Home Economics

Here's something that has worked pretty well for my girlfriend and me:

We have found a few recipes that are (1) relatively simple, (2) we both like, and (3) scalable and once every ~3 weeks, we order a bunch of groceries from a delivery service and have a ~4 hour cooking session where we cook them all at once. We eat out or get takeout about twice a week, and the massive cooking session produces all our other dinners for the 3 weeks. We freeze most of what we cook and then when we want something, we microwave it.

I'm really interested to see what people have to say on this topic, but I think its broadness prevents most people from responding, since we don't really know what you're looking for.

There seem to be quite a number of distinct topics that would each deserve their own post. Off the top of my head: budgeting/finances, decorating, cooking, organizing, cleaning, clothing, entertaining, mixology, etc

Could you ask some specific questions that people could respond to?

My random tip: White vinegar (the cheap kind you buy in a big plastic jug) is great for getting rid of smells. My favorite usage is for clothing and towels. Especially if you live in a humid area, towels often develop a bit of a musty smell when wet, even when they've just been washed. If you toss some white vinegar in the laundry machine while washing, it will get rid of the smell. I throw in some vinegar in each of my loads (the vinegary smell is gone once dry. Other useful usage is cleaning microwaves, refrigerators, etc.

I thought of the permanently shoddy state of my bank account

mint.com fixed that for me. The cost of mint is your bank data is agrigated and used in ways you don't control, and you get personalized advertising when you view mint. The benefit is mint looks at your expenses and suggests a budget. The budget it suggested for me was achievable and as I followed it my finances stabilized and I was able to set and achieve goals. Of the 3-4 people I convinced to try it (at no benefit to me), all had similar experiences. Mint is attentive to security and has a clear explanation of how to remove all your data from their computers.

Here's a few things that work well for me:

Many home chores are parallelizable. e.g. cooking something nice may take around 40 minutes, but most of that is spent waiting for timers to go off. The intervals of non-cooking are too short to do anything interesting, so I use the time to get other chores done. During morning hygeine and breakfast cooking, I run laundry. While cooking dinner, I fold laundry and make the next day's lunch. This reduces the real loss of time to chores, because it was time you would have lost anyway. From another perspective, it reduces the time lost to cooking, because most of that would have had to have been spent on chores anyway.

For meals, we buy about five kinds of meat at Costco and freeze it all, then thaw what we need as we need it. (I'd be happier getting groceries delivered, but no one seems to do it here) We have about a half-dozen dinner recipes that we rotate through so we at least feel like we have variety. We've sometimes found that making a list at the start of the week of what we're going to have each night helps with the Trivial Inconvenience of "decide what we want to eat before we can start cooking."

If you're not disposed to abusing a credit card, here's a good way to handle personal finances: Get a credit card with a sufficient limit and put absolutely everything on it. At the end of the month, pay it off in full, preferably online via electronic transfer. This ensures that you will never accidentally bounce a check (because there's never any checks "in the pipeline" to worry about), makes it apparent very quickly if you're overspending (if you can't pay it off in full, you fail), and reduces the time spent on managing finances to about ten minutes a month. The year-end reports CC companies send you are quite useful for figuring out where all your money's going, too. For bonus points, use a card with cash-back benefits. If you can't trust yourself with a CC (or can't get one with a high enough limit), use a debit card.

If you live in an apartment, small annoyances can often be solved by the owner's maintenance people. I'm thinking of things like clogged drains -- we went through a lot of drain cleaner before realizing it wasn't actually our problem.

The best chores are the ones you don't have to do. Have your paycheck direct deposited. Do everything by CC and online banking so you never have to go to the bank for cash. (but carry emergency cash if you want to) If you can order something instead of going out to buy it, do it. When you do have to shop, do it all in one place if you can. We have a walmart and costco right across the street from each other, which makes groceries and necessities easy.

And for keeping the place neat and tidy, it helps to have a partner who's a professional housekeeper. :-)

I have taken Home Ec in highscool and it barely had enough subtsance but only because they were doing it wrong, they taught us how to sew a button hole, fry an egg and screw in a lightbulb but not how to organize a house. I had only my shallow Home Ec book required for class which looks more like arts and crafts really. any books relating to Home Economics I have read is "At Your Sevice: Memoirs of a Majordomo by Desmond Atholl", a biography of a Majordomo who serviced many a celebrity and powerful clients. And while the usual 30 bedroom mansion he has to command and organize is definitely not my 2 bedroom apartment I still picked up a couple of vital things in keeping a home clean and in optimum condition.

