Wise Bread (Philip Brewer)

Live Where the Water Tastes Good

Philip Brewer — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:00:02 +0000

There's an old song, the "Michigan Water Blues" that starts, "Michigan water tastes like cherry wine." I grew up in Michigan, so the song always had a certain resonance for me, but I've lived other places where the water tasted good, and a few where it didn't. If you don't like the water where you live, you're all too likely to start buying bottled water or investing in a filtration system — neither a very frugal option.

Does it make sense to move somewhere just because you like the water? Probably not — just like it probably doesn't make sense to move somewhere just because they've got good public transit or because you can live within walking distance of work or because they have good public schools or because there are diverse natural areas nearby. But good-tasting water ought to be right up there with considerations like that.

Healthy water, of course, is an even more important consideration. But many people seem to think that bottled water or filtered water will somehow be magically safer than well water or water from a public water system. The fact is, though, there's no reason to think that filters make water any safer — unless you know there's something bad in the water and that your particular filter is the right kind to remove it. And bottled water is definitively less healthy — you've got whatever was in the water when it was bottled, plus the chemicals that leach out of the plastic the bottle is made of.

If you're really worried about the safety of your water supply, it would make more sense to investigate whether it's safe or not. You can start with the Centers for Disease Control Drinking Water page. It covers public water systems, private wells, springs, drinking water for campers, bottled water, and so on. Public water systems in the US are required to publish their water quality test reports. Start with the EPA's Public Drinking Water page.

For most people, though, filtration systems and bottled water are an aesthetic choice — they like the taste better. And if that's all it is, a much cheaper option is to evaluate the taste of the water the next time you're thinking about moving. If you don't like it, put the cost of a filtration system down in the minus column for that location.

And, if you're free to live wherever you want, think about moving to Michigan, where the water tastes like cherry wine. (The water in Champaign is pretty good too.)

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Turn Off Your Air Conditioning

Philip Brewer — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:19:29 +0000

By Philip Brewer

There are a few places where it is impossible to live without air conditioning. These places are easy to identify: they were uninhabited until well into the 20th century. If the place you live now was not in prior days a desolate wasteland, unseen except by the occasional nomad or caravan, then air conditioning is not required. However, most people lack the skills for getting by without air conditioning. Here's a quick primer.

First a little personal history. Back in the early 1980s I lived in Ft. Lauderdale for a couple of years. Finding money a bit tight, my roommate and I agreed to economize by turning off the AC. I was a bit doubtful about being able to manage, and I did get pretty hot and sweaty at times, but in fact it turned out to be pretty easy. Since then, I've largely avoided air conditioning wherever I've lived.

So, here are my getting by without air conditioning tips:

During the heat of the day, go some place cool. This was easy for me, because I worked in an air conditioned office, but there are plenty of other cool places: libraries, movie theaters, coffee shops, campus buildings, parks, forests, ponds, lakes, oceans, etc.

Manage your windows. We would open our windows wide during the night and by early morning the interior would have cooled down nicely. On a work day we'd close the windows as we headed out, so the place would stay somewhat cool. If you're home during the heat of the day, things are a bit more complex, but you can still close your windows as soon as it starts to warm up outside and have an extra couple of cool hours indoors. Likewise, use curtains to minimize solar gain.

Live in an appropriate building. I discovered what a big difference appropriate architecture made because various friends lived in homes that were much better than the one I lived in. One place in particular was a small block of apartments built before air conditioning was common. They had jalousie windows on two sides, to let breezes through. They were only one story, so there was no second story to get hot. They were made of masonry, which helped stabilize temperature extremes.

Install ceiling fans. In South Florida, everyone had ceiling fans, even people who used their air conditioning all the time. A gentle breeze makes a huge difference in what temperature is comfortable.

Drink plenty of cold water. Anything that directly cools your body is going to help, and cold water is effective and virtually free. Cold soda and cold beer are also effective, but cost money and add calories: use only in moderation.

Take it easy. When possible, arrange for physical labor and exercise to take place when it's cooler. If your schedule will tolerate a siesta, that's a great way to manage the hottest part of the day.

