The research continues as I investigate companies that produce dried fruits and dried fruit powders in my quest to perfect a few homemade oatmeal recipes. The going has not been easy, but it has brought me to an interesting understanding of food and how I relate to it. The short backstory is that my favorite […]
Category: Economics
Sketchy Food Companies
Last week, I saw acai powder in the grocery store for the first time. I had considered buying some of this online in the past to assist the blueberry powder I have for various oatmeal experiments, but the price tag of $24 for roughly 8 oz scared me away, at least for the day. Having […]
Don’t Make a Giant List of Everything You Want to Buy
Every great now and then, annoyed by a scramble of checklists, I sit down and write out a list of all of the things I’ve been meaning, wanting, or considering to buy. In some ways this is great, because it pulls all smaller lists together, addressing both immediate needs and someday-kinda wants, and can be […]
The Search for More Money
A lot of problems can be solved with money, far more than people often want to believe. At the same time, the human mind isn’t naturally wired to handle money well, and all of history has been plagued with crooks who will take as much as they can get from you, either by force or […]
Voting With Your Dollars Doesn’t Always Work
A week or two ago, I discovered that Amazon no longer lets you search product reviews without logging in. On the one hand, these reviews are probably being scraped constantly by web crawlers, driving traffic costs up, and no doubt that may have something to do with the market for fake reviews. But let’s be […]
California Burning: Reflections on Insurance
As many people know, several suburban housing areas near Los Angeles have burnt down as fires tear through the area. This sucks for all of those people – and hopefully they are otherwise okay – but what is maybe a little less talked about is how several weeks or months ago, insurance companies stopped insuring […]
A Few Principles for Monthly Budgets
December was an absolute bloodbath of spending for me, not even considering the Christmas gifts I bought. It all started with a few ill-reasoned purchases of vintage mainframe manuals, which ate a $50 chunk out of my budget, and then progressed to numerous “I’ve wanted this for awhile” items, including a few otherwise very fun […]
Affording Three Years of Unemployment
It’s been almost 3 years since I quit my job, and as time continues passing, people have started giving me stranger and stranger reactions to the subject. This was especially notable last week visiting family when, over breakfast with my parents, my Dad mentioned I must be doing pretty good to still have money, and […]
Small, Stupid Ways to Spend Money
Just as with my food budget, I give myself $400 every month for discretionary spending, which consists of everything from clothes, to books, to paper towels, to restaurants. Things like annual vehicle registration, gifts for my nieces, and expensive car parts are outside of this budget, but I’m still frustrated how I exceed this $400 […]
Saving Money on Groceries
I budget about $400 every month for groceries, and this seems to be a realistic target. But not all too many years ago, my goal was $200 every month, although I rarely achieved this, typically spending closer to $300. Then the pandemic happened, and everything has gone up since then. This still kind of shocks […]