Okay, technically it’s merging. I’m in the middle of simplyfying my life, and FIVE FREAKIN’ BLOGS is too many. So my food and finance and fandom blogs are becoming one super-blog that will RULE THEM ALL.
Oh, I’m sorry, is my megalomania showing?
So head on over to Eat, Drink, and Be Mary (Sue) where I’m just about to write something about the Beyond Paycheck to Paycheck Friday Q&A, namely “How do you save on one income?”
(I’ll give you a hint: one dollar at a time)
I’m feeling kind of trapped in Portland and I want to get away for a weekend here soon.
I just checked my travel fund, thinking there was probably enough to get me a slice of pie up in Centralia, since last I remember I emptied it out for my Seattle Comic Fun Fest.
There’s $250 in there.
That’s what regular saving does! SAYONARA, SUCKERS! I’mna getting out of town!
“I made beans and rice last night,” my coworker informed me proudly.
“I didn’t!” I said.
My coworker was shocked. And rightly so. I eat beans and rice at least eight meals a week.
Because beans and rice are tasty. And cheap. But also? TASTY! As for me and my house, we only eat tasty food. Because what is the point of living if you don’t eat tasty food?
That’s a double serving of beans and rice right there. Using 100% organic ingredients, because that’s how I roll. Including the strained yogurt, the cost for that double serving is $1.95. Sans yogurt? $0.95. Because I bought the expensive I-Promise-Not-To-Dink-Up-Your-Lactose-Intolerant-Digestive-Tract yogurt.
Which lied to me.
But anyway! BEANS ARE AWESOME. Chickpeas make hummus. Kidney beans make chili. Pintos make everything better. And lentils are f’n awesome, yo. For the pulse-challenged, the beanie weanies in the photo above are lentils. Lentils are the gateway drug to serious bean addiction. They cook up in 20 minutes flat, just as fast as pasta, and take a lot of the same toppings as pasta, but have something like 8 of the 12 amino acids that make up ‘complete protein’. The other four are found in rice.
BEANS AND RICE FTW! \o/
However, beans are scary to people for some reason. “I don’t know how to cook with them” I hear a LOT. I also hear that they’re boring. You see that picture up there? Does that look BORING TO YOU? The photo above is dal, which is not crazy-complex, but it does take about an hour with some intense onion carmelization action. Some days, though, all you want to do is boil and eat out of the pot. RECIPE FOR YOU! YAY RECIPE!
Got a letter from the Oregon State Department of Revenue last night.
Apparently I did a math error on my taxes and owe them another $324.00.
Plus 7.85 in interest.
This month, since I was gone on an unpaid vacation for a week (yeah, temps don’t get paid vacay because it’s more fun to watch their heads explode from the stress of this work) I’m not going to be able to pay it. Good news, though! The State will only charge me $.08 a day in interest and if I pay before August 22nd, I won’t be hit with a 5% penalty!
This year has made me a 100% proponent of the Universal Flat Tax. 12% across the board, no excuses, no upper limits, no deductions, none of this bullshit.
This blog post is rated R for language. If you don’t like that kinda thing, best move along now.
In case you couldn’t tell, I’m a bit of the office character. You know every office has to have (at least) one kinda geeky, out-there person. Well, for my office, that’s me.
My dislike for green vegetables is well-known, so when Coworker K stepped over to find me poking dubiously at the plastic container holding her spinach salad, she took it all in stride. “Yeah, I know, rabbit food.”
The microwave chose that moment to beep, and as I pulled my lunch* out of it I declared “Not-Rabbit food!”
“I bought a bikini this weekend,” she volunteered, picking up her salad. “So today I’m dieting.”
Coworker K walked off, and all I could do was blink.
Ladies and gentlemen– she spend MONEY on CLOTHES SHE CANNOT WEAR BECAUSE THEY DO NOT FIT HER.
Nuh uh, pumpkins. This is not how we do it. We buy clothes that fit, that flatter, and that make us feel good, for the body we have right now, not for the body we wish we had.
And fuck the designers and their ‘sizes’.
*For those of you who care, my lunch consisted of vaugely-steamed zucchini**, country-style pork rib, brown rice.
**How to vaugely steam zucchini for lunch: cut into matchsticks or rather thin slices. Pile atop rice in a microwave safe tupperware. Nukerwave the tupperware with the lid on.
Where have I been, young lady?
On vacay at the Family Homestead in Nowheresville, California. Where there is no Internet access, no cell service, and no paved road.
Staycations are for people too proud to mooch off their parents, yo.
I’m back, baby! And ready to start living la vida frugal and telling you all about my Adventures at the Casino and Next Steps in Financial Planning.
But right now I’m tired. Go read this thing from Single Ma about living life on your own terms. This is something I will expound upon later, the only person spending your money, honey, is Y-O-U.
This is an article in an occasional series focusing on the unique challenges of personal finance for single people. Yes, I’ve decided it’s going to be a series. Rejoicing may now commence.
If you’re single, buying food in bulk quantities is usually not a good idea.
I’m not talking scooping half a pound of sugar out of the bin at your local cooperative/hippie grocery store. That, actually, is brilliant and if you’re not doing it now, you really should. No, I’m talking about buying 10 pounds of dried potato flakes at Costco.
Face it: unless you eat dried potato flakes at every meal, you are increasing the chance of spoilage and bug infestation by having the big ol’ box sitting on your shelf for months and months. At which point, you would throw out the box of potato flakes, which is also tossing the money you spent on the unused portion.
Having smaller amounts of food on-hand also means increased food rotation in and out of your cupboards. Doesn’t that sound virtuous and frugal? Let me translate: increased food rotation decreases the chance of you standing in front of a cupboard filled with twenty pounds of, let’s say, pinto beans, and deciding that you can’t abide one. more. meal. of. pinto. beans… so you head for your favorite restaurant.
