Biking? Eating healthy? Working out? Learning a new technical skill?

**You are already an amazing person.** But don’t let that stop you from getting even better.

For me? I’m participating in #30daysofbiking. I’m not going to bike all 30 days. But I’ll be better than I was last year. And I’ll get more exercise, which is usually zero.

But I am a parent of 3 kids. How do you teach them to relate to technology in a sensible and appropriate way? Especially when each generation uses technology advances so differently.

Let me explain with an example: Email

I fall into late Generation X. I grew up without the Internet, and by college, email was available and it was the norm. Today, my generation couldn’t tell you how often we check email. We have it open constantly – all day long. It is a primary and preferred mode of communication for pretty much all of our dealings. The phone? Too slow.

From what I can tell, the generation before me – Baby Boomers – do not use email all that much. My parents read & reply to email a few times a day. They have email and use it, and that’s about it. They certainly don’t live email the way I do. Their peers in office settings use it a bit more.

The generation after me? I hear they don’t like email. Too slow. They prefer social media messages, and text messaging. A year ago Pew Research found that the average 14-17 year old sent a 181 text messages a day. That’s over 5000 a month. Like with email for my parents generation, I know of and use text messaging. But certainly not 181 messages every single day. That’s crazy!

Separating Technology from Generational Differences

The goal is simple, right? Raise kids that are sensible, that are kind and compassionate, and listen well. Kids that work hard, and know how to maintain good balance with all of the weird stuff life throws at you.

I see things like 181 messages a day and get confused. My wife sent(*) me an article, Tweens and Texting by Maria Green who is having a similar struggle. Her kids were staying up late to send text messages, and the content of the messages was questionable. One of the commenters was shocked by the 5000 messages their kid sent in a month.

But if the content is age appropriate, and the kids are respecting their curfew’s, is 5000 messages in a month an inappropriate use of technology, or is it just a generational difference? How can you tell?

If Different, then When?

I’m inclined to say it is just a difference that we old folks will need to get used to. Which is fine until you get to the next tricky question. When do you let the kids have some of these technologies? There doesn’t seem to be a precedent. I had a computer when I was 6 years old, but not an email address until I was 18, and not a smart phone till about 30. We have an iPod Touch for our kids (ages 9 and younger) to use for playing games, taking pictures, making videos. It’s pretty awesome to see what they do with the photos and videos.

Our 9 year old reads lots of books (non fiction and fiction alike) and hasn’t quite made a jump to reading much online. So we have a little time. But he does like to look up Lego prices on Amazon. He’s done some simple text messaging already under close supervision, but it’s far from where we would let him have an account of his own. He’s just not that interested yet, and there are almost no people who he’d converse with. That’ll happen soon though.

And I wonder. When should we give him an account and let him spread his wings just a little further, while he is still under our roof and we can help him learn to use the technology sensibly?

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(*) by text messaging!

The thing I love about the Quick Wash, is that it gets most things clean, but not everything clean. That may seem counter intuitive to you, but the way I look at it is that the short wash uses just enough water and just enough energy to get the job done.

The few dishes that it misses I just run through a second load.

If the dishes all came out perfectly clean with every wash, how would you know that the dishwasher is using just enough water & energy? It might be wasting 2 or 3x the energy to achieve that perfect rating.

Perfect, as they say, is the enemy of good.

The Setup

So there’s this successful blogger, Mr. Money Mustache. He writes about “Early Retirement through Badassity”, which is cool and interesting. My wife and I have been following his posts for a while now and even have read through a bunch of his back-catalog. We’ve been using it as a yardstick to measure how frugal (responsible?) we are with our own finances and to help us focus on the right things. This has been great, but I had to unsubscribe today. It’s not because his ideas are bad, but because his ideas work best for a very narrow subset of people. And I’m not one of them.

This is not a complaint post. This is a MMM-isn’t-for-me post.

The Things We’re Good At From a Mustachian Perspective

We already use his ideas in many ways!

