Displacement

When you buy something, you aren't just buying that something. Buying a TV isn't just buying a TV.

It's buying a device that may suck up as much as two months' worth of time per year from your life (yes, on average, people watch that much TV). Further, watching TV actually makes us less happy.

In other words, "buying a TV" is really displacing about 15-20% of your time, and likely displacing an equivalent amount of your happiness.

If you knew that gleaming new TV you were about to buy would actually provide anti-time, anti-enjoyment and anti-happiness, would that change anything?

Let's say you buy one of those meal prep/meal delivery services like Blue Apron or HelloFresh. The benefits (as they are presented to you) are clear and concrete: you'll save time, you won't have to cook, your life will be easier. This is why these services appear worth buying.

But what might this service displace?

It will displace the practice of a basic life skill that, over time, could become increasingly easy for you through use--or increasingly difficult through disuse. It will also displace the act of building efficient grocery shopping skills, yet another basic life skill that gets gradually easier and easier over time. It displaces healthy social activities centered around the practice of cooking. And this is to say nothing about the displacement of all the other things you could do with the money you've spent.

You can certainly drive yourself crazy overthinking this, but it doesn't change the fact that all of our purchases (really, all of our acts and all of our decisions) displace something else that we could otherwise do.

And in the heat of the buying moment it's nearly impossible to focus on the abstract idea of "what a purchase will displace." But because it tends to put the brakes on spending actions, I believe thinking about this idea could be a useful frugality tool to have handy when making any purchase. 

Of course, it goes without saying that the companies selling these items or these services to you do not want you to think about this at all. They want you focused on the easy-to-visualize realm of apparent benefits--benefits that they shape and present to you in order to get you to buy. They don't want you in the abstract realm of displaced activities and displaced happiness.

With all this in mind, I've created a mini-checklist of pre-purchase questions you can ask yourself to help you focus on what that purchase will displace:

1) Am I being humble about the results of this purchase? What incorrect assumptions might I be making about how I'll use (or mis-use) this product or service?

2) Unintended consequences will undoubtedly result from this purchase. Have I considered them? What might they be?

3) Should I hold off on this purchase to think through questions 1 and 2 a bit more?

Readers, what would you add?


See the intelligent and useful book Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton for related ideas on this topic.


You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!

And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!

Frugality and Tradeoffs

Is frugality always worth it? Is it always worth it to trade your time to save money?

And at what point does frugality simply become not worth it?

One of the interesting ironies of frugality is if you get really good at it, you get to a point where you don't have to do it any more. You'll have plenty of money left over because you're using that money as efficiently as possible.

Which then leaves you with a new decision layer: what types of frugality are worth it relative to the tradeoffs in time required?

Grocery shopping gives us an excellent example of this decision layer: A competent frugalista will reduce his or her grocery bill to a point where it takes up a smaller and smaller portion of the household budget. Then, all of a sudden, it stops being worth it to invest an extra 25 minutes driving to another grocery store to buy a couple of cheaper items there. The few bucks you save stops being worth it.

Now, granted, some frugality skills become automatic and thus require no effort. Like buying lower cost unbranded or store brand items. After all, the less expensive product is right there, buying it requires no extra effort. Further, some frugality techniques may remain worthwhile because they offer sustained payoffs. Examples here would be a one-time phone call every few years to renegotiate a cellphone or cable bill, or a quick call to tweak coverage on an insurance bill. That phone call could save you hundreds of dollars a year for years.

And then there are big-ticket frugality decisions that always stay worth it. Replacing a high fee mutual fund with a near-zero fee index fund is a prime example here. This single decision can save you tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of an investing career, and the savings differential grows as your assets grow.

In our home we are grappling with this new decision layer too, and I finding I'm retaining the frugality habits I do automatically and habitually, the ones that come naturally to me and don't require any thinking or extra cognitive energy. And then I try to maintain any frugality habit that saves me both money and time, so I can entirely sidestep the money/time tradeoff above. And this often involves avoiding shopping and avoiding buying things entirely, and re-allocating that time to things I'd much rather do. It's another one of frugality's rich ironies.

One last thought. What happens to readers who "get" the value of frugality, learn and then master it… and then master it so well that they don't really need to be frugal any more?

They stop reading blog posts about frugality! It's an interesting second-order question for frugality and budget bloggers to think about.


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You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!

And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!

Compounding

We think about the word "compounding" in a needlessly narrow sense. Typically, we consider it only in the context of investment compounding. As in: If I save X dollars a month and it compounds at Y percent, I will have [buttloads of] dollars in 30 years.

Today I want to think about compounding more metaphorically and in a broader context. It's a much more powerful concept than it at first appears.

One aspect of compounding that's always interested me is how, over time, it transforms tiny differences today into enormous future differences. If you can stay patient, that is. Sticking with a simple (and once again, "narrow") financial example for the moment, imagine two median income households in the USA, and consider what happens if one household chooses to save and invest a couple hundred bucks a month while the other saves nothing.

At first, there's next to no difference between these households, either economically or in quality of life. To the typical middle class household, $200 doesn't really feel like all that much money. It doesn't feel like it really matters all that much whether you save it or not. Which is of course why many households fail to choose to save.

