The original title of this post was Random Thoughts for February 2011 but I held off uploading it until it turned into March. Talk about procrastination… I haven’t posted anything in almost a week so I thought now would be a good time.
While I was doing laundry a couple of weeks back and left my clothes in the dryer, someone added their clothes to mine (it’s a community laundry room shared by the condo residents). When I went to pick up my clothes and after sorting them out at home, I saw a pair of girl’s jeans and a blouse. In the meantime I was missing a few items of mine. I went back to the laundry room downstairs and found the rest of my missing clothes on the table except for one sock. I left the blouse and jeans there since I had no intention of being a cross dresser. Maybe next time I’ll put a sign on my clothes saying that the owner of these has a very communicable disease.
Gone are the days when I could eat anything (fried foods, ice cream, fast foods, etc.) at any quantity I wanted without worrying about gaining weight or increasing my cholesterol level. It’s not about running off the calories any more although that helps a lot with weight maintenance. I found out in the past decade that running doesn’t necessarily enable you to control your cholesterol level if you don’t follow a proper diet. Somehow when you are younger, cholesterol doesn’t stick as well to your arteries regardless of what you eat, but that stops working as you age.
More thoughts on frugality: why buy soda and snacks from overpriced vending machines when you can buy the same products for much lesser at the grocery store especially when they are on sale? For example our vending machine at work sells cup of noodles for $1.25 each, but when they are on sale they can go for as low as 4 to 6 for a dollar. A can of soda may sell for a 75 cents but you can buy a 12 pack for 2 dollars when on sale. Another thing is the ice cream truck that roams the neighborhood that sell overpriced products you can buy for a fraction of their cost at grocery stores. Most the people who buy from these ice cream trucks are the least who can afford them.
When the recession struck, I moved most of my investments to fixed income funds. I still have about 5% left in a balanced fund which because of the stock market comeback, is now earning more than all of the fixed income funds combined. Is it time to move more of the money to riskier investments? Hard to say at this time because the stock market has been having wide swings the past couple of weeks.
With the internet, a lot of people learn information about what to do and how to lose weight, or how to exercise, etc. This used to be the domain of fitness trainers who either learned about them via formal schooling or getting certified through various organizations by attending seminars or classes and being tested afterwards. With all the information available nowadays, you would think that the percentage of obese people would have gone down because I’m guessing that a lot of them would like to lose weight. Overweight people talk about those goals all the time but as far as applying the info they get from the internet, that is another matter. Sorry if that sounded too preachy.
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