Live Lean

The Case for Getting Outside.

Space is there if you look for it.

By Brad Beckstrom.

It seems like a lifetime ago but last spring I was in Tokyo, Japan. It was mid-March and cherry blossoms were just starting to bloom.

Tokyo is a crazy, crowded city. I had mentally prepared myself for the arrival and train transports from the airport to Shinjuku station, the world’s busiest rail terminal. It lived up to its reputation, especially since I arrived around 8 PM. With some help from Google maps, I was able to make the transition without any issues.

My hotel was a few blocks away from the train station and I passed through the wildly busy Shinjuku intersection. I was just part of the horde with my rolling bag en route to my hotel, just across from the Park Hyatt hotel that Bill Murray made famous in the movie “Lost In Translation.”

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Happy Friday from The Frug’s Basement Bar

04/20 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Sharing some Frugal beer finds and a few other things.

Well, it’s been a long week for everybody. And I think it’s Friday so it’s time for sampling a few new frugal beers. Today I’m trying a couple of affordable favorites from Aldi and Trader Joe’s.

Happy Friday from the Frug’s basement bar. 17th in the series. Today I’m trying a couple beers. The first is Wernesgrüner from a brewery founded in Saxony Germany in 1436. It’s available exclusively at Aldi stores for the (well below import) price of $5.99 a 6 pack. It’s a very balanced easy to drink Pilsner with a nice finish and depth of flavor. The second is Boatswain American IPA. A smooth IPA with a malty sweetness and caramel and spice notes at Trader Joe’s for the very non-IPA like price of $4.99 a six pack. Sharing #beer #Art #Travel #Photography #Traderjoesfinds #aldifinds and some places I’ve traveled.

In case you’ve just found this beer art, for the past few years I’ve been having some fun with old coasters, postcards, matches, photographs, and other various items I find in my travels. I tend to accumulate these things from different bars, restaurants, and hotels that I stumble upon. I’ve always enjoyed the creative effort that goes into some of the simplest things, like the logo for a new craft beer or an unusual coaster or postcard.

I keep a small stack of these items in my office. When they get to a certain height, I spread them out with some old photographs and other random things on a card table and photograph them with an iPhone. Since these are essentially Friday happy hour images, I’ve always added a nice cold beer which I enjoy at the end of the photoshoot. So far, there are now 17 in the series and you can see them here on Flickr, or occasionally popping up on my Instagram feed.

This year I’m adding a new twist. Lately I’ve been finding some good quality imported and craft beers at our nearby ALDI and Trader Joe’s stores where we do most of our shopping. I’ll also be trying out a few local brews supporting craft breweries that are near by.

Cheers,

The Frug

Financial Independence through Living Lean, Working Lean, and Traveling Lean Follow me on Twitter, Facebook , Flickr , or Instagram

Think Big, Live simply. Our Five-Year Plan to Go Big by Traveling Light.

01/20 by The Frug Leave a Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

I know, I tend to get excited about things. I’ve always been like this. Periods of intense interest in something that wanes over time, then comes back full force months, sometimes years later. Minimalism is one of those things.

Minimalism often shows up in different places in my life. It could be frugality, architecture, lean investment strategies, work, art, even fitness. When I write about it I like to call it living lean.

One thing I’ve noticed is that minimalism sometimes gets painted as a movement for people who aren’t interested in success and the financial, social, material trappings that come along with it. Then I’ll see an article in the New York Times talking about how minimalism is now conflated with self-optimization and the rich who can afford to leave things alone.

To some extent, it’s both. If you’ve ever watched the show Billions, you’ll notice the minimalist offices and penthouse apartments of the hedge fund traders in the show. They are using their money to save time by minimizing distractions. Using money to skip lines, travel in private jets, have an empty desk in a spotless office. All of the “little things” are taken care of by staff and assistants. However, with minimalism, there is something deeper going on.

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What Are the Odds of You Existing?

09/19 by The Frug 1 Comment

Before you achieve anything today, you are already a very successful 850 Centillion to one shot. Vikings, Pilgrims, Veterans and Vagabonds. Your odds of even existing are oh-so-slim.

