Simple Tips for Financial Freedom

I’m something of a money guru. I’ve spent my whole life grinding in order to get where I am, but I wasn’t always the affluent life-style icon that you have all come to know and love. There’s been some ups and downs, and today I figured I would share with you all exactly what kind of habits and activities have helped me amplify those ups and survive those downs over the years.

First, some background. As a young adult, I made some serious financial mistakes. These mistakes were, at the time, ruinous, but over the years I’ve managed to recognize and rebrand them as learning experiences. For instance, when I was thirteen I was living in my mom’s basement, but I was spending money a lot quicker than I was making it. I remember leasing a brand new BMW, constantly eating out, and picking up a UHD, 4K, OLED, HDMI, 56 inch, IUD television that I definitely couldn’t afford. These were lifestyle choices I was making that, at the time, should have been on the polar opposite end of my priorities list. These mistakes (and others like them) caused me utter financial ruin, but since then I have adopted a series of habits that have allowed me to live debt-free for the past few years.

My wallet, which I beat myself over the head with whenever I think about spending money.

My first tip is to establish a positive relationship with money. You see, money today is something of a taboo. You can seriously risk creating awkward situations or straight up offending people by bringing up money. This kind of relationship with the thing that acts as the lifeblood to your existence is inherently toxic because it gives money an intense power over you. We, as a society, often relinquish all financial control we have to our money. That’s why, as a rule, I take every paycheck I get on a romantic and thought-provoking date, often engaging in complex and serious conversation with it. I do this in order to establish a repertoire with my money, letting each and every cent that enters my life know all of my deepest and darkest secrets, and I like to think my money does the same with me. My paychecks and I become closer to each other than any of my human compatriots and I ever could, which makes my money lower its guard. This is usually the perfect time to exercise my second tip; cultivating a sense of fleetingness with money.

Overbearing capitalism has taught us as a civilization to hoard and covet money, but that’s entirely the wrong attitude to have concerning the stuff. In order to combat this long-established bad habit that our economic system has engrained in me, I take a crisp $100 bill out of my savings each week and kill, cook, and eat it. I’ve written at least a dozen recipes for my money that help me keep things spicy in the kitchen, although none of my recipes contain any sort of spice, as anything spicier than kosher salt ruins my extremely delicate digestive system. A digestive system that has, without a doubt, suffered some serious damage as a result of consuming really just upsetting amounts of cash over the years. Consuming so much money helps me not only reinforce my first tenant by enforcing dominance, but also teaches me that money is something fleeting, and I shouldn’t bother myself about it exiting my life.

My third tip is one of the most important: frugality. About 80% of American citizens live paycheck-to-paycheck. This is no doubt a result of American greed. So many people spend money on little things that they don’t really need, which is a habit that I have broken and replaced with a habit my close friend Merriam-Webster and I like to call frugality. For instance, I got rid of my above-mentioned TV long ago, and now every week I have a series of puppet-masters put on an extensive puppet show reenacting all the events of my favorite programs. Sure, they have to spend a few days a week building sets and puppets for each show I watch, but the money saved by not paying for cable or internet makes it all worth it. My puppet method works exactly the same, if not better than the antiquated TV method so many other people subscribe to. That’s not all, however— I also exercise frugality by bathing exclusively in McDonald’s restrooms, which comes in doubly handy, because I can use their free WiFi to publish my blog which helps me cultivate my own personal brand.

Frugality goes hand-in-hand with tip number four: shaving down purchases to the bare minimum. So many people fail to realize just how cheaply they can get some of their household essentials. I need a lot of hangers to hang up my very soft and well-fitting shirts, but hangers can cost upwards of six dollars per twenty-pack, which is why I refuse to purchase hangers. Instead, I purchase twenty, sometimes thirty, shirts at a time from Target, walk out to my car to remove their hangers, then come back and return them all. This quick tip has landed me hundreds of free hangers over the years.

All in all, I’ve managed to cultivate quite the lifestyle for myself. I hope that this post helps all of you attempt to live something approaching the healthy financial lifestyle that I have so impressively created.

An Ode to My Infinite Wisdom

I’ve got a short one for you all today.

For those of you who don’t know, I live in Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s one of the four cities that show up on a map of Tennessee, and it’s by far the best. Knox is a really nice place, all things considered; we’ve got a pretty active downtown, decent enough greenways, and a close proximity to a killer national park. One thing Knoxville doesn’t have going for it, however, is its water quality.

According to Knoxnews (click above), East TN water often contains FDA-regulated safe levels of carcinogens, but those levels are pretty often double the national average, just so you know.

