Letter Never Sent

The secret to saving money is to learn how to trick your emotional, animal brain. Here are a few tips I use:

• Before you buy something you don’t need, make sure you want it three or more times. Back in college when I worked at the Eckerd’s one-hour photo lab, this guy came in to check out our selection of digital cameras. He really wanted to buy this particular Olympus camera, but then as he handed the camera back to me, he said he was going to take a walk around the block to think it over. This struck me as very sensible. Often when you want something, the feeling is temporary. Before you buy something extra, make sure it’s really something you want.
• At the grocery store, load up your cart with whatever you want. Then before you check out filter out any items you don’t really need. By the time you filter, the desire for many things will have passed and you can put back those cookies.
• Think yearly for any recurring monthly expenses. Let’s say you sign up for cable at roughly $100 a month. Instead of thinking of this as $100 a month, think of it as $1200 a year (100 x 12). If you cut off the cable, you give yourself a raise of $1200 a year. Do this calculation for any recurring expenses you are considering taking on. I created a spreadsheet listing any current recurring expenses like bills, bank charges, internet subscriptions, rent, etc. Then I created a section where I show what I could cut every expense down to if I needed to make drastic cuts in spending due to job loss or other catastrophes. Anything you spend automatically every month is considered your “nut”, the bare minimum of your expenses before discretionary spending. Try to keep this as low as possible and you’ll have more money to invest and save.

My friend Phillip recently recommended the blog of Marc and Nathalie Fleury. Marc is the former CEO of JBoss, which was acquired by Redhat. Both Fleury’s are entertaining bloggers with a matched sharp sense of humor. Maybe it’s a French thing. Many of Marc’s entries are delightfully over the top like Fake Steve Jobs, but with the added bonus that it’s the real Marc Fleury. For example:

From Remember, I don’t give a shit:

And, while you’re at it, please address me as Doctor Fleury, and no, that’s not my DJ name. I didn’t suffer through ten years of differential equations to be talking on a first name basis with some random honky.

From Life After Marc Fleury:

And then I wonder, maybe Cameron is on to something. Could it be that all the ballsy visionaries are in one place and all the pontificating windbags are in another? Is it possible that Cameron is very happy at Oracle, just as it is apparent that Shaun is happier at Red Hat and I am only happy when I call the shots?

Good stuff.

A lot of people (example) are starting to realize that stuff is not all that important. As we get better at mass producing cheap food and consumer products, stuff will cease to be important at all. The only stuff that will be valuable is stuff that can no longer be made due to lack of sufficient demand or stuff that is too difficult or time consuming to make cheaply. Artifacts and original artwork will grow more valuable, but everything else will just be future trash someone will have to get rid of when you die.

Wealth will be valued in terms of freedom and influence rather than in terms of material accumulation. It was not long ago that many people collected things: records, books, films, etc. Before downloadable music and eBay, it was difficult to find certain things. You could score cultural points for having a super deep collection of records or books that were hard to find. It sucked having to search around only to have to buy from heavily marked-up specialty stores or, worse, collectors. Now if you want to listen to music or find a particular book or movie, it’s easy. Snobs have been disintermediated by technology.

Media is quickly becoming unimportant stuff, too. When you can pipe in thousands of songs from thousands of artists around the world, how important is the individual song? We’ve only been recording music and film for a hundred years, imagine when you have access to three hundred years of human cultural produce. You won’t feel the need to ‘own’ any of it. It will just be part of the atmosphere in which we live.

As we grow wealthier, we will be faced with choices on how best to live. When the essentials of survival are easy to acquire, how should we proceed? We are already starting to see that stuff, entertainment, and material comfort do not satisfy our hunger for meaning. We are so wealthy but so alienated from life as it could be lived and experienced. We can accomplish so much, but we have so few goals that capture the imagination. If you never had to worry about survival, how would you live? What would you like to accomplish?

The Blackberry makes a pretty good alarm clock. It has a weekend off setting, so you can leave the alarm set all the time. And, it’s portable and battery-powered so you can hide it on a shelf or behind something, so you have to get up and turn it off. It also makes an awesome travel alarm. Just stretch out, set the alarm and you’re good to go. Another good feature is the ability to set the alarm to play any sound file based on how you like to wake up. The other day I had the idea to create a ringtone from Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” to use as my alarm sound a la Phil Connors in the Harold Ramis classic, Groundhog Day. In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is jaded weatherman, Phil Connors. Trapped in time, he wakes each morning to a clock radio playing “I Got You Babe” to relive the same day over and over.

When every day can feel like a repeat of the day before, it makes the perfect song to wake up to. Download it to your Blackberry or cellphone.

