adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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deductioneers:

Amass Fuck-You Money

 

thejochiang:

Goals: amass fuckyou money

Forever reblog the mother goddess

 

brin-bellway:

(status: I acknowledge that this is psychological damage from an extended period of financial hardship during formative years, but I nonetheless mostly endorse it)

Hmm. I seem to be having a bunch of thoughts and feelings about this.

There seems to be a…maybe “divide” is too strong a word, I don’t know. But…like, I called it “fuck-you money vs fuck-me money” in a post a while back. Even when the actions are the same, there’s this psychological difference in how people can approach it.

When I see FIRE people, they always frame it in terms of *freedom*. (It’s right there in the acronym: Financially *Independent*, Retiring Early.) But to me, it strikes me as being a thing about *safety*. “Enough money that you can run your household solely off the interest from your investments” can protect you from a lot of different problems, and *that’s* why the idea appeals to me.

A few weeks ago I saw some distant acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance on Tumblr (I don’t recall who) advising a young person with a high-paying job and relatively low expenses (Silicon Valley programmer, I think, or something like that) to go on some trips and enjoy themself, because they weren’t going to have this much disposable income again until their forties if not later. And it felt like a very weird framing to me, because…the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.

16-year-old me got to eat because 7-year-old me’s dad put away some ““extra””, and eventually that ““extra”” was all he had left. Where is 33-year-old me getting *her* food from?

Because if the source isn’t me, then I don’t trust it to come through for her. I want to do all I can to make sure that, no matter who is or is not willing to employ her or for how much, 33-year-old me (and 44-year-old me, and 55-year-old me…) is fed and housed and so forth.

—

(This was going to be a tag ramble, but then I thought it should probably stay with the post if somebody reblogs it to respond or something. I’m just going to leave it in tag format.)

#this post probably partly inspired by my first anniversary of non-freelance employment   #which is coming up soon   #I think I will celebrate by scheduling the dental checkup I have been putting off for ~3 years because I didn’t feel I could afford it   #(yes government healthcare does not cover dental)   #(OHIP has some very weird-looking exceptions)   #(this is probably the result of some kind of complicated political negotiation that I’m not sure I want to know the details of)   #anyway a dental checkup seems like a good compromise between celebratory and practical   #(and [practical celebrations are easier to enjoy]/[I find myself drawn to practical gifts these days anyway including gifts I buy for myself])   #((that safety thing manifests here especially))   #((the things I dream of buying these days are always things that protect you from something))   #((checkups that protect you from tooth damage and electric cars that protect you from rising oil prices and solar-powered phone chargers that protect you from power outages))   #((this I am much less sure I endorse))   #((I mean I think it is good to want practical things but it would also probably be good if I felt safe enough to want a few non-practical things too))   #(((sometimes on especially bad brain days I can’t even bring myself to play Flight Rising)))   #(((that is currently the most common cause of my FR hiatuses)))   #(((it used to be the most common cause was that I felt like playing some other game instead)))

 

maryellencarter:

This is really interesting and I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I’m still not sure I actually have the brain to word everything I’m thinking/feeling about it, but here’s one bit, at least:

“the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.”

I think… there are two things I’m thinking here. One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves. This is almost certainly trauma-based – having enough money to eat has been a recurring theme in my life from the time I was very young, always coupled with inability to actually earn any money myself to buy any food. I’ve almost always been, and was *meant* to always be, dependent on somebody else to provide for me, and that has done Things to my wiring, which I don’t think I’m articulate enough to parse out right now.

(I think, at least partly… I’m not sure this even comes out in words, but I think there’s a thing I need to think at when I have words, which is that I – I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live. Like there’s a… you see posts about “you have rights as a worker, the company needs you, you have some control here”, etc etc, and I… can’t parse that? It fritzes me out. I can’t process the idea of me having any power in that equation. I’m supposed to only take what I get and be thankful they allow me to serve them. I think I see it as even more dysfunctional and abusive than how most workers in late-stage capitalism see it, and that makes it harder for me to deal with long-term. But that probably needs to be a post when I have slept recently.)

Where was I? Right. Tied into the same traumas is the – well, the brainwashing, that I eat Too Much. That no matter how little I eat, I have to eat less, because I am the Fat. (I’ve said this before, but my skeleton alone is probably hefty enough to play high school football. I’m never gonna be acceptably skinny, even if I literally starve to death.) So the… concept of feeding all my future selves, ties into that irrational belief – the idea that not only is it impossible to amass that much money under late-stage capitalism because the elder gods will not give it to me, but it’s impossible for there to *exist* enough money to feed all my future selves, because I’m like one of those entities in the one Norse myth. You know, the one where the cat was Jormungandr. Words aren’t wording and I can’t identify *which* entity; I feel like the logical one would be fire, the one that eats everything faster than anyone, but I keep thinking of the cup tied to the sea. But, I mean – am I making any sense? This irrational belief that no matter how much money I ever have, I will eat it all. (And that there will be other disasters, that I’ll always have to fix my car or buy new shoes or whatever, but fundamentally: that my needs are too much, that I’m too greedy, that no matter how much money there is, I will use it all up, because I am Bad and demanding and selfish and I take and take and take and never give. But also specifically that if I could eat, and I wasn’t forced to pinch pennies or count calories or be *controlled* somehow by people or circumstances, that I would literally never stop eating and I would eat and eat and eat all the food and all the money and use up all the resources and devour the world. Maybe *I’m* Jormungandr. ;P)

Uh. That… that turned into a thing. I really hope Tumblr doesn’t eat this. It hasn’t eaten any reblog posts I tried to make on my laptop *yet*, but I’m gonna copy it first anyway.

