Easy Slow Cooker Beef and Barley Stew

This is a recipe we've tweaked and adapted to where it's finally just about perfect. The tender beef combines with tangy tomatoes, rich barley and a mild hint of dried thyme to make a recipe that's out-of-this-world delicious.

But best of all, it's easy. It takes maybe 15 minutes of prep work, and then just a few hours of zero-maintenance simmering in your crockpot. Before you know it, you'll be sitting down to an incredibly delicious and hearty meal that feeds up to nine hungry people. All for the laughably cheap cost of about $1.25 per serving. Can't beat that!

*******************************
Slow Cooker Beef and Barley Stew

Ingredients:
2 to 2.5 pounds stew beef, cut into 1- to 2-inch chunks
Black pepper and kosher salt, to taste
4 Tablespoons olive oil, in all
2 onions, chopped coarsely
3-4 carrots, peeled and chopped
2-3 stalks celery, chopped
3/4 cup red wine
3 15-ounce cans diced tomatoes (canned!)
5-6 cups water (depending on your slowcooker's capacity)
2 bouillon cubes
1 teaspoon ground dried thyme
2/3 cup pearl barley
Fresh parsley, for garnish (optional)

Directions:
1) Season the beef with black pepper and salt. Heat about 2 Tablespoons of the olive oil to medium-high in a large skillet, then brown the meat for a few minutes on each side. Don't overcook. Place the meat in the slow cooker.

2) Add another 2 Tablespoons olive oil to the same pan, heat to medium high, and saute the onions, celery and carrots for 5-7 minutes until softening. Add the red wine. Deglaze the bottom of the pan and let simmer for 3-4 minutes. Then add the vegetable/red wine mixture to the slow cooker.

3) Last, add the tomatoes, water, bouillon cubes, thyme and barley to the slow cooker. Stir and combine everything well, set slow cooker on high and cook for 3-4 hours. Serve with optional fresh parsley.

Serves 9.

*******************************************
Recipe notes:
1) You'll need a 5 quart slow-cooker in order to make this recipe as written, and even then, you might need to slightly reduce the amount of water in the recipe by a cup or so to make sure everything fits. Don't worry, it's still going to come out amazing. A good crockpot rule of thumb is to leave half an inch or so of space between the top of the food and the crockpot lid. Otherwise, sauce can splatter out from under the lid during cooking.

2) A suggestion for two easy side dishes that go perfectly with this recipe: Morrocan Carrot Salad and Perfect Corn Bread. Delicious and healthy!

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

My Goals For Casual Kitchen For 2013

Leave it to me to share my 2013 blogging goals in late January, but today I'd like to share with readers my plans for CK for the coming year.

1) Increase income
CK earns a couple hundred bucks a month in a good month. Frankly, I haven't concentrated all that much on maximizing what I earn here. This year, however, I want to grow both readership and revenues, and by year end I'd like to scale up my income at CK to a nice, round $500 a month.

My entire body of work (nearly 900 posts, including well over a hundred recipes) is available completely free to readers. And while CK earns the bulk of its income from advertising (mostly from Google's Adsense program), one thing I've encouraged readers to do in the past several months is to do more of your Amazon shopping via the affiliate links here at CK. Hey, if you're going to purchase something you need at Amazon anyway, why not use the links here to support my writing too--at no incremental cost to you? Over the past few months my Amazon affiliate income has become much more significant, and I thank readers for using this avenue to support my work.

2) More recipes
Last year I wrote about branding, consumerism, the advertising-consumption cycle and dietary philosophy. I also dedicated a ton of pixels to the Your Money Or Your Life series. This blog stepped into a lot of controversial subjects.

This year, I also want to get back to Casual Kitchen's roots: Really easy, really good and really low-cost recipes. Last week's Minestrone Soup was just the first of several new, laughably cheap recipes I'll publish this year. Stay tuned.

3) Post less
Here's my final goal--and yes, you read that right: I want to post less. Uhhh, this month notwithstanding.

Why? Well, first, I'd like to free up a bit more time for other projects. One is an investment guidebook that's been on my back burner for more than a year now--I want to do some serious work on it in 2013 and see if it amounts to anything. I also want to continue learning French: I had the great fortune to spend November of last year studying at an exceptional language school in Montreal, and I'll head back for still more classes later this year... once the temperature rises above zero kelvin up there.

Most importantly, however, I want to keep giving readers better and better quality articles. And after tweaking my writing and publishing schedule here over the years, I've found that my article quality goes way, way up if I do two things: keep a few weeks' worth of articles "in the can" at all times, and stick to a (mostly) once-a-week posting schedule.