However, it's also true that saving a couple hundred bucks a month on a median household lifestyle would involve giving up very little. Hilariously little. Cancelling cable TV and getting a lowish-end cellphone plan would do it. Skipping a few dinners out per month would do it. So would choosing to drive a modest paid-off car rather than driving an expensive debt-financed car. Note also: combining all these steps would produce savings well beyond a couple of hundred dollars per month, all for a trivial change in living standards.[1]

So, for the average American household, is saving a couple hundred bucks a month trivial, or not? Certainly in the short run it may seem so. But in the longer run, these two households--with their "trivial" differences in living standards--will begin to diverge economically. Even at modest compounding assumptions of 7% a year (a reasonable guess at future returns for an ultra-low fee broad market index fund), a savings of $200 dollars a month compounds to an astonishing quarter of a million dollars after 30 years. Quite frankly, it's hard to believe such "trivial" incremental savings can morph into sums like this over time, but it's all thanks to compounding.

And that's just the money side of things--this post isn't even supposed to be about money! The truth is, compounding works in far more ways, on far more levels, and with far more nuance. When you start thinking conceptually about compounding, you begin to see many life domains where things start out very small, yet gradually transform into tremendous results over time. Just like that two hundred bucks, except better.

An example. Let's go back to that household above that decided to practice the act of savings, even at a "trivial" level of $200 a month. Actually, it's not trivial in the least, as we'll soon see.

Adopting this practice (think of it as a kata) will "compound" that family's future ability to navigate a wide range of psychological challenges, like deferring gratification, understanding desire triggers, and other psychologically manipulative aspects of modern consumer society.

Further, the meta-skill of how to get better at saving money also compounds: A family that can find a couple of hundred bucks a month in savings today will get far better at saving over time, leading to substantially more future savings.[2] Note further that once you're in a position where you are regularly producing excess savings, you'll gradually compound your competence at intelligently investing that savings. So, a saver will get better at saving, while also improving at investing, while also managing his psychology better, and so on. Level on a level on a level compounding.

What at first glance appears to be a trivial financial baby step later gives rise to a whole range of powerful skills:

* The ability to get better at saving and investing
* The ability to manage yourself psychologically
* The ability to visualize a future and plan for it
* The ability to maintain discipline and install good habits
* The skill of building skills

Better still, all of these skills compound too. You'll get better over time at each as you practice them, and, fascinatingly, your improvement in each augments improvement in all the others. All of a sudden we're talking about a matrix of second- and even third-order compounding.

And to take it one more step further, someone learning how to better navigate her psychology will improve at identifying instances where her ego subverts her efforts to grow. You could easily argue that ego management and ego suppression are the ultimate cross-domain skills.

At this point, an insightful reader should be able to see all sorts of life domains where these wide-ranging skills play formidable, and compounding, roles. Forget about turning a $200 a month into a quarter million bucks--you're thinking way, way too small!

Pushback
There's a predictable--and cynical--response to these ideas, and it deals with the presumed long-term timeframes involved. The pushback (actually it's an excuse) sounds something like this:

Compounding over 20 or 30 years? Years??? I'm already [insert your age here], which means in twenty to thirty years I'll be [choose an age that sounds old]. It's too late!

Let's start with a screaming logic problem. Obviously, the idea of giving up on doing something because you could have started earlier is a particularly toxic form of defeatism. It's also circular. Everybody starts when and where they start. If your first thought is it's too late for me, you're essentially saying that nothing is ever worth doing because you haven't already started. That sure makes sense.

Further, even the central premise of this complaint is flawed: In nearly all the domains we've discussed above, the compounding of skills is so rapid that you don't have to wait 20 or 30 years to get big results.

To see what I mean, think about the central topic of this blog: cooking easy, healthy and laughably cheap meals. This is based on the above skills of a) managing yourself psychologically, and b) visualizing a future and planning for it. Miraculously, you only have to "compound" of a habit of cooking simple and low-cost meals at home for a few weeks to develop substantial competence in effortlessly putting healthy, low-cost meals on your table.

Another example: in his brilliant book How to Be an Imperfectionist, Stephen Guise shows us how a laughably minimal exercise habit of "one pushup" quickly compounds into a well-grooved, consistent fitness habit. Forget years of compounding--that process took more like twenty to thirty days. Psychologically speaking, 20-30 days is about how long it takes us to permanently install a brand new habit.

Even in financial domains, where we typically do think in longer compounding periods, the premise that things take too long is still flawed. The ability to save money, for example, is a skill that compounds very rapidly. The average Your Money Or Your Life reader who quietly and sincerely completes the book's nine steps will develop skills at saving money they never dreamed of in a matter of mere months.

Finally, skills like the ability to manage yourself psychologically and the ability to visualize and plan for the future are intrinsically valuable skills that compound rapidly and can be used in almost any life domain. In other words, they merit practice no matter what your age or life stage happens to be.

Everybody typically thinks about compounding in the limited, long-term financial sense: that of investments requiring multiple decades to grow. Don't let that be you!


