Tag: USA

Healthy Wealthy and Wise

Your most valuable possession is your health

“The race is long, but in the end it’s only with yourself.” – Line from the song Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) by Baz Luhrmann  

Twenty years ago, Baz Luhrmann released his pop song Everybody’s Free, which was a 7-minute spoken word poem set to instrumental music, offering advice on health and happiness, which stressed above all else, wear sunscreen. The ultimate point of the song is that you’ll be much happier if you take care of your physical and mental well-being. Good heath is a wonderful thing to have, but it’s not a given. You still need to do the right things to care for your body if you wish to live a long life.  

There are no certainties in life except death and taxes. I can’t explain why some people live to a hundred while others die at fifty. My father was a few weeks short of his 58th birthday when he passed away. He was overweight, smoked, drank, and didn’t exercise or eat the healthiest of foods. Clean living and exercise won’t guaranty that you live a long life, but they will drastically improve your odds. Because of advancements in health, medicine, and nutrition, people are living longer. Now I wasn’t even born fifty years ago, BUT by living a healthy, active lifestyle, there is a chance that I may yet still be alive fifty years from now.

This is 2018, fifty years ago it was 1968.

In 1968 these were some of the prices:

Average annual income–$7,844
New house–$14,975
New car–$2,822
Gallon of gas–$0.33
Gallon of milk–$1.21
Loaf of bread–$0.22

Now compare those with today’s prices.  Imagine how expansive everything will be fifty years from now.  I often hear people complaining about how expensive their prescription medication is. Imagine the cost of these medications fifty years from now. And now imagine if you required them because you failed to take preventative steps today to improve all aspects of your total lifestyle.   This is why you have to not only take care of your finances, but your health as well.  

As you know, in two prior blog posts, I covered the both the  possibilities that your money might not last as long as you do, and the opposite where sudden death robs you of a well-deserved retirement. The  THIRD item which you should be concerned about is your health. The most valuable possession you have is your health, and in many cases once it’s gone all the money in the world can’t replace it. This is why along with improving your financial situation, and increasing your knowledge base, you should be taking every step you can to achieve your healthiest physical potential. Just as living to a ripe old age with no money is a miserable existence, so is being so unhealthy that you can’t partake or enjoy activities that require you to be physically fit. Being the best you should encompass EVERY aspect of your life.  

But health food and exercise equipment  are expensive.                                   

If you think health food and exercise equipment cost too much to fit into your budget, consider how expensive it is to be unhealthy and sickly. According to a study in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) There are more obese US adults than those who are just overweight. Almost half the population of the US is overweight, BUT nearly one third of adults are obese. If a person’s body weight is at least 20% higher than it should be, he or she is considered obese. If your Body Mass Index (BMI) is between 25 and 29.9 you are considered overweight. If your BMI is 30 or over you are considered obese.

Being overweight is expensive. Clothes cost more for one. When traveling on a plane, you may be required to pay for a second seat. You may require a certain model of car because you can’t fit into a compact model.  Limited mobility from extreme obesity may require a person  to need a motorized power chair for even short trips. You may need a handicap accessible house with special facilities and ramps.  Have you noticed how many grocery stores and department stores like Wal-Mart have increased the number of handicapped parking spaces and have started providing motorized shopping carts? Next consider the secondary illnesses triggered from living an unhealthy lifestyle. Everything from high blood pressure and heart  disease  to adult onset diabetes. All of these require treatment with medications, which can be each have side-effects requiring additional medications to correct.  Taking all of this into account, what’s REALLY more expensive? How much more expensive will it be fifty years from now?

First off, I don’t smoke or drink alcohol. These are expensive and bad habits that only deprive you of your health and wealth.  If you are doing these unhealthy things, for God’s sake please quit doing them today. Then apply the money you same towards your new healthier lifestyle. You can always find ways to fit healthier alternatives into your budget.  Secondly I’ve been a vegetarian since college. Ovo-lacto, NOT VEGAN. And no, I have no intention of going vegan either. I like my milk products, eggs and honey far too much.  Going vegetarian will cut your grocery bill while improving your health. Meat is expensive and not really good for you either.

