Groceries Goal: Under $21 a Week

Early Retirement Extreme in a nutshell: your biggest expenses are 1) housing 2) transportation and 3) food.  Through some intelligent planning, and adding skills, you can drastically cut these big 3 and watch your savings rate soar above 50% to something like 75%+, or you can take my route and be semi-retired at much earlier age than most would think possible.

I am trying to challenge myself to make all of my meals $1 or less.  This means my meals will be home-cooked and mostly meatless, though eggs are still going to play a major role, and cheeses will will certainly show up.  That makes the weekly benchmark $21.  This week I messed up a bit and spent $26.  I wanted to try out making a vegetable lasagna and black bean burgers from scratch, so my curiosity made me buy more than I am going to use this week.  I'm not completely certain I'll be able to keep next week's purchases down to $16 to make up for the overage, but even if I don't, that still puts all of my eating in the range of one "nice" meal out (paying for my wife as well, and don't forget the tip!)

Internet Fast Completed

It was only a week, but I think it was good enough.  Toward the end of the school year, I was on a loop with the kind of "itch scratching" websites that it seems most people use to run out the clock -- news, reddit, espn, the like.

A guest on a Tim Ferris podcast once said something like "I realized I was getting a bunch of little dopamine hits, but I wasn't learning anything."

Life is better with real projects to work on, my favorite have actions in the real, physical world.  With those projects, however, it is easy to get exhausted, and so then the rest feels better, often with interesting intellectual sidelines to be working on.  Those truly interesting sidelines are not be found in the little bites of popular internet sites, but still in book-length material.

And that's what I got back in touch with during this internet fast:  big projects, good books (ie good art).