Anyway. All of that was approximately the first of the two things that I was trying to say here. The other one is, of course, that I also don’t actually believe in my future self existing. Any of my future selves. Again, it’s a trauma thing (obviously), but it doesn’t make it any less… convincing. It’s hard to feel like saving up to support my future self has any validity when I’m quite certain – not at all rationally, but still quite certain – that I’m gonna either keel over or kill myself sometime in the next few years. Or that somebody else will kill me. Something along those lines. “Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.

*sigh* I don’t even know if any of that made any sense. Basically I think it’s just a lot of irrational beliefs that I know are irrational but I can’t seem to uninstall them. But maybe writing them down will… help, at some point? Possibly?

>>One is, I don’t think I believe, subconsciously, that it’s *possible* to have enough money to feed all of my future selves.<<

Sometimes I try running some calculations regarding how much money my household would need in order to live off the interest, and depending on what assumptions I feed into the model I tend to get results in the 1 – 2 million USD range.

And on the one hand that’s a lot of money, but at the same time it’s not nearly as much money as I might have guessed off the top of my head. *And* that’s assuming the goal is to not–in an average year–have to touch the money originally invested at all, rather than merely having funds that aren’t due to run out until after dying of old age. (Brain: “The point is to *not* die; why would I make Plan A’s that rely on me dying at some point?”)

(Not to mention the various in-between consolation-prize states, in which one can cover a significant chunk of one’s expenses with interest and only needs to find a *little* work to cover the rest, which is not entirely safe but still quite an improvement.)

You might not find that sort of thing helpful yourself, but personally I find it reassuring to have a sense of the end goal. Even if I have a hard time believing I’ll ever actually have that kind of money, I like having an idea of what Enough money would look like, to help me know where I stand.

—

I was mostly using food as a metonym for necessities, but yeah, it does sound like you’ve got some food-specific brain issues.

(I have fairly low food needs myself, but that’s really just luck. Luck that I have a low metabolism, luck that when a nasty stomach bug in 2012 gave my gut flora a hard whack I found that afterwards my appetite now matched said metabolism rather than being slightly higher, luck that I live in a place where drinking water is extremely easy to source so that needing an extra 2 – 3 litres of water a day doesn’t cause more problems than needing less food prevents. (I don’t expect those things are *directly* related, but all bodies have their own quirks, and some circumstances are more amenable to some quirks than others.))

—

>>I don’t think I see working as me *earning money*. I think I see it as me doing what is incomprehensibly required by the eldritch deities that control whether I get to live.<<

I wonder if something like that isn’t more common than one might think, though maybe not to the same severity and…I think it’s particularly expected of *higher*-tier workers? Like, cubicle farmers and stuff. There is *some* room in the cultural consciousness for people scraping by on minimum wage to be displeased by having their hours cut, but people with a generally comfortable-in-the-medium-term paycheck are expected to have that mental disconnect between work and money, expected to desire to work as little as possible even when their pay is directly tied to how much they work. One is supposed to respond to the prospect of an additional day off with “Sweet, vacation!”, not “Damn, I wanted some more metaphorical acorns to squirrel away for later.”

(and even with low-tier stuff, I *still* sometimes get people expecting me to be pleased if one of my shifts gets removed from the schedule. even my own mother does this sometimes, and she *really* should know better.)

(And yeah, this is another financial aspect where I have the opposite psychological issues to you: I’m *acutely* aware of the connection between work and money. I still have a hard time believing that anyone is willing to pay me $14/hour just to do *this*, and I feel like I have to constantly justify my wage.

On the bright side, I think that *has* gotten me a niche in the employee schedule: slow times and times when he’s not *entirely* sure he needs an extra person on but the risk of being understaffed if he doesn’t is too great. My *top* speed is not very good, but my *average* speed can be quite competitive, because I keep looking for things to do long after everyone else has given up and started looking at stuff on their smartphones (or chatting to each other, or showing each other stuff on their smartphones). And if he puts me on and then finds out too late he didn’t need me after all, he gets a consolation prize of cleaner walls.)

—

>>“Sense of foreshortened future”, that one post called it. I died too young and now my brain can’t stop thinking I’m going to keep dying.<<

Reminds me of a conversation we had a while back regarding nausea, where the same basic impulse manifests in *your* brain as “I want to die” and in *my* brain as “I want to be temporarily unconscious; please wake me when this is over”.

Tags:

#…and now I’m late for bed #oops #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #disordered eating #abuse cw #suicide cw #death tw #long post #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

thejochiang:

deductioneers:

Amass Fuck-You Money

Goals: amass fuckyou money

Forever reblog the mother goddess

(status: I acknowledge that this is psychological damage from an extended period of financial hardship during formative years, but I nonetheless mostly endorse it)

Hmm. I seem to be having a bunch of thoughts and feelings about this.

There seems to be a…maybe “divide” is too strong a word, I don’t know. But…like, I called it “fuck-you money vs fuck-me money” in a post a while back. Even when the actions are the same, there’s this psychological difference in how people can approach it.

When I see FIRE people, they always frame it in terms of *freedom*. (It’s right there in the acronym: Financially *Independent*, Retiring Early.) But to me, it strikes me as being a thing about *safety*. “Enough money that you can run your household solely off the interest from your investments” can protect you from a lot of different problems, and *that’s* why the idea appeals to me.

A few weeks ago I saw some distant acquaintance-of-an-acquaintance on Tumblr (I don’t recall who) advising a young person with a high-paying job and relatively low expenses (Silicon Valley programmer, I think, or something like that) to go on some trips and enjoy themself, because they weren’t going to have this much disposable income again until their forties if not later. And it felt like a very weird framing to me, because…the way I see it, if future-me doesn’t have money to spare, then neither do I. I don’t have spare money unless I can afford to feed myself, and I can’t truly afford to feed myself unless I can afford to feed *all* of my selves.

16-year-old me got to eat because 7-year-old me’s dad put away some “”extra””, and eventually that “”extra”” was all he had left. Where is 33-year-old me getting *her* food from?

