Saving money on hot water is cool

Hot water is one of the luxuries of modern life, and it is also ridiculously expensive for a number of reasons.

Hot water requires heat, which usually comes from the combustion of fuel, and is constantly radiated away from the water into the surrounding structure, air, or ground. As a result, there is a great deal of waste involved in the process of making, and keeping water hot.

Not only that, once the water is heated it usually goes from a piping hot boiler to a series of copper or plastic pipes throughout a structure that allow the heat to dissipate once again, so it is frequently necessary to let the water run before it reaches warm enough temperatures to satisfy our demands.

Needless to say, the water waste from simply letting water run down the drain until warm enough is considerable, and the fuel waste in heating water over and over again is major as well.

A number of money and resource saving solutions to this problem exist, including point of use water heaters, insulated and high efficiency boilers, and much more, but the simplest and cheapest answer to this problem is insulation.

At a cost of less than 50 cents per foot, insulation for pipes is dirt cheap, and offers savings of approximately 50 dollars per year in utility costs for the average household in a temperate environment, and serves to reduce the likelihood of frozen pipes in the winter time.

But beyond finance, there is little better than having hot water immediately available when you turn on the tap.

Saving money is cool, but hot water is just so soothing that it's worth paying for, as my recent home depot receipts and electric bills will show.

Is the Secret to success as simple as waking up earlier?

I wake up every day at 4:00 AM sharp. Every morning, I rise, make myself food, and begin my day. However, I have recently come across a video concerning this kind of lifestyle, a TEDx Talk recorded from a presentation given by a man named Felipe Castro Matos. He decided to wake up earlier for 21 days, setting his alarm clock for 4:30 sharp, with the understanding that he would be building a new habit over the course of those three weeks.

And it took off.

Mr. Matos was featured on Business Insider, his story was publicized worldwide, and there have so far, as of March 27th 2016, been 1,884,404 views of his TEDx talk on Youtube (here is a link to his video, if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOEB1Fr0_MM ), but I think that his message has a good bit of wisdom in it.

You can set a goal of doing the things that you want or need to do, and you can actually accomplish them by making time for them. In my case, when I was a high performing student, worker, and member of society, I rose early to work on my assignments, get time to study and perform my various chores and duties before I had to commute to work, school or various meetings. Now, many years after I started waking this early, I can go exercise, work on my cooking and household tasks, write, read, keep up with my industrial education, and even indulge in leisure activities in the wee hours of the morning. The amazing thing is, waking up earlier rarely subtracts from your lifestyle, because you can always socialize in the early evening.

Whether you decide that you are going to wake up at 4:30, or at 4, or start walking every day, or pick up a hobby, you can follow up with the activities that you care about and make them part of your schedule, part of your lifestyle, and part of yourself. You can, as Mr. Matos was insightful enough to say, make all of the little things that you do each day positive, or at least make time for the positive things.

Getting Back Into Pinterest

I remember opening my Pinterest account.

It was another time, I lived in another state and had vastly different life goals. Most of what I pinned was in the form of an infographic or pulled directly from a blog or advertisement, and I was primarily interested in delicious food and high quality glassware.

All of my friends were using Pinterest to swap recipes and show off the pictures from their camera phones, and I was interested in getting involved with them, so I made my account and promptly forgot about it for several months.

In any case, I'm getting back into it with a quickness that I hadn't anticipated. So far I have reviewed a good number of my infographic pins, and a fair portion of the different kinds of tea that I like.

If you haven't looked into Pinterest lately, check it out and try to find something you like!

Cooking Up A turkey

I have a lot of little ways to save money, but one of my favorite is taking advantage of advertised deals and stretching out my savings.


I was able to purchase turkeys frozen after the winter holidays, and I am planning on roasting another one today. It has sat waiting in my freezer as I ate through frozen beef, discount chicken, and bags of frozen vegetables, and I am finally ready to cook it!


I have been keeping it in the refrigerator for several days now, and after just a few hours I will be able to carve out a great slice of turkey.

New Year, No Fear

We're into the year of 2016, and it's correspondingly time for all of us to make our New Year's Resolutions, give up on them, and reflect on our muddling around in the last 12 months.

I'm not going to do any of that here with you.

Instead, I'm just going to keep on updating my different sites with new content, and hopefully I'll be able to keep you guys and dolls reading for at least a little while.

Thanks for sticking around with me through 2015, and hopefully I'll have something interesting to show you this year.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get back to staring at the moon.

My Grocery Shopping Philosophy: How to Live Well on less than 100 dollars a Month

For the longest time, I've been spending much less on food than other people, but eating both a higher quality diet and enjoying the food that I eat. While I would attribute at least a portion of  this success to my character, I think that it might also have something to do with what I choose to eat and how I shop for food. I have been on a higher than average calorie diet in order to gain some weight, so keep in mind that I am not shopping to minimize calories, but rather to maximize nutritional value at a relatively low price.

It is also worth mentioning that there is a significant portion that could, in a crisis or if my circumstances changed, be reduced or removed from this spending plan without negatively impacting my health, but this is a comfortable way for me to shop for food without spending a great deal of time to do so.

I spend about 100 bucks on food for myself each month, and I'm finally gaining a little bit of weight.

I recommend getting in a good high fiber carbohydrate to use as your base for calories. I like to mix rice with beans, but potatoes are also a good base, and are quite economical. I actually recommend getting both potatoes and rice, since they are cheap and keep well. Oats are also nice.

Next up we should tackle vegetables. I don't know what you like, but you probably do. Buy those and cook them cheaply, by steaming or baking them until edible. I usually pick a price that I am willing to pay per pound or unit, and then only buy vegetables in amounts that I am definitely going to consume when under that unit price. In general, I get leafy vegetables and root vegetables of some kind every month.

