sacha chua living an awesome life

How can you bring together different ideas in order to innovate? Red Thread Thinking (2013) shares guidelines for coming up with new ideas and recombining old concepts for profitable innovation, with plenty of stories of real-life products and services. It also includes some chapters on how to package the innovation for greater appeal (including simplicity, engagement, and design thinking), and how to train your brain and your intuition in order to make better decisions. Whether you’re an idea person in a big company or a solo entrepreneur in a microbusiness, you’ll probably find good questions and examples to jog your creative thinking. If you’re tired of brainstorming sessions going nowhere or resulting in small, incremental improvements, try out what this book says about relaxing and generating ideas on your own before bringing them to a small group for expansion and refinement. (That said, incremental improvements can also be a good thing!)

After reading this book, I plan to experiment with the obscure feature method and the generic parts method. They might be great ways to sharpen my observational skills and see opportunities for everyday creativity.

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Amazon affiliate link: I earn a tiny fraction if you buy something from Amazon’s site after clicking on the link, even if it has nothing to do with the book. =)

If you have a library near you, you can check it out there too. (I totally love the Toronto Public Library.)

Come to think of it, I used to worry more about ways to keep in touch. I customized my address book so that it would keep track of the last time I e-mailed or met someone and so that I could see whom I hadn’t contacted in a while. Some people are easy to connect with because you interact with them frequently or bump into them a lot online, but there are lots of other interesting people who don’t – and so you’d need to reach out to them in order to find out what’s going on.

After I stopped being able to use Emacs for my mail, I tried out different personal contact relationship management systems like Contactually and Nimble to see if I could have that kind of contact tracking there. It was pretty interesting, and sometimes I used the prompts to focus on one or two people I hadn’t heard from in ages. I checked their Facebook page or Twitter to see what they’ve been up to and looked for excuses to help them or reach out to them. Sometimes that led to interesting conversations.

I often deleted the reminders, though, and I decided it wasn’t worth paying something like $20/month for that kind of a reminder service. I’m becoming more comfortable with the way people flow into and out of one’s life. There are some old friends I get to talk to once in a while, which is wonderful, but I’m in no rush to develop old acquaintances into friendships.

There are lots of awesome people out there, so I can go with the flow – to respond to people, and to reach out when something prompts me. I’ve gotten pretty good at being open and comfortable with people. I remember what it’s like to be around close friends, and I get as close as I can to that as I can even with new groups. I don’t have the same kind of everyday camaraderie I had in my old circles of friends, but that makes sense in this part of my life. (Although Hacklab feels like an instant barkada too, with the way they’re friends with each other. ^_^ Hmm…)

So instead of worrying about keeping in touch, I keep part of my budget for coffee, lunches, dinners, tea parties, and stamps, spend time with friends in leisurely conversation or shared activities, and read people’s blogs and Facebook updates. I’m a little sad that it means my circles tend to be tilted towards people who are active on the Internet or who are in the same city as I am, and I know there are wonderful people whom I’m missing. But life moves in mysterious ways, so let’s see!

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Another mild panic attack in fitness class yesterday, jolts of worry and tears that I wiped away as sweat. I knew it was just my lizard brain in overdrive. I couldn’t stop it by reasoning it away as irrational. All I could do was breathe and keep on going, dampening my emotions by spacing out while going through the motions of the exercise. W- checked on me frequently, cheering me up from time to time, and I finished the class.

It’s not so bad, actually. It would be better to not have to deal with panic at all, but since it happens, it’s better that I know what it’s like in a safe(ish) controlled environment and I can start figuring out what to do about it. Part of the reason that I’m susceptible to panic attacks is probably because I’m using willpower instead of motivation to get through the fitness class, and that can get quickly sapped in a stressful environment with negative self-talk. I don’t intrinsically enjoy this form of exercise, although I like spending time with W-. Also, It turns out that I’m pretty good at imagining how something will hurt, like the time I freaked out over a leapfrogging exercise a month after I’d sprained my ankle, and that sends me into a whirl even as I’m reassuring myself that pain is both unlikely and temporary. The good thing is that I seem to get panic attacks only in fitness class these days, and not all the time either.

What would better look like? I’m good at knowing I’m having an unreasonable panic attack. Wouldn’t be interesting if I could label it and put it on a shelf for the time being, procrastinating the analysis for a quieter and more composed time? I’m good at plodding through the class anyway, even though I’m embarrassed at the thought of quietly sniffling in class. If I can let go of that embarrassment, I can use that energy for other things. I don’t get panic attacks all the time. I can get better at understanding the contributing and mitigating factors, and tweaking things to fit me (a mental soundtrack? a mantra or prepared objections to drown out negative self-talk?). Eventually finding another kind of exercise that suits me better will help in the long run so that I can build confidence along with strength, but I still have to hack stressful situations.

This, too, is part of life, and I can embrace it and make it mine.

