Being low debt and high freedom in life.

Debt isn't neccesarily a bad thing, in fact debt like cash is a useful tool. Debt can allow one to leverage assets in order to buy an asset that will increase in value down the road. A house or land for example.

However bad debt will simply eat up your money like a crack addict, to buy a mere entertainment item by going thousands of dollars into debt is just plain foolish.

Yet flat screen TV's were all the rage this past Christmas.

so let me understand this, going into debt to buy an item that wastes your time and freedom is somehow what the majority of Americans wanted this past Christmas?

So when they are busting their collective humps this June to try and pay off that silly television and complaining all the while, I should somehow feel badly for them as I go on an extended vacation?

Fat Chance.

The savings program is going ahead of schedule, I did splurge a bit and bought Chinese for lunch today.

A whopping 4 dollars....

So far I am 4,500 dollars away from my goal of 5,000.

So far, so good...

Well now, a few days in and things are going, well.

Finished a few projects that (added a HP deskjet 792 for a whopping 5 dollars) this along with an old laptop could be resold for 50 bucks or so this spring at the local swap meet.

Which brings up a point for me at least.

Wasting time.

How does someone waste time? Is it a waste of time to read a book? Stargaze ( I recently had my outdoor telescope stolen from my backyard, I don't mind too very much as long as they actually use it..:) )

Making ones hobbies productive is a great use of time, productive could mean almost anything, just shut off the TVee and do something, Lookup www.fija.org learn a language, heck learn how to sew a button back on a shirt...don't start planning the super bowl party for a week only to watch a boring game that involves large men playing a child's game....

Paredo's Rule

The old 80/20 rule, you can have 80% of the fun for 20% of the cost, it's the remianing 20% of the fun that costs so much. Most Americans have no idea what that means or would even care if they did. It seems to me that maority simply worry about "afford/cannot afford".

and if the average consumer cannot afford it, they buy it on credit.

Which is great for people with a hint of Do It yourself in them. The "old" quickly becomes the "discarded"
from leather coats to old kitchen appliances, most of these sorts of things are either give aways, or low priced at the local thrift store or charity.

Dual coffee and expresso machines are commonly sold for 8 dollars or so, and these are Krups machines, not exactly the bottom of the barrel.

I wil admit that the Siren Song of "buy buy buy" has hit even me, even though I limit my debt to one weeks pay, the bills sit there accusing me, making me wonder when they need to be paid (in full BTW) so starting tomorrow, I will live on the "new" minimum wage no matter what I bring home.

This will accomplish more than a few things

1. It will allow me to see where I spend money on junk.
2. I will lose weight, some 30 pds or so. 30 dollars a week for an adult will be "fun".
3. It will force me to actually get all of the stuff I have accumulated into working and usable order.
4. For entertainment I will have to dust off the old weight set, we all have one of those, be it the "nordic skier" or the "bowflex" that is buried underneath whatever (I would bet jackets..Am I correct?)

So follow along (or not) as I meet my goals whcih are:

1. Save 5,000 or so.
2. Learn at a small level Spanish, French, some Latin,
3. Get all of my "paredo's rule" stuff in working order.
4. Lose 30 pds, and get back down to my College weight.

We shall see....

Passport? We don't need no stinkin' passport

So the US's march to Authoritarianism continues with the recent implementation of "No passport, no Canada or Mexico".

This borders on the foolish, but that hasn't stopped the imperial conversion...err...."Homeland Security" from marching forward like mind numbed robots. The ironic thing is there is a built in 12 million person resistance already to this idiocy.

"illegal" aliens are not likely to be applying for passports anytime soon, why should they?

Sadly, the US powers that be are determined to make the US "commbloc lite" and the majority of people inside the US are more than happy to follow along with the plan. Well, it isn't politics. it is personal, we are sovereigns or we are not.

Windows 95...man I'm cheap

After months of struggle, I finally got an ancient HP omnibook laptop up and running.. It has a win95 (a) OS, no usb ports, and a ebay acquired 2gb HD. The great thing about using this Model T of a computer is the software is free!

If it is free, it is for me.

The next step is finding a suitable parallel port printer, these are no longer made new, but the local Goodwill has everything from a Canon Bubble Jet, to the occasional Apple Laser writer. If one is lucky, not only is the power supply included, but the cartridges are still good.

Or my personal favorite printer, the Okidata Microline 320, these old Dot Matrix printers have a character life of 200 million characters for the print head, and the ink cartridges are a whopping 5 dollars a piece.

Mobile printing perhaps? I like the Canon BJ 10 x series, battery powered, what a great deal for 20 dollars or so, there are even wireless cards available for the old 16 bit Win95, granted, they are slow, but they are faster than dial up.

Ciao

Hello

Ahh the blogosphere, what more needs to be said, where the unknown share there thoughts and their lives with whosever will.

I plan on writing about what interests me, old tech, privacy, sharp things, bad poetry, or good poetry
perhaps the beauty of being.the gross indifference of cats, trying to learn foreign languages.