Knox water is fine enough for most purposes, and probably safe enough, but it contains a pretty hefty amount of chlorine. Like, I could fill a neighborhood pool with my kitchen sink and the only complaints would probably come from my roommates who need access to the sink in order to not do their dishes. Growing up in an upper middle class household, I always had access to one of those fancy fridges with the water dispenser built into the door. This liberated my child-self from the slings and arrows of having to drink a kinda soapy-ish flavored water growing up. It also likely protected me from all sorts of micro-organisms that could probably have killed me, or at the very least, had absolutely no effect on my bodily health.

Last August, however, I moved to a new place with a decidedly water filter-free fridge, but that wasn’t really an issue because my roommate Joseph brought with him a Brita pitcher. So for the past five months or so I’ve been drinking water filtered through said pitcher, and just today it occurred to me that changing water filters is generally connected to better performance of Brita pitchers. So imagine my surprise when, after taking my Brita apart like John Wick does a gun, I found that there was no. Filter. In. The. Brita.

Yep, I guess it never occurred to any of us to actually make sure there was a filter in our water filter. I’m not really sure the thought process of someone who buys a Brita pitcher, tosses the actual filter part, then goes on with their life.

The good news? The chlorine taste was all in my head. The bad news? I had to buy filters for like $15.

Food Crime - 2 - Pizza Hut’s Bad Decision

Pizza Hut recently used their dark tricks to combine two things I love into a horrible amalgamation of despair and sadness, then they made me eat it and spend my extremely valuable time writing about it.

Introducing Food Crime entry number two: the Pizza Hut Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza.

It wasn’t as good as this picture makes it look, if that’s somehow possible.

A couple weeks ago I got a text from Zach where in which he informed me that Pizza Hut had somehow combined Cheez-Its and pizza into a new and exciting square. This was a move I was sure could not possibly, in this universe or any other, go right.

With that mindset, we headed over to our local Pizza Hut a few days later and gave it a try ourselves.

Before we get into the review, however, let’s break down the name of this excruciating rectangle of “food.” The Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza. Stuffed it was, it’s basically a crust filled with cheese and, should you request it, pepperoni. That’s right— Pizza Hut will let you order a loose crust filled with melted mozzarella. That’s gotta be mentioned somewhere in the Geneva Conventions, right? Cheez-It? Not really. It’s shaped like a Cheez-It, which is more than I, as someone who made the decision to consume such a thing out of my own free will, probably deserves. The taste, however was NOT very Cheez-It-y, but more on that later.

Pizza? Well, that’s interesting. See, Pizza Hut obviously considers the Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza a pizza; it’s right in the name, after all. However, the only connection the Cheez-It Pizza has to actual pizza is, on the base model at least, mozzarella cheese. That means that, according to Pizza Hut, anything with mozzarella on it is a pizza, which is a terrifying idea.

A pizza. photo— Wikipedia.org.

The taste was something I like to imagine one day I will forget. It was like someone at Pizza Hut HQ decided to make a sad apple pie, but had to substitute Cheez-Its for its graham cracker crust, but then maybe it started storming and the thunder scared the employee? Or maybe it was fireworks? Either way they obviously got confused and ended up using cheese instead of apples and forgot what a pie is shaped like so they used a Hot Pocket for reference, basically ending up with a mushy Cheez-It sleeping bag for hot cheese, which they decided to just seal up and call it a day. Then, my guess is, their head cleared and they decided to quit and move states, but unfortunately they left their shame on a counter or something, and some executive found it and thought something along the lines of “I sure am tired of eating pizza for lunch everyday,” so they threw away their Italian sub and munched down on the first ever glorified Cheez-It flavored Hot Pocket, which then refueled said exec’s love of “pizza” so much they decided to share this new creation with the public, as if merely selling Pizza Hut pizza wasn’t punishment enough for the masses.

You know what really shakes me to my core, though? It wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been. Sure, the marinara dipping sauce was so sugary that it tasted like the pizza sauce from a Lunchables, but the square itself wasn’t overly horrible. Sure, Cheez-Its and pizza separately are both better than Pizza Hut’s bad square, but it didn’t revolt me quite like the Burger King Taco did. More than anything, the worst part of the Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza is that it was allowed to exist. Its mere presence on the same plane of existence as me is an insult to everything I stand for, which is why I hate it so much.

Anyway, the final score comes out to 7/10. Pizza Hut really set out to make something horrible, they just forgot to make it quite bad enough. Maybe that’s just impossible to do with anything pizza-related, though. If nothing else, the Stuffed Cheez-It Pizza sets the bar low enough that I really am interested to see what Pizza Hut decides to do next.