I'll still run a bonus post on occasion (like today), but this year I intend to stick to a more predictable, every-single-Tuesday schedule. With luck, I'll keep improving the quality and value of what you read here.

One last thought: I'm considering reducing the number of Friday Links posts I run to perhaps every other week, or a couple of times a month. (I'd love reader feedback on this by the way: what do you think?) In the coming weeks I may skip a Friday links post here and there and see if there's any reaction, either positive or negative, from readers.

Readers, what are YOUR goals in 2013 for YOUR blog? Share them!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday January 25, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
*************************
Use these safe food handling rules in your home. (Food Woolf)

"Following complicated dietary guidelines--or counting every nutrient I eat--will surely take years off my life." (100 Days of Real Food)

Start a cooking club! (Eating Rules)

Recipe Links:
Perfect for next week's Super Bowl: Bacon Flavored Chicken Wings. (Bibberche)

Straight outta Quebec: A delicious and easy Pouding Chômeur, or Poor Man's Pudding. (Food and Fire)

Off-Topic Links:
You're okay. (Postmasculine)

I write to find out what I think. (The Reformed Broker)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

How Do You Eat Tomatoes Ethically?

Barry Estabrook's striking book Tomatoland explains two things with perfect clarity: why tomatoes in your grocery store taste awful, and why you probably should stop buying them if they come from Florida. Here's his take:

1) Florida supplies an enormous portion of the USA's out-of-season fresh tomatoes, as well as slicing tomatoes used throughout the food service industry. These tomatoes are picked green, ripened en route, and arrive perfectly red and tasteless in our stores and restaurants during winter and spring.

2) Because of the poor soil quality and warm climate in Florida, growers there use up to six times the pesticides and fungicides used on tomatoes grown in California (the USA's other primary tomato region).

3) Worse, labor conditions for people picking our out-of-season tomatoes in Florida range from mediocre to deplorable. Safety standards are highly questionable--especially concerning pesticide use in close proximity to fieldworkers. Worse, in the past several years there have been documented cases of slavery among contract work crews hired by major Florida growers. Yes, that's right: slavery.

4) California growers, in general, have better labor practices and pesticide use practices. The problem is, California supplies the vast majority of North American canned tomatoes, not fresh/out-of-season tomatoes. Casual Kitchen readers should instantly see a possible solution here for their tomato needs: when tomatoes are out of season, stick to buying canned.

5) In other words, if you buy an out-of-season, fresh tomato, chances are it's from Florida. And that tomato was likely sprayed, grown and picked under suspect conditions. If you buy canned tomatoes, they were probably grown under better--and safer--conditions.

6) Finally, that perfectly red out-of-season tomato sitting in your grocery store (or on top of your restaurant hamburger) is almost guaranteed to taste like styrofoam. And yet people still buy them. Why? Because consumers want something red on their plate, on their salad, or in their sandwiches.

So, with this as backdrop, what steps should concerned consumers take when buying tomatoes? Should we avoid out-of-season tomatoes because of the practices of the Florida tomato industry? Will this cause growers to improve their practices, or will it cause growers to squeeze workers still more?

What's the right thing to do?

I don't know. But I can share what we are doing here at Casual Kitchen since we've read Tomatoland: We've stopped purchasing of out-of-season tomatoes. Why? Well, for one thing, I never did like overpaying for tomatoes that, more often than not, taste like nothing. But I also have concerns about the way out-of-season tomatoes are grown. So, if we do have a pressing need for tomatoes out of season, we stick to canned tomatoes--which we know are most likely from California, not from Florida, and thus are more likely grown under better conditions and with fewer pesticides.

Readers, what about you?



Related Posts:
How to Defeat the Retail Industry's Ninja Mind Tricks
Is Organic Food Healthier? Or Just Another Aspirational Product?
How To Be Manipulated By a Brand
A Conversation With An Angry Vegetarian

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Money Sundays: Two Easy Rules To Value Insurance Coverage

This is a long and borderline wonkish post on insurance that follows up last Sunday's post Is All That Insurance Really Worth It? If insurance bores you even in the slightest, feel free to skip reading it.
*****************************************
Commenter Brittany disagreed with some last week's suggestions on reducing insurance costs:

"But it was only about $10-$15 more a month to have comprehensive instead of liability only or to go from a $250 to $1000 deductible. And saving $150/year while giving up protection on a $5000-$10000 asset strikes me as pretty penny-wise, pound-foolish.

