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Shaving for Real

: Image via Wikipedia

When you look at a safety razor, you see the mostly-unguarded blade. When you look in the mirror, you see your throat and you see this blade–by definition, razor-sharp–and you realize that you are about to put a knife to your own throat. Why?

Because shaving sucks.

For my 18th birthday, I received 2 Mach3 razors. I used them for more than 10 years. It certainly beat disposable Bics, but not by much.

I liked it, but only because I didn’t have anything good to compare it to.

I’ve start using an old-fashioned safety razor. Now, I can shave smoother and with less irritation than I ever could with a modern razor and it only takes a few extra minutes.

Why would you want to abandon modern technology to put a blade against your jugular?

Modernization isn’t always an improvement. There is something about reaching back in time a couple of generations and doing things, not only the way they used to be done, but the way they should be done. It’s the same feeling I get handling an old rifle or sitting in an antique car.

A real shave is 15 minutes of peace and focus. Lock the kids out of the bathroom and focus on the task at hand. The concentration will usually give you a chance to forget about the rest of the world for just a few minutes. This is pure meditation.

As a benefit, when you’re done, you feel refreshed and well-groomed. It feels good to take care of yourself.

What do you need to shave like a real man?

Start slow and ease your way into it. Put a cup in the bathroom. If you shave with a modern razor, the easiest way to improve your shave is to use hot water. Put your shaving cream in the cup and add a bit of hot water. Mix that up and use it to shave. The hot foam will do wonders for your skin and the closeness of your shave. I did that and immediately start trolling antique stores looking for a good, cheap shaving brush.

A brush makes applying your shaving cream a small pleasure. Spreading the hot foam on your face with a brush gets in on all sides of each hair, softening it for the razor. Ideally, you want a badger-hair brush, but I’ve been perfectly happy with boar hair. I found one at an antique store for $5.

Shortly after acquiring my antique shaving brush, I decided to go even older-school and upgraded to an old-fashioned safety razor. I took my life, and my life-blood, in my own hands to shave for real. I went with a Merkur 23C Long Handle Safety Razor. It’s a basic razor with a longer handle, because I have large hands and long fingers. Don’t worry about getting an adjustable razor. There’s no point. It cost $29 at West Coast Shaving*.

You will need blades for the razor. West Coast Shaving sells a variety pack of 45 blades for $15. Try them all and stick with the one that works best for your facial hair. I tend to change blades every 4-5 shaves. More than that, and they get a bit dull and make me bleed. I try to avoid bleeding.

Now that you’ve got a brush, a razor, and blades, it’s time to get rid of the worthless can of shaving foam. Shaving soap works much better. You can get 3 discs of Col. Conk’s soap for $15, and they will last 6 months each, easily. They are almost exactly the same diameter as a regular coffee cup, so guess what? Just drop it in your cup.

That’s everything you need to shave for just $65, and of that only the blades and soap are recurring costs. Your razor and brush will last forever. I figure it costs me about $1 per month to shave, now.

How do you avoid killing yourself while getting ready for work?

It’s all a matter of technique.

Dampen your cheeks with hot water to soften the hair. I prefer to shave immediately after I shower.
Run hot water over your brush. Get it thoroughly soaked, then shake off the excess water. You want it hot and wet, but not dripping.
Briskly brush the soap disk until the brush picks up as much soap as it can. It may or may not form a lather in the cup.
Put the brush on your face and whisk it around. I use a quick circular motion to build up a lather on my cheeks. This works the hot soap into each hair. Keep brushing it onto your face until it forms peaks.
Pick up your razor. I run it under some hot water, just so the cold metal isn’t a shock after the hot foam. From here, you need your full attention on what you are doing.
Shave.

When you are shaving there are a few things to keep in mind.

Take your time.
Never, ever, ever, ever turn the blade while it is in contact with your face. You will bleed. Once the blade touches your face, it goes in a straight line.
Keep the edge of the blade as close to parallel with your face as possible.
The goal is hair reduction, not removal.

I make 4 passes when I shave. First, I shave from the top down. Next, from the back towards my nose and mouth. Then, from the front to the back. Finally, I shave against the grain from the bottom to the top. This results in a closer shave than anything I’ve ever had with a modern razor.

When I think I’m done, I dip my fingers in some warm water and run them around my face, in all possible directions, to see if I missed a spot.

When the hair is gone, wipe of the remaining cream and splash cold water every place the razor touched. This closes the pores and will help prevent infections and razor bumps.

The last step is aftershave. Aftershave disinfects your face. It also prevents infections and makes you stink nice.