 

“Ninety per cent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.”– nutritionist Victor Lindlahr

The shorter the ingredients list is, the better off you are.

Many of today’s groceries  are filled with preservatives, chemicals, fillers, and dyes. Also they are overly processed and sweetened with high fructose corn syrup or sugar. Some still even have trans-fats.  No wonder diabetes and obesity are rampant in our country. We’ve become a nation of junk-food junkies.    

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I’m not going to tell you that healthier food doesn’t cost more than junk food, but good health is PRICELESS!  The extra money you are spending for organic, non-GMO, ‘health’ foods, and supplements may seem pricey at first, but imagine how much better off you’re going to be in your golden years when you aren’t wasting all your money on dozens of medications to combat all the future health issues you prevented by living a healthy style today.  Not all of the food-swaps you will be more expensive. Bottled spring water is cheaper than soda. V8 vegetable juice is good for you and has less calories per serving than soda or fruit juice.  An orange or a banana are cheaper than most candy bars. Better for you too. Ditch white bread altogether! It’s one of the worst foods out there.  Switch to wraps such as Flatout flatbreads, or sprouted grain breads like  Food for Life’s Ezekiel 4:9 Bread, or   Dave’s Killer Bread, the #1 best-selling organic, whole grain, Non-GMO Project Verified bread available.  They even have bagels!

I usually like eating a PB&J sandwich for lunch, and when I do I ONLY use the BEST peanut butter Crazy Richard’s  (which has ONE ingredient: PEANUTS), and my favorite pepper jam from Jacky’s Jams and Jellies.   Jacky’s Jams are handmade, all natural, fat free and no gluten added. Also no preservatives or food coloring added. Just a few simple ingredients.

Here’s some other suggestions you can do to improve your health:

Keep track of where you are in your journey to better health

Most successful fitness enthusiasts keep a fitness journal. This can list everything from the days you exercise to your weight or what you eat. I’ve been recording my weight weekly for years. Having something to chart my progress really helps to keep track of where I am, where I was, and where I want to be. 

Add supplements to your diet  

A multi-vitamin can help supplement some of the vitamins and  minerals necessary for good health. You decide what’s right for you. Just be mindful of the dosages. Some discount vitamins may not pack as much punch, or lack potency due to inferior contents. Do your research and always remember that you get what you pay for.

Look into Chiropractic care

I’ve been seeing a chiropractor regularly for years. I feel they are essential to good health, a credit them for my lack of back and neck pain. Again you decide if this route is good for you.

Therapeutic Massage

Treat yourself to a massage to release toxins and improve circulation. I go monthly for a 90-minute full body massage. It’s worth the expense and I feel wonderful. 

 “You can do it.”– Fitness guru Tony Little

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Join a gym.

The average monthly cost of a gym membership in the US is about $40 a month. Look around, there are some discount gyms out there.  Planet Fitness  offers memberships for as little as $10 a month. I have the Black Level membership which has a few extra perks and just cost $21.99 a month. I like the fact that they are open ’24/5′ M-F,  7am to 7pm Sat & Sun. It fits my busy schedule. The advantage of joining a gym is that you’re not buying expensive exercise equipment that you’re only going to use a few times and then hid in the basement. 

Of course you can always do sit-ups, push-ups and jog for free.

No matter what you do, the only way to effectively lose weight is to eat right, eat less, and exercise.

Look what’s for dinner!

