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Comment by robertAngst | Hacker News Reader

Some notes- At base, the recipes eat for ~21$/week/person. After I lost my job, I definitely got below 20$/week, less protein, more rice.

I have seen HN dispute 19k/yr living, so I also wanted to share with HN, the 3 things that allowed 2 people to live on $19,000/year. We lived like this for 3 years as my wife got her Doctorate.

>Health Insurance- Don't pick the wrong one. Too often I hear people choosing 'a good plan', but the reality is, the Payments(preimums) + Max Out Of Pocket exceed the cost of a Bronze plan.

>Used cars are better than new. Nothing quite like not caring if your car gets a ding. Nothing quite like not having a car payment.

>Stop eating out, the 6$ meal is 6x the cost of the meals in the cookbook. Doing a Calorie Per Dollar comparison is a wakeup call for value.

Thought this is useful for everyone. I'm planning to study another round of Calorie, Protein, and Nutrient Per Dollar data. Any requests?

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I have lived on $20k/year when I was in grad school. I was also into body building, so my staple diet was rice, chicken, eggs, and veggies. If I was pressed for time, I would go for whole roasted chickens which I found quite tasty and full of protein. Other good sources of cheap protein I loved were greek yogurt and cottage cheese.

More ideas.

Organ meat is relatively cheap because people don't like it. But loaded with nutrients. Another good one is sardines. You are getting the whole fish and bones and people don't like sardines either.

Some keto diets are heavy on using coconut oil for fat, which is cheapish for the number of calories you are getting.

Could you add split-peas to your analyses? They're the best value food I've found - 25% protein, and 1/3rd cheaper than lentils, at least where I am.

Nutrition per dollar numbers are a bit dubious. https://efficiencyiseverything.com/food-nutrition-per-dollar... Flour tends to beat everything since it is so cheap. For example, flour has 83.3 mg of iron per dollar. However, if you tried to hit your DRI for iron using flour, you would greatly exceed your daily caloric intake.

One could argue just using a vitamin pill for micronutrients, and optimizing protein/dollar for macros.

I hope that using Linear Algebra I can make flour useful.

Current plan is to collect the data, match it to recommended amounts of nutrients/calories/etc... and see what the outcome is.

I fantasize that it tells me to eat ~50 calories of flour a day, but until the equations are finished its merely an outlier.

The nutrient-price analysis sounds cool, let me know if you're looking for help or someone to bounce ideas off.

Here's my request - assuming data for a corpus of recipes with ingredients and ratings, plus food nutrient data and prices, I'd like to pull top n most nutrient-dense/price recipes and order by rating per regional cuisine.

I went further for myself and looked at protein per dollar and several others as well. This was 12 years ago and I no longer have the spreadsheet, but lentils and other beans were absolutely stellar, shrimp and turkey are great for protein and tryptophan.

Tailor your diet to your needs, are you exercising mentally or physically or both?

Fats are cheap, because Americans have vilified them. But they are a great source of calories at 9 kcal per gram.

Would be a good opportunity to reduce expenditure while increasing caloric intake.

Ofc, I’m talking good fats only. Animal fats mostly. No oils.

Which animal fats? Beef, for instance, is quite high in trans fat.

Butter. Olive oil.

Occasionally use peanut or vegetable oil but only for frying.

I wouldn’t use any plant fats for cooking. All of them oxidize pretty quickly.

Olive oils are often fake, unless you are paying around $20 for a small bottle.

There are a number of reputable olive oils you can buy that aren't fake. I buy from the costco lineup personally. We prefer Ottavio, the one from Spain, but I believe the Kirkland Brand was also tested.

Also, can you elaborate more on why you don't use plant fats for cooking? We do the opposite here, so I'm curious.

Yup, Costco is a great source. I emailed them and asked about the fake oils. They said they do random testing of every shipment.

First, I avoid most of the m vegetable oils in general. Not just for cooking. The only exceptions is olive and coconut. Most oils are high in omega 6 fatty acids. This skews the ratio of omega 3 to omega 6 that our body desires. But cooking or heating the oils makes them even worse. It destroys good properties, oils become rancid / oxidizes during heating.

I just don’t see the reason to even use veg oils. Food tastes so much better cooked in butter or ghee, or bacon fat, or beef tallow.

> Olive oils are often fake

what?! fake as in, it's synthetic? Or fake as in not really olive oil, but it says it is on the label?

1. Blends with other oils 2. Just other, cheaper oils 3. Olive oil, but spoiled or rancid 4. Olive oil, but lower grade than advertised

Never heard of synthetic yet. But I’m sure that’s coming.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/where-to-buy-real-extra-v...