Accept that you will be hot. The various tactical adaptations mentioned above are really secondary. They key strategic step is purely mental: embrace the heat. Yes, you will sometimes be hot and sweaty, but that is hardly the end of the world. When you're uncomfortable, go someplace cool or take a shower or sit down in the shade with a big class of cold water.

Important Caution

The very young, the very old, and people with certain medical conditions, can't handle as much heat as healthy youths and adults. People die every year from heat stroke. Especially vulnerable are people who can't take the common-sense step of going someplace cool:

Children left unattended in a hot car,
Elderly or disabled people who aren't mobile without help,
People in neighborhoods so bad that they're afraid to leave their home,
Athletes, soldiers, and prisoners pressured to continue working in the heat.

If anyone you care about (or that you're responsible for) falls into a category like that, take the responsibility of checking on them and making sure that they're okay. A little care will go a lot further toward protecting them than just dumping an extra few hundred dollars into air conditioning.

This post was included in the latest Festival of Frugality.

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USDA Data Visualization Tool

Philip Brewer — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:00:05 +0000

By Philip Brewer

The USDA has just released a cool new data visualization tool called Your Food Environment Atlas. If you're interested in poverty, food security, or the related public policy issues, there's a bunch of stuff here that's worth taking a look at.

The tool gives you county-level maps on topics like:

How many low-income households have no grocery store within 1 mile?
Is whole grain much more expensive than refined grain?
How many farmers markets are there?
What's the poverty rate?
Which counties are losing population?
What percentage of adults are obese?

The idea is that you can cross-reference and compare metrics on health and well-being with community characteristics and food choices. You can also get all the data for a particular county.

I assume the tool is primarily aimed at people who have a public policy interest in one of these areas, but it should also be of interest to others. For example, people who are thinking about moving might be very interested in looking at maps of various statistics before pulling up the complete statistics for any counties that look interesting.

Check it out: Your Food Environment Atlas.

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Can a Little Inflation Be Good?

Philip Brewer — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:00:05 +0000

By Philip Brewer

Let me jump to the end and say right at the start that I don't think so. However, there's a serious argument being made right now among economists and economic policy makers that higher inflation would be good. There's enough of them in the pro-inflation camp that it's worth taking a look at what they're saying.

The Economist has a good article summarizing the current economic thinking that very low inflation can lead to trouble.

The basic case of the pro-inflation camp is that certain kinds of economic adjustments are very hard to make under a condition of stable prices. The classic example is wages, which are (in the term economists use) "sticky on the downside." That is to say that workers will resist wage cuts very strongly — strongly enough that employers find it easier to cut jobs than to cut wages.

When an economic downturn hits during a period of very low inflation, it's hard to adjust. Output goes down, jobs are lost, businesses go bust, asset prices fall, etc. (In other words, exactly what we're seeing right now.)

When there's a little inflation, it's possible to make much the same adjustments with less loss in output. Instead of trying to cut wages, employers can achieve the same result simply by giving raises lower than inflation. That means that fewer jobs are lost, fewer businesses go broke, asset prices don't have to fall as far, and so on. Economists like to speak of a little inflation as a "lubricant" in the adjustment process.

In addition to making the adjustment smoother (all wages and prices go up, but some go up slower than inflation, which amounts to a cut), a little inflation can stimulate the economy, by prompting people to buy now before prices go up (i.e. before the value of their money falls even further).

I've talked before about the downsides of inflation. When prices are stable over the long term, people can focus more of their attention on productive activities and less on keeping track of price changes.

Worse, though, I think higher inflation rates are inherently unstable. An inflation rate under 2% is low enough that inflation can just about be ignored, and a consensus can develop that it's okay. A higher inflation rate, though, becomes noticeable — and there will be pressure to change the inflation rate. Whether the pressure to raise the inflation rate will win over the pressure to lower the inflation rate can't be known, so everyone has to keep their plans flexible so that they can adjust to either possibility. That makes it much tougher to make long term plans — and that, I think, costs our economy quite a bit.

