GLOwing weekend

Early in graduate school, a friend and I termed the phrase "General Life Organization" (GLO), pronounced "glow". GLOwing means catching up on all the loose threads: running errands, catching up on housework, computer maintenance, paperwork, setting up furniture, and all those kinds of low-priority tasks that pile up.

We spent this weekend "GLOwing". I'd been under rapid-fire deadlines for the past two weeks so the entropy was stacking up. Things reached a breaking point when one of our book shelves tipped, triggering a "bookvalanche" that made a huge mess. Our biggest accomplishment was reorganizing our office space, including identifying a huge pile of books to get rid of. We also stocked up on food at Costco and the farmer's market, bought some much-needed clothes, made a thrift store run, organized our recipes into a binder, replaced a flaky network cable, and got about 90% of the way through merging our two always-on Linux computers into one machine.

I'd estimate we're getting rid of 4 linear feet of books. Most of them are old textbooks, which turned out to be worthless. Lesson learned: if a textbook isn't worth keeping forever, sell it ASAP. I'm getting rid of all my roleplaying game books from high school; those have a little sentimental value but I learned that I can buy PDF copies of the few that I care about. I'm pretty happy to convert bulky, rarely-read books into a PDF file on my computer. We're trying to unload the books on Amazon and an upcoming family garage sale, and will donate whatever's left over.

Sifting through the books wasn't fun. In many of the borderline cases we'd either feel frustrated by the money we once spent, or anxious that we might want the book "someday" for some reason. But seeing that heap of clutter leaving the house was well worth it. It's a couple hundred pounds of material that we are no longer responsible for, won't have to move, and someone else can benefit from. Our bookshelves were overflowing, and now we have ample space. Now we're on the warpath for more clutter to jettison. My pile of spare computer parts is the next target.

Why bother?

This article in the Green Issue of the New York Times, written by Michael Pollan (author of the famed “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto”), does an amazing job of explaining why we should all bother to change our habits in this current environmental climate. Sometimes it takes the words of people much smarter than I am to remind me that the actions of individuals can be powerful. Read it.

Dead car battery

Amanda and I both own cars. My commute is a walk, and Amanda's car works better for routine errands, so my car is relegated to "backup" duty. A couple weekends ago we tried to use it while taking her car to the shop for some maintenance, and found that the battery had drained out and my car wouldn't start.

The car was boxed in on an incline in a busy parking lot, so jumping it was impossible and moving it would be a risky feat of strength. According to my Hank Hill-approved maintenance file, the battery is 5 years old; young enough to be salvageable. After some analysis I decided the most prudent solution was to order a battery charger online, wait for it to arrive, then recharge the battery outside the car.

Right now we're on the "charging" step. The charger registered a fault at the fastest charge rate, so I'm trying the slowest charge rate. The battery might be toast -- which would be unsurprising for a 5 year old battery that's been deep-cycled -- but hopefully I can nurse it back.

This whole thing reinforces several rules of thumb:

1. Keeping (comically) detailed maintenance records has a concrete benefit.
2. Modern cars are outrageously complex. They are full of limitations (need electricity to start) and patchwork fixes (rechargeable batteries) that may fail (drain out after a month of non-use).
3. If you can afford to be patient, you save money. The charger took a week to come from Amazon via free shipping, but was a lot cheaper than buying a charger or new battery locally.
4. Every "thing" in your life has the potential to cost time and money, even seemingly-inert things like parked cars.
5. Keeping an old car running feels expensive because it amounts to occasional out of pocket expenses, but in reality it's usually cheap. A $31 charger is a lot less than a single monthly payment on a new car.
6. If my car were parked in my own garage this would have been easier to solve. Houses offer a lot of little miscellaneous benefits.

"Investing" entertainment experiences

Mass-market entertainment gets cheaper as it ages. Examples:

• movies start showing at dollar theaters
• shows on premium TV channels become available for rental through Netflix
• DVDs, CDs, video games, and books become available used

And on longer time frames,

• libraries add media to their collection
  
• movies are broadcast on over-the-air television
• media formats go obsolete (e.g. VHS tapes now, CDs and non-HD DVDs soon) and become extremely cheap
  

As I discussed in my post on old video games, this creates an opportunity to enjoy media for pennies on the dollar. Instead of paying for entertainment when it first comes out, set it aside until its price lowers to a "strike price" you're comfortable with. The cost becomes much smaller, so you can either

1. consume more with the same amount of money, or
2. use a lot less money for the same amount of consumption.