Because if the source isn’t me, then I don’t trust it to come through for her. I want to do all I can to make sure that, no matter who is or is not willing to employ her or for how much, 33-year-old me (and 44-year-old me, and 55-year-old me…) is fed and housed and so forth.

—

(This was going to be a tag ramble, but then I thought it should probably stay with the post if somebody reblogs it to respond or something. I’m just going to leave it in tag format.)

#this post probably partly inspired by my first anniversary of non-freelance employment   #which is coming up soon   #I think I will celebrate by scheduling the dental checkup I have been putting off for ~3 years because I didn’t feel I could afford it   #(yes government healthcare does not cover dental)   #(OHIP has some very weird-looking exceptions)   #(this is probably the result of some kind of complicated political negotiation that I’m not sure I want to know the details of)   #anyway a dental checkup seems like a good compromise between celebratory and practical   #(and [practical celebrations are easier to enjoy]/[I find myself drawn to practical gifts these days anyway including gifts I buy for myself])   #((that safety thing manifests here especially))   #((the things I dream of buying these days are always things that protect you from something))   #((checkups that protect you from tooth damage and electric cars that protect you from rising oil prices and solar-powered phone chargers that protect you from power outages))   #((this I am much less sure I endorse))   #((I mean I think it is good to want practical things but it would also probably be good if I felt safe enough to want a few non-practical things too))   #(((sometimes on especially bad brain days I can’t even bring myself to play Flight Rising)))   #(((that is currently the most common cause of my FR hiatuses)))   #(((it used to be the most common cause was that I felt like playing some other game instead)))

Tags:

#tag rambles #adventures in human capitalism #this should probably have some warning tag but I am not sure what #I will put this in the tags though: #I was reading my Tumblr archive recently and *damn* 2014!me was having a hard time #she didn’t talk about it much in public but occasionally she couldn’t quite hold it in anymore and it leaked out into a post #I felt very sorry for her #basically what I’m saying is #hi 2022!me #I hope you’re in a good enough position that you can feel sorry for me rather than going ”yeah I still know that feel” #(but if so please do still provide for farther-future!us) #(just with a healthier frame of mind) #(maybe buy solar chargers *and* video games) #in which Brin has a job #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

moral-autism:

moral-autism:

moral-autism:

moral-autism:

Laptop is in the shop almost certainly overnight at least. I can’t find the power cable for my old 2010 one. I probably can’t set up my Raspberry Pi, I know I don’t have the right adapter for it because I broke it. I might be able to use someone’s old AlphaSmart?

Laptop still in shop. I should get info tomorrow at least, emails say I’ll be called after 48 hours. I forgot to ask about the AlphaSmart.

Honestly I think the amount of stuff I’ve done and the fact that I have had chunks of happiness over the past several days and not injured myself at all is really suggestive of a lot of mental health improvement. Maybe it’s experiences, maybe it’s having more produce and sardines, but something’s working.

This is still really difficult for me, though.

Update: Apple called this morning to say that I have a hard drive problem (that affects booting from USBs and persists when the drive is wiped, yet doesn’t present any issues when copying files off the drive? seems unlikely) or a motherboard problem. Apple wanted to charge $475 to fix it, which I declined.

I was able to install Xubuntu on it from USB, and it is “working”, in that it still can’t talk to the battery at all and that it seems to freeze sometimes. I’ll probably try to transfer files later today. I am still overall dissatisfied with this state of affairs, though.

I am happy that I have a computer right now, but this does create a bit of a dilemma. I’m not sure I can justify replacing this computer just because I want to play some video games without Linux support and be able to see how charged my battery is. I guess this might get worse in the future, which might also justify replacing it. I sure don’t know how to replace a motherboard myself, and it sounds like a huge pain.

Laptop status update:

  • It gets completely nonresponsive and requires a forced shutdown sometimes more than once daily
  • Still doesn’t show the battery level (acpi won’t work)
  • Sleep/wake issues, does not travel well (overheats in bag)
  • Cannot shut down properly

I also still haven’t put my files on this thing. “Mount a 200GB disk image, on an HFS-formatted drive, of an Ext4 partition with logical volume management, and then figure out how to decrypt an encrypted user folder, with the password but without being able to log into it” is something which sounds like it should be technically feasible but also kind of sounds like a nightmare, and I have a feeling that my current computer setup is really not my long-term setup. I can get files from SpiderOak but that will take a while and they won’t be as recent.

What’s going on with the disk image was that booting up my computer in Target Disk Mode and getting the data off of it, using a connected Mac, was such that I couldn’t mount or even really properly interpret a partition with logical volume management, so I just frickin’ copied the whole thing. Yadda yadda I should make more frequent cloud backups or actually figure out how to do regular nice usable backups to a drive or both. At least I have the files. Probably.

I will apparently have some support in repairing or replacing this machine, which biases me towards doing so. Also, I’ll want to use it for taking lecture notes and other time-sensitive outside-the-home uses, so freezing and being a pain to store while asleep are problematic. If I repair it, I’m pretty sure it needs a logic board replacement which I would really rather not do myself. (I don’t have the right screwdrivers, a good workspace, etc.) If I replace it, I should probably replace it with a Windows machine, because the only times I’ve used OSX recently have been gaming and taking the easy route in dealing with printers/scanners.

I don’t know much about shopping for non-Macs or using whatever the latest version of Windows is. Every time I interact with recent proprietary operating systems I do get the vague feeling that they are tending in a direction my computer is not, such that my experience with Windows XP and 2016-and-previous versions of OSX won’t necessarily generalize.

If anyone has advice on any of the above, let me know.

For replacement laptops, eBay is great, especially for people located in the United States. The laptop I am typing this on, which I recently bought from one of the refurbished-laptop stores that sell through eBay, was USD$300 *after* international shipping and import taxes. For an American, it would have been around USD$250.

