Back to Basics – What we learn from Milling Grain
Bread, the staff of life, has some interesting things to tell us when we compare making it from first principles compared to buying it as a finished product. Here’s a guest post from Mrs Ermine for whom food is a passion with the lowdown.
I buy bread wheat directly from some farmer friends who live close by, by sack of twenty or so kilograms for £8 each. This is above the wholesale price they are paid for wheat, to take into account the extra work entailed in organising collection, bagging the grain up, and so on.
Wheat in the fields
I pick a couple of sacks up whenever I am passing by, or visiting them, so there is no extra transport cost involved for me. To turn my wheat into flour I have a small, but sturdy, “Country Living” grain mill that I bought many years ago when I had a “proper job” that earned me a good deal more money than running The Oak Tree Farm does now.
Mr Ermine, being a handy sort of chap with all things electrical, has grand plans to motorise the mill, but for the moment I turn the handle myself in the dead times when I am cooking something else. I don’t really need the extra exercise now, running a smallholding gives me quite enough of that, but I certainly did benefit from the effort it took when I sat behind a desk all day.
American "Country Living" Grain Mill
My habit of making bread and pasta from wheat grains surprises a lot of people, but it really is quite a sensible way of carrying on. As soon as wheat is milled, the increased surface area of the tiny flour particles results in rapid oxidisation of the vitamins in the wheat. Flour that is stored for any length of time, even wholemeal flour, has a considerably lower nutrient content than freshly milled. And for the Ermine household, it has the great advantage of being cheap. Really cheap.
Your local, friendly, near-monopoly supermarket chain charges, at time of writing, £1.29 for 1.5kg of wholemeal flour. A rapid calculation shows I pay 60p, a mere 47% of the shop-bought price. When you start to make bread and pasta, the savings really add up, but you could just as well benefit from those savings by using shop bought flour.
So in short, thanks to a one-off investment in the grain mill, Mr and Mrs Ermine eat better food for less than half the price of supermarket supplies, thanks to a friendly transaction with a local farmer and a small amount of physical effort. Our food miles are vastly reduced too. What’s not to like?
Mr Ermine adds:
The cost difference suprised me, as it shows the invisible hand of the market is in full price-gouge mode. A 100% markup on a low-tech basic foodstuff which is a 1000-year old mature technology is really quite remarkable.
The grain mill is designed to run at 60rpm and needs about a 1/4 horsepower (200W) motor. An average human can achieve a sustained power output of about 1/10 horsepower. This accords with observation, I don’t hear the sound of this running for sustained periods of time, more 2-3 minute bursts 
personal finance rant reflections simple living: live off investment income
by ermine
20 comments
towards a long term investing strategy
One of the disadvantages of saving money in a shortish time to retire early is you get a whole lump to manage at once. ISAs are designed for people who save in a civilised and steady way, not in a mad rush to get out of the workforce before the edifice falls around their ears. SG and TNT are great examples of how to do that task right, well done those guys!
I have saved a six-figure sum in pension AVCs, up to the absolute limit that I can save (25% of the total FS fund value) before being forced into an annuity for which I am too young. All the AVCs have to be converted to cash, which has already happened, then tax-unwrapped as a tax-free wodge of cash on leaving work.
The tax system identifies people with lump sums as rich bastards ripe for the picking so it’ll take me over 10 years to get the equity part into ISAs. I’ve made a hash of the post-work tax planning. For technical reasons I will have to draw my pension, actuarially reduced because it’s early, but still over the putative £10k basic rate tax threshold for 2015. So I need a long-term investing strategy, to give me an income for the next 40 years. Preferably one that doesn’t add to my tax burden.
Pensions are designed to avoid investing a lump sum all at once – either you get a defined benefit, like mine, or you have restrictions placed on how you draw down your pension or have to take an annuity. That is to avoid retirees blowing the lump sum on as frenzy of cruises and fast cars, resulting in penury afterwards. The most common question I’m asked when people hear I’m leaving with a payoff is ‘what am I going to spend it on?’ It’s a strange way of thinking. I’d rather give the lump sum a chance to earn some money before running it down 
There’ll be some people that will need to invest a lump sum like me, so this post might be of some interest in showing the thought process. It’s not advice – I might screw things up, and my risk tolerance and background are unusual in some ways.
A strategic overview
Initially, my pension is easily enough for my running costs plus a reasonable entertainment budget. It is to some extent RPI linked, but I will slowly lose the fight to inflation as the decades roll by. Inflation contains a lot of consumer frippery and iFads that I don’t consume, but which generally come down in price due to technological advances. Needs and services tend to go up over time. If I buy less of the stuff that is getting cheaper relative to the stuff that is getting dearer then overall I will experience > RPI inflation.
I started work in February 1982, without any long-term vision or strategy of life. You can get away with that at 21 because you have fifty-odd years of life remaining (as it was at that time, current 21-year-olds will be happy to know they are up for nearly sixty years from now).
It looks like I have picked up a decade of life expectancy in the intervening 30 years, I’m not sure why. I’m up for another thirty years according to the ONS. So I probably stand pretty much midway through my adult life. If I look at my family history I might be wise to think in terms of income for 40 years, rather too much than too little…
Let’s just get up in the crow’s nest and look out for icebergs in the seas ahead. What’s likely to happen in the next 40 years?
Relative decline of the UK (short, med, long term)
I expect the UK to fall down the pecking order over the coming decades, largely due to our decadence and nasty tendency to live beyond our means, combined with the rotten state of the education system because we don’t dare discriminate between the bright and the dim bulbs in case it hurts the dim bulbs’ feelings. We may turn this around – there is probably enough nascent dynamism in the country and the British have a decent track record of resilience in the face of adversity, but the low-water mark is still some way off IMO.
A relative decline doesn’t necessarily mean an absolute decline. Living standards in the UK have fallen in the last couple of years, but compared to the 1960′s London I was born into, we enjoy a fantastic standard of living. The problem is that humans are relative – people felt better about their lives in the 1960s than they do at the moment, because they felt things were looking up.
economic storms across Europe (short, med term)
Large swathes of Europe are not just bankrupt but seem hell-bent on becoming destitute. In the immediate future there’s an extremely high risk of a godawful crash as the Eurozone goes titsup and an awful lot of what used to considered wealth simply evaporates because it isn’t backed by anything. That’s the cheerful interpretation, for the Mad Max scenario look no further than George Soros in the FT, who opines
Far from abating, the euro crisis has recently taken a turn for the worse. The European Central Bank relieved an incipient credit crunch through its longer-term refinancing operations. The resulting rally in financial markets hid an underlying deterioration; but that is unlikely to last much longer.
The fundamental problems have not been resolved; indeed, the gap between creditor and debtor countries continues to widen. The crisis has entered what may be a less volatile but more lethal phase.
There are opportunities there. That explosion will probably trash share prices across the region, possibly the world. The brave and the reckless, who are prepared to fly into the storm rather than trying to run before it, may find value is cheap as they pick over the wreckage. The successful must have internal reference points. When the falcon cannot hear the falconer and the centre loses hold there will be no external references to steer by.
