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527 sats \ 2 replies \ @orthwyrm 15 Sep 2023 \ on: We should all try and be more frugal meta
Bitcoin and frugality go hand and hand, yet I find it isn't emphasized as much as I'd expect in this community. My guess is that most of the influencers are a couple of cycles deep at this point and have already "made it". Flying out to conferences all year and eating nothing but ribeyes sounds fun, but it sure ain't frugal.
Anyway some ideas, in order of importance:
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Accomodation: Live with friends / family and split the bills. It can be a lot of fun if you pick the right people. Humans are social organisms and don't do well living alone.
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Travel: The bicycle is the most important tool you can own. It's cheap yet offers free travel, exercise, and fresh air. Also move closer to work! Your 1 hour clown car commute is a collosal waste of time and money.
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Food: Good cooking equipment is the second most important tool(s) you can own. Preparing your own food is cheaper, more rewarding, and healthier (even the nicer restuarants add all sorts of processed shit to get you hooked).
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Exercise: You don't need a gym. Cycle + do body weight exercises at home (check out r/bodyweightfitness to get started). Buy a set of weights if you really must.
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Clothes: Simple, cut back. I have no idea how people spend so much on their elaborate rags. Really you shouldn't be spending more than a couple hundred £ on clothes each year, apart from a solid pair of shoes which is always a good investment.
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Tracking: Monitor your expenses. Yyou should also work out costs not in terms of £, but in terms of hours worked. An expense of £100 is abstract, but knowing that it took 5 hours of your scarcest resource, time, is not.
Do the above and you'll stack a shit load more BTC.
__@_'-'
All of them good, solid points. Thanks!
The one that resonates the most with me, is this one:
Tracking: Monitor your expenses
While I've been doing this for most of my life - often frustrating my family - I recently started tracking some key expenses in bitcoin. I.e. converting the expense from fiat to sats.
It's fun and rather 'inspirational' to see these expenses deflate in BTC terms over time. And helps to maintain a low time preference by somehow making it more tangible & real.
Currently I only track a few items but the plan is to expand the list to eventually include all my expenses. For example:
- Electricity: sats/kWh
- Food: sats/loaf of bread
It also serves as my own, personal inflation index. One I can rely on more than any government issued "CPI".
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Yeah. Every time I make a purchase there's a mental calculation I do in the back of my mind about what future value I'm throwing away by making a purchase today.
My working assumption when doing these calculations is a 20-20 rule: Bitcoin flips gold's market cap (x20) a generation from now (20 yrs). So if I buy a bar of chocolate for £1 today, that's £20 I'm throwing away 20 years from now.
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