There are two big downsides:

1. you don't get to experience the excitement of premieres at the same time as other people
   
2. if you're excited about something you have to wait until it eventually shows up under your terms

At first downside #2 is discouraging because it effectively cuts off your flow of entertainment. I.e. if you decide to only watch movies at a dollar theater and you've already watched everything that's showing there, then you can't watch any movies. However once you wait through an entire release cycle you will enter a "steady state" where movies debut at the dollar theater at the same rate as a first-tier theater, just offset a few months later.

These tradeoffs parallel those of investing. Let's say you decide to invest $1,000. Then you are depriving yourself of the short-term gratification of $1,000 worth of consumption now, for the promise of much more than $1,000 worth of consumption later. If you choose to wait to see Iron Man until it's at the dollar theater or on Netflix, in a sense you are "investing" the experience of watching Iron Man for the promise that the experience becomes much cheaper in the future.

We apply this mentality to the media we consume. When something comes out we make a quick assesment as to where our "strike price" is. A movie is either worth seeing at a full-price theater, a discount theater, renting on Netflix, or not seeing at all. In addition to saving money, this moment of reflection also helps us sort out the movies that are actually worth our time, from the ones that we're only interested in due to marketing pressure.

The "Big Project"

In a previous post, Kevin had alluded to some "big projects" that we are currently absorbed in. I'm here to finally announce one of them: Kevin and I are engaged and will be getting married later this year! As I'm sure many of you know all too well, traditional weddings are one of the most expensive events that will ever occur in your lifetime.

Kevin and I hope to share parts of our wedding planning on this blog as a way of helping others out there in a similar situation. It's difficult trying to balance the traditional aspects of having a wedding that both our families had hoped we would do, and the frugal and simplistic way Kevin and I are accustomed to living our lives. I will tell you, it hasn't been easy so far. Imagine the horror I was met with when I mentioned I didn't want anything to do with bridal salons or "princess" wedding gowns. Imagine the shock when I came home with my bridal dress: a sweet little (used) white lace dress that cost me a mere $5!

Every step of the planning process has been like this so far, but Kevin and I are confident that we can pull off an event that is both something that will please our families, and won't cause us to be in debt for the rest of our lives. More updates to come...

The cost of basic sustenance

Our breakfast routine includes oatmeal we make from steel cut oats. We buy them in bulk at a local health food store.

Last time we bought some we tried to get enough to last a month or so, and it cost less than $2. This got us to thinking about how cheaply one could live on oats alone.

Steel cut oats cost 49 cents per pound at the health food store. According to Quaker, every 40 grams of dry oats yields 150 kcal. If you assume a 2,000 kcal/day diet, then the arithmetic works out to 1.2 lb/day, which is 59 cents per day or $17.64 per 30-day month. I guess the water and energy to cook the oats might cost something, but that would be pretty insignificant. We cook ours in a crock pot, which is pretty efficient.

So basic sustenance like this costs about $18 per person-month. Even less if you buy the oats by the 20 lb sack instead of by the scoop. This is certainly not a nutritionally balanced diet; multi-vitamins would be a real good idea, and there are probably a bunch of other nutritional deficiencies you'd have to worry about. And I'm sure unflavored oatmeal gets gross fast when it's all you ever eat. But it's reassuring to know that in a desperate situation we could stave off starvation for $36/month.

This also gets me to thinking about our own grocery costs. We cook a lot of recipes at home, and use a lot of the usual tricks to keep the costs low. But even with those tricks, we spend a lot more than $36/month. I had thought of our grocery spending as spartan, but in absolute terms it's luxurious.

Frugal hobby #1: classic video games

My post on my frugal approach to hobby computing got me thinking about other frugal hobbies. So this is the first in a series of "Frugal Hobby" posts where I'll highlight a pastime that can be enjoyed frugally.

I'm going to focus on activities that are customarily expensive, or aren't well known. It's easy to point out that blogging is a cheap activity, but I'm hoping to dig a little deeper like I did with computers.

My first post is about classic video games. The console video game industry has adopted a cycle wherein every manufacturer releases a new product at the same time, and those products comprise a "generation." By "classic" I guess I mean systems not from the current generation, nor the one before, but rather two or more generations back. Right now that would mean the "fifth generation" consoles, or Sega Saturn, Sony Playstation, and Nintendo 64, or even older systems.

Video game hardware and games depreciate extremely quickly. A new, state of the art Playstation 3 costs about $400, and a Playstation 1 seems to be worth $10-$30 on eBay. These things were sold in large quantities, so you could probably find one at a thrift store, garage sale, or freecycle without too much trouble. Further, you can tap into the hindsight of others to help choose systems and games that are particularly good. By the same token you can "go crazy" and experiment with some oddball game when it only costs a couple bucks.

