Last week I inaugurated a season of bike commuting and in the subtitle of my Bike Commuting Begins post I jokingly proclaimed it the “dawn of the sore bottom.” I was expecting a little soreness, maybe a little tenderness to the touch – but nothing like what I am experiencing. My quest for frugal transportation is making my sit bones feel like they’ve been hammered by Thor himself.
Now I have narrowed down the culprit to one (or all) of three things:
(1) My biking shorts. That’s right, my biking shorts are none other than the highly sought after khaki shorts. To be honest, they just aren’t providing the padding that my delicate derriere needs. They fit well, loose and comfortable – but not so loose that they get caught in my wheels. That is really important so I don’t eat crap in the middle of the road. Additionally, they are stylish and resist stains pretty well – but if you look carefully you can see the marks left on the seat of my shorts by potential culprit #2 – my saddle.
(2) Iguana seat … ha! … more like Iguana-make-your-arse-sore-eat. I knew the seat was a little firm, but golly whiz. I didn’t think it would grind the flesh and muscle between it and my Ischial Tuberosity into grits. This is my prime suspect (and like $40+ bucks to replace).
(3) Then there is my riding style – as fast as my little legs can handle. Now I don’t have a bike computer or anything else to measure my RPMs, but I think I am in the 60-120 range. Since my legs are spinning pretty fast-ish I generally feel bumps in the road without the benefit of my legs cushioning the blow. This may be a technique thing, but I’m not sure.
Since I have such soreness I have been reluctant to take the long rides. When all is said and done, I have ridden 55.1 miles in 6 1/2 days of commuting I could be logging many more miles if I thought I could sit in the saddle for that long every day. The day after my longer days, like when I ride the 12 miles home after work, I am usually pretty tender, but not sore anywhere else on my body except my butt. Lame.
I have ridden all the way home from work twice now. The first time I did it on “accident” after getting ditched by my bus. It already had two bikes on it (the limit on my transit system) so I got left at the stop. Instead of waiting another 30 minutes till the next bus might ditch me I decided I’d ride until the next bus caught up – it never did. On that first trip I went door-to-door in about 1 hour 10 minutes.
The second attempt I did much better, making the 12 mile trip in ~45 minutes. That was a very pleasant surprise to say the least. It has me thinking after some training I might be able to make the trip in 30 minutes. That would be as quick as driving to work in a car … on the freeway.
Another concern that has been raised about bike commuting has been safety. As of today, I have not had any close calls, been afraid for my life; or encountered an out of control driver. Everyone has been very respectful and I have felt nothing but safe on the roads.
I really hope that I can get past the tender tush and on to more ridding. Before I go out and buy a new seat or riding shorts with padding I may do some experimenting with old pillows since my wife has a penchant for sewing. I’d rather look like a toddler with a loaded diaper than let this soreness keep up. Think of all the practical joke I could play … Seriously, think about it and leave a comment – I need to know what they are.
Have you ever considered moving because you can live somewhere else for cheaper? I know that my wife and I have. I’ve mentioned before the outrageous prices that currently exist in the housing market in San Diego – and that is despite the precipitous fall in prices in recent months. While in South Carolina, home to my wife’s family, we could buy a pretty spacious fixer-upper with plenty of land about 45 minutes from Charlotte, NC for around $50,000 (plus $40,000 renovation costs over a few years after purchase). We could probably ride that mortgage.
But that is not what I wanted to talk about today. Instead, I want to look at the whole notion of relocating from a perspective other than that of a rich person. Yes, I know – my net worth hardly classifies me as ‘rich’ by American standards, but in the eyes of the world I am super rich. I eat like a king, have adequate shelter, own a car, own a computer, have access to high quality education, I am decently educated, and I make more money in one year than some people will live off of their entire life. I am incredibly wealthy.
In order to accomplish my goal of looking at the question of relocation from a non-rich perspective I am going to have to do one of two things:
- Rely heavily on my training in history and tap some of my ancestral heritage going back to the industrial revolution or
- Try to see life through the eyes of the poor around me
I’ll try to use both, but I am going to mainly try and see life as the poor around me see it.
Living in San Diego I rub shoulders with a large contingent of Hispanic immigrants, who are also often illegal immigrants. They leave their native land to live as expatriates in one of the richest countries in the world. Sometimes whole families make the trip, like the family of one of my high school friends. These are generally, but not always, the best off in terms of support structures and income levels. They have relatives who have already made the trip (usually uncles) and quickly find some type of ‘regular’ job because of these connections. Even though these people are poorer than me and their experiences are interesting I really want to think at a lower level of poverty.
Walking to the bus stop in the morning I often pass an Hispanic male who sleeps on a narrow concrete slab with bushes on one side and a bank on the other. Sometimes I hear him talking to a buddy who must be sleeping in the same area just a skip away from the sidewalk. Other times I hear the sound of his sleeping and I am a little embarrassed to be sharing this intimate moment with a complete stranger. I say “Hello” when I pass him as he heads off to buy food or wherever it is he is heading at 6:27 in the morning.
I don’t know this man’s background and I don’t have any idea why he is living in my quiet suburban neighborhood. But I do imagine, and I do have some book knowledge of what his story could be. I imagine that he has a wife and kids back in his home country and that being away from them makes his heart a prisoner in his own chest, longing to break free from the bars of bone and flesh. I see his little girl completely naked from the waste up, sitting in a day-old diaper – her olive legs red with rash. What money he makes doing day labor for my neighbors is enough to feed his belly and send a small amount back to his family, but it’s never enough for him to go back home or to bring them up to America.
So he waits and he works. His clothes become stale with sweat, his face leathery and worn. Gradually he meets new friends in similar circumstances and begins to adapt to his new life. And the main reason he has done so is for money.
