Author Archives: Maria Langer

Don’t Tell Me How to Spend My Money

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I tell yet another long backstory and get a few things off my chest. Sorry about the dirty laundry.

The other day, I did something I didn’t want to do: I bought a new monitor for my computer on Amazon.com.

The Monitor Backstory

It isn’t that I didn’t want to buy the monitor — I definitely did. Years ago, when I wrote books for a living, I had a wonderful computer setup that consisted of a 27″ iMac with a 24″ second monitor. I needed all that real estate for the work I was doing, laying out book pages on one screen and working with images, files, email, social media, and who knows what else on the other. It made my work easier and more pleasant to do, especially when I started getting involved in video projects for my helicopter YouTube channel, FlyingMAir.

But things change. I sold the helicopter and stopped doing videos. I bought a boat and started spending months on it at a time. I didn’t need a desktop computer so I traded it in for a new laptop. Along the way, I sold that second monitor, which, in all honesty, wasn’t that good anyway.

Dell Monitor
Here’s the marketing photo of the monitor I bought. Looks like a photo from Death Valley near Dante’s Point with a shit-ton of post processing and the saturation amped up, no?

But now I’m spending more time at home again, prepping to lay out another book, and making boating videos for my personal YouTube channel. So I bought a Mac Mini from Apple and bought a 27″ Dell UltraSharp monitor from Amazon to go with it.

The monitor is great and has more useful features than I need to cover here. It was working okay, but I really did miss that second monitor. So when I got home from my brief (comparatively speaking) trip south this winter, I decided it was time. I’d buy another monitor — preferably the same model — and set it side by side with the one I already had. It would make me more productive, I reasoned (whether rightly or wrongly). And yes, I’ll admit that the desire for some retail therapy weighed into the purchase decision.

And that brings me to Wednesday’s purchase.

The Amazon Backstory

I have been using Amazon.com since the only thing it sold was books. I was a Prime member when it was $49 (or maybe $39?) a year and all it got me was free 2-day shipping. I have spent thousands of dollars on Amazon over the years — sometimes more than $10,000 in a single year.

Sounds like I’m a real fan, right? Well, maybe I was but I’m not anymore. I dumped Prime when it got up to $149/year. (I think that’s what it is now, no?) I don’t watch TV and 2-day shipping is something Amazon stopped doing to my home back around Covid. I don’t like the way Amazon dominates the market and is putting smaller businesses out of business. I didn’t like the way “marketplace” vendors could be unreliable. I didn’t like the way search results — unless you had a specific make/model in mind — brought up so much crappy Chinese junk. And when it screwed up three of my orders right before Christmas, I started wondering why I was using Amazon at all. Surely I could just find stuff elsewhere.

So around mid-December 2024, I stopped buying at Amazon. Completely.

It wasn’t easy. You don’t realize how easy it is to fire up the Amazon app on your phone or tablet, find what you want (or think you want), and order it. With Amazon out of the picture, I had to source the things I couldn’t find locally elsewhere. It was a struggle. But I was succeeding. Up until Wednesday, I hadn’t ordered a single thing from Amazon. That’s about two months.

And I would have kept up the streak if it weren’t for the damn monitor.

Shopping for This One Specific Thing

Before you comment with advice on what I should have done, please read this…

  • I wanted this monitor, not some other make or model.
  • I wanted a new monitor, not a used or refurbished one.
  • I wanted to buy from a reputable source, not some guy selling on eBay or Craig’s List.
  • I know Best Buy will match prices, but not online. The closest Best Buy is a 2 1/2 hour drive from me.
  • Costco does not carry every single make/model of monitor and I am not a Costco member anyway.

I really did think this through. This post might be long, but it doesn’t include every single thing I did and thought about this.

You see, I wanted the exact same monitor. I knew it would work well with my Mac. I confirmed that it could be daisy-chained, via USB C, to the one I already had. I knew that my little Mac Mini could support two UHD displays. Not only that, but because they were identical, they’d line up perfectly, side by side, on my desktop, making a seamless ultra-wide monitor with plenty of easily accessible real estate.