Skip eating out, fast foods, or frozen microwave dinners. Cook fresh healthy meals at home. Subscribe to a meal-kit delivery service. They deliver the meals to your door in kit form. You just follow the recipe and do the cooking yourself, all the ingredients are provided (excluding butter, cooking oil, salt and pepper).    There are four major meal-kit delivery services that I know of in the USA. FULL DISCLOSURE: The ONLY one I have used is Hello Fresh.  Some of my friends and co-workers have tried the others.  I am one-thousand per cent satisfied with the vegetarian menu  from Hello Fresh. I had a discount code to try it, (most do) and I decided to give Hello Fresh a try for one month to see if I liked it. I didn’t need a month. ONE BOX was all it took. I have cooked some of the most  amazing, healthy, flavorful  meals I have ever eaten.  I URGE you to try a meal-kit delivery service, and I will let you chose which is right for you. They all appear to have similar offerings, websites, and prices. Most run about $60 a week for three two-person meals. As I am single, I usually cook the meal, eat one serving and have the second  serving the next day as leftovers. Because you’re dealing with fresh foods, you MUST cook the entire three meals within five days max.  If you decide to try Hello Fresh, use my promo code EXPRESSOM to get $40 off your first box.

Four Popular Meal Kit Services Listed In Alphabetical Order.  

I have been using Hello Fresh now for three weeks. I have cooked some amazing meals.

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This is in the Hello Fresh box. Three recipe cards, some promotional offers, and a big insulated cold bag with an ice pack containing, three 2-person meals, each meal separated in a smaller paper bag.

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This is the contents of one bag, the Yellow Squash Flatbreads meal.

hellofresh3Here’s the finished meal. Delicious! IMG_0070

Who needs to go to a restaurant when you can cook fine meals like this at home? Fresh herbs, fresh ingredients, few if any preservatives. If you have basic cooking skills and a basic assortment of kitchen utensils,  pots and pans, you can cook these meals easily in about 30-50 minuets, prep time included. Discover what great food tastes like.

Another benefit of the meal kit is that it helps teach you portion control. The caloric information per serving is listed on the recipe cards. As each meal makes exactly two servings, you become accustomed to what is a healthy amount of food. Binge eating is disastrous to your health. Like I said, I cook the two person meal and eat the second serving  the next day for dinner as left overs. So my three meal Hello Fresh box is providing me almost a full week of healthy dinners.

Again, all of these suggestions are just that, suggestions. Only you can decide what’s right for you. Fitting all of the above into your budget may be tricky and take time depending on your financial situation, but neglecting your health all together will prove to be far more expensive in medical costs decades from now. An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure. As always, I wish you happiness and success!      

 

   

 

Be American, Buy American!

Is there really a trade war?

When I was much younger, there was a period where I lived with my aunt Arleen and uncle John. This is a long story, but the short and simple version is that my mother couldn’t even take care of herself, let alone me. My uncle John was a retired union employee. A popular slogan used in advertising at the time was ‘Look for the Union Label’. This was meant to encourage consumers to buy not only domestic goods, but domestic goods produced in union shops which supposedly provided better conditions, benefits, and higher wages for employees.    

My uncle had a coffee mug which I really, really liked. The mug had pictured upon it The Great Seal of the United States (used to authenticate certain documents issued by the U.S. federal government), and the phrase ‘Be American, Buy American!’ But, in tiny print under the last word was printed ‘Made in Japan’.  It was a novelty mug meant as a gag, but I laughed so hard the first time I saw it, that it stuck with me all these years.

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Nowadays, cheaply made products come to the USA more from China than from Japan. We import goods nationally to provide alternatives to local varieties, or to give consumers an item not locally produced, for instance Australian  Vegemite  or its cousin British Marmite.  I like them both, but they are strictly foreign goods and sometimes hard to come by, as well as expensive.

Consumerism is driven by both supply and demand,  as well as wants and needs. I may want Vegemite, but I don’t need it. And if it’s in low supply and priced quite high, I’ll settle for the lower costing Marmite which is more readily available. In the case of similar products both in high supply, it comes down to preference. Bottom line, you can have anything you want in the world, as long as you are willing to pay the price.

Which brings us to such topics of importing, exporting, free-trade, and tariffs.

