Internet is your standard Big City Scandinavia internet (75 MBps so less than at home but fast enough for my purposes – fast enough that I didn’t even think to check it before you asked)
and how is business travel interesting to you?
I’m just not super used to travelling, nor staying outside my own home. I don’t have to worry about breakfast, lunch or dinner and while I hear that hotel food becomes bland once you get used to it, I sure haven’t yet. Also if I was at “regular” work tomorrow I’d be writing some astonishingly dull product design specs for a new component in our software but tomorrow and Tuesday I’m ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ ⬛ ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ instead and that’s kind of cool.
Fair. Also that makes me want to finally visit Scandinavia and try out your hotel internet.
I hear that hotel food becomes bland once you get used to it
I’m not even business traveling that much and this rings extremely true to me and I’ve reached that point way faster than I’d ever have anticipated. I mean it’s probably different if you’re a high-class executive staying at really upscale hotels, but the usual buffet fare at 3-4 stars gets old pretty fast. Same with airport lounge food – I still eat there though, not least because it the hot buffet sure beats shelling out like €20 for a small sandwich.
So are y’all like, actually eating at the hotel? I can see the occasional convenience but isn’t there the option of just going down the street or whatever for something more interesting.
I don’t know about them, but why would I pay money to eat food from down the street when hotel food is free?
(Valid answers include “the meal the hotel was serving today was a food I find actively repulsive” and “they only serve dinner Monday – Thursday and it is dinnertime on Saturday”, but do not include “the hotel food was bland”. It’s not like I’d be able to enjoy paid food anyway, haunted by the knowledge that it was a waste of money. Plus I kind of like blandness, tbh.)
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Context: I have not business-travelled *per se*, but when we do travel we tend to stay at hotels catering primarily to businesspeople. I am thinking of hotels mostly in Massachusetts, with occasional other states plus a couple in Ontario.
A) it’s a business trip, I’m expensing dinner. It’s free either way. Also how common is free dinner anyway, don’t most hotel restaurants charge.
B) I regularly pay money for the purpose of eating food I like more, and regularly turn down free food.
C) I value the cluster of food novelty related goods. The associated opportunity cost of staying in is especially high if you’re traveling anywhere decent (although this goes down if you go the same places a lot, but in that case, haven’t you found anywhere you like?)
A-1: The concept of companies paying for their employees’ food continues to boggle me, but then my entire family works in food service, so our idea of company-provided food is “the customer changed their mind about wanting the food *after* I made it, and the boss let me keep it”. (Although occasionally my brother will be rewarded with a free meal for training a newbie or agreeing to show up on a day he would normally have off.)
If the marginal increase in food quality is free, then absolutely maximise quality.
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A-2: IME, free hot breakfast 7 days/week and free dinner Monday – Thursday is standard for business hotels. (Slightly lower-tier hotels offer cold breakfast and no dinner.) Many also keep cookies by the front desk, and some keep packets of hot-chocolate mix by the coffee machine.
I think I have been to one (1) hotel with a restaurant that even theoretically charged money, and that was at Disney World. (And in that case my mom had managed to wrangle some promotions into getting us a meal plan for free, so in practice even *that* hotel food didn’t actually cost anything.)
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B: Nah, there are starving children in Africa future selves to think of. We keep getting inheritances just as we’re about to run out of money, but that streak’s bound to end sooner or later, and it’s best to start preparing now.
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C: I *can* enjoy food, but I seem to have a lower cap on how much pleasure I can experience from a meal than other people do, even when the cap *isn’t* further lowered by the meal’s distance from the financially-optimal meal. (If a meal cost more than about $7, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I will get net-negative utility from it. Meals in the $3 – $7 range are increasingly iffy.)
(For anyone wondering “but if you’re that much of a miser, why do you even *know* what hotels above the bottom price tier are like?”: early on it was because Dad had a cushy programming job, in the middle it was because my parents were hiding the extent of the problem from their kids, and later it was because they–while not *oblivious* or anything–seem to be incapable of fully *grokking* the severity of the problem and occasionally drag me to sub-optimal places.)
Tags:
#adventures in human capitalism #food #disordered eating? #reply via reblog #I uh may be feeling guilty about acquiescing when my boss told me to go home after 8 hours on Saturday #when I’m pretty sure I could have talked him into 9.5 if I’d tried
Does anyone know of any reason why someone shouldn’t eat exclusively bananas, apple sauce, those round red cheese ball things, and sugar cubes for lunch for three weeks? Uh, asking for a friend.
I would like to meet this… friend.
*waves* Apparently I was too subtle. Look, I didn’t choose the Anxiety Diet, it’s just that going out to buy food at work is stressful, and packing anything but snacks at my aunt and uncle’s is also stressful, and work has bananas and sugar cubes. Hence, my question.
c.f. why my intake of snacks has drastically increased
What’s wrong with fruit and cheese? Totally legit lunch. Surviving exclusively on them for three weeks might run into some difficulties, but if it’s just for lunch that doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.
(Speaking as someone whose non-dinner diet is mostly pretty…I don’t know if “atomised” is quite the right word here. Things that are individual food units in themselves, like “banana” or “peanut butter” or “yogurt”, rather than mixing lots of ingredients together into something meal. My food-unit selection is also fairly limited: there are the basic food groups, “fruit”, “dairy”, “nuts”, “protein” (usually mixed into the dinner meal), “chocolate”, “starch”, with usually ~2 – 3 possible foods in each category (not always the same 2 – 3 over time) and making some effort to cover as many categories as possible on any given day. My nutrition seems to be doing fine.)
I’ve been living on mostly Soylent for the last few months for other reasons. It works great for this too. You’d have to explain Soylent to your coworkers, but then it stays explained. (Mine are a very weirdness-tolerant bunch. You might be less lucky.) And then you don’t have to pack food.
#also apparently you get 50% off your first 12 bottles if someone refers you? #I will totally type in arbitrary emails if people want to take advantage of that #as long as they look like your actual email and don’t end in ’@congress.gov’ or similar
(It looks like the current Soylent referral bonus is $10 off for both referrer and referree. I don’t know whether @comparativelysuperlative is still doing this, but if not ask around and you might find someone else to refer you.)
Tags:
#(July 2016) #conversational aglets #food #disordered eating? #the more you know
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.
>>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*
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†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?)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #disordered eating?
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.
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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…)
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(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).)
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>>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.
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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.)
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I’ll go look at your number-crunching and see if I can find anything.
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†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.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #long post #disordered eating?
FRIENDLY REMINDER BECAUSE I KNOW I NEED THEM EVERY SO OFTEN.
ALSO HERE HAVE A KITTEN:
YOU I ACTUALLY FORGOT TO TAKE MY MEDS TODAY
this is the third time this post has reminded me to take my meds
we’re all gonna die
dude i haven’t had any water today or taken my meds thank you for this post
Tags:
#PSA #signal boost #I drink more water than probably anyone I know #(they say the average amount that people actually drink is 1L/day) #(I’m pretty sure I would die of thirst on 1L/day) #(and I know for a fact that I have a constant nagging thirst after one day on 2L/day) #(takes about two days to recover from one day on 2L) #I’m not on any meds #I’m not sure I’ve laughed aloud today but I’ve definitely been amused #and somehow I’ve managed to end up with an inner food critic that reminds me to eat rather than fat-shaming me #which is pretty sweet all in all #(its malnutrition-from-lack-of-variety-in-diet alarm is overly sensitive though) #(it’s okay not to have fruit *every* day brain) #still this is a nice concept #good luck with the whole self-care thing everybody #tag rambles
Brinens and Things 