So I fired up Duck Duck Go — my current search engine of choice; don’t get me started on Google — and put in the monitor’s model number: U2723QE. Of course, Amazon appeared at the top of the search results, but I ignored it. I figured that I’d buy it at B&H, which is where I’d seen it at a slightly higher price than Amazon in autumn.

But that price had gone up. And, to make an already too long story a tiny bit shorter, I’ll summarize my shopping experience: the monitor was more than $100 less on Amazon than anywhere else. And I think I looked just about everywhere.

Dell Monitor on Amazon
Although most pricing I saw was in the $540 to $590 range, I actually saw this monitor for more than $600 on AliExpress, which someone on social media suggested.

My Dilemma
My Mastodon post. Imagine me getting the whole story in less than 500 characters!

I stressed over this purchase. The way I saw it was that I had two choices: (1) I could save more than $100 by breaking my No-Amazon streak and buying it on Amazon or (2) I could skip buying it. There was no way I was going to spend $100 more than I had to.

I discussed this dilemma on my social media network of choice, Mastodon. The replies started coming in. The general consensus was that avoiding Amazon purchases when possible was a good thing. But when I needed to make a purchase and Amazon’s price was far better than anyone else’s, I should just go for it.

Bought Monitor
I posted this on Mastodon on the thread about my self-imposed moral dilemma.

So I did.

And Now to the Point of this Post

All that is backstory. What would one of my blog posts be without backstory?

It was one of the replies to my post about the purchase that really got under my skin. I don’t want to put the poster in the spotlight because maybe that person didn’t mean to trigger me. But I was definitely triggered and that’s what this post is all about.

The reply was:

You could always donate a portion of the money you saved to an organization you support…

I was (possibly unreasonably) offended by this.

The main and somewhat obvious reason this might offend me is the insinuation that I don’t normally contribute to charitable organizations. That cannot be farther from the truth, as I attempted to make clear (with possibly some humor?) in my response:

The organization I support right now is my grocery bill, which was $200 yesterday for one person for one week. And I didn’t even buy eggs. ;-)

Throughout the year, however, I donate to NPR, Wikipedia, World Kitchen, Pro Publica, Goodwill, the Humane Society, and others. That comes to a lot more than what I saved today.

Ben had it right: a penny saved is a penny earned. The more I save, the more I can spend elsewhere, whether its on me or for charitable donations.

(The Ben I’m referring to here is Ben Franklin, of course. He was a smart guy, even if he never really did say “A penny saved is a penny earned”.)

But the deeper reason it offended me was because I saw it as someone trying to tell me how to spend my money — and that is a particularly sore spot with me.

Don’t Tell Me How to Spend My Money

The way I see it is this: I earned everything I own, either through hard, smart work or through good investments. No, I didn’t get everything right, but I got enough right to put me where I am today as a financially secure home owner with enough money in the bank to make money one of my lesser concerns in life. There’s no generational wealth propping me up — as a few people with giant chips on their shoulders seem to think. Since graduating from college back in 1982, I have never asked for or received any financial help from anyone in my family or elsewhere, no matter how much I needed it.

Factory Photo
Here’s a blast from the past: on November 23, 2004, I took my sister and brother to the Robinson Helicopter factory for a tour. By an amazing coincidence, it was the same day they put my helicopter on the assembly line. Here I am standing next to hull #10603, holding a photo of a mockup based on a friend’s helicopter.

One of the ways I got to financial security was by making enough good financial decisions. The purchase of this monitor at Amazon for a savings of $100 is an example on a micro level. The purchase of a $346K helicopter, straight from the factory, that formed the basis of a lucrative 15-year career as an agricultural pilot is an example at a more macro level.

I spend my money the way I see fit. Yes, I have three vehicles, but the newest one is 12 years old. (The oldest is 26 now.) They all run, they all serve their purpose. And they’re all paid for. Why should I replace any of them if they’re doing what I need them to do? Why would I want to spend money on something with no real benefit? I’m not trying to impress anyone with what I drive. Why should I?

The Fleet
I’d rather have three old vehicles in my garage than just one with a loan on it.