There you have it: the secret to a baby-butt-smooth shave and 10-20 minutes of masculine meditation. If you are looking for a present for someone, you could do a lot worse than a real razor set.

*I have absolutely no affiliation with WCS. I am just very happy with the service and the product.

Make a Budget

Finance

: Image by r.lovewell via Flickr

In the past, I’ve gone through a detailed series of budget lessons demonstrating how to make a budget and showing my personal budget spreadsheet template. If you weren’t here to see them develop, you probably haven’t seen them at all. I’ve never built an actual index for those posts.

This is the master index of my budget planning resources. As I develop more, this will grow.

Budget Lesson #1 – In this lesson, I go over how we handle discretionary income and I explain our modified envelope system. The discretionary budget contains things like our grocery bill, or the clothes we buy. We have near-total discretion over what is purchased, hence the name.

Budget Lesson #2 – Lesson #2 contains the details of our monthly bills. These are the ones that are consistent, predictable, and actually due each month. Most people take these for granted as the bills they have to pay, but it’s not true. You can get almost all of your regular bills reduced just by asking. You would also be surprised what you can do without, when properly motivated.

Budget Lesson #3 – This is where I explain how we deal with the non-monthly bills. That is, the bills that have to be paid, but are not due on a monthly basis. I also share the personal budget spreadsheet template I developed. I am working on a few sample templates to match various imaginary scenarios. If you’d like to be an anonymous case study, and get free help setting up a budget, let me know, please.

Budget Lesson #4 – In this lesson, I describe our “set-aside” funds for things that will need to be paid eventually, but not on a set schedule. Sometimes, they are never actually due. We set aside money for the parties we throw, for car repairs and for a number of other things. A few of these items are outright optional, but they are part of what makes life fun. You can’t make a budget without including some of the extras.

Budget Lesson #5 – This is the companion piece to lesson 2. Learn how I’ve reduced–or attempted to reduce–each of these bills. For the better part of two years, I called Dish Network every few months to ask for a discount. For almost 2 years, it was granted. Then one, day, they told me they were putting a note on our account to keep us from getting any more discounts, so I canceled. 100% discounts help us save more.

Budget Lesson #6 – This is the reduction companion to lesson 3. These bills are harder to reduce. Have you ever successfully gotten your property taxes lowered?

Budget Lesson #7 – This is the reduction companion to lesson 4. Notice a pattern, yet?

Budget Lesson #8 – Here, completely out of order, is the reduction companion to lesson 1. Watch as I magically reduce–or rationalize–our discretionary budget.

So, dear readers, what part of budgeting should I address next?

Ignore Your Budget

Finance

For the first year of our journey out of debt, we had a strict budget, with all of our discretionary money spent out of an envelope system. We had an envelope for groceries, one for discretionary spending, one for clothes and one for baby crap. At the beginning of the month, we’d divide the money into the envelopes according to our budget spreadsheet. If we used a card for anything, we’d take a matching about of money out of the appropriate envelope and put it in a box to get reconciled the next month.

Ugh. Almost 2 years later, it has turned into too much work and too much nagging about everything either of us put on a card.

We decided to simplify the system a few months ago. Now, we still have a budget. It’s even a zero-based budget, but we ignore it. We only look at it if something changes for the worse. If something changes for the better, the extra money just gets automatically rolled into our debt snowball, so there’s no need to worry about updating the spreadsheet.

Instead of envelopes, we kind of eyeball it. We budget $450 per month for groceries, so we aim to spend $100 on our weekly grocery run. That leaves some room for losing track of how much we are putting in the cart, or a last minute addition to the list. It also leaves room for our secondary grocery trip to buy bread and milk later in the week. We do go through a lot of milk at my house. We budget $55 per month for diapers, but the deal we are currently getting with Amazon Mom is only costing us $30.79 for 6 weeks of diapers. We ignore the difference.

This—and our heavily automated bill pay and savings—lets us keep our finances on track, without stressing over every dollar or fighting over every little thing that comes home unplanned. I used to fire up Quicken and balance the checkbook every week. Now, that happens at the beginning of the month, usually. If I forget, it doesn’t matter. At the beginning of February, I balanced the checkbook for the first time in almost two months and we never came close to exercising our overdraft protection account. In fact, we had some extra, so that got sent directly to our debt.

Overall, it’s been good to test out a new system. We have almost no financial stress and managing our money takes about a couple of hours per month instead of per week. It’s all win.

