family of four stats

What Are the Odds of You Existing?

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.

Super Airfare Travel Hacks for Families and Groups

12/18 by The Frug 4 Comments

By Brad Beckstrom

There are a ton of great travel hacking tools and adventure travel blogs out there. The blogs include lots of great tips like maximizing use of frequent flyer miles, credit card point programs, traveling during off-peak periods to less popular destinations and top 10 lists of great online tools and apps to use.

Despite the abundance of advice out there, one area that’s rarely mentioned is travel hacking for a family of four (or a small group of friends.) Planning for four or more people takes travel hacking to a whole new level. Keep reading if you’re traveling solo since these tools can also work when traveling alone or as a couple.

When planning for four people, you’re often not only dealing with the worst time of year to travel, like spring break or the holidays, but you’re also trying to use up some of your frequent flyer mileage. This goes against the grain of what most travel hackers recommend, including efficient use of frequent flyer miles and traveling at off-peak periods. [Read more…] about Super Airfare Travel Hacks for Families and Groups

Lessons Learned after 30 days playing The Minimalist Game

05/16 by The Frug 2 Comments

By Brad Beckstrom

My wife Kelly and I just wrapped up our 30th day of the Minimalist Game. The Minimalist game basically requires that you get rid of one thing on the first day of the month. On the second day, two things, three items on the third and so on. If you have two people playing the game, by the end of it you will of given away 992 things. We called it a 30 day giving challenge as we were trying to focus on giving away items that could be used again like toys, clothing, electronics, kitchen stuff, and dreaded decorations category.

We also thought it would be fun to document the challenge, so I set up a table next to the moving boxes we were filling up and photographed each item before it was either given away, recycled, or trashed. I thought it would be cool to have a record of all the stuff we got rid of. It’s almost like some sort of sociological study of all the junk people keep in drawers. I liked how some of the photos came out, but it got a little trickier as more and more items were given away on day 25, 26, 27 etc.

Photos were also helpful for some of the sentimental items we were both holding onto. When I was much younger, my grandmother bought me a beautiful toy car in Dublin. I was excited and surprised. When she gave it to me, she said” this is something to remember me by when I’m gone” so I had hung onto it for over 40 years. The problem is when we store stuff away in a box we just forget about it and it’s not doing anyone any good. The trick is separating the memory, which I definitely want to keep, from the physical item, the toy. By photographing it and writing about it, I’ve remembered her. It was time to send this toy on its way so some collector or child can enjoy it.

A few other things we learned:

The Costco Date. Declaring War on your Grocery Bill.

03/15 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Jumbo Dog and Refillable 20oz Pepsi. $1.50

My wife Kelly and I have started a new tradition. The Costco Date. Kelly actually coined the term and I jumped on it. I was recently complaining about our grocery bill that two growing teenage boys have something to do with. We had bailed on Costco a few years back primarily because the times we usually went, weekends, it was usually a zoo. I have better things to do with my time than visit a big-box store on a weekend. We also started ending up with oversize stuff we didn’t need like giant jars of olives and other questionable clothing and gadget purchases.

We’d started using Amazon Prime for paper products, pet food, and lots of other items so we decided not to renew our Costco membership. That was before I decided to declare war on our grocery bill. [Read more…] about The Costco Date. Declaring War on your Grocery Bill.

How to take a hatchet to your spending with a hit list.

11/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Stop budgeting and start using a hit list.

I hate budgets.They are a pain in the ass to put together and, once you do, they just sort of sit there. They’re like a line in the dirt you just can’t cross, but often do. It feels like you’re trapped between the lines. It may remind you of work since it involves spreadsheets! That’s probably the reason most people don’t put together a personal budget and hold themselves to it.

I’ve experimented with different budgeting tools like Quicken, Mint, and various sad spreadsheets, created with good intentions and never updated or opened again. I tend to do much better with actuals. As in, what did I actually spend and what can I do about it. I’m calling this “action-based budgeting.”

I want it to be simple, something that can be done in an hour on a piece of paper and pay benefits all year. Less = More.

What is a hit list?

Holiday Escape Plan.

09/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Your guide to skipping the insanity this year.

I was driving the other day and I saw a pumpkin patch sign up. It’s freaking Labor Day weekend! I know what that means. Halloween will quickly turn into Thanksgiving and the insanity of the spendy holiday season will begin instantly.

Have you ever thought about escaping the holidays? No last-minute trips to malls, hiding gifts in the trunk, wrapping oversized packages. Completely ignoring the news stories about people getting trampled on Black Friday. There’s really a reason it’s called Black Friday.

Choose Adventure over Stuff

What would happen if you could get the whole family to buy in on your secret holiday escape plan? Choosing adventure over stuff this holiday season. I know this is next to impossible if you have kids under 12 years old, but it’s never too early to start planting the seed. Our kids got a taste of it last year. We had a get together with family and friends in Mexico. We saw whales, visited small villages, took boat rides, sat on the beach.

The holiday escape plan is pretty simple. Instead of the traditional gift giving bonanza of material goods that are soon forgotten, we will put all of that money towards a family adventure. Last year we did a little of both which, looking back on it, is cheating. We also spent a bit too much once we got to Mexico.

I needed complete buy in on the plan this year. Our gifts to each other would be adventure and time with family and friends. To my surprise, I got very little pushback. Our youngest commented “Why wouldn’t we choose that?” Another comment was “I always have a hard time coming up with stuff to ask for anyway.” I’ll let you know how all this turns out after Christmas morning, at least they’ll be waking up at the beach.

Paying for your adventure

Now the hard part starts, but just think how much time you’re saving by skipping all those trips to the store and wrapping presents. The first thing I did was look back over the last couple years at what we spent on Christmas gifts, local travel, and all the other holiday related “stuff”. [Read more…] about Holiday Escape Plan.