Frugality

How Much is Enough?

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The fourth chapter of Your Money or Your Life deals with fulfillment.  It includes three questions that will assist you in clarifying what fulfills you.  The three questions are:

  1. Did I receive fulfillment, satisfaction and value in proportion to life energy spent?
  2. Is this expenditure of life energy in alignment with my values and life purpose?
  3. How might this expenditure change if I didn’t have to work for a living?

After asking yourself these three questions you will probably discover some expenditures that you would like to change or eliminate.  I still sometimes spend money on stuff that receives a “no” answer for one and/or two but doing this step helps me reduce such expenditures. The third question allows you to see that enough might be less if you didn’t have to work.

This is a brief summary of this chapter of the book be sure to read the book to get the full details.

Check out this $2000 Solar Homestead

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I came across this little cabin somewhere on the web a few weeks ago and really liked it. I would love to have a little cabin in the country and live in it. When I share my plans most people don’t grasp how small a cabin I’m talking about. When they do grasp how small a cabin I want they often compare my prospective cabin to the Unabomber cabin. Not the best comparison but I think his cabin would have been plenty big enough.

The cabin I have linked to is 400 square feet. I’ve lived in studio apartments that big so it shouldn’t be a problem to live in a cabin that size. Especially since it has a porch where I could spend a lot of time outside. I also like how the house is not dependent on any utility company for power or water. I’d just have to find a way to get Internet and I’d have everything I need. There isn’t a whole lot of information on the site since he is selling an e-book. It looks like the e-book contains a lot of other useful information. If I were closer to doing this I’d buy the book and I might just buy it anyway. Living in a cabin like this for part of the year would work great for my future semi-retirement plans. It would be a very frugal way to live.

Would anyone else like to live in a cabin like this or am I just crazy?

Where Is It All Going?

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The third chapter of Your Money or Your Life builds on the topics of life energy and tracking your money that were introduced in the second chapter and asks you to do three things.  It asks you to create a table of all your income and expenses organized by categories.  The categories you have are dependent on how you spend your money.  You also need to balance your monthly income and outgo totals. Also you should compute how many of hours of life energy you are spending on different categories.

I do the first step and sometimes do the second step but I think the last step is the most beneficial to those who are just starting to take control of their finances. This last step might cause you to discover that you are spending lots of life energy on categories you don’t really care about and not much life energy on categories you do care about.  This information is very useful in helping you change your spending patterns.

That is a very brief summary of this part of the book.  You really should check the book out from your local library or buy it to get the full benefit of this book.

My Cost for School Supplies- $0

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The best way to save money on school supplies is to not buy any. Other than books I haven’t needed to purchase anything for law school this semester. I’ve previously posted strategies for saving money on books and using these strategies I was able to get the two books I needed fairly cheap. These books have the added advantage of being great resources for studying for the bar and when I’m finished with them I should be able to sell them for close to my purchase price.

The only other thing I need for school is pen and paper and those are both things I get for free. When I have to print something to turn in I have to pay three cents a page but other than that I won’t be spending any money for school supplies. I’m sure many of you have other school supplies you must have but you should analyze whether you really need them before you make the purchase. This is a cost of education that can most likely be reduced. If I needed a loan I could find out more at studentloans.gov.

Another way that I have reduced my overall spending on schooling is by taking classes online. I won’t spend anything on the classes that I take online, since most of the material is available on the computer. The books that go with the course are mostly unnecessary because most of the information is available through the school‘s online portal. I don’t even need a pen and paper, as I can take notes on my computer while I watch lectures remotely. The fewer supplies I have to purchase before attending class, the more money I will save in the long run.

It is even possible for me to earn my entire degree online, which could help me to cut down on my expenses even further in the near future. In fact, online universities allow me to save on things like fuel and parking, since I don’t have to leave the house to attend class. If I choose to further my education after completing my current degree, I plan on doing it exclusively online because of the cost benefits. Master’s and doctorate programs are quickly becoming more abundant online, giving students who want to work full time while attending school the chance to do so.

Publicity: Good,Bad, and Possible Click Fraud

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Traffic to this blog has skyrocketed over the past couple days due to multiple plugs of some of my posts. First I had a post in this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance which is being hosted at The Writer’s Coin. My post “Five Radical Ways for the U.S. Government to Raise Revenue” is the very first one listed which leads to a lot of traffic. The Carnival wasn’t as large as usual this week either which probably also led to more traffic for my post. Next, my post “Five Things You Should Get for Free” was featured on the MSN Smart Spending blog which resulted in a huge surge of traffic. With both of these combined I’m likely to receive about as much traffic in two days as I usually get in a month. My site seems to be handling ok though.

I’ve also received some negative publicity and negative comments. BA posted “The limits of frugality” which is in response to my “I’m Frugal So Why Am I Poor” (part 2), (part 3)series of posts that I wrote shortly after I began this blog. I’m glad to see someone is reading my old posts and I’m pleased to expose them to new readers since I didn’t have many readers when the post was first published. BA is critical of the results of my frugal efforts in the post. For the most part I agree with him. The series was meant to be a critique of the shortcoming of frugality efforts to that point in my life and determine what I needed to change. I don’t agree with his criticism of my future. I’m not sure if he understood that it wasn’t my plan to continue with the same behavior. Also, my definition of success is not the same as most people’s definition. The get married, have 2.5 kids, and work until you’re 65 life is not one I aspire to. I plan to work for myself, have a great relationship with my wonderful GF, and live a life of semi-retirement.

I wrote that series of posts almost two years ago so it is the future now. I like to think I’ve made great progress since then. I have almost two years of expenses saved. I’ll be graduating law school in May. I’ve been dating my GF since last April and I think we will be together for a very long time. I plan to go on a five month hike after I graduate. The difference between this trip and trips in the past is that even while hiking I’ll be making almost enough to cover my expenses. The hike should cause only a small decrease in my savings if it causes a decrease at all.

The other negative thing is that I think people might be fraudulently clicking on my ads. Even with the increased traffic the number of clicks on my ads is absurdly high. I’m wondering if one of my posts has angered someone and they’re trying to cause me to lose my Google account. I’ve removed my Google ads for now and I’ll put them back when my traffic is back to normal levels. Oh well, I guess you have to take the good with the bad.t