My usual strategy for laptop buying is “get the best PC USD$300 can buy”. I generally find laptops at that price point strike a good balance between “cheap” and “will keep pace with my needs for the approximately three years it takes for a used laptop to die of old age anyway” ; if you need more from a laptop than I do, you may need a higher budget.

You might not need me to tell you this, but make sure you know what kind of specs you need in a computer (RAM quantity, storage space, number of CPUs, dedicated vs basic graphics, etc), and add a little to leave room to grow. When searching, keep an eye out for laptops that have been discounted because they have problems in areas you don’t care about or are willing to live with: my previous laptop was unusually cheap because it was incapable of standby and took several minutes to come out of hibernation, which was pretty easy to adapt to for someone with my usage pattern.

Since I only just got a Windows 10 machine yesterday, I can’t say much about it. I *can* say that I’m pretty much just keeping that partition around for gaming, and intend to continue using Ubuntu for my primary OS.

—

Rather than a dedicated backup drive, I just keep a full copy of my files on my smartphone [link], where they are readily accessible and can in fact–in most cases–be accessed directly from the drive itself. I gather that a lot of people have too much data to pull that method off easily, but even if you can’t do it *yet*, maybe keep it in mind for if/when the progression of smartphones’ increasing storage space catches up to your needs.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #home of the brave #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(that is a category tag; I actually own four right now) #(it’ll drop to three probably-tonight when I give Dad my old laptop to replace his broken one) #(and I haven’t yet had a chance to sell off my old smartphone but I still plan to) #(morning edit: I think it probably qualifies for this tag too:) #adventures in human capitalism

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Anonymous asked: Do you think the age to be an adult should be lowered from 18?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

theunitofcaring:

I think we probably shouldn’t primarily be using a discrete legal category of ‘adult’, and should try to transfer each right to people at the point where the coercion made possible by denying them that right is worse than the harm they can do with it. So the voting age should be a lot younger, the driving age probably shouldn’t be, teenagers should be allowed to sign a lease or check into a hotel, you should absolutely never get charged with sex crimes for taking naked pictures of yourself. 

And then in other areas we’re wading into some serious competing access needs. I’m one of those kids who really benefitted from having to interact with zero sexual content until I was 18, and I actually found sex-ed in middle school and high school mildly traumatic because it was giving me information about sex which I did not want to know and wasn’t allowed to opt out of knowing. But sex ed is still really important. I suspect lots of rights-and-access-for-teenagers runs into stuff like that, where some kids genuinely do benefit from being prohibited because they wouldn’t be good at opting out on their own, while other kids really need it. I don’t know exactly how to navigate those. I suspect in general we’re currently erring too far on the paternalistic side.

Here in Ontario, we have a little more progress towards having a staggered adulthood, though I’m sure we have a long ways to go and some of the unlocks might not be in the right places.

That one news story that was all over the place a few years ago, a 17-year-old who tried to refuse cancer treatment and the hospital forced her to take it anyway, is *extra* horrifying if you live in a jurisdiction where the age of medical consent is 16.

(it is a little weird that you can legally consent to *prescription* mind-altering drugs three years before you can consent to *recreational* mind-altering drugs†, though I am aware there exist ethical frameworks in which that makes sense)

I’m not very clear on what exactly legally happens at 17, but I do know my 17th birthday was when our bank started bugging me to take control of the investments my father held on my behalf. (I was, however, allowed to keep my youth bank account until my *19th* birthday (at which point it was transmuted into an adult chequing account).)

(Other banking note: when I first signed up for that youth account at 13, I was immediately offered a debit card, albeit with a pretty low withdrawal limit (a maximum of $100 in purchases and $20 in ATM withdrawals per day, IIRC). I just went and looked at the fine print on youth accounts, and there is no mention of a minimum age for debit cards. It seems doubtful that they would actually give a debit card to, say, a five-year-old if the parents said no, and presumably there’s *some* age before which you need parental permission and after which you don’t. (my parents said yes to the card at 13, so I did not test it then)

The youth account I had at an American bank from age ~6 – 13 did not give me a debit card, though now I wonder if they would have if I had thought to request one and my parents had signed off on it.)

I’d never really thought about it before, but I find that the idea of having a minimum age to check into a hotel feels intuitively nonsensical when I consider it. (I mean, we probably do have one, and I never tried to test it, and maybe there’s some non-obvious reason why it’s a good idea, but) My brain just goes “We serve unattended children at work all the time; why should a hotel clerk respond differently from a fast-food maker? If you’re capable of showing up, communicating your request for purchase, and giving the cashier enough money, and you would be legally allowed to have the thing if somebody else had gifted it to you, then you are old enough to buy the thing.”

P.S. Okay, I went and Googled it and apparently hotel rooms are a little like sex, in that it’s kind of 16 and kind of 18 depending mostly on who you can talk into what. [http://hotelassociation.ca/pdf/Renting%20Hotel%20Rooms%20to%20Minors.pdf] Note, however, that it appears to be *much* harder for a 16-year-old to talk the higher-ups into letting them have a hotel room than into letting them have a sexual partner. A 16-year-old is assumed capable of consenting to sex unless somebody can come up with a good enough reason why not [http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/faq-age-of-consent-law-canada-1.3851507], and assumed incapable of consenting to a hotel room unless they can come up with a good enough reason why. (and a 14- or even 12-year-old can sometimes be allowed to have sex under the right circumstances, and never allowed to get a hotel room)

(How much you want to bet that nobody involved in deciding what any of the ages in the above paragraph should be directly compared the two acts? made any attempt to ensure we didn’t end up with stricter standards for a smaller deal?)

—

†Alcohol, tobacco, and–soon–marijuana [https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/pm-trudeau-says-cannabis-will-be-legal-in-canada-on-oct-17-1.3981228] are all at age 19 in Ontario.