Recommended Reading:
1) Anders Ericsson: Peak
2) Stephen Guise: How to Be an Imperfectionist
3) Josh Waitzkin: The Art of Learning
4) Karl Sunstrom: Breaking Out of Homeostasis


Footnotes:
[1] In one of the many intriguing ironies of modern life, "giving up" things like televised media and vehicular status competition actually makes you happier. Anyone who's tried it knows it's true; anyone who doubts it hasn't tried.

[2] Saving $200 a month on a median income represents an extremely low savings rate, less than 5%. [Math: Median income in the USA is currently $59,000, thus $200 a month or $2,400 a year divided by 59,000 = 4.07%.] If you are familiar with just a few concepts from Jacob Lund Fisker's book Early Retirement Extreme, you could easily juice this savings rate enormously.



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You can help support the work I do here at Casual Kitchen by visiting Amazon via any link on this site. Amazon pays a small commission to me based on whatever purchase you make on that visit, and it's at no extra cost to you. Thank you!

And, if you are interested at all in cryptocurrencies, yet another way you can help support my work here is to use this link to open up your own cryptocurrency account at Coinbase. I will receive a small affiliate commission with each opened account. Once again, thank you for your support!

21 Questions (To Ask Yourself Annually)

Readers, I wanted to share a list of questions from How To Retire Happy, Wild, and Free by Ernie Zelinski.

This unusual and indiosyncratic book comes from the same family of foundational works as Early Retirement Extreme, Your Money Or Your Life and Mr. Money Mustache’s blog. And as any Casual Kitchen reader knows, these books and sites have massively influenced my thinking. Zelinski’s book is yet another work that pushes readers to think wildly differently about the world we live in, and like these other books, it offers thoughtful, open-minded readers an opportunity to "play chess instead of checkers" in the game of life.

The following list of twenty-one questions is structured in a way to get you to think and reflect. Are you surrounding yourself with the right social and informational inputs? Are you spending your time properly, in a fulfilling way? Are you making truly active choices about these things? Or are you making passive choices while telling yourself they’re active?

I consider Zelinski’s list of questions to be an important contribution to the canon of early retirement/anti-consumerist literature. And while these questions come from a book about retirement, the questions below are really about living a mindful life of quality. In other words, anyone--at any stage of life--will benefit from thinking about them.

Questions to Ask Yourself Annually

1) Am I in control of my lifestyle?
2) Do I make the most of my money to give me the best quality of life?
3) What can I achieve in my retirement that would make me proud?
4) What can I do that is unique?
5) Do I have enough great friends in my life?
6) Do I devote sufficient time to see my close friends?
7) Do I watch too much TV?
8) Does my lifestyle complement my partner's?
9) Do I travel as much as I would like?
10) Do my time commitments allow me to make a contribution to making this world a better place?
11) Do my time commitments allow me to indulge in creative endeavors?
12) Am I developing spiritually as a human being?
13) Do I exercise enough, in my own enjoyable way?
14) Do I complain too much?
15) Am I as grateful as I should be for what I have in my life?
16) Am I continually learning something new?
17) Do I do something special for myself each and every day?
18) Do I take enough time to meditate and keep my mind in tiptop shape?
19) Am I living in the right country or in the right part of the country?
20) What will make me feel better?
21) Do I have everything I need to be happy, but don't realize it?


Readers, what do you think? Which questions do you find particularly helpful or provocative? And why?


READ NEXT: The Official Your Money Or Your Life Reading List

There's Still Time

Have you ever seen those personal finance compounding tables, the ones that show how much money you need to save per month to have, say, a million dollars by age 65?

There's a familiar pattern to these charts. If you start saving at age 21 at a given annual rate of return, the required savings might be around $250 a month. If you wait until age 40 to start saving, you'll need to save more like $1,250 a month. And if you wait until very late, say age 50, you'll need to save something like $4,000 a month.

The central idea is this: small steps, begun early and taken consistently, produce impressive results. Likewise, if you skip those small early steps and don't take action, things get hard--very hard--the longer you wait.

There's another sort of sneaky nuance here. $250 a month is a small, hardly-significant amount of money, less than what the average consumer spends on cable, internet and cellphone together. And since it's such a small amount of money, it takes a while to really see any real results of a habit of saving $250 a month--for a long time it simply doesn't add up to all that much capital.

Finally, this habit offers no extrinsic validation, no opportunity for identity construction. It isn't overt or salient to others. Nobody will ever say "Wow, nice looking 250 dollars you saved this month! So hot!" to this young twenty-something. Nobody will notice at all.

However, this 21-year-old is compounding something very important: an intrinsically rewarding habit of regular, disciplined saving and investing. It's just totally invisible to the outside world. For now.

Over time, however, bigger and bigger differences begin to emerge between the person with a disciplined savings habit and the person who never built that discipline. It just takes a while. But at the 15 or 20 year mark, when people reach, say, their late 30s, early 40s, you begin to see enormous differences in peoples' outcomes. The intrinsic becomes extrinsic. And the differences in outcomes spring from vanishingly small initial differences in actions. That $250 a month really does add up, in more ways than you'd think.

Okay. This post isn't really about retirement savings, it's broader than that. So let's stretch this concept a little.