Will I hold my head when all around are losing theirs? Buggered if I know. I’ve seen three recessions up close and personal and was a teenager in the 1970s oil crisis and stagflation. I was a heavy investor in 2009 after appreciating the logic behind this, indeed looking at my AVC contributions I stole a march on the article by a couple of weeks, but it did stiffen the spine. However, desperation concentrates the mind, and a 40% tax-free discount makes courage easier. Even a dog can be a great investor with a 40% leg-up.
a multipolar world (med, long term)
The power centres of the world economy are shifting, and it’s not really possible to say where they are shifting to. America is bankrupt but has the advantage of being the money creator of last resort, China is an enigma within a conundrum, they seem to be top dog at the moment but it is questionable if they will get rich before they grow old. India seems well-placed, though it could do with reining in the backhanders. Russia, well, do you feel lucky, punk?
It’s pretty unclear where the engine of growth will be in the decades to come, or if there will be one. We will have resource wars, beginning with oil wars. We’ve already had a few, Iraq and Libya spring to mind, Iran is on the hit list. As for that growth, perhaps Uncle Sam will dust himself down, spit on his hands and show everyone how it’s done. Maybe Africa will do something with all that Chinese money and a few of the rotten ageing dictators will get bumped off and the economies soar. Perhaps Peak Oil will come along and the entire economic system must fall until some of us work out whether trade still has any meaning in a energy-starved world. Who knows?
Go East young man – diversify
There’s only one way to handle that lack of knowledge – bet on several outcomes! Diversification comes in to flavours, coarse high level asset class diversification and fine level equity diversification, equities being a subset of the asset classes. I have now lost all equity geographical diversification from the UK, which I had emphasised in the AVC holdings.
Monevator has a listing of asset allocation strategies in his Lazy Portfolios Make Asset Allocation Easy post. That illuminated my thinking greatly, though I was initially confused as hell because all but the Harry Browne portfolio as asset allocation strategies as it said on the tin, but the Harry Browne one is in fact a asset class allocation strategy with a 1970′s era equity allocation.
Let’s take a run through them (the original 2009 post is more explanatory though TA’s later update is more actionable)
1. Allan Roth. Nope. I may be reckless, brave, even mad, but I’m not young.
2. David Swensen. I’m not an Ivy League endowment fund with a 100-years plus investment horizon. Not unless we go through the Kurzweil singularity and I don’t know about you but I’m not sure I want to live for ever in a world of beings increasingly smarter than me.
3. Rick Ferri’s Core Four
Too much developed world for my liking. I think the developed world is likely to become a lot less developed over the next 10-20 years. So it doesn’t meet with my world-view. Rick Ferri may well be right, but heck, it’s my life so it has to go along with my beliefs, even if I turn out to be wrong and this sort of thing happens.
4. Bill Schultheis Now we’re getting somewhere, the spread is similar to my mind to Tim Hale’s which I preferred but this is the first one I’d be happy with in terms of equity asset spread (I lop out bonds and gilts from every spread because of my specific circumstances of having significant fixed pension income)
5. Harry Browne’s Permanent Portfolio. Fascinating geezer, Harry Browne, with his seminal How I found Freedom in an Unfree World. He’s somewhere to the right of Ayn Rand who looks like a pinko Communist in comparison so it’s kind of disturbing that his was the one that really resonated with my world-view. It matches my expectation that there are serious challenges ahead, his choice of four orthogonal asset classes is what I like. His domestic-only equity target is very much of his 197os world where the developed world ruled, so it needs adapting to the modern world. It’s more an asset class allocation strategy.
6. Six Ways from Sunday. I just didn’t get this, so no dice. I actually share Scott Burns’ viewpoint that energy is the ultimate currency, so I did pinch one ETF idea from him.
7. William Bernstein’s No Brainer. Same issues to my eyes as Rick Ferri’s portfolio, too much developed world IMO.
8. Harry Markowitz. Attractive simplicity. I don’t do bonds because of my special circumstances (a FS pension that is pretty close to bonds in characteristics of fixed and index-linked income). I probably want to weight more than the World ETF, but if I had a DC pension sum to invest this has a lot to be said for it., Being a fiddler, I’d weight to the UK (because that’s where I am) and after that underweight the developed world (because of my world-view). Thereby buggering up the simplicity, so not right for me and my resources.
9. Tim Hale – much to like here, though again I’d lop out the government bonds and index-linked gilts due to my specific circumstances. And translate the Vanguard funds into something I can access in an ISA without paying the earth. The bonds and gilts I’ve eliminated is 40% of the portfolio, but the capital value of my FS pension is a lot more than the free capital I am investing, so taking a high-level view I am overweight fixed income. I may get his book from the library to catch up with his thinking. I will use the equity distribution to illuminate my equities later.
Asset Class spread
Asset class diversification gets you out of the stock market in periods of irrational exuberance like 1999. And into it in times like 2009 when the world is caving in, and only Warren Buffet stands between the shattered wreckage of Wall Street and the Four Horsemen thundering in from all points.
As far as asset class diversification, I am drawn to Harry Browne’s Permanent Portfolio, which is roughly
25% stocks in the country you live in, 25% bonds, 25% cash and 25% gold
But since I’m an inveterate fiddler, and prepared to accept the consequences, I will consider this as
- 25% equity portfolio
- 25% bonds I shall consider my final-salary pension
- 25% cash I will hold as NS&I ILSCs (I don’t know what a money market fund is, this seems to be US-specific)
- 25% gold I will consider as including my non-financial investments.
I don’t know what Harry Browne was thinking of doing with his gold, but if he considered it his SHTF Bug-out stash I wonder if he considered the weight of it, he was a lot richer than I am and it was cheaper in his time. I wouldn’t want to run with it, particularly with in the form of coins. I may add some in the form of an ETF, but I’m happy to think about that later. My non-financial investments also fall into a similar role in that they gain as the financial system falls, but they don’t have the portability or divisibility of gold.
We should also remember that Harry Browne lived in a country where householders are encouraged to keep a shotgun handy and are entitled to take down intruders within the curtilage of their property. In Europe we are somewhat namby-pamby and effete for such gung-ho defence of one’s chattels, so holding physical gold is a lot less attractive for me than for Harry Browne.
Now the majority of my free cash savings come from pension AVC savings, and by the time I leave I will have driven this all the way to the 25% tax-free pension commencement lump sum limit. Given that the pension itself is in the fixed interest part, I’ll never balance that at 1/4, it will always be bigger.
this is not a canonical Harry Browne asset class spread but I start from where I am
Well, always bigger until this prediction comes to pass and the shares section eats the lot like Pac-man. Rebalancing keeps the right-hand-side in relative proportion but the whole would squeeze down the pension section The reason the fixed interest isn’t 3/4 of the pie is because I have existing savings and the non-financial assets are substantial. And no, I still don’t include my house as part of my net worth because I have to live somewhere.