Maybe my thinking is overly influenced by my own experience — I was setting up my first household in 1980-1981, right at the peak of the 1970s inflation. But I don't think inflation is ever a better answer than stable prices.

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Contingency Plans

Philip Brewer — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:00:03 +0000

By Philip Brewer

Are you assuming that things will go along pretty much okay? Most people do, and they're usually right. Even when they're wrong, it tends to be okay, because the typical household's finances can absorb the occasional small blow. But sometimes the blows are medium-sized or large. What do you do then?

I've written before about handling the large financial blows. (In particular, I've written about losing a job and about moving your household finances to an emergency footing.) Dealing with the medium-sized blows is easier, but at least as important. After all, they're more common.

Sometimes the blow falls on the income side: Wages or salary cut, hours cut, an expected raise or bonus deferred or canceled, falling interest rates or dividends (a big deal for those living on capital). Other times on the spending side: Unexpected expenses, rising prices. So, how do you handle problems of this sort?

Well, the short answer is that you handle them in the obvious way. In the very short term you dip into your emergency fund, cut back on savings (or cut back to the minimum on repaying debt), or even borrow money. Then, in the medium term, you hustle to boost your income and take steps to cut your spending until things are back in balance (and you can replenish your emergency fund and resume normal saving or accelerated debt payments).

The longer answer, though, is that it's worth having a plan — because taking one of these medium-sized blows to your home economy can prompt you to make unwise decisions when you try to play it by ear.

We just had a good post on making an emergency plan for how to hold your emergency fund, how to access it in the case of an emergency, and what steps to take if the emergency outstrips your funds. The distinction here is that not all contingencies are emergencies. In fact, the whole point of a contingency plan is to keep contingencies from becoming emergencies. That's why it's worth going to the trouble of making a plan now, rather than waiting until it's an emergency.

Make your plan

Everybody's budget is a compromise between the cheapest way you could meet your actual needs and the most luxurious way you could satisfy your slightest whim. But there are many, many decisions embedded in that compromise. A contingency plan makes those decisions explicit, so that you know which dollars are going to the least important wants. Then you know where to cut when you get hit with falling incomes or rising costs.

As a bonus, actually making a plan informs your long-term commitments. Imagine that before you took out a car loan or signed a lease, you rejigged your contingency plan to allow for the new fixed expense. Seeing exactly which expenses might have to be cut if your finances took a hit might make you reconsider.

Strategies for implementation

Things change, so you don't want to just blindly follow a contingency plan that you made months or years ago.

Especially in the case where rising costs for specific categories are the problem, one thing to do early is to look at cutting those very costs. If the problem is rising food prices, take a fresh look at what you're buying at the grocery store — it's rare for all prices to go up the same. If the problem is rising fuel prices, take a fresh look at thermostat settings, at combining trips, carpooling, mass transit, etc.

Of course, at some level you ought to be doing this all the time. But once you've done it once (taken a serious look at where your spending is going and compared it to where you get the most satisfaction), the payoff to doing it again is going to be smaller. But when things are changing — especially when things you buy are rising in price faster than things you don't buy — it's worth doing again.

Probably the most common element of a contingency plan is simply deferring expenses. In many cases you can (temporarily) make do with what you've got, freeing up the portion of your budget that would have handled upgrades to cover contingencies.

Thinking about these things in advance makes it a lot easier to adjust smoothly to the little financial glitches that we all face.

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Is Just Leaving Some Slack Better Than a Plan?

Philip Brewer — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:00:02 +0000

By Philip Brewer

Are you as tired as I am of personal finance sites saying that you've got to have a plan? If you're a planner, it's unnecessary advice, because you've got a plan. If you're not a planner it's pointless advice, because you're not going to make a plan anyway. And that's okay, because just leaving some slack can be as good as making a plan.

Your natural planner has a plan for how he's going to spend his money. He knows how much money he's got. He knows what he wants to buy. So, he makes a plan for getting as much of what he wants as possible with the money available. (That particular sort of plan, by the way, is called a budget. It's a useful tool.)