Which of your peers "compounded" a few pounds of body weight per year? And at what point were you really able to see the results? A few pounds of new body weight a year is nearly invisible on a person in his 20s, starts to be gently visible in his 30s…. and then, seemingly all of a sudden, this person is 80-100 pounds overweight by age 45.

Which of your friends or peers compounded in terms of lifestyle inflation? Which didn't? Which of your friends or peers compounded a habit of reading widely, or a habit of lifelong learning? Which of your peers anti-compounded intellectually by watching a ton of television?

Yet again, in your 20s, you simply can't see all that much of a difference between the compounders and the anti-compounders. No, wait: it's worse than that. In the short run, the rewards tend to sit on the wrong side of the ledger! Early on in the game, the lifestyle compounders and the non-savers get to drive slightly nicer cars and eat out more often. The heavy TV watchers seem more hip and trendy and know more shows.

But these small, insignificant-seeming consumption, behavioral and habit differences compound--no, they explode--into something substantial in the long run. And it really begins to show itself in the late 30s and 40s--the age I'm at right now. It's heavy.

Admittedly, I've done better in some life domains and much worse in others. I suspect most of us can say the same.

One last point. I'm sure by now most readers "get" this post's general metaphor on compounding: take little steps, build a habit, be patient, blah blah blah.

For those readers in their late 30s, their 40s--even their 50s--who are thinking "But I'm not in my 20s anymore. It's too late for me to capture the benefits of compounding!" I have a question for you: Do you expect to be alive fifteen, twenty, even thirty years from now? Exactly.


Read Next: The Teacher Was Already There All Along


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. 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.

"When U Know the Cost You Know the Margins"

Readers, today we're going to travel a little afield from the domain of food. Although not as far afield as you might think.

We're going to address a consumer products domain that separates more people from more money than perhaps any other: sneakers. And we'll do so by way of an interesting series of statements from retired pro basketball player Stephon Marbury, who also happens to be the founder of a budget-priced shoe brand called Starbury Shoes.

Marbury hit the news recently to announce the relaunch of Starbury sneakers, and he caught a lot of publicity, much of it negative, when he said that Starbury sneakers, which retail for just $15, are made in the same factories as Nike's Air Jordan sneakers, which retail for as much as $200.

Made in the same factories. Hmmm, now wait just a minute. Does this sound vaguely familiar? Where oh where have we seen higher-priced branded products produced at the same facility--often with the same materials--as lower-priced or unbranded goods?

Why, in the food industry! It's a theme long-time CK readers know by heart: lower-priced generic or store-brand foods are often not only indistinguishable from much higher-priced branded foods, but often they are made in the exact same facility, by the exact same third-party food manufacturer, with the exact same ingredients.

We see this across countless products in our grocery stores: canned vegetables, pasta, juices, frozen foods, and many consumer products categories. And these branded and unbranded products sit right next to each other on your store shelves, at wildly different prices, just waiting for your "brand awareness" to needlessly separate you from your money.

Well, well, well. So the same exact thing happens in the footwear industry. And yes, Stephon Marbury is right: all too often, you'll find high-priced, high-end sneakers (as well as most other types of clothing) manufactured at the exact same facility as low-priced, discount versions of the same item. With the same materials too.

It's the same dark secret. The same cruel joke played on status-minded consumers.

I give a lot of credit to Marbury both for what he's doing and for how he frames up the issue for us. And I'm actually blown away by an insightful and sophisticated statement he offered up on Twitter to someone mocking him for his low-priced shoes:

"when u know the cost you know the margins."

Why is this statement sophisticated? Here's why: once a consumer becomes fully and deeply aware that their precious and seemingly worth-it $200 sneakers...

1) are made from a few dollars worth of foam, plastic and glue,

2) sit on the retail shelf next to shoes at wildly different price points, all made at the same factories with the same materials,

3) have a minimal or even negligible quality differential from shoes priced at $15, and

4) are astonishingly profitable for the company selling them,

...one of two possible things will happen in the mind of that consumer: ego resistance, or righteous anger.

So, if after learning the dark secret of the food processing industry it suddenly irritates you to pay, say, 30-40% more for a branded can of beans, how does it make you feel to pay 1,200% more for sneakers?

Consumers rarely know what they are paying for in terms of materials, product quality, manufacturing and so on. More importantly, the consumer products companies selling to us do not want us to know. Correction: they cannot have us know. Why? Because once we know we're paying $200 for a few bucks of foam, plastic and glue, we feel duped. Taken advantage of. We feel like suckers.

And until we fully understand this, we are suckers.


For further reading:
1) The Do Nothing Brand: Required reading to understand the true nature of the food and consumer products industry.

2) Why the Return of the Starbury is a Very Good Thing at Pacific Standard Magazine.

3) Coming Soon: Stephon Marbury to relaunch $15 Starbury sneakers at The NY Daily News.

4) Wikipedia on Starbury Shoes: See in particular the segment "Findings On Shoe Quality."

5) Stephon Marbury Defends His Affordable Sneaker Being Rereleased at The Root. Interesting here to read the fierce ego defense implicit in various comments, quotes and tweets from consumers clearly habituated to high-priced footwear brands. Companies love consumers like this--it's all too easy to separate them from their money.



