Archive for April, 2010

Video Update: First Ever Edition (Who Let This Guy On Camera?)

Posted By damien on April 14th, 2010

Broken Video Tape

Today is an exciting day, here is the first ever BSI Video Update.  I’m testing out some new things on this blog, and want your opinions.

Here’s what’s in today’s video

  • [00:20] Why am I making this video?
  • [01:18] What is a bite size idea?
  • [02:15] Why do I write?
  • [02:55] What can you expect from BSI?
  • [03:35] Two ways that I need your help!
  • [04:28] Why do I look so bad on camera?

A few of the people I mention in the video

I need your help!

What did you think about the video?  What do you want to see more of?  Any ideas for a good logo?

Posted in Minimalism
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DMM: Cheap High-End Clothes, Deodorant Delivery, and Money Mind Games

Posted By damien on April 12th, 2010

Anchors in the sand

Welcome to Digital Manna Monday.  Here I share links to some of my favorite online happenings from the past week.  They could be news articles, blog posts or cool new services.

Whatever they may be, they’re all digital manna: online gifts of illumination and enlightenment.

1) Gilt

Gilt is an online retailer of high-end clothing. From their website:

Gilt Groupe provides access, by invitation only, to Men’s, Women’s and Children’s coveted fashion and luxury brands at prices up to 70% off retail. Each sale lasts 36 hours and features hand selected styles from a single designer.

Did you catch the part about it being invite-only?  I was lucky enough to be invited in several months ago and here I am sharing invitations with you.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have never (yet) bought anything from Gilt; I can’t justify spending over $100 on a shirt.  But don’t let me stop you from spending copious amounts on clothing!  Take my invitation and have a look around.

2) Alice.com

Alice.com is really cool.  It’s an online seller of “home essentials”, offering free shipping and, if you so desire, scheduled shipments. From their website:

Alice provides you a better way to manage all of your household essentials online. You tell Alice what you buy—choosing from great deals on 1000’s of products—and Alice goes to work. We organize all of your products, find coupons and deals for you, remind you when you might be running low, and help you order just the items you need so you can avoid that trip to the corner drugstore or the big-box store. And all this convenience comes direct to your door with free shipping included.

My wife and I love this service.  You can browse by room, price, or discount.  Shipping is fast (at least it was for us).  Heck, if you can buy books, music, and cars online, why not toilet paper and deodorant too?  After setting up your cart and scheduling shipments, Alice.com will save you trips to the grocery store.  Here’s an invitation to join.

Two Awesome Articles on Price Anchoring

I absolutely love articles about money and psychology.  Personal finance is more about emotions than just numbers. So this week I was really digging two articles that came out about price anchoring.

Briefly, price anchoring is the mental assigning of values we give to products.  Marketers are only too happy to set the anchor for us, and then tell us how much of a “deal” we’re getting.

MSRP (Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price) is an example of setting a price anchor.  After setting the anchor, the retailer then sets the actual price lower, making us think we’re getting a great deal.

3) What to Do When People Just Aren’t Buying Your Product

The first article, from Erica Douglass at erica.biz, talks about price anchoring from the seller’s perspective.  She offers some tips for struggling marketers on how to set the anchor.  Very informative post with good examples.

4) Price Anchoring, Or Why a $499 iPad Seems Inexpensive

The second article, from Mint.com (a financial service I highly recommend), starts with an example of how Steve Jobs used price anchoring to make the iPad launch one of the most successful ever in the consumer electronics industry.

This was one of those articles where I hit myself on the forehead and said, “Dang! I wish I had written that!” It concludes by showing how price anchoring leads us to buy junk we don’t need, and how to combat it.

That’s it for this week.  Have any great links you would like me to share next time?  Shoot me an email at damien[at]bitesizeidea[dot]com

Posted in Business, Technology
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Accumulation Traps: Free Stuff and the Great Deal

Posted By damien on April 9th, 2010

Free Kittens

Today’s guest post comes from “Brandon Zeller, who graduated from Brigham Young University in 2008 with a philosophy degree.  He currently studies at Harvard Law School.  He enjoys soccer, formal logic, and most varieties of cheese.

What makes us get so much stuff that we don’t need?  This post (and the next) describes a few traps that lead to clutter and why those traps are hard to avoid.

Free Junk!

One trap that leads to having more stuff than you want or need is the “Free Stuff” phenomenon.  Chances are you own a lot of things because the acquisition cost was so low.  It almost doesn’t matter what it is.  If you can get something for nothing, you want it.  I know that I have a lot more T-shirts than I actually wear.  My wife and I have two TVs in our 1-bedroom apartment because we found one for free.