Do you realize that the money I saved by not buying a new (to me) vehicle every two years — as my wasband was so fond of doing — is probably why I was able to pay off the mortgage on my home in less than 10 years? Do the math, folks. Home ownership might be more within reach than you think if you just adjust what you’re spending your money on.

And that’s the point. We all need to decide what’s important to us. It’s more important to me to have financial security with a paid-for home than to drive something new and flashy every few years. It might be more important to you to get your kid into a special school than to buy a home. Or more important to buy assets or get specialized training to build your business than take a vacation in Europe. We need to make our own decisions — and to respect the decisions of others.

The Sore Spot

Two and a half years ago, after spending a total of 10 weeks with two different boat captains on their boats along the Great Loop, I decided I wanted to cruise the Loop in my own boat. I had sold my helicopter and my charter business and had money to spend on a relatively new (but admittedly costly) “pocket yacht” that would meet my needs. I was very excited about the purchase and my upcoming journey. I wanted to share that excitement with people who meant a lot to me.

Boat for Sale
This is one of the photos on the brokerage website. I have a fondness for red, but that’s not what drew me to this boat. It was absolutely perfect for me — and a good deal, to boot.

But rather than them accept my purchase decision, they decided that they needed to tell me what a bad idea it was and to tell me what I should do instead. Their reaction made a few things clear:

  • They didn’t know me very well. This is nuts considering I already had a track record of doing unusual things.
  • They didn’t trust my ability to make my own financial decisions. This is also nuts given that I’m probably in better financial shape than they are.
  • They thought they had the right to tell me how to spend my money. This is also nuts given that neither one of them did very much of interest with theirs.

This situation put a rift in our relationship that has yet to be mended. I was offended by their stance and made it clear to them. They have neither apologized nor made any efforts to repair the rift.

And this is what makes people telling me how to spend my money a sore spot.

I should mention here that, like the helicopter, the boat and the experiences it has made possible have given my life a new trajectory at a time I really needed one. I completed the 8000+ mile Great Loop trip and am working on a book about it. I’ve already written articles about it. I’ve become a USCG licensed boat captain and have already done some paying work for people who needed training on their own new boats and have secured gigs with at least two boat training organizations. I’ve become a certified boat instructor for single and twin engine power boats. And I’ve put my boat — which is a valuable asset, after all — into a charter program where it will earn money for me this coming boating season and possibly seasons beyond. None of this would be possible if I had not bought the boat that they told me not to buy.

They might be satisfied sitting at home, pulling pages off their calendars as the days of our lives tick by, but I’m not.

Are you still reading?

This post has been an unusually circuitous drive. Like so many of my blog posts these days, I wrote it, in part, to clear my mind of things that were bothering me. Someone insinuating that I didn’t make charitable contributions — by suggesting I do so with the savings on a computer monitor purchase — both bugged and triggered me. I felt a need to get this — including the dirty laundry that went with it — off my chest.

I guess the message I have for you is this: money is probably one of those topics we shouldn’t be talking about, like religion and politics. If you feel the need to tell someone how to spend — or not spend — their money, why not hold back? Unless the person is making a lot of seriously dumb decisions that are causing financial harm, they probably don’t need or want your advice.

Instead, why not take a closer look at your own spending habits and how they are serving you?

Puzzles and My Aging Brain

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I develop a daily puzzle routine — with friends — to keep my mind challenged.

I’ve always been a fan of word games and puzzles, whether it’s something like Wordle or a crossword puzzle or the Washington Post’s excellent Keyword game. I’ve been doing them on and off for a while, but have recently made them, and other games, part of a morning routine.

The Routine

I wake very early — usually between 4 and 5 AM. (And please don’t lecture me about going to bed later; don’t you think I’ve tried?) I don’t mind waking up early. A year or two ago, I developed a morning routine that kills those first two or so hours pleasantly. It consists of these things, usually in this order:

  • Morning bathroom visit.
  • Make coffee.
  • Put my Apple watch on the charger. (I wear it overnight to track my sleep.)
  • Get back into bed with my coffee and turn on the light. (It’s still dark here this time of year at 5 AM. It won’t be in a few months.)
  • Use my iPad to check in on social media. I’m on just Mastodon now and I’ve used extensive filtering to block out 90% of the political crap going on. (I do this for mental health reasons. I still know what’s going on, but I don’t have to live and breathe it.) So catching up on what went on overnight is usually pretty quick.