Tags:

#reblogged from a person who’d reblogged it to avoid the first-degree-ask bug #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #my childhood #medical abuse mention #nsfw text?

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Swagging in Canada

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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{{Title link: https://swaggingincanada.blogspot.com/ }}

brin-bellway:

Mom asked me to help spread the word about her new website, so here it is!

It’s a guide to earning supplemental income through Swagbucks (a site I previously mentioned in this post, though not by name). It’s got some pretty good tips, and while it’s aimed at Canadians, some of it still applies elsewhere.

(Fun fact: between the three of us who use it, we got about $1,500 from Swagbucks last year.)

Tags:

#weekend reblog #signal boost

Swagging in Canada

Link ~ ~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{Title link: https://swaggingincanada.blogspot.com/ }}

Mom asked me to help spread the word about her new website, so here it is!

It’s a guide to earning supplemental income through Swagbucks (a site I previously mentioned in this post, though not by name). It’s got some pretty good tips, and while it’s aimed at Canadians, some of it still applies elsewhere.

(Fun fact: between the three of us who use it, we got about $1,500 from Swagbucks last year.)

Tags:

#she’s excited about making her own website #oh look an original post #adventures in human capitalism #signal boost #our home and cherished land

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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justice-turtle:

You know, as long as I’m thinking about it, let’s run the numbers here, maybe y’all can point out some things I’m overlooking that would make living either more or less expensive than I’m estimating.

Keep reading

>>Depending on what kind of deal I could get on my internet service, it could cost anywhere from $50-$100 a month.<<

…holy shit, I thought paying USD$80 for four people was bad. (I mean, it kind of *is* bad, I’m pretty sure we could save a couple dozen dollars a month if we hadn’t gone and locked ourselves into these guys’ email-address system. We were all young and foolish once.)

>>estimate that everybody’s car drives at least 15k miles a year<<

That’s approximately 40 miles/day on average (including weekends). Does that seem like a reasonable assessment of what a job-having!you is likely to need? It seems kind of high to me; maybe USAA is assuming a pretty long commute?

(Would it be feasible for you to pull your actual figures from when you were a call-center worker by looking at old bank records and such? My own estimates of what my family is likely to spend in the future always start with a baseline of what we actually spent in previous years. I have Google Sheets breaking down our expenses (and incomes) for each of 2016, 2017, and 2018 (updated quarterly) by category.)

>>And iirc my grandfather used to say that you should budget as much for car repairs / maintenance as you do for petrol<<

Mind you, petrol was rather cheaper in your grandfather’s day. I don’t know about you, but our car-repair cost in 2017 equalled 55% of our petrol cost.

>>Meat is fucking expensive, okay? :P<<

It occurs to me that you, too, have a generally cheaper country to the south, not so far away. Can you pull any New-York-style exploitation of cost-of-living differences in Mexico? It’d be pretty bargain-hunty, but I seem to recall you once went to a Mexican dentist to save money, so there’s some precedent. (There are extra language-barrier and border-security issues compared to Canada-to-America cost-of-living tricks, though. Not sure how big those effects are.)

For smaller-scale bargain-hunting, you can try checking around to see if there are any little butchers or anything that sell meat cheaper than your usual grocery chains. The cheapest meat seller in this county (that I know of) is a non-chain grocery store that we overlooked for ages until a friend told us about how cheap their steaks were.

Also, did you get that PM I sent you a while back about how to use Amazon credit at Safeway?

(The offer to sell you Amazon credit at 10% off is still open, if you ever want. Conversion-via-electronics is workable, but it’s a pain and it means the 10% lost goes to some random person on Craigslist. You could pay in USD and I’d deal with the currency-conversion issues myself (and maybe figure out a trick that’ll let me funnel it directly to New York trips and never pay any conversion fees at all; still working on that).)

I also keep a spreadsheet of food prices expressed in cents-per-calorie. Some of them are much cheaper than I expected, notably peanut butter (as cheap as ramen!) and bananas. Plus, even when you’re specifically looking for meat, there’s a lot of price spread between different meats. (Mom occasionally says stuff about not really being able to afford a diabetic-friendly diet, and I always tell her there’s still *relative* cheapness to be found even within medical restrictions. If she thinks she ought to spend less on food, she can replace some of her canned tuna with (non-canned) chicken (which costs half as much).) I can’t be too specific without more knowledge of your own local food prices than I have, but some things to keep in mind.

>>Do any of you know what one normally spends on this sort of thing?<<

I don’t. My expense-tracking spreadsheets work at the granularity of a transaction, which means most sundries get lumped in with groceries under “things bought at grocery stores”.

>>I am reluctant to switch too much up on that, as due to some interesting bits of luck, I am currently month-to-month rather than on a contract.<<

Is that difficult to come by in America? (And here they told me Canada had some of the worst cell plans out there, far worse than America.)

Recently I systematically went through every cell brand with coverage in this area and compared their plans (all of them had no-contract options, though they weren’t always front-and-centre), which is why I was able to find Dad a $40/month plan big enough to cover his work needs. The main thing I learned was to *never ever* buy from a flagship brand: buy from a little reseller or offshoot brand instead. (Holy shit, do the Big Three ever overcharge on their flagship-brand plans.) But, again, the Canadian cell-plan situation is famously weird, so I don’t really know what Arizona is like with that.

How much mobile data do you have? How much do you need? How much data can you offload onto non-mobile-data versions of the same thing? (…she says, as someone who carries an offline copy of Wikipedia with her at all times and has memorised the location and size of every public Wi-Fi hotspot within walking distance†.) Can you arrange to downgrade? (I know you need some mobile data for mental-health reasons, but like with Mom eating chicken instead of fish, sometimes there’s still room to do less-expensive versions of a necessary expensive thing.)

