Jeff Hendricks (.net)

Today’s thoughts on Being Frugal center around Downsizing Your Home. This is an awkward subject, but as one of the biggest investments in people’s lives, it bears some scrutiny. Don’t get me wrong, when we talk about “Downsizing” your home, I don’t mean like corporate downsizing… though for some people, that’s exactly where it leads. There are two sides to this discussion: Cost, and living space. Let’s address each separately.

Cost. Let’s be honest, houses cost tons of money, and they continue to suck money out of our pockets for pretty much our entire lives. It goes without saying (or does it?) that you want to get a good deal on a house… but that’s not the same as getting more house for your money. Would you rather buy as much house as you can afford, or buy what you need and save the remainder of your money? More often than not, we buy the biggest house we can afford!

However, smaller houses not only cost much less to build/buy, they cost less to operate and maintain. You could end up saving more money than you know what to do with if you only buy what you need! Our modern consumerism societal norms, however, say “bigger is better” and “keep up with the Joneses” but in reality, it’s a financial waste. If you’re renting, think about it before you drop money on a house that’s bigger than you need.

Living space. The reality is, most people aren’t going to sell their house for a smaller or more affordable one. And remember, being frugal means optimizing what you already have! In my case, I can’t make my house much smaller, but there are some key areas I can look at for optimizing the space I already have. We can use shelves, cabinets, and compact storage solutions to make better use of space in the house, and I can rearrange my workshop to make it more efficient as well.

I was considering buying another workshop/shed, because I need a place to work on things, as well as a place to store bulky things like lawn equipment and bikes. Maybe instead of buying another shed, I need to minimize what I have, and see if I can make what I need fit in my existing space.

I think I’ll work on it this weekend. I’ll post pictures of my progress!

Time for the Frugal Living Day 2 challenge. Are you ready?

Now it’s time to really start attacking the root of the problem: our poor spending/consumerism habits. We must thin our lives down to the minium, and then we can add back what is really necessary. Andrea gives us a list of tips for things to start thinking Frugal.

• Use less laundry detergent: We already make our own
• Use less hand soap: We’re pretty good about this, we can stretch hand soap quite a ways
• Reduce water usage: This we’re not that good on. My kids alone waste hundreds of gallons just playing in the yard, and we have a leaky toilet that runs off and on.
• Use less shampoo: I have hardly any hair, but my wife and 3 daughters have long hair. Need to try to get them to not waste it.
• Don’t use the blowdrier every day:  We hardly ever use ours
• Go without makeup:  Ummm… got it. Debbie doesn’t even like using makeup (she’s pretty enough to not need it anyway)
• Don’t use shaving cream:  I do use it, but rarely. With good razors, you need very little anyway.
• Use less toothpaste:  We had to teach our kids this from the start. They were wasting so much it wasn’t funny, but we’re much better now.
• Drink water:  Check. Got a filter for the kitchen sink, I drink more water and green tea than anything else.
• Use a shorter dryer cycle:  I wish I could. The humidity here makes it nearly impossible to dry clothes. I do, however, need to clean out the dryer exhaust to make sure it’s working at maximum efficiency.
• Eat smaller portions:  I do this. Coupled with cycling to work, I lost 40 pounds. It works.
• Eat a little piece of chocolate: I love the tiny bite-sized dark chocolate bars. Debbie and I can make a large chocolate bar last a week if we try.
• Use a French Press for coffee:  I’ve been wanting to try a french press, since I grind my own coffee beans…
• Buy cheaper brands: Not a problem. The only brands I care about are instruments, bikes, and cars, and I’m not buying those any time soon.
• Buy in bulk:  We don’t do this much, actually, because it’s hard for us to store everything. There are only certain things that we use that we can buy in bulk. It only works if the item is something you actually use a lot of, and if you can control how fast it gets consumed. I’ll see if I can improve on this.
• Eat real, whole food: This is a must. If you do nothing else in this challenge, this one is the “big one.” We eat as much whole and organic foods as we can afford.
• Turn down/up the thermostat:  Where we live, we run the A/C 10 months out of the year. It’s because our house isn’t made for cooling efficiency. To fix this, we need to put screens on all the windows and leave them open more often. I’m working on this.
• Low watt bulbs:  Done.
• Water heater: Need to check it, but with 6 people, we use a lot of hot water. I need to look into an instant-on heater, but our house is all electric (I know, I know) so it would be a significant cost outlay to add the needed circuits. Need to see if it would be worth it over time.
• Drive less: I was bike commuting for a year before I had to stop. It didn’t save me a lot on gas (about $45 a month) but the health benefits were incredible.

