My basics:

• no drugs, no alcohol, no meat, and I prefer to buy non-perishables bc my fridge isn’t very big. Rice, beans, or peanut butter cost like <$13 for a weeks worth of calories
• buy less. Use everything you have until it is so irreperably broken it must be replaced. Wear old clothes, don’t buy new underwear, don’t throw out all your current stuff so you can get new quality stuff, though still buy quality items that don’t constantly need to be replaced only when actually necessary

If you want to get an appliance, you should probably be getting it because you will actually use it to improve your life, not because it saves money (because it probably won’t)

Sure hypothetically, a bike or a crockpot or a bidet or a fishing rod or a sewing machine or a garden or a gym membership or a bread maker can technically save you money, but only if you use it.

Worse still, note that many of these items require maintenance and space, their price is not just limited to the money they costed.

I’m sure there are no shortage of people online who say that they love their bike or something and it saves them tons of money on car expenses, but if you just buy a bike and never use it- it will have been a waste of money.

For example, if we take the average cost of ingredients to make a loaf of bread go be $1.50, the average cost of a store-bought loaf to be $2.50, the average cost of a breadmaker to be $150, and the average calories in a homemade loaf of bread to be 1466 (numbers found with basic google searches), then you would have to make 150 loaves of bread, aka 440 meals for which bread constitutes 50% of the calories eaten (ex: 440 sandwiches) just to break even on your breadmaker purchase

Am I saying this is never a valuable purchase for anybody? No, of course not. If you want, buy a bread maker and enjoy delicious homemade bread. I just think that in general, people should be of the mindset that buying new stuff is a great way to improve your quality of life, but not necessarily is a very good strategy for saving money.

It seems crazy that Twitter is actively taking steps to become a worse social media company. Back when I was a kid, companies were supposed to be these well thought out, highly methodical entities that would only make the most optimal moves. I suppose it’s 2023 now though.