>>Laundry. Roughly $5 a week at the laundromat for one large load of laundry. This covers the amount of laundry I generate, which I know because my aunt hauls me to the laundromat every week. Still, it adds up; $260 a year for laundry, not counting detergent (which goes under Sundries). *sigh*<<

Does that mean it’s safe to assume the Hypothetical Apartment won’t come with a washing machine and dryer? I’ve always had a washing machine and dryer in my house, so I have no idea how to optimise laundromat usage. (My laundry optimisation looks like “run the machine during off-peak hours to reduce its electricity cost”.)

>>Clothes. Once again I haven’t the faintest notion how much these actually cost.<<

I haven’t bought much in the way of new clothes since I started keeping track of expenses (I haven’t finished wearing out all my clothes from before), so neither do I. When I do buy clothes these days, I generally buy from thrift stores, but I suspect you’d have a lot of trouble trying to find anything there in your size.

(Mom is somewhere around your size, and she managed to get a 50%-off birthday coupon from a Canadian plus-size clothing chain after signing up for their mailing list.)

You could really do with some housemates who don’t suck so you could get some bulk discounts happening, but if that were actionable advice you’d probably have done it already.

*hugs*

—

†And keeps being surprised and kind of horrified by how little attention her offline friends and acquaintances pay to minimising their data usage. (Do you know how many people I’ve met at Wi-Fi-blanketed Pokemon gyms who *didn’t know* they were in a Wi-Fi zone? (No wonder they’d been so surprised when I told them I was able to play Pokemon Go 1 – 2 hours/day on a 100 MB/month plan.) Do you know I once had a friend burn through her entire month’s allotment in four days, and she neither knew nor cared why?)

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~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

justice-turtle:

justice-turtle:

Yeah, I’ve just now run the numbers and in order to support myself on minimum wage without any roommates or government assistance, I would need to work full time and also quit karate. (At $99 a month, karate is quite a lot of money.)

Part of that is that y’all are splitting both rent and working hours among a whole family. Part of it may or may not be your part of Canada having a different minimum wage compared to cost of living, I haven’t looked up that part. (Arizona’s minimum wage is $10.50 USD an hour, which is A Lot compared to the federal minimum wage of $7.25 USD, but for comparison a one-bedroom apartment is about $500 a month plus utilities.)

Part of it is definitely that feeling Poor – bargain-hunting, cooking scratch meals, fiddling with threadbare or only-semi-working possessions, inability to afford a few shinies – stresses me out more than the extra spoon expenditure warrants, and (it’s my impression) way more than it does you. That’s a psychological flip that happened during / due to the Remodel of Doom; there’ll probably be a separate post on that at some point. Tumblr tends to eat mobile photo posts with a lot of text, so I’m gonna go ahead and post this before it gets too long.

Oh – yeah, Uber/Lyft is off the table for a few reasons. My car is extremely elderly (1996 model year), I don’t live in a large enough metropolitan area that anybody local actually uses those services, and I really strongly dislike having anyone else in my car – it’s the only space where I actually feel safe and in control, and having other people in it shorts that out. :P So, yeah.

Yeah, I can think of some reasons why I’m in a much better position to live cheaply than most people:

  • Four adults, zero children. Both halves of that are pretty huge, I expect.
  • Because we used to be a lot richer than we are now, we were able to end up in a situation where we rent from a mortgage company† instead of a landlord, which costs about half as much as the going rate for a local house of this size (~$800/month instead of ~$1,600).
  • While there *were* children in the household when we moved in, they were homeschooled and expected to (and did) remain so, so school district was not really a factor in the housing decision. (Apparently competition over good school districts drives up the price of housing a lot? So I’m told, anyway.) (I honestly don’t even know what our school district’s reputation is.)
  • I walk to work and my parents carpool with each other, so there are only two cars’ worth of commute expenses for four people.
  • No student loans. We paid for Brother’s culinary school out of pocket, and we’re currently paying for my university out of pocket (a mix of my wages and the mutual fund my relatives gave me as a baby for my education). I don’t really think of student loans as an option: if I ever reach a point where I can’t scrape together $820 for a university course††, I’ll stop going until and unless I can afford it again.
  • 2 – 4 times a year, we drive to New York, exploit their lower cost of living (and the fact that we still have enough savings between us to do things like “spend $800 in one day to avoid spending $1,400 over four months”) to stock up on cheap groceries, drive back, and store the cold items in our three freezers.
  • The medication assistance program caps our prescription expenses at 4% of our income, IIRC. Not going to be nearly as useful now that we’re making more, though. (Note: currently, only my parents have chronic prescriptions.)
  • (However, we don’t have food stamps, because those aren’t really a thing here.)
  • The foods I genuinely enjoy and want to eat frequently mostly happen to be cheap, plus I have a low metabolism (and an appetite to match). (This might be cancelled out by Mom being diabetic, so having to eat a fairly expensive diet for health reasons.)
  • I continue to not have a cell plan, and everyone else is on light-use $100/year plans. (Dad’s going to have to upgrade soon to a $40/month plan, though, because he’s now using his phone a lot for work.)
  • Apparently we use very little water? I wouldn’t have thought so, but we got a pamphlet from the county government a while back talking about how to use less water, and when we compared their figures to ours we found that we use *half* as much water as the average *three*-person household. I’m not sure what’s going on there.
  • Plus, you know, free healthcare in most aspects. The usual counter is “oh, you’re still paying health insurance, it’s just integrated into your taxes”, but we paid, like, negative three thousand dollars in taxes last year, so.
  • Probably other stuff I don’t even realise.