• We live close to where I work. < 10 miles.
• I take the bus every day. This let us get rid of one of our 2 cars.
• Last summer I biked to work ~20% of the time. Aiming for better this summer.
• We contribute on a large hobby farm, grow a few food items on our city lot, can food for the winter, and hunt in season. This reduces the grocery bill a lot.
• My wife is an amazing cook, and can make a tasty meal appear out of almost nothing. Our food bill is silly cheap.
• Cheap fast internet. I pay annually with the city wireless, which works out to be about $25/month compared to $50+ if I went with the cable company.
• We don’t pay for cable. Technically, don’t even own a TV, though we do love Netflix.
• We pay about $3/month for our home phone via Ooma.
• We save for retirement. Not much right now, but we have a little something put away.
• Our debts are minimal: a used-car loan that will be paid off this year, a home mortgage, and a little credit card debt that is getting actively paid down.

The Ways I’m Not a Mustachian

1. Family Size.

Mustache has a 2-adult, 1-child family. My wife and I have 3 children. The feds say each child is a $3,800 exemption every single year. It’s pretty obvious to everyone that more people adds more expenses, but few understand the sorts of places this can show up. The obvious is groceries. Less obvious, tickets to any event – like to the Children’s Museum or to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts is more costly. Or splurging on a dinner-out — by almost twice. The family car needs to be bigger and, with little kids, needs to be safer and more reliable for more years than a more mature family would feel the need for. A car alternator gone bad on the highway is one thing if it’s you and a 6-year-old and another thing entirely if it’s you and a 9, 7, and 4 year old. Mix in a “I have to go potty” and stress can go through the roof. This is not an impossible situation of course, just immeasurably harder with more kids. MMM’s suggestions such as driving an older car work better with smaller families. Another aspect of this is:

2. Safety & Housing.

MMM thinks that Safety is an Expensive Illusion, and in many cases he’s right, but I can tell you in terms of buying a house, neighborhood safety and house expenses can and have to be measured (murders, poverty, vacant/condemned buildings, violent crime, etc.). It would be interesting to do a study on it with precise numbers, but from my review of the real-estate listings and crime data put out by the city police department, every mile you got closer to downtown (where I work), the price of the house went up by $25k and the crime increased noticeably. Safety is not an illusion in all situations, and it matters with kids. When we moved into the city, we paid a premium on a house in a stable neighborhood with a low crime rate. We’re not in the fashionable part of town, but we don’t have to worry an inordinate amount about some of the problems that comes with living in an urban area.

We moved to a new house 2 years ago (to be closer to work – a very mustachian thing to do) and wanted space to accommodate three kids. If we’d only had one child we would have had smaller, cheaper houses to choose from in our area. In the end we found one in a safe neighborhood with ~1700 square feet and 3-bedrooms. And we finished more of the basement to turn it into a ~1900 square foot 4-bedroom because…

2. Home Schooling.

… we wanted a room for school. A place where we could set school up, gather all of the books, and make a space that the kids could not mistake for another play area. The space also doubles as my home office on the weekends. It’s worth underscoring here that because everyone (except me) is home all day long, every single day, that the personal space for each kid is more important.

The reasons we home school are many and varied, but despite all of our worthy reasons for choosing this lifestyle it does come at a cost. The catch is that although we’re already paying for public school through our taxes (and glad to do so), getting materials for schooling at home is an added expense. Those used books and piano lessons aren’t free! We try to be as economical as possible, but it’s still a financial output for our family. Some might critique our decision to opt for this educational plan when there’s a free program down the street, but we feel it’s an apples to oranges comparison to what we’re offering at home, despite the expenses. It’s cheaper than private school.

3. Pre “Badassity” Income.

MMM writes for the high-income earner, though he does attempt to be more broad. Depending on how you read his Is Tbis Blog More Powerful than Doubling your Salary? article, he says that an appropriate income to aim for is “around $100,000 per person per year”. So he and his wife were probably pulling in 6-digits each during their peak earning years (did he say so explicitly anywhere?). $200k/year puts you in the top 4% and by popular opinion, barely middle class. You don’t have to make hard decisions or even be that smart to save up the $20,000 deductible needed to get to make his $237/month Health Insurance Plan a workable option. He notes that a one-time $20k “would not be a significant hardship for us”.