A while back I recommended a cool Greasemonkey script to check the library for the books you are browsing at Amazon.com. It has saved me a ton of money (sorry Amazon) and has turned me into a regular library patron. Now when I click a link to Amazon, the script checks to see if my libraries have the book. Then I can click through and put the book on hold and grab it when I get to the library.

I was talking to this guy I work with about good books and I told him about this script and found out which library he goes to. Then I just edited the script to support his library. So, if you get your books at the Plano library, you can now use this script. (Remember to install Greasemonkey for Firefox first.)

While we’re at it, if you have a library and can’t find a similar script on userscripts.org, let me know what library you go to and I can whip one up for you.

For more on Greasemonkey, you can read Mark Pilgrim’s Greasemonkey Hacks in its entirety online.

Due to my general lack of patience, I was a late arrival to shopping with Amazon. With the zeal of a convert I am convinced that this is the way people will shop in the near future. It is just a superior way to buy things, especially if you hate shopping or fighting the Malthusian crowds. Anything not needed immediately can be ordered online. For any trip to the grocery store or a place like Wal-mart or Target, a certain percentage of items will be non-perishable. Most of these items are already available via Amazon. Amazon has also recently started delivering fresh groceries in select cities.

As a business, I think Amazon could grow to eclipse even Wal-mart. Sure, anyone can sell products online, but Amazon just does it better. Also, with an online model they need fewer facilities (lower overhead) and fewer employees than their bricks and mortar counterparts. The retailers deliver goods to you and you ship them to your customers via UPS. No truck fleets to manage, no shoplifting, no fancy stores with big electricity bills, etc. Pure sales. For customers, you get a good deal and often no sales tax unless you’re in the same state as an Amazon facility where they must collect sales tax. With no sales tax, this is an automatic 6-8% discount.

Amazon Prime is a good example of this superior approach to retail. With Amazon Prime, you pay $80 a year for super cheap shipping. This is a great deal if you use Amazon frequently. As an Amazon Prime member you get free two-day shipping and $3.99 per item for overnight shipping.

Amazon Prime is also genius for a few reasons:

1. When you join Amazon Prime, you buy a whole lot more. With free two-day shipping and super cheap overnight shipping, you can order something and have it the next day, which is tough to resist.
2. Amazon Prime also trains you to buy more exclusively from Amazon versus from other retailers who offer products on Amazon.com. In addition to selling their own stock, Amazon is a storefront for independent partners who use Amazon as an ecommerce platform. The thing is, if you’re an Amazon Prime member and there are multiple sellers for a particular product, given the choice you will buy from Amazon since only Amazon fulfilled products qualify for the free shipping.

We’re seeing a cultural shift that will lead to new, more flexible concepts of work and social life. With the advent of widespread personal connectivity, people are now interested in public spaces again. While technology has allowed many people to stay closer to home while they work, when you can stay connected anywhere why limit yourself to the confines of the home or the office? When you can take your media and communications anywhere, every place becomes your place. Because what is your home or office, but a locus of activity, expression, and business?

With your iPod, laptop, and smartphone you can colonize almost any space. How will this change how we work and live? How we regard our local and national identities? It is already easy to imagine a world where people flow from place to place, wherever there is opportunity and interest. The only physical limitations are infrastructure and ease of movement.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t get so-called social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc. I don’t use them to find music, hang out, send messages, or whatever it is people do. I don’t use them period. I have signed up to try them out and to see if I could stalk find people from high school, etc., but after that what else do you do? Just leave notes on people’s pages? Why not just send an email, instant message, or make a call? Whenever I go to the library it seems like all the people on the library computers are using MySpace. I don’t understand it. Is it basically asynchronous, public instant messaging?

My working theory is that social networking sites are the successors to online dating websites. In effect, MySpace reintegrates online dating into some semblance of a normal, social life, albeit one that is semi-virtual and online rather than physical and actual.

Rather than cruise for connections with strangers (the normal online dating paradigm), social networking sites facilitate lively echosystems where people can potentially pair off. In fact, I believe this is the whole point of MySpace-type sites. According to this theory, I would expect the people who are most active in MySpace/Facebook to be single and looking. Or cynically, in a relationship and looking. In simple terms, dating sites are the online equivalent of a singles’ bar, whereas MySpace is a party. Even though the goal in both often comes down to romance/sexual gratification, they both go about it in very different ways.

Social networking sites will eventually replace dating sites because they perform one very important function: they erase the stigma of meeting people online.

This is just an idea because I am clueless about it. I’d be curious to know what the appeal is. If you participate in social networking, how do you use it? What purpose does it serve for you?