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tuyop posted:I don't think 20mg of DMAA, which doesn't wind me up at all, taken 2-3 times a week, is taking the place of my dozens of cups of coffee. I still feel the withdrawal, anyway. You have a history of addiction problems, and your psychologist has told you that you have a high disposition toward severe substance abuse. Kicking one habit only to replace it with another within a few months is common among those with addictive personalities. You should probably be avoiding unnecessary pills as much as possible. In addition, the crap you're taking now is arguably worse than caffeine. DMAA has been restricted or is in the process of being restricted in several countries due to concerns about its health effects. It's currently banned in the US military while they investigate an apparent link between DMAA and soldiers mysteriously dying in the middle of training. As for Chinese brain powders, there's been numerous incidents of Chinese supplements or chemicals being cut with cheap crap to increase profits, occasionally resulting in an outbreak of sickness or death. If Canadian lentils killed 10-20 people with heavy metal poisoning every five years, you'd better believe they'd start testing lentils for heavy metals. I know you say you don't really care about health dangers, but if you can't even take risks to your own life seriously, how can you take financial risks seriously?
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Dec 7, 2012 19:28
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tuyop posted:Thanks for the huge effort post, what's your prescription for action, kobayashi? I think you definitely need to either improve your sense of what is or isn't a necessity, or find someone you trust who has that sense and is willing to be completely honest with you about your decisions. Right now the forums are serving that purpose pretty well, but you can't live the rest of your life running all your major decisions by BFC - you need to find a real-life friend who can tell you "building your own home and devoting half of it to growing BASIL is dumb" or "man, I heard that brand of supplements is 80% sugar" while you guys work out together or whatever you do for fun. You've got the whole mindframe of "I don't really need to be buying non-necessities unless they can make me money somehow" down and you're making progress on "I bet I could probably find this cheaper, let's go bargain-hunt". But is it a necessity to spend $750 on presents? You're congratulating yourself for saving $50 on kitchen appliances while buying a $150 breast pump for your sister-in-law. Your priorities tend to get all messed up, and you seem to prefer risky ways of saving or making money (like building a house yourself to save a few thousand or trying to turn hydroponic BASIL into a moneymaker). You need to learn some impulse control and curb your tendency toward risky behaviors.
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Dec 8, 2012 23:01
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tuyop posted:Regarding the breast pump and Christmas expense. The pump was kind of sprung on us as our "share" of a present for the SIL who is really not in the proper place to be having a child, and between us it's not really a big deal. Toeshoes also has a huge immediate family and we're splitting the cost, so I don't think it's an outrageous amount to spend. How do you square this with congratulating yourself for saving $50 on kitchen appliances, though? You can't buy a microwave for yourself but you're just fine with spending ten times as much on things for other people? There's nothing wrong with blowing more than half a grand on gifts for people, and there's nothing wrong with being frugal with your appliances. However, there's something seriously wrong with when you're doing both at the same time, running a minimalist kitchen while coming up with a Zaurg-esque gift budget. That, to me, signals serious problems with your spending patterns and priorities. It also ties into your usual cycle, where you over-deprive yourself and build up stress which leads to you splurging on something. It shouldn't matter that someone else "sprung it on us". You're physically disabled and have $50,000 in debt. That gives you all the right you'll ever need to say "No, I can't buy a lot of expensive gifts this year" and give cards or homemade crafts or something instead. Not that you really need a right to do it. If you hate the practice of buying gifts for people, then don't do it. If they expect you to do it, then just buy them little things, rather than going whole hog on it. Opting out of Christmas altogether because you disapprove of the practice can make you look like an rear end, but there's nothing dickish about spending less than $50 on every gift - not even if your family was expecting you to spend more. They can't tell you how much to spend, and if they try even after you gently refuse, then they're the ones being assholes.
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Dec 9, 2012 03:49
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ToeShoes posted:We aren't planning on getting a microwave. So we can stop talking about that, and the cheapest microwave we can find is 60$ anyway. That's fine, there's nothing wrong with not getting a microwave and saving sixty bucks. There's also nothing wrong with spending six hundred dollars on presents. Doing both at once, on the other hand, is a little suspect. It's not really about the specific purchases so much as it is about the spending strategies and patterns behind them.
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Dec 10, 2012 00:05
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tuyop posted:One thing we would really like to do is set up an RESP or some kind of savings vehicle for our new niece. The goal would be to pay for 1/3 of the cost of her tuition to either university or a vocational college when she graduates high school. You know you're running short on maniac ideas when you're taking ideas straight out of Zaurg's playbook.