Dealing With the Police 101

Life

NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 01: Shackles for slav... — (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Last night, a friend called me up and asked me to accompany him to the police station. The police had knocked on his door, waking up his girlfriend while he was out. When he called, they wouldn’t tell him why they wanted to talk to him. Was it an ex trying to make his life difficult or one of his employees getting investigated?

This friend has had a number of interactions with the police, but never learned how to deal with them. Before we left, I gave him a crash course in “stay out of jail”.

Lesson 1: The Police Are Not Your Friends.

During an investigation, you are a suspect. They are looking for a conviction. There may be a “good cop” trying to “help you out”, but he is trying to put you in jail. “Protect and Serve” doesn’t mean you. In general, it means society as a whole. During an investigation, they are serving the interests of the prosecutor.

Generally, they are going to look at you–as the target of their investigation–as the enemy. This is normal. They spend all of their time dealing with scumbags and s***heads. Naturally, they start to assume that everyone who isn’t a cop will fall into one of those categories.

Don’t get pissed when they act rude, ignore you, or anything else. It isn’t a lack of professionalism, it’s just a different profession. They are using interrogation techniques that have been proven successful. Ignore it and focus on Lesson 2.

It will feel wrong to disobey the authority you’ve been taught your entire life to obey. You’re not. You are standing by your rights. Nobody cares about your future more than you do. Certainly not the guy investigating you.

Lesson 2: Your Lawyer is Your Friend.

The second a police interaction starts to look like they are investigating you, demand your lawyer, then see Lesson 4. When you demand an attorney, they stop asking you questions. You can take it back and start talking, so again, see Lesson 4. It’s your attorney’s job to talk to the police and, if necessary, the media. It’s your job to talk to your attorney.

You don’t need an attorney ahead of time. Criminal defense attorneys are used to getting calls at 3AM. It’s part of their job. If you have a low enough income as defined by whatever jurisdiction you are being investigated in, you can get a public defender. That’s better than nothing, but I’d prefer to hire a professional shark, even if it means mortgaging my future. Prison is a big gamble.

Lesson 3. Consent is Your Enemy.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

“Officer, I do not consent to any search and I would like to speak to my attorney.” Remember this. Memorize it.

They need probable cause, a warrant, or permission to search your stuff. Never agree to it. Don’t stop them if they search anyway, but never, ever agree to a search. If the search is done improperly, your lawyer(see Lesson 2) will get the results of that searched thrown out.

It isn’t possible to get into more trouble for standing by your rights. There is no crime on the books anywhere in the US called “Refused Consent to Search”. Your day will not go worse because you defended your Constitutional rights.

Lesson 4. Shut Up.

I know a few defense attorneys. According to them, most of the people in jail either committed a crime in front of a bunch of witnesses, or they talked their way into jail. Shut up. You’ll want to either justify or defend yourself depending on the circumstances. Don’t. Shut up. It may be one of the hardest things you ever do, but keep your mouth closed. The only thing worse than talking is lying. Don’t lie, just keep quiet.

There is nothing you are going to say that will make your interrogator invite you home for Christmas. He isn’t your friend, you won’t meet his parents, you aren’t going to his birthday party. There is absolutely no win in talking to him. Shut up. The answer to every question is “Lawyer.” If the only thing you ~~say~~ babble is “Lawyerlawyerlawyerlawyerlawyerlawyer”, you’re probably not going to do too badly.

In your car, the dynamic changes a bit, but the principles don’t. When a cop pulls you over, don’t argue. You can’t win an argument with a cop on the side of the road. Be nice, be polite, and as soon as possible, pull into a parking lot and take as many notes about the encounter as you can. If you are planning to fight whatever he pulled you over for, don’t give him any reason to remember you or spin his official report to make you look bad. Again, shut up. Catching a theme?

Gambling With Your Future

If you are being investigated by the police, your future–or some part of it–is on the line. While you are gambling with your criminal record and your freedom, don’t forget that you are an amateur in this arena. The police, the prosecutor, and your attorney are the professionals and the stakes can be huge. Keep your mouth shut, call your attorney, and thank me later.

Budget Lesson, Part 8

Finance

This is a continuation of the budget series. See these posts for the history of this series.

This time, I’m looking at our discretionary budget. These are the things that don’t have a fixed cost. Any individual item is largely optional, and, ultimately, we don’t track these purchases closely. At the beginning of the month, I pull this money out of the bank in cash, except for 1 category. When the discretionary budget is gone, it’s gone.

