Enhancing Personal Efficiency

[Solomon960]

As a longtime MrMoneyMustache disciple, I have been advised that my personal methodologies are a bit too extreme; thus I have been asked to share my ways with the Early Retirement Extreme (ERE) community to receive suggestions on how to improve my operations without sacrificing my principles.

While my sense of "extreme" is not like some in the ERE Universe, I do practice a few habits which others simply cannot. This thread is intended to discuss and offer proposals to others on how to maximize one’s personal efficiency without adding to one's limited financial, energy, or time burdens. To begin, I will open with five topics and encourage community members to share their experiences and/or suggest “improvements” (incl reliable products that perform with lower expense) to our contributing peers.

Home: I house share with two other adults in a three-bedroom/two-bathroom house. I occupy the master suite (with private bathroom) and share everything else (including the garage). I own no furniture or appliances of ANY kind and can fit all my possessions into my hatchback sedan (bought used!). I pay one flat rental payment for room & utilities each month. Having been transferred to a different worksite in 2018, I do have a daily 30-mi one-way commute that I hate; obtaining identical accommodations on the other side of town costs $400/mo more than what I currently am paying (for an entire apartment) while necessitating that I sign a lease, which I’ve never done and refuse to do. I’m a single person and don’t need more space. Sadly, my rent will rise in 2021; I have decided to sacrifice the private bathroom in exchange for relocating closer to my work while maintaining my current low living expenses.

Food: I spend less than $10/wk on food, including no meat and rarely any dairy. My main protein source is peanuts with other nutrition derived from granola bars, canned veggies and beans, whole wheat cereals & bread, mac & cheese, bananas, tap water, and a daily multi-vitamin (split in-half). Outside of bananas, my food purchases are made in bulk – if it’s on sale/closeout, I’ll buy every unit thanks to the long shelf-life of pre-packaged foods. I do scan food labels to avoid known carcinogens and popular heart disease-inducing ingredients. My daily meal regimen is very disciplined, allowing me to spend virtually no time in the kitchen for prep (and minimal clean-up). The one improvement I would like to make is dumpster diving though living in a high homeless-populated city, this has proven not to be a fruitful endeavor.

Hygiene: I personally shave my head every three weeks using an electric razor. Disliking the thought/feeling of going to bed "dirty," I wash my body and hair daily using Dollar Tree Home Store Dish Soap with a kitchen sponge that I replace monthly ($0.17/ea). (Unlike netting exfoliators, sponges may be put in a microwave to kill bacteria.) For hand washing, I purchase hand soap refill bottles from Dollar Tree to refill my hand soap containers (50% soap/50% water). I would love to consolidate both soaps to one for use on all body parts – scalp, body, and hands – but I have yet to perform my due diligence/cost analysis to learn how I may reduce the $0.06/oz I am currently paying while utilizing multiple soap products without further drying out my skin.

Cleaning: LA's Totally Awesome All-Purpose Concentrated Cleaner ($0.03/oz undiluted) and LA's Totally Awesome Laundry Detergent ($0.015/oz) are my go-to cleaners - they perform nearly as well as ANY name brand cleaner/detergent while being the cheapest cleaning products on the market. I bought just one unit of each in January 2020 and while my detergent bottle is nearly empty, the all-purpose cleaner is not even half used as of this writing (8/11/20). Using old socks/t-shirts and spraying diluted all-purpose cleaner, my floors look shiny after a once-over with my manual Swiffer mop.

Purchases: I pay all but my rent using one of three credit cards, which offer a minimum of 2.5% cashback with no limit. Gas (2.5%-5% back) and Groceries (3% back) are my primary monthly expenses, averaging less than $100/mo. My annual rewards balances are unsurprisingly “small,” but I did earn ~$240 in cashback bill credits in 2019.

Please post your experiences/thoughts. Thank you!

[Hristo Botev]

That's certainly extreme (and impressive) from an expenses and minimalist living standpoint.

In the interest of providing "suggestions on how to improve [your] operations without sacrificing [your] principles," and to try and beat a few of these ERE forum regulars to the punch: are you investing any time and/or money into skills development? To take your food topic as an example, how are you preparing yourself to manage in the event that there's a prolonged disruption in the pre-packaged foods supply chain? Are you developing basic cooking skills so that you can pivot to preparing meals from a wide variety of whole foods, should there be an extended shortage of canned beans (like there was with COVID) or other processed, pre-packaged foods? In other words, how are you decoupling from and limiting your dependence on that industrial food supply chain?

Also, are you also investing time/money into building social capital, your physical and spiritual health, your financial investment skills, your pursuit of knowledge?