When I was growing up, I raided my mom’s bookshelves for whatever I could understand—and quite a few things that I didn’t at first, but which yielded under repeated reading. In one of her personal finance books, I came across an anecdote about someone who bought stocks of the companies of which he was a frequent customer. When my mom decided it was time for us to learn a little about investing and offered us a choice of several Philippine stocks, I used the same reason to pick Jollibee. Although I didn’t eat at Jollibee that often, I knew lots of people did, so I figured that it would work out the same. I haven’t been tracking Philippine stocks since then, but apparently Jollibee has been doing pretty well.

When I moved to Canada for my master’s degree, I was fortunate to have a combination of research assistantships and scholarships. I never spent more than I had – another lesson drilled into me by my mom. Living frugally helped me graduate without student debt. By that time, I’d grown to love W-, which made it easier to accept IBM’s job offer and go through the permanent residency process here in Canada.

Once I started earning money here, I wanted to apply the best practices from the personal finance books I’d been reading all this time. I set aside a portion of my income for long-term investments. After lots of research, I settled on TD e-funds as an inexpensive way to get started with index funds. I didn’t know enough about individual companies to feel comfortable buying stocks, and books and blogs said it was really hard to beat the market anyway. Index funds were a less intimidating way to get started. Small steps – a tiny investment here to see whether I’d set things up correctly, then more as I became more comfortable with the idea.

I figured that if I hold the funds for decades and get average performance, that’s still all right. If the funds lose value, well, that’s life, and I wouldn’t be any worse off than if I hadn’t been saving. I joined the workplace and started investing just as the financial crisis broke, so it was a little tough buying while people were losing so much, but it turned out all right.

Canada has a Registered Retirement Savings Plan program (RRSP) where you can shelter some of your investments and savings on a tax-deferred basis, so I put in as much as I could. When the Tax-Free Savings Account program started, I moved my emergency fund into that, and then started using it for some of my investments too (also in TD e-funds). For my long-term goals, I needed non-registered investments as well, so more TD e-funds there.

The stock market has been up and down since then. The market value of the portfolio is occasionally below the book value, which looks a little discouraging. When I use the XIRR formula in Excel or other spreadsheet programs to analyze my actual returns, though, it works out okay because the reinvested dividends are also accounted for. Besides, as long as I keep an eye on the money I may need within the next five years, I can let the long-term investments go up and down without panicking.

Investing with uncertain income was a little more difficult for me to get used to. At the beginning of my experiment, I was worried that I might not have enough in cash despite my budget, and I wanted to keep as much as possible in savings accounts just in case. Lately, though, I’ve been able to relax a little and say that at least 10% of this should be put in long-term investments. I look forward to being able to increase this proportion as I become more comfortable with managing finances during this experiment.

It’s getting easier and easier to postpone present spending for the abstract idea of enjoying extra time and flexibility later on. For example, we were at a thrift store looking for books, and we came across some DVDs for movies we had enjoyed. After some consideration, we put the DVDs back because we get a lot of free movies from the library anyway. It’s easy to keep my lifestyle simple now so that I have the space to keep exploring things later.

I still haven’t sold a single stock or index fund I’ve ever bought. Well, I guess the transfer of my Sun Life funds (from the IBM defined contribution pension plan) to TD counted as a sale, because it needed to be transferred in cash, but I put it back into investments once the transactions got sorted out. I haven’t tried doing the paperwork for capital gains in non-registered accounts yet. I might do it one of these years just so that I know how that’s done and so I’m sure I’m keeping all the records I need. At some point, I should probably convert some of these e-funds to exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for even lower management expenses. Bonds and stocks still boggle me, so it’ll be quite some time before I get around to buying these. (If ever!) Many things to learn! My sister is a lot more sophisticated when it comes to investing, I think, but as long as I can figure out something that’s comfortable for me, I’ll be fine.

Investing can be scary for lots of people, but if you can create some space for yourself so that you aren’t as worried about the ups and downs, it seems a little bit easier. The biggest risk of loss comes from having to sell at the wrong time, and that space can help. Many people struggle with saving even just a little, but if you can manage it, it might be worth trying investing. Like in gardening, it’s fun to see things grow without much more effort from you, even though sometimes the seasons can be tough. As long as you don’t have to use up your seeds for food, there’s always next season.

I started tracking our grocery expenses when we decided not to sign up for a community-supported agriculture program. I’d tracked several seasons of the CSA, and I wanted to see if we would still eat lots of vegetables without the bi-weekly commitment of a farm share. I also wanted to get a sense of what we bought.

I started scanning my receipts, and I found an assistant who could type them in. I set up a spreadsheet where he could type in the dates, stores, and line items (including quantity, unit price, and total). There were occasional typos, but I could find and fix them. I used a look-up table to match the line items with friendlier names (ex: RDPATH SUGAR is white sugar) and file them under categories.

The data below isn’t complete because there were a number of receipts that slipped through the cracks. If I let too much time pass between data updates, I couldn’t remember what some things were. Still, it should give a general idea of how the year went. The data covers April 2012 to March 2013 and includes 1223 line items.

Here are some questions I wanted to explore:

• A. How much did we spend in various categories, and how does that vary month by month? For example, how much do we spend on vegetables? Is this in line with what we want our diet to be?
• B. What items do we spend the most on? This could point to better ways to economize (buying in bulk, finding cheaper choices) or show us where it’s worth spending on better quality because we use so much of it.
• C. How frequently do we buy certain items? Can we predict consumption patterns or sale patterns, and stock up when things are on sale?
• D. What are the normal prices and the sale prices for various items? When and where does it make sense to buy different things?