Your play-it-by-ear guys, on the other hand, tend to have some slack in their non-budgets. (If they don't, they tend to find themselves at the end of the money before they run out of month. Let that happen a few times and they start leaving some slack.)

If things go just about as expected, your planner has a slight edge. He'll have planned to have a surplus and targeted that surplus to specific savings and investments. The guy who just leaves some slack tends to reach the end of the month with a little money left — but without a plan for that money, anything might happen. The money might get spent. (It was "extra" after all.) It might get saved or invested. Most likely, lacking any plan, it'll just hang around in the guy's checking account. That puts the planner ahead by whatever he can earn by getting his surplus into superior savings and investment vehicles sooner.

When things don't go as planned, though, your play-it-by-ear guy may have an advantage.

If you're a planner, and things don't go according to plan, you've got a problem. You've probably allocated every penny to some category or another, so, if some of those pennies don't show up, there's no slack to allow for a smooth adjustment. Unplanned expenses obviously screw up a plan, as do rising costs for any of the planned expenses. If you don't have any slack, you're stuck with a broken plan.

Now, the actual adjustment is about the same in either case. An unplanned expense can be covered with your emergency fund. Changing prices prompt the obvious adaptations — you substitute for things that have gotten more expensive with things that haven't gone up so much and, if necessary, you buy less over all. But your planner has to do all that plus come up with a new plan. When prices are shooting up every month, that can turn into a lot of extra work.

The guy who relied on slack can usually just adapt in place. Over a period of a few months, he finds that he has a lot less slack than he'd expected, so he cuts back, buys less of the stuff that seems to have gotten expensive, and gradually reestablishes a comfortable amount of slack. He makes about the same adaptations, but he does it without all the extra planning and re-planning.

My point isn't that plans are bad (or good), because you're either a planner or you're not. My point is that you're making pretty much the same adaptations either way.

If you're a natural planner, though, there is a way to keep the advantages of planning without losing the advantages of just leaving a little slack in your finances. It's called contingency planning. I'll talk about that in an upcoming post.

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Ruthless Frugality

Philip Brewer — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:00:04 +0000

By Philip Brewer

There are many strategies for frugality: Don't buy stuff you don't need. Stock up when you get a good price. Make smart decisions about when to pay up for quality and when to get the cheap stuff. Then there's what I call ruthless frugality: Always getting the best price.

I'm not talking about stupid frugality — buying the cheapest shoes you can find even though they hurt your feet. Nor am I talking about shopping around, using coupons, and so on. Rather, I'm talking about getting the best price you can without regard for what's behind the great price.

At the extreme, of course, there's criminal frugality — buying stolen goods and pretending to believe that they fell off the back of a truck. But short of that, there are all sorts of things that enter the general stream of commerce at prices that embed lots of bad practices — stuff made in sweatshops by children or prisoners or slaves, stuff made in ways that poison the workers or trash the environment.

Most people delegate to the government the job of policing how things are produced. There are, for example, laws about how farm animals have to be treated, and most people hope that those laws are strict enough that the food produced is safe and the animals' suffering is minimized.

But it's worth thinking about the costs of ruthless frugality. One good reason to pay more than you need to is to be a good neighbor, such as by buying locally. Patronizing local shops often costs more, but part of the reason the big box stores are cheaper is because they've got competition. Let all the local stores die and you can expect to see prices rise at the chain stores. More important, money spent in local stores tends to stay in town — possibly getting spent on stuff that you make or services that you provide. Perhaps more important yet, local production is often more ethical and more sustainable.

I talk about voluntary simplicity as being an essentially hedonistic lifestyle, because a high overall level of frugality frees up resources that can go to those specific areas of your life where paying more makes a difference that matters to you. The upside of frugality is more of what you care about.

I think a little hedonism is great, when it is enabled by thoughtful choices about priorities. But I think a similar amount of thinking ought to go into where really cheap stuff comes from — and whether your values can support the ruthlessness built into the price.

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Book Review: The Trap

Philip Brewer — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:00:05 +0000

By Philip Brewer

The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America by Daniel Brook.