The title of your thread is "enhancing personal efficiency," but the 5 topics you've identified are all focused on reducing expenses and getting by with less. That's of course all great (and a helluva lot more than my family and I would even try to accomplish), but personal efficiency (or, in ERE speak, something more like developing your "web of goals") is broader than just minimizing consumption: "The purpose of ERE is to design a structure (a set of connections) that minimizes waste and maximizes the synergy between specific choices to increase efficiency and opportunity." https://wiki.earlyretirementextreme.com ... _is_ERE%3F

My point is your post focuses on simple living and anti-consumerism, which is of course important; but what about self-sufficiency?

[basuragomi]

I saw your post on the MMM forums, they didn't take too kindly to it. Hopefully you get a better reception here!

$400/month to skip a 50-km drive would be worth it to me, moreso if it would allow for going car-free and also getting private space. You'd be recouping ~$140 in gas costs alone, and an hour or two a day of driving which is critical. That's a lot of time you could spend doing something that helps you instead of costing you.

What's your sleeping solution? I tried learning to sleep sitting up, Buddhist monk style, but never succeeded. That would be ultra-efficient space and furniture-wise.

The Yanomami people subsist mainly on bananas but some apparently consider starving to be preferable to eating bananas alone. Do you eat fresh/raw produce besides bananas? Don't need a fridge and it might be cheaper than the vitamin supplements. Sweet potatoes and carrots last ages unrefrigerated and can all be eaten raw (and also unpeeled) - and you can sprout beans at home from dried bulk purchased ones for vitamin C. How about instant noodles, eaten dry (they are pre-cooked)? What do you do with all the cans?

Thoughts on eating green bananas versus waiting for them to ripen? I'm interested in all the banana nuances you've learned from eating so many.

If your house has a yard, would you ever grow your own produce? It's potentially lower cost than buying the equivalent food and gives you more food security. Even with a raw/industrially processed food diet you could grow things that would be edible.

My father has pretty much the same diet as you, except he substitutes canned meat for peanuts and bread for bananas. From what I can tell it is not healthy at all - he got scurvy before introducing multivitamins. What does your macronutrient intake look like? How about salt, saturated fats and simple sugars? Breakfast cereals and bread especially are terrible for salt content in my experience.

Easy way to save on soap is to use less, especially on your head. Your facial skin might benefit from less aggressive soap use. If you have a car, firearm and live near a rural area, you could also manufacture soap from animals you kill which could be even cheaper.

[Stahlmann]

https://optimisingnutrition.com/nutrien ... -a-budget/

[Dream of Freedom]

I don't know what home prices are in your area or how long you want to stick around, but you might consider buying a place and renting out the other rooms yourself. Or living in a camper and just renting the land like Jacob used to do.

As far as diet you just need to try several and see what you feel best on. Feeling good and having energy definitely effects performance. Same with whatever you need to do to have high quality sleep.
.

[7Wannabe5]

Instead of specific ideal "recipe", start thinking about generalized recipe. Also consider reasons for value/price. For instance, ask yourself why bananas are so inexpensive and/or why they evolved to exhibit these traits, etc.

There is an essential conflict between efficiency, power and resilience, so you have to drop, lift and stretch. Something like that.

[jacob]

It's quite impressive and hard to squeeze much more blood out of those stones. It reminds me of the Tightwad Gazette. See https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Tightwa ... 375752250/ for more tips.

However, it's possible to realize more value by changing perspective away from the individual cost efficiency of various budget items.

See this table and the discussion here: viewtopic.php?t=10897

[Frita]

Low numbers, you provide a clear roadmap for someone to copy your method.

What’s your why? You mentioned not wanting to sacrifice your principles, though I didn’t read specifically what they are. At first glance, your highest values seem to be low cost and minimalism. Is there something I am missing?

Can inexpensiveness in terms of money mean higher/lowest costs in other areas? Are your choices maximizing your total benefit while minimizing drawbacks as defined by your values system?

[BWND]

Thanks for sharing Solomon. Given how willing you seem to be to find the outer limits of what you/'normal folk' can tolerate expenses wise, soap might be another way to squeeze them down further, as others have alluded to:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl ... ring-wrong

I might offer the suggestion as others have of considering the classic move closer to work->can go without car entirely->use time saved commuting to develop other skills.

When you say the living arrangements closer to work would be $400 extra per month, was that with space to park the car in mind?

To be honest all you'd see is squander in my life so I'm loathe to try and offer too much in the way of advice!

[Alphaville]

Right, what's missing here in terms of efficiency is a web of goals to measure efficiency beyond mere cost-cutting.

The cost cutting alone is great if that works for you though.