It’s obviously not pure Harry Browne because the cash and non-financial investments put together are about the same as the shares, which reflects my prejudices. I’m easy with that. I understand Harry Browne’s rationale and if I were working up from scratch over a working life I’d stick to his equal split. But I’m not, so I am going to do it my way, and take the hit for being an opinionated git if necessary.
The equity part of the Harry Browne portfolio, updated with Tim Hale
So I’ll take the equity portfolio, retain my HYP which is largely UK based, and already includes Aberforth for UK smallcap, turning it into a bastardized Hale variant like so:
- 20% HYP (for the UK part)
- 5% Aberforth Smaller Companies
- 20% s Dev World ex-UK Equity, consisting of four HSBC funds as used in the slow and steady portfolio. Asia Pac seems to be developed world in investing terms.
- 16% some sort of Global Emerging Markets LGAAAK seems to fit.
6% db x-trackers Stoxx Global Select Dividend 100 ETF (XGSD) TER 0.5
No, not doing any sort of index-tracking select dividend. I got slaughtered with IUKD a while back until TI educated me and TA showed me the 4% running costs that, basically, you can’t automate value plays. The huge attractors of value traps will always kill you. If you want to file that flight path you have to fly it on manual, or get sucked into the black holes on auto.
I’m going to swap that sucker with a gratuitous addition from Scott Burns’ portfolio to reflect my views on impending Peak Oil. And yes, it probably does overlap LCTY to some extent, life is just like that. It’s nothing like what IUKD is claimed to do, but since a HYP has a bias to what IUKD should do but doesn’t I don’t feel value is unrepresented.
- 9% Global exUK DW SmallCap
- 10% HSBC FTSE EPRA/NAREIT Developed ETF (HPRO) – this is property
- 10% Lyxor ETF Commodities CRB (LCTY)
- 10% db x-trackers Stoxx Europe 600 Oil & Gas ETF (XSER)
The proportions are higher than in the original article because I have chopped out the 40% for the gilts and Government bonds, which I don’t need, due to my fixed income.
There’s a lot of noise and hum associated with running something like this, so many funds, and rebalancing. Passive investing bores the bejeesus out of me, so one attractive alternative is to buy a Vanguard Lifestrategy 100% Equity fund ISA from Hargreaves Lansdown and be done with it. And then do the same next year. And the next. And the next, and so on. The HYP would skew that to the UK somewhat, but so be it.
The one thing that scares the hell out of me is Vanguard is so astronomically big. Big rewards mean big temptations. Somewhere, in that big monolith, I am sure there may be a young Nick Leeson or Bernie Madoff in the making, dreaming of riches beyond belief. Perhaps he is there right now, sitting behind the glowing light of a computer terminal in a ventilation shaft with nobody looking over his shoulder. Power corrupts, and it only takes one of them to get through…
ISA and temporal diversification
The annual limit on ISAs may work to one advantage, enforcing temporal diversification. Just as if you are going to quit the market to buy an annuity you should wind down your position over five years, the reverse is true on entering it. As it is I need > 5 years to enter anyway. There’s an argument to say I should use several ISA providers too, but this mitigates against rebalancing, as holdings in separate providers can’t be rebalanced across the divide. This isn’t a problem in the early buying years, but once the ISA has reached steady state it is. I’ll probably compromise and keep the HYP with iii and use a different platform for the rest.
What’s with all this passive rubbish all of a sudden?
I’m unashamedly active with my HYP, in the choice of what to buy, though I try and be Buffetesque in buying and holding; my churn is low, trading is not something I have any skill for. The income from that will be the first line of defence as my fixed income falls below the waterline. The UK is not a bad place at all to seek income from a HYP.
I can do okay with a HYP in the UK but if I want a slice of anywhere else I either have to pay someone like Anthony Bolton to understand it or I can go passive. There’s no point in me trying to pick stocks in areas I only know of as shapes on a map, but I’d like exposure to them. So the scattergun approach of passive investing becomes attractive in the face of no cheap alternatives.
Passive investing gives me concerns in big developed world indices tracked by lots of ageing Baby Boomers about to sell out of the stock market on retirement, like the FTSE100 or the S&P500. I don’t track the FTSE100, and I hate trackingthe S&P500 and would avoid it if I could – I’ve split the US one into 3% S&P500 and 2% US dividend aristocrats because doing the same as everyone else is never a good thing in investing. There seems no S&P allshare open to me. For all the other global stuff which won’t be tracked by loads of people I am relaxed about passive investing. In the end I want to do other things with my life than obsess about far-flung stock markets.
Perspective is also important. I will add value to DW’s project and the time may well come when my financial assets will be less significant. She has managed something I only managed on the side – and that is capturing the entire fruits of her labour by working for a company owned by herself.
There’s a common thought-pattern that you can never become rich when you trade your time for money. I love the American directness of this straight-between-the-eyes approach
This might offend some people, but as long as you are working for someone else, you are not working for yourself. With that kind of attitude, you are actually thinking as a poor person does. If you are not investing into yourself and your own business, you are going to stay in the position where you are.
I can’t complain too much, I did okay working for other people, and wasn’t entrepreneurial enough to work for myself full-time. I don’t regret it – in the end you will only know joy if you can recognize what enough looks like, and it looks different for each one of us.
living intentionally reflections simple living: quality of life standard of living
by ermine
11 comments
Your Standard of Living may take a hit, your Quality of Life doesn’t have to
Ben said something in a comment that made me think a bit
for the upper side of middle class these are brutal times with generation X ers significantly harder up than their baby-boomer parents. The desire they have to maintain the same lifestyle they were brought up with is almost certainly overpowering
There’s a lot in that. It’s hard to equate directly – I am probably tail end of the baby boom, DW is GenX and I had a better experience of work than she did. And work in general is getting less rewarding IMO. I’ve ascribed this to digital Taylorism before, although there is also the possibility that I am losing tolerance and adaptability to business trends through the usual process of getting more ornery and curmudgeonly as I get older.
Ben’s comment gave me a double-take. A lot of things are far better for GenX than they were for baby boomers, gone are the draughty coal-fire heated houses of the London I grew up in. TV is better, both in programming and in picture quality. Far more people have cars, though that has its downside too. Those cars are far more reliable now – I recall changing clutch cables and water pumps by the side of the road in the freezing winter a couple of decades ago. But I know what he means. Some of the important things in life, like accommodation and jobs early on, were commoner and easier to afford on typical wages than they are now. Britain paid its way in the world more, and had less global competition. More of our consumption was made locally in the mid-20th century than it is now. As a resut we had more jobs, relatively, but our stuff was of a poorer quality, hence the unreliable cars and TV sets
That decline in standard of living will progress and accelerate, as the West loses competitive edge to the East. Robert Peston had a programme ‘How The West went Bust‘ on TV last year and he pretty much laid this out with evidence. We’re overpaid compared to other people, and globalisation and improved communications will see to it that wages equalise. To see the level they will find themselves at, we are probably overpaid by five times relative to the Chinese by his reckoning. Split the difference and real wages will fall to about a third of their current real value, weight by population size and our pay will fall even further.
