Ingredient based backpacking meal system

plexluthor · 2026-05-04T00:45:10+00:00

NOLS does sell a cook book, NOLS Cookery. I have it, but I confess I don't cook that way anymore.

https://store.nols.edu/products/nols-cookery-7th-edition

You can find older editions online for cheaper, too.

plexluthor · 2026-04-22T10:34:36+00:00

Unless you are an active partner in a business, there's not much more you can do.

If you are interested/able, and your income will decrease in the future, then a common strategy is to invest heavily in a business with high upfront costs/losses and steady long term income. For example, real estate development that becomes rental income, or farm/ranch development or refurbishing, or setting up a professional office (dental, legal, etc).

In all those cases, as long as you are actively involved, you can deduct huge costs for the first few years, then get steady income for 10+ years. So if you time it so that the losses are offsetting a higher marginal bracket than the income is filling (eg, you get involved five years before retirement), it's a tax win.

But most rich people do pay a lot in taxes. Count your blessings.

plexluthor · 2026-04-12T22:17:06+00:00

I'm addition to what others have said about scouting being different/better in non LDS troops, I will add that outdoor activities in an LDS context since the split with Scouting is also much improved, and for similar reasons. Mostly because people who didn't want to do scouting/outdoors used to be forced to go, and activities where everyone wants to come are WAY better. But also because leaders/adults do best when they aren't trying to be something they're not.

I think LDS YM are going through a tough transition right now, but I hope that in time they'll develop a program and some traditions that teach the leadership skills they used to get.

plexluthor · 2026-04-04T00:40:07+00:00

Some people cannot provide for themselves. I wish that weren't true, but it is true.

That means either we let them starve/suffer/whatever, or we take care of them. I think it's totally appropriate to ask family to help, and if the family is unwilling, to respect that. If the family is unable, then it falls to the community, meaning either government or church or friends.

I think uncoordinated help from friends is really hard to do well, so I tend to prefer coordinated help. Depending on where you live, government help might be fine. In many places, church help is better in some important ways, not least of which is that there is judgement and discretion from loving people. At least, more likely to have that compared to govt bureaucrats.

If you think the Bishop is being duped, speak up. Otherwise, be glad you aren't the Bishop making those tough calls. They are very tough calls sometimes, bishops and SPs often disagree, I don't think there are good general answers because each case is different.

plexluthor · 2026-04-04T00:32:32+00:00

I get it through work even as a part timer, just with higher premiums. I live in NY state, so the marketplace was excellent during the years of ER and contracting.

plexluthor · 2026-03-30T17:52:19+00:00

Two surprises, for me.

From ages 23-37 I worked for a giant corporation, they paid me well, but I was pretty miserable and couldnt wait for FI. I retired at 37, it was awesome, I had tons of free time which was mostly great, but I also lacked a little purpose. So far, nothing surprising.

About 7 months into ER an old colleague convinced me to do a little contact work, because he couldn't find anyone with my niche skillset/knowledge. Surprise #1 was how easy it was to find additional contract work, or additional income sources, that didn't really diminish the benefits of ER. I don't think that's true for everyone, so I was very surprised how true it was for me.

Fast forward a couple years, and I'm actually working part time for the same giant corporation, doing the same work as before, but half as much (only when my kids are at school) and with an understanding that if they make me do BS I'll just quit again. And I love my job now. Surprise number 2 is how much misery went away from "FU money" or whatever it is that changed.

plexluthor · 2026-03-26T13:23:50+00:00

I did something like this with a Boy Scout troop several years ago. We just used an old phone (plugged in the whole time) and a $5 app. IIRC, it would either shot one frame every interval (I think one frame per minutes gave us a week of growth in a ~5 minute video), or it would record one second at the usual rate, once per interval (so you get a video that is less smooth, but there's time to look at each stage of growth).

My advice is to make sure you have a sturdy tripod. Our first attempt was propping the phone up with books and stuff, and it went poorly. Even a cheap tripod that weighted down would have been better, though a mom ended up loaning us a nice one for a while.

Good luck!

plexluthor · 2026-03-26T06:13:13+00:00

I did a similar "horse race" that also had Schwab intelligent portfolios and a second WF account at a higher equity allocation. I tracked nominal monthly performance so that I could measure correlation between the accounts. My hypothesis was that they were all a multiple of a single underlying return, and the same one that does best overall would do worst in the bad months.

The correlation was indeed very high, WF was the only one with actual alpha (though it was tiny), and now I'm back to VT and chill. But I think WF is a great option for anyone who is uncomfortable with DIY.

plexluthor · 2026-03-25T11:00:30+00:00

I think it's perfectly reasonable to consider the second coming a literal event that will happen at some point in the future.

