sh00g

Seltzer water 99% of the time. Ski otherwise!

1. For the first few years of my career after college which has a pretty generous 401k company matching scheme I put the maximum amount possible into my retirement accounts and lived well within my means to build up a nest egg. Now that I am married I have dialed back my investments so we can afford to live a little bit nicer with the knowledge that we have a really great start in our retirement accounts.

2. My wife and I moved in together two years before getting married. This made living substantially cheaper for both of us and made us positive that we wanted to live together and could tolerate each other prior to tying the knot :).

3. I got a vasectomy mid-last year. My wife and I both agreed long before marriage that we only want to adopt. Adoption is obviously very expensive, but now we have the peace of mind of knowing we have full control over when we start to invest in that process to expand our family. No “accidents” can happen which is very liberating.

To add on to this explanation, the food industry in the US is chock full of fake marketing terms that are designed to get more eco-conscious consumers to fall into their trap. This is a problem across large swathes of the food industry, but one of the most egregious is chicken.

• “No antibiotics” is supposed to mean the chicken was never given antibiotics (shocker, I know). There is no regular methodology for verifying this label is accurate outside of random sampling of poultry at slaughter.
• “No hormones” is a completely useless label you’ll see used all the time. Hormones are not allowed in the production of chickens for slaughter in the US.
• “Cage free” is another tricky one. Chickens are almost never kept in cages when raised for slaughter. Hens are frequently kept in cages for egg-laying purposes. If you see this on chicken breast packaging it probably doesn’t mean anything.
• “Free-range” means the chicken had some kind of access to “outside.” There are no standards for how much “outside” space is required or what that “outside” space has to look like.

So unfortunately a bit more legwork is required to make sure product labeling statements are actually worth something. That’s a problem in the US, but the opposite side of the coin is problematic too (like how many people now attribute “GMO” as meaning “toxic”).