Perhaps the most common and most dangerous example of the “free stuff” phenomenon is free food.  There is a lot of free food out there—and it’s almost always unhealthy and more than you should be eating.

Why You Fall For It

It’s tough not to fall into this trap because the normal ways we talk ourselves out of getting stuff aren’t available here.  You can’t tell yourself that you just can’t afford it, because, hey, it’s free!

Even defenses like “where would I keep it?” and “what would I do with it?” aren’t as effective when you’re trying to keep yourself from getting free stuff.  After all, it’s not as painful to throw away free stuff if there doesn’t turn out to be anywhere to put it or anything to do with it.

Check out This Deal!

There’s a second trap that is a subset of the “free stuff” phenomenon.  This is “Check out this deal!” syndrome, in which you’ll buy something you don’t need because you can get a great discount on the purchase.

When I was in college, a local grocery store ran a sale on cereal:  eight boxes for eight dollars.   Being a college student, I was powerless to resist cheap cereal.  I not only bought eight boxes for myself, I bought eight more for my roommates.

The trouble was that they also saw the sale and went for it.  Soon, our kitchen was stuffed to the rafters with thirty-two boxes of cereal.  Within a month we were begging people to take them from us.

(Note from Damien: I was one of Brandon’s roommates; we were buried alive under cereal boxes.)

Why You Fall For It

The tough thing about this trap is that it’s a natural outgrowth of being a smart consumer.  If you consistently think about your purchases and do research before buying things, you know a good deal when you see one.  Often, it becomes hard to think “this is a great deal!” without also thinking “I should buy this!”

So, there you have it, two accumulation traps we are prone to fall for.  Free stuff is hard to avoid because hey, it’s free.  Great deals are tempting because they make us think we’re savvy shoppers.  Stay tuned next time when we look at more accumulation traps.

Do you fall for these accumulation traps?  How do you overcome them?

Posted in Minimalism
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The Simplest, Smartest Personal Finance Set-up

Posted By damien on April 7th, 2010

Simple Investing

I love personal finance because it is such a taboo subject.  Everyone knows they should be spending more intelligently and saving for retirement, but hates confronting these facts and taking control.   I want to remove the fear and help others become financially secure, so they can focus on living life.

Today I want to present a brief overview of the simplest, smartest personal finance set-up.  Sort of a minimalist’s guide to financial accounts.  Here I’ll condense months of research to give you the best checking, savings and investing accounts for automated, simple, secure finances.

Remember, this is just a brief overview, if this post becomes popular enough, I’ll take the time to go more in-depth into each account.

1) High-Yield Checking Account

The foundation of all your financial accounts should be a high-yield checking account.  Interest rates are pretty low right now, but I suggest checking out your local credit union.  Some of the credit unions around here are still offering 3% on balances up to $25,000.  Pretty good for the current state of our economy.

There will be some conditions for getting the high-yield rate, but I’m sure you are already doing most of them.  Our credit union requires 10 debit card purchases a month, electronic statements, and one electronic transfer (like from a paycheck) per month.  Set up your paycheck as a direct deposit and do away with paper checks.

2) High-Yield Savings Account

Where do you keep your savings? Under your mattress? Get over your conspiracy theories and put it in a high-yield savings account backed by the FDIC.  Just like high-yield checking accounts, the rates are low right now, but as the economy improves, so will interest rates.

Online savings accounts, such as ING’s, Ally’s and Everbank’s are all the rage right now.  Put your 3-6 month emergency fund in your savings account and set up monthly transfers from your checking account.

3) Retirement Accounts

Are you saving for retirement? If not, plan on flipping burgers into your 80’s.  Everyone should have a 401(k) or equivalent with their employer and an Individual Retirement Account (IRA).

This is a broad generalization, but I suggest saving about 15% of your gross income for retirement.  Make monthly contributions on the 401(k) up to your employer’s match, then max out the IRA with monthly contributions, then, if there’s any money left over, put the rest back into the 401(k).  For more information on investing for retirement, check out my free Minimalist Guide to Investing.

Hungry for More?

This post has only been the briefest of introductions to setting up your financial accounts to function simply and automatically.  If you would like me to go into more detail about each step, let me know in the comments or by twitter, email or my contact form.

Posted in Building Wealth, Dumping Debt
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DMM: World Domination, Productivity Tips, and More

Posted By damien on April 5th, 2010

Digital Manna from Heaven

Welcome to Digital Manna Monday.  Here I share links to some of my favorite online happenings from the past week.  They could be news articles, blog posts or cool new services.

Whatever they may be, they’re all digital manna: online gifts of illumination and enlightenment.

