A New Town, An Old Question: Where to live, and how to get around

I've recently relocated from my old home base to a new home base seveal thousand miles away, but I am presented yet again with the age old question of how to most efficiently and safely commute to work from where I live.

In the area I've moved to, it's quite common for people to ride bicycles everywhere, even moderate distances (which I consider to be 5 miles or more one way), or use ride sharing applications for trips that would usually require a bicycle trailer or car.

I located a place  to live within walking distance of my new office job, but I soon realized that the area that I had chosen was not very friendly to walk through at night, with many tales of crime, lots of gang activity, and a very large homeless population. It was impressed upon me that I did not want to walk much in my neighborhood, and lower rents were more attractive in other parts of town. So, I purchased a cheap, early model used car (2000 Mazda 626) for about 1600 dollars, paid some outstanding registration fees with the local state, and bought liability only car insurance.

After driving 3-5 miles per day for 3 months, I'm ready to move a little further from my workplace. I realize that this is likely to come at an additional commuting cost due to more driving, but I am at something of an impasse on this front. Even though my employer is willing to reimburse me for public transportation expenses, I would be unable to use public transit to go home from work due to my schedule, and living alone means that I would have no-one to pick me up if I took the bus or light rail to work. It is not really economically wise for me to take public transit to work, and then hire a ride share back home, not is it particularly wise for me to cycle in complete darkness to make my way back home. Thus, I will continue to car commute.

It's Tea Time

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter months carry many associated rituals, but among my most treasured is the preparation and consumption of warm beverages in copious amounts.

Something about the crisp chill and driven snow makes the diffuse heat of a cup of coffee, cocoa, broth, or tea a treasure. As an accompaniment into the cold or a warming welcome to the indoors, tea is particularly reminiscent of the winter months, and is built into many parts of my winter schedule.

For those of you more interested in the history of tea, there are more resources out there than I could name, but a great treatment has been prepared by a youtube China Scholar of the history of cultivation of Camellia sinensis, the tea tree.

Please enjoy the history of tea
In my opinion there is really nothing better than an on-demand water heater and a good supply of tea leaves. My personal preparation methods are a bit more mundane, involving a stove and saucepan, a liter flask, and a couple of cases of freeze dried ginseng and oolong tea.

Driving a Used Car makes me Hundreds of Dollars a year!

Driving a well-used car can sometimes be a pain. When looking over the costs of maintenance, the effort of repairs, and the inconvenience of arranging for the issues that can come with used cars, it can be tempting to think that it would possibly be cheaper just to buy a new car and not worry about maintenance or repairs.

However, driving a newer car comes with a requirement for comprehensive insurance if the car is financed, and if one chooses to drive with only liability insurance, exposes a more significant fraction of one's net worth than one might like to damage when driving around town, so even if owned outright comprehensive coverage is a good idea if the idea of replacing the car is unpalatable.

In my case, the purchase prices of used cars can be very low, but maintenance and repair expenses are higher, and the purchase price of a new car is much higher, and the cost of insurance is much greater as well.

I decided that, in the interests of personal finance, I would run the numbers with a few basic assumptions:
1. I will buy a used car and save money to repair or replace it on a monthly basis, which will be sufficient to repair or replace it.
2. If I were to buy a new car, I would get a $20,000 Honda Civic and either pay cash or finance it over 36 months
3. I am willing to invest the difference in price between the new car and the used car
4. Investments earn me 5% year over year, and I am able to invest the returns as well
5. If financed, I can pay 3,000 down and pay a rate of 3% compounded monthly
This last one isn't really an assumption, but it's important to note that I am not considering taxes or fuel efficiency

I looked at the costs to me over the course of 15 years of driving, and it was pretty clear that after 15 years or so I would have spent nearly the same amount buying, repairing, insuring and replacing used cars as I would have buying and insuring a new car, whether or not I financed it. The cumulative difference between buying used and new, regardless of financing, came out to be less than 2000 dollars after 15 years. However, the key in this case comes down to the opportunity costs of buying a new car. If invested, the difference in value of the new vs used cars would provide about 800 dollars of income (in the case of the cash purchase) or 696 dollars of income (in the case of the financed purchase) on average through all of this time. This means that the opportunity cost of buying a new car vs a used car is actually about $12,000 over the course of 15 years if one buys in cash, and $10,000 over 15 years if one financed.

Let me know if you guys are interested in seeing the actual charts and calculations, but I find that this is really compelling for me. Running the numbers really helps make things clear.

Every year that I keep on driving used cars and avoiding a new car, while sticking to my repair/replace budget, I can earn myself 690-800 dollars with the difference in price. In fact, my actual investing returns on about that much money were spot on in that range since this March, so I am really excited about this plan.

Used cars for the win!

The best part is, I can actually keep the majority of this amount in my IRA, and let the money grow tax free instead of paying taxes on the growth.

The only downside to this is that the concept doesn't work if you didn't have the ability to buy a new car in the first place. If the only money you have is enough to buy a used car, and you can't qualify for a loan for a new one, then you are going to be stuck with the higher maintenance and repair without the comfort of the income from the difference in new vs used.

Falling College Admissions is good for the economy?

I've been pretty tuned in to the news in recent days, and there are a lot of interesting headlines floating around right now July of 2016 has brought a number of troubling and controversial trends to light, from protests all across the United States, the declaration of political choices of the major parties for candidates for president, and all time highs in the US stock market to terrorist-style vehicle crashes in France. The most fascinating headline that floated over towards me in the past few days was the observation that college enrollment was declining in recent years, specifically at for-profit colleges, and specifically for programs focused on two year or shorter courses of study and tailored towards specific careers. Most of the students that had been attending these schools in pursuit of a new job had been on the whole older than the general college graduate, and had been motivated  to take additional coursework on because they were unable to progress in a rough job market without either additional training, certification, or potentially a complete re-training and a pivot into a different sector.

If the enrollments in these types of trade-focused schools is falling, this could mean that those careers are less attractive, which is a possibility, but it could also mean that there are many more opportunities available to people besides paying for two years of post high-school education to get a certificate.

I suppose that this would qualify as a curious case in macro-economics, as it is likely a net positive when people are going to school, getting extra skills, and then going out and applying those skills to help make the economy more efficient, but it is also a positive thing when there are opportunities available to people that allow them to earn a good income without the need for additional, lower efficiency educational programming right out of school, which would allow the people working at that for-profit college to go and produce work themselves.

What do you think? Should we consider falling enrollments a positive or negative sign for the economy? Is there an education bubble in the West right now?

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!