What I find particularly interesting about it is this: while I, the rich man, think about relocating for the purpose of reducing expenses this (imaginary, but real) man relocated to increase income. The fact is, working for suburban households at relatively low wages is the best job that this guy could find both in his country and in ours. He has moved away from everything he has ever known to a new land that costs a lot to live in in order to make more money than he could have anywhere else. He lives like a beggar here in order to improve the situation of his family there. Poverty motivates him while comfort motivates me.
We both are looking at our financial situation and what we will be giving up with our moves, but he definitely sacrifices more than I do. While I could see my side of the family again if I move out of San Diego, it would be very hard for this individual to do the same without jeopardizing the very reason that he came across the border in the first place – end his family’s fight against poverty.
We are the same, but different – and I am not so sure what to do with that. What I am sure of is that poverty stinks and that we (the rich) can do a lot to help others with greater needs than our own.
What do you think we should do about relocation as a result of poverty? It happens on both an national (flight from rural to urban) and international (immigration to richer countries: i.e. US and EU) scale. Should these be treated differently?
Tracking your expenses is an important part of setting up a budget that is effective at predicting future expenditures and educating you on your current progress. There are a few different styles that people employ to do this, but I don’t want to get into that discussion now. What I want to do is to show you a way to gather your income and expense information is such a way that you can completely customize that way that it is displayed for you.
The reason I think that this is important is because many of the expenses that we incur during our lives are rarely one shot deals. Most budgets I have seen are single line items. They look something like this:
Very pretty, but lacking in some practical punch. You see very few people spend all the money they have set aside for each category in a single pop. Most people exhaust the funds set aside for each line item gradually over time. A classic case in point is grocery shopping. If you are like my wife and I your food budget of $160 is spread out over the entire month. My wife makes a weekly shopping trip on Wednesdays and buys our food for the entire week (and often times more than a week). She even shops at multiple stores, often bringing our total receipt count up to 3 per Wednesday. If we had to add all these trips up into one cell that would be terribly inefficient and the equation would look gawd-awful.
Imagine having to look through that for errors. It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies just looking at it.
Here is the fix that I have used to make my life easier and that I hope will make your life easier too: track your expenses in a list form. It is simple, efficient, and really opens up some cool possibilities in terms of analysis. After all, that is why we budget – to keep more of what we have earned to promote social justice … er, I mean retire early.
The way I make a list of my income and expense looks just like this:
Not very pretty, but pretty functional if you ask me. Let me break it down for you how it works:
(A) This is the date on which you made the transaction. This isn’t that important unless you do a lot of your banking online and maybe even use your online statements as your receipt receptacle. I do this even though I probably shouldn’t. Recording the date at the very least helps you order your information and give you points of reference – which is a good thing if you ask me.
(B) I like to record the store at which I made the purchase or the source of my income. That way it is easier to find the receipt or scan the online receipt receptacle for transactions made on a certain date at a certain store. It is not necessary, but I like it a lot.
(C) Here you put down the price that you paid for something or the wages you received. This is obviously important and you should obviously do this step. I like to put income as positive numbers and expense as negative numbers, but I can see an argument for doing exactly the opposite
(D) D is the real power behind recording your expenses in a list form. Here is where you put the category for every expense that you have. If I go shopping on the 11th at my local grocery store to buy food I would put “food” in this column. If it was a bill I paid I can put “bills” or “utilities” depending on how I chose to categorize my expenses – for simplicities sake I choose to categorize it as bills. Pretty self-explanatory, but crucial.
(E) In this column I put random information that might be useful, like confirmation numbers. This is not a necessary field.
Again, (D) is really the power in making the expense tracker that works. It will enable you to make the pretty spreadsheet that we saw earlier, but this pretty spreadsheet will have power.
Then, to put an end to the tracking spreadsheet you will want to us the SUM function available in the major spreadsheet applications (both Excel and Open Office Calculate). It should look something like this:
=SUM(D2:D70)
The ‘D2′ is the first cell in the range and ‘D70′ is the last cell in the range. The ‘:’ is there to let your spreadsheet application know that it should be adding all the values in the cells between D2 and D70. You can put this equation at the end of the list or you can put it off to the side. It doesn’t really matter just as long as it works best for you.
You can find a starter template that I created with Google Docs here. Just copy and paste it into your spreadsheet application of choice and it should work (including the equations) just fine. Or you can download the Expense Tracker for Excel here: ExpenseTracker.xls
If you have any questions about this please feel free to ask them or use our contact form. How does anyone else track their expenses? I’d love to hear how you do it. Also, Stephanie over at Poorer Than You is holding a “Know Where the Money Goes” Challenge. You could use this template to know where all that money goes.
I have finally updated my family’s net worth and I am pretty pleased with the results. Since last I checked at the beginning of June my family’s total value has grown by $940 or 3.54%. June was a relatively slow month, bringing in only $341, a 1.28% growth, The big mover definitely was July where I got three paychecks (sweet!) and we saw our net worth increase by $599 (2.23%). I think I was expecting a higher jump because my extra paycheck was for the normal amount ($937 I get paid bi-weekly) and our total value has been growing by $700-$800 on normal months. The reason for the slower than expected growth is a lagging job market, fall-out from the sub-prime fiasco, moving out of our apartment and in with a relative, and vacations. Stupid boxes costing money and bosses not paying my wife while she spends time with her family.
For the visually inclined, here is the always beautiful net worth graph:
In other income related news I saw a nice growth in my alternative income in July. It grew by a massive 309%, bringing my monthly total up to $34.26. I agree, that is not very much, but if I see that same rate of growth (which I probably won’t) I will see revenue jump to $139. Either way, my $34 from July averages out to about $1 a day. This is exactly 1/73 of my additional income goal. Just 98.63% left to go!