Comment by leonroy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by leonroy | Hacker News Reader

Stop buying stuff.

I was a compulsive spender. Never bought on credit mind but I’d blow my entire paycheque after bills on stuff like cameras, hifi, the latest Apple doodad, etc.

I literally stopped buying anything not required for my day to day sustenance. No Netflix, started renting what I wanted to watch which forced me to be more picky with my expenditure and time.

No more eating out except for special occasions. Packed lunches and home made meals only.

No more buying books until I read the ones on my shelf.

No more buying a new Mac every time my old one got mildly slow.

No more video games or Blu-rays until I had finished the ones sitting in shrink wrap on the shelf.

Once you pare things down you start to become almost painfully aware of how the seemingly little expenditures add up fast.

With the surplus income I ended up with about 6-8 months living expenses saved which suddenly made me realize that I had the freedom to look around from my present job. Which so far is working out I think... (started my own company and launching our product this month :)

Our local library, connected to seemingly every other library in the country, provides me with every book and movie I've wanted for years. Such an amazing resource. Request it online, pick it up locally, usually within two days.

Great recommendation! I haven't really used our local library because I keep forgetting that it's an option. But, I just checked and it looks like ours has the same Inter-Library Loan process for requesting books.

Thanks, I'm going to try to remember this and start using it more. Hopefully it'll help me both save money and reduce the number of unread books collecting dust on my already full shelves.

Plus one on that.

The public library + kindle + a book club of a group of friends who have their own internal library for members.

Haven't bought a new book in years.

It's funny I remember being in the library all the time as a kid. Nowadays when I want a book I go on Amazon and buy it.

I recently rediscovered the public library. Took a bit of relearning when I realized, yeah, I get all these books for free!

Does a library support the authors/creators, though?

That's probably my biggest philosophical hurdle.

Would like to add "habit of drinking water" to this list. ANY beverage whether its coffee, soda, tea - is easily 4 to 6 dollars and is an entirely made up requirement.

For those who don't want to relinquish drinks altogether, getting a thermos/French press etc. and buying tea/coffee yourself reduces those expenses almost twenty fold over time.

Soda is best abandoned, however.

Yeah, coffee is crazy expensive when you look at how much shops charge you for a drink. It costs about $1.33 per day for the 20oz of coffee I make for my wife and I. Really not bad considering if we were to both go out and buy a coffee everyday it would be around $10.

20oz = 591,471 millilitres for others wondering.

And it is a good practice indeed. I think deep down my comment history here one can find that I found it strange that someone would pay a lot of money on an annual basis for coffee out of the home.

That said I also think that it is not bad to be able to spend money like that. Not about the money itself, but the mindset required to spend. It must require a very pleasant way of life to not want to save all money, like in case of emergencies or saving up so you or your kids can go to college.

Balance, basically.

591.471 liters of coffee? ohmygoodness! :)

Eheh, "lost in translation" - "," and "."

Coffee and tea can be inexpensive if you brew it yourself. Coffee even less so if you roast it. I've been roasting my own coffee for years now, started with a $100 machine which lasted about 4 years/100 lbs, and then I upgraded to a $350 machine. A pound of coffee costs between $4 and $7, and tastes comparable to something that a boutique roaster sells for $15/12oz. The upfront cost is relatively high, but if your enjoyment of coffee is encroaching into the realm of "hobby" then it's absolutely worthwhile.

I second this. Fresh coffee tastes awesome. I've been using a $100 roaster for a while now, only recently having got into the habit of roasting all the time (previously I'd get lazy and buy a bag at the store pretty often, which would break the habit). I need to roast every 3 or 4 days, but it only takes about 10 minutes. I don't think my roast quality is quite on par with the $17/12oz (aka $1.42/oz) bags from the store, but it's still damn good, and only like $5/16oz (aka $0.31/oz, 77% cheaper).

if you don't mind, can you share the brand of the machine, and your source for preroasted beans? i'd like to get into this too but am not sure the best approach

So I'm currently using the Behmor 1600+ as my roaster, and Happy Mug Coffee as my green (unroasted) coffee bean supplier and also my tea supplier.