It’s not guaranteed, of course. There are some things that could happen that would forestall this sucker punch from globalisation. Peak Oil would put a major spanner in the works of those long supply chains and we’d have to make the stuff we use more locally again or do without. The Raspberry Pi could galvanise a generation of British kids to do something with the sticky grey stuff in their craniums rather than watching TOWIE and wanting to become a sleb.
However, the tragedy behind Ben’s comment is that each generation will have to strive harder to achieve some of the basics their parents had because of increasing global competition until that is assimilated, or the myth of continuous growth finally goes titsup, in which case it is Game Over for a lot of our standard of living.
Standard of Living ≠ Quality of Life
Just because we have an advertising industry hollering out that buying Stuff and Experiences is what makes a better quality of life doesn’t make it true, but unfortunately it makes it easy to believe that’s the case.
Obviously, at the bottom end of the standard of living scale it does directly influence quality of life. If you haven’t got enough to eat or you haven’t got a roof over your head then your quality of life isn’t great. However, one of the myths of British culture that causes a lot of misery is that you have to own that damned roof. At an early stage in your adult life you take on a huge financial risk and expose yourself to a big one-time purchase in a cyclical market. To make things worse, some of us don’t understand the repayment part of buying a house and get ourselves into a right pickle.
Other European countries manage better by having a working rental market with professional landlords rather than our motley crew of amateur buy-to-letters. It’s been a long time since I had dealings with landlords but the professionals always delivered a better experience than the amateur accidental landlords. It sounds like nothing has improved in the intervening quarter of a century.
That’s just one aspect, but there are many cases where we built non-negotiable costs into our lives. Each and every one of those binds the chains of wage and debt-slavery tighter. It doesn’t have to be this way.
You can separate Quality of Life from Standard of Living
Subject to a minimum standard, which you can achieve in Britain on benefits which is part of the financial problem we are in you can improve your quality of life separately to your standard of living. Ray has a much better quality of life than I currently have, though my standard of living is probably higher than his even after saving is taken out. Standard of living you influence by earning more, and/or eliminating debt costs. It is primarily about the amount of money you have in terms of income.
Quality of life is largely about how well your needs are met. Finance and society address the bottom two of Maslow’s hierachy of needs, after that it’s up to you and the people around you to work it out. Ray is living his values, and he’s comfortable. I am not living my values, so I have issues in the self-actualisation department. I am working towards fixing that, but I’m not there yet. Once I have sorted that, I will probably have a better standard of living and quality of life than Ray
It’s the job of the advertising industry to convince you that money will buy solutions to the top three levels. They do a very good job of it, and lead most of us into a continual epic fail. Let’s take a look at those top three levels.
You can’t buy Love
For a start most of us manage to break out of that fail in the love department, though there’s the oldest profession in the world for those that prefer to use cash rather than charm
To get anywhere with love you have to be a lovable person and to be able to give enough of yourself to love. That’s about how you are, not what you buy or what you own. However, the admen get in there too, with Valentine’s day, diamond rings, the wedding industry, almost anything to do with children, you get the picture. We are all social creatures to some extent, and again, lasting success in interacting with others is about who and how you are. You can take some shortcuts with what you have, but the sort of love and friendship money can buy tends not to stick around at times when you need it, or when the money runs out.
You can sort of buy Esteem
The Esteem level is absolutely rife with products to make you feel you are special by virtue of what you buy, and we fall for it every time.
The sort of esteem that money can buy you is shallow and impermanent – you achieve self esteem through self-knowledge, consistency, living your values and knowing what you stand for.
The sort of esteem you get from lowering your car suspension, fitting a loud sound system and detuning your engine with a bigger exhaust pipe is all about trying to dominate the ‘hood. It’s the same sort of esteem as the cock sparrow on the gutter dominating the area with his chirping. The self-esteem you get from what you own is all very well but it suffers from the ancient problem of the sound of a tree falling in the forest with nobody to hear it. If your self-esteem is dependent on other people looking at what you have and where you are then it will fail you in the dark night of your soul when you need it most. You can’t buy that, you have to grow it through hard work and self-knowledge, and even then there are no guarantees.
You can’t buy Self-Actualisation
It’s in the title. Doesn’t stop there being a huge industry being out there to separate potential self-acualisers from their money, but the Delphic Oracle had it spot-on, all those years ago.
'Know Thyself' in Greek in a stained glass window
Know Thyself. It’s something only you can do, and to achieve self-actualisation it’s something you have to do.
Quality Of life is about what you Are as well as what you Have
It took far too long for me to come to this realisation. Shona hasn’t got it yet, bless her, though she’s on a voyage of discovery. It is something that I found in a crisis point, I saw clearer, that I didn’t need another eight years of a decent middle class salary doing a middle class job.
So I started to make the biggest purchase in my life, of something no ad-man has ever offered me. In financial terms it is much more costly than my house and car. What I am buying cannot be held, or weighed, it is intangible by definition.
It is freedom and dominion over my time. No Stuff will be as good as Freedom from wage-slavery feels. It has no fixed price – Jacob in his ERE days won his freedom far earlier in his life than I and for a far lower price. There are other ways of doing it – Dolly Freed’s book Possum Living shows another way.
One of the things that saving towards buying financial independence showed me was I don’t need a lot more Stuff in my life, because my spending on Stuff dropped way down. I don’t miss it any more. Even if I had no independent savings if I drew my pension early I would have to increase my spending on Stuff to use it up. I do miss some things that I had to give up to shorten the period of saving to a minimum, and I’ll probably restart them. But more than half of my spending was a chimera from which I derived no lasting pleasure. To hell with that. I had to find that out the hard way, some times that is the only way; Nietzsche had some point with that which does not kill us makes us stronger.
Tyler Durden showed why it’s so hard to see this consumerist fallacy in Fight Club It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. Because he’s a movie the principle is overstated for dramatic effect, but far too many people cling to the inessentials of life as their standard of living falls only to lose the essentials because they are misallocating their resources.
Taking a controlled standard of living hit upfront means I haven’t had to give up anything really important to me
I was ‘lucky’ when I thought I was done for working three years ago. I first prioritised short term savings, along these lines, but what I percieved as an immediate hazard of having to leave work turned out to be less acute. At no time in the past three years have I attempted to recover my original standard of living. I simply aimed for a controlled crash-landing to a satisfactory standard of living, slowly surrendering disposable income to buy my future income, a reverse of the ‘borrowing from my future self‘ by saving to my future self.
I targeted half my income as a reasonable goal. I was more than halfway through the controlled crash landing when I realised that I was in danger of succeeding, despite not having the benefit of compound interest on my side. Some things make the job a lot easier for me than, say, ERE. I already own my house outright, and I have been saving in a good pension for nearly a quarter of a century. Against me, I want to retire early, which weakens the pension severely, combined with dastardly dealings from my employer which means even if I carry on working to 65 I can never realise the original target of half my salary with that pension now.
It is only now that I realise I have no need for half my current income, proven by the simple fact that I am saving well over half of it. This is largely as a result of taking the standard of living hit entirely under my control and in ways of my choosing. I will improve my quality of life once I have completed the path.
