Happy Hanuchristmakwanzivus.
Family and travel. No posts today.
Make the most of the holiday.
The no-pants guide to spending, saving, and thriving in the real world.
Happy Hanuchristmakwanzivus.
Family and travel. No posts today.
Make the most of the holiday.
Why do you get out of bed in the morning? Is it so you can exercise the privilege of spending 8 hours in a cubicle?
I didn’t think so.
In Okinawa, it’s call the ikigai. In Costa Rica, it’s the plan de vida. It’s your sense of purpose–the reason you get out of bed in the morning. In these cultures, having a strong ikigai can be directly correlated to a statistically extreme lifespan*. All around the world, the plan de vida is the single factor most likely to cause someone to feel they have lived a fulfilled life.
Do you know your ikigai?
For some people, their plan de vida is to successfully raise their children, then their grandchildren. For others, it is charity. Some folks are serial entrepreneurs, always looking for the next deal, the next business. For still others, it is a collection or an urge to travel. There are even some whose sole reason for getting out of bed(other than potty breaks) is work.
The last category is most common with teachers, soldiers, and police. The problem with wrapping so much of your identity up in your profession is retirement. What do you do when your ikigai–your reason to wake up–goes away? In Okinawa, teachers and police tend to have very short retirements because they lose their reason to for living.
What is your plan de vida, your passion? What drives you to keep going? Do you live to write, or to raise your children? Do you <shudder> live solely for someone else’s happiness? When you find it, it will resonate as “this is you”. Finding it is a deep soul-searching, not a light-hearted explanation or a new fad.
Your reasons can, and should, change over time. You can’t live for raising your children years after they have grown up and moved away. Finding this one factor in your life can be the thing that leaves you on your deathbed looking back with a smile instead of regret.
What is your plan de vida?
* From The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest
Everybody knows the reputation New Year’s resolutions get for being abandoned in under a month. Following through with your saving and budget goals can be difficult. There are thousands of strategies for keeping your resolutions, but I’ve found that the best goal-keeping mechanism is to make yourself accountable. There are several ways to accomplish this.
Make Firm Goals. If your goals are open to interpretation, it’s easy to interpret them in a way that lets you off the hook. Make the goals concrete and immune to interpretation, and that can’t happen. “Get up earlier” may mean five minutes, which is technically meeting the goal, but not really. “Get up at 5am” is clear and concrete.
Get a “Goal Buddy”. When I am out shopping, if I’m struck by the impulse to buy something I probably don’t need, I call my wife. She’s more than happy to encourage me to put the movie or game back on the shelf. I have a friend who will call me up if he’s thinking about buying a new gadget so I can talk him down. Friends don’t let friends mortgage their futures.
Go Public. As you may have noticed, I’m being as open as possible with my goals for the year. I have laid out clear goals and I provide fairly frequent updates through both this site and twitter. If I fail, I fail in front of an audience. That’s strong encouragement to succeed. Tell your family, friends and coworkers. Announce your goals on the internet. Make it as difficult as possible to fail gracefully.
Punish Yourself. I have a line item in my budget called “In the hole“. If I go over budget one month, the overage is entered as an expense the following month. This serves the double purpose of getting the budget back on track and forcing me to sacrifice something the next month to make that happen. Another option may be to write out a check to a charity you hate, and drop it in the mail if you miss your goal. Anything unpleasant can work as your punishment.
How do you keep your goals?
The summer of 2013 has proven to be a destructive one. Brush fires have engulfed much of the Western United States, consuming large forests and chasing citizens out of their homes. The fire known as the Rim Fire is closing in one the Yosemite National Forest, one of the most popular tourist destinations in the country.
Managing forest fires in the Western United States has been a consistent struggle over the decades with budgets proving to be hard to navigate around for local, state, and federal firefighting forces. Around 32,000 individual brush fires across California and other western states has resulted in the destruction of 3 million acres of land. To battle these blazes, the U.S. Forest Service, a federal office, contracts with private, state, and local firefighting agencies by providing funding, equipment, resources, and the chemicals needed to stop the blazes. On August 19th, 2013, the U.S. Forest Service has used $967 million to fund the management of these fires. At that time, the U.S. Forest Service only had $50 million left in its budget.