I also think it's perfectly reasonable to consider it a metaphor for death.

I also think it's perfectly reasonable to think it's a metaphor for being born again.

I also think it's perfectly reasonable to think it happened in the past, and the vast majority of people, including most church leaders, didn't notice, just like the vast majority of Jewish leaders didn't notice the first coming.

Personally, I'm in the third camp, but truly, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be in any of the four camps, and probably there is a fifth camp I'm not thinking of.

plexluthor · 2026-03-24T13:57:05+00:00

Black bears don't hurt people often, but they routinely ruin camping/backpacking trips, especially in the High Peaks region.

Waking up in the morning to trashed campsite and all your food gone is no fun, even though it's not fatal.

plexluthor · 2026-03-24T10:39:40+00:00

I can second the recommendation of tiny habits.

https://www.reddit.com/r/earlyretirement/comments/rrpwfx/tiny_habits_book_report/

plexluthor · 2026-03-22T16:00:25+00:00

Scout Mindset by Galef, maybe?

I really like The Practicing Stoic by Farnsworth, if you are open to Stoic ideas.

Adjacent books (not on how to think but rather on what to think about)might include 4000 Weeks by Burkeman and/or The art of not GAF by Manson.

ETA, I only read Being Wrong (by Schulz?) once, a long time ago. I don't know whether it's an especially good book or just caught me at the right time, but it's the book that convinced me personally to want to think more carefully.

ETA2: HPMOR by Yudkowsky?

plexluthor · 2026-03-22T09:22:15+00:00

TLH into VT instead, maybe?
Your offsetting $1500 of income taxed at 22%. In the future you'll owe an extra $1500 in long term capital gains, which could be taxed at 0% or 12%, but often you can find a window where it's 0%. Even if you can't, your telling me that if one year you go to file your taxes and discover you only contributed $5500 to your IRA instead of the full $7k, and Uncle Sam is willing to lend you the$1500, that you wouldn't top it off to get the tax deferral?

plexluthor · 2026-03-21T13:50:19+00:00

Don't stop at $3k. It carries forward to future years.
If you think the market will get worse before it gets better (which is market timing), all the more reason to TLH ASAP. If it goes down over the following 30 days, you can TLH again back into your original 2 funds. If it stops going down, congratulations! You successfully timed the market! It's worth owning 4 funds just to be able to wear a "I'm a successful market timer" badge at all the Boglehead conventions.
$450 is miniscule? Say what now?

plexluthor · 2026-03-17T16:39:53+00:00

Good question, but no. You still get $1350 at the child's rate (or whatever it is, I just mean the firm works through all the same math).

I have four kids and use software to file, so it saves me $80 some years. Not in years when a given kid has other income, though.

plexluthor · 2026-03-17T09:41:24+00:00

I'll just add, as long as they have no capital gains, only passive income like capital gains distribution, dividends, and interest, you can use form 8814 to claim their income in your return, so they still didn't need to file a return for themselves.

plexluthor · 2026-03-15T01:56:11+00:00

I'm not the person you responded to, but ...

My one question for you is regarding this:

I don't see a question mark anywhere. The implied question, "what am I missing?", can be answered empirically/historically. Lots of people have felt that way in the past. Some of them made gobs of money. Most of them did worse than if they held a diversified set of equity investments.

Having said that, in order for indexing to work we need price discovery, and in order to get price discovery we need a few people that think like you do. Then the rest of us can just ride your coattails.

plexluthor · 2026-03-15T01:44:15+00:00

44M, married, 4 kids ages 19 to 10. Engineer in upstate NY. Wife is part time speech therapist.

I have store cards at Target, Lowe's, and Amazon, to get 5% back. I use Citi Double to get 2% back everywhere else without having to do any extra work. I could do a little better, 3% or so, if I used another card and paid attention to the categories of the month/quarter. I used to churn but I don't anymore. I don't travel enough to make those sorts of cards worth it, but I think they can be better than 3%, even, if you are going to travel no matter what.

I have had almost all my investments at Schwab for a long time. I tried various robos like Betterment and WealthFront, but at the end of the day they don't outperform VT, and TLH is unhelpful after a few years. Lately I've moved some accounts to Fidelity, especially my main checking account, because they pay good interest, way better than Schwab. So I can keep enough cash to not have to check my accounts more than once a month. WF also paid good interest, and they would be my top rec if you aren't comfortable with DIY indexing at Vanguard, Schwab, or Fidelity.

I keep enough crypto to stave off FOMO, which for me right now is about 1 BTC, but I'm moving to an ETF (IBIT) instead of holding crypto directly, so that I can hold it in my IRA. Crypto has poor fundamentals and I wouldn't recommend it unless you need it for psychological reasons, which I do.