So these games' cost is very low, but their utility really isn't. Good older games were a blast when they were new, and the human condition hasn't changed enough in the last few years to change that. A game that was intrinsically fun 5 years ago will still be fun now; the only difference is that our expectation of graphics quality has risen. Some classics, like the Super Mario Brothers series, also have a certain "retro" appeal.

You can also go one step further and play these games through an emulator, which is a piece of computer software that simulates the behavior of the entire game system -- it's CPU, graphics chip, and so on. Emulator software is typically free, and copies of the games ("images") are generally available on the internet. Playing games this way has the added benefit of avoiding the clutter of keeping all the specialized hardware lying around. Keep in mind that game images are copyrighted works, and are supposed to only be used as backups for games that you own on their original media (cartridge).

There are emulators for arcade games, too, and some people have built their own wooden cabinets around a spare computer to make something resembling an arcade game. Obviously a project like this will take up a lot of space, and may not be very cheap. But then again part of the fun is making the thing, a lot of the parts could be salvaged, and you end up with something that's more capable and easier to maintain than an obsolete game console. And there's a certain frugal charm to squeezing some more fun out of an old PC and some nearly-forgotten arcade games.

Simplifying cosmetics

I'm revising my array of cosmetics to deal with two problems. First, I'm concerned about harmful synthetic chemicals in mass-market cosmetics. There's debate over whether this is a grave concern or not, but then again I apply this stuff to my skin every single day. Second, I find choosing cosmetics to be annoying and have been frustrated with my favorite products becoming unavailable at my local stores for one reason or another.

Accordingly, I'm shaking up the line of cosmetics I use. My preferred disposition for any given product is, in order of preference:

1. Eliminate my need for it
2. Use a homemade version
   
3. Find an "all natural" product that's likely to endure
4. Find a "mass market" product that's as safe as possible

Eliminating something is the ultimate simplification, of course. "Homemade" ranks highly because I like the idea of knowing all the ingredients in this stuff, and staying stocked in raw materials is simpler than tracking various brands and products when they're changing all the time.

I've replaced shampoo, body wash, and even shaving cream with Dr Bronner's liquid soap. It's affordable and readily available at health food stores and the internet. It's a real win to replace the need for three separate packaged products with one substance that's sold in bulk.

Method seems to be a decent compromise for hand soap and dish soap. It's also affordable and easy to find.

I've never been convinced that conditioner does anything, so I don't buy that.

Replacing deodorant has been difficult. None of the "all natural" products have really worked at all. For now I'm using unscented Sure, which, according to the Skin Deep cosmetics database, is just as safe as "all natural" stuff.

I'm still working on face scrub, aftershave, toothpaste, and mouth wash. Face scrub and toothpaste are prime candidates for making at home, but I haven't found the right recipes yet.

Update on the Hefeweizen

I realized that I posted about bottling my batch of Hefeweizen but never said how it turned out.

It turned out pretty well! It certainly has the taste, appearance, and head of a Hefeweizen. I was trying to amp up the natural banana overtones produced by Hefe yeast, and was pretty successful in that regard.

It's a little more watery and hoppy than I'd like, so next time I'll steep the hops less and use a higher concentration of wheat malt.

Free Online Magazines

I just discovered The Winding Road, an online-only magazine about cars rather like Car & Driver. Like a traditional print magazine, it's published monthly and typeset into a page-based layout. Subscribers can access an in-browser viewer application that simulates reading a paper magazine two pages at a time. Subscription is free; the magazine is supported by advertisements embedded in the magazines.

I'm pretty happy that something like this exists, and frankly surprised I didn't find out about it earlier.

I've replaced nearly all of my magazine and newspaper consumption with blogs, because blogs:

• are free
• don't create the clutter of old issues
• don't involve the waste of printing and shipping
• are upfront about their viewpoint/bias
• are written by enthusiastic volunteers or entrepreneurs
• don't pester me with misleading renewal ads
  

However, blogs fall short in a small number of areas. Blog posts tend to be limited to the equivalent of a printed page or so, and sometimes I appreciate an article that goes into more depth. I also appreciate professional-grade writing, and frankly this is rare among blogs. And there are some kinds of articles -- testing very expensive equipment, for example -- that require resources and connections that individual bloggers can't muster.

So I'm happy to see this compromise of a professionally-written periodical that's still free and supported by ads. This combines several of the "pros" of blogs I listed above, with the "pros" of print magazines. I read somewhere that magazines get nearly all of their revenue from advertising, not sales, so this business model should be sustainable.

Hopefully more magazines like this will crop up, covering a variety of topics. Then I could finally ax my last couple magazine subscriptions.