In the world of Save. Spend. Splurge.: How much does convenience really cost? + Concentrate Shampoo/Conditioners + Other Articles

1. GIGGED OUT

Seriously, if you are in Canada, you can watch this entire documentary – THE GIG IS UP – on CBC Gem, and I highly recommend it. If you use ANY service that is convenient, from having food delivered to your door, etc, this is an extremely enlightening view on how the industry works, what people go through, what the workers think, and not just in Canada, but in the U.S., in France, in China.

2. CONCENTRATED

I just realized that some people think that what I was doing with the concentrate bars for shampoo and conditioner, came in a plastic bottle!! No not at all, my whole thing is to try and be as low plastic as possible. So, I switched over to shampoo and conditioner bars about 2-ish years ago. I tried a whole range of brands from local to online, to random clothing stores selling them beside them so I could meet the shipping requirement to get free shipping.

In the end, this brand Ethique is the absolute best for a shampoo/conditioner bar. It doesn’t leave my hair greasy, or strip it of all oil like a regular soap bar (trust me, I went through a phase where I gritted my teeth and used up a shampoo bar that left my hair in greasy lanks of oil).

I am very committed to no plastic and low waste, but I really didn’t enjoy rubbing the bars on my hair or my scalp, I preferred a lotion of some sort, or a liquid like regular shampoo/conditioner.

ENTER: THESE CONCENTRATE BARS!

They are sold in little paper packages that are recyclable, and you take them home, break/chop them up and then melt them down to reconstitute them into a liquid with hot boiling water. Then you just pour the liquid into a bottle you have that you can continue to refill over and over again. I ran out of shampoo/conditioner bottles (who keeps empties? not me..), and had to end up buying ONE SET of plastic, cute looking shampoo / conditioner refillable pump bottles to refill with.

Long story short, I love this option. It’s the best. Zero additional waste (save for the one-time buy of the plastic refillable bottles), and I can continue buying concentrates in a paper package and refilling the bottles over and over again.

Small little caveat – I would suggest chopping up the bars very finely, or using a grater (this is my next step to try), to get them as small as possible in the bowl BEFORE pouring the boiling hot water on them, as the water needs to melt them, but cools quickly in the bowl. That’s the only kind of finicky part I think, but I also suspect that the lumps you see in the bowl eventually melt in the containers as liquid over time, so it may not be that big of a deal in the end.

Here are some photos:

Me chopping it up in the bowl to try and get it to melt faster. I do not recommend doing this, chop them up beforehand.

Second attempt with chopping them beforehand and THEN mixing the water in, worked a bit better but now I am going to grate the bars instead to get a finer melt.

And these are the cute plastic refillable bottles I got to reuse over and over again. I got them off Etsy from this shop but there are so many other options if you search refillable shampoo bottle (in different colours etc), the label won’t melt or peel off in water and it’s plastic because glass in the shower is not a great idea even though I would have preferred this option.

Again, if I had some empty shampoo / conditioner bottles leftover from 2 years ago, I would have refilled them instead of buying more plastic (I think Ethique also just recently came out with concentrates but did not have them before), but alas, I do not keep empties around. But at least, this is ONE bottle I can refill for years to come.

You can get 20% off with this link here. I don’t think the link expires, it’s my referral link and I think that I get points towards my next order, or something like that, if you use the link.

3. CORRECTIVE ACTION

This is a great, simple article that explains what is happening to the stock market these days. It’s a correction. Will it last? Maybe. Will it last forever? Unlikely. If we look back until 1935, you can see all the years where January wasn’t great. Some years, it picked up in February. Other years, it didn’t, and by the end of the year, we ended in the red (most notably 2008).

Honestly, I am looking at the average return of these bad years, and it doesn’t look bad at all. The only “bad” year was 2008 and it was a good buying opportunity in the end.

Also, not that many really since 1935 until 2021 (too soon to say if 2022 is also “bad”), if we only have 17 to look at, it means there were 69 years of RETURNS over the years that were red.

So what should you do? The answer is simple – keep investing, even as the market is dropping, and invest consistently.

Don’t try to time the market. You don’t know where the bottom is, just look at 1935 – it started “badly” for Jan and Feb, and ended going up 41.4%, or even 2009 where it started badly, and ended up going up 23.5% at the end of the year.

Don’t sell everything and take it all out to sit in fear in cash, unless you have a dang good reason to do so.

Sitting on cash during inflationary times is the most counter-intuitive thing to do with your money, rationally speaking. Cash is worth less and less as the years go on due to inflation. $100K today, buys $50K tomorrow (I am being facetious, but this is just to illustrate a point).

4. TANNED

I rather like this boxy turtleneck from Paisie. They have it in Navy as well, which might be a better colour for me as I find Camel / Tan difficult to wear because if it is fitted to your body, it looks like you’re naked.. especially if you wear camel/tan pants it is isn’t clearly defined in the silhouette that you are indeed, not naked. This whole brand is fire actually, because their roll neck jumper is also super cute.

5. HISTORIC

I always say that I enjoy buying vintage bags, especially classic items because it is like buying wearable history. I really enjoyed watching this Christie’s presentation on the history of Gucci in 10 bags.

(She speaks kind of fast however, and should have slowed down a bit, it sounds like she is trying to hit some sort of time limit.)

It’s well made, well done, interesting take on vintage bags, and talks about what is inside, the patterns, and I found it more interesting than their logoed prints of today which I am not a fan of. Gucci, BRING BACK YOUR VINTAGE PRINTS!

6. GLORY

This book is magnificent. It’s photographs taken of the most beautiful children, dressed up in costumes, with their own notes on their hopes and dreams. It shatters “standards” that are set for black children in terms of beauty, and some of the photos are so STUNNING. I see it partly as a style book as well, because I’d definitely want some of these outfits.

7. SELFISH

How much of yourself, your true self, should you really bring to work? I find this question interesting because I cannot separate who I am from who I am or try to be at work. I’ve tried it. I have tried not saying much, not getting personal, not trying to. connect with people, but I feel like it just stifles me. I like knowing about people, their personal lives, and seeing them as colleagues. I try very hard not to be so much of an open book but it is hard. I just don’t want to deal with the hassle of being judged unfairly for whatever reason, but in the end, it is hard not to judge someone even for the little bits that they show.

My partner however, is from France. In France, it’s 100% professional. People at work are not friends, they’re colleagues. You don’t really talk about your personal lives, and you don’t hang outside of work, very rarely actually going to lunch with these people during a work day. I find that quite cold! You could go years not knowing a single personal factoid about them. But every work culture is different and I personally thrive in an environment that is more North American, though my partner tells me this false camaraderie at work that people put up as a front to show like they are friends, does not fool him. He finds our general societal friendliness grating because he knows it isn’t genuine. People make plans to meet up, or give false promises but they do not follow through.

I disagree to a certain extent. I think some colleagues can bond like friends, and others, you just smile and grit your teeth, or just are polite but not necessarily trying to be friends with them. But real friendships can come out of work environments, though my partner does astutely point out that these do not last past the work environment / stage. Once you leave the company, even the department, it’s rare to keep in touch and he finds a lot of this geniality quite false in our culture.

8. DUFFY

I am a SUCKER for duffel bags, and this one is catching my eye. There’s something about a great duffel bag in leather that looks incredible, though I don’t have a use for it in my lifestyle necessarily as I am not traveling for the weekends. I want to think I would use it normally in day to day but I really wouldn’t as it’s massive.