bored." My childhood was over, but my life wasn't. Since then I have become better at many more things.

In conclusion, this guy reminded me that I also would like to do projects. Maybe even some big, hard-seeming, crazy ones.

P.S. Not secret. It turns out he has a web page explaining all. See a video of the musical fire machine in Edwin's journal entry. You can also learn about some of his other projects. Yes, he wrote all those books.

I've been listening to a lot of music sung by Richard Schindell lately. The songs are catchy, beautiful, deep and mostly sad, haunting. The first one that grabbed me was in the "Cry, Cry, Cry" album and is about a guy who was scared straight.

I was lying in the garbage [after drinking too much], praying I would die
When a light came on above us, and a voice called from the sky.
Half a dozen unmarked cars came screeching to a halt.
They grabbed Bob. He started screaming it was all my fault.
There were men and dogs and helicopters flying all around.
They had the brothers on the pick-up hood and me down on the ground.

Most are so tragic I am in danger of having nightmares and feeling inadequate for not having made enough of my nontragic life.

Entry of the day - The Simple Dollar's first entry in his Ten Books that Changed My Life Series, Fahrenheit 451. "For too long, I let the values of others - materialism and consumerism - override my own values, and it is something that fills me with regret on a daily basis. My finances were one of the last areas where I let others have so much influence over me; I kept letting the lifestyle of my peer group pull me along for far too long. Every time I have evaluated a portion of my life and put effort into aligning them with my core values, I've grown as an individual - and it all began with Fahrenheit 451."

Coincidentally, I just watched "Pleasantville" at my sister's house, which is supposed to have the same theme, though I find it deeply flawed.

Thing I am not buying - family rocking chair. It seats one adult and two little kids. Very silly.

With the new year, I've put together a new list of things I'd like to do this year like they do at Uberlist Central, only I start with a "mere" 100 items. I'd been ignoring my list I made in 2006, but now that I've started fresh, I've actually made some progress on some of the items:
* I wrote to my brother (progress toward "regularly" writing)
* I copied the addresses of my relatives who sent me holiday cards (part of updating my address books)
* I sewed a button back onto a pair of pants (part of mending at least 12 items)
* I gave my boss a draft of one of the training modules (part of finishing all the modules)
* I decided to separate out $75 of my "fun" budget for "seasonal fun" (part of re-doing my budget)
* I submitted a blog entry to be in next week's Festival of Personal Finance (more news on that next week) (part of submitting writing to at least three places for experience)
* I started making a list of things I want

That last item, a list of things I want, is a weird idea. I thought it might be depressing to write down a huge list of stuff I want, but that's not how it's working out. When you get to be as old as I am, with things going basically well all the time, you end up collecting most of what you really want. So far, anyway, it all fits on two pages (one sheet of paper, front and back).

But I'm doing this so that when I'm at a library or a store, I can remember all the things I'm looking for that I might find there. For example, yesterday at Thrift Town I remembered to look for a black and white jacket, but I forgot to look for an interesting 12-ounce iced tea glass. (Now that my favorite two have broken, there is room in the cabinet for more.)

I have books that have been recommended to me that I want to look for in a library as well as things I have been looking for and things I am saving for.

It's actually very nice to have such a silly list. For example, I saw a billboard today advertising the annual sale of some fabulous but expensive shelving stuff. Because nothing like that is on my list, I don't feel like I will be missing anything if I don't go to that sale this year. (Not that I ever do go to that sale, but I often think I should have.)

Some people think that when you find yourself tempted to make an impulse purchase, you should instead write it down. Then if you still want it three days later or a week later (or some other arbitrary rule you decide for yourself ahead of time), then you may go back and get it. Much of the time you find it's just not worth the trouble. Of course, sometimes you find something you never realized you wanted until you saw it and knew such a thing existed, and I'm sure I will keep finding and buying some of these things.