Hello Raisa,
I hope that you are well. This week, I am just sharing a few of the things that I have been working on and what I have learned.
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"What's for dinner"
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Getting a new fridge
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Hurting my arm
Dinner:
As a parent, you always have to figure out what you are going to do for dinner. Sometimes this question can become overwhelming. Dinner can easily become an ordeal that takes a few hours between, figuring it out, cooking, eating, and cleaning up.
As I told you before I have been reading Naval Ravikant's work. He talks a lot about leverage and figuring out how apply leverage most effectively in your life. I have been thinking about how I could more effectively apply leverage to dinner.
The absolute most effective form of leverage in this situation is that we hire someone to cook and clean up for us. That is a bit out of reach for us. The next closest is for us to order out. We have been doing this quite a bit lately and it really does save a lot of time.
I wanted to find something in the middle. I am currently experimenting with Hello Fresh. I was able to get four meals for four people for $89. That is a pretty good deal. For reference when we order out it is somewhere between $30 - $50 for one meal.
The experience has been good however, I don't think that it is something that I will continue doing. I did, however, learn a very valuable lesson. Cooking meals in the oven is great! When you make a meal that is baked there is prep time and then everything just cooks for a while and you don't have to do anything. You are free to either clean up or work on something else.
Fridge Negotiation:
We have been having problems with our refrigerator. It is about 20 years old and it is starting to fail. We have decided to get a new one. I realized today that I could have done a much better job of negotiating when be bought the new one.
The key to negotiating is doing your homework and truly understanding the market. I didn't do that when I went to pick out this fridge. We simply compared prices between the different fridges and then we compared the price for individual fridges between stores.
I failed to think about the entire experience like delivery times, and level of delivery service. We ended up just buying the fridge at the Home Depot here in town. The price was the same as other places when I looked online so I just went for it. However, I have come to realize that the Home Depot lead time is longer and their delivery options aren't as good as Lowe's.
If I had truly done my homework I probably could have either negotiated a better deal at Home Depot or just have made the purchase at Lowe's instead. My issue is that sometimes I spend way too much time trying to figure out what is best. In this case the fridge was failing every few days so I had to make a decision quickly (side note - I was able to use Youtube to figure out how to fix the fridge). We are still getting the new one though.
Getting Hurt:
I have always been pretty strong and capable. Often times I would push myself and do silly things that put my body at risk. It took me getting hurt two times to finally understand this lesson. The first time was in June of 2020. I had been running a lot. I wanted to do a half marathon. My right foot had started to bother me while was training. But, I was stubborn and didn't want to slow down in my running. Eventually, I injured my navicular bone and had to stop running for months. I actually, had to wear a boot, get an MRI.
More recently I have been doing workouts with bands. It has been going great. I have been losing weight and getting stronger. Then I got stubborn and I was doing work on the chicken coop. I really should have asked for help but I decided to do it myself. I ended up tweaking my shoulder. Now I haven't been able to workout for a few weeks.
Best,
Dad