Renter's insurance also cost me $15/month. Yet my exploding water heater and related flooding did $1500 worth of damage in only a few hours, and it only damaged two rooms. (And I don't even own that many nice things!) If I think I am going to have an equivalent disaster more than every 8 years or so, I'm ahead by having insurance."

Okay, there's a lot going on in this comment, and some things we can all learn here, so let's address Brittany's points one at a time:

But it was only about $10-$15 more a month to have comprehensive instead of liability only or to go from a $250 to $1000 deductible. And saving $150/year while giving up protection on a $5000-$10000 [car] strikes me as pretty penny-wise, pound-foolish.

There are two concepts here: the idea to hike your auto insurance deductible, and the idea to drop your car's comprehensive insurance coverage. Let's address them separately, starting with the deductible.

Here's the thing. In the example above, hiking the deductible to $1,000 is a total no-brainer. To explain why, I'll first share an important fundamental concept and I'll then share an easy rule of thumb that readers can use any time they want to assess the relative value of insurance coverage.

Understand your incremental liability
First the important fundamental concept, one I want to make perfectly clear to all readers: When you hike your deductible, you're not giving up protection on the entire $5,000-$10,000 car, you're only giving up protection on the difference between the deductible amounts. In other words, your incremental risk from hiking your deductible is only $750--the difference between $250 and $1,000.

Trust me, you do not want to pay $150 a year to protect yourself from a measly $750 dollars' worth of potential incremental loss.

The Premium/Incremental Liability Rule
Which brings us to our rule of thumb to value insurance coverage: To see if a change in an insurance policy is worth considering:

1) Take the amount of premium savings and divide by the incremental liability you take on by cancelling that coverage.
2) If the resulting percentage seems high to you, and if you can easily cover the incremental liability, drop the coverage.

Further, you can use this rule in reverse to consider whether it's worth adding coverage:

1) Take the premium cost of the insurance policy and divide by the exact liability the insurance company will cover.
2) If the percentage seems reasonable (or low) to you, and if you cannot easily cover the incremental liability, consider buying the policy.

I hereby deem this The Premium/Incremental Liability Rule. You can use it to help you assess most types of insurance. So let's apply it, and see if hiking your auto insurance deductible is as much of a no-brainer as I claim it is.

First, your premium savings from hiking the your deductible from $250 to $1000 is $150 a year. In exchange, you increase your potential liability by $750.

So, divide. $150 divided by $750 is 20%. That seems high. Really high. Is it really worth it to you to pay 20% (twenty percent!) to have the right to maybe use $750 of some insurance company's money? Worse, note that the actual returns to the insurance company here are in reality far higher. After all, only a small percent of drivers get into accidents and file claims every single year.

The bottom line is, keeping low deductible tends to be pretty darn expensive. And now, you've got a simple calculation to help you see exactly how expensive. Further, you have a far better alternative: you can protect yourself... for free. As we discussed last week, save the extra $750 in incremental liability in your household emergency fund. Pocket that $150 a year in premiums that you would have paid out. And then instead of paying an insurance provider 20% for their money, you can earn that 20% yourself in the form of premium savings. In today's ultra-low interest rate environment, it's pretty hard to find any investment that beats hiking your auto deductibles.

Never pay through the nose to insure a loss you can easily cover yourself. An incremental cost of 20% for a measly incremental liability of $750 clearly qualifies as not worth it. As always, your mileage and your policy may vary, but in this stylized example, we have a total no-brainer.

Comprehensive coverage
Okay. Let's move on to addressing comprehensive automotive coverage. In Brittany's example, she also states she could save $10-15 a month (or roughly $150 a year) by dropping comprehensive coverage on her car. So once again let's apply our rule of thumb.

What's the premium? $150 a year. What's the incremental liability?

A-hah. Okay, this is a little harder to assess. First we have a car worth $5,000 to $10,000. For the sake of argument let's take the mid-point and use $7,500.

But wait: you have to pay the deductible, so in this case you are responsible for the first $1,000 in losses. The insurance company picks up the rest. Therefore, the insurance company agrees to cover up to $6,500 in losses. This is your denominator.

Great. Now divide: $150 divided by $6500 is about 2.3%. And here, we actually see a fairly compelling case for keeping comprehensive coverage. 2.3% is not that high a cost to pay for money, and $6,500 is a far more meaningful amount of potential liability.