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. 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.

Hurting the Frugal Consumer with a Narrative

One modest follow-up thought on last week's post on how people now spend more on food in restaurants and bars than they do on food cooked at home.

It's interesting, isn't it, that the average American is supposedly struggling financially, yet somehow we can afford to eat out more than ever. I don't know what's behind this trend in restaurant spending, but I wonder if it's a symptom of us, as a culture, being increasingly unable to distinguish "discretionary" spending from "necessary" spending.

More importantly, if I were a company selling discretionary services or products, I'd be extraordinarily interested in figuring out ways to make them seem "necessary." As necessary as possible.

So, if I were, say, in charge of marketing at a major restaurant chain, or if I worked for a company selling prepared food, I'd definitely want to encourage the use of narratives like "healthy food costs too much... I might as well eat out" or "it takes way too much time to prepare food at home... it's far more convenient to pick up takeout instead." In this context, these narratives become ready-made justifications encouraging people to spend more. Not to mention, they'd help my company sell more, possibly much more.

So who are we supporting, exactly, when we consumers use these narratives... on ourselves?


Read Next: Consumers: Pay For Your Own Brainwashing! (Or Don't)


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. 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.

Restaurant Spending Now Exceeds In-Home Food Spending. But it Still "Costs Too Much" to Eat Healthy?

Recently, a striking datapoint came out on household food spending. I shared it in a Friday Links post just a few weeks ago, but I felt this data, and the trend it signifies, was worth a full post.

Here's the data in graph format, courtesy of Mark Perry's economics blog:

What this chart says is this: Now, for the first time ever, Americans spend more on food in restaurants than they spend on food to prepare and eat at home.

Which makes statements like "healthy food costs too much" and "it takes too much time and costs too much money to cook healthy food at home" even more hollow and preposterous than ever.

To see why, think about the extra and unnecessary costs we consumers bear whenever we eat out. Here are just a few:

* Rent costs for the restaurant
* Staffing costs (waiters, bar staff, hostesses, cooking staff, bussing staff)
* Extra costs for food waste/spoilage
* Advertising, marketing and promotion costs
* Tipping costs
* Sufficient residual profit needed to support the restaurant owners (or the restaurant's shareholders) and justify the restaurant remaining in business

All of these costs are passed through to the paying customer. And none of these costs above have anything to do with healthy food. They're just... costs. Essentially this is the cost stack [1] the customer bears at any restaurant that expects to stay in business. Furthermore, a restaurant will typically need to mark up the cost of the food by as much as several times in order to cover all of these ancillary costs and still earn a profit.

This means, by definition, you can cut your costs massively just by cooking something simple and easy at home. All you'll need is my post The Top 25 Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen (or the followup post More! Top 25 Laughably Cheap Recipes at Casual Kitchen).

Now, let's go one step further, and think about the various time costs involved in eating out. Here are some of them:

* Driving to the restaurant
* Waiting to be seated
* Ordering
* Waiting for the food to be prepared/thawed/microwaved/brought to you
* Waiting for the check
* Driving home
* Laying down on the couch because you ate too much

And so on. Obviously, you can eliminate some of these time costs by ordering takeout... or by eating a little less.

Let's take one more step, and think about some of the longer-term costs of eating out: Is the food at restaurants and take-out joints any healthier than food you can cook at home? Most likely no. And in comparison to most of the easy and laughably cheap recipes here at CK, no way.

In general, food in restaurants and takeout joints is designed for easy storage, bulk preparation, and rapid serving. As a result, it tends to be laced with sodium, sugars, and cheap hydrogenated fats. Worse, much of what we eat in restaurants is specifically engineered to make you want to eat more, and in general tends to tune your palate increasingly towards loud, salty and sugar-salt-fat-laden foods.[2] Needless to say, this engineering also tends to turn your palate away from the kind of simple, healthy, less processed and less expensive foods you can easily prepare at home.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not criticizing going out to eat. If you want to eat out, go for it! Enjoy it for what it is. Just don't try and claim, as you whip out your credit card to pay for your restaurant meal, that "healthy food costs too much" or "it takes way too much time to cook food at home." If you still think this, you haven't been thinking at all.

Readers, what do you think?


Footnotes/For Further Reading:
[1] For more on the concept of cost stacks and how to think about (and avoid!) unnecessary food costs as a consumer, read Casual Kitchen's Core Principle #4: Focus On First Order Foods.

[2] The topic of engineered and "hyperpalatable" food is extremely well-covered in Dr. David Kessler's intriguing book The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite.


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
Easy. 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.

Consumerism and Modern Pseudovalues: Some Thoughts

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.
--Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

It's normal for human beings to search for meaning in their lives. Otherwise... what's the point? Unless we actively seek out real meaning--genuine, existential value--there is no point.

Unfortunately, consumer culture has handed us an easy alternative to the challenge of searching for true meaning: buying things. You can purchase meaning now. It's not the same, but it's close enough to fool many of us.

What, then, are examples of purchased pseudo-meaning?