The Times They Are a Changing – Choose Quality of Life over Standard of Living
These challenges are coming to many of us in Britain, and Ben opined
The desire they have to maintain the same lifestyle they were brought up with is almost certainly overpowering
They need to kill that desire. The key to preserving your quality of life when your standard of living is going down is to get ahead of the curve and choosing where the dwindling resources will be allocated. Doing that reactively puts you in endless firefighting mode.
Choose your battles before they choose you. Live intentionally, know yourself, what your values are, what matters to you, what your resources are and what your potential is. Then deploy those resources, stay adaptable to changing circumstances, and live.
One good tip here is to engineer out as many fixed costs and long term commitments as you can from your life, things like Sky TV, long mobile phone contracts, any sort of contract like gyms. For elective spending it’s sometimes worth paying more for something to get that freedom from long-term lock-in. For things you must have, like mortgage/rent and fuel contracts are okay, but many people see the savings on elective contracts without seeing the invisible chains of spending that tie them down. And think long and hard before taking financial responsibility for anything that eats.
That’s where Shona screwed up. That family could either pay for school fees, or for their huge house. If the school fees mattered more, they would have downsized ages ago, when the first child went to public school, and not been caught on the hop. If the house were more important, then the school fees would go, and they’d still be living in their fancy house.
Prioritising worked for me, though I was already living within my means when I started, unlike Shona. I cut the holidays, the gadgets, the media buying. I’ve already bought myself a tax-free income of over a hundred pounds a month with my measly post tax savings, and a potential income of a lot more with pre-tax savings, which I will spring tax-free as a pension commencement lump sum. I also bought myself a stake in a business, three years’ index-linked living expenses with NS&I and a cash emergency fund.
It’s all about the choices you make, and I’ve chosen to surrender standard of living to buy a better quality of life. They’re not the same, whatever the admen want to have you believe. If it traps you in a job you don’t like or takes you away from seeing your children grow up, then a higher standard of living is often associated with a poorer quality of life. It’s the dirty underside of consumerism, and it needs to be called out every so often. Choose quality of life over standard of living. You’ll feel better for it
Financial freedom is having options, not just having money to spend
I remember times when I didn’t have enough money to buy the stuff I wanted. Still plugged into the world of consumerism and advertising to some extent, the stuff I couldn’t afford bugged me.
What I discovered was not that it bothered me because I really needed the stuff and it would give me lasting improvement of quality of life. What bugged me was that I didn’t have the option of having it. I couldn’t afford it, and because I wasn’t brought up to buy consumer goods on credit I couldn’t have it.
It took a bad experience at work to show me that there was something a lot worse than not being able to afford consumer tat. It was not having options to walk away from bad situations.
Our American friends, with their delicious lack of irony, can get away with saying things that would just sound hokey and ridiculous from me. In this old newspaper clipping, which is a 1963 ad for a savings and loan company.
The Pleasure of Walking Tall (cringe)
It highlights the advantages of financial freedom -
A man without savings is always running. He must.… He must take the first job offered, or nearly so. He sits nervously on chairs because any small emergency throws him into the hands of others.
Two-and-a-half years ago I sat in an annual appraisement, when The Firm had had a general annus horribilis due to incentivising the salesforce to sell products without evaluating whether they were profitable first. And I listened as a little twerp of a line manager told me he was going to slaughter my appraisement because the project I had been on had been cancelled and my skills didn’t fit in his area. He did it because he needed to score a decent number of negative hits. I was in a weak position, had had some upheaval in my personal life, and had no options. I didn’t have savings, so I had to sit nervously on the chair. Nowadays I would read him the riot act and launch a grievance (you aren’t actually meant to drop someone down three grades without giving them some warning in the preceding quarter, so I could have nailed him for not giving me a heads up first).
He can take a level stare from the eyes of any man.…..friend, stranger or enemy. It shapes his personality and his character.
The ermine is a noble and proud creature, and chose to take action so that this would never happen again. That means independence of working for a living. Getting another job is not the answer. There’ll be another jumped up twat who has just had a child, has no savings, and is desperate to achieve his objectives at my expense so he can continue to afford to pay interest on the debt buying his nice middle-class lifestyle.
Having savings, and therefore options, makes it easier to resist the blandishments of consumerism. Now, I can walk into a store and look at the stuff they have, all gaudily pushed for the weak of will. I can look at it, and think to myself “yes, that would be nice. I can easily afford it. But I’ll pass, because I don’t have a need for this stuff, and I know the want leads only to fleeting satisfaction for a few days”. After a certain point, it is the people in your life that matter, and what you do with them, not what is in your life.
Somehow, having to option of buying the stuff, without particularly breaking a sweat, makes it easier to say no. You can ignore all the 10% off, SALE, everything must GO signs. I’m old enough to have seen it all before, and rich enough and ornery enough to be perfectly happy to pass up on the offer if it means I can take the time to consider the purchase at my leisure. If the damn thing costs 50% more, so what? I don’t buy consumer goods often enough and they are such a small part of my budget that I can afford the luxury of consideration. And many of these offers are cyclical.
I don’t understand the fuss made on Martin Lewis’s moneysavingexpert site about topcashback and quidco etc. Obviously if you are going to spend a shedload of cash on some consumer goods then for sure, try and spend less using these sites. However, the truly radical money saving tip is don’t buy the stuff in the first place, guys.
Ivan Illich, seemed prophetic in the 1970s when he wrote in Tools for Conviviality
Elite professional groups . . . have come to exert a ‘radical monopoly’ on such basic human activities as health, agriculture, home-building, and learning, leading to a ‘war on subsistence’ that robs peasant societies of their vital skills and know-how. The result of much economic development is very often not human flourishing but ‘modernized poverty,’ dependency, and an out-of-control system in which the humans become worn-down mechanical parts.” Illich proposed that we should “invert the present deep structure of tools” in order to “give people tools that guarantee their right to work with independent efficiency.”
Look at so many of the products people will buy for Christmas, they are a lock-in to a complex system of more payments. For example, an Xbox, a mobile phone, Sky TV, a gym subscription, a motor car, a twin-blade razor, contact lenses. So many ways to engineer extra costs into your life, and you tend to do that once you have sunk some costs into it. It was such a relief when I sold my Sky Plus PVR to a friend at work – it had suckered me into an extra £10 a month!
There are also deliberate attempts to change time-honoured ways of doing things into things that require continuous locked-in purchases of overpriced consumables. Take a Nespresso machine, for example. What a daft way to overpay for coffee. Any product that has a club on the website should ring out ripoff alert in big letters. With a bog-standard filter coffee machine I can get my coffee from anywhere, in any quantity I want. From Tesco to some hideously overpriced London coffee emporium selling me Java Blue Mountain air-freighted fresh that morning, no doubt.
