My favorite lazy meal right here. If you're too lazy to make a spice rub, just pour half a bottle of barbecue sauce in the crock pot with a whole chicken and you're good to go.

I'm with you on not needing soap with every shower.

I love this idea and have preordered some Soylent.

I love this idea and have preordered some Soylent.

My current strategy for not exceeding my grocery budget was to decide any money under budget goes straight into a vacation fund.

I am an R&D Engineer who designs and develops new medical devices for a living, and my advice on kicking off any startup idea is to avoid the medical industry. There's a reason it's largely dominated by a few monstrous companies: getting FDA clearance is ridiculously expensive.

Of after-tax income, 30% goes to Roth 401(k) and Roth IRA. Then another 20% goes to a combination of savings and paying myself back after paying my wife's school loans.
That's the benefit of my wife and I sharing one '96 Civic and living in a small 2-bed apartment with no kids. I'd rather retire early.

I have a 2010 iMac and last year upgraded from 4GB to 8GB of RAM, and honestly I can almost never tell a difference. Photoshop, Logic Pro, Final Cut, can't tell any difference. I think I can load a dozen more tabs in Chrome before it slows down but it's really hard to tell. The RAM upgrade was barely worth the $20.

Find a program at a school that hires undergraduate Teaching Assistants. After acing a freshman level class and applying to TA that class my junior and senior years, I got a tuition waiver and monthly stipend those years. It's a great hourly wage compared to campus jobs and looks better on a résumé.

If you know your expenses in advance, you can still use Mint to budget for them as goals. Set up a goal to save $1000 by next month, another for $750 the next. I don't know how to use Mint with variable income.

If you have Aldi stores near you, I'd recommend them. I just switched from Mariano's to Aldi for the majority of my groceries and have cut my monthly food budget by about 20% while eating better. Some items are sub-par but you'll never know the difference on most items.

I'm definitely a slow riser, but a shower makes me ready to be awake and productive instantly. My wife, however, is chipper in less than 2 minutes and ready to be annoyingly hyper. But she's cute so it's okay.

My wife is gluten intolerant, and we used to buy a lot of GF breads and pay out the wazoo, but recently she cut back and just eats less grains in general, and feels way healthier as a result. Not healthier like there were traces of gluten, just general less carbs healthier. And it's cheaper.

This is really cool. I wish the timer app did the same to allow you to set a timer for a number of seconds.

Bicycle to the train (Metra) to a shuttle bus which drops off a 5 minute walk from my office. Do I win for using most methods in ine day? I need to add a boat in there...
It's 90 minutes each way, but at least my wife is a 20 minute subway (El) ride from school where she works and takes night classes, making for a long…

That's a good point, I guess you can always put more down on a house to lower total interest paid. I already have the 401(k) and Roth IRA maxed out and about a years worth of post-tax income in savings, so I guess I just need to decide whether my continued savings should go towards paying off my eventual home purchase…

So what are you supposed to do (eventually) with this 20% savings? Once you have an emergency fund, if you have no need to buy a car and no plans to buy a house for at least 4 years, do you just let that savings grow with no goal or occasionally dip into it for a vacation or that sexy new Mac Pro? Should those kind of…

I was there in spring semester of 2006 and compared to Chicago, housing was way cheap, and food/transport was 30-40% less expensive than what I was used to.