So, there you go. So far, I think our score is pretty good. There’s more we could do, of course, but this is a good list for starters. How did you do on this list? Let me know! Andrea says:

Daily Goal:  Examine your own unique situation and challenge yourself to the minimum level. How will seeking the minimum level effect the way you live now? What will you reduce today? What can you work on reducing in the future?

I think I can reduce a large amount of stuff I have stored away, but that’s a time-consuming process. I need to look deeper and find what I really need to let go of. Piles of magazines, boxes of computer parts, broken electronics, extra clothes that don’t fit, and so forth. No matter how many times I get rid of this stuff, it multiples and fills our spaces, which tells me one thing: I need to learn how to stop accumulating it. They belong to hobbies or dreams I no longer actively pursue, and they need to go. I need to find someone else who would appreciate them, and let it go.

Something that’s become sort of a dirty world lately is “Frugal.” What exactly does it mean to live frugally? Wiktionary defines it as “Avoiding unnecessary expenditure either of money or of anything else which is to be used or consumed; avoiding waste.” So much of what we do today is wasteful. When I say “frugal” I’m not talking about throwing away everything you own, that would be even more wasteful! In a nutshell, being frugal is making the most of what you already have, so that you don’t need to buy more.

One of the blogs I’ve stumbled on recently is Frugally Sustainable. I can identify with much of what Andrea writes, as it echoes my sentiments almost exactly. She’s started something called the 23 Day Frugal Living Challenge, and it’s quite a challenge indeed! Start with Day 1, and go from there.

I’m going to be going through this, but not because I think I have to. I want to find out if I can reclaim more of my productivity and time by being even more frugal. I already know I’m doing some of the things on Andrea’s blog, but I’ll spend some time reflecting on each one. Think of it as a journey I’m sharing with you to see just how much excess baggage my life has accumulated over the last few years.

Since there’s no better time than now, I’ll kick things off with Day 1: Redifining Frugality. One quote that stood out to me is this:

Our level of frugality should never be measured by our ability to shop a sale, or use coupons, or penny-pinch. No, frugal living is found in the enjoyment of what we already have.

I’m surrounded by people who love to “shop sales” and use coupons religiously. Saving money doesn’t bother me, but oftentimes this results in buying things we didn’t actually need in the first place. I don’t like buying stuff I don’t need.

One of the goals of Andrea’s blog is to guide each person down the road to evaluating their own lives, setting goals, changing perspectives, and making changes. I’m going to say my goal for today is to try to identify areas in my life that I know could use work. I’m not going to think of everything, I know it will take some time, but here’s what I know needs work in my life:

• Reducing how much I waste
• Sharing more things with others
• Being a good steward of my time (I never was good at this)
• Reducing things that are unused and taking up space
• Taking care of needs quickly so that I will have time to do things I really want to do

I don’t expect anybody else to do what I do, but if you are inspired by Andrea’s blog and feel like you could use a little more frugality, then by all means, follow along! Post up your thoughts, let both of us know what you’re doing. Part of the process is sharing your thoughts, which helps to 1. keep you accountable, and 2. help you to see your thinking from an external perspective.

Just a quick note: I’m not associated with Andrea Muse, or the Frugally Sustainable website. I just want to document my own process using the guidelines she’s laid out, nothing more. I’m sure along the way things will come up that we may differ on, but this is a learning process, so I welcome those things.

Since I’m looking into getting into model railroading with my 10-year-old son, I obviously had to go about it in the geekiest way possible: find a CAD program to design the track layouts! Well, since I’m a Linux guy (what self-respecting geek isn’t?) I tried a few different things before I stumbled across an open-source solution: XTrkCAD. I tried the Atlas-branded RightTrack Software, but not surprisingly, it only has Atlas-brand track pieces in its libraries. XTrkCAD will work with any operating system, was pretty easy to install (even compiling from source) and loads any kind of track, scenery, building, or scale you can think of. When I get some more of it under my belt, I’ll post up a review/HowTo on it.

I’m planning on building an N-scale recreation of the New Orleans streetcar lines. It’s much too complex to model the entire thing, but I’m going to make a small layout that will fit on (or in) a coffee table and capture the “feel” of the N.O. line. I’ll most likely use Bachmann “Brill” streetcars (instead of the 1920′s Thomas ones they actually use today) because 1. I can get them pre-painted in the right colors, 2. they’re cheap, 3. at one point they actually ran double-truck Brill cars on the line from 1906 to 1935 (though not on the Desire route), and 4. nobody makes a working scale model of the Thomas cars. So it looks like I’ll be modeling it in the 20′s or 30′s… plenty of period buildings and scenery to go with them.

