get rid of stuff

Let’s Clean This Mess Up.

What you can learn from a minimalist lifestyle even if you’re nowhere close to adopting it.

By Brad Beckstrom

Minimalism is hard. After five years of working on it, I’m not even close to my original goal of a vastly simpler lifestyle. I’ve worked on applying minimalist ideas in everything I do. I’ve slowly realized that for me there is not some ultimate minimalist goal or destination. The reason is that there’s always stuff coming into our lives. And it’s not just our stuff, it’s our family stuff, our work stuff, stuff related to our home, our hobbies, our kids. The average American home has 300,000 things in it. So, I guess my family’s making progress — we’ve gotten rid of about 50,000 of these things over the past five years.

I think part of the reason adopting a minimalist outlook is hard is that many of us have lived our lives doing the opposite. It’s only much later, after decades of accumulating stuff, that we realize it’s all really just weighing us down. Given this, it’s going to take some time to unravel all that.

One of the interesting things I’ve found is that you can apply minimalism to a lot more than just cleaning out closets and garages. Over these past five years, I’ve developed everything from minimalist investing strategies, work habits, and exercise routines.

As I’ve been working to apply minimalist principles, I look around and notice people adding more more more. Like spending 30 minutes driving to and from a CrossFit Gym to spend hard-earned dollars on increasingly complex workout routines. Constantly bringing complexity into life with high-tech toys often built into expensive new vehicles and smart appliances. Using social media, news apps, and productivity apps to create more and more urgent notifications. Complex volatile investment schemes involving everything from cryptocurrency to meme stocks. Utilizing multiple tools and technologies that were designed to lighten the load, but instead, end up adding hours to the average workday.

Let’s simplify this stuff.

I don’t think anyone will ever look at me and my home or family and say “Oh, that guy is a minimalist”. For me it’s not about that, it’s about applying minimalist principles to one part of your life at a time and making small improvements. So, in the spirit of minimalism, if we could apply just one idea across everything we do it would make a big difference. Here’s one idea I use: [Read more…] about Let’s Clean This Mess Up.

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.

[Read more…]

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

Knowing Things Instead of Buying Things.

08/18 by The Frug 1 Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

What if every time you thought of buying something, you decided to know something instead? You’d probably build up a pretty good “store” of knowledge. You’d constantly be refreshing that knowledge whether you’re in a grocery store, online or shopping for a large purchase. I’ve used this strategy on large and small purchases. Something simple like “that health bar has more calories than 2 whole eggplants.” Now whenever you look at those 240 calorie health bars you’ll think about the equivalent of eating two entire eggplants.

Knowing things can impact larger purchases.

I’ve been putting off replacing our old car. We probably should’ve sold it a year ago but that time has not been wasted. Since then we’ve been learning about:

Making 30% more by selling a used car on craigslist instead of to a dealer.
How new cars lose 20% of their value just 6 months after you drive them off the lot.
You can find some really great cars using an app like Carvana once you know what you’re looking for.
Whether an electric car or a hybrid car is a better fit for our daily driving.
All of the benefits of having a car that’s paid for and skipping the commute.

You can even apply this thinking to investments. When you pay high annual fees on your investments, your spending money. Years ago I used to sell off underperforming mutual funds and search for up and comers. I stopped doing this and took a few years to completely revamp my investing strategy. I learned that many funds I had been buying had high fees of around 1% per year. I also came across a study that Fidelity had done about the most successful individual investment accounts. The winners were investors who were dead or had not touched their retirement accounts for years. After some research I decided to buy and hold ultra low-cost index funds with fees less than 0.060% and exchange them only when I needed to rebalance my portfolio. This one change has saved me thousands of dollars every year, and will continue as long as I hold these index funds.

Often when I’m interested in something, I decide to research it and by doing that I delay the purchase. I believe that delaying purchases is one of the best ways to cut your spending. Even a delay of one or two days to do a bit more research (learn something) can make you rethink that impulse purchase. I also have a simple rule of not replacing something until it is completely worn out or, in the case of perishables, gone. When you run out of something and stay out of it for a few days sometimes you realize you don’t really need it. If it was really amazing you’ll remember to replace it. (sorry kale snacks)

Here are some tried-and-true ways of knowing things instead of buying things. [Read more…] about Knowing Things Instead of Buying Things.

Prestige Syndrome and the Startling Difference between Vertical and Horizontal Wealth.

05/18 by The Frug 4 Comments

By Brad Beckstrom

If you read enough, eventually you come across some big concepts. Whenever I see one, I like to jot a quick note or clip entire articles in Evernote. Sometimes these ideas just sit there and I later come across them accidentally when searching for something else. One of the things I’ve been thinking about for a while is prestige or, more specifically, Prestige Syndrome. A syndrome is defined as “a group of symptoms that consistently occur together or a condition characterized by a set of associated symptoms”. So, just for kicks, let’s take a look at something I like to call “Prestige Syndrome”.

Prestige Syndrome

Prestige Syndrome can be caused by earning more money and then feeling the need to spend that money to exude prestige, to do what rich people do. Continually upgrading your home, transportation, entertainment, and clothing choices to be aligned with that certain level of prestige that comes with your new higher-paying job. Sometimes this lifestyle creep can be very subtle, spending away our discretionary income on luxuries that suddenly seem more affordable to us.

An even larger problem, especially in our country, is spending money you don’t have to exude prestige. This is also more commonly known as “ Keeping up with the Joneses”.

We don’t have to look far to see examples of Prestige Syndrome. McMansions with three extra bedrooms and four extra bathrooms “just in case”. Massively oversized SUVs primarily used to run to the grocery store and sit in traffic. Prestige Syndrome can occur at all income levels.

The interesting thing about Prestige Syndrome is that there is no top. If your friends and business associates own Gulfstream jets than Prestige Syndrome tells you you should own one. You’ve earned it, and you believe people do things differently at this income level. The spending levels simply increase with the career ladder. The McMansions, vacation homes, yachts, limo services, security, valets, and private jets are all just steps on this ladder.

Vertical Wealth

This ladder is what we call vertical wealth. Spending goes up as your income increases, often surpassing your income. This is how debt-fueled spending is created. [Read more…] about Prestige Syndrome and the Startling Difference between Vertical and Horizontal Wealth.

How to Banish Worry and be Thankful Everyday.

11/17 by The Frug 1 Comment

By Brad Beckstrom

Everybody’s got stuff. Not the stuff you might be thinking, like knickknacks, or closets full of junk. I’m talking about the stuff in your head. It’s something we all have. Those thoughts and worries that creep in. They can keep you up at night or distract you during the day. This stuff is not unique to people based on age, race, marital status, or station in life. In fact, it can be argued that the healthy and the wealthy often have even more of this stuff. As rapper notorious B.I.G. famously said “Mo Money = Mo Problems.” He had them both, and he was dead at 25.

Sometimes I’ll be on a great walk listening to a podcast or an audiobook and find that I missed entire parts of it as my mind wanders off and goes to this “stuff.” Sometimes other people’s stuff creeps into my head. Things I have absolutely no control over, but there they are, pissing me off.

One thing that makes me feel better is understanding that everybody has this stuff in their head, worrying about a family member, their health, some work-related issue, or something that popped up in a random tweet. You know the feeling, “WTF, that can’t be true, how can they do that! Let me see that link, let’s dive in so we can worry more about this.” [Read more…] about How to Banish Worry and be Thankful Everyday.