1) A Brief Guide to World Domination

Chris Guillebeau is one of those bloggers I admire for his amazing writing, worthwhile products and anti-sleazeball approach to selling.  He has an awesome story to tell; his plan is to visit every country in the world while still in his 30s and he’s already been to well over 100.

His mind-expanding Brief Guide to World Domination is a kick-in-the-butt motivator to go out and do something with your life.  The best part is that it’s free!  Check it out, and while you’re there, subscribe to his blog.

2) Productive! Magazine

The name is self-explanatory.  Productive! Magazine is an online publication featuring interviews with productivity gurus and articles on getting things done.  The latest issue, volume four, features an interview with Leo Babauta, blogger extraordinaire of ZenHabits.org and leader of the minimalist/simple living movement.  Did I mention that the pdf version is free?!  Check it out.

3) HootSuite

This is my new favorite app for managing my social media accounts.  From this one place I can track twitter, facebook, and LinkedIn.  I used to use Tweetdeck, but three features made me switch to HootSuite.

First, and this is a big one, with HootSuite I can schedule tweets and facebook updates to be posted in the future.  Second, HootSuite displays twitter conversations as threads.  This means that when someone replies to me, my original message is displayed below, so I can quickly resume the conversation. Third, Hootsuite has built-in statistics.  I used to use bit.ly for url shortening and click tracking, but HootSuite has built in ow.ly shortening and tracking.

4) Why You Really Need a Logo

Mars is an up-and-coming blogger who writes about brand creation at MarsDorian.com.  He was kind enough to write this post about logo brainstorming and creation after I mentioned that mine sucked and needed lots of help.  His post explains why you need a logo and several tips for creating one that’s appealing and slick.  While you’re there, check out his logo, he knows what he’s talking about.

That’s it for this week.  Have any great links you would like me to share next time?  Shoot me an email at damien[at]bitesizeidea[dot]com

Posted in Selp Improvement, Technology
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Compulsive Hoarding. Or, How Your Stuff Can Kill You

Posted By damien on April 2nd, 2010
Cluttered kitchen

image courtesy of Hassan & Mariko

As an aspiring minimalist, I wanted to understand the other end of the spectrum.  What is life like for people who are addicted to stuff?  How is their quality of life?  Turns out it’s not a pretty picture.

Compulsive hoarding is a registered mental disorder, characterized by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things.  No matter if the items are worthless, dangerous or unsanitary, compulsive hoarders need stuff.  Over 3 million people are categorized as hoarders.

This is heavy stuff.  Hoarders may rationalize their behavior by calling it collecting, but once their “collecting” interferes with their health or relationships, it becomes a problem.

Buried Alive

A&E has a TV show called Hoarders which documents the stories of people suffering from compulsive hoarding.  I decided to check it out.

The episode I saw featured two hoarders: Bob and Dick.

Bob—The Slow Accumulator

Bob is the father in a family of six.  He couldn’t pinpoint an exact cause for his hoarding, but that things in their home just built up over time.

Their home became so full of clutter that bedbugs moved in and infested the place.  To escape the infestation, the family moved into a tent in the front yard!  They camped out all summer and fall, but with winter and freezing weather approaching, aren’t sure what to do next.

Dick—The “Collector”

Dick is a 71 year-old retired veterinarian.  He has sunk over $500,000 into his “collections”, including over 50,000 rare beer cans.  Dick has cut pathways through the junk in his house just to get from room to room.

On the verge of bankruptcy, he needs to sell some of his possessions in order to survive.  Unfortunately, being a compulsive hoarder, Dick is too emotionally attached to his stuff to let go of it.

Observations from a Psychologist

The show features clinical psychologists specializing in compulsive hoarding who attempt to help the subjects confront their addictions.  Bob’s psychologist observed that his mother lived through the Depression and tried to teach him the value of saving things for future use.  The psychologist tells Bob that he is neglecting his family’s present needs for some theoretical future need; some need that may or may not ever come about.

In Dick’s (the collector) case, the psychologist drew the distinction between collectors and hoarders: a collector is someone able to manage their things.  A hoarder’s things take over their homes and lives.

Observations from a Minimalist

Here are a few points I gathered from watching the show:

  • Enough is never enough for hoarders.  It’s not about the things they acquire; it’s about constantly acquiring new things.
  • The things they own, own them.  Hoarders are not free to leave their things; they are prisoners in their own homes.

Heavy stuff, I know.  But it’s good to be reminded of the other end of the spectrum.  How do you fight the desire to constantly acquire new things?  Do you know any hoarders?

Posted in Minimalism
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