I have the choice of how strong and how much I want, by varying the grind and the ratio of water to coffee. If I am lazy, I can use a coffee machine – this is in fact how an Ermine rouses himself, by loading a coffee machine in the evening, and using a wireless remote control to start this in the kitchen from the bedroom
If I am not lazy I can use a filter cone, a French Press or a stove top espresso maker. With the exception of the filter cone, zero waste bar the bag of coffee beans, and even in the case of the cone, the waste is compostable paper.
With a Nespresso machine, my choice of coffees and choice of suppliers is narrowed massively, to the 16 of the Nespresso range and to one supplier. I’d waste an aluminium capsule each go, so wasteful that Nestle have to come up with a whole greenwash site to assuage the eco-consciences of their customers.
It’s absolutely and staggeringly bizarre. Nestle have designed a complex system to wastefully lock-in their customers by replacing a perfectly serviceable and simple range of historic methods of extracting coffee from ground coffee, purely so they could make more money. And people will willingly buy this. Illich would despair of us.
Savings. Yes, there’s a lot to be said for them. Most people save in order to buy something. That’s good, particularly is the alternative is to use credit. Though the most common reason for saving, it isn’t the only one.
I save to buy power and freedom – the freedom to walk tall in the 1963 ad. The ad looks really odd to 21st century eyes – modern ads for savings accounts emphasise saving up for something like a house, or the advantageous interest rate. I have never seen a modern ad advocating saving to buy yourself independence of thought and action. Wage slavery is too ingrained in our culture, and we have surrendered to Illich’s modernized poverty.
How much do Mr and Mrs Ermine need to live on?
Commenter TNT was intrigued to know what The Number is – how much do Mr and Mrs Ermine need to run their Nest.
We’re anomalous in many ways, so you can’t extrapolate from this a general ‘what does it cost to live in an average paid off three bed semi in Suffolk’. There is a wider and more consensual summary in the post What is your Number. For instance we don’t have any children. That is obviously a big difference from most folks, and from a financial POV it is probably to our advantage. We also, unusually for Westerners, have control of some of the means of production of our everyday needs, in the form of The Oak Tree Low-Carbon Farm. This massively distorts our food bill, most people buy their veg from Tesco, we get most of ours from the ground.
Chris with the squash harvest. There are no Clubcard points on this lot...
We also get firewood, both directly from the farm, from wood that is given us which we have enough land to air dry, and in a year or so from some biomass willow planted nearby. This distorts our heating bill, though not so much as yet. The plan is to nuke that gas usage in winter.
So here it is – the running costs for our household. Two things of note are excluded – I’ve only shown my car. Mrs Ermine’s car is a lot younger than mine so the servicing costs are probably less, and her mileage is probably about the same as mine. Depreciation (original capital cost/years of ownership) is higher. There again we save up for our cars and pay cash, so I could take the line we eat the depreciation upfront in one hit.
The second is some sort of sinking fund for depreciation/house repair, which is somewhere between £500 and £1000 p.a. for an average semi. I have a general emergency fund allocation to that, for instance there’s a flat roof that is past its service life and I have a fund allocated to replace it. Since DIY repairs every couple of years seem to work well I leave well be, knowing that I could replace it at any time should the need arise.
So, given all those caveats and hedges, what gives? What does it cost to run the basics for an Ermine’s nest?
Doom and Depression Death Spiral Deliberations
It’s all going down. The Euro is going to explode and Crash Mk2 is on its way. It’s hurricane season on the stock markets.
This is the sort of thing that could really change things for me. I haven’t got enough capital to become particularly rich, but I have cleared all my debts and cut my costs.
I have tried investing in a bull market – the late 1990s. Everybody wants to invest in a bull market like that – until it ends and they lose their shirts. I’ve also tried index investing into the post-dotcom crash over the 2000s. Though the circumstances were unfortunate, I had to liquidate in 2007, before the crash. Like SG, I was lucky and dodged a bullet…
After waiting a year, I am lucky enough to have started again into the teeth of this recession, and I expect it to turn to Depression over then next few years. I believe there is some possibility this is the denouement of Western industrial civilisation, in which case the stock market will never recover, because the assumptions that underpin industrial civilisation are beginning to unravel. In particular the myth of unending growth in a finite world is beginning to fail in the face of natural limits.
The Germans have a fine saying that “The good Lord sees to it that the trees do not grow into the sky”. Tragically, we have built this requirement for continual growth into the foundations of capitalism. Without growth we will see an erosion of jobs and will never be able to pay off debts.
However, I feel that this is not that time yet. Which is why I want to invest into this blue funk, because paradoxically it could change things significantly for me. If the market turns, and the assumptions of capitalism still hold, then the 5% or so of my working life earnings will be magnified by buying when stocks are on sale.
In the end it boils down to if I believe in the stock market as a way to get a return on money, then if I’m not prepared to buy into a bear market, then when else? Doing otherwise is illogical and being untrue to my values. I am aware that I may be throwing this last year’s salary into oblivion, but I feel the likelihood is a lot less than 50%.
So bring on that stock market death spiral. If I am right, my 5% of my working life will punch above it’s weight. I want to invest in a bear market, and I want to be still investing while I am still working, through the low-water-mark when all seems lost. And if the assumptions of capitalism hold, there will be a turning point.
If they don’t, well, so what? That year’s worth of income won’t buy me early retirement in the desperate times to follow, but some of the community and alternative non-financial investments may help soften the blow as living standards in the UK decline, and we focus once again on the needs of life rather than the wants.
Money isn’t everything. You need a certain amount of it in an industrial civilisation. Most of the wins are to be had in not being suckered into consumerism, to know when enough is enough, and what is necessary, what is nice to have, and what shouldn’t be bought even if you have the money.
Not buying crap and empty dreams is most of the personal finance battle, along with gaining an appreciation of the economic cycles. It’s one of the benefits of gaining experience as you get older. I was a child in the 1970s crises, though I observed the upside of it when my Dad bought his house outright in his late forties. I thought I would never find a job in Thatcher’s first recession of the early 1980s, but it did happen after six months.
I survived the negative equity and 14% mortgage rates of Thatcher’s second recession in the early 1990s, when it looked like house prices would never recover to the long-term norm of 3-4* salary (I know that sounds like a sick joke now, but reversion to the mean is a strong force, both from the upside and the downside. The problem is it tends to work over the 10 year period, which is a long time to put life on hold). What I lost of the first house I gained on this one.
So in financial crises it always looks like the world is going to end, it goes with the territory. And the bear argument always makes a better story. This crisis is probably different from others, inasmuch as it is the cumulative denouement of several recessions that were put off by inflating asset prices in 2001 and the mid 2000s, so we probably have got three recessions-worth of pain to go through anyway as all the stuff that was put off comes home to roost. Capitalism seems to need recessions to flush out irrational exuberances.
Added to that are the structural changes in the global economy, the barmy shenanigans un Euroland, increasing energy prices and the like. None of this is looking good, but it’s not clear to me that it amounts to a terminal death spiral. In the West we have been living above our means on borrowed money, so not only will living standards fall to something that matches the wealth we create, they will fall below that with the suckout from paying down debt. In the end you don’t borrow money from someone else, you borrow it from your future self. We are now that future self and it’s pay back time.
