Quick Update on the October Challenge – November Challenge Announced

Posted by on November 2, 2011 No comments

Hey Internet.

Looks like extreme food budgeting during a month were I have to move may have been a bad idea. I couldn’t use my kitchen to any real extent for about two weeks, and as I’m sure you all know, pre-prepared and frozen food while they don’t have to be expensive, aren’t super cheap. I also lost track of my exact costs. I have a good estimate and I’ll do a proper postmortem later. I might even try this specific challenge some month in the future again.

November Challenge

NaNoWriMo

Probably not too many updates on this one, and no I won’t share what I’ve written. It’s sure to be terrible (as all first drafts are), and I haven’t written fiction since high school. This is more of a personal exercise than anything. If it’s amazing, I’ll keep going with it. It probably won’t be amazing, I’m not expecting it to be.

By the way, I started the novel with no plot, setting, or characters in mind. This should be interesting :)

October Challenge Update – Day 9

Posted by on October 9, 2011 No comments

I’m almost a third of the way through my October Challenge, and I’ve so far been fairly successful. Here are the basic numbers:

Amount spent: $25.82
Budget so far: $29.03
Difference: -$3.21
Difference in Days: -0.995

The difference in days is assuming that each day is worth $100/31 days, which is about $3.2258 per day. I’m fairly excited that I’ve been able to keep it under budget.

Reflections so far

My goal for the first couple of weeks here has been to go through all of the food in my refrigerator and freezer before I move on the 15th. At this point it’s looking like I’ll have most of it cleared out in time. As a result, I haven’t hit my reserve of rice too hard yet. I expect to start draining that after the move.

Probably the only completely unnecessary thing that I’ve purchased so far this month was a pizza. I had fast food on a day that I was on the road. I’m OK with that. I’ve been getting a burger for lunch at a bar with coworkers on Mondays, I think tomorrow will be the last time I get to do that. The soda so far hasn’t been excessive. Well, as least it hasn’t been as excessive my typical amount. I have been fairly successful with switching to tea at home.

Protip for anyone planning on switching from soda to tea: Green tea has somewhere between ½ and ⅓ the caffeine as most sodas. If you’re as addicted as I probably am, you’ll want to back off a bit at a time or have some other caffeine supplement for a while. Otherwise you’ll have extreme sleepiness and possibly headaches. I speak from experience.

Since I have a lot of flour and such around I made something resembling Indian Naan, but with a few changes to the ingredients depending on what I had on hand. I fried it in a skillet. The results were… edible. Not great by any means, but edible. I might take another stab at it, but probably not until next week. Also, probably not without milk, that seems to have been a mistake.

All in all, I’ve made it so far at or under budget. It’s not playing out exactly how I was expecting at first, but I’m happy with the experiment so far. I think it’s still too early to do any kind of analysis. I expect the last week to be the most interesting.

Log

Date Item Amount
10/3/2011 Dbl cheeseburger w/fries @ a local bar $6
10/6/2011 6 pk diet Dr. Pepper 24 oz bottles $4.09
10/6/2011 Pizza $6.15
10/7/2011 Burger King $4.21
10/7/2011 12 pk Pepsi Max 12 oz cans $5.37

Your Life Today

Posted by on October 6, 2011 No comments

Steve Jobs died yesterday.

I’m not going to write about his life or achievements. I’m not a person who can write an appropriate tribute. People more familiar with him have written words more eloquent than I could muster. Instead, I’m writing about something he said that affected me.

I’ve owned Apple products. My first computer was a Mac, and my first smartphone was an iPhone. The company and products Steve Jobs built have had an impact on my life.

This got me thinking. Reflecting.

What Are You Doing Right Now?

In his speech to Stanford in 2005, Steve Jobs talks about death. A somewhat morbid topic for a commencement address, but relevant. The quote that resonates with me was “Since then, for the past 33 years, I’ve looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, ‘If today were the last day in my life would I want to do what I’m about to do today?’”.

Just let that sink in for a minute.

He goes on to say “And whenever the answer is ‘no’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

Do you need to change something? I certainly do.

This topic has kept coming up for me, over and over again. Every time it stings a bit, and Jobs’ way of saying it is so grounded it stung hard. Let me share with you what I’ve learned on the topic.

How Do You Change?

For most of us, we can’t just quit whatever it is we’re doing today and start doing the thing we love or get the most satisfaction out of tomorrow.

We can, however, take steps towards that goal.

The first is to determine what’s important to you. It could be family, it could be religion, it could be your work, or anything else. Sometimes we all lose sight of what is important to us. Just take a while to sort it out. It may take a few minutes or a few days, either is OK.

Also, even if your job is just something that pays the bills I think you should consider it. You spend most of your week at your job, you should be doing something that you love.

Next, figure out what you can do tomorrow. If you want to change careers or jobs, your first step is research. Don’t quit before you have fairly concrete plans. If possible, line up your new training/job before you quit. If you need to change locations or move closer to family, look for real estate or rentals. Take a weekend trip and see if the place is what you think it is. If you’re going to need seed money, start aggressively saving or looking for investors.

In any case, it’s likely that you can do some research or planning right away. Don’t wait any longer.

Lay Out a Plan

You’re not going to know every detail. Life doesn’t work that way. Planning will give you a better idea of the potential options and pitfalls. You won’t be able to write a step by step guide. You should, however, be able to determine the first step. Put a date on it.

Take a few evenings and think through the pitfalls you might encounter and the worst outcomes you can imagine. Try to think of how you can avoid those pitfalls and outcomes. You won’t think of them all, that’s fine. You need to build the confidence and knowledge base to handle whatever life throws at you.