So, let’s see! Click on the images to view larger versions.

A. How much did we spend in various categories, and how does that vary month by month?

Grocery expenses worked out to be $422/month for this family of three in Toronto, Canada. We ate pretty well, enjoying our favourite foods, the occasional snack, and fresh fruits and vegetables, and buying organic milk (which turned out to be a large part of the budget, but probably worth it). Because we cook in bulk, some months have larger grocery bills and some months involve more freezer-raiding. The standard deviation was $160.

We spent the most on meat ($59/month) and dairy ($53/mo), but fruit ($47/mo) and vegetables ($46/mo) also made a respectable showing. Vegetables worked out to $22 every two weeks, which is less than what we were paying for the CSA box. That could be accounted for as a pricing difference between conventional and organic produce, and we still bought extra vegetables when we were in the CSA. Paying attention to our increasing vegetable spending helped us learn lots of ways to prepare food. Yakiudon turned out to be a house favourite, and other stir-fries are great too. We haven’t been able to get our vegetable spending to overtake meat, but that’s probably because of the occasional indulgence in lamb korma.

The month-by-month pattern made me think there were bigger differences, but because stocking up and bulk cooking means our monthly patterns probably aren’t a good source of information. Our vegetable spending is positively correlated with our overall grocery spending (0.7), which means that ~50% of the ups and downs are explained by the ups and downs in our grocery bill (maybe we just bought less).

Anyway, I feel pretty good about how the proportions worked out. There’s hope for us yet!

B. What items do we spend the most on?

We buy milk because J- likes it. It turns out that Canada prohibits the use of artificial growth hormones for dairy cows and antibiotics are also controlled, but we still get the organic version for extra safety. Lamb shanks from the butcher are a splurge when it comes to making lamb korma. We found that Metro often has the lamb cuts we want, though, so we check there first now. Shrimp sees a lot of use in pad thai, stirfries, and other wok-based dishes, plus our occasional wonton marathons. My standard breakfast is rice and fried egg, and we use lots of eggs in baking and stirfrying too. I was surprised that much butter (and we do, even though we try to stock up during sales!) because of baking, and that grapes made it into our top ten despite being something we don’t eat that often. We buy grapes only when they’re super-crisp, and sometimes we forget to eat all of them before they soften. Also, we usually buy chicken legs or drumsticks, but it was interesting to see that whole chickens turned up on this list even though we don’t buy them frequently.

C. How frequently do we buy certain items?

A block of butter, a carton of 18 eggs, and a bag of 4L milk every 1.5 weeks (eggs and milk feel more frequent than that, though…)
A 2kg bag of white sugar every ~2 months, a 1kg(?) bag of demerara sugar every ~6 months

It’s a little harder to tell how often things go on sale and how much we want to stock up, because we skip sales if we still have stuff in stock (ex: butter) and we shift our buying patterns depending on what’s on sale (ex: 30% on a particular meat package that’s nearing its best-by date). It looks like butter is always good to get on sale, though, and that seems to be every other month.

D. What are the normal prices and the sale prices for various items?

Hmm, I think it might be useful to remember which ones sometimes go on big sales, so then it makes sense to postpone until things are in season.

Butter is usually $4.97, sometimes $2.88. Salami is sometimes $4.20 off ($5.29), clementines are sometimes $3 off ($3.99), and bacon is sometimes $2.58 off ($2.97). Sometimes we can get Japanese udon noodles for $1 instead of $2.19. And then there was that time that Campbell’s condensed chicken soup was on sale for $0.50 instead of its usual $0.97, and we bought a lot. =)

In general, our neighbourhood No Frills supermarket has pretty prices for stuff, although some things necessitate a special trip to the Sweet Potato organic food store or the Welcome or Oriental Harvest ethnic supermarkets. Metro also stocks some sauces and lamb cuts that are hard to find elsewhere. I sometimes look up prices from my records, but the difference is usually pretty small.

So that’s roughly a year of data. Hmm… Should I continue? Maybe I’ll scan and stash the receipts, but I might not have someone type in the information until I have more questions I want to ask. It was interesting to collect that data over a decade, though!

This weekend was very much a home sort of weekend. I planted pansies in the front flowerbox. Planted peas and beans in the back, too. I want to see how much I can learn about gardening during my semi-retirement. I love the way plants grow. For example, the spring onions I transplanted to a pot keep inching upwards, and there are rows of seedlings peeking out of the mounded rows in the back cage. Yay! Maybe this week I’ll buy a 6-cell pack of cherry tomato seedlings and get those started too.

Prepared and froze Japanese croquettes, getting through most of the bag of russet potatoes that we bought. Future yumminess! Also prepared yakiudon, which W- helped me cook. We’re getting better at improvising dishes based on whatever looks good at the supermarket. It takes us a while to shop for groceries, but it’s social time.

Life stretches before me. I think it would be wonderful to get really really good at gardening and cooking and all of these other things that make life better.