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The Spending Styles of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

Finance

Image via Wikipedia

Everybody has a spending style.  Like a fingerprint, it is unique to each individual, even if that individual is fictional.

Since it is the Halloween season, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a Halloween movie, I’m going to look at how those characters spend their money.

Janet Weiss – A Heroine

Janet is the stereotype of every suburbanite soccer-mom-who-hasn’t-gotten-married-and-had-kids-yet. She wants to keep up with the Joneses(“It’s nicer than Betty Monroe had! [Oh Brad!]”) and she is obviously impressed by and envious of people who have all of the trappings of the “finer things”.  If she has a credit card, you can bet that it is peeling on the sides from over-use.   While she wears conservative clothes and sensible shoes to go visit an old mentor, she’s almost definitely got a closet full of fancy shoes and a drawer full of real-baby-seal-skin g-strings.   If Brad were smarter, he’d run, and not just because of her loyalty issues.   She’ll never be content with a sensible car and modest house.

Brad Majors – A Hero

Brad is a pompous jerk who thinks he’s better than those around him.  He’s also extremely conservative and slow to accept change.   He’s going to give Janet an allowance and complain every time she spends a penny of it.   His investment portfolio is well-balanced and configured for long-term growth and he’s going to rub your nose in it at the neighborhood barbecue.   To shut him up, just ask why his kid was born with an accent and garters.

Magenta – A Domestic

What’s a domestic?  Magenta is the most financially responsible person in the show.   She’s third -in-command of an alien invasion, but still takes on a second job?  That’s a woman planning for retirement.   She’s not going to rely on anyone to support her.   She knows how to enjoy a party, without having to spend all of her money on a glitter-suit.

Columbia – A Groupie (as Little Nell)

Columbia is incapable of making a decision that wasn’t pre-formed by her peer group.  She’s doomed to chase every fad, hoping it will impress those around her.  While she’ll always be remembered for her glitter-suit or the corset that isn’t quite tall enough, she’ll never be happy or have a spare penny in case of emergencies.

Riff Raff – A Handyman

Riff Raff has jealousy issues.  He sees his boss and commander throwing a party and having a good time, but, instead of working towards being able to do that himself, he kills his boss and steals his house.  He is greedy, jealous, and deceitful.  Don’t ever turn your back on him, or he’ll steal your wallet, hit you over the head and bury you in the backyard just so he can pretend it’s his party.

Eddie – Ex Delivery Boy (as Meatloaf)

Eddie is out of his head (H-E-D).   He’s the tag-a-long who will keep buying expensive dinners that he can’t afford in an attempt to impress whoever is around to see him pick up the check.  He isn’t sure how to fit in, but he’s positive that he can buy his way there.    In reality, he’s dead(spelled right) broke and will end up getting screwed.

Rocky Horror – A Creation

Here is the true blank slate.   He’s just seven hours old, so he’s got no bad habits to break.  Unfortunately, he’s never had to learn any hard lessons, so his head is easily turned by an glittered bauble or babbling, half-dressed flake.   He’s incapable of making an informed decision about anything, so he follows everyone around getting whatever they like.   He’ll spend his entire life getting by on his looks, which will almost always be successful, until life catches up to him and he dies broke and alone.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter – A Scientist

Frank knows how to throw a party.  He travels 12 billion light years brings not only a keg, but the entire party house with him.   Who wouldn’t want to be his friend?   There’s a fancy house, a room to stay in if you drink too much, pretty people being built in the lab, and gourmet corn-fed delivery-boy being served for dinner.   Watch out, though.  He doesn’t tend to his job.  One day,  the credit cards will be maxed, the bank will foreclose on the house and send it back to Sweet Transexual Transylvania, leaving Frank penniless.  Who will be his friend then?

Which Rocky character are you?

           Science Fiction
           Double Feature.
           Frank has built and
           Lost his creature.
           Darkness has conquered
           Brad and Janet.
           The servants gone to
           A distant planet.