Which brings us to yet another ironclad rule of insurance: If you don't have the resources to meet a loss, you should insure it. However, if you do have the resources, you can use our simple premium/incremental liability calculation to help you decide if the insurance is actually worth it.

Warren Buffett's $7,500 car
Before we move on, I want to go over one more nuance. Let's imagine Warren Buffett owning this $7,500 car. [Don't laugh: Buffett actually maintains surprisingly modest lifestyle.]

What would Buffett do? Well, clearly, he wouldn't insure this car no matter how the numbers worked out. After all, the car's value is insignificant compared to his overall financial resources.

This gives us another useful prism to help us consider the relative value of insurance: compare it to your resources. I hereby call this idea of considering the value of insurance in the context of your available financial resources The Warren Buffett Prism of Insurance.

Look, you don't have to be Warren Buffett to rethink insurance, I'm just using him as an example. But the point still stands: as you travel your own financial road, saving aggressively and carefully building your wealth, you will find yourself reconsidering many of your views on insurance. You'll see more and more value in hiking your deductibles, and you'll see more value in switching to simple, low-cost, catastrophic coverage. And you'll start see zero value in some forms of insurance that previously you couldn't imagine living without.

Why? Because you already have a cheaper and better source of funds--your own aggressively accumulated savings.

Some of these ideas may seem outlandish to you at this stage of your financial life. Indeed, some of these ideas are totally contrary to the conventional wisdom out there about insurance. But you didn't come here to Casual Kitchen for conventional wisdom, did you?

[Gratuitous plug: For more on how to save aggressively so you can begin to make decisions like this, see my in-depth series on Your Money Or Your Life]

I know this post is getting long here, but we're almost done. Let's move on to addressing Brittany's comment on rental insurance:

Renter's insurance also cost me $15/month. Yet my exploding water heater and related flooding did $1500 worth of damage in only a few hours, and it only damaged two rooms. (And I don't even own that many nice things!) If I think I am going to have an equivalent disaster more than every 8 years or so, I'm ahead by having insurance.

Okay. If Brittany has $1,500 worth of things in two rooms, let's guesstimate that all of her rental assets have a total insured value of $2,500. Remember, I'm just trying to show an example for the benefit of readers. You can plug in your own numbers from your own policy, and use the fundamental principles of this post to decide for yourself if your policy is worth the cost.

Another point: keep in mind that some of the liability of an exploding water heater will accrue to the property owner, not to Brittany. Because she's a renter, she won't be responsible for floors, carpets, walls, some appliances, and so on.

So, first, apply the Premium/Incremental Liability Rule and run the numbers: $15 a month is $180 a year. $180 divided by $2,500 is 7.2%.

Hmm. This number is kind of a tweener. It's not ridiculously high like the 20% rate on hiking your auto deductible, and it's not attractively low like the 2.3% rate on comprehensive coverage. We don't have a clear answer yet.

Next, apply The Warren Buffett Prism of Insurance. Ask yourself: can I easily come up with $2,500?

If you can't easily come up with $2,500, keep the coverage. Simple. However, if you do have $2,500 easily available, look at that 7.2% and decide if that's a rate you're willing to pay for protection from a loss you can easily cover yourself. Remember, the insurance company can only give you money, they cannot replace your stuff. Insurance--no matter how much you buy--cannot grant you immunity from misfortune.

Use these rules. And let me reiterate: as you continue to accumulate savings and as you continue on your journey towards financial independence, you will find more and more instances where insurance simply doesn't provide as much value as it used to.

tl;dr:
1) Hiking your deductible and saving on your insurance premiums is (usually) a no-brainer. Consider it.
2) Understand the incremental liability you're taking on when you make changes to your insurance policy. Make sure you've saved that amount yourself before you drop coverage.
3) Use The Premium/Incremental Liability Rule to help you assess the value of insurance. If you arrive at a rate of 10% or higher and you can easily cover the liability, consider dropping that coverage.
4) Use The Warren Buffett Prism of Insurance to help you consider the value of the insured item in context of your overall financial resources.
5) As you save money and carefully build your personal wealth, you'll find less and less value in high-cost, conventional insurance policies.
6) Insurance can only protect you from financial loss, it cannot grant you immunity from misfortune.

Readers (uh, those of you who made it this far), share your thoughts!

Related Posts:
On Timeshares, Beware
Do You Let Yourself Be Manipulated To Buy?
What Is a Scarcity Mindset? Investing and Living In a Zero Sum Paradigm

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday January 18, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
*************************
A sobering, moving essay on life as a restaurant line cook. (The New Inquiry)

Do food blogs kill the joy of cooking? (Daily Dot, via 1WineDude). (Readers, can you spot the irony?)