Some of the challenges in recreating a streetcar line in only a 3′ x 6′ space is the ability to make tight turns. With most model railroads this can be an issue, but only running streetcars/trolleys allows me to use much tighter curves. With regular rolling stock, you would be limited to about 24″ circles or bigger, which would make it much more difficult. (If your model train has 50′ boxcars, you want wider turns, otherwise the train will derail.) The actual turning radius on the N.O. streetcar line however is a 50′ minimum on the streets, which translates to a 3.75″ turning radius in N-scale (1:160). I can therefore squeeze a full radius turn into a 12″ circle or less! Perfect. Except…. nobody makes pre-made track pieces with that small of a radius. Or do they?

So I did a little poking around, and lo and behold, Tomix makes N-scale track specifically for trolleys, even with tight-radius turns! (as small as 4″) So it would be possible to create a streetcar line, including a pair of tracks going around Lee Circle! (It scales down to about a 10″ circle) As I do more research, I’m wanting to do this more and more. I will either have to find a retailer for Tomix track (they do not normally export from Japan) or use flextrack… and I would end up having to use Tomix switchtracks anyway, as nobody else makes them with that small of a turnout radius.

Bachmann “Brill” streetcar:

And here is the last real Brill semi-convertible streetcar (the rest were scrapped in 1935): Car 453. This picture is from 2009.

Here’s a map of the route I rode the other day, it follows an abandoned railway bed. We eventually turned around due to time, but it goes on for quite a ways further.

The unspoken rules of conspicuous consumption (ripped off from bikesnobnyc):

1) You are what you “own” (or, as is more often the case, lease from a bank)
2) The more money you spend on a vehicle the more human rights you have
3) Anybody smaller and smarter than you deserves to be punished

And there you have it. Anyone still wondering why OWS is happening? This is why. The affluent believe that anybody who isn’t buying the most expensive stuff they can afford isn’t “successful.” What’s more, they feel anybody who doesn’t is a lesser person. Never mind the fact that there are people who don’t want the most expensive cars and houses they can afford, or the headaches and horrendous work hours and/or ethics required to make that much money. Yes, they exist.

What if your goal in life wasn’t to make as much money as possible? What if you simply wanted to be the best writer, or musician, or artist, or teacher you could be? What if living within your means makes you happy? What if being a “good businessman” means your family goes neglected, you compromise your beliefs daily for the sake of profit, and you think anybody else who doesn’t is stupid? If that’s success, then count me out.  What is wrong with choosing not to want to be rich and powerful?

Sadly, with today’s America being what it is, people aren’t being taught to be the best at what they love. They are being taught to obey, submit, conform, and surrender, and maybe someday if they’re good at bootlicking, they can achieve “success.” Sorry, but I’m not interested.

I read a story once about a businessman who went to Mexico on vacation. He met a local who sat on the beach most of the day playing music with his friends, and occasionally would go fishing to earn just enough money to feed his family for a while.
The businessman told him “You should fish all day, every day, to make more money.”
“Why?” replied the local.
“So you can buy more boats, and hire people to work for you,” the businessman answered.
“Why?” replied the local.
“So you can grow a huge business, take over the market, and earn enough money to retire,” the businessman answered.
“Why?” he asked yet again.
“So you can sit on the beach all day and play music with your friends, and go fishing every now and then.”

Sadly, this is the world we live in now. It’s funny, but only because we know it’s true. What is the purpose of killing yourself trying to achieve the unachievable? What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?

Unlike most of Americans, I am not envious of them, nor do I want to be like them. I feel sorry for them. I freely admit I’m wrong for despising affluent people, because the real enemy is affluency itself. Jesus Christ himself put it this way: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”

We are taught self-indulgence, when we should be practicing self-denial.

Oh yeah; Merry Christmas.

To prepare for some off-road trekking, I put some 26×2.15 knobbies on my Surly Long Haul Trucker. They fit, but barely!

Also, I love Surly for several reasons, but this is truth in advertising:

Just got in the first proof of the book from CreateSpace, and I couldn’t be more excited! Very nicely printed, and very quick and easy. I will definitely look into working more with this.

For now, here’s a quick video of me thumbing through the hard copy:

Seeking The Heavens proof

May God bless you and your family, and I hope you’re thankful for all the good things in your life!

Testing, one, two! Is this thing on?