Slow Carb Diet: How to Avoid Going Bat-**** Crazy

Life, Recipe

Space-filling model of the lipoic acid molecule

I received an email recently, asking “what kinds of things are you eating so that you don’t go bat-**** crazy?”

First, some background.

On January 2, 2011, I started Tim Ferriss’s Slow Carb Diet and, as of 2/18/2011, I have lost 30 pounds. The first 11 or so were water weight, but I’ve still been losing 4-5 pounds per week.  This diet has a few—but only a few—rules.

  1. Eat nothing white.  That means no sugar(including fructose), no flour, no potatoes, no rice(even brown), and no milk(or any dairy).  Beer is white.
  2. Breakfast is high-protein.
  3. Cheat day once a week.  On cheat day, there are no rules after breakfast.
  4. Meals should consist of 40% protein, 30% vegetables and 30% legumes(beans or lentils).
  5. If you get hungry between meals, you didn’t eat enough at the last meal.

That’s it.  The rules are simple and don’t require that I refer back to the book for anything.

Here is a typical day for me on this diet:

For breakfast most mornings, I have 3 eggs and 2-3 sausage links.  I bought brown-and-serve sausages so this takes 10 minutes to cook in the morning.

On the way to work, I have a diet soda if we have any in the house.  If not, I skip it.  I like pop, but I’ve broken my caffeine addiction completely.

For lunch, I will either have leftovers from the night before or some stir-fry with beans and whatever protein is convenient.  I’ve been keeping pre-cooked brats(wurst, not kid) or polish sausages as a convenience food.

Several times a week, I make some stir-fry.  I use a basic, flexible recipe.

  1. Chop whatever vegetables are on hand.  We usually have onions, broccoli, a variety of peppers, and mushrooms.  If I have celery, asparagus, or almost any other vegetable.  Lettuce works poorly in a stir-fry.
  2. Put some oil in a hot pan.  I prefer sesame oil, but I’m not picky.  I’ll use whatever oil we have on hand.
  3. Cook the vegetables, stirring constantly.  Cook them in the order of how long they take to cook.  Onions are usually first.  Celery tends to be last..  While they are cooking, I sometimes sprinkle ginger powder over the top.
  4. If you are getting sick of eating beans, toss them into the stir-fry, cooked.  They mash and disintegrate, giving you the benefit and some flavor, without the mouth-feel.
  5. When the vegetables are cooked to your satisfaction, put them in a bowl.   They will keep in the refrigerator for a few days.

I tend to cook the meat separately, as that lets me vary the meal more.  I’ll make some chicken or steak ready to toss in the stir-fry before I re-heat it.

I vary the seasonings, vegetables, and oil to get different flavors  I rarely make the same stir-fry twice.  The real trick to keeping the food satisfying is to experiment with seasonings.  They make a huge difference between bland and yummy. Seasonings can make or break a meal all by themselves.

If I don’t have any stir-fry or leftovers, I’ll bring some salad and a polish sausage. Most salad dressing is sugar-based, so I either go light on the dressing, or use balsamic vinegar.   I try to avoid doing this more than once every couple of weeks.  It’s boring and doesn’t taste that great.  It’s okay, but that’s all.

I try to always have cooked beans or lentils in the refrigerator.  They provide a significant part of my calorie intake.   Beans are kind of a necessity.  Vegetables taste better, but  are a low-calorie, bulky food.  You can’t stay full all day on nothing but lettuce.  Beans get old. I’ll usually toss a few spoonfuls of salsa to change the taste.  When I cook lentils, sometimes, I’ll cook it in beef broth with fried onions and garlic to make a tasty change.

For dinner, I have whatever vegetables we are cooking for the kids, a scoop of beans, and a protein that usually isn’t cooked for the family.