My aim is to do okay out of the Depression, for in such times what matters is to be truly debt-free, because money will be tight.
This guy needed $100 more than he needed a car in the 1930s. We will see things approaching this, I don’t know if we will see Hoovervilles in the years to come.
The way to tackle a Depression is basically to try and decouple as much as possible from the economic system. That means
- Eliminate debt – of any sort. The reason is that money becomes incredibly hard to come by, so servicing non-negotiable debts like mortgages becomes extremely onerous if your income falls or disappears. Where you can’t do this then prioritise mortgage debt over all else.
- Don’t rely on benefits of any sort. I am not sure that this will fall to 1930s era harshness, but it’s likely to be a lot less liberal than we’ve been used to
- Reduce costs wherever you can, particularly recurring costs (gym memberships, Sky or other pay TV, long mobile phone and internet contracts.
- Insource – do as much as possible for yourself – whether it’s home repair, prepare and grow your own food or bringing up your own kids.
My policy is to avoid debt of any kind unless it’s underwritten by cash assets, and to minimise dependency on others, particularly the government and any benefits. The latter will come as a shock to a lot of people who have built the assumption of continuing benefits into their economic lives. Many of these will probably be scaled down or shed in the coming years because the government doesn’t have the income it used to have. We already see the straws in the wind with the clampdown on incapacity benefits and the steady increases to the state pension age.
There are other things to be done to improve resilience in the harsh times ahead.
One of those is to live healthier – in addition to the usual culprits of eating and drinking less and taking more exercise this is at odds with my financial goals. Financially, it would make sense to work a little bit longer, but I have seen all too often that as people get older their tolerance for the day to day low levels of stress in the modern workplace can break out in physical form. I am lucky enough to enjoy good health at the moment, but I have seen too many colleagues fall by the wayside in the last ten years of their working life.
In the hard times to come health spending will be less. Although we don’t have the health insurance fears in Europe that Americans suffer from, the quality and availability of health care will fall. It is also something that one should do anyway, but the stress of working life mitigates against living healthily in many ways.
Connection with the community is another aspect of life that may pay dividends in future. Rich societies become atomised because everybody can afford to buy in services and every house can have their own washing machine and lawn mower. However, getting to know other people gets you a wider range of skills and a deeper understanding of the way things work in your house, if these are your responsibility. I repaired my central heating system which failed for want of a zone valve with a replacement motor for less than £15, whereas I am sure getting in a heating engineer would probably cost more. Repairing things rather than replacing will probably become more widespread. Knowing other people and helping them out and being helped out by them makes a lot of things that are expensive or are a grunt a lot eaiser. We would have really struggled to raise a polytunnel between two of us, whereas many hands do make this easier and a lot more fun.
The next few years are going to be a rough ride. I could get slaughtered financially in it, and I’m aware of the risk. However, I also believe fortune favours those who are prepared to take a calculated risk, and this is mine. I’m not one of the pussies that when asked what is your attitude to losing money is “No, never, under no circumstances” and shovels all their money into cash. I’m prepared to take the hit if I screw up, on the grounds that the UK economy is going to be so shattered if I am wiped out that there’s precious little that would preserve wealth. Sometimes you have to do the best you can with whatever you have to hand.
simple living Suffolk: Aldeburgh Covehithe Dunwich frugal holiday Minsmere Southwold
by ermine
2 comments
A tranquil Suffolk weekend away
This post is about something which is about as unfrugal as you can get, gratuitous travelling. Maybe it’s the mad dogs and Englishmen sort of thing and summer is breaking out…
The county of Suffolk is charming and pretty, and DGF and I though we might try going away at home so to speak. A long time ago she had stayed in a B&B in Southwold and was surprised at the number of weekenders from London who were up there, and also how well they seemed to know the county. We were trying to work out why, and came to the conclusion Suffolk is is quite a rural and tranquil county reasonably close to London and easy to get to from there. The relative isolation in the bulge of East Anglia such that nobody goes through it to get anywhere else, there are no motorways in the county for instance.
We haven’t been away for a fair old time, but the weather looked good and there’s no point in living in a beautiful county if you don’t make use of it every once in a while So I thought I’d share some of the local treats.
We started off near Aldeburgh on Friday night with some fish and chips from Aldeburgh Fish and Chips. This place has a seriously good rep, because the fish is fresh.
Aldeburgh fish & chips, unfortunately eaten before I'd though to take a picture
You do have to put up with a fair old queue, this next photo was taken on a chilly December day and there was still a long line.
Aldeburgh Fish & Chips still has a queue on a cold December's day!
Then if was off to find a suitable spot to eat next to the long shingle beach with the roar of the sea as a background. The beach at Aldeburgh is very long, and though of course at the town itself there will be enough other people, but it was easy enough to find seclusion here. We went a little way along the coast road north of the town towards Thorpeness, past the Maggi Hambling shell sculpture to more isolated parts of the beach.
Our fish was very fine indeed. If you’re into self-catering instead and want really fresh fish then Aldeburgh beach is a good place to get it at one of the local fish stalls selling fresh fish just in
Fresh fish stall selling locally landed fish at Aldeburgh
Aldeburgh Beach
This area is a nature reserve and as the dawn broke there was birdsong against the crashing of the waves, including this flock of linnets that appeared in the gorse bushes on the landward side of the road.
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Dawn breaking over the Aldeburgh coastline
simple living: advertising consumerism David Bailey photography
by ermine
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A Close Shave with Consumerism and a Canon G12
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, and that applies to freedom from consumerism too. I came close to being had by the old serpent of gadgetitis lately, and it was the good old 30-day rule for new purchases that saved me from an unthinking purchase suckered by marketing. I might even make the purchase after 30 days, but I’ll make it for my own reasons.
I was looking at Everyday Minimalist’s pictures from China which are quite striking. I’ve never been to China so of course it will be striking because it’s new to me, but I was struck by gadgetitis was when she said
I took each and every shot with my amazing Canon G12 camera.
I will go as far as to say it is the best camera for a tourist because of it relatively light body compared to its packed features, the easy exposure dial on the left to adjust each shot, the amazing flip screen and overall awesomeness.
BF was cursing his heavy “professional” camera the entire 5 weeks, although he loved his wide lens option. He wished he had brought his Canon G11 as well, for quick (amazing) shots like mine.
I know how he feels – I have a couple of SLRs and if you’re going to shoot pictures that will be used in print or of anything that moves then it’s the only way to go – the larger sensor and the fact that the picture gets taken when you press the shutter button rather than some random but noticeable period of time afterwards means a digital SLR is the only way to go – for A4 size and up you need the quality, which is different from pixel resolution, and to capture the decisive moment you need the speed.