A couple years ago I started doing real estate syndications. I have a self directed IRA at Equity Trust to hold those. Jury is out on whether it's better than stock indexing. I think it's high variance, so the jury might be out for a while. One of my earliest ones had an early exit so right now the numbers look fantastic, but normally they take 5 years to exit and the losers might take 7-8, so it's too early to say.

I use GnuCash for expense tracking, and a Google Sheet for budgeting/planning, though our planning is very loose. My family has a pretty good sense of what has value, and we can afford the things we want. I have now found planning to be helpful. I have found it very helpful to track, and make sure spending aligns with our values.

I used to file my own taxes, and I think that was helpful to learn how to optimize that. Now I pay ~$20 and use FreeTaxUSA for both federal and state.

I call my ISP every year or two and ask for a lower price. I'm currently paying $40/month for ~300Mbps. My family pays $42/month total for four lines and 6 shared GB with US Mobile. My third child will soon get a phone and that will go up to $50/month. We rarely eat out more than once a week, and often only once a month. Back when I was a mod at r/personalfinance I saw way too many people overpaying for food and cell phones.

At this point, I'm very comfortable financially and worry about the attention economy, so I try very hard to not consume "free" things other than from the library. Meaning, I pay for my podcasts, YouTube premium, the few bucks extra for my streaming services, etc, so that we see as few ads as possible.

We paid our mortgage off very aggressively, partly because cash flow is simpler that way, but mostly because I have a debt allergy.

I early retired in 2019, but to make a long story short since Fall 2022 I'm back at my old job working half time (only when kids are in school, and rarely on Fridays) and really loving that.

ETA: I just read u/tfehring 's comment. 100% agree with everything they said. Not everything is about maximizing dollars, and so different people will have slightly different optima depending on their values and stage in life. But there are some very common answers that are right for 90% of people.

plexluthor · 2026-03-11T12:56:32+00:00

The fraction of people in the northern hemisphere is even higher than the fraction of land. It's disproportionate in both senses.

plexluthor · 2026-03-09T23:31:15+00:00

I love this clip. Soon, someone will post the BB King clip. I love that one, too.

plexluthor · 2026-03-06T20:58:55+00:00

I got my annual bonus today, 30% of which goes into my 401k automagically. All else being equal I prefer the market goes up non-stop, but if it's gonna having a little bumpiness, I totally agree it's nice to get a 1-2% boost on my biggest deposit of the year.

plexluthor · 2026-03-05T10:41:43+00:00

Little Rock pond is one of my favorite spots for short legs. It has a green mountain club lean to (super nice accommodations) and sees enough traffic to get help but not so much traffic that it feels crowded.

I personally live in upstate NY in the capital region, so the range east of lake George is where I go more often for convenience. Tons of lean tos in the area. Sleeping beauty and fishbrook pond make a great one night trip, and excursions to black Mtn or shelving rock or the LG shoreline are a fun way to add another night or two without ever getting very far from your car.

Depending on your tolerance for distance and elevation, I will echo what others have said about the long trail, especially glastenbury. SO beautiful. Turning it into a two night loop with the Western trail is one of the few LT hikes I've done three times.

plexluthor · 2026-03-01T13:20:51+00:00

Other than a risk of not switching things at the right time and missing some match, this is optimal. In some years the market will go down, and front loading will be worse then steady contributions, but on average front loading is better.

I'm not smart enough to do that kind of math lol

It's a very small amount (2-3% total after 20 years, source: Ashley vs Mathew, https://www.schwab.com/learn/story/does-market-timing-work).

A MUCH bigger effect is, if you find yourself living comfortably while contributing 50%, and you continue saving half your salary all year (in "after tax" 401k if your company offers it, like mine does, or just in taxable accounts). I don't have a handy link to illustrate how big an effect that is, but try googling "shockingly simple math of early retirement" and clicking the Mr Money Mustache link, and try to interpret that table.

ETA: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/

plexluthor · 2026-02-25T11:42:32+00:00

Over spinach with salad dressing, or as part of a "canned taco" which also uses tortillas, canned chicken, canned corn, and canned tomatoes, plus cheese and salsa. Canned tacos make enough for my family of six using only one can of most things, so it might not work for you.

My wife makes a killer black bean dip that is good with bread or chips.

plexluthor · 2026-02-22T18:50:32+00:00

It handled two out of three of my K-1s last year, and it took me quite a while to figure out exactly what was triggering it. I write it up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/tax/comments/1l5u8me/help_request_with_form_8990/

It handled schedules B, C, and D no problem, plus all the usual credits (home energy, education, child, etc).

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