  • Keyword Results
    Last week’s Keyword Results. I think this might have been my best week yet; the big challenge now is getting my averages down.

    Play a few daily online games: Wordle, Connections, Keyword, Sudoku (all three levels).

  • If I woke up really early, sometimes I’ll do a crossword puzzle; I have a great app on my iPad with more than 100 Sunday puzzles saved up and ready to go. (I don’t want to start my day before 6 AM unless I have something I need to do that early.)

By the time I do all that — the difficult level of Sudoku usually takes 25-50 minutes — my pups are ready to go out. If not, I wake them up and let them jump all over the bed, excited that we’re going to start our day. Then I throw on some clothes, take them outside (or for a walk, possibly on a leash if we’re on the boat or in the camper). When we get in, they usually go back to bed, but sometimes they wait by their dishes for food and I feed them and then they go back to bed. (Seriously: my dogs sleep a lot.)

Wordle

I have two Wordle buddies, Cheri (an old friend) and Teri (a neighbor). Every morning I play and send them my results. I have to use the Send Later feature on my phone so I don’t wake them. (Not everyone uses Do Not Disturb, although I don’t think I could live without it.)

Back when I had just one Wordle buddy, that buddy went on a trip to Europe and didn’t post her results. Because I didn’t get a text from her (and had not carved my morning routine in stone yet), I forgot to play and broke a 118-game streak. That really pissed me off. I’d rather just lose one day to break a streak than to break it by simply forgetting to play.

Then I started sharing results with Teri, too. I joke with her that it’s my proof of life. If she doesn’t get a Wordle text from me by noon, she should come make sure I’m not dead.

Connections & Sudoku

Connections and Sudoku are new to the routine. I used to play some Wordle-like puzzles that had me solving four or eight or even sixteen Wordles at once, but when Teri introduced me to Connections, I decided to mix things up a bit.

Connections gives you 16 words and you have to figure out how groups of four of them are related. It’s a lot tougher than it sounds, especially until you get the hang of it. I like it because it makes me think of each word in multiple ways. Because there’s no timer, there’s no stress. I get it 5 or 6 times a week. I think my longest streak was 6. That’s okay. I love the challenge.

I know that Sudoku has been around forever but I never got sucked in. I’d always seen it on paper and it looked like a lot of work. But then I discovered the digital version on the Washington Post website. It does the “pencil work” for you, leaving the task of using logic to fill in the grid. In the beginning, I didn’t fully understand the ways I could look at the pencil work and grid to logically deduce answers or eliminate possibilities. I found myself at a point where I’d have to guess, and I knew that wasn’t right. So I did some research and learned.

Sudoku
Here’s what today’s Sudoku looks like on the web. I usually play it on my iPad and it looks different, but not by much. I have what I call the “pencil work” showing. If I were doing this on paper, those little numbers would need to be manually penciled in (and erased) after scanning each row, column, or 3×3 grid to figure out what numbers are possible. The digital version keeps this updated, but at a certain point, I have to modify the pencil work to eliminate the little numbers using logic. That’s the part I like best.

Each day there are three puzzles: easy, medium, and difficult. The easy puzzle is painfully easy — I’m not sure why I bother with them. The medium puzzle is a good warmup for the difficult one. I love the way I can get to a point in the difficult puzzle where I seem stuck — and then use what I’ve learned to scan through the pencil work and eliminate possibilities. Then look at it all again and start getting answers.

I’m extremely pleased with this difficult Sudoku because it really makes me tap into my brain power and use logic. It forces me to focus. I know that I can solve the puzzle if I look at it in all these different logical ways. I’m really using my brain and I feel the challenge. I love it!