Groceries/Dining – At the beginning of the week, we sit down with a meal planner and (Can you guess?) plan our meals. The planner we use has a weekly calendar with a checklist below each day to build the grocery list. At the bottom of the page is another checklist for staples that don’t apply to a specific day’s meal, like milk or snacks. We build the list, then transfer it to another sheet, broken out by grocery department. That keeps me from having to criss-cross the store. I make one lap. When I go to the store, I only bring that week’s grocery budget in cash, so I keep close track of how much is going into the cart. Recently, we’ve gotten so good at making our meals cheaply from scratch that I reduced our monthly food budget by $50. I enjoy good food, so I wouldn’t reduce this budget item if it was a sacrifice in quality. For example, the Rainbow Foods store-brand chips actually taste better than Lay’s for half of the price. We stock up when things are on sale and cook creatively. Sometimes, if time has been too tight to make a meal plan, we eat solely from the pantry for a week, buying nothing but bread and milk. By sticking to the list, and not fearing the store’s brand, we are able to feed our family of 5 1/2 for $450 per month and still eat well.
Discretionary – This is for the random things that come up, and some of the not-so-random. Toiletries, activity fees, admissions, and fund-raisers all come out of this fund. At the end of the month, whatever is left gets tucked into a box and forgotten. When the box gets full, it goes to the bank to be applied to debt. There isn’t a lot to cut here, since this line-item is only $200.
Baby stuff – This category is continually shrinking. Our middle kid is recently potty-trained and our youngest is trying. There is no baby food and no formula, just 1 pack of diapers every month. In 6 months, this category will be eliminated.
Gas/oil – This is the single category that isn’t cash-based. It makes no sense to take the kids out of the car to pay inside, especially in the winter. Also, all of the temptation is inside. It’s much better to spend the money at the pump. There isn’t much we can do to reduce this, at the moment. Our next car won’t be a full-sized pickup, but we are several years from that purchase. We’ve started clipping oil-change coupons to keep this down to the minimum amount possible.
Clothes – We only allocate $15 per month for clothes. In a good month, we don’t spend it. We can’t eliminate it completely, because things do come up. Over the summer, I’m hoping to completely leave it alone to save up for a new(used) winter jacket for our older daughter, who doesn’t get hand-me-downs.
Blow Money – This is the safety valve. It can’t get reduced and still work.

We’ve now addressed out entire budget, including what we can do and have done to keep our costs under control. Looking back, I don’t see too many cuts I’ve missed.

Budget Lesson, Part 4

Finance

Part 4 of the Budget Lesson series. Please see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 to catch up. The Google Doc of this example is here.

The final category in my budget is “Set-aside funds”. These are the categories that don’t have specific payout amounts and happen at irregular intervals. When my car is paid off, there will be a car fund added to the list, instead of a new car payment.

Parties – We throw two parties each year; a Halloween party and a summer barbecue. We also have three children who have varying expectations and needs for their birthday parties.
Gifts – I don’t buy presents for my friends, and the number of relatives I buy gifts for has decreased dramatically over the years. I do, however, buy birthday and Christmas presents for my wife and kids and I participate in some form of gift exchange with my brothers and their wives. Combined, we set aside about $100 per month for parties and presents.
Pet Care – We have four cats and a dog. This is to cover cat litter and food the bunch. We have too many pets, but we can’t give them away. They are family. However, there is a moratorium on new animals for a few years. Two cats and a dog are our hard limit.
Car Repair – Cars break. Tires wear out. This isn’t a surprise, and it certainly isn’t an emergency.
Warranty Fund – We are building up our own “Warranty Fund“, to replace appliances when they break. I’d rather have the interest accruing than see this as a line-item fee on any of my bills.
Medicine/Medical – Kids get sick and prescriptions need to be filled. We figure our monthly prescriptions plus one office visit per month, but the money accrues in this fund. On low months, we have more, so we can cover the visits during flu season.
In The Hole – This isn’t actually a fund we set aside. If, for some reason, we go over budget one month, it gets entered here to immediately pay ourselves back for the over-spend. This month, this number is $170, which is how high we went over for Christmas. Since we have all of the “Set asides” and non-monthly bills stored in the same account, there was no actual debt, just this “paper” debt to ourselves. This serves the combined purposes of a mild punishment for overspending and a method to get back on track.

That is my entire budget laid out. As the series continues, I’ll be examining how I have lowered the bills, how I could lower them more, and how I’ve screwed them up.

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Lesson 1: The Police Are Not Your Friends.

Lesson 2: Your Lawyer is Your Friend.

Lesson 3. Consent is Your Enemy.

Lesson 4. Shut Up.

Gambling With Your Future