Posted by Dave on September 28, 2010
When do you replace something? My wife and I have discussed this quite a bit lately, with our decision over the last couple of months to get a new car, we’ve set a repair maximum of approximately $1,000, over which we’ll probably just replace the car. With a car, there’s a market for even semi-broken vehicles – they can be sold “as-is”, generally at a steep discount, but there are buyers out there for them, with published book values available to buyers and sellers. With my car only being worth $2,000-$3,000 in its current condition, it really doesn’t make sense to spend half of the vehicle’s worth to maybe make the money back, if the car is at least salable. In the past couple of weeks though, similar situations have come up with smaller items which have required repairs.
Earlier this week, it cost me $15 to buy a new watch band for my Timex digital watch. I had to call directly to Timex to order it, because a replacement band was not available at retail stores. The $15 I paid for a new band would have been about half the amount I would spend on a new watch to replace the five-year old watch. It doesn’t really make sense to replace the band, given the cost of a replacement, but if I didn’t replace it, there’s really nothing to do with the watch at all, other than to throw it out (or alternatively let it sit somewhere until the battery dies in a couple of years not getting any use).
In the same vein, the set of hair clippers that I’ve owned for several years has a missing guard, something that happened during my move last year. A new set of hair clippers is reasonably cheap (less than $30), but much like my watch, there would be a perfectly good product that would most likely go to a landfill because I’m not sure anyone would want a used set of hair clippers. Ideally, I wouldn’t have lost the part, but a replacement part can be purchased for $10.
There are a myriad of products out there that are essentially disposable due to replacement parts being just as expensive to buy as the product itself (think printer cartridges). What these products create is a lot of waste, as most people, including myself would rather pay a few extra dollars to get something new than keep the old product, which has a higher probability of breaking. Over the last couple of years I have tried to reduce my waste as much as possible. I realize that a set of hair clippers and a watch really wouldn’t have that much of an impact on our landfills, but if applied across everything I owned, there would be a lot less waste created.
I’m just not sure where to draw the line – right now, the items that I’m “saving” are things that I use regularly and are easily (and cheaply) fixed; the car decision comes due to my recent decision to replace our car in the spring of next year, as well as the fact it can be sold.
How do you decide what to throw out and what to keep? Have you been burned by fixing something that broke again shortly after?
Posted by Dave on August 24, 2010
I picked up 272 pounds of beef from a farm on Saturday, which cost me $1,088 ($4 per pound). I recently purchased a freezer (9 cubic feet) to put the meat in. Which if used only for this load of meat would increase the cost per pound marginally, but it will get additional use over the years that I own it, reducing the cost of purchasing it. Other than the freezer, I have basically pre-purchased most of a year’s worth of meat for my wife and I. We will still probably buy chicken and pork (mostly bacon), but not significant portions of it. There are a few reasons why I decided to buy my meat straight from the farm rather than going through the grocery store:
- It was cheaper: My wife and I have significantly increased our meat consumption over the past few months, as I discussed in a previous post around paleo/primal eating. Eating this way was having a very positive impact on our health, but was significantly more expensive than eating beans and rice a few days a week. The $4 per pound its cost is less than the majority of cuts of meat we were able to find at the store, even when it was on sale.
- I know where my food comes from: I visited the farm where my meat came from and seen the herd that my animal was coming from. When we went and picked up our frozen meat, we were given a tour of the farm. We walked the pasture that the animals were grazing in, discussed with the farmer his philosophy on the business he was in and saw the condition that my food grew in. Couple this experience to what I had been eating – that meat had probably grown up in something like this, which requires significant antibiotics. Likely because of overcrowding and unsanitary conditions and also because the grains that the cattle are being fed make the animals sick. Instead my beef had never been given drugs – it grew up on a pasture with plenty of room.
- My beef is “green”: Part of the problem with conventional farming is that it requires significant resources to produce a pound of meat. It takes a lot of energy to create the grains that are fed to livestock. The growing of the grains have a significant impact on the environment from tilling of the land, as well as the inputs such as seed, fertilizer, and pesticides. At some point in the future this is going to become a significant problem, which is discussed in two books I’ve read “The Vegetarian Myth” and “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization”. Instead I bought grass-fed and grass finished-meat. The grass just keeps growing with little inputs. When talking to the farmer while walking through his field, he noted that the land we were walking on was essentially bare 2 years ago when he started farming. Currently, it is an incredibly lush pasture that supports his herd of cattle – this farmer is actually helping the land rather than removing needed topsoil.