I wonder why you don't have olive trees over there. Maybe a work in progress... it takes decades to grow them. Modern machines make harvest very cheap.

In Spain we have best quality for under 5€ l, so I guess globalization has not arrived to oil.

I personally consider all animal fats to be safe.

https://chriskresser.com/can-some-trans-fats-be-healthy/

Include protein quality/digestibility scores for each food.

I would love sorted summary lists of their relevant statistics: active time, total time, cost/calorie, etc. Finding fast (=easy) meals is critical for me.

It would be interesting to see. My experience with meal prepping on Sundays has seen an hour of cooking eliminate “food seeking” behaviour and given me back a lot of time.

I didn’t realise how much of my day revolved around food until I planned out every meal in advance and eliminated the need to!

Fast+Easy always: stirfries. Soups. Salads. Blended fruits (and some vegetables like cucumber).

And since you're only using what you buy on sale, they taste different every time!

Learn what doesn't need peeling. Potatoes - don't peel. Cucumber - don't peel. I don't even peel carrots. Just rinse and scrub.

Being lazy, I buy frozen vegetables to bulk it up. Don't buy anything if it's not in a clear bag, otherwise you're buying expensive chopped carrots.

For things that are canned and "require" rinsing, rinse in the can.

Anything that involves an oven takes too long. Find out where you can use the microwave instead.

When I make a stirfry, I put the potatoes in the microwave first to mostly cook them, then finish them in the stir fry. Same for carrots if I'm feeling a softer texture.

If you're parking for work, invest in a good set of glass Tupperware-style containers that seal well. Don't buy a big set: you won't use 75% of them. I just buy plastic cutlery and keep them in my desk at work and dispose 50/50 (sometimes they'll fit in my container to take home, other times they won't and I don't want to deal with it).

Any recommendations on the specific Pyrex/Tupperware set?

Just did some research, you want this kind with the lock on 4 sides and a rubberized gasket: "Glasslock".

Square should be better than round.

These are 2 compartment, which sounds even better. This is the style you want:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07CZPZ87F/

We just got a set of the single-compartment version and they are absolutely fantastic. The flat top allows a small post-it note for the date the food was made and lets them be stacked in the fridge.

We got ours at Sam's Club.

Does Sams club have large sets of 1-person lunch sizes? Or can you only get the 38 packs or whatever of different sizes?

I dunno for sure as it was the work of my wife and daughter, but it was a fairly big box of `em. We rarely go out to eat so lots of food goes into them, from olives to butter to thawing blueberries to hummus to leftovers. It looks like they got the 24-piece Glasslock set for $25.

American Pyrex isn't, it's a Chinese knock-off that was deified as the brand. But it's not the original Pyrex and it doesn't stand up to heat.

I know, but it beats plastic. I’m not smashing it with a hammer.

American "Pyrex" is actually less vulnerable to hammers than borosilicate. What it lacks is resistance to extreme temperature changes.

These are the three closest things I have to time studies on food:

High protein per second foods-

https://efficiencyiseverything.com/protein-per-second-fastes...

Cooking protein faster-

https://efficiencyiseverything.com/protein-per-second-part-2...

Foods that can be prepared in under 3 minutes, sorted by calories per dollar-

https://efficiencyiseverything.com/3-minutes-of-effort-calor...

The whole used car thing is just flat out wrong. If you are a mechanic and you know how to asses the health of a car perfectly and you are able to actually find a car that she not unreliable then maybe buying a used car would make sense. But even then you are giving up backup cameras, good mileage/hybrid tech and most importantly you are giving up the HUGE amount of progress that has been made in safety that is designed into the structure of the car. And on top of that you have to drive around an old beater that you aren’t proud to be seen in. Just buy a new Toyota Corolla. It’s guarnteed to be as reliable as possible, has a backup camera and modern safety features. And it looks good. But if you pay in cash it’s only 17k so you won’t be worried about dings anyway. In my opinion thats worth ~8k.

But for the average person buying a used car will result in huge reliability problems, being stranded on the side of the road multiple times and you’ll end up paying thousands for repairs anyway. Yes, we all know that one guy who bought a used Toyota and never had problems. There’s a reason why it’s an anecdote about “that one guy I know.”

You bring up some valid points, yet I remain a used car advocate. A used car does not mean an old car. The last car I purchased was two years old and in quite nice condition. It has a rear view camera, heated seats and steering wheel, and advanced stability controls. I enjoy it, and enjoy that I spent about half as much as if I brought new.