For more than two years now writing at Wise Bread, my whole thesis has been that frugality leads to freedom — if you can live cheaply enough, you can choose whatever work calls you, instead of whatever work pays the most. This book thoughtfully presents the case that my view is not just shortsighted but actually harmful.

I've always recognized that the lifestyle I advocate has its limits. All sorts of perfectly ordinary aspects of a normal life — whether positive, such as having kids, or negative, such as becoming seriously ill — make it a lot harder to live a very frugal life.

Brook talks a good bit about the limits of frugality as a way to do whatever work calls you. Many of the examples Brook uses are people whose work requires that they live in a big city:

Activists who need to live where there's a critical mass of others with the same vision.
Social workers or community organizers who need to live in the community that they serve.
Creative types of the sort who can't just do their work by themselves the way a writer can — filmmakers, dancers, actors.

It's possible to live frugally even in a big city, but living very frugally requires not only luck and flexibility but also a level of constant attention that makes it hard to focus on the work that was the whole point.

Sure, Brook says, it's possible to live frugally enough that you can do whatever you want — as long as what you want doesn't include expensive things like sending your kids to college or paying for your healthcare if you get sick or living in a big city.

But that's really Brook's secondary point. His central point is that the way we've organized society is harmful.

Low tax rates were supposed to be good and fair. Letting everybody keep what they earn seems only right, and in a growing economy it wasn't supposed to be harmful for some people to become extremely rich. After all, as long as the poor and middle-class are also making progress, does it matter if some people are super-rich? Brook's answer is that it does matter.

Perhaps it wouldn't matter if the super-rich were spending all their vast wealth on Old Master paintings and private islands — but they aren't. They're spending significant amounts on stuff like college for their kids and healthcare and apartments in the city. Stuff, in other words, that the rest of us need to buy too. And, since they have so much money, they end up bidding up the price of the ordinary necessities of middle-class life.

The result of that is that people are pressured into selling out. Even people who are strongly inclined toward service in government or a non-profit find that they just can't do it — not and pay off their student loans, get married, buy a house, and support a family.

The big reason I advocate frugality as the path to freedom is that it's entirely within your own grasp — it doesn't depend on the government nor on changes to the way society or the economy are structured. But that doesn't mean that society and the economy are structured perfectly. Whether you're with me on the advantages of frugality or disagree, The Trap provides a fascinating look at the issues.

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Frugality, Simplicity, and Sustainability

Philip Brewer — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:00:03 +0000

By Philip Brewer

The frugality blogosphere was buzzing last week with an article by Katherine Hibbert about how she was getting by in London spending just about nothing. People were arguing about whether her lifestyle was really frugal, simple, or sustainable.

You ought to read her article My free and easy life, which is excellent, but, very briefly, she gets by through a combination of living in vacant buildings (squatting) and dumpster diving (called "skipping" in the UK). The questions in the blogosphere, though, had to do with the extent to which her example can serve as a model for the rest of us.

(I should mention that the laws on squatting are different in the UK. The article goes into some detail on that topic.)

In all three spheres, the disconnect had to do with where you drew the line around the activity before deciding whether it was frugal, simple, or sustainable.

If you drew the line just around Katherine Hibbert, her lifestyle was obviously very frugal — she got by on less than £1 a day! It was simple, too — once she got past being stressed over knowing that she might be evicted at any time, her biggest problem was boredom, and she solved that by studying and doing volunteer work.

But if you drew the line a bit wider, the frugality and simplicity became a lot fuzzier. All over London people are maintaining vacant buildings; that's how she and her friends found places to squat. All over London people were pitching perfectly good stuff into dumpsters; that's how she and her friends found their food, their furnishings, and the stuff they sold to pay the bills that they needed cash for (such as her mobile phone contract). That's not simple and it's certainly not not frugal.

It's true that people were already doing that before she came along and made use of the buildings that were sitting idle and the stuff that was on its way to the landfill. In fact, part of her motivation is to draw attention to the fact that these resources are going to waste. (The results of her efforts are sometimes perverse, though — she points out that perfectly good food is being pitched into the dumpster and merchants respond by puncturing the containers so as to ruin the food, or by locking the dumpsters to keep people out.)