- It is Healthier : Grass-fed beef has been found to have a higher quantity of conjugated lineolic acid, which is thought to have anti-cancer properties.
These were the main reasons why I bought the beef from where I did. As a side-note, if you were to purchase the same amount of meat from a farmer who raised their animals in a grain-fed feedlot, you could save approximately 50% over what I spent. So, although the beef I bought was significantly cheaper than what can be found at the grocery store, it is possible to find cheaper meat straight from the farm. I chose to pay a premium for grass-fed beef because of the reasons noted above.
Do you buy your meat in bulk? Do you take an interest in where your food comes from? Do you pay a premium for organic or other specialized food?
Posted by Dave on June 22, 2010
I had an interesting discussion with my brother about diapers on the golf course yesterday that lead to a more heated discussion between my spouse and I because she thought I was being unreasonable in my expectations of ‘other people.’ This happens fairly frequently as I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t look at things like I do. 
I had asked my brother what kind of diaper he was going to use with his new baby on the way. He didn’t even think and answered disposables.
I questioned why he made this decision, to which I received the answer “because it’s easier”.
I asked him if he had looked into the cost of cloth diapers vs. disposables or any sort of analysis beyond the simplicity factor, to which I received a negative response.
At this point, because we were at a golf course on father’s day I left the point alone – until the car ride home when I went over the conversation with my wife and noted (even though we don’t plan on having children) I couldn’t see any reason beyond the pain of cleaning the diapers to buy plastic that had to be thrown out after 1 use vs. cloth that would last for a significant period of time. I was told that most parents don’t think like that, they don’t want to deal with the messiness and inconvenience of cleaning diapers when there is a simple alternative available. These are arguments that I really dislike – I’m as lazy as the next person but like to look at the big picture on subjects like this. My arguments for diapers can be applied over many consumer products in use today, such as ziploc bags vs. reusable containers; paper towels vs. rags etc.
Tim had previously discussed his switch from cloth to disposable diapers here – rather than look at it from a quality of life stance, I’m going to look at the impact of using something disposable (in this case a diaper) to something re-usable (cloths). Most of the information I got came from here, which admittedly is a pro-cloth diaper site, however I don’t think the pro-disposable diaper conglomerate has much in the way of an argument given the following:
- Over 92% of all single-use diapers end up in the landfill.
- It’s estimated that a disposable diaper would take 250-500 years to decompose.
- Disposable diapers are the third largest consumer item in landfills, and represent approximately 4% of solid waste.
- Disposable diapers contain traces of dioxin as a by-product of the paper bleaching process, along with several other nasty toxic pollutants, which besides probably not being good for a baby’s skin is definitely not good for the land and soil during the 250-500 years this product takes to decompose.
So, rather than having to deal with some baby messes most people buy something that will have to be dealt with for maybe the next FIVE CENTURIES? Does this make sense? I’m not really sure why there’s even a product like this out there – I would have to say that in this circumstance the environmental impact isn’t being looked at, rather most people are looking at the easier choice right now, rather than the total impact that the purchase will have in the future (hundreds of years down the road).
From what I have read cost of cloth to disposable varies, but let’s say they are approximately the same on average. At the end of 2 years, approximately 6,000 diapers have been put into a landfill if you’ve been using disposable diapers. While if you had chosen cloth, you’d have some tattered rags that could be used around the house, or alternatively (because it’s made of a decomposable material) will disappear (in optimal conditions in about 2 weeks).
As a culture we have created products whose main purpose is to be thrown out in order to make things more simple for us. From a personal finance perspective longer-lasting reusable purchases tend to have a lot of up-front costs that make them undesirable to many people. What is created by the easy choice is a lot of garbage. I’m sure more trash has been created in the last 100 years than there ever has been in the past due to the invention of plastic. From an environmental perspective these products are a nightmare, but most people are not looking at the big picture.
For myself, I attempt to purchase as little as possible and when I do I tend to buy longer-lasting durable products rather than disposable goods. I will freely admit that I do own disposable products (ziploc bags, paper towels etc.) but try to limit my use of them.
I’m wondering:
- Do you think about the purchasing decisions you make beyond the initial outlay?
- If you have your child in disposable diapers did you ever think about cloth? If you chose disposable diapers, how did you come to this conclusion?