The protein source varies based on whatever was on sale when we went grocery shopping.  It can be steak, chicken, or anything else.  This week, we bought 16 chicken drumsticks.  We spread them out on a cookie sheet and seasoned them 3 different ways, just for variety.  Some got garlic salt, some got Italian seasoning, and some got a Greek rub.  After an hour in a 350 degree oven, we had a delicious meal.

If I feel a need for a snack, or a craving for sweets, I just take a spoonful of peanut butter.  It helps.

Exercise

I’m not doing any major form of exercise.  I wanted to test the diet on its own merits, first.  What I am doing is some timed exercises shortly before and 90 minutes after I eat, when I remember.   The exercises are resistance-based and 60-90 seconds in duration.  The purpose is to crank up my metabolism before the food gets introduced into my body, and then keep it up and running for a while afterward.

I use a mid-level elastic rehab strap, doubled-over twice.  I do 75 chest extensions about 5 minutes before I eat.   Most days, I forget to do them again 90 minutes later.  There are any number of other exercises that would work, including air squats or push-ups.

Supplements

I am not your doctor.  In fact, I am not a doctor in any capacity.  Similarly, I am not a nutritionist, a dietitian, or even a board-certified snake-oil salesman.  I have no qualifications here, in any way, shape or form.  Follow this at your own risk.

I take 5 supplements.

Policosanal.  This is an herbal supplement that is supposed to help with cholesterol, which is a helpful thing to do when you are on a low-carb, high-protein diet.  More importantly, a side effect is weight loss.  Hurray for helpful side effects!

Alpha-lipoic Acid(ALA).  This is an antioxidant that helps your body produce vitamins C and E.  It is also supposed to inhibit triglyceride and fat storage.  To quote from the book, “ALA helps you store the carbohydrates you ea in your liver as opposed to in fat.”

Decaffeinated Green Tea Extract.  This inhibits your body’s ability to store carbs as fat and it accelerates fat cell death.  The second bit means it should help prevent the rebounding so many dieters experience.

Garlic Extract.  This assists with cholesterol management and the inhibition of fat regain.

B Complex.  I take a B complex vitamin with vitamin C.  The B vitamins help balance out some of the things the rest of the supplement regimen does to cellular metabolism while giving your overall metabolism a boost.

I take the whole mess in the morning and again before bed.  Shortly before lunch and dinner, I take the ALA, green tea extract and garlic extract.

Ice

As a pure body-hack, I ice my upper back every night.  I have an ice-pack sheet that I place on my upper back for 30-45 minutes each night before bed.  This lowers my core body temperature, forcing my body to work harder to maintain 98.6 degrees.  That burns calories.  An additional benefit: getting cold makes you tired, which helps with my chronic insomnia.

This combination of factors has resulted in my losing an average of .7 pounds per day, without meaningful exercise.  It’s a violation of a number traditional dieting principles, but it’s working.  Is everything I’m doing necessary?  Useful?  Possibly not.  Over the next few months, I’m going to be experimenting with dropping individual pieces of the plan, to see if my rate of loss drops for any of it.

For now, it’s working, and doing so at a rate I like.   Dieting usually sucks, because the results are so slow.  This is much more satisfying.

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Living the XBox Life on an Atari Income

Finance

Nintendo GameCube Silver.
Image via Wikipedia

At some point, everyone has “champagne wishes and caviar dreams.” Over the last 25 years, we’ve even been peddled the “you can have it all” myth from every direction, including the media and the government.

The truth is simple: you cannot have it all.  You can have anything, but you can’t have everything.  In order to have one thing, you have to give up something else.  It’s a law of nature.   If you have $5, you can either get a burger or an overpriced cup of coffee, but not both.

“But wait!” you shout, rudely interrupting the narrator, “I have a credit card. I can have both!”

Wrong.

And stop interrupting me.

If you have $5 and borrow $5 to get some coffee to go with your burger, you will eventually have to pay that money back with interest.  You will have to give up a future-burger AND a flavor shot in your overpriced coffee.

Everything you buy needs to be paid for, some day.