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Dec 11, 2012 01:45
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I don't think ToeShoes and Zwife are really comparable at all. The big problem in Zaurg's life was that his wife was not on board, at all, and he was incapable of really getting her to stop wanting poo poo like a new car or a new house or to spend a few hundred on gifts every month; their relationship was horrible, she often went behind his back to secretly spend money without his knowledge or approval, and he was incapable of effectively communicating with her so he was basically never able to work anything out for more than a few weeks. The impression that I'm getting from ToeShoes, on the other hand, is that she's completely on board with Tuyop's debt banishment plans, and they agree on most things. Unfortunately, she's maybe too in tune with Tuyop, so she also agrees with (or at least doesn't criticize) many of his more ridiculous decisions that he probably needs to be called out on.
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Dec 13, 2012 05:04
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Tuyop can definitely spare a few hundred on going on a long trip to see his folks; considering his love for vacations (if I remember right), it could very well kill two birds with one stone by satisfying his love for travel for a while. He just can't do that and also spend a few hundred on gifts. Splurging a little to go see family on Christmas, though, is just fine.
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Dec 13, 2012 20:01
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ToeShoes posted:We are working on that. I think that we are both getting better at making choices as we learn from paying off this debt. We try to discuss the items we need to buy and we also use tips from you guys and books we have been reading to have a way of buying things smartly. That's fantastic. You guys are getting a lot of criticism for your ideas, but coming in here and getting laughed at is better than not getting the criticism and going through with some of the more ridiculous ideas. Eventually, you guys are going to get enough of a handle on things that you'll be able to make good purchasing decisions without needing any advice or criticism, but until then, keep at it and don't get discouraged. Plenty of people are perfectly happy (maybe even a little too happy) to let you guys know right away when you're stepping even a little bit off the right path.
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Dec 17, 2012 20:40
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tuyop posted:Except that the frame is literally too large. Like I can't stand with the frame between my legs with both feet flat on the ground. Raising the seat and lowering the bars has made it usable, but the bike is just too large, guys. Wait, you bought the bike five months ago, you used it for regular commuting for at least a month or two, you bought all sorts of tricked out gear for it, and you're only just now figuring out that the bike is too small? Are you sure you're not just coming up with excuses to go through with your pre-existing plan to buy a new bike next year, like you were planning on immediately after you impulsively blew some money on a road bike, because you still want to buy a new bike but have realized that you don't have any real justification for doing so?
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Dec 18, 2012 01:06
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To be exact, he bought it off kijiji.
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Dec 18, 2012 07:22
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tuyop posted:Spending less than 400 bucks on a new road bike really won't ruin me if I can use it to go car free for any amount of time at all. Isn't this what you said the first time you bought a bike and like a hundred bucks worth of cycling accessories, totally on a whim while you were still in the middle of researching it, without even making sure it was the right size, which eventually led you to have (or at least want) to spend even more money to replace the bike you bought the first time. This expenditure is a direct consequence of the careless purchasing decisions you make when you get into your manic phase, and I'm a little worried because you haven't really acknowledged it. You've said "I need to buy a bigger bike because my current one is too small", but you haven't demonstrated that you understand why your current bike is too small - because you bought a poorly-sized bike and either didn't notice or didn't bother to mention it until recently. If you don't understand what you did wrong, you'll do it again, or perhaps something even dumber and more wasteful (see also: building your own bike).
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Jan 7, 2013 04:14
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tuyop posted:There are other reasons, clearly I'm willing to spend money on things that are of dubious importance (IKEA, POWDERS You don't need poo poo from Ikea, but that doesn't mean you go completely without furniture. You don't need Chinese brain powders, but that doesn't mean it's a bad thing to have a nutritious diet. You have certain needs (furniture, nutrition, hygiene), and as long as you're making progress on your debt, your goal should be to minimize the spending on those needs while still fulfilling them, not cutting them out of your life completely. If you're worried about your deodorant spending, use cheaper deodorant. If you're worried about shampoo spending, then instead of removing "wash my hair" from your daily routine, try finding ways to cut costs rather than dropping them completely. Hell, it's possible to make your own soap and shampoo, and some people even sell homemade soap in markets or online. I have no interest in it so I don't know for sure if it'll actually save you money, but it's just crazy enough for you to love it, and it satisfies your manic urges while preventing you from abandoning personal hygiene altogether.
