how to save money: never buy a box

I've never been too concerned about minor moving expenses. Last time I moved, I probably spent about $50 on cardboard boxes to move my stuff in.

This time, I decided to keep my $50. You can get boxes free from most liquor stores. I'd never done this before, but I have a friend who has done it. Still, it was really hard to resist the urge to just go out and buy boxes. I was especially resistant to just walking in and asking (fear of rejection). If you don't have this problem, good on you. If you're like me, you can solve the problem by doing what I did: I just drove around to the back of the store and did a little dumpster diving. Yes, it felt a little disgusting. The cardboard boxes had all been flattened and were in a dumpster specifically labeled for recycling, but I still wondered about cleanliness... Nevertheless, the boxes are only intended to move my stuff from point A to B, and they can be discarded without misgivings once I'm through with them.

Cost saving measures like this give me a bit of pleasure. I know some people sneer at this; but then I guess they don't feel like corporate slaves in their jobs. I'm not as extreme as the retire early extreme guy. Some of the things he does make me cringe. But I'm very willing to make some sacrifices in pursuit of my own freedom.

how to save money: move

As I mentioned in a previous post, I don't have enough savings to cover my expenses indefinitely, so I look pretty carefully at every dollar I spend. Clearly I have two options: make more income, or trim expenses. The latter is the easiest thing to do in the short term. I already know the breakdown of my yearly expenses. Like any good developer, I decided to optimize by working on the most expensive operation. Excluding taxes, my number one expense is rent. The solution is obvious: I need to move!

Where to? Personally, I'd be happy to move to various locations around the world, but practically speaking it's a bit difficult for a couple of reasons.

First, I have an elderly relative who is within driving distance, currently. This person is not really dependent on me, but I feel some qualms about moving so far away that it would require a plane flight for a visit. I am definitely reconsidering these qualms, because I don't want to let this constraint affect my life too harshly. In effect, I already have let it chain me to a certain region. If I were free from this constraint, I would have moved around much more in the past.

Second, there's the whole health insurance trap. I know my health insurance costs where I live now. Moving blindly to some other area, I have no idea what my health insurance costs will be. (And going without health insurance is a risk I just won't take.)

In the past, whenever I moved from state to state, I didn't pay much attention to health insurance. I was always moving from one job to another, and I knew I would automatically be covered by my new job's group plan.

Health insurance for individuals in the US is a game designed in hell. But that's a rant for another day. Meantime, I'm somewhat afraid to move out of state without knowing definitely what my health insurance options are.

So I decided on a move in-state, at least for this first year.

I used hotpads and similar sites to help me search for low rent apartments. One thing I quickly learned is that certain things scale with rent: privacy, space, and safety.

1) Privacy. Initially I considered all options, including house shares. It did not appeal, since I value my privacy and autonomy. Some people doing the house sharing thing make demands that I just won't tolerate (no visitors, group meals etc). I was hoping to find a "hacker house" to share with like-minded people, but I never did, and pretty quickly abandoned this tactic.

2) Space. I was shown rentals for rooms that were approximately 12 ft x 12 ft with rents of $600/mo or so - about 1/2 the price of my current 800 sq ft apartment. I considered these prices outrageous. These were rooms way out in the suburbs of my tech hub, mind you, not smack in the middle of the city. My advice to you if you encounter these places: unless there's some special appeal to the situation, keep looking. You can almost certainly find something better. Leave these apartments for more desperate people.

3) Safety. When researching a rental, take a look at the crime situation using a site like Family Watchdog. If you're looking at a place with a steep rental discount, it's very likely in an "undesirable" area.

In my case, I finally compromised by taking a small place, with a lot less safety than I'd like. I drove through town and it didn't creep me out, but the statistics are not great. Clearly I will need to take precautions. On the plus side, I'm still close enough to a tech hub so I can get to that once in a blue moon meetup or tech event without a day of driving.

Once I signed the lease, I had a huge case of buyer's remorse - I felt like I'd grabbed the first acceptable place and should have continued looking. My new space is about half the size of my current place, and I'm afraid it will seem incredibly cramped, since I'll be working from home. I'm worried that I won't feel safe. I'm worried that the place will be depressing because it just has a few small windows. And while I've managed to cut my rental expense in half, this new rental is clearly not a permanent solution to my problem.

So I'm looking at this first year as an experiment. I didn't have much time to put into finding a place, and I needed to cut expenses fast. Over the next year, I will research other ways to solve the rent problem. Meantime, I've reduced my rental expense by over 50%, which is a big help.

bye-bye, rat race... or should I say, au revoir?

Rat Cage, a photo by deborah|silverbees on Flickr.

Well, I did it. I quit my job, which was making me crazy. Quit the rat race altogether, at least for a while.

I never planned to work until retirement age. The idea was to work for a while, accumulate a big nest egg, and live off the income stream from that. Some people appear to happily turn their lives over to corporate America. Not me. I have a ton of stuff I want to do, and I found the extent to which my time was wasted in a corporate job to be incredibly frustrating.

Well, I'm not getting any younger. And I don't have enough savings to live off of for the rest of my life. It was starting to look like I'd be working for another 10 years before I could be relatively safe, and who knows, maybe not even then. I finally lost my patience for deferring living. Fifteen days of vacation a year was not cutting it. I had to try plan B.

Now you hear about people who quit their jobs, and say it was a terrible mistake. And that kind of scenario ran through my mind over and over again as I made my decision. You unplug yourself from the Matrix, and you wonder if you'll ever be able to plug yourself back in again. Even if you don't want to, what if you need to? Yet somehow you can't... and then you're homeless. Big scary thoughts.

Well, I'm smart enough to quit with substantial savings. It will take me a couple years until I have to start eating into retirement savings. I have to trust I can find some other way to make a living before that happens.

So here I go.