If you have an Atari income, but insist on living the XBox life, you will wake up one day, buried in bills, forced to live the Commodore-64 life out of sheer desperation.

There is a solution.

Don’t get all XBox-y until you are making XBox money. That way, you’ll never have to worry about going broke tomorrow paying for the fun you had yesterday.

Even when you have an XBox income, ideally you’ll restrict yourself to living a Gamecube life, so you’ll be able to put some money aside to support future-you instead of constantly having to worry about your next paycheck.

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Brown Bagging Your Way to Savings

Finance

Today’s post is written by Mike Collins of http://savingmoneytoday.net as part of the Yakezie Blog Swap in which bloggers were asked to share their best day to day money saving tip.

Do you buy lunch at work every day?  Have you ever actually sat down and added up how much money you’re spending?

I did once…and I almost fell out of my chair when I saw how much I was spending!

Back in the day I used to buy lunch at the office almost every single day.  It certainly didn’t seem like I was spending much.  A chef salad here, a cheese steak and fries there.   But every day I was spending about 7 dollars and change.  That’s $35 a week, which adds up to a whopping $1820 over the course of a year!

I started thinking about all the things I could do with that extra $1820, like paying off some of our debt, increasing my 401k contributions(ed: but staying with your 401k contribution limits, of course!), picking out a new big-screen tv, or enjoying an extended family vacation at Walley World.

I immediately starting bringing my lunch to work 4 days a week (I do treat myself once a week) and I’ve been saving money ever since.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  It costs money to bring lunch from home too right?

Yes, of course it does…but nowhere near as much as eating out every day.  Let’s do some basic math to prove the point.  Say you swing by the grocery store to buy some ham and cheese so you can make sandwiches for the week.  You pick up a half pound of ham for $3 and a half pound of cheese for $2.  A loaf of bread on sale runs you another $2.  That means you just spent $7 for a week’s worth of lunches.  Even if you only bring lunch 4 days a week you’ve still saved yourself $21.  That’s over $1000 a year!

And here’s a tip to save even more:  If you have extra food from dinner, just bring the leftovers for lunch the next day.  We always try to make just a little bit extra so I can have free lunch the next day.

So the next time you’re sitting around complaining that you don’t have enough money for so and so, think about how much money you are spending every day on lunch, or coffee, or cigarettes, etc.  You might just find that you have plenty of money after all if you just shift your priorities a bit.

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Money Problems – Day 8: Insurance

Finance

insurance
Image by alancleaver_2000 via Flickr

Today, I am continuing the  series, Money Problems: 30 Days to Perfect Finances.   The series will consist of 30 things you can do in one setting to perfect your finances.  It’s not a system to magically make your debt disappear.  Instead, it is a path to understanding where you are, where you want to be, and–most importantly–how to bridge the gap.

I’m not running the series in 30 consecutive days.  That’s not my schedule.  Also, I think that talking about the same thing for 30 days straight will bore both of us.   Instead, it will run roughly once a week.  To make sure you don’t miss a post, please take a moment to subscribe, either by email or rss.

On this, Day 8, we’re going to talk about insurance.

What is insurance?  Insurance is, quite simply a bet with your insurance company.   You give them money on the assumption that something bad is going to happen to whatever you are insuring.  After all, if you pay $10,000 for a life insurance policy and fail to die, the insurance company wins.

A more traditional definition would be something along the line of giving money to your insurance company so they will pay for any bad things that happen to your stuff.   How do they make money paying to fix or replace anything that breaks, dies, or spontaneously combusts?  Actuary tables.  Huh?  The insurance company sets a price for to insure—for example—your car.  That price is based on the statistical likelihood of you mucking it up, based on your age, your gender, your driving history, and even the type of car you are insuring.  What happens if a meteor falls on your car?  That would shoot the actuary table to bits, but it doesn’t matter.   They spread the risk across all of their customers and—statistically—the price is right.

What kinds of insurance should you get?

