If you're new here, this blog will give you the tools to become financially independent in 5 years on a median salary. The wiki page gives a good summary of the principles of the strategy. The key to success is to run your personal finances much like a business, thinking about assets and inventory and focusing on efficiency and value for money. Not just any business but a business that's flexible, agile, and adaptable. Conversely most consumers run their personal finances like an inflexible money-losing anti-business always in danger of losing their jobs.
Here's almost a thousand online journals from people, who are following the ERE strategy tailored to their particular situation (age, children, location, education, goals, ...). Increasing their savings from the usual 5-15% of their income to tens of thousands of dollars each year or typically 40-80% of their income, many accumulate six-figure net-worths within a few years.
Since everybody's situation is different (age, education, location, children, goals, ...) I suggest only spending a brief moment on this blog, which can be thought of as my personal journal, before looking for the crowd's wisdom for your particular situation in the forum journals.
If you enjoy the blog, also consider the book which is much better organized and more complete. You can read the first chapter for free, listen to the preamble, or see the reviews (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,Z). Subscribe to the blog via email or RSS. Get updates on the facebook page, join the forums, and look for tactics on the ERE wiki. Here's a list of all the ERE blog posts.
This tastes better than Smoothie project #5 in my opinion.
- 1 banana
- 1 orange
- 1 celery stick
- 2 leaves of white cabbage
- 1 handful of frozen black berries
- 1 cup of water
I also added some powdered egg+milk protein I had lying around (got it on freecycle). I doubt it affects the taste much.
I think I could easily kill the blender if I wanted to. I would simply set it on liquify, which is the second highest setting, and press start. This would quickly overload and overheat the engine much like starting a stick shift car in the 2nd gear by flooring it and dropping the clutch(*). You can think of this as impedance or inertia, that is, resistance to change. Unless one has access to overwhelming force, frozen and tough food have to be processed gradually.
I start at one of the slowest settings and run a few pulses. This cuts up the stuff on the bottom. I put the soft stuff, here oranges and bananas, at the bottom for that reason. Once I can’t quite tell the ingredients apart and I don’t hear any crunches from the blades hitting the frozen ingredients anymore, I switch over to higher settings and let it run continuously for 10 seconds at a time. I use a duty cycle of about 60% letting the engine cool down again.
I mention this because DW was going all out and abusing the blender the other day causing it to smell like burnt electronics. I managed to stop her/it before it melted down, but it left me wondering how many blenders die an early death due to not knowing their limitations.