I’m 15 years into my career in a great industry (software development). I’ve been very fortunate to have had abilities and interests in a field that the world has deemed very valuable. I got to ride most of the Dot Com boom, and was minimally affected by the bust. I work hard and am considered to be smart by my peers. Yet we’re a single income family and not anywhere near the top 4%. A $20k hit would be a very significant hardship.

4. iPhone

God knows, I could learn to enjoy more things that are free. But I am a technologist and I love my gadgets. An iPhone can be pretty expensive when compared with other bills, but when I look at the use from the cost-per-hour that I get out of it, it’s one of the most affordable tools and cheapest avenues of entertainment available to me.

So I read about his $10.00 Per Month iPhone Plans and I wonder why he even has a smart phone. It assumes less than 250 minutes on the phone a month (no problem), but also assumes that you never use a mobile data connection. Any mobile data use will rapidly bump up that monthly cost.

I use cell data all the time. Sure I have wifi at home and again at work. But these are not the same place for me, and when I’m traveling on that bus twice every day I catch up on email, I read the news, I send (free, data-only iMessage) text messages. The idea of a no-data smartphone doesn’t make sense to me. What’s the point? Seems like getting a nice iPod Touch and one of those pay-as-you-go phones would be a better option.

I did look into another alternative: If I dropped my iPhone plan entirely I could pick up an iPad Mini with a monthly only-data plan. I’d break even after about 12 months and save $50/month from then on. Text messages would be limited to iMessages with my iOS friends, and SMS messages for everyone else would route through the clunky Google Voice. Out-bound Skype phone calls would be a dubious effort and in-bound calls would mostly end up in voicemail. I’m still thinking about it, but the cons feel too strong and the ROI too far out. So I stick with the phone plan.

You can be a Mustachian if you like.

I like his ideals. Conspicuous and mindless consumption is the norm and I like how he makes people question their lifestyle assumptions and expectations. But when I read his suggestions for saving and simplifying a budget, it seems as though we don’t have the scratch to participate. His website doesn’t account for larger families or already conservative budgets. I’ve made decisions in my life that shouldn’t be antimustachian, but have worked out to be antimustachian in practice. Like being a single-income family and homeschooling, or living in the city with its increased cost of housing. Or paying for piano lessons for the kids.

And then there’s the whole snowball effect that MMM has benefited from. He started off making a lot of money which afforded him the ability to save a lot of money quickly, allowed him to retire early and subsequently purchase cheap insurance. And because he’s retired/working from home, his need of a cell phone is also quite different from the rest of us commuting/working middle-class folks. I don’t want to seem as though I’m belittling the work or discipline that it took to save that money, or to begrudge the independent mind that resisted the lure of our consumer culture. It’s just that my start in life was quite different and I just can’t relate.

This chart shows the visits to Edstrom.net over the course of the 2012. Dark green is day with a lot of visits, light green is fewer. Looks like I had a lot of visits in December on the The Right Tool For The Job post, and also in April on my Custom Fabricated T-Pole Clothes Line post.

Want me to make one for you and your site? Shoot me an email at peter@edstrom.net. $20. You can see a high-res version here.

Find out who’s solved your problem and run with their solution.

It pains me to see friends and family try to save a few pennies here or there, only to lose hours of their time instead. Over and over, this happens. Stop it. The “what you need for this job” problem has already been solved. Your job is to recognize and clearly understand your problem and then find the solution that others have already created. Saving a few bucks is not worth the pain, aggravation, and inconvenience you will suffer over the duration if you try to solve it yourself with a half-solution. Here are a a few places I suggest you start:

Product Reviews: The Wirecutter

The site picks out the best product in a lot of different categories. They review the reviews, and make a call for you. The next time you buy a flat screen TV, or a multi-function printer, don’t waste your time researching it. Just buy whatever they recommend. Or if you prefer, use Amazon’s “Best Selling” or “Avg. Customer Review” sorting. Decide is a nice extension that will help you track a product prices so you can buy when the price drops.