That’s right, the odds of you existing right now are about 1 in 10^2685000. That’s a 10 with a couple of million zeros after it.

If we go back just 10 generations, the number is still far north of 1 in 100 Centillion. That’s 100 with 303 zeros after it.

Once you get past 100 Centrillion, there’s no need to keep counting the zeros unless you’re in a lab somewhere at MIT. Other folks were smart enough to crank these numbers for us. See infographic below.

Why did I bother to look this up? Over the years, various relatives have collected some interesting family tree information. A few years back, I took some time and put all of this info into ancestry.com. Ancestry.com is a great way to research and link your family history. Once you put in the basic data, grandparents great-grandparents etc. your family info is cross-referenced with millions of genealogy records worldwide.

Sometimes you get lucky. A distant cousin, or someone with similar records, put in additional information dating back many generations. Some family histories are already very well documented. You can now even submit your DNA to the database and match the location and ethnicity results against a global database. Talk about putting it all out there!

For example, my grandmother on my father’s side was a Horton. This side of the family is so well documented there are actually books written about them! I found well researched records allowing me to match siblings up with parents and birth records through the generations to provide matches on one side all the way back to a 9th Great Grandfather — William Million born in Middlesex, England in 1600.

Wars, famines, plagues

I started thinking about all the things, wars, famines, plagues, and even low sperm counts over 10 generations since 1600 that could have precluded my existence. This is only one quarter of the picture, what about the Irish on the other side of the family or my grandfather’s family origins in Finland and Sweden, no doubt descendants of Vikings. The odds of me or my family being here just keep getting smaller and smaller.

The Freedom of Limited Options

08/19 by The Frug 2 Comments

By Brad Beckstrom

I’ve been busy lately, limiting my options. Nope, not talking about stock options. I’m pursuing a simpler lifestyle built around fewer possessions and more time to enjoy what I already have.

The idea is simple, stop spending time and money accumulating, storing, and caring for stuff. Give it away, starting with the small stuff, knickknacks, unused toys and clothing. Later move on to larger items, eventually cars and houses. With each box of things we get rid of, each closet we empty out, there’s a sense of lightness. With each thing we wear out, then don’t replace, there is a feeling of freedom.

The closer you move to this limited lifestyle, the more things improve. If you limit your wardrobe, you’ll spend less time picking out what to wear every day, less time in the store replacing cheap sweaters and shoes. If you limit your diet to exclude crap foods and monster menu items, the payoffs include your finances and your health. Those “vintage” clothes will fit better.

Even the best restaurants serve crap food. If they don’t get you with the heavy-handed ingredients, they will get you with the portions. I do miss my weekly visits to the local BBQ joint with 100 different sauces. Now, when I stop in, maybe every few months, it’s more of an event, something I look forward to. My gut has not missed the weekly three meat platter at all.

Limiting options does not just apply to clothing, diet, or the number of cars you own. It’s something you can apply to any part of your life with benefits. I’ve learned to master investing by knowing less about stocks, bonds, and mutual funds and more about simplified lean index investing.

I’ve gone on a high quality, low information diet by using tools like Feedly and Flipboard to follow the best and most trusted writers I can find. Anytime I add a new source I see if there is one I can prune.

Time

The New Frugality

08/19 by The Frug 1 Comment

Does frugality still work? If so has it changed?

By Brad Beckstrom

I learned a lot from my grandmothers. One ran a business with my grandfather and the other invested in dividend stocks. They were both ahead of their time in the 60s and 70s. I remember my grandmother showing me her stock certificates and explaining how dividends worked. She explained how she used dividends to support herself after my grandfather Tom passed away at the age of 58. I remember the railroad and utility stock certificates with their elaborate etchings and visiting her stockbroker to execute a trade well before computers arrived.

I didn’t get to really meet either of my grandfathers since they both died young. I did spend quite a bit of time with both grandmothers, either staying overnight or while visiting cousins nearby. By the time I was a young man, they both had lived through two world wars, the depression, Vietnam, the Womens and Civil Rights movements, the Kennedy assassination, 1973 and 1974 energy crisis, inflation, cold wars, and multiple recessions. As savers and investors they had seen some setbacks.

The Old Frugality

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