Travel lean

Is your wallet hurting your health?

“The best way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it in your back pocket”

– Will Rogers

This is excellent advice. However, my wallet is sitting out in front of me on my desk because my chiropractor told me it’s throwing my back out. Here’s what’s happening: Sitting on my not-so thick wallet is not only twisting my spine but it’s also compressing a large nerve that extends through the buttock and down my left leg. Ouch!

You see, my not-so thick wallet has gotten too thick with membership cards, business cards, healthcare cards, credit cards, debit cards, access cards, and even some cash once a while. I clean it out every week but it’s still too thick.

At the chiropractor, I open my wallet looking for my healthcare membership card and my HSA (Health savings account) debit card to pay my chiropractor to solve the problem. They also need to make a photocopy of each of said cards and my driver’s license – for the third time.

There are quite a few problems with men’s and women’s wallets.

The wallets are designed to hold a lot of stuff, inefficiently, making them thick and bulky. (see some new options below)
For men, we spend too much time sitting on them throwing out our backs and compressing large nerves.
For women, (based on a lifetime of observation in retail checkout lines lines and also being married) Women spend too much time rooting for their wallet through large purses with entirely too much stuff in them. Once the wallets are found in the large purse, the rooting begins again in the large wallet.
This problem increases for both sexes with age. Most young guys and gals tend to travel lighter. Mature adults and professionals of some sort seem to accumulate all kinds of crap in their wallets.
Old men and old ladies are off the charts keeping entire decades of information in their wallets. For a while, my mom had my birth certificate in her wallet, 20 years after I was living on my own.
If you lose said monster wallet, your whole month is pretty much messed up. Credit could be damaged, shit goes wrong. Yep, you forgot about that folded up check you had in there.
Speaking of losing wallets, if you travel frequently you will eventually be pickpocketed if you keep your wallet in your back pocket or in a purse. Best to carry something in your front pocket. In parts of Europe and South America pickpocketing has been elevated to an art.

Waterfront Frugal Living

09/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

A quick guide to living on the water for less.

I visited Baltimore last weekend and went for an early walk through Fell’s Point and Canton. Both neighborhoods are on the water and have a great maritime history. Just a week before, the city celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Star-Spangled Banner, written by Francis Scott Key in 1814 during the British bombardment of Fort McHenry just across Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

The two neighborhoods are part of a vibrant diverse waterfront community thriving with tourism, small businesses, local restaurants, coffee shops, and pubs. I walked along the waterfront promenade towards Canton, checking out one of the largest marinas in the area. The promenade was great for a walk, right on the water with plenty to see, smell and hear.

Well Hello Houseboat [Read more…] about Waterfront Frugal Living

Holiday Escape Plan.

09/14 by The Frug Leave a Comment

Your guide to skipping the insanity this year.

I was driving the other day and I saw a pumpkin patch sign up. It’s freaking Labor Day weekend! I know what that means. Halloween will quickly turn into Thanksgiving and the insanity of the spendy holiday season will begin instantly.

Have you ever thought about escaping the holidays? No last-minute trips to malls, hiding gifts in the trunk, wrapping oversized packages. Completely ignoring the news stories about people getting trampled on Black Friday. There’s really a reason it’s called Black Friday.

Choose Adventure over Stuff

What would happen if you could get the whole family to buy in on your secret holiday escape plan? Choosing adventure over stuff this holiday season. I know this is next to impossible if you have kids under 12 years old, but it’s never too early to start planting the seed. Our kids got a taste of it last year. We had a get together with family and friends in Mexico. We saw whales, visited small villages, took boat rides, sat on the beach.

The holiday escape plan is pretty simple. Instead of the traditional gift giving bonanza of material goods that are soon forgotten, we will put all of that money towards a family adventure. Last year we did a little of both which, looking back on it, is cheating. We also spent a bit too much once we got to Mexico.

I needed complete buy in on the plan this year. Our gifts to each other would be adventure and time with family and friends. To my surprise, I got very little pushback. Our youngest commented “Why wouldn’t we choose that?” Another comment was “I always have a hard time coming up with stuff to ask for anyway.” I’ll let you know how all this turns out after Christmas morning, at least they’ll be waking up at the beach.

Paying for your adventure

Now the hard part starts, but just think how much time you’re saving by skipping all those trips to the store and wrapping presents. The first thing I did was look back over the last couple years at what we spent on Christmas gifts, local travel, and all the other holiday related “stuff”. [Read more…] about Holiday Escape Plan.

The Frug Manifesto

08/14 by The Frug 1 Comment

My name is Brad and I write about Living Lean, Working Lean and Traveling Lean. I recently shared “finding your why by creating a personal manifesto”. In the process I created this manifesto for thefrug.com. I guess you could think of it as a giant tag cloud that includes many of the things I write about. If this looks good to you please join my email list for a lean serving of about 1 post a week.

Thanks.

The Death of Chucklehead DJs and Bad Talk Radio Hosts.

05/14 by The Frug 2 Comments

By Brad Beckstrom

Here’s why you should dump satellite radio and chucklehead talk radio shows and start streaming podcasts.

Podcast-a-palooza

I remember when podcasting first got hot. It was around 2006 and people were discovering podcasts via iTunes, listening on their iPods. Podcasting had another growth spurt when the iPhone came out, soon to be followed by Android phones, and lots of options for listening to podcasts on all types of devices. But by 2011, listening to podcasts started to seem dated and there was less buzz about new podcasts.

At the same time, there were lots of new options like streaming radio apps, tunein and iheartradio as well as video blogs. People were busy looking at their phones instead of listening to them. Podcasts didn’t go away, but they stopped growing.

The Resurgence

About a year ago, things started to change. [Read more…] about The Death of Chucklehead DJs and Bad Talk Radio Hosts.

Find Your Treehouse. My one year experiment using Airbnb.

04/14 by The Frug 2 Comments

Find Your Treehouse

When I was in third grade, my dad helped me build a treehouse. I should say, I helped him. It was a great treehouse, larger than most with a solid deck, walls, and a gable roof. It was built in a huge tree that could easily support its weight. We had windows with large screens and even ran power via a long extension cord. I could run a fan, a radio, and even a small tv.

My stock value went way up for coolness of sleepovers among my friends. I miss that treehouse. It was a great place. For me, it was my “other” place. There was home, school, and the treehouse.

I think Airbnb, the travel app juggernaut, had people like me in mind when they started featuring photos of all kinds of lodging alternatives including: Yurts, Houseboats, Airstream Trailers, exotic treehouses and even old trains. It’s now the most popular page on their website. You can find it on their website homepage just by clicking “popular.”

I mean, who wouldn’t want to sleep on a boat or on a train or in a rainforest treehouse. These are the type of places where people can really get a good night’s sleep. And you get to skip buying the boat or vacation house part. Oddly enough, I started experimenting with Airbnb a few years back for business travel, not personal. I was headed to New York and sick and tired of business hotels that charge over $300 a night with nothing much more than free WiFi. And don’t forget about the 15-23% lodging and misc. taxes most cities add on. I found something much better on Airbnb for $130 a night in the East Village.

One of my best finds was a one-bedroom apartment in the center of the old city in Barcelona for $70 a night. Yes, you read that correctly — $70 per night. Prime location with balconies that opened out to one of the nicest parts of the city. It had WiFi, full kitchen and a living room. In a pre-war building with 15 ft high doors. A comparable room in a hotel would be close to $300 a night. [Read more…] about Find Your Treehouse. My one year experiment using Airbnb.