As a counterpoint to outrageously expensive meals, how about some stupid, unethical, and somewhat scary stories about how I ate on the cheap while in school? Note that I don’t do any of these anymore. (Unless left alone for more than a month, then I regress…)

1. Bringing Ziploc Bags the Dorm Dining Hall. You know you’re not supposed to, but when you’ve just spent all your money on a fancy date, you bend the rules. Our dining hall was pretty much a buffet and I would make entire sandwiches and put them in ziploc bags for later. Cost of lunch: 6 cents for the bag.

2. Crash Random Student Association Meetings. “Why yes, I would like to join the Society of Hypercompetitive Brainwashed Kids (Pre-Med Society)! I too studied for 54 hours straight for that O-Chem midterm. Ummm… the flyer mentioned free pizza?”
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While in Paris, my friends and I decided to have a “nice French meal”. While you don’t have to necessarily spend big bucks to have such a meal, we were not French, not locals, and therefore we simply dressed up and stumbled into a nearby restaurant recommended by our concierge… and proceeded to have one of the most expensive meals I’ve ever had.

My previous record was at a restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area called Chez Panisse. It’s won countless awards as one of the top restaurants in the country and is famous for its fresh and inventive California/French cuisine. While I’ve since dined at both the restaurant downstairs and the cafe upstairs, the prix fixe restaurant was my first and pricier experience.
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Really no other way to put it 🙂 Eating out in London is atrocious. After a while a £10 meal starts to look like a great deal, when in reality it cost you $19. A one-way subway ride in London starts at £3 ($5.60), and day-passes start at $11. I extended my trip even longer and went to Paris for a few days. I reasoned that the hotels and food were cheaper, so I could cover the train ride 😉 A one-way Paris subway ticket is less than $2 no matter how far you travel.

Did you know that the price of baguettes are actually controlled by the government in France? Less than 1 Euro for the best bread you’ll ever have. Stop by a charcuterie and a fromagerie for some deli-style meat and stinky oozy cheese by the kilo, and you’ve got yourself a righteous picnic on the cheap. Wine is literally cheaper than bottled water there as well, starting at about ?1 a bottle!
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Here are two different viewpoints on ‘The best time to buy everything’, one from SmartMoney and the other from CNN Money. Some excerpts are below, see the articles for more.

Airline tickets
SmartMoney and CNN agree: Buy on a Wednesday, about 21 days (or just a couple of days earlier) before your flight. This is when airlines release their available seats for the upcoming weekend and the weekend after.

Televisions
SmartMoney: Six to 12 months after a particular model is launched.
CNN: While the blowout sales on electronics tend to cluster around the holidays, even cheaper deals on TVs can be found in the spring beginning in April, after the end of the fiscal year in Japan.
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So while in London, I’m going to visit a friend in Southern England, and I’m going to get back into London late that night for an early flight back to the States. So basically I was looking at paying $100 for a hotel so I could sleep for 6 hours between the train ride and my flight. Although I’ll have a decent amount of luggage… I was thinking… maybe I could just go straight and sleep in the airport? Would that be impossible? stupid? Of course, I run off and google “sleeping in airports”…

…And find SleepingInAirports.net! Complete reviews of every major airport in the world. Marvelous. Checking out the London Gatwick Airport page, comments range from the promising “I was able to stretch out on the padded, armless seats” and “the soft backed chairs in one of the closed cafes could be placed together to make a nice bed” to the more forboding “GOT ROBBED OF MY MONEY PASSPORT PHONE CAMERA TRAIN TICKET ETC.” and the hilarious (well, not for him) “a small child wiped her Big Mac on my face”. Maybe I need to pay Priceline another visit…

Everyone’s heard of Priceline.com and Hotwire.com. In exchange for a great deal on airfare or travel, you give up some flexibility and information. That is, you don’t get to find out which airline or hotel you’re using until you’ve committed your money.

This lack of information spawned sites like BetterBidding.com and BiddingForTravel.com provide. Inside the forums, people share their bids, if they won, and what they won. There are also a few useful tips that novice users may not be aware of, like how to get “free” rebids. For example, maybe you bid $50 for a hotel room and got rejected. With the right information, you can try rebid again at $55 or $60 without having to change your original search parameters. Using this combo of history and multiple bids, you can avoid overbidding and get the best price possible.
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Time to cross another ocean! I’m going to London for a conference next week. My flight and most of my hotel stay is all paid for, but I’m going to try and tack on a few days for personal leisure. (That’s my cheap travel tip – take advantage of business trips!). I’ve already been there about 5 years ago as a backpacker, so I’ve hit most of the touristy spots.

Similar to my San Francisco itinerary, eating the food is right up there with seeing the sights. My usual thing is to go for small hole-in-the-wall food stalls, simple food like pub grub, and also fancy restaurants that do a nice prix fixe lunch for less than $25. For activites, I like to try off-the-beaten path stuff. I know London is like New York City and even more expensive, but if anyone has been recently and has suggestions please leave a comment!
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On the path to financial freedom, it’s easy to get bored and unmotivated. The thing about goals like an early retirement is that they can feel just too distant. I mean, there are always those articles about how you can still retire even though you’re 50 and broke, right? Why worry now?

When I get that way, I actually try to channel my inner greed. Let’s take a new cell phone that costs $100. In order to justify buying it, I’ll need to somehow generate at least $200 of “new” money – either by making more of it or saving more than last month. That way, I’ll still have $100 to put towards my net worth, but I use my toy fixation to drive me.

My only problem? Recently, I can’t find anything I want that badly. Computer? Nah. Digital Camera? Cell Phone? Clothes? DVDs? Video Games? Nope. What’s wrong with me?

It’s peak wedding season again. Since I got married earlier than all of my friends, I have become somewhat of a resource on weddings and such. It took me a while to formulate my opinion on this, but this is basically what I tell people now:

First, let’s get some things out of the way. Yes, diamonds are essentially very organized carbon atoms. Nobody can tell it apart from a lab-created one or even cubic zirconia. It’s a horrible financial investment. De Beers has a virtual monopoly on the diamond trade, and does it’s best to create a false scarcity of diamonds. Those “Diamonds are Forever” commercials are some of the best marketing I’ve ever seen.
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