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Jan 23, 2013 16:18
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, etc.). I'm mostly interested in experimenting with minimalism. I already know that I don't need powders or poo poo from Ikea, but what about other stuff?
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Haifisch posted:I'm pretty sure that death is the only thing that can get rid of them if you don't pay up. Other than that? You can't get rid of them with bankruptcy, being too poor to pay(they'll offer lovely income-based repayment that you'll only be stuck with for a mere 25 years, don't worry), or pretty much any other mechanism you can think of. I guess you could flee the US to a country that won't cooperate with making you pay, but that assumes you have the money to flee in the first place. Disability can also get US student loans discharged, if you're so badly messed up physically that you are incapable of earning any income at all ever again in your entire life. Also, I'm pretty sure you can only get them discharged after 25 years if you work a teaching or government job and never miss any payments, and even then, that (and the income-based repayment) only apply to federal loans - if you take a private student loan from a bank, the bank calls all the shots and that debt is yours till death or disability do you part. tuyop posted:Are they foisted upon your children on death or something so that you have a dynasty of poor English majors? Not necessarily, but many US student loans require the parent to co-sign on the loan; once that happens, the debt is as much the parent's as the child's.
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Feb 4, 2013 16:30
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tuyop posted:
It's only linear if you look at it primarily as a waste cycle (when waste is really just a mere byproduct of our food cycle) and ignore the presence of water as both an input and an output (also making the cycle circular). According to Baloogan, in Canada the water usually isn't treated at all, so no chemicals at all - it goes right back into nature! No one thinks that reducing your resource consumption and reusing what you can is "retarded" (poor choice of words, I'd say). No one's really got an issue with your proposed waste management cycle, it's just that there's a very good reason that the "poop collects in a pile" phase usually takes place in a sewage treatment plant a few miles away rather than in your living room, and it's the same reason we stopped using human waste as fertilizer when modern fertilizers and waste treatment techniques became available: human waste is smelly, unsanitary, and is a major carrier of disease. The use of crap as fertilizer is the primary factor in the spread of many diseases and parasites in undeveloped countries. It's not just disgusting, it's outright dangerous. Arakan posted:Are you guys aware that large numbers of people in other countries have been composting their poo poo and using it for fertilizer for centuries and still do today? Sure it might be pretty useless for this one guy to do it, but stop acting like it's a bad idea in general. This is the reason why many diseases that are so rare in the developed world are so common in undeveloped countries. There are a lot of diseases and parasites that spread almost exclusively through human poo poo, and crap-as-fertilizer contaminates the food supply with those organisms. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Mar 5, 2013 |
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Mar 5, 2013 16:49
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tuyop posted:Tl;dr: modern sewage systems are the ultimate manifestation of the destruction of, and alienation from, the environment and human dignity and brotherhood in order to endlessly enrich a few shortsighted, pitiful members of our species. I don't really get what the hell your theory about the origin of warfare has to do with making GBS threads in buckets, but the people who dealt with human poo poo were often reviled even when those practices were commonplace. In the UK, the people who collected poo poo were only allowed to live in certain areas, were only allowed to work at night (hence the euphemism "night soil" to refer to human fertilizer), and were required to take the stuff out of the city or town boundaries. In India, poo poo collectors were considered untouchables and only allowed to marry other poo poo collectors. Collecting human poo poo was never a dignified profession.
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Mar 5, 2013 21:00
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Aurora Borealis posted:Even if they are cosigned? Yep. Even PLUS loans, which are made to the student's parents rather than the student themselves, are still canceled upon the death of the student the loans were taken out on behalf of.
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Mar 18, 2013 02:34
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tuyop posted:This lack of laptop is really killing me, guys. I have to spend all day every day doing nothing and have no computer access until August. The fact that you already have a computer and have just been deprived of access to it for a couple of weeks while your fiance uses it. You wouldn't be "buying a computer", you would be "buying another computer", and that's an entirely different set of calculus. Buying a cheap computer can be a decent decision if you don't have one, but buying a second computer because you can't wait a couple weeks to get the one you already own back is the kind of leisure you shouldn't be blowing money on. Besides, you're able to post here about your bad decisions, so you should have enough computer access to fulfill your needs; this is entirely about your wants, and spending $500 for a month of watching movies when you can go to the movie theater three times a week for less than half that cost is absurd.