And here is where sustainability comes in. Some number of people can get by on the detritus of western consumer society. In fact, quite a few people. I have no doubt that the food, clothes, and consumer goods thrown away every month in the United States, if distributed among the very poor, could bring every American up to a decent standard of living. But that's only true because so many people are trying so very hard to live better than that.

If ordinary people decided to live the way I keep recommending — building a frugal lifestyle grounded in careful thought about what they really need — the cornucopia of surplus goods would dry up pretty quickly. Whether you call it dumpster diving or skipping, it doesn't scale.

Now, in one sense that's a theoretical point. I don't think we need to fear that millions of working-class and middle-class folks will suddenly abandon the rat race and decide to get by on what they can scavenge. But, I think it's more than a merely theoretical point, because there are a lot of pressures against the present model.

None of the people producing the excess stuff that ends up in the trash is doing so because they want to. In fact, they're all trying actively to waste less — and as they get better at reducing waste, the waste stream will tend to dry up. At the same time, social pressure to divert the waste stream to the truly needy will tend to dry it up as well, at least as far as people like Katherine Hibbert are concerned — the "surplus" food will end up at food banks instead of dumpsters. That's a good thing, but it'll be tough for people who used to get their food for free.

Of course, to the extent that people are choosing this lifestyle in order to make a point (rather than because they're lazy slackers), it's all to the good — it'll mean that their point has been heard. But to the extent that they've chosen this lifestyle because it appeals to them, I don't think it's got a long term future. It only works because cheap energy and cheap money have made us all temporarily rich; that's not going to last.

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How Debt Fools People

Philip Brewer — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:00:05 +0000

By Philip Brewer

People who have a natural aversion to debt often wonder how some people get themselves into such terrible problems with debt. Don't they know how much it costs? Don't they understand they can't just go on boosting their standard of living through ever-increasing levels of debt? But that's not really how it happens. As a public service, here's a worked example of how debt spirals get started.

Suppose: Two neighbors are debt-free. Both want a new TV that will cost $500. Money is a little tight — each one only has about $50 a month available in the budget.

One saves for a TV. He puts $49.76 into a high-yield savings account paying 1.3% interest. After 10 months he has $500 and buys a new TV.

The other borrows to buy the TV. He takes out a $500 loan at 11% interest, makes payments of $52.56 and pays off the loan in 10 months.

At the end of ten months both people have a TV. The guy who borrowed the money paid a total of $28 more than the guy who saved, but he got his TV 10 months earlier. You could look at it as if he paid $28 to rent a TV for 10 months. That's a nice boost in standard of living that someone could reasonably view as being well worth the money.

The debt-averse people suppose that a classic debt spiral starts when you extend this logic beyond a single time-limited purchase: A couple months after buying the TV you decide to buy a recliner — after all, now that you're spending so much time in front of your TV you want a nicer chair to sit in. In this scenario the foolish borrower encumbers every available dollar in the budget with payments on more and more stuff until he or she can no longer make the monthly payments.

I'm sure that happens to some people, but I don't think it's the most common scenario that gets people into trouble with debt.

The reality of debt spirals is more insidious. It results from the loss of flexibility when a household incurs a perfectly reasonable amount of debt — or even no debt at all, but some amount of fixed monthly expenses — and then suffers a negative economic event such as a large unplanned expense or a drop in income.

Because that's the way that debt really works its harm. It's not that it costs so much money (although it can), nor is it people obligating themselves beyond their means (although some do). It's that it makes the household finances so much less flexible. It's not the extra $28, it's the inability to adapt.

To the saver, a spike in fuel costs means cutting back on saving in order to put enough gas in tank to get to work every day. To the borrower it means either not being able to get to work or borrowing money he can't pay back.

The reason debt fools people is that even when the cost of the debt is perfectly reasonable, the lost flexibility means any little problem can kick off a debt spiral.

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