Latte Factor Revisited, Small Lower-Waste Moves, etc.

Photo from a recent weekend visit with K to Felix Roasting Co., on one of the rare occasions when I add a pastry to my coffee order. I couldn't resist the Instagram-friendly matcha croissant from Supermoon Bakehouse!

Turns out I spoke too soon about not buying as many lattes and flat whites this year. It seems that certain types of busy periods at the office, depending on the kind of tasks I'm doing, can increase my cravings for those small indulgences. All these fluctuations in my fancy espresso (or matcha) drink consumption habits these past few years, combined with how I carefully track every expense by individual transaction in YNAB (so I know, down to the penny, how much I actually spend at coffee shops each month, and exactly how often I go), give me what I think is an unusually specific level of insight into