On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 08:50:43PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: > Bah
Heh! > 1. Opportunity cost = the cost of fixing whatever shit it was yourself > instead of paying someone to fix it for you, and getting on with whatever you > do that puts food on your table. [leave alone whatever tinkering and fixing > you do in your spare time - a lot of which goes to reading mailing lists if I > don't miss my guess with people here] Of course increasing your income is often a better option than reducing your expenses, but that doesn't imply that reducing your expenses is not worthwhile. Frugality is about reducing your expenses. The opportunity cost does, of course, vary. As Deepa implicitly pointed out, the cost of paying someone to fix it for you can be a lot lower if you are much richer than the guy around the corner who can fix it for you, but if you live in a country without great extremes of wealth and poverty (such as the US, although of course this is changing) getting someone else to fix it for you can be quite expensive. > 2. Dollar store flipflops - even if interchangeable - wear out fast. Buy a > $100 pair of shoes and they'll last you for far longer, and can be used in > far more places than you can use dollar store flipflops. [You might even > find that they last longer than $100 worth of flipflops] I had a lovely US$150 pair of Red Wing boots which would have lasted far beyond my lifetime if I'd oiled and waxed them every year the way I ought to, or paid someone else to do it. That was US$150 as of 1992, which ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt tells me is equivalent to US$239 today. Unfortunately, I didn't take proper care of them, and finally had to throw them away in 2006. I was probably wearing them on average about half the time through this period. Most US$100 pairs of shoes are not nearly that durable. To compete with a 3% ROI from other possible investments of your capital, a US$239 investment needs to earn or save you US$7 per year, even assuming that it *never* wears out or depreciates. You can probably find investments with a 3% ROI in almost any economic times and at almost any scale. The first one of the ten US$0.75 flipflops I bought in January broke yesterday. My best guess is that I was wearing that flip-flop about a quarter of the time over that eight-month period, for a total of about 60 shoe-days to replacement, about US$0.005 per shoe-day, or US$0.01 per shoe-pair-day, or US$4 per year. I think this means that I can expect to spend less than the Red Wing US$14 per year to keep myself shod (all the time and not half of the time!), but I'll keep you apprised as future reliability data rolls in. If a shoe-day costs less with the flip-flops than wear and tear on some other, more broadly applicable pair of shoes, you can use the flip-flops when they're applicable and the other shoes when they're not. I still have a pair of Nikes depreciating in my closet, which I wear occasionally (e.g. on cold days) but I expect the flip-flops to extend their life considerably. > 3. As for sharing a vacuum cleaner with your neighbors, you don't get to have > the cleaner available when you most want it (mornings or evenings, whenever > you have the spare time to vacuum rather than code or wait tables or approve > loans or whatever). And who gets left holding the bag when someone you > loaned the damned thing to breaks it and returns it without telling you? If you vacuum every morning or evening, perhaps. It's true that cooperating with other people isn't easy, and you have to resolve questions like scheduling and liability. But very little that produces prosperity is easy. > 4. and 5. And over organization and too much discipline for simple tasks can > turn other work that you do into garbage by taking up all the time you have > available. Yes, of course time is a limited resource that must be allocated carefully. I find that keeping things organized saves me time rather than wasting it. There is no doubt a threshold beyond which that is not true, but my natural inclination is to fall pretty far on the chaotic side of that threshold, probably in large part because the rewards of organizing are not immediate. > The sort of "just in time" system of inventory control and household task > management described will work great if you're running a large manufacturing > plant or an agile software process. You'd have to put in a huge amount of > work to see any tangible results from applying the same principle to > household tasks. So there's this threshold where such tasks cease to be > essential and become a total waste of time. Perhaps I should have been more specific, since you don't seem to have understood that these two points are in a sense each other's opposite. It's true that walking a block to the hardware store to buy a gasket to fix the faucet is slower than picking a gasket out of your stock of faucet gaskets and scheduling a replacement for your next monthly trip to the hardware store. But maintaining a stock of faucet gaskets requires, in addition to the investment to buy the gaskets, a big up-front household ERP effort to figure out how many of which spare parts you need to keep on hand and careful organization so that you can find them when you need them in less time than it takes to go to the hardware store. I do not think you need to put in a huge amount of work to see tangible results from walking to the hardware store to buy a replacement gasket to fix your faucet with. (more later) Kragen