* Meals at exclusive or high-status restaurants
* Branded merchandise
* Status-driven pastimes or activities
* Exotic-sounding vacations
* Relentlessly seeking more money or more income
* Purchases that signal our success, good taste, or wealth.

Okay. Intellectually, we all know (well, most of us know) that these things do not, and cannot, bring lasting meaning to our lives. But here's where the problem lies: When we buy stuff and experiences like the things above, it produces a temporary illusion of meaning and value, and it can be deceivingly easy to mistake that illusion for the real thing.

Another problem lies with the ostensibility of each of the pseudovalues above: each gives us overt ways to advertise our status, originality, importance, wealth, success… to the point where we can construct a plausible and believable facade of living a meaningful life just by filling our lives with things from this list. No one will know the difference, and you’ll "be seen" as the kind of person who (uh, ostensibly) lives a rich, meaningful life.

This would be lovely, if appearing to live a meaningful life was more important to you than actually living a meaningful life. Can you spot the difference between the two? Many people can't, leaving them endlessly chasing items from the list above. They may think they're pursuing happiness, but all they'll end up with is more stuff. And usually more debt.

Worst of all, since consumerism-as-meaning is most peoples' default choice, it can be awfully lonely to avoid consumerism in order to seek out real meaning. Hey, if you're not out there buying stuff with everybody else, it's easy to feel uneasy. As if you're doing it all wrong somehow.

I'm not sure of much, but I'm certain that the point to life isn't to die next to a large pile of branded consumer goods. Which takes us to one of the key existential challenges of living in the modern world: You must discern true meaning from pseudo-meaning. Forget all the overpriced, meaningless crap on the list above. Instead, I'd make the case that meaning comes from activities like the following:

* Helping someone
* Teaching someone something
* Private learning and expertise-building
* Cultivating a mindset of "enough"
* Sharing a simple meal or experience with a friend, partner or family member
* Rejecting consumerism-based pursuits in all forms.

A final thought: It's an interesting coincidence that all of the things on this list are either free or close to it.

Readers, what would you add? Do you struggle with the consumerism of your peers, friends, colleagues or family? What solutions have worked for you? Share your thoughts in the comments!



How can I support Casual Kitchen?
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The Great Consumerism Reset

If the mass consumption of the last half of the twentieth century had a catchphrase, it was "keeping up with the Joneses," and in the past decade or two, that has become almost a fearsome mantra. Manufacturers and retailers capitalized on this ethic of identification through acquisition and effectively marketed ready-made taste and status. Were you Armani or L.L. Bean? IKEA or Pottery Barn? ShopRite, Winn-Dixie, Kroger or Whole Foods?

Popular culture became so infected with the brand-name obsession that it became next to impossible to tell the ads from the actual content. I wonder if someone picking up The Devil Wears Prada fifty years from now would have any idea what the title means. And what of the women of Sex and the City, who uttered the names of their favorite shoe and handbag designers as often as they did the names of their best friends?

Looking back, it doesn't even seem real.

--From The Great Reset by Richard Florida

One of the unexpected blessings of a really severe recession is that it tends to cure consumerism. With any luck, our society's last 30 years of rampantly conspicuous consumerism is finally--hopefully!--drawing to a close. We've entered a new era.

Readers, I want to know what you are doing differently now. How do you think about brands, luxury products, big-ticket purchases and expensive items now compared to several years ago? How have your priorities changed since the "great reset" of our economy?

Have you "downsized" your lives or your careers? What's changed about the cars you buy, the vacations you take, the major purchases you make?

And here's my last question--and it's the one I want you to answer as honestly as you can: are you any less happy now that you've made these changes?

Share your thoughts!


Related Posts:
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Attack of the Cheaps! Eight Ideas to Save $500-$700 a Month
Extreme Savings
How to Defeat the Retail Industry's Ninja Mind Tricks

How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Eight Things Frugality Taught Me

Frugality taught me:

To feign polite interest in peoples' latest gadgets.

To ignore the open-mouthed stares when I tell people I hardly ever watch TV.

To judge value based on my wants and needs, not society's.

To give many of my things away. The things collecting dust in your home could be useful to someone else.

That most people live in a state of constant fear of being different, and one result of that fear is our culture's voracious consumerism.

That many people will perceive your lifestyle choices to be a threat to their lifestyle choices, and they will project their insecurities onto you.

To accept that most people carry heavy psychological baggage about money.

That you can live on a lot less than you think--and you will actually be happier as a result.

What has frugality taught you?

This post is gratefully dedicated to Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar.

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Breaking Your Own Frugality Rules
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Ask Casual Kitchen: Best Investing Books
Avoiding the "Yes, But" Vortex
Ask Casual Kitchen: Do You Make Money Blogging?
Trusting Your Own Taste in Wine and Food
The Art of Being Minimalist


How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Breaking Your Own Frugality Rules

Here at Casual Kitchen we don't think of frugality as a rigid way of life. Rather, we view it as a tool--the kind of tool that we can pick up or put down as we need to.

And oddly enough, our efforts at saving money on healthy food have never really been a function of our income. Back when I was making medium-sized bucks during my Wall Street career, we still ate out infrequently, carefully managed our food spending, and regularly cooked the easy and low-cost recipes readers can find in CK's recipe index.

