Category: MONEY

Don’t Buy The Pie

Don’t you do it! I know you’re thinking about it! Don’t do it! Don’t buy the pie!!!

All this talk of inflation. Prices continuing to rise along with company profits. Gas is up! Groceries are up! Car prices are up! The sky is up! A bunch of various numbers are listed. 8%. No! 6%! No! 7.5% Cancel the Thanksgiving dinner! It’s too expensive! No one can afford anything! Etc., Etc.

It may feel like you’re hopelessly trapped, in this endless cycle of money that’s evaporating faster than you create it! Perhaps that’s true in some aspects. But for others, I find it really quite simple, especially for food stuffs. You want to minimize and perhaps avoid a massive grocery bill that’s not just 7% inflated, but perhaps even up to 50% or more inflated? Well… Just don’t buy the pie!

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Granola Bar Gold

I’ve been thinking about food a lot lately, specifically on how to minimize costs. We spend a lot on food. How much? I’m not entirely sure, but I’d bet well over 10k/year, probably even closer to 14 or 15k. And I hate it. I hate it so much! There are a number of contributing factors, such as the inflation issue we’ve been having of late, especially greedflation. Some foods also just cost a lot more than others, especially pre-processed foods. But one thing that is hard to get around is protein We eat a lot of chicken, and sometimes steaks here and there. But lean protein is generally quite expensive.

There’s also the kids’ snacks, which although convenient and somewhat tasty, come at a cost premium. Especially if you aren’t able to get them in bulk. We go through a lot of basic snacks like granola bars (chocolate coated and uncoated), nutrigrain bars, and bear paws.

But since getting into the hobby of bread baking recently got me thinking that it can’t be that hard to make a homemade, cheap and nutritiously delicious snack right? I mean, the main ingredients in those kids snacks are essentially flour, sugar, and oats. Those things are dirt cheap as far as ingredients go. And there’s a ton of internet recipes available. The trick is finding out which ones are actually descent, and which ones would actually work for me. So let’s see what it takes to make some Granola Bar Gold!

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Riding It To The Bottom – Part 2 – Ditching the Bonds

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

I published “Riding it to the bottom” on July 6, 2022. Shortly thereafter, I ended up selling all my entire bond ETF portfolio and thus converted my asset allocation from an 80/20 stock-bond split, into a 100% stock allocation. I know I had written about staying the course, which is still what I stand by. Whatever your personal investment plan statement instructs you to do, is what you should do, as it is based on your own personal situation, comforts and risk levels.

However, I didn’t just randomly switch over to 100% stocks. I’d been thinking about it for a while, and decided to dust off my investment plan for review. I hadn’t really updated it in a couple of years and the whole situation with both the stock and bond market heavily plummeting caused me to re-evaluate my overall plan.


And I did. I thought about it a lot, and about the pros and cons of keeping or ditching bonds, and what my overall goals going forward should look like.

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