Moosicles

It’s been awhile since I’ve had the motivation to post anything on here, but I’m making a comeback. I’ve got some (in my opinion) crazy awesome ideas for useful webapps or general software, but first, some background info:

I want to make a personal inventory system to keep track of all of my crap. I just bought some new Choco sandals for $80 – those things are known to last years. The guy that sold them to me had his for 13 years and repaired them only occasionally with some shoe glue. Now this is the first time I’ve spent that much money on footware, normally I would go spend $10 at Walmart for flip flops, which is what I did last summer, and they broke less than a year later. But let’s assume these Choco’s last me 10 years. That makes them just $8 a year – and these are NICE. They are comfortable and great for hiking. After 10 years, the Walmart flip flops will have cost $100 assuming they break every year like this year, and then they are not as nice to begin with. Oh yeah, one more thing – think of all the time and gas money it would take to have to go to the store to get more flip flops every year. Unless you love shopping, which I hate, it’s pretty much to your advantage, as well as the environment’s, to get something that’s going to last as long as possible. It used to be that lasting long was something that was looked for when we bought things perhaps 40 years ago, but now, Walmart has changed this. Now you are seen as being wealthy and loose with your wallet if you buy quality items instead of going to Walmart. Why can’t we learn to invest in the long-term when we make purchases nowadays? I think this should change, in order to increase our own quality of life and address the social and environmental problems that are occurring in the world.

With that said, I think that for me, the main reason that I don’t think about making things last as long as possible is that I forget about things quickly. I’ve got a busy life – I’m in college. I don’t have time to keep track of my crap, to research everything before I buy it, and to do a cost-benefit analysis of stuff before I buy. What I want to do is create a personal inventory system that is aimed at helping people make their personal items last as long as possible and get their money’s worth out of them. Maybe something like this already exists. If it does, please show me! But I want the system to be simple: just input items that you buy and expect to last longer than… let’s say six months. You will input the date of purchase, the place you bought it from, the price, and the target amount of time that it’s supposed to last. Then, you will know what you have, how much it’s worth, and if your small investments in simple objects are paying off or if they are ripping you off. This will also help people to know when it’s worth it to repair an item and when it’s worth it to buy a new one.

What do you think?

I have a two part possibility plan for the summer:

1. I will save money by living on a sailboat.

2. I will earn money farming worms and selling them to fishermen and gardeners.

Part 1: Living On A Boat

I found that a boat slip at a nearby marina for a 24′ boat will cost $1756.80 per year, or $146.40 per month. In contrast, a cheap apartment around here will go for $300 a month, and that does not even include utilities. The boat slip comes complete with water and electricity. If I wanted to be truly cheap, I could even anchor the boat away from shore for free, but I would rather spend the $146.40 per month for the water and electricity. With that said, this leaves the problem that boat slips are one-year leases. There are two easy solutions: I can either rent for the summer and then sub-lease to another boater for the remaining nine months or I can simply live there for a full year. Going to school at NC State, it would be easiest to not have to drive 30 minutes each way to school every day – but hey, living on a boat for half the price of an apartment can’t be that bad! Then there is the other possibility that I could have a “boat mate” in which I would split the price of the boat slip with them, making it cost only $73.20 a month. That is dirt cheap for a place to live. While it would be tight, a boat mate is a possibility. A 24′ sailboat can typically sleep 2 people comfortably or 4 people uncomfortably. So lastly, the cost of the boat would have to be factored in, but I plan on purchasing a sailboat anyways. For the sake of the cost analysis, I will assume I spend $3,000 on a used 24′ sailboat, which is a reasonable price to expect to pay. There may be problems with the boat, but for the purposes of living in it, not everything has to work perfectly. $3,000 + $1,756.80 = $4,756.80, divided by 12 months is $396.33, which is not an unreasonable monthly price to pay for a place to live, not to mention this assumes that (1) I will be on the boat alone, and (2) the boat will cost $3,000. In reality, it is possible to find a 24′ used sailboat for as little as $1,000. I think you get the idea: living on a sailboat is not expensive, and it will provide a fun experience that I will be glad to have. Oh yeah, and I should also mention that sailboats don’t require gas. There’s savings in that aspect as well.

Part 2: Selling Worms

Worms are easy to breed and sell. Farming worms is not much more complicated than putting worms in a dark, moist bin and feeding them a little bit of food, like a slice of bread, every once in awhile. Like growing anything, it takes practice to get it right, but I’m confident the task could be conquered in a summer. A bin of worms would be extremely easy to keep on a sailboat and it would be closed, so there would be no risk of having worms get all over the boat. There is no initial investment cost in this endeavor: I loosened the soil in my garden today and collected about 100 worms which I put into an old plastic cat litter bin with some moist dirt. My plan is to get the worm farming down by the time summer comes so that I can raise the worms and sell them. Since I will already be at the lake on a boat, selling worms will be easy. A small container of about 25 worms will sell for about $5 (about 20 cents per worm). This is only slightly more expensive than a gas station near the lake sells the same amount of worms for, but mine will be fresher and I will be already at the lake where I can hand-deliver the worms to the fishermen.

I have two final comments: A summer selling worms allows for a lot of free time. I will purchase a cheap 3G internet device for my laptop so that I get internet access at the lake, and I will do web development from there. I can work on a small buisness that I am working on starting as well as make simple websites for friends at a small cost and blog.