Why is the budget so affected this year compared to other years? For example, in 2012, the total amount of forest fires the U.S. Forest Service answered to totaled to around 67,700 fires and the destruction of 9.3 million acres of land. However, budgetary choices made by the Congress over the decade have made available funds for the U.S. Forest Service hard to find. In addition, the budget sequester, which went into effect this budget year, subtracted $115 million from federal wildfire management programs.
In addition, individual states are seeing their state budgets affected. California had to declare a state of emergency on August 23rd, 2013. One example of a damaging effect to California included the Rim Fire destroying much of the infrastructure near the Hetch Hetchy Resovoir, which supplies water and hydroelectric power to much of San Francisco. As a result of the damage, the city of San Francisco and neighboring municipalities that use the same energy source, spent over $600,000 in replacement water and energy. Private costs are also immense; thousands of homes and private property have been destroyed across the west, including from the Rim Fire. The Rim Fire near Yosemite threatens the national park, the metropolitan San Francisco area’s water and energy supply, and the major municipalities near. By August 25th, 2013, 143,980 acres near Yosemite National Park have been engulfed by the Rim Fire with only 7% of the fire contained. The Rim Fire is approximately 20 miles away from Yosemite National Park and although Route 120 heading into the park is closed, park officials are hopeful that the park will not be affected by the fire thanks to its current distance. If the Rim Fire expands to the Yosemite National Park, the costs for the U.S. Forest Service from the fire damage and trying to contain the fire could catapult higher.
Last weekend, we had 2 birthday parties. In two weeks we are having our biggest party of the year. I’m going to try to get our yard done this weekend, while my wife and a couple of her friends decorate inside the house. October is still nuts at Casa del Myhouse.
Today, I found out that I accidentally made a huge extra payment to my car. $650 too much. I thought I had deleted the auto-payment series from the bank’s site, but I only deleted September’s payment. Hopefully, I can find enough slack in the bills to make up the difference, instead of hitting the emergency fund.
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J. Money’s doing a series on side hustles. The latest one is about chicken farming. If I lived in a more reasonable city, I’d have some chickens of my own.
Self-improvement is always good for you, kind of by definition. Here are a few ways to pick up some interesting certifications.
Lifehacker posted on Squaretrade. I can tell you that, without a doubt, I’ll never again get an extended warranty in-store.
In this corner, weighing in at the only thing you have in this life that you can’t possibly get more of: Time!
And in this corner, weighing in at the thing people think they need to be happy: Money!
Keep it clean. No biting, scratching or hitting your opponents with a chair unless my back is turned. Fight!
Yesterday was Jimmy John’s customer appreciation day. They had subs for $1, but you had to go there in person to get it. At noon, there were more than 50 people standing in line. If it takes 1 minute to make a sandwich, that’s almost an hour in line. To save $5.
Good for Jimmy John’s. They brought thousands of extra people into the restaurant and had a huge line running down the sidewalk. That makes them look great to everyone driving by.
But, the people? Really? Would you work, at any job, for anyone(excluding charitable work) for $5 per hour?
Round 1: Time!
My mother-in-law regularly drive 6 miles out of her way to save 5 cent per gallon on gas. If usually takes 10-15 minutes to get there, if the stoplights behave and traffic is decent. If she arrive with her gas gauge on “E”, she gets to put 15 gallons of gas in her car, for a savings of 75 cents. That’s an effective rate of $2.25 per hour, not counting the gas used to drive there. However, if I ask her to give her $2 to stand in her driveway doing nothing for an hour, she looks at me like I’m nuts!
Round 2: Time!
My wife will occasionally make a shopping list that includes coupons and items spanning three grocery stores. If that were to happen, there would be an extra hour wasted, just traveling between the stores, minimum. Then another hour wasted walking past the items in the first store that were slated to be purchased at the second, or third store. Add another 15 minutes per store to check out, and we’re looking at 2 and a half hours down the tubes to save a possible $20?
No freaking way.
Round 3: Time!
My time is valuable. No matter what I do, or how hard I work, I can never get more than my allotment. Why would I waste it to save a fraction of what I can earn by using it in other ways?
And the winner is….Time!
What’s the craziest thing you’ve done to save a few bucks?