It's pure fun to come up with counterintuitive (and sometimes downright unusual) ideas on how to optimize effort, time, money and food, and it's a privilege to be able to share these ideas with readers. And hey, saving some serious dough ain't such a bad thing either.

Hypocrisy and orthodoxy
However, I've also written posts you'd never expect to see in a frugal food blog. Many people would make the case that articles on Kona coffee and champagne, or posts about our extended visits to Chile, Hawaii and New Zealand have absolutely no place here. Some readers have pushed back hard against these posts, saying essentially that it's misleading, even hypocritical, to write with one hand about lentil soup at 60c a serving, and then turn around and write with the other hand about $29-a-pound coffee.

Does the world of frugality require this degree of rigid orthodoxy? And if you don't adhere at all times to an impossibly high frugality standard, are you, like, some kind of a cheater?

Some of us even internalize this frugality standard to the point where it becomes a source of guilt. I've seen talented bloggers beat themselves up on their own blogs because they weren't always following all of the frugal ideas and recommendations they offer their readers.

Winners, losers and lentils
And then there's an exact opposite reaction I often see: people will react with inappropriately magnified revulsion to a certain frugal tip or practice, as if a certain tip, like eating lentils, psychologically pushes them over the edge into a place where they feel like a cheap loser.

Look, this is all ankle-biting. It misses the point.

So what is the point? It's this: frugality is all about making thoughtful choices about how and where you spend your money. It's about allocating your money to things that are most important. And when I say "most important" I mean most important to you. Not what meets some imagined and impossibly high frugality standard.

You are not on this earth to make spending choices to meet some imagined social construct. And you are most definitely not on this earth to impress your neighbors or social peers, either by what you save or by what you spend. Frugality is not some kind of a contest with winners and losers.

The right to break your own rules
Here's the ultimate truth and the real advantage to regularly using your frugality muscles. If you make conscious and intelligent choices with how you spend the bulk of your income, you'll have extra money around to break your frugality rules if and when you want to. You'll have the resources available to splurge on the good stuff from time to time. That's the real reward of a life of conscious spending decisions.

In my view, the rules of frugality are made to be broken. And the more you use frugality as a tool, the more often you'll earn the right to put that tool down when you want to.

Readers! What frugality rules do you break? And do you think a blogger can break his or her own rules without being hypocritical?

I'd like to thank Marcia at Frugal Healthy Simple for inspiring this post.

Related Posts:
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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Let That Other Guy Pay! Saving Money in Two-Sided Markets

Continuing with our theme of Spreading The New Frugality, this article explains how you can save money on food and other consumer items by taking advantage of one of the idiosyncrasies of our modern economy: the two-sided market.

PS: For those of you who missed last week's post, the phrase "The New Frugality" is just a catchy-sounding name for plain old regular frugality.
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There's an intriguing section in Chris Anderson's otherwise mediocre new book Free discussing two-sided markets. These are markets where products are free or heavily subsidized for the end consumer, thanks to a third party who pays the bills.

The most obvious example of a two-sided market is broadcast media. Over-the-air television and radio are free to consumers because advertisers are willing to pay for access to a large audience.

But let's think about this arrangement a little more deeply. Who really pays in this kind of arrangement? In reality, the advertisers don't really pay. The people who buy advertised products end up paying. They pay in the form of higher prices.

If you see a national marketing campaign for Pepsi and at some point decide to buy a can of the stuff, you should be well aware that in making that purchase, you indirectly pay for that advertising--as well as for several other embedded costs. Furthermore, you pay for incremental profit margins on top of all these costs because Pepsi, understandably, wants to make a profit selling bubbly brownish liquid.

Quite frankly, this model works exceptionally well. Forgive the finance-speak for a moment while I give a quick example of exactly how well: in the most recent quarter, Pepsi printed operating margins of 20.7%. During the worst recession in recent memory.

[Some of you might reasonably ask, "wait--are 20.7% operating margins good?" And I'm here to tell you that, yes, they are. Really good. Very few companies can maintain this kind of profitability long-term. Seriously, if I had a nickel for every money-losing technology company I met during my prior life on Wall Street that claimed it would earn 20% operating margins, I'd.... well, I'd have a very tall stack of nickels.]

Let's look at a few more examples of two-sided markets:

1) Free credit cards: Consumers who carry credit card balances and who do the most buying subsidize your access to free revolving credit.

2) Online pay sites: Online sites tend to obey a 5% rule, where 5% of users paying for a premium service generate enough revenue to subsidize a large pool of free users (e.g., Flickr or Yahoo Games).

3) Grocery stores: Grocers make the bulk of their profits on prepared and processed foods (what we call second-order foods here at Casual Kitchen). Therefore, shoppers who buy Hungry Man frozen dinners essentially subsidize shoppers who purchase simple grains and inexpensive in-season produce.

Okay, this is all very fascinating, but what is my point? Well, as we'll soon find out, this two-sided market model--where some pay and others get a free ride--works well not only for companies. This model works exceptionally well for consumers too.

For the consumers who put their money back into their pockets.