But they’re a bear to cart around, and don’t go in your pocket. Plus for some types of photography like street photography you change the action with a big SLR so you need something smaller, like EM’s Canon G12. Or in my case, my Canon Ixus 950
Canon Ixus 950, somewhat worn
Pocket digicams don’t last forever with me, whereas my SLRs are still going, even my film ones, ‘cos they are in a bag when not actively used. I don’t know how people manage to keep their digicams in the sort of condition where they can sell them, perhaps they don’t take them out with them. I can see how girls have a chance keeping them in a handbag, but as a guy I stick the damn thing in a pocket. The trouble is that if you stick a pocket camera in you pocket, it gets to look like this. After a while, dust works its way into the lens mechanism and you get the dreaded E18 lens error. I’ve already had to dismantle this, taking out a bazillion tiny screws to get dust out of the lens mechanism. The only way I could do this was with compressed air, after which some of the dust lodged in the sensor cell so I get dark spots in the sky on bright days.
I use this one if I expect low light and the aperture wide open, and a secondhand Nikon coolpix 4500 for daytime digicam shots. And in general, the photos I took with those a couple of years ago, or their predecessors five years ago, are better than what I shoot now.
It’s not the camera that takes the picture, it’s you
I’ve read a fair few photography magazines in my time, and the spiel is always the same in both editorial and the ads, if you want to take great pictures, get a better camera. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? This advertising was imbibed over many years, all B.F. (before frugality). It still lies there in a corner of my mind, and rises like a snake-charmer’s cobra when I think of wanting to take better pictures.
It’s utter bollocks. The message is always something like:
Psst – wanna take pictures like David Bailey? Use the same camera as he does and you’re away!
For most consumer products, it’s true, because they are consumed passively – if you want to get the same features on your phone as David Bailey then use the same phone as him. If you want to look like Kate Middleton then wearing the same dress as her gets you some of the way there if you’re young enough and of her general physique. Unfortunately if you want to take the same sort of pictures as David Bailey then you really do need to be him. You need to go where he goes, have his contacts, and his vision. Even if I use the very same Olympus Trip as he did, his photos will be better than mine.
At least there is something noble about aspiring to be like a well-known photographer if you want to take pictures, even if it isn’t your camera that will make your pictures great. I detect the strong whiff of decadence in Nikon’s adoption of a well-known generic celebrity to market their current camera line. I had to look him up, because my first reaction was who the heck is Ashton Kutcher, I’d never heard of him? As soon as I saw a picture of him I knew he wasn’t a photographer. Real photographers usually look grizzled and weatherbeaten, rather than some Hollywood pretty boy. Let’s just say that when you Google Ashton Kutcher photography you get a load of pictures of him rather than by him.
I’ve got nothing against the guy, and good luck to him for earning a few more dollars. It’s more the social science of it. Either the ad company was lazy, and generalized the usual ‘if you want to get her look, wear her dress’ ad campaign. I hope so, because otherwise we’re all getting simple, and merely aspire to be minor celebrities by using the same Stuff.
So why are my pictures getting worse then?
It’s not that my camera is knackered. It’s what’s behind the viewfinder that is at fault. I am jaded, I am not living my values. Saving money means I haven’t been anywhere different on vacation for a while, apart from the odd work trip. What you put in front of your camera is half the work of making decent photographs, however, I live in a beautiful county of England and occasionally travel to London for work.
Most cities ramp building height to downtown gradually, but London and LA have planning regs that give this toytown juxtaposition of the old and the gargantuan new. My work mobile did a serviceable job here
Let’s face it, tourists from other countries come to the UK for its sights and history, so it would be rude to use that as an excuse. And I’ve taken enough magazine features even in the last couple of years, so 40 years of experience is still working for me, I can get the light right and depth of field and all that jazz, and basic composition.
So I thought I’d go out into the pleasant Suffolk countryside and shoot some pictures with my old Nikon Coolpix (it was bright enough the Ixus will have spots in the sky from the dust).
Five spot burnet day flying moth
I ran into this red-spotted moth, it’s a workmanlike record shot of what is probably a five-spot burnet. Or maybe a six. Something bored me about this so I figured I could try a bit better, the bugger’s trying to get out of the frame so it was time to see if I could nail him in context.
Moth with some of the Suffolk countryside t keep it company
It’s better. It’s not a great picture, but it’s a step in the right direction, the moth should be pointing up a bit and shame about the moth antenna in line with the thistle spike. I wasn’t able to see subtleties like that on the screen in daylight.
Further on the light interplayed with the water-starved grain which is a sort of greeny-yellow compared to what I think it usually looks like.
Luminous water-starved Suffolk grain. I'm sure it should be a different colour this time of year
All-in-all the trip served me well. it reminded me that it’s not my camera I need to fix, it’s me. That’s not to say I won’t get the G12, but it’ll be for the right reasons. Not because it will make my pictures better, because only I can do that. But because I’m tired of spotting the dust specks out of the sky with the Ixus in Photoshop, and because the flip out screen will enable me to shoot from lower down or higher up than the usual eye level. Perspective is another key aspect of getting better pictures, and eye level isn’t always the best vantage point for a lot of things – like the moth for instance.
Or I might wait, because the greatest weakness in my image taking system is my own inspiration, which is unlikely to be fixed for a year and a bit. I’m not David Bailey, the fire of photographic creativity doesn’t blaze from my very pores, it burns low at the moment. That’s the trouble with anything in the artistic line, it’s moody, and sometimes creativity just goes AWOL. And I learned the memes of advertising sleep for a long time just below consciousness. That is scary…
Listening to the barley bird – one of the pros of cycling to work in a beautiful county
One of the downsides of being a crabby old git on here is I don’t tip my hat often enough to some of the finer sides of life. A year ago I posted about the advantages of cycling to work with the emphasis on it saving money. However, there are other pluses to cycling to work, my route goes next to fields and then across a small patch of heathland, where I was treated to this lovely sound
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It’s the sound of the barley bird. You have to have a heart of stone if you can’t tale a few minutes to listen to a nightingale that has crossed the lonely thousands of miles from Africa. He sits deep in a bush or some scrub and calls out his signal, which he hopes is heard by a lady nightingale who follows his long journey a couple of weeks later. That’s just not the sort of thing that you hear from your car over the traffic over the Today programme. Called the barley bird in old Suffolk because nightingales arrived as the barley was sprouting, according to the wonderful nature writer Richard Mabey
Bike odometer
As for the financial advantages, well, that still holds – I pass the same petrol station and it looks like things have gone up somewhat – petrol was £1.20 a litre then. So I get to save about two pounds a day. Okay, so it isn’t earth shattering, however it adds up. In the time I’ve had this bike computer I have put about 3000 miles on it. I’m a utility cyclist not a recreational one, so most of these miles I’d have driven otherwise.
And every so often I get to hear a nightingale. What’s not to like
fixing things oak-tree low carbon farm: germination heat mat lettuce thermostat
by ermine
4 comments
temperature controlled heat mat success
The heat mat I fixed three days ago has delivered We’ve had lettuce seeds in a cold frame from two weeks to no joy so far, whereas a new batch with heat @ 20°C looks like a win in three days.
lettuce seedlings germinated in three days @ 20C
Now I just need to get a control on the Sankey propagator which uses four times as much power for an area about one-sixth of the size. For all that power it does raise the temperature to over 30°C which is unnecessary, and possibly slightly detrimental.