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I'm always surprised that more people don't bike to work, if they can do it in a reasonable amount of time and safety.
Laziness. I'm able to commute by bike, on a well-maintained bike path, no less. However, more often than not, I don't do it. Why? Because since I also have a car, I'm more likely to drive when running late (which is basically ALL the time).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Laziness. I'm able to commute by bike, on a well-maintained bike path, no less. However, more often than not, I don't do it. Why? Because since I also have a car, I'm more likely to drive when running late (which is basically ALL the time).
This is literally the main reason my wife and I do not own a car. If we need one for a long trip or a holiday, we rent or borrow one. We have discussed renting a garage a couple of miles from our house if we ever do buy a car though.
Two caveats: I live in a city with fantastic public transport. I would not be any faster at work by car, probably slower on most days.
I'm a member of a car sharing cooperative (something like ZipCar, but on a non-profit basis). If I do need a car I have a dozen (literally) at my disposal within 5 minute walking distance.
The range is from a Smart to a Mercedes transporter. And I use this option about 3-4 times a year.
Not owning a car saves me 5-6k (USD) a year. And this includes my yearly public transport pass, car hires and even longer term rental and leaves a few hundred $ for cab rides.
If you can do it it's extremely liberating and leaves a lot of cash on the table for more useful things. Like nice vacations.
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In fact quite a lot of the top-level posts seem to have chosen the same hostile reading of the text. It makes me think perhaps some buttons were pushed and there's some rationalizing going on in at least some of these messages.
"The people who generally have their financial shit together don't usually realize when it's pay day." Seems like a pretty specious argument. If you pay bills, then you know when bills are due and you know when payday is. That's finance in a nutshell - managing your AR and your AP. "Do you live within biking distance from work? No? Then move closer to work." I live in one of the better school districts in the area an…
I'm always surprised that more people don't bike to work, if they can do it in a reasonable amount of time and safety.
It's crazy inconvenient, not particularly pleasant and offers weak health benefits[1]. If someone likes it, great but for most of us getting sweaty right before classes/work (and likely keep sweating while there), not being able to dress properly and not being able to go out afterwards is a deal breaker. And you can't even ditch the car and all the maintenance costs and efforts that go with it because you will still…
Years ago I used to do a 40 mile round trip to work by bike with a few good hills on route , so there was a mixture of hard anaerobic effort and lower intensity pedalling. After about 3 months of that I was probably never thinner and fitter.
Regards sweat, this depends on if you can shower at work I guess and also how sweaty you get. If you wear cycling clothing that can absorb a lot of the sweat and then change and spray some deodorant when you get to work you really don't smell all that bad.
Here is my own piece of financial advice that I learned from a wise man 20 years ago: You have to double your income in order to improve your standard of living by 10%. Many people get a raise or a new job and they think they are now rich and can spend like crazy. You can't. Double your income and you'll honestly only see a 10% lifestyle change. Don't forget it. Keep saving. Limit spending. And give a percentage of y…
That can mean many things - for every year you work, you could theoretically retire one year earlier. You could now afford a car that doesn't cost more in maintenance than gas each year. You could now afford to double your extremely tight grocery budget and spend more money on healthier foods.
"Lifestyle" and "standard of living" are unquantifiable, which is why this is a compelling factoid, but the reality is that, ignoring inflation, a 10% increase in salary is a 10% increase in disposable income.
Now obviously if you have more disposable income than you need, a 10% increase doesn't mean much. If I was pulling down 200k I wouldn't move for 220k if I was happy where I was at, but if I was pulling down 40k I would move for 44k in a heartbeat.
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The text says you should carefully consider all your expenses. It definitely doesn't claim that you should blindly eliminate all of them. You seem to have chosen an extremely hostile reading of the text. In fact quite a lot of the top-level posts seem to have chosen the same hostile reading of the text. It makes me think perhaps some buttons were pushed and there's some rationalizing going on in at least some of thes…
The big problem, at least in the UK is that cost of food and other essentials has gone up by a lot while wages have remained stagnant. This can make even a frugal budget fall apart because at the end of the day you still need to put some food in your face. It's easy enough to stop buying consumer stuff that you don't need, but you do need some way to entertain yourself and if you want any social or family life at all…
For what it's worth, if you're a HNer, I'll tell you something Ramit Sethi says often which would have been useful to internalize, oh, five years earlier: it is very hard to cut expenditures in such a meaningful fashion that your financial situation qualitatively changes. (There's only a few big wins there, and lattes or "stop buying books" do not qualify.) By comparison, the amount of impact you can have by moving your salary up is quite substantial indeed, particularly because there's just a crazy dynamic range in our industry and, well, most of us by default do not make choices which tend to land us on the top tiers of that range.
Seriously: I get people who email me on an almost weekly basis saying they got $5k ~ $15k a year just by asking for a raise. You know how many trips to the library it takes to move your financial situation by that much? You won't accomplish it in your lifetime. And that's between a few hours of work or, literally in some cases, minutes.