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Jul 5, 2013 18:40
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Come to think of it, Tuyop was talking about wanting a laptop last month, even though he acknowledged back then that he didn't really need it. So once again, he's coming up with an excuse for why he just needs to have something he's been wanting for a while. I doubt he'll be selling this once he gets his desktop back. Seriously, Tuyop, have you forgotten this already?tuyop posted:/\/\ Yes, but I've dialed back the debt repayment because my job is also on fire and I don't know how I'll be living in 4-12 weeks at any given time. You decided yourself that a laptop was a "messed up priority to have right now". Now that you're bored, you're buying a wanted item you admit you don't need, unless people can give you good reasons not to do it? I mean, other than the fact that you're five figures in debt, have no room in your budget, have plenty of costs you don't know the exact details of yet coming up, and haven't articulated a single clear reason for wanting it other than "I'm bored" and "it's a little inconvenient to have to go to the library". It's not like you have internet at your place right now anyway, so even with a laptop, you'd still need to leave the house to use it for anything.
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Jul 5, 2013 21:06
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tuyop posted:During the day I can use a computer at work when one's available, or walk to the library if one's not. I mentioned the tracking thing just because I feel like most stuff is totally out of control and I think filling my days in a more productive-feeling way might help with that. Or just distracting myself with Skyrim or something, I don't know. Maybe go hang out with friends or something? Hell, going to the movie theater three times a week for the entire month still comes out to cheaper than buying a laptop, and so does doing some crafts or even buying some ingredients to make your own sushi or build your own bat house. "I'm so bored without a computer, there's nothing I can fill my days with besides playing on the internet all day" is the gooniest cry. I'm just as tech-addicted and even I can make time in my goony goony life to sit down in a park occasionally and just enjoy nature for a while. tuyop posted:And I know that this is ridiculous but I really feel like, so what? I drop 600 bucks on car payment and insurance every month and it's no big deal, what's 1100 bucks on a MBA or 600 bucks on a windows laptop that will last for three to five more years? Your car payment is a huge deal. That's why you're trying to pay it off and/or get rid of it. You're falling into the same old Tuyop trap of doing something stupid because you think it'll save money, and then once that choice has made you sufficiently miserable, you end up wanting to splurge on something to reward yourself for enduring poverty. I can understand that, but you personally admit that you don't need a laptop  and that you don't have even a single cent to spare for it in your budget (this is important!). All the tracking and chart-making and budgeting in the world ceases to matter the minute you say "gently caress the budget, I want this expensive thing NOW". And since you don't seem to know what your near-future income and expenses (particularly tuition) will be just yet, you're in absolutely no state to blow money.
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Jul 6, 2013 02:05
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tuyop posted:I appreciate your post, but this kind of thing keeps coming up when it seems to me like I haven't bought anything in quite awhile. Like, there was a bicycle, and some brake parts and tools for the brakes that saved me some 300 bucks or whatever. How long it's been since the last time you bought something is irrelevant, that shouldn't even be coming up unless you think you deserve to be able to make a wasteful, needless big purchase without even looking at your actual situation if you spend enough time being responsible. What matters is whether you actually need it and whether you have room in your budget for it - and last month, when you had access to your computer and all your budget charts, you said that neither of those were true. Now, I'm not a spartan, a little money spent on a little entertainment here and there is fine. So go to the movies or something, go out more, put a few dozen bucks into a hobby or something, find things to do that don't add up to $500 over the course of a month. How much you've saved with your self-deprivation doesn't matter either, unless you're looking at that $672 as windfall money that doesn't exist in your budget - another thing you shouldn't be doing. Instead of looking at it like extra money unaccounted for that you can spend on whatever you want, consider putting it toward your debts, or maybe putting it aside in anticipation of big costs like your wedding and the upcoming tuition bill you still don't know the size of. Yes, congratulations, you've saved a thousand bucks. That doesn't mean you get to waste as much money as you want as long as your total bill comes out to under a thousand. If you're even thinking like that, you haven't internalized the right attitudes toward money.
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Jul 7, 2013 16:46
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Leperflesh posted:On the third hand, it's already resolved, he borrowed a laptop from his dad's company and isn't going to buy anything so there's little point continuing to harp about it. Don't forget, he's still planning to buy a brand-new laptop at full price sometime in the near future. The one he's borrowing now is a business laptop for an architecture company, so it's too clunky and uncool for his college needs. To be fair, tuyop does have back problems, but a 17" laptop isn't that heavy, and he seems to prioritize spartan living over back health in every other case.