Homeowner’s Insurance

For most people, their home is, by far, the largest single purchase they will ever make.  If your home is destroyed, by fire, tornado, or angry leprechauns, it’s gone, unless you have it insured.   Without insurance, that $100, or  200, or 500 thousand dollars will be lost, and that’s not even counting the contents of your home.

Homeowner’s insurance can be expensive.  One way to keep the cost down is to raise your deductible.  If you’ve got a $1500 emergency fund, you can afford to have a $1000 deductible.  That’s the part of your claim that the insurance company won’t cover.  It also means that if you have less than $1000 worth of damage, the insurance company won’t pay anything.

You can get optional riders on your homeowner’s insurance, if you have special circumstances.  You can get additional coverage for jewelry, firearms, computer equipment, furs, among other things.  You base policy will cover some of this, but if you have a lot of any of that, you should look into the extra coverage.

Auto Insurance

Car insurance is required in most states.  That’s because the kind caretakers in our governments, don’t want anyone able to hit you car without being able to pay for the damage they caused.  To my mind, I think it would be more effective to just make whacking someone’s car without paying for it a felony.  If someone is a careful driver or has the money to self-insure, more power to them.

Auto insurance comes with options like separate glass coverage, collision, total coverage (comprehensive), or just liability.  Liability insurance is what you put on cheap, crappy cars.   It will only pay for the damage you do to someone else.

Rental

I’ve never had rental insurance.  The last time I rented, I could fit everything I owned in the back of a pickup truck with a small trailer, and it could all be replaced for $100.   Heck, I had the couch I was conceived on.  Err.  Ignore that bit.

Almost everything you can get homeowner’s insurance to cover will also cover renter’s insurance, except for the building.  It’s not your building, so it’s not your job to replace it.

Life Insurance

If you care about your family, you need life insurance.   This is the money that will be used to replace your income if you die.   I am insured to about 5 times my annual salary.   If that money gets used to pay off the last of the debt, it will be enough to supplement my wife’s income and support my family  almost until the kids are in college. You should be sure to have enough to cover any family debt, and bridge the gap between your surviving family’s income and their expenses.  At a minimum.  Better, you’ll have enough to pay for college and a comfortable living.

Life insurance comes in two varieties: whole and term.  Whole life…sucks.  It’s expensive and overrated.     The sales-weasels pushing it will tell you that it builds value over time, but it’s usually only about 2%.  It’s a lousy investment.  You’re far better off to get a term life policy and sock the price difference in a mutual fund that’s earning a 5-6% return.

Term life is insurance that is only good for 5, 10, or 20 years, then the policy evaporates.  If you live, the money was wasted at the end of the term.  The fact that it’s a bad bet makes it far more affordable than whole life.  It doesn’t pretend to be an investment; it’s just insurance.  Pure and simple

Personal Liability Umbrella

An umbrella policy is lawsuit insurance.  If someone trips and hurts themselves in your yard, and decides to sue, this will pay your legal bills.  If you get sued for almost anything that was not deliberate(by you!) or business related, this policy can be used to cover the bill.

If you call your insurance company to get an umbrella policy, they will force you to raise the limits on your homeowner’s and auto insurance.  Generally, those limits will be raised to $500,000, and the umbrella coverage will be there to pick up any costs beyond the new limit.

A little-known secret about umbrella policies:  They set the practical limit of a lawsuit against you.  Most ambulance chasers know better than to sue you for 10 million dollars if you only have a policy to cover 1 million.   They will never see the other 9 million, so why bother?  They’ll go for what they know they can get.

The flipside to that is that you should not talk about your umbrella policy.   Having a million dollars in insurance is a sign of “deep pockets”.  It’s a sign that it’s worthwhile to sue you.  You don’t want to look extra sue-able, so keep it quiet.

Insurance is a great way to protect yourself if something bad happens.   Today, you should take a look at your policies and see where you may have gaps in coverage, or where you may be paying too much.

 

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