 Importing and exporting are easy enough to understand. We export or ship-out goods to foreign countries where there is demand for the good, and at the same time import exotic items like Vegemite and Marmite from overseas. It gets trickier when the items are ‘the same’ though.  I might be tempted to buy a foreign good over a domestic good if the foreign product is significantly cheaper.   If free trade exists between countries, a foreign country which can produce goods at a lower cost can flood the other country with its goods.   This is where tariffs or duties come into play. A tariff is a tax imposed on a foreign good. Tariffs are bad for consumers. They are mostly good for domestic companies, and the government.     Tariffs increase the cost of foreign goods and decreases consumption of the lower priced import. Let’s say the US decided to slap a $5 per jar import tax (tariff) on Marmite, raising the cost from $5.99 to $10.99. The one jar a year I currently buy would drop to ZERO. I REFUSE to pay that much for a mere 4.4 ounces of something I like, but don’t necessarily need.

Types of tariffs

There are five main types of tariffs, protective, prohibitive, specific, ad valorem, and revenue:

  • – Protective Tariff:  These push up the price of imported products as a protective measure against foreign competition.
  • – Prohibitive Tariff: the tax is so high that it makes an import far too (prohibitively) expensive.
  • – Ad Valorem – the tax applies to a percentage of the imported good’s value. For example, an ad valorem of 10% would mean that a product costing $100 would sell in the market of the importing country for $110.
  • – Specific Tariff: A tax is levied on the specific amount – which could be the good’s weight, number, or other measurement.
  • – Revenue Tariff:  Imposed solely to raise government income rather than to protect domestic producers.

In each of these cases, the consumer will pay more for the good, or discontinue its use all together and the only one really benefiting is ‘The Tax Man’. Taxation is theft! 

“Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.” ― Murray N. Rothbard

 FREE TRADE

NAFTA, The North American Free Trade Agreement is the largest free trade agreement in the world. It was negotiated by three US presidents (Regan, Bush, and Clinton) before it was finalized and signed in  1993 by President Bill Clinton. NAFTA became law January 1, 1994.

This is great for consumers in North America because it keeps the costs of goods low. But with free trade, if a product can be produced cheaper in a foreign country, there is no need for local production.  This resulted in a loss of US jobs when companies like HERSHEY CHOCOLATE shifted production to Mexico where non-union labor was much cheaper.  (Unions, like tariffs can also kill local production, but that’s another topic altogether.)  If a company can import a product cheaper than they can produce it, and still turn a profit, they will shut down plants, slash jobs, and shift their business model from producing to simply shipping. Business is business. Here’s your pink-slip, nothing personal.  

So it falls back to the consumer to ‘vote with their wallet’ if they want to protect American jobs and products. If you like a band and want to see it flourish, buy it. If nobody buys the products a company produces, they will either change their products or cease operations. Successful business rarely shut-down overnight without some long-standing cause.  Many times there is an American made item that is comparable to the foreign produced good. Often the cost is same, but occasionally even  a little cheaper. Sometimes not.  Many domestically produced goods will sport an American flag and proudly proclaim made in the USA.

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I buy Pepsodent toothpaste, Pennsylvania Dutchman Mushrooms and often check the country of origin. If it’s made in the USA, I’ll buy it over a foreign brand. Even if it’s just assembled in the USA, it still means American jobs. If there’s no readily available domestic equivalent, I will only then purchase the foreign import.  For me, it’s patriotism and I have the means to support my spending habits.  I do understand that there are many cash-poor people in my country for whom every penny counts, and they MUST buy whatever is cheaper, but if you live in the USA and you are in a financial position where you can support the US economy by purchasing goods made in the USA, I encourage you to do so. The job you save may be that of a friend or relative. There are many companies online that sell US made products like  http://madeinusaforever.com/ for one.  

As for the manufacturers of Marmite and Vegemite, no worries mates. 

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As always, I wish you success and happiness!