My wife and I have decided to adopt the Icelandic tradition of buying each other books, and opening them on Christmas Eve. We then have a wonderful quiet read that evening.
We might buy each other small presents aside from the books, but nothing is expected or required.
My husband’s mom bought our cats a chirping kicky toy that I guess is supposed to look kind of like a ferret. It was really shrill and annoying and they wouldn’t leave it alone because the noises made them so curious. It mysteriously vanished later on christmas day lmao.
I mostly use the envelope method. My parents used literal envelopes when I was growing up, and somewhat early in my adulthood and in my career I came upon the online bank Simple. That bank changed the way I look at finances and saving money. So I still do it the way they taught me to do it.
I now use a bank called Monzo, and they are working toward building in a very similar budgeting method to Simple, with “Pots” instead of envelopes, that automatically get filled with money every paycheck.
I previously had Simple, and One before that, but banks don’t seem to like the buckets/pots/envelopes paradigm. You said Monzo is working towards it, what does that look like currently?
This is so fucked up but yeah I can see them settling for research on a drug or treatment that just keeps you from reaching Stage 4 to where you become a lifelong consumer of said medical company.
You can not have a cure for cancer, but a cancer. I promise I am not trying to be pedantic here. Cancers are so different from one another, that a single cure for breast cancer might not even work on all breast cancer.
Omg yes this absolutely. I eat to nourish myself and survive and am punished randomly by self-inflicted mouth wound that lasts for days/weeks => evolutionary failure at its finest.
Insult to injury when the food is actually something healthy like a salad instead of fries.
I don't know if this is the case in the US, but a lot of food products here in the UK have a version of the nutritional information which is "prepared as directed". Breakfast cereal is often shown as "x grams with y ml semi-skimmed milk" for example. Is your tea doing something like this and giving you values for brewing it and adding a splash of milk, perhaps?
For Tazo Awake English breakfast tea the label says “based on tea brewed with freshly boiled water for 5 minutes (no milk, no sugar), an 8 fl oz cup typically contains insignificant amounts of calories, fats, carbohydrates, sugars, protein and sodium”.
Seems weird for yours to have such a significant difference even if its a slightly different type, could you post an image?
My parents gave me one of those 2023 Guinness World Record book. I appreciate the gesture, but it screams “we didn’t know what to get you, and there were a pallet of 'em at Costco”. I can see the book’s appeal for a child or teenager but I’M 37.
I’ll be re-gifting it to my father in-law 😎 I’m 100% sure he’ll love it.
One thing I frequently think about is just how toxic everything would turn if humans suddenly disappeared. There’s a hell of a lot of waste and fuel that would go unmanaged and seep into the ecosystem. Nuclear reactors across the earth would a irradiate almost the entire water supply on the planet. Life might survive but not before a lot more species went extinct. Huge tracts of land would be no longer able to support life for possibly thousands of years
yeah exactly my reaction, I’d worry the world would be messy - at least near any nuclear plant that doesn’t self shut down… I agree it would irradiate an enormous amount of water and soil but 1000 years later? most of the hot stuff will be long gone and nature will just adapt around the dead zones. see the results @ Pripyat.
Most of the radiation won’t go away for tens of thousands of years actually, We also don’t know the long-term effects on the animals and life in those zones, extreme cancer occurrence is likely for one
A relative gifted me a really ugly tree ornament. I don’t put up a Christmas tree and haven’t ever in my adult life. Relative knows this and delivered it alongside comments about me needing to get a tree and get more into the “religious” spirit of the holiday.
Normally I would at least look to donate or something I don’t want, but ugly, religious proselytizing junk goes in the trash.
Yep, from Rome to Rīga, they used to mark the death of nature with plants that refuse to die. Later, they started decorating them to symbolise the blossoming or the harvest of the year’s last feast.
Source: school education from the last pagans of Europe.
Oh yes, we all remember that well established in the bible parable about Jesus dragging a pine tree into his house in a dessertic weather town for his birthday party every year and how mad Mary and Josef were when it started to rot in February because Jesus just refused to take it out.
I don’t really budget, I live alone, and make enough money to support myself and live a decent life.
But I do have a few rules:
I will never set up any kind of subscription, be it media (HBO, Netflix, Disney+, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal), apps (Flightradar24, Vesselfinder), games (Geoguessr). What I will do is buy prepaid cards with credit for those services, and activate them for a set period of time, but I will never buy into a recurring charge for a service, I have seen too many people ruining their economy with subscriptions being a big contributer.
I seldom give into impulse buying expensive stuff, but if I have the money and can afford it I am not against buying quallity even if it more expensive at first.
I don’t accept a seller or sales system stressing me out to buy as fast as possible, I can and have just walked away when I felt uncomfortable with how fast the sale if being pushed, I want to have time to think about if this thing is worth it for that price and if I need it now before I buy it.
You may want to see if your bank will let you create disposable cards. I have two credit cards where I can create temporary or reloadable cards at no charge for transactions.
So if I wanted to trial something, I would create a card with $1 on it. The trial starts and does the test transaction. I forget to cancel before the trial is over, but the card has no money so it automatically cancels.
If I wanted a subscription to HBO, I could create an HBO card and load the amount for it every month. When I cancel, I don’t have to worry that they’ll try to keep charging me because I just don’t add anything else to the card. It also makes me think about whether I’m using a service every month.
It saved me a few hundred bucks not terribly long ago. I tried a clothing subscription box that was absolutely terrible. So I contacted their customer service to cancel because they don’t have a real way to do it on their site. They didn’t get back to me in time and attempted to charge my card for another box. Luckily it was on the temp card and there was no cash on it so I just got a rejected charge on my card.
Yep, it was an old system, I think it was flash based, which makes it understandable that they shut it off, but not that they didn’t replace it with an updated system.
Yea, fully agree. Our workplace had a sweater selection one year for birthdays (the second sweater selection actually) and I deliberately took a size too large for myself. Super nice in a chilly winter day
I always found it easier to basically automate the process as much as possible. “spend” every recurring expenditure and also set aside the most aggressive savings/investments possible using separate bill pay and savings accounts or buckets. Everything is taken out of the main account as soon as your paycheck hits, so it means everything you see on your spending account is a free dollar that you can use for fun or food.
Some people might operate better with a set amount for groceries too, but I personally found that too restrictive.
A good budget is one that you stick to, helps you achieve your goals, and crucially, allows you to enjoy your life to at least some extent. Whatever method works for you, it’s important to give yourself permission to spend some money on fun. However small.
Yes, I definitely rely on all automatic payments. When I first moved out on my own thought I had a grip on things but too many bills ended up paid a couple days late, even though I had the money.
We also have recurring transfers to savings and to individual accounts for “fluff” spending.
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