—

The minimum wage here is currently CAD$14/hour (theoretically USD$10.75, if you completely ignore cost of living and just do a straight exchange-rate), but I don’t know if that actually means much in practice, or if the prices just change to compensate, or what. (Mind you, the prices in *New York* grocery stores probably wouldn’t change to compensate for a high Ontario wage, would they…)

—

(While some of these are dwindling-savings!poor vs paycheck-to-paycheck!poor, there are still things that would save money in the long run that we don’t have enough savings to pull off. Personally, I dream of one day being able to afford a plug-in hybrid car. They cost like $20k (*maybe* $13k if you can find a used one), but *damn* are they cheap to run (especially in an area with cheap electricity and expensive gasoline†††, as we are).)

—

>>feeling Poor […] stresses me out more than the extra spoon expenditure warrants, and (it’s my impression) way more than it does you.<<

Yeah, seems like it.

Relatedly: I hear sometimes about this placebo-effect-type thing where people enjoy food more if it’s (or they believe it to be) expensive? I think I have the opposite of that: I enjoy food more if it’s cheap. Peanut butter is already pretty tasty in isolation, but its tastiness is enhanced by the comfortable knowledge that this was a *fantastic* use of fifteen cents. Whereas I have trouble fully enjoying restaurant food, because there’s a part of me wondering if it’s really possible for any food to be worth this much when there are all these good cheap foods out there.

—

The other-people-in-your-car thing wouldn’t prevent freelance food-delivery, which is why I was thinking Uber Eats. The elderly-car thing probably would, though, as would the small-population thing. (There are definitely advantages to living in a county of 600k.)

—

I’ll go look at your number-crunching and see if I can find anything.

—

†Interest-only payments on a *very* large amount of house debt. I think it’s pretty fair to characterise this as “renting from a mortgage company” for most purposes, though it also comes with better tenants’ rights.

††That might be a factor in itself. I’ve definitely known people who were paying a lot more than that per course.

†††Although not quite as expensive as I thought; I think I wasn’t fully factoring in the exchange rate, and the thing where a gallon is a bit *less* than four litres (so multiplying a per-litre price by four gives you an overestimate of the per-gallon price). WolframAlpha says the figure at the local gas station translates to USD$3.75/gallon.

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~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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brin-bellway:

Relatedly:

Keep reading

Update: as of today, all three of these problems are gone.

* Last summer, a guy I bumped into at a Pokemon gym inducted me into the local raid-coordination chat. I’m still pretty bad at actually *catching* them, but I’ve made it to the catch screen a fair number of times (and got some TMs!), and I did get an Arcanine.

* Today I checked the Discovery Channel website just in case things had improved, and they *had*: it looks like they’ve gone back to ad-supported streaming, and no longer require a TV subscription. I watched Daily Planet today, for the first time in about a year!

* Learned last autumn that I could indirectly sell Amazon credit (taking roughly as much loss as I’d expected to take selling directly) by buying electronics on Amazon and then immediately turning around and selling them on eBay/Craigslist/suchlike. Still not as good as extracting the full value from the credit, but it’s something. (and they continue to expand their gift-card section! still have hope for eventual Wegmans! *crosses fingers*)

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How to credit card

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

serinemolecule:

spiralingintocontrol:

serinemolecule:

Using a credit card is like paying with cash, except you also get free money and other benefits.

“But Serine, there’s no such thing as a free lunch! [1] Where does the money come from?”

I’m glad you asked. When you buy something with cash, the seller gets 100% of what you pay. When you use a credit card, the seller gets around 97% of what you pay, and the companies involved in handling the payment get around 3%. [2] This includes the credit card company, which is very willing to give you money and other benefits if you choose them to get the rest of that 3%. [3]

Sellers are willing to give up 3% because handling credit cards is so much easier than cash. You don’t have to count change, and you have a computer record of who paid how much, so it’s easy to figure out who’s lying when the customer said they paid. Not to mention it eliminates the problem of cashiers stealing money by pocketing customers’ money [4]. Also not to mention the store wants the customer to be happy (happy customers spend more) (customers hate having to pay a fee to use a credit card).

Anyway, in the general case, credit cards are basically always a good thing, and you should basically always use them. [5]

When not to credit card

If you are irresponsible with money, and are afraid you will spend more money than you have, you should not use a credit card. Never carry a balance on a credit card (pay off less than the total amount you owe), it piles up and ruins your life. You should spend money on getting things you want, not on paying off interest.

What benefits you get from using credit cards

Most credit cards will give you 1%-2% cash back (for each dollar you spend, you get a certain percentage back in free money).

Basically all credit cards give you the ability to chargeback. This means that if some business steals your money (charges you more than you owe, etc) and you can prove it, you can call the credit card company and tell them to take your money back. Note that this is a last resort (only to be used after you contact the business and they don’t give you your money back), and will generally result in the business completely cutting off contact with you (for instance, if you chargeback Steam, you’ll lose access to all your Steam games etc).

Credit cards also act as a short-term loan. If you ever need a payday loan, a credit card will give you significantly less interest than an actual payday loan. You never want a credit card as a long-term loan (the rates are horrible), but they actually give you close to the best possible rate for a short-term loan. Just remember that debt is evil and never to fall into it.

Other benefits vary wildly and are specific to the card, but common benefits include various forms of insurance (car insurance on any rental car you rent with the credit card, warranty on anything you buy, etc).

Which card to get

It’s actually really easy to choose a credit card. If you’re in the US, here is Serine’s One-Step Guide:

Do you spend more than $2500 per year in travel (hotels, flights, Ubers, etc) and restaurants?

– No -> Get the Citi DoubleCash

– Yes -> Get the Chase Sapphire Reserve

In some extremely obscure situations, you might want other cards, but I’ll cover those after I cover these two cards.

The Citi DoubleCash

The Citi DoubleCash has no yearly fee, and gives you 2% cash back, effectively. This makes it better in every way than most other cards.

Some cards give 1% cash back and a rotating 5% category. They will give you a headache trying to optimize them and you will still get less money back compared to the Citi DoubleCash, in the end.