Fruits are also subject to the unit price phenomenon. I like to buy under 1 dollar per pound for fruit, but for certain things I will go over that, like berries or dried fruit, either because I love them (dried fruit) or I can use them sparingly compared to other fruits (berries).

Meats are a great way to hit a number of nutritional goals and potentially gain weight, but there is a lot that you need to be concerned with when it comes to meat from both a procedural and a budgetary standpoint. Comfort with the supply chain that the meat takes from conception to the market, handling between your purchase and your storage, and processing in your home can be somewhat daunting, especially if you are not a confident cook or have some qualms with the current state of things. And on a purely budgetary basis, meats can be really expensive if you don't shop smart. I try to pay well under 5 dollars a pound per meat, and prefer to stay as close as possible to 1 dollar per pound. I like to buy chicken (bone in if possible, so that I can make soup), beef (also bone in if available, because marrow is delicious), and lamb (bone in if possible, which is almost all the time because I usually get lamb from an abattoir). If you watch for sales or have good relations with a slaughterhouse or butcher, meats are eventually available for around a dollar to three dollars per pound depending on the type of meat (chicken, beef, etc). That is when I stock up. Once I get meat home, I usually do one of a few things with it. I will either immediately put it into the refrigerator for use within the next 2-3 days (before the sell by date on the package), put it into the freezer for use within the next couple of months (food in the freezer is good for up to a year if processed correctly), or I will prepare it immediately for use that day. I like to poach or bake my meats, to ensure that they are thoroughly cooked.

Dairy is a great way to improve the variety of your meals, and add additional vitamins and minerals to your diet. I buy milk at its regular price, which is already pretty low considering that a gallon of milk is 3.7 liters and less than 4 dollars for me no matter where I shop. Cheese is pretty expensive, but if you use it sparingly it lasts for quite some time. I recommend being price conscious when buying any dairy other than milk though, because most other forms are ridiculously expensive.

I like to buy eggs, for several reasons. I enjoy using them to add additional protein and exciting textures to a dish, they are very quick and easy to cook (5 minutes or less, stovetop or microwave), and nutritionally they are quite valuable sources of essential B vitamins.

It is important to note, however, that fresh fruit, vegetables, and milk will usually not last a month in your home, so you might want to schedule several trips or buy more durable forms of those (dehydrated milk, dry fruit, frozen vegetables) to use after the fresh ones are consumed.

Taking the Fine Grained Approach to Budgeting Can Yield Fantastic Results

In the majority of the United States, minimum wage is about $7.25 per hour.

A person that makes this wage, working 40 hours a week, 4 weeks a month, with no taxes included, makes about $1,160 dollars every month.

In my current setting, I actually spend more than the gross income of a minimum wage worker every month, and I am considered frugal compared to most people living in the United states. As a result, I consider it well worth my time to manage my spending, since I have the potential to save just as much money as a minimum wage worker earns, every month, just by paying close attention to spending.

By taking the time to investigate the details of your expenses, you can identify higher value options, patterns of behavior that are likely to become destructive to your financial wellness, and opportunities to reduce expenses in a way to save the most money with the least effort.

For illustrative purposes, I will share three examples from my own recent budgeting efforts that highlight these principles.

Identifying Higher Value Options

As a creature of habit, I tend to like to cook certain things at certain times, and this manifests itself in my purchasing a number of staple groceries. One of the most highly acclaimed among them is the humble chicken egg, which I buy every week or two. After gathering price data over a few months, I found that eggs, when not on sale, are reliably 1-2 dollars cheaper at store A than they are at store B or store C for the number of eggs that I buy. Only buying eggs at store A results in monthly savings of 3-6 dollars, and offers virtually no opportunity cost since store A is collocated with stores B and C in the same complexes. I actually do the same math for all of my groceries, and as a result average slightly less than $1 per pound, on average, for all of the food that I buy.

Identifying Patterns of Destructive Behavior

If you are like me, you know the value of good habits, but you also can recognize the damage done by bad habits. Bad financial habits can eat deeply into your overall financial well-being, erode your savings, and lead to negative cash flow.
After I relocated to my current town, I rented a car to get around town. I quickly realized that I couldn't afford to continue to do so for even a single week without spending far too much money, so 16 hours after I rented that car I drove to the bus station and bought a bus pass. I ended up making it a 1 day rental, instead of the 7 that I had anticipated, and the savings financed 3 months worth of bus passes, three cab rides, a stay at the hotel, and my first month's utilities.

Keeping a close eye on the expenses of transport allowed me to save myself from the massive waste that I could have made of this resource.

Identifying Opportunities to Reduce Expenses

One of the most powerful means of taking control of your finances is minimizing your repeated expenses, which are more effectively visualized as annual or biannual costs instead of monthly costs.
I was looking at purchasing a car, and even though I would come out ahead on a financed vehicle in terms of resale value and operating expenses, the cost of insuring a financed car was well over four times the cost of insuring a cash purchase, which would obliterate not only the lower cost of operation but also any potential resale value if I kept the car for over two years.

It was (and is) actually much cheaper for me to purchase a car with high maintenance costs and low fuel efficiency, but cheaper insurance costs, than it is to purchase a car with no maintenance costs and high fuel efficiency.

Not only car insurance, but utilities, fuel, maintenance, mortgages, rental fees, cleaning services, and many other recurring expenses can be reduced or eliminated to reduce your expenses. You don't need to be a poorly dressed hobo shuffling down the street, but there is a tremendous comfort knowing that you have positive cash flow every week, month, and year.

I recently looked into the average cost of living in the city where I live, and on a monthly basis the average single person spends nearly twice as much as I do. The funny thing is, I'm looking to save even further!