If you want to start with a less expensive roaster you can find recommendations on reddit at /r/roasting.

In India earlier, people in the South used to brew their own coffee at home, from coffee grounds / powder. There is a special steel utensil for it, with two vertical parts, one of which sits above the other. The top one has fine holes in the bottom of it. You put the coffee powder into the top, then pour some hot water over it, then wait for some time until it extracts the coffee into the bottom part. None of your fancy coffee machine stuff. They call it "decoction" :) Oldsters (and youngsters too) used to swear by it, and could not manage without their morning fix of a cup or two. Some probably still do. We had one of those utensils at home. Usually made with milk, BTW.

It's still here. A lot of tea/coffee shops use it to prepare coffee. It tastes really good.

Cool. Haven't had that kind for a while. Should try it some time.

Would like to add making your own water Kefir to the list as a replacement for soda. Super inexpensive, relatively easy, really healthy, and tasty.

I've been looking for non sugary, non caffeinated soft drinks. I can Google, but do you recommend any particular recipe or instructions?

If you can find it in the library, the book "Brain Maker" [0] has a good starting point in its recipes section. Here's [1] a video showing how it's done. You've got to buy the Kefir grains (or get them from someone you know who makes Kefir). Once you have the grains, you most likely won't need to buy them again, as you'll keep them alive and growing on your own. (Note for the grain-free folks, Kefir grains aren't actually grains. They're a bacterial culture conceptually similar to what you'd use to make yogurt.)

Basically, you combine water, Kefir, and sugar, then you wait a few days. Then, you drink. Or if you want to add flavoring (which I highly recommend), you do a second fermentation process: add in the flavoring (e.g. dried strawberries or something), bottle it for a 1-3 more more days, then drink or refrigerate.

[0] https://www.drperlmutter.com/about/brain-maker-by-david-perl... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_d7wQ-lkvI

Thanks for sharing. Sounds interesting. I had been reading about various kinds [1] of fermented milk products recently, and had seen kefir among them.

[1] There seem to be many such kinds, across various countries.

Quark, skyr, doogh, kumis, buttermilk, dahi, chaas, filmjölk, blaand, ayran are some of the varieties.

Here's a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_milk_products

Don't pay for somebody else to make your tea! A cup of ordinary tea should cost, like, 15p. That includes teabag, electricity, water, milk, and amortized cost of kettle and mug.

Even if you buy something unnecessarily expensive, like fancy matcha tea powder, you're looking at less than 50p.

What kind of monster puts milk on their tea? :) You're right though.

Most everyday teas sold in the UK are made for use with milk. They are - or I have always found them so - a bit astringent and bitter without.

Quite right - tea first is an abomination - it's milk first then tea:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/oct/...

Ask the billion+ Indians who drink chai! :)

:D Chai is bliss. First tea, then milk and sugar.

Couldn't agree more. Chai is truly bliss!

tea is not one thing

Learn to brew loose leaf tea and you cut down even more on the expenditure (or rather, for the same 15p expense, you're consuming much better tea).

Amen to this, for coffee. I buy coffee grounds for $10 that last me 3 or more weeks, with 2-3 cups per day.

Ever tried aeropress? Portable manual gadget, great coffee, approx 15 cents/cup

I buy coffee because the coffee place is my "second office". As I'm working from home, I need to get out every day to keep my sanity.

I moved across the US a year ago, and moving with a single suitcase (until the moving truck arrived, months later) re-taught me how little I need in order to live comfortably.

Since then, I've been aggressively paring back my "material footprint", and every thing I shed makes me feel a little lighter.

I recently moved countries and managed to pack my whole life into an old army duffel bag.

It was so liberating. I was trying to make sure that if I want to move again that I could still do that. Unfortunately I now own a house worth of furniture (including 3 queen size beds).

In one religious ideology here in India, they actually focus on one thing which is being non-materialistic

Funny you mention cameras, I've just bought two more this month, bringing my total up to 5 cameras.

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