Recipe Links:
Make your kitchen come alive with this hearty Greek vegetarian dish: Cauliflower Stifado. (Kalofagas)

Ten authentic Spanish Tapas recipes. (A Little Bit of Spain in Iowa)

Off-Topic Links:
16 habits you should do every day. Long, but well worth it. (Kratosguide)

Understand and avoid the sneaky hate spiral. (Hyperbole and a Half, via The Clumsy Girl's Life)

Excellent advice on how to edit your own writing. (The Daily Muse, via Mystery Writing Is Murder)


Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Easy Minestrone Soup

This is a simple and utterly delicious soup that you can make in about 30 minutes. It feeds six generously, and it's perfect for a cold winter day.

And like almost all of the best laughably cheap recipes here at Casual Kitchen, this one comes in at well under a buck a serving. That's right: yet another recipe that's so inexpensive, it literally makes you laugh out loud. Once again, it's pure fiction that healthy, delicious food has to be expensive or difficult to prepare.

I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as we did. Enjoy!

********************************************
Easy Minestrone Soup

Ingredients:
5 slices bacon
1 onion, chopped
3 medium carrots, sliced
3 stalks celery, sliced
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon black pepper (more or less to taste)
3/4 cup frozen peas
1 15-ounce can chickpeas
1 15-ounce can cannellini beans
1 15-ounce can diced tomatoes
2 bouillon cubes
8 cups water

Directions:
1) In a large soup pot, fry the bacon until crispy. Set bacon aside and drain all but about 2-3 Tablespoons of bacon drippings from the pot.*

2) Add the onion, celery and garlic to the remaining bacon drippings and saute for 5 minutes on medium-high heat. Add the black pepper and carrots and saute for another 2-3 minutes.

3) Add 1 cup of water and deglaze the bottom of the soup pot. Then add the remaining water and the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 15 minutes, or until veggies are cooked to your liking. Serve into bowls, and crumble the reserved bacon over the top of each bowl. Serve immediately.

Serves 6-7.
******************************
Recipe Notes:
1) * A confession regarding bacon drippings: Readers, when I make this recipe, I don't drain away any of the bacon drippings--and I saute those veggies in all of that glorious, artery-clogging fat. Partly it's due to the influence of books like Why We Get Fat and Wheat Belly: I'm simply not as aggressive as I used to be about reducing our fat intake. Your mileage (and your conclusions on dietary fat) may vary, so feel free to use the amount of fat in this recipe you wish to.

I'm quite curious to hear what other readers have to say about this issue: Do you drain away excess fat in your recipes, or do you keep it all in there? Why? If you have thoughts, share them in the comments!

2) Cost rundown:

5 slices bacon: $1.20
Onion: 20c
Carrots: 50c
Celery: 50c
Garlic: 10c
Chick peas: 67c
Cannellini beans: 67c
Frozen peas: 30c
Diced Tomatoes: 67c

Total cost: about $4.81, or about 80c a serving.

Related Posts:
The 25 Best Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen
Black Beans and Rice: Laughably Cheap Comfort Food
Eight Tips to Make Cooking At Home Laughably Cheap
Laughably Cheap Carrot and Fresh Cabbage Curry
Yellow Split Pea Soup: Hearty, Healthy and Laughably Cheap


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Money Sundays: Is All That Insurance Really Worth It To You?

Warning to readers: if you happen to sell insurance or work in the insurance industry, don't read this. It will just make you mad.
*****************************

From a comment from long-time reader Chacha:

My total insurance bill (renter's, health, life, and auto) is nearly $1000/mo for a family of two healthy adults in a rental household with paid-off cars.

We have the highest-possible deductibles that our company will allow on renter's and auto. We have multiple discounts etc for safe driver, secure parking, low mileage, etc. Our cars are 1996 and 1999 models - hardly high theft risk - and neither of us has ever caused an accident.

But we live in Beverly Hills, CA, and that alone apparently doubles the premiums (it's far worse of an inflation factor than we've found applied to rent).

For those readers interested in reducing the money they spend on insurance, here are a few things to consider:

1) Save up in your regular savings account the difference before your prior, lower deductible and your current, higher deductible. Then, jack up your deductibles, exactly as Chacha did.

