Category Archives: Frugality

5 Ways Losing 50 Pounds and Saving $1M Was Exactly the Same

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2018 is proving to be an eventful year for the Fetching Freedom Family. Three weddings of close friends and family and we are on track to be officially financially independent in mere months, you guys, a full year ahead of our original schedule and before my 29th birthday, even after putting a year’s salary into our newly minted Donor-Advised Fund.

Not to mention I will be a speaker at FinCon (affiliate link for tickets, though they have community passes too), attending the inaugural Cents Positive retreat (sold out, but sign up for their list serv for details on the scholarships), taking an eight week sabbatical (including three weeks in and around the beautiful Acadia National Park in Maine), and I’m on track to lose over 50 pounds this year (bringing me down 67 from my highest weight over the last two years)!

Unlike frugality and personal finance, healthy habits do not come naturally to me. Losing weight with diet and exercise always sounded reductionist and didn’t seem to apply to me. Vegetables were my friends, after all, and red meat was never part of my diet; if I already ate my greens, how could I possibly lose weight? Plus running is just awful. I’d rather have some extra weight than have to go for a run every day. I don’t eat any different from my friends, and they’re not overweight. It’s obviously just the way I am, right? (Spoiler Alert: wrong!)

It took unknowingly gaining 30 pounds in a year (and, okay, the Secret Eaters TV series if I’m being honest) to really get me to make a conscious change, and in the journey I’ve realized there are an insane number of parallels to personal finance and the journey to financial independence.

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Personal Finance Rules Are For Dicks

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Today’s post is part of the Women Rock Money movement, with a massive 42 contributors at last count alone. Yes, that’s right, 42+ kickass women dropping knowledge today. While I haven’t been able to read the others at the time of this writing, as all the posts went live today at 6AM EST, but the snippets and titles alone make me question if I’ll be able to get any of my 9-5 work done tomorrow. 

Disclaimer: Links to Amazon and Personal Capital are affiliate links.

You know who’s used to hearing often-conflicting advice about what they should and should not do in life? Women. We’re taught being fat is a crime punishable by spinsterhood, yet it’s somehow also our vain faults that eating disorders are on the rise. We’re supposed to lean in and be assertive at work, but only if we aren’t bitches about it. It’s exhausting and futile to try to satisfy all of society’s expectations. In a word, it’s bullshit.

In honor of International Women’s Day, I’m calling bullshit on one more thing, because personal finance rules are for dicks.

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Fluffster the golden retriever smiling like mad

Does Dollars and Sense Grow Cents?

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Disclaimer: Links to Amazon are affiliate links 

Dan Ariely has a knack for helping us understand ourselves as humans and delivering science in an approachable way. Probably best known for Predictably Irrational, a well-named tome about how humans behave irrationally (but in a predictable way), Ariely is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics. Basically, him writing a book about humans and money was bound to happen one of these days!

This time around, Ariely teamed up with Jeff Kreisler, a comedian and writer. The tone of the book did seem noticeably different and written in a lighter way. Dollars and Sense, as a result, comes across as even more approachable to the casual reader.

There’s a little something for everyone in Dollars and Sense, but it seems most applicable to someone fairly new to thinking about personal finance, or to someone who has struggled to stick to budgets and saving.

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Wow, Yeah, Unfortunately I Need to Go Car Shopping — What Now?

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My condolences. Seriously, car shopping sucks. Here are a few lessons we picked up to make it less sucky, mostly focused on buying from a dealership (for Craigslist shopping, LifeHacker has you covered).

[This is a continuation of our previous article, Why Did We Just Spend $1150 Repairing Our $500 Car?, which you should totally check out if you haven’t already read it.]

Get a Burner Phone & Spammy Email

We love to shop around for the best rates, and dealers love to spam with calls and emails. I initially inquired about new car prices just for the hell of it on TrueCar (meaning I had to give an email and phone number), and I instantly got six different emails from four different dealerships. Months later, and some of them still haunt my voicemail. Take a note from drug dealers and get yourself a burner phone.

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Fluffster sitting next to car

Why Did We Just Spend $1150 Repairing Our $500 Car?

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[Make sure to check out Part 2: “Wow, Yeah, Unfortunately We Need to Go Car Shopping — What Now?“]

So we just spent $1150 on car repairs… oh, and the trade-in value for our car is roughly $500 (from a dealer; we could surely get quite a lot more selling it ourselves, but probably still less than $1150). When does spending more money on repairs than the value of the car make sense financially? Let’s explore [cue evil laugh].

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White car with dark spots on it from a bad paint job

Six Steps to Saving Money by DIYing Everything Like a Bad-ass Engineer

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In my freshman engineering seminar, there was one phrase forever drilled into my head: “Engineers Solve Problems (ESP™).”

ESP was the one thing that brought all the disciplines together – from six sigma-ing industrial engineers to code monkey computer engineers (engineers can be super cliquey).

So how can you be like an engineer? You guessed it – by solving problems. Why would you want to? Oh, man, because engineering is cool? No? Okay, how about saving money, time, and sanity? Yeah, I thought so.

Step 1: Destroy Mental Barriers

“But everyone solves problems,” I hear you groan, “What makes engineers special?”

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Chromebook

To Chromebook or Not to Chromebook

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I just got a new computer. And I love it.

I primarily wanted something for writing (this blog + other random projects), and for general checking email, browsing the web and the like. I needed something lightweight and portable, something I could pick up on a whim for hours of creation. I went with a Chromebook and am very happy with my decision.

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Free Events in and Around Boston

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The weekend before last we went to the Boston Local Food Festival on the Greenway in Boston. While we used the opportunity as our one fancy “nom out” for the month (see this post for details on our monthly adventures), there were loads of free samples, a cooking competition, and demonstrations all for free. We even got free parking using Spot Hero**).

There are so many great, free activities in any city, and this post is a guide to what’s available in our own neck of the woods. However, most of the tips are valid across the country. This doesn’t cover the most touristy things you can do for free in Boston (freedom trail, etc), but Boston on Budget has a great article covering that base for your reference.

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Saving Money on Money (International Transfers)

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This is not a sponsored post, but there are affiliate links to TransferWise, a company we enthusiastically support and reached out to.

I love technology. So much information at our fingertips, such almighty power compared to twenty years ago. So why is so much banking technology awful? At work I could spin up a network of VMs in minutes, so why does it take multiple days to make a transfer of funds from one bank in Massachusetts to another bank in Massachusetts? Why? Why does it need to be that way?

The worst culprit by far has been international transfers and exchanges. We have family outside of the US, and occasionally we like to send money overseas. Our first experience with transferring money was just painful. We searched around, trying to find the best combination of rate and fee for our use case.

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Be Lazy, Eat In: Frugal Kitchen Breakfast Edition

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I am spoiled. Fergus is in charge of cooking, and for good reason: his food is delicious (plus he enjoys cooking). Some mornings I literally wake up to the offer of breakfast in bed.

Yet as I write this Fergus, is away on a business trip. And I can’t cook. And I hate cleaning the kitchen. What’s a frugally minded, culinarily-impaired engineer to do? Since we only go to restaurants rarely (and they have to be special, not just a convenience purchase), eating out is not an option. That would be weak.

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