So, if a new Toyota Corolla is reliable, surely a lightly used one ought to be too? I mean, provided the owner changed the oil regularly and what not. For the record, I have bought and driven a number of used cars and never had a significant reliability issue. Cars don't magically become unreliable when bought second-hand.

I don't know anyone who buys second-hand who has had significant issues. So if anything your claim about anecdotes would be inverted for me.

A two years used car may be a great compromise here: it still has another year of warranty left, so you're getting pretty much the same car for 30% off.

Or just don't own a car.

a used car is not the same as a beater. Getting a used car that is just a few years old will shave off a good chunk of the depreciation curve in many cases without sacrificing features/reliability.

This is correct - don't buy cars new, esp. if you're not using it as a status symbol. a low milage (but new-ish) used car is much better value for money.

>only 17k

That's an order of magnitude more than people on the edge could dream of having all at once or hoping someone would loan them. 2k+ is an effort to save up.

Used cars are an amazing deal. It's riskier sure, but that is the reality of being poor. No one is paying thousands of dollars to get an old subcompact repaired, it's going right to the scrappers. I think you are underestimating the reliability of ~8-12 year old sub compacts/sedans. Fluids, pads and belts keeps most early 2000's Asian cars going well into the 300s.

Your view is non-sense. Most used Toyotas, Hondas, lexus, and acuras are extremely reliable. Buy one that is 4 years old with around 40k mileage and you'll save 50% on the price.

Will still include backup cameras etc.

In Europe, the situation is different (cars and gasoline is a lot more expensive here, and salary in tech is a lot lower), and your argument doesn't make much sense. A new Toyota Corolla is 25k euro, which is more than 28k dollar. That is more than my gross year income and about 8 years of rent (and I work as an IT consultant, which is not a particularly bad job), and I still completely neglected recurring costs (taxes, gasoline).

If you buy a new car, you're paying for the fact that it is new, even if you can't see it. I did a quick search, and found a gorgeous Audi A8 that looks like it's new for 6k. You can buy a crappy old car for about 1k. So anything in between should get you something modest. Most people I know buy used cars, and I rarely have heard anyone having troubles with them (IDK, are American cars less reliable?). If you buy a relatively new used car, you get all of the advantages you list, and none of the disadvantages.

Where are you working that your gross yearly income as an IT Consultant is below 25.000 euro? Did you mean net income?

Netherlands. I am a starter and work part-time (4 days). I'll make more than 25k next year, don't worry ;)

Is your rent for 8 years really less than $28k? That's about $291 per month. I never thought Netherlands could be this insanely cheap. What region in the Netherlands do you live in?

My rent was about 8.5 times of that last year (for the whole year of 2018, I paid $28,800). I lived in Manhattan (in NYC). The salaries for programmers is higher though. The average base salary (in NYC) is around $144k[1]. With bonuses and stock though, it can easily reach $200k per year. And it gets even higher in the SF Bay Area.

The funny thing is employers are so desperate for programmers that they're willing to hire anyone who can code. You definitely don't need a degree, and you could even be a college dropout. Coding bootcamps have been sprouting like crazy all over the U.S. for the past few years. (And recruiters like Triplebyte helps people without degrees or CS backgrounds get high-paying jobs.[2])

[1] Triplebyte measured NY's average to be $144k (which my experience confirms): https://triplebyte.com/software-engineer-salary

[2] https://triplebyte.com/blog/bootcamps-vs-college

I think it's more likely that we all know the one guy who bought a used Toyota or Honda and did have a significant problem. No one can assess the health of a car perfectly. You make a purchase with some broad averages in mind.

That's also what sets the used car market, of course. Is that specific Audi or Range Rover going to cost more in maintenance than that Honda or Toyota over the next 5 years and 50K miles? I can't say. Are those 20 Audis/Range Rovers going to cost more than those 20 Honda/Toyotas? I'd bet a large fraction of my net worth on it!

I'm not sure where the idea that most working-class people have $17K lying around to drop on a new car, so they can avoid carrying insurance/worrying about dings comes from, but it doesn't match my anecdotal experience with solid, working-class people.

Our family could relatively easily afford any non-exotic car, paying cash for new. The last 3 cars we bought were a 1998 Mercedes diesel with 188K mile on it, a 2005 CR-V with 167K miles on it, and a 2014 LEAF (new, with $10K in tax credits on it). Over that ~10 year period, I bet I haven't spent $4K on maintenance across that fleet and still have the Honda and LEAF. Only significant repair was Honda clutch ($1500), tires ($600), then a bunch of wear items (serpentine belt tensioner, brakes, a battery, an exhaust repair $400, wipers), and oil changes. The items with dollars above are farmed out; the routine wear items and oil changes I do in the driveway.

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