Nobody says you have to pay extra for heavily advertised or overpriced foods, products or services. Let others purchase them, and let those purchases subsidize you, while you buy less-processed and less-marketed items without these embedded costs.

This thinking goes far beyond the grocery store. In fact, you can apply it to practically every area of consumer spending. The big home renovation firm that advertises all over town will likely charge you an arm and a leg for a job, while the small-time contractor who quietly built a good reputation by word of mouth may do better work for much less. Instead of patronizing heavily advertised national chains, you might find better value (and much better food) at a local owner-operated restaurant. The eye doctor or dentist in a prominent, high-rent office in your community will likely charge high prices, but she may not necessarily give the best care. And so on.

However, don't misread this post and conclude that you should never do business with any company that advertises, pays a lot in rent or earns 20.7% operating margins. Nor does embracing The New Frugality forbid you from buying widely advertised second-order foods like Pepsi, Doritos, M&Ms or any of a long list of foods I myself occasionally indulge in.

The point of this post is to get you to think about what you are actually paying for when you buy products or services that are particularly expensive, heavily processed or heavily marketed. Ask yourself whether that incremental cost is worth it to you. If it's not, then choose to not buy.

This is the easiest way I know of to save a lot of money, not just in the grocery store, but in all areas of consumer life. It's never been easier to be frugal, and there have never been more reasons to embrace The New Frugality. Spread the word, and help those around you embrace it too.

Photo credit: Meanest Indian

Related Posts:
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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!

Spreading the New Frugality: A Manifesto

This essay discusses how frugality is suddenly coming back into fashion in our culture, and how we can do our society a favor by helping it along.
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As representatives of the small but growing minority of Americans who take pride and pleasure in spending less money rather than more, I believe we have an obligation to society to spread the ideas of The New Frugality--especially now.

What exactly is the new frugality? Well, it's really just the same as the old frugality. It just seems new to lots of people of this generation. But thanks to a stiff credit crisis, 10% unemployment and a good old-fashioned recession, being frugal is coming into vogue once again.

It may seem counterintuitive, but recessions are actually good for society. They help us put things back into their proper perspective, and they remind us that life is about much more than our stuff and our status.

Therefore, if there was ever a time for the frugal lifestyle to go viral, with all of the cultural, financial and environmental side benefits that accrue with it, it's right now.

Let's face it, humans tend to act in herds. That's why the stuff-and-status mindset became so contagious during the boom. Today, however, more and more members of society are casting off the old stuff-and-status lifestyle and they're trying out this newfangled frugality thing.

And they are finding that being frugal doesn't have to mean wearing tie-dyed shirts, cutting your own hair and being cheap. Not any more.

Instead, they are finding the real truth of the new frugality: that you can save money, be a better steward of the environment and live a higher quality life by thinking a bit more about what you buy and how you spend your money.

That snotty comment I made a few sentences ago about humans acting in herds? Well, watch what happens as the current recession progresses and as these heretofore heretical ideas about saving money rather than spending it begin to spread. More and more people will find it easier and easier to follow along.

So, to all my readers, and to all of the food bloggers, debt bloggers and frugal bloggers out there: our obligation begins now. We owe it to our economy and to our society to spread the culture of the new frugality. Now is the time, because there's never been a more receptive audience to our ideas.

If you've already taught yourself to cook and you've mastered some inexpensive recipes, share your skills by inviting your less-frugal friends over and cooking for them. You won't even need to say a word about the savings of cooking at home, just show them. The delicious food and the great times will make the idea an easy sell.

If you're a regular Casual Kitchen reader, then you've successfully escaped the clutches of the culinary-industrial complex and its overpriced second-order foods. Well, now it's time to help your friends escape too. Write about your ideas and insights on this subject in your own blog.

Do you usually meet your friends out for dinner and drinks? How about hosting a dinner party at home instead? Or instead of dropping $70 in a loud bar, shouting over your appletinis, why not learn to mix great drinks yourself and invite your friends to your home? You'll save money (not to mention your vocal chords), and your popularity will increase in direct proportion to your mixology skills.

Pretty soon, your other friends will want to host their own dinners at their homes. Guess what? Suddenly your entire social circle will be spending a fraction of what it used to spend, and you'll be having more fun than ever.

And if you don't yet know how to cook, team up with a friend and learn together. Scale your spice costs and your cooking gear purchases across two households. You'll eat healthier food, you'll learn some great skills--and you'll both save a ton of money.

These may be modest ideas, but they can have meaningful results. If each of us helped a friend save some extra money, spread just a little bit of our cooking knowledge, shared our ideas on frugality, or shared our time enjoying experiences that really matter, we could collectively make an enormous difference across the whole of our society.

Readers, what's your take?

Photo credit: Tracy O

Related Posts:
A Recession-Proof Guide to Saving Money on Food
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Diet, Food and Cooking
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How can I support Casual Kitchen?
If you enjoy reading Casual Kitchen, tell a friend and spread the word! You can also support me by purchasing items from Amazon.com via links on this site, or by linking to me or subscribing to my RSS feed. Finally, you can consider submitting this article, or any other article you particularly enjoyed here, to bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, digg or stumbleupon. Thank you for your support!