Some cards give you points that you can spend using a complicated procedure, which will be worth approximately 2% if you can spend them perfectly. Just use the Citi DoubleCash, and skip the complicated procedure.

The Chase Sapphire Reserve

The Chase Sapphire Reserve has a $450 yearly fee, and gives a huge number of benefits that are totally worth it if you spend a decent amount of money. Also it looks really cool because it’s metal and black. [6]

It comes with $300 of travel credit per year, which you can blow through in, like, a single flight, or like a few days of hotel, or like a normal amount of Ubering (anyone who’s even considering this card should have no problem spending that much). So the yearly fee is effectively $150.

It gives you 3 points per dollar on travel and restaurants, and 1 point per dollar on anything else. “Points” can and should be converted to frequent flyer miles, at which point they’re worth 2-4 cents each if you put them towards international flights, especially international first-class flights.

It also comes with a pile of side-benefits, like free Priority Pass membership (gives access to a bunch of airport lounges), and free TSA Global Entry (lets you basically skip airport security and customs).

Assuming you spend enough and you’re willing to spend the effort optimizing flyer miles, it basically pays for itself and the other benefits are free.

Honorable Mention: The AmEx Platinum

I know I didn’t mention the AmEx Platinum at all, but if you have lots of money and want the best benefits on a card (or you take a lot of flights), the AmEx Platinum is probably the card for you.

The AmEx Platinum costs $550 per year, and is a luxury card pretty similar to the Chase Sapphire Reserve. Its biggest advantage is that it has much better airport lounge coverage in the US.

Priority Pass (which comes with both the Chase and the AmEx) gives you lounge access for most international flights, but the AmEx Platinum also gives you lounge access for US domestic flights.

It gives 5 points/dollar for airfare and AmEx Travel hotel purchases, and 1 point/dollar for other purchases, and its points can also be turned into flyer miles.

Other advantages include Gold membership status at Hilton, Marriott, Starwood, and Ritz-Carlton hotels. Mostly this means guaranteed late-checkout at all of those except Hilton, and, like, free bottled water sometimes.

Instead of the $300 travel credit, though, the Platinum has a $200 airline fee credit (abusable to buy gift cards) and a $200 Uber credit (spread out across 12 months, so hard to maximize unless you use Uber all the time). It’s harder to max these out, but if you do, it’s also effectively $150/year.

Overall, the main reason you’d actually want the Platinum over the Sapphire Reserve is if you fly a lot in the US and really want the additional airport lounges.

Extremely obscure situations

So the most common one is: If you have a ton of free time and spend a decent amount of money, you might be interested in churning. I don’t really want anything to do with churning so you’re going to have to learn how to do it from someone else (google it, I guess).

If you travel internationally, be aware that the Citi DoubleCash has a foreign transaction fee. It’s still worth it (2%, which is still less than the fee you’ll be charged by most money exchangers – Wells Fargo takes like 5%), but it’s also not very hard to just get a credit card that doesn’t have that fee. The Amazon Prime card and the Costco credit card are good options (these two are pretty good cards to have in general, honestly; they have no yearly fee and a few specific uses, just don’t use them as your main card because they don’t have the 2% base rate the DoubleCash has).

That’s it

I haven’t actually taught you how to spend money wisely (maybe that’ll be a different post), but at least you can get more value out of the money you do spend now.

[1] In a way, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but in a way, there totally is. Like, think about breathing (but not too hard – I don’t want you to start manually breathing – …I’m sorry). There are some minor trade-offs (you have to use energy) and situations where you shouldn’t (do not breathe while underwater unless you have special equipment) but overall, it’s basically always correct to choose “breathing” over “not breathing”.

[2] The 3%ish is split kind of complicatedly, in terms of who gets what. The credit card company definitely gets most of it, though.

[3] And also to get your late payment fees and interest and stuff, but honestly, credit card rewards come out of the processing fee.

[4] It’s easiest for cashiers to steal money if you’re selling something hard to track, like french fries. A cashier can give a customer some french fries, pocket the customer’s money, and the store owner would never know. This is why a lot of fast food places say “free food if we don’t give you a receipt”. The receipt makes sure the cashier gives the store owner the money.

[5] Some stores don’t accept credit cards. These are very very rare in the US, and mostly restricted to, like, certain vending machines, and tiny stores that hate the 3% transaction fee. Also, a lot of service workers prefer you to tip in cash, because that makes tax evasion easier (it’s up to you whether you consider this a good thing or a bad thing).

[6] You can tell people it’s “the black card” and they’ll totally believe you (it’s not) (also remember to tell them you were joking about it being “the black card”; you don’t want to be that asshole who lies about dumb stuff like this).

Interesting! On a politics note, I will say that at least some of the “free money” you get from credit cards comes from secretly skimming off of everyone else: Credit card companies generally prohibit stores from charging more to credit card users, which means the fees have to be spread out over everyone by increasing prices slightly on average.

Maybe I should get the Chase Sapphire Reserve… I travel a lot…

I didn’t go over that part, because opinions are kind of mixed on whether or not handling cash or handling credit cards is actually more expensive, after all the fees and costs and varying levels of theft.

Like, fraud costs, miscounting money, etc are a lot lower with credit cards, so who is really skimming off whom?

(Empirically, though, mom-and-pop small businesses seem to prefer cash, so feel free to use cash at those places, if it makes you feel better.)

Tags:

#interesting #home of the brave #adventures in human capitalism #all I have right now is a little 0.5% card from my bank because it was all I could get with no credit history #(fortunately I’ve been with that bank for 10+ years and never caused them any problems) #(so they trusted me enough to help me bootstrap into having a credit history) #but yeah I definitely do take cashback into account for financial analyses #(”hey Dad can we put my university course on your card? we’ll save an extra four dollars versus putting it on mine”) #anyway I found this post buried in my open tabs and realised I forgot to reblog it #so here it is