Solving Puzzles as a Diagnostic Tool

I think that my ability to solve difficult puzzles is what’s going to cue me in when I’m heading into cognitive decline. I live alone, so there’s no one around to tell me if I’m starting to slip mentally. It’s up to me to diagnose any possible problems. I look at the difficult Sudoku as my daily test to make sure my brain is still functioning. If I can’t solve the puzzle, I have a problem.

I know my short-term memory is getting bad. For example, I’ll solve the Wordle and text it to my two friends. Later, after 7 AM my time, I start getting their results. By that time — just an hour or two later! — I can’t remember what the answer word was, let alone the words I used to get it.

I don’t think my memory is a problem, at least not yet. I have tools and techniques to work around any short-term memory issues:

  • I keep an open spiral notebook on my desk to write down things I need to remember for a day or two. I tear off the sheets when I no longer need the notes.
  • I have a to-do list app on my phone, tablet, desktop computer, and laptop that automatically keeps the lists synced, so I can add items anytime, anywhere and have them available when I need them. I even use this for my shopping list and things I need to do 2 months from now, like changing the HVAC filter.
  • As I mentioned elsewhere, I use Scrivener to take notes on things I need to remember long term that aren’t things I need to do, like the size, in pixels, of the featured image on my Great Loop blog — why can’t I remember that?) Those files are stored in a Dropbox folder so I can access them from any device, anywhere.

As things stand, I’m not worried about memory or cognitive issues. But I’m getting older and I need to be aware of the situation. I think my puzzle solving abilities will be a good indication of how things are.

The Uncertainty of Politics — and Its Affect on Small Business Investors

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I come up with a new goal and a business plan to go with it — and realize that this simply isn’t a good time to take risks.

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you should know a little about me, but if you don’t, let me fill you in on what’s important to know for this post.

At Chicago
I crossed my wake in Chicago on August 12, 2024. Here’s my boat, Do It Now, in a slip at DuSable Marina in Chicago, exactly 6 feet away from the slip I started from in October 2022.

I’m currently 60-something. I retired from my most recent career as a helicopter pilot in 2023, after selling the helicopter, the charter company, and the cherry drying company in 2022 and 2023. I took the proceeds from those sales and used them to buy a 32-foot “pocket yacht,” which I shipped to Chicago in October 2022. I then spent most of the next two years cruising on that boat, alone and with friends, along the Great Loop. (I blog about that in my Great Loop blog, so if you’re interested, please check it out.)

Big Garage
The bigger your garage is, the more stuff you’ll accumulate to fill it.

I finished my Great Loop trip in August 2024 and trailered the boat back to the Seattle area, where I launched it in Puget sound. I then spent most of the next month cruising around there and the Inside Passage before bringing it home and cramming it into my very large garage for the winter.

In those final days on the Loop — keeping in mind that I covered more than 8,000 miles — I realized that the part of the Loop I liked the best was the northern part, say from New York City all the way up to Canada and then west into the Great Lakes. There’s nothing quite like cruising in the lakes, rivers, and canals of New York and Ontario; I felt that I could do it forever.

At Valcour Island
Here’s Do It Now anchored off Valcour Island in Lake Champlain in June 2024. I could spend a lifetime exploring the waterways of New York and Ontario.

Wouldn’t it be great to do it every summer until my age caught up with me and I was done boating?

Goals

I’m a person of personal goals and finishing the Great Loop left me kind of floundering without one. I also felt weird about being retired — not having anything to do to bring in a few bucks to cover my living expenses. I was living off my retirement savings, waiting a few more years to start collecting social security, and it didn’t look as if running out of money was going to be a problem. (I’m remarkably thrifty about some things.) Although my side gig as a silversmith did bring in some money, it was small change without the potential to get much bigger — unless I was willing to spend five days a week in my studio producing jewelry and a bunch of time finding new markets for my work. I wasn’t.

But when I finished the Loop I felt the inklings of a new goal coming on, a new business endeavor where I could spend eight months of the year cruising northern inland waters and the remaining four months soaking up the sun in Arizona. I’d use my captain’s license to offer one- and two-week cruises to a specific potential market of people, cruising in the waters I wanted to explore while teaching them what I knew about cruising. The money I brought in would cover my cruising expenses, reducing my cost of living and helping me preserve some of those retirement savings.