For example, if you are carrying a deductible of $250 on your auto collision and comprehensive policy, increase it to $1,000, as soon as you've saved up an extra $750 (the difference between the two deductible levels) in your savings account. In other words, you will use your own savings to "self-insure" your first $1,000 of potential liability, rather than paying through the nose to an insurance company to do it for you.

Hiking your deductibles usually results in compelling savings. Making a change from $250 to $1000, for example, could save you some $150 a year in premium costs every year (your mileage may vary). And the way to think about that $150 in premium savings is to see it as a permanent, tax-free 20% annual return on the incremental $750 you're holding in your savings account. Not too shabby!

2) Don't bother carrying collision and comprehensive insurance on older, paid-off cars. Remember, in the event of a loss, the insurance company will only pay up to the blue-book value of your car. After 14 or more years (Chacha's cars are 14 and 17 years old respectively), even expensive cars will have depreciated down to just a few thousand dollars. This is an asset that you can far more cheaply self-insure with personal savings.

Thus, you should save up a few thousand extra dollars in your savings account, and view that as your collision and comprehensive "insurance policy." Then you won't have to pay money every year to some dumb insurance company. If this step sounds a little bit like step 1, it is--except in this case you are relying on your personal savings to protect you entirely from a risk, rather than using your savings to cover the difference between a low and a high deductible.

An aside: if you've read my series on Your Money Or Your Life and you're pursuing your personal road to greater financial independence, you'll find that as you build your savings cushion into thousands--or tens of thousands--of dollars, you can dramatically increase deductibles and significantly reduce all of your insurance needs. You'll be able to save hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in annual premiums.

3) Now, with regard to your legally required auto liability insurance, consider carrying the minimum amount required by your state combined with the highest deductible possible. These steps will save you big time on your insurance costs.

4) Let's move on to renter's insurance. Two thoughts: First, do you really have valuables that are valuable in the monetary sense, or are they just valuable in the sentimental sense? Insurance companies can only give you money... they can't actually reverse time and miraculously replace your stuff.

And if that thought didn't sufficiently bake your noodle, how about this one: How much value do you really get out of having expensive stuff if you're also stuck paying still more to insure yourself from losing it? Roll this over in your mind and you may decide renter's insurance has no value at all.

5) Life insurance. Under what circumstances, really, should you carry it?

You can make an easy case for purchasing life insurance if your household depends on a primary breadwinner. For example, if you're the primary earner in a one-income household with small children, you're probably a good candidate for a policy.

In this case, however, you should only buy a basic term life policy. Avoid fancy "universal life" type policies which wrap investments, variable annuities, etc., around a life insurance policy. These types of financial products are fabulously lucrative for insurance agents and insurance companies, but their value to consumers is dubious. They can be complex, hard to understand, and they can contain disturbingly high investment fees.

Furthermore, as good as they are at collecting your premium payments, insurance companies are often surprisingly mediocre at investing. I make this statement based on my own professional investing experience at an unimaginably large insurance company that, in 2008, went through an unimaginably embarrassing bankruptcy.

As the old saying goes: buy term and invest the difference. Get a simple, competitive, inexpensive, plain-vanilla term policy, and invest the savings in premiums yourself. You'll save on fees, your money will be in your own hands--and you'll probably enjoy superior investment returns.

Of course, if your circumstances allow for it, don't pay for life insurance at all. For example, a two-income household with no children shouldn't need life insurance. Without kids and with both spouses working, what is a life insurance policy really for? Who is it for?

Conclusions
A final word. Insurance is a product that, typically, is both sold and bought emotionally. At its core essence, it is a product designed to (try to) protect you from your fears. Therefore, it shouldn't be a surprise that the people who sell insurance want you to see and feel your fears as much as they can.

Don't let yourself be goaded into carrying water for the insurance industry. Be sure you really need insurance before you buy it, and be sure your need is economic one, not an emotional one. Remember, an insurance company can only give you money in the event of a loss--it can't give you back your car, your stuff or your loved ones.

The counterintuitive ideas on insurance here may already be obvious you. If so, great. But for many people these ideas are far from obvious. If you know someone who could benefit by reading this post, please forward it to them. You might help a friend or family member save many tens of thousands of dollars over the course of their lives.

tl;dr:
1) Jack up all your deductibles and reap the savings on premiums.
2) Ditch collision and comprehensive on any car that's old. Instead, self-insure with your savings.
3) Carry the minimum liability insurance required in your state.
4) Don't own expensive stuff and you won't need renter's insurance in the first place.
5) With life insurance, don't buy it based on fear. Buy it only if you need it, and then get only a simple term policy. Buy term and invest the difference.

