How to live comfortably on $1,000 per month

The secret? Find roommates, people have been doing this for generations. It isn’t limited merely to those moving out for the first time or in college either. The pure economics of sharing rent and other major expenses allows living costs to be cut significantly. If you can manage to share food as well you can save more money by buying more bulk items from random wholesale places instead of normal grocery stores.
Read the full article on cheaper living here.

Affordable Healthcare in Rhode Island

A group of Rhode Island doctors have decided to combat the rising costs of primary healthcare with their HealthAccessRI plan. HealthAccessRI is a monthly subscription service to a primary care physician for “‘less than the cost of a cell phone, less than the cost of cable TV, less than the cost of high-speed Internet,’” according to founding doctor Michael Fine. Fine and a group of likeminded doctors have setup a system that allows for affordable doctor visits without insurance or government involvement.

HealthAccessRI solely covers access to primary care physicians and does not cover other things such as hospital stays, x-rays, or other more serious procedures. Arguing that these are the things that should be covered by the insurance companies Dr. James M. Schwartz contends:

Today’s health-care financing perverts the original concept of insurance, which was supposed to pay for catastrophes, he says. “No auto insurance sells you a plan that covers oil changes and tune-ups,” he says. The current system has also harmed primary care, Schwartz argues, by paying doctors per visit, making it financially difficult to give patients the attention they need. HealthAccessRI gives doctors a steady, predictable income to cover predictable costs.

I think that HealthAccessRI is an interesting experiment that requires further investigation. I would love to have the option to pay for such a service while holding a significantly cheaper health insurance policy which would be reserved primarily for catastrophes and things other than primary care.
You can read the full article here.
Also posted on Ethereal Madness.
& Marketing College: Essential Marketing Knowledge

Americans Can’t Pick Fruit?

Or at least that’s what this article claims. Farmers in southern California might be forced to let their crops rot rather than have them picked. Why? Because tighter border security is shrinking the pool of sub-minimum wage laborers. And since there aren’t as many laborers from Mexico coming to pick fruit the fruit won’t get picked. It may be time to invest some serious time and money into research for mechanical or robotic fruit pickers.

I still don’t understand the problem the farmers are having. Is there truly no one in southern California who is willing to pick fruit? Or is no one there willing to pick fruit for a few dollars per hour? I’d have no problem picking fruit all day, but I’d expect at least $12 an hour to do it. Really I think the farmers are just whining about nothing right now. It's probably not the difference of paying someone $50 to pick a few a thousand dollars worth of fruit a day or having it rot; the difference is paying someone $50 or $150 to pick the fruit. If that is truly not the case, I’m willing to fly down Thursday nights and fly home Sunday nights to anyone hiring and willing to buy plane tickets. If there really is such a crisis, then paying for
people like me to work for you is still more profitable than letting your crops rot.

Alternative Fuels

If you go to extreme measures to use less gas in your vehicle you will probably get a visit from people who are very unhappy with you. They will be very displeased that their employer isn’t making money off of your driving and will use legal power to force you to pay them. They get this legal power because of the money and influence their organizations possess. Not buying gas decreases the revenues of these organizations and they aren’t pleased from this. Which company do these people represent? Exxon Mobile? Shell? British Petroleum? Nope, think bigger.

Try the government.

Here’s a story about what happens when you try to fuel your car yourself.

And the moral of the story is: If you try to do something for your wallet the environment that isn’t forced on you by the government, they will bite you.

Gas Saving Tips

With gas in Seattle above $3 a gallon people are more concerned with fuel economy. The easiest way to improve your car’s gas mileage is to replace it. The Volkswagen Lupo TDI has one of the best MPG ratings in the world (over 80mpg), yet is not a hybrid, nor is sold in the US. However, replacing your car solely to save a few cents per mile is neither practical nor economical.

Many sites give you tips on maximizing your gas mileage in your existing vehicles that have been around for many years. Things such as proper engine maintenance and tire pressure are a given and are important in maintaining maximum mileage. Here’s a few that aren’t normally listed (some for good reason).

1) Kill your engine. Your engine is burning gas whenever it’s running. There are times when you don’t actually need your engine. When you’re waiting at a long red light, turn the engine off. This is not recommended if your battery or starter motor are bad as you could get stuck in the middle of the road.

2) Extreme drafting. One of the biggest factors that reduce your gas mileage at high speeds is air resistance. You can eliminate much of this air resistance by tailgating larger vehicles such as semi trucks. As ninjawords defines tailgating as driving “dangerously close behind another vehicle,” do so at your own risk.

3.) Shed extra weight. I’m not talking about emptying the random junk out of your trunk or the garbage out of your back seat, although that can help too; I’m talking about your waistline. That extra Big Mac may add a few cents you your gas bill. If you weigh less, your car weighs less on the road which means less gas is burned. You might also end up a little healthier and you’ll save a few bucks a year on your gas bill too.

Thus concludes my first addition to this blog. Enjoy.

Loss Leaders

One of the best deals you can find from any store is their loss leader items. These are the items that they generally advertise below cost in order to get customers like you through their doors. The hope is that you will then buy other items, offsetting their losses and increasing the stores’ overall sales dollars.

You can use this to your advantage by buying only the loss leader items. These are usually marked as “limit x per customer” so they are easy to spot. If you need the item(s) on sale you’re in luck. If you really don’t need those items, you’re not really saving yourself any money by buying them, even if they are below cost.

Textbooks

One of the biggest shams in the educational world is the cost of college textbooks. Professors expect students to pay around $100 for a book that they probably have no interest in reading and most likely won’t use a few months after it was purchased. Text books are expensive because they are generally large, hardcover books that have many full color pages in them. On top of the expense of printing a single book these books generally don’t sell many copies so the huge publication cost is spread across a relatively small number of books.

The real fraud in this business is the publication of new editions every year or every few years. The differences between editions can be as insignificant as a new cover. Often the introduction is the only change. Sometimes the only differences are the homework questions found at the end of the chapters.

I used the 7th edition of an engineering book almost 5 years ago when I took a drafting class. Last year I took the next class in the series which required the 9th edition of the same book. I checked with the teacher during the first week of the class to compare the two books. They were virtually identical. The only changes were the cover, the introduction, and the side-bar examples scattered throughout the chapters. Of the hundreds of diagrams and problems found throughout the book, every single one matched between the two books. Thus I saved $80 by recycling my old book.

On the other end of that scale was my Calculus book from three years ago. I needed a particular edition for my 1st quarter calculus class. For the following quarter I needed the next edition which had come out during the fall. I could not reuse the book because the problems were different. Honestly, how much of the theories behind calculus changed in my lifetime? Never mind three months!

Most of my teachers have encouraged the students to buy used books from the campus bookstore to save money. I have a better solution: check the library first. Many of the books I’ve needed for classes were available at the public library. I could put them on reserve so that I would be able to check out the next available copy. I can also talk a few friends of mine to also put that book on reserve so that when it is due, I turn it in and they then check it out for me. This allows for the use of a textbook during the entire quarter at no cost.

The second option is to buy the book used, but not from the campus bookstore. The few books that I cannot get from the library are always available from Amazon, usually for less than the bookstore. This quarter I needed three textbooks, two I was able to check out from the library, and I bought the third off Amazon for $18 with shipping. A friend needed an Anthropology book; it was $106 + tax at the bookstore new or $80 + tax used; Amazon had the book new for $106 with free shipping and no sales tax, or used for $48 + $4 shipping with no sales tax either. Buying online can save you almost half on your textbook purchases.