Energy saving tips for today's economy.courtesy Food Network

With the recent downturn in the economy and increase in gas and fuel price everyone is looking for money saving tips. These money saving tips could be energy saving tips or gas saving tips or even grocery saving tips. In my previous post I talked about a healthy and moderately priced dining out options in the rough economy and recommended Sweet Tomatoes.

Lets see some myths transform into energy saving tips.

Ever thought of cooking salmon in a dishwasher or cooking an egg over your car engine?
Recently while watching the Food Detective Show on Food Network TV I came across these crazy ideas or myths as you call it.
Ted Allen runs the show covering myths around food and drinks along with some not so usual energy or money saving ideas.

How to cook a salmon in a dishwasher:
1. Take an aluminum foil and then apply some olive oil at the bottom.
2. Lay your raw salmon on the oil and then apply some lime juice over the salmon.
3. Carefully cover it up with one more layer of aluminum and then wrap it up nicely so that soapy water does not get in.
4. Load it in your dishwasher with all those dirty dishes.
5. Start your dishwasher with the normal or full cycle.
6. Sit relax and enjoy! At the end of the cycle take out the covered foil and unwrap to see what happened to the salmon !
Food Network claims nicely cooked Salmon thanks to the heat that the dishwasher creates to properly sanitize the dishes.

Late for breakfast , got to get to work quickly? Take that egg break it up and carefully wrap in layers of aluminum foil layered with olive oil and open your car hood. Place it on an engine so that the aluminum bundle with the egg in it does not spill over parts of the engine. The car hood should hold your egg with all the aluminum is in place.

Drive to work , your egg's ready.

I have not tried any of these saving tips but thought these as being quite unusual and worth sharing.

What are your thoughts?

Your money or your life

Recently glanced through this book, especially the section covering the crossover point which signifies "financial independence" after mymoneyblog wrote up an article on this. This point dictates the start of financial independence when your passive income (income generated not by working at a job or business) exceeds your expenses.

The author describes the crossover point by means of this simple figure.




Figure courtesy of the book : "Your Money or Your Life" and mymoneyblog.com.

The author uses the treasury note rate of return to calculate annual return of investment.


Consider the savings invested 60% in one year CDs and 40% in stocks will earn an interest/rate of return of around 4% and 6%(typically stocks should return more) to give an average of 5 % rate of return.

$100k will earn $5k per year or $416 per month before taxes. In reality it will take a long time before which the monthly investment come will touch the line of tip over of financial independence which is the expense line.


However I see that a few milestones could be derived from this discussion. Complete financial independence is the ultimate goal but there could be minor goals on the way. One common example is grocery or eat out bills. This I call as food independence as seen in this example.



There could be other milestones built on the same fundamental idea.

Essentially an individual would like to track the performance of passive investment making some intermediate goals along the path to the final goal.

The crossover in my mind is not a single point but a range. I will discuss that in a separate post.