Living Life on Manual

2016 is the year of self-reliance, in which I'll explore how little I need to be happy. So far I've dropped a few minor habits, like drinking and dining out, and I've tried to be stricter about careless spending. Estimated monthly savings so far: No coffee out: £22 Taking lunch to work: £52 No Alcohol: £50 Cycling rather than bussing: £90 Cutting my own hair: £5 Not dining out: £50 If factor in the alternative costs, like bike parts, tea, groceries, then the savings are around £215 a month. Invested in index funds at a 5% return for 10 years would yield £33,385! I would need savings of £74,000 to generate enough income to pay for these habits (at a 3.5% return) in retirement. Instead I'll be  earning  a bonus £100 a month from my savings - that's one ivory backscratcher a year! Let's see if we can do better though.  Instead of buying clothes new, there are perfectly nice clothes in charity shops. Estimated savings: £15 a month . Doing ...

January is almost gone, and the many good resolutions of December 31st are beginning to falter. I skipped a few days running because I just didn't feel like running. No one else I know runs, they seem happy enough. I decided that a few drinks on the weekend and one or two during the week are ok. After all, everybody else drinks, why should I be different. I didn't bother making lunch last week so I ended up spending £20 on snacks and coffee. What difference does it make? I earn a salary, right? Sound familiar? It does to me.  The difference is that those excuses are from past years. Today on January 28, 2016, there hasn't been a blip in my dedication to this year's resolutions.   Instead of making 16 mini-resolutions and trying to stick to them all, I adopted a single mega-resolution:  independence . With that mega goal in my mind, I found it easy to make 7 sub-goals and stick to them. No alcohol. No money spent on coffee or food out. No reading...

Wishing to leave my mark on history, I have invented a new sport. I call it: Airport Walking. Essentially, the sport consists of walking. In airports. I recently went on a holiday consisting of two 22 hour multi-stage flights (out and back). The morning of the trip, I drove rather than cycled to work. Having sat at work all day, I arrived at the airport and considered the fact that a 22 hour sitting odyssey 'stood' before me. A few quick mental calculations told me that I had about 10 hours of waiting in airports, and about 13 hours of enforced airplane stress positions.  While this was going through my head, I realised that I had already been walking around the duty free area for about 15  minutes - that was almost a mile! There was still another 45 minutes until boarding time. "I could easily do another mile", I told myself. 2 miles became 3 and by the time I boarded the plane, I had covered 5km or about 17 laps of the 300 metre waiting area. At the...