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Jul 16, 2013 17:01
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tuyop posted:Did you get the Holmo, perhaps? tuyop posted:It's a bit off topic, but I was reading that Edmonton was looking pretty good for housing. For someone who thinks buying a house is a bad idea and recognizes that you have bigger priorities for your money at the moment, you sure are trying awful hard to justify buying a house right now. I'm glad you've allowed yourself to be talked out of it, at least for now. But you do this a lot, where you openly acknowledge you don't need something and think you probably shouldn't get it...and then, instead of dropping the issue, you spend days or months trying to convince yourself to buy it. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Aug 2, 2013 |
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Aug 2, 2013 01:34
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Considering tuyop's luck with transportation and the fact that he's going to be biking around with it in his backpack everyday, the only laptop he should buy is one that can survive hitting a wall, getting run over by a car, and spontaneously combusting. At the same time. The more I think about it, the more I realize he needs an absolute tank of a business laptop. Two days on a train isn't that bad. I've done a day and a half by Greyhound.
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Aug 19, 2013 01:18
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[quote="tuyop" post="418656684"] Wow, you guys really sperg out about laptops. We've been through it, again, I don't need a laptop at all. Somehow people got higher educations for hundreds of years without laptops, and I have access to all the free computers and a desktop and laptop already. The discussion isn't which laptop I should get, or need, or whether I need a laptop at all, it's really about whether I should buy something that I want. Imagine that this is instead a vacation to Hawaii for a week and we're getting a sick deal and only spending 1200 bucks. Or I'm just setting the money on fire or something. The object of my purchase is inconsequential. [quote] Well, why do you want a Macbook Air in particular and not just any old laptop? Just because it's not something you absolutely need doesn't mean you get to completely turn off your fiscal discipline for the duration of that purchase, nor does it mean you can just randomly buy anything you want based on the justification of "well, I want it" without considering need, usefulness, and most importantly, whether you can get something equivalent somewhere else for cheaper. It's fine to buy things that you want, sometimes, but it's still your responsibility to minimize the cost of the thing you want, taking advantage of sales and not overspending just for the fun of it. If you want a laptop, that's fine, go ahead and buy a laptop, but you're going to have to justify buying a $1200 laptop instead of $700. It's not like you've set aside money for it in your budget or anything, either, unless you're draining your combined fun budget for three months Your net worth is 0. Zero. Your net worth is nil, nada, nothing. That means that, before you buy the sexy popular laptop, you have to come up with a reason why you don't want something that does all the same poo poo but costs half as much. Why are you spending $200 for a 250GB upgrade when you can get a 250GB external drive for fifty bucks or less?
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Aug 21, 2013 22:17
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tuyop posted:Yup, that's what I'm saying! But do you guys want literally nothing that you can't afford right this second? How do you plan to buy things that you want in the future if you don't want them now at all? Budget for them or buy them out of your personal entertainment/fun/whatever spending? Set aside half your entertainment budget for six months and you'll have enough money for a basic standard unupgraded MBA. April posted:Ok then, why don't you have a category called "Tuyop's Toys" and budget a little towards it every month? He does. Go look at the budget he posted last page again - he puts $400 a month towards "Fun Money". He just doesn't want to use that or any other part of his budget to save money for a laptop, instead preferring to cut his debt payments for a few months (!) in order to put his income toward buying a laptop NOW NOW NOW that he only decided last month that he wanted.
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Aug 22, 2013 15:51
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Too bad you didn't want that business laptop from your dad (because you were holding out for a cooler laptop)! Instead, you ended up buying a broken iPod for almost exactly how much it'd cost to fix it. Your resolve in tolerating the issues is admirable, especially the "shot battery", which makes me surprised that it's even usable given the length of your days, but it's yet another example of your wide swings between demanding to blow large sums on unnecessary opulence (refusing to settle for anything less than a Macbook Air) and then putting yourself through intense self-deprivation (broken iPod, unfinished basement) without regard for necessity so that you barely even save money and end up fueling the hunger for the next manic phase.
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Oct 1, 2013 17:44
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Congratulations, Tuyop! I'm super glad to see that not only have you gotten a handle on your finances, but that you feel good about doing so and that you've found a way to happiness. It's been a long, tough journey, but you've pulled through and I hope you can keep this happiness and satisfaction your whole life.
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Jan 24, 2014 20:05
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