Am I speaking from personal experience? You betcha.
As a rule of thumb, I use the 1-5 Rule. If it is something I eat at least once a week, I will buy one quantity (pound or can or bag) at a time. If I eat it three or more times a week, I will buy five quantity (pound or can or bag) at a time.
..but it sure as shooting can sometimes buy peace of mind.
Ever since last night and Morty’s demise, I have been all sorts of anxious. Yes, hi, I’m Mary Sue, and I’m addicted to my computer.
I worried and fretted and did the math several times over. And this morning, doing the math YET A-FREAKING-GAIN, I realised:
1) I have enough money. This is why God designed the Emergency Fund.
2) This was interfering with my ability to concentrate on my work.
I got on the phone with a local place that does certified Mac refurbs, and I’m picking up my new baby tonight, a 12″ G4 iBook. And a wire to transfer eleven years of writing from Morty to the New Baby.
*A note on naming conventions:
I name stuff. It’s a thing. Computers are always, ALWAYS male. Because computers are a pain in my butt. Morty was actually named after a character in the film “Undercover Blues” starring Kathleen Turner and Dennis Quaid.
Morty is my G3 iBook. About a year ago he fell off the bed and his hinge cracked. Since then, he’s been held together with duct tape, and periodically his monitor would either not turn on or would have fun, random colors. Gentle prodding and prodigious cursing would usually kick his monitor back into life.
I am not computer-free, of course. I’m writing this on Moco right now, my 2G Asus EEE. Which, over the last few months I’ve owned him, has shown me that he’s a great little lappy for travel and writing in cafes, but he is not condusive to long-term use, such as writing for six hours straight, or playing Kingdom of Loathing.
I have money. YAY I HAVE MONEY! All hail the glorious budget and savings! But I also have tons and tons of choices. Choices bad, because I have a terminal case of indecision.
1) Buy a brand new iBook. Price with Big Ol’ Hospital discount: $999
2) Buy a used iBook. Price: about $700.
3) Buy a used Mac mini and hook it up to my televison and/or a used monitor: At least $450, plus $50 for the used monitor.
4) Buy a cable to hook Morty up to the TV: $40, and have to buy a new computer within a year since G3 iBooks are going the way of the Yangtze Dolphin.
I play a completely free, text-based online RPG called The Kingdom of Loathing. If the previous sentence is gobbeltygook, just ignore it. Seriously, it’ll hurt your head if I try to explain it.
KoL, being free, does have to drum up donations to keep the servers running. They manage this by offering an in-game item, called a Mr. Accessory. You give them $10, you get a Mr. A, which you can then trade for an Item of the Month, something offered for one month only that will help your game play. There’s also an in-game mall, where you can sell items, including Mr. As. The price for a Mr. A is pretty stable at 4.5 million meat.
Yes, the game’s financial system is not called coins or gold, but meat. It’s funny if you get the joke, and if I try to explain why it’s funny, again with the head hurting.
Back to the important bit: this game has an economy that can be described in real-world dollars. I, myself, if I sold everything I’d collected over a year’s worth of serious but casual playing (about two hours a day, five days a week), would have about 12 million meat, or about $22USD. It is easy for someone who cares to meat-farm, or collect as much meat as possible by fighting the same monsters over and over, to make 125,000 meat a day.
Within the game, you can join a clan, which up until last week gave you certain small advantages (an easy system to trade items, extra turns per day, more meat, and camraderie). Last week the game runners implemented new content specifically for folks who have played a lot and aren’t interested in just repeating the same quests over and over. It costs 10 million meat for a clan to install a basement dungeon, and one million meat to start a dungeon dive.
O, the hue and cry! O, the woe! Woe, damnit, WOE!
People are demanding the price on dungeons be dropped. People are decrying the neccessity to move from smaller clans to larger ones that can afford the fee. People are demanding the price of dungeons is unfair, and that the individuals who put in many, many hours of their own, free time to create the game are attempting to line their pockets. People are demanding that the untapped oil reserves in Alaska be drilled to lower the prices…
…wait, I think I got off topic.
The problem, as I see it, is that the people complaining are not thinking like personal finance bloggers. When one of us wants something, we find a way to do it, or do without.
Translated to real-world dollars, 11 million meat is about $22, with reoccuring expense of $2 every time you wanted to start a run. Three Mr. As would cover it.
But I am a PF blogger. I give up my money only after a fight. So, let’s say I don’t want to go clan-hopping. Let’s say my clan is me, my brother Larry, and my other brother Larry. We’re all over level 25, so the dungeon won’t kill us instantly dead. Since we’re also over level 25, we have some nice items in our possession that can up our meat count. Between the three of us, if we straight up meatfarm, imagining a lowball take of 100k meat a day, it would take four days to scrape up enough meat to install a basement. If we decide to finally clean out our display cases and inventories of stuff, even just autoselling all those amulets of extreme plot significance that seem to collect up real fast, we could get there faster.
Sounds familiar to the PF folks, right? That’s because it all boils down to maximizing your income sources: switching clans to one that has a higher ‘income’, taking on second jobs meat-farming, or sell excess stuff.
As for me and my characters, well, I enjoy speed-ascending (for my own quantities of ‘speed’). So my main character, LoverPrimeNumbah, is going to stay in the clan I created (which consists of LPN and my friend’s characters, which I am babysitting while he spends a couple months in Europe and Africa). My multi, though, has hopped clans and can be frequently found after rollover diving into the dungeon with the rest of the KoLAddicts.
Die, Hobos, Die!
(It’s German for “the hobos, the.”)
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Fangirling My Finances 
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