Sometimes insurance is necessary. Don't get me wrong. But insurance also quite often fulfills our emotional needs at the expense of our financial needs. As you continue on your road towards financial independence, you'll most likely find you need very little of the insurance you once thought you did.


Related Posts:
Becoming a Knowledgeable and Sophisticated Investor: Six Tips
What Is a Scarcity Mindset? Investing and Living In a Zero Sum Paradigm
How To Make the Tax Code Work For YOU
Is Looking For Tax-Efficient Investments Icky? Or Intelligent?
On Timeshares, Beware
Extreme Savings


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday January 11, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
*************************
What about the Asian Paradox? If carbs make you fat, how can Asian countries consume so much white rice and noodles yet remain thin? (Mark's Daily Apple)

Just eat the damn brownie already! (Rookie, via Alosha's Kitchen)

Big goals--like weight loss--are accomplished in a series of small victories. (344 Pounds) Also: Tyler's got a new book out! 344 Pounds: How I Lost 125 Pounds by Counting Calories

Recipe Links:
Easy, unusual and delicious: Clementine Cake. (Nigella Lawson, via Cream Puffs in Venice)

Intriguing mix of southern USA and Italian cuisine: Hoppin' John Risotto. (The Kitchn)

Off-Topic Links:
"Because we had no money we looked for reasons to hate those who did." (Expatriated Consumer)

2012 was the best year of my life. And I have an earth-shattering failure to thank for it. (Dana Richardson)

Please don't interrupt. (Steve Pavlina)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Why Do Cheat Days Work?

The cheat day is one of the all-time great innovations in diet and health culture. Truly a genius, genius idea.

If you're unfamiliar with the cheat day concept, it's just a pre-chosen day of the week where you get to break your rules--dietary or otherwise. You want to enjoy an extra snack? Go for it on your cheat day. Got your eye on that big slab of cheesecake? Have at it--on your cheat day. But don't forget the important part: make sure you keep your cheating limited to the one day you've chosen for it.

Better still, you can apply the benefits of cheat days in many disciplines. Are you trying to minimize your consumption of television or other vapid media? Give yourself one day a week to indulge in it without guilt. How about building a habit of waking up early? A cheat day gives you one day a week to sleep in and not feel like a loser for it.

Most importantly, the knowledge that you've got a cheat day coming up makes it easier to control yourself the rest of the week. Here's how:

1) It makes habit-building easier.
It's a lot easier to follow any habit when you only have to string six days together. It's a lot harder to build a habit when you know it's for .... FOREVER. But when you incorporate a cheat day, your new habit isn't for forever, it's just for the next six days. Then you can indulge. It just doesn't seem quite so hard to do, so you actually do it.

2) Satisfy the craving, pursue the pleasure.
Who says a diet has to be a life of permanent abnegation? One thing that sucks about dieting--or any new habit for that matter--is the ugly permanence of it all: no more "bad" foods. No more fun.

But with a once-a-week cheat day, you can let your hair down and enjoy some extra pleasure. Better still, the fact that you can indulge means you'll actually experience fewer cravings for that indulgence. You'll appreciate the "sin" more, and you won't need it quite so badly on your "good" days.

3) You'll feel like crap after a heavy cheat day.
A well-executed cheat day has some convenient follow-on effects. A dietary example: if you eat clean for six days but then indulge heavily on day seven, you're going to feel pretty lousy--both on that day and perhaps the next couple of days.

This is a good thing. It just reinforces better habit formation. You'll want more discipline and you'll want to experience more moderation going forward, and it will be even easier to make it through the next six days without cheating.

4) More mindfulness.
All of this adds more mindfulness--not just with how you eat, but in any area of your life where you seek improvement. You know what sinful foods are for, and you know their proper place in your diet. You know what habits you want to build, and what behaviors you want to change. And since you can still "cheat" once a week, you know they'll never find their way back into your daily habits again. And this helps you reach your goals faster and more effectively... and without any unnecessary suffering.

Once again, cheat days aren't just for food. I'm convinced we can take the cheat day concept and use it in nearly any area of life. And hey, why not consider a financial cheat day? After six days of carefully minding your spending, reward yourself with a "money cheat day" and go out and blow a pre-determined sum of dough on whatever you want!

Readers, what ideas can you share for applying cheat days in your lives? Share your thoughts!



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

CK Friday Links--Friday January 4, 2013

Links from around the internet. As always, I welcome your thoughts.