A ideal home is basically Clean and Efficient, that is all there is to it. It's a verry personal thing so I can't tell you how or whether you should fold or hang your clothes since I don't know if you own a cabinet or a drawer or if it's even ideal to your bedroom arrangement. You can use your err.. Rationality? XD to figure most of it out and whatever you have problems with you can ask us. :] Also, just to be clear, I don't recomend the book. If it just takes too much time and effort figuring Home Ec, you should just hire your own Majordomo haha

Suprisingly interesting topic. Like how a disorganized book collection, which you might take more time finding the book rather than reading it, should be organized. The homes we live in should follow the same if not better treatment since we wake up in it everyday, for most people it's also where they spend the most money. I wish they tackled these in HS Home Ec :c

Most of the stuff I own is consumer goods, and I need to store it in a way that optimizes for accessibility. You know who else needs to do that? Retail stores. So I made a list of all my available closets, shelves, under bed storage, etc. and assigned each space a corresponding retail category. There's sporting goods, where I keep things like my tent and sleeping bags. Headlamps go in electrical along with the flashlights. Some sections are just 1/4 of a shelf, but having a designated area makes it way easier to find things, and cleaning up is a lot faster, when I actually get around to cleaning up, that is.

When I first implemented this idea I went a little overboard and it was really organized, but inconvenient. They say you should normalize until it hurts, then denormalize until it works, and sometimes it's just nice to keep things handy, sometimes in more than one place. So I added back things like the kitchen junk drawer, which consists of a subset of office supplies (pens, notepads, scissors), electrical (batteries), hardware (measuring tape), and personal care (vitamins). After adjusting the balance a bit the system got more comfortable.

I also have two more categories of stuff that fall outside the retail model: reference, and archival. The reference section is for books, digital media and papers, basically the bookshelves and file cabinets. I don't use The Universal Decimal System but it seems like the logical way to organize books. The archival section includes things like artwork and artifacts with historical/sentimental value, which I curate like a museum collection. Some go on display, others go in the least accessible parts of my storage spaces, ie. long term storage.

Kind of like how people are always saying about coding -- a good way to learn to sew is to have a problem you need to solve. I learned basic hand sewing on my own, and picked up machine sewing and pattern-using in college when I worked costume crew for plays. Volunteering in community theatre might be a good way to learn the basics quickly with tight feedback loops and success spirals/clear sense of pride/ownership. Plus then you also learn lots of cheats/hacks, which you won't get from a book.

Halloween is an excellent time to put this to use (for you or for children). I made this medium rated dress as my first solo project after learning machine sewing for Pippin.

And, best of all, sewing really rewards spatial thinkers, especially when you're altering or improvising a pattern.

I recommend the Cooks Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen family of cookbooks, because they test something like 40 variations of a recipe/technique and give you the one that works best. (They don't optimize for cost or nutrition, though, just tastiness.)

On the topic of Debt, I'd like to quite this interesting piece from Steven Marshall's blog (he posts here as lionhearted, he's a pretty cool guy, eh makes money and doesn't afraid of nothing):

You're American, yes? Okay, do you have a credit score? If not, here's the easiest way to get one. Go to your bank, put a small amount of money in a certificate of deposit, and get a secured loan against it that pays off automatically. Basically, the CD will pay you 2% interest or whatever, and the secured loan will cost 3% interest... so if you put $1,000 into the CD, you lose $10 to do this, but it massively increases your credit score (it's automatic payment of revolving credit, which is good for a few reasons - I won't get into the exact details, just trust me and do it). You can do it with as low as $100 I reckon, I did it with a $1000 and it was good. After a few months of this, you'll have an established credit history. I'd recommend you apply for the Amazon credit card, which gives a big discount on books, so you can get $50 of free books or something. Then you get points which you can use for more free books later. Much later on, when you have higher spending, you'll probably want an AMEX gold card, but secured loan + Amazon credit card is probably enough for now. Do this ASAP, I lost a lot of money once when I couldn't get a mortgage on a very good buy because I didn't have a credit history. Trust me on this. By the time you start thinking of needing credit, it's too late to build it. Do it now.

Never, ever, ever get into debt. Just don't do it. If you have debt (student loans, credit cars, etc), pay them off as soon as you have any cash at all. Debt is okay for a mortgage on a house, and that's about it. I think education debt is a bad idea personally, and that universities exploit young people who don't understand the value of money yet, but I'm in the minority on that. Maybe take university debt if you need to, but much better to save and pay cash if possible. If you take on debt, absolutely no buying toys or partying with your money until your debt is paid off. Debt cripples a man's ability to do what he wants with his life. Stay away from it at all costs.

What do you guys think of this, US Citizens and others? My dad used to go even further than this, he always taught me one should at least try to live with only half one's income (after taxes) and invest the rest in savings. As a result, we've lived in pretty shoddy conditions for the last couple of decades, but we have gained a lot in terms of freedom and security, compared to families of similar income who spent most of it in consumer goods.

Virginia Postrel points to the advantages of having extra stuff during economic downturns. Using clothing as an example, she argues that having a full closet makes you more economically resilient because it gives you a form of savings which you can draw upon when you have to cut expenses.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560552064806106.html

no less than 215 physical books

I am sad that someone can apparently consider this to be a large amount.

Home ec was not an elective where I went to school; three hours a week, and you didn't bring a lunch that day - you ate what you cooked.

This is a great post! Haha. I only recently found out can cook brocoli, carrot, beans, lentils and even rice with just water and a microwave safe container in the microwave!