Hardware and Software: Apple

This may be passé to recommend, but I do it because of all my Android-loving and PC-loving friends. Apple (and their products) get accolades all the time, for very good reasons. Get a Mac. And an iPhone. And an iPad. Stop debating PC-vs-Mac or Android-vs-iPhone. The mental cycles you will loose trying to force-quit an app on an Android, or verify that the copy of Angry Birds you found isn’t malware, or installing and updating virus software on a PC … that time can never be salvaged. Go Apple, and you’ll be amazed at how many of your problems just melt away. (*)

Software Photo Management: iPhoto

Get your photos into iPhoto. Order some 4×6′s without any website upload hassle. Even better, order a photo-book for the grandparents. Enable Photo Stream and never have to import photos from your iPhone again – they just magically show up on your computer, ready for printing. While your at it, install Cards and start sending (snail-mail) thank-you cards. Right from your phone. iPhoto solves all my digital-to-print photo needs.

Password Management: 1Password

Everyone has a password problem. Too many passwords, for too many web sites. You’ll remember your password but forget your username. And which email address did you use on that site? I have about 300 passwords stored in 1Password. The iOS app and the Desktop app with the browser extensions … well worth the expense. A little command-\ and I’m logged into any site, anywhere. Very useful, and I’ve stopped worrying about saving passwords. I only have to remember one password. For security, I print off all my passwords once a month and put it in our safe deposit box.

To Do List Management: OmniFocus

There’s a highly-anticipated new version to be released very soon, so don’t buy it quite yet. This is the To-Do app to conquer all other To-Do apps. Yes, there are others that are prettier. And others that do That One Thing a little better. But this is the one based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, and supported by Merlin Mann’s productivity bend (you know, the guy who invented Inbox Zero). And built by the incredibly smart Omni Group. These folks were the first to figure out how to enable you to use Siri to create to-do’s in OmniFocus, without Apple-provided API’s. It’s a great app. But more so, it’s expensive. It’s my theory that if you pay a lot for high quality, comprehensive to-do management app, you’ll stop trying yet another to-do app, and just hunker down and use the one you’ve invested in. It worked for me, and I think it can work for you.

I’m not saying any of these are perfect. But that’s sort-of the point. Can you make an Android phone your perfect phone? Maybe. But if I told you that it’ll take you 20 hours to configure it at the start, and another 30-minutes-a-week for on-going tweaking, and all that work will result in a phone that is just slightly better than a plain, un-configured, not-jailbroken iPhone … straight out of the box … is it worth it? I say no. Stop saving pennies with your hours, and just get the nice thing that will make you happy. Start this year.

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(*) I know I’m biased, but it’s a long-term bias with a foundation in both camps. Today I tried installing an Android simulator on my Mac for the fun of it. Within the simulator, I tried installing the ever-popular Flipboard app. After a frustrating install start (“here’s three stores you can install Flipboard from, but only one of them works!”), a dialog popped up with the install progress. “Installing” was in the menu title. And it was blinking. You all remember that <blink> was the “most hated of all HTML tags,” right? Well apparently Android people forgot this lesson from 15 years ago.

… facts & data

… your beliefs and world view

… your experience (which is also data)

No one is really illogical in their opinions. Or at least they are not internally illogical. It’s just that their beliefs, world view, and experience may be a more powerful influence to their final opinion than the facts and data you present.

A prerequisite to having “priority” is having something to spend: attention, money, or resources.

Basically this means that I’m certified as a bit of a data nerd. I like digging into what visitors to your web site are doing, and measuring how well they are behaving the way you want. Are they visiting and leaving right away? Are they confused? Did they find what they wanted? Did they see what you wanted them to see? Why not? Where did they come from? Where did they go? Was your latest email effective at getting them to visit?

Anyway. They say you should measure what you want to improve. And I can help with that.

If you want some insight into the world of Understanding-Your-Web-Site-Visitors, let me know. Maybe I can help.