Control Your Fear and Live

When it comes time to take some of the first steps you’ve determined in your plan, take them. You will probably be afraid. That’s OK, just don’t let that fear stop you from trying to improve your life. If you’re not already on track, you will never achieve your life goals without changing anything.

When you start to fear the process leading towards your desired outcome, just remember that we all die eventually. None of us are getting younger. Waiting a few years will only make it harder and less likely that you’ll ever get there.

Life is too short to wait to live.

October Challenge: Spend $100 or less on food

Posted by on October 2, 2011 No comments

I’m in the middle of moving halfway across the state. I’m excited to get into my new place, but I’m not excited about the associated bills. To combat the costs, the first thing I did was stop buying things like video games, electronics, and so on. It seemed like there was more room to cut, so I took a step back and analyzed my food costs.

They seemed high.

For example, some quick accounting places my food costs last month (September 2011) around $450. Doing a little digging, it looks like the USDA averages in 2011 for a male 19 – 50 are $176 – $347. Again, my food costs are much higher than they should be.

I’ll be changing that, at least for a month.

The Reasons

Save Money. This is easily the simplest and easiest to understand reason. Dropping my food costs by a few hundred bucks a month would give me a little money to spend on something else (like moving expenses) or save for a rainy day.

Use What I Have. I’ve ended up with a lot of canned, frozen, and otherwise preserved foods that I haven’t been using. By severely reducing my food budget, possibly below a sustainable level, I’m forced to use up some of the food I’ve had just sitting around wasting space. This will help me clear up space and re-evaluate what canned and frozen foods I should keep around.

Gain some perspective. Aside from a few times in college, I’ve never really been in a spot where I couldn’t afford food. And honestly, those times in college weren’t all that bad. I’m hoping that by limiting my food budget I’ll gain a better perspective on the actual cost of the food I’ve been buying. Most of these basic facts are easily enough found online, but you don’t truly understand these things until you’ve lived them.

Minimalism. I’ve always been interested in minimalism, but I’ve never had the motivation to actually implement minimalism into my life. Just looking around the room I’m in, I see shelves packed with clutter. Moving is highlighting just how much clutter I have in my life. Perhaps this will give me a first step towards actually eliminating unnecessary things.

The Goal

Spend less than $100 on food in the month of October.

The Rules

I’m laying out the rules here more or less for myself. I’m not recommending this to anyone, this is more of an experiment. I might fail, and it might not be remotely healthy.

What Counts: Groceries, Fast Food, Restaurants, Soda, Vending Machines, etc. All food purchases count towards the budget.
One exception: In a couple of weeks some family is helping me move my bigger stuff (furniture and so on), and I’ll be buying them lunch. I’m counting this as a moving expense.

What Doesn’t Count: Food that I already have (since I already paid for it), and food that is given to me for whatever reason does not count (since I didn’t have to pay for it).

Since I’m doing this and making the rules, I’m not worried about gaming the system. There are probably holes in it somewhere, but since I’m not a hostile player, I feel confident in these simple rules. Oh, and no, I didn’t just stock up on food before October started.

The Plan

Last month, I spent somewhere in the ballpark of $100 on fast food and restaurants. First step is to cut that down or out. Simply, bring lunch to work.

The surprisingly large expense is soda. I spend probably $4 – $6 a day on soda. That’s about $120 – $180 a month. I’m planning on cutting that down as much as possible. First, I’m switch to tea at home and bringing my Black Zojirushi 17-Ounce Mug in filled with tea to cover the mornings. It’s a challenge to make good tea at work, so I’ll just go with water in the afternoons unless I’m in desperate need of caffeine.

Aside from those, my basic plan is to start by seeing how long I can go without buying any food at all. Then, once that’s no longer an option, try to be careful to use coupons and go with inexpensive options.

Conclusion

That’s more or less the plan. I’ll do a post every weekend on how this project is going. I’ll include how much I spent in the last week and more or less what I’ve been eating. These will be to keep me honest, I won’t go into too much detail.

Some time in the first week or so of November I’ll write up a postmortem to summarize my thoughts. I’ll try to get some good, money-saving tips out of the experience and write those up as well.

Why Blog?

Posted by on September 30, 2011 No comments

I’m not a professional writer, I’m not a journalist, I’m not a social media expert, I’m just a regular working guy. That’s not to say I don’t plan to make the jump to Internet entreprenuer, but for now this is only going to be a weekends and evenings thing.

So why write? I’m not exaclty sure. I’ve found that even though I’m not a writer, I write. I write to sort out my thoughts, I write to design, and I write to break down complex actions, and I write to find places to start. So, I figure that I might as well clean it up a bit and put it on the Internet for whoever stumbles across it. Maybe it will help someone, even if I can’t write on a professional level.

I write because I’m compelled to write. I hope you find my writings useful, entertaining, or both.

I’m planning on writing about my passions, which consist mainly of producitivy, personal time management, organization, technology, and mathematics. Lesser passions of mine include video games, anime/manga/cartoons/comics, and a frightening number of nerd stereotypes. I’ll probably be writing about those later ones less, but you never know.

I expect to have an About Me page up in the relatively near future I’ve posted an About Me page, so I’ll keep those interesting facts on that page, instead of this post. If you’re from the future, Good News! it’s already up. Go find it and read it if you’re interested. You must be one of those types who either wants to see where this (hopefully Internet Famous by, um, now) person came from or you’re one of those weirdos who reads a blog from the beginning. ;)