I’m Going to Need a Bigger Boat

But there was a catch: I needed a bigger boat.

I needed a boat with two full sleeping cabins. My guests would get the good one and I’d take the lesser one, but the lesser one had to be a lot bigger than the lesser one on my current boat. I needed to upsize and I had a few models in mind.

Of course, all of these bigger boat options, although pre-owned, would cost a significant amount of money. I figured I’d get that money by selling my home, which is fully paid for, and my current boat, which has a small loan. (I could go into a long lecture about having a paid-for home, but I won’t do it here.) I figured I’d put all of the boat proceeds and half the home proceeds into a bigger boat and use the rest of my home proceeds to buy a modest place in Tucson. After all, although I love my current home, I don’t like it nearly as much during the four months I’d be taking my annual break from the boat. Surely I wouldn’t miss it.

When I was in Arizona, I looked at homes and land and actually found two different lots that were perfect for me. One would be easier than the other to build on, but I’d still have to build on it. I built my current home, acting as General Contractor while the experts did the stuff requiring experts and I did the rest. Did I have another build in me? I thought maybe I did.

American Tug
What a deal! This 2014 American Tug could be mine for just $610K! Not what I was hoping to spend, however.

So all this is what was going through my mind when I cut this winter’s trip to Arizona short so I could attend the Seattle Boat Show. I had multiple goals for the show, but the main one was to look at used boats in the marina portion of the show. And I did. I actually found two models that would work perfectly for my new business.

The unfortunate thing was that they cost about 50% more than I was hoping to pay. Oops.

Okay, well maybe I could get a small business loan. I had good credit and could work up a business plan that would pass muster. My number-smart brain — did I mention I have an accounting degree? — went to work considering possibilities to make this happen.

How the Current Political Climate Stopped Me Cold

Meanwhile, the demented old narcissist that half the country thought should be the most powerful man in the world got sworn into office. (Did you notice how he didn’t touch the bible? I think he was afraid he’d burn his hand with the lightning God would send through it.)

And things got pretty weird pretty quick.

I won’t go into a litany of the weird shit the Orange Clown and his South African crony, the Space Karen, have subjected America and the world to. First of all, I couldn’t list it all. I stopped following the news. All I know are the things that have crept through my social media filters, things I’ve heard while I had my head in the sand and my fingers in my ears singing la, la, la, la, la at the top of my lungs.

And even that is enough.

More than enough.

Boat Longing
There will be no return to Valcour Island in a boat anytime soon. But I will get to cruise the Pacific Northwest this summer so I’m not as sad as this picture might make me look.

More than enough to tell me that I’d be insane to invest time and money in a new business in this crazy political climate. Tariffs will result in inflation far beyond what we saw over the past few years. Job losses from the shutdown of government offices and the cancelling of grants will put people in dire straits. Another recession, which is definitely possible when the guy making laws by signing executive orders keeps making asinine decisions, will make it highly unlikely that anyone will want to pay me to take them on a cruise. (Unless there’s a chance I can smuggle them into Canada, I guess. If Canada even lets us in.)

More than enough to tell me that I’d be a complete and utter fool to walk away from a paid-for house to build a new one in the kind of economic uncertainty we face, where the price of lumber and building materials could jump 50% — if such materials were available at all. And in a red state? A place where the majority of people think calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America is a good thing that proves their cult leader has their best interests at heart? (How are those egg prices doing, my deplorable friends?) And how long before they cut our social security and medicare benefits — the exact thing most Americans in my age group are relying on to take care of them in their old age?

Am I nuts?

No.

So there won’t be a new business in my future. (Well, at least not one beyond the tiny business I started late last year and will talk about elsewhere.) There won’t be cruising in the freshwater lakes, rivers, and canals of New York and Ontario and beyond, at least not in a new-to-me, bigger boat. There won’t be a new house on five acres of desert land in the foothills of the Rincon Mountains near Tucson.

There will just be the financial security and comfort of the home I’m in now, a home I love eight months out of the year. I’ll keep myself busy enough.

And learn to be satisfied without chasing down another goal.

I still have that camper for a winter escape.