PS: Follow me on Twitter!
*************************
Never underestimate the art of bussing tables. (Food Woolf)

Today’s modern household appliances are not only cheaper than ever before to purchase, they are also the most energy-efficient appliances in history. (Carpe Diem Blog)

I am not done. I will never be done. (Happy Healthy Cook)

Recipe Links:
A Chili Mole recipe with chocolate and Guinness? Sounds like a must-make to me. (Eats Well With Others)

Easy, scalable and cheap: Spicy Black Beans and Quinoa. (Alosha's Kitchen)

Off-Topic Links:
Your two minds. Use them both. (Post-Masculine)

Real authors vs. implied authors. (Bloomberg)

Gen Y will be in big trouble when Gen Z comes of age. (Penelope Trunk)

Do you have an interesting article or recipe? Want a little extra traffic at your blog? Send me an email!


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.

Did Newark Mayor Cory Booker Really *Try* With His Food Stamp Challenge?

When a politician does a food stamp challenge, should he do it well? Does he have an obligation to show people how to do it competently?

Or is there a higher obligation... to do it incompetently?

Readers, I'm talking about Newark mayor Cory Booker, who just completed the most publicized celebrity food stamp challenge of 2012. Mayor Booker spent one full week eating on a food stamp budget, blogging and tweeting as he went. And the New York metro area media literally ate it up, giving him--and this issue--tons of free publicity.

But here's the thing. Like nearly everyone on the growing list of politicians and celebrities doing food stamp challenges these days, he sucked. He burned his food, he ate really boring meals, he shopped badly. Heck, he appears to have no clue how to cook.

Except that Booker runs Newark, New Jersey, a city with a $700 million annual budget. He went to Stanford undergrad and Yale Law. And Oxford! You're telling me this guy can't figure out how to structure and execute a low-cost weekly meal plan?

Hmmm. Readers, here's where we unearth an ugly truth about every food stamp challenge ever done by every public figure, forever:

Food stamp challenges cannot be done well.

Food stamp challenges must appear incredibly difficult, and good manners (and smart politics) do not allow you to make them any other way.

Look, obviously, eating on only $30 a week per person can be difficult. But should it be difficult... for him? Does he have an obligation to do his SNAP challenge well, so that others can learn?

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The purpose of a food stamp challenge isn't to help people learn. In fact, if you do too well on your food stamp challenge, if it seems even remotely close to not difficult, you might appear to downplay the plight of people on food stamps. You'll appear unsympathetic, and you'll be criticized for being privileged and for failing to grasp what it's really like to be poor.

If you're the mayor of an economically-challenged city and someone levels these criticisms at you, your entire career could be at risk. In other words, if you don't show that your food stamp challenge is hard, you lose.

But wait, you're thinking, what's the big deal? So Cory Booker sucked at his SNAP challenge, so what? Isn't it more important to show sympathy and solidarity with those struggling with food insecurity?

There's nothing wrong with sympathy and solidarity. Nothing at all. But it's a gigantic deal that Booker blew it.

To see why, consider an alternate reality where Cory Booker instead nailed his food stamp challenge. What if he showed people exactly how to eat a healthy, delicious and nutritious mix of foods on just $30 a week... or even much less? The advance research is easily available to him (hint, hint), and with his media darling status, he could have taught millions that it can be done--and shown that it's easier and less time consuming than you'd think. And he still would have brought plenty of attention and sympathy to the issue of food insecurity.

Instead, he bungled his food stamp challenge, and therefore created still more "proof" that it's impossible to eat well on very little money.

So, imagine a Newark citizen on a limited budget. Imagine, after Booker's less-than-competent food stamp challenge, what this citizen might think about his or her own food situation: Gosh, if Cory Booker can't figure out how to eat healthy food for less, how will I?

Remember, a lie told often enough becomes the truth.


For Further Reading:
1) Cory Booker's posts on his food stamp challenge at LinkedIn
2) A dollar-a-day food blogger gives advice to Cory Booker
3) Booker Too Honest For His Own Political Future
4) Yes-Butting and You
5) The "It's Too Expensive to Eat Healthy Food" Debate


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
For those readers interested in supporting Casual Kitchen, the easiest way is to do so is to do all your shopping at Amazon.com via the links on this site. You can also link to me or subscribe to my RSS feed. Finally, consider sharing this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to Facebook, Twitter (follow me @danielckoontz!) or to bookmarking sites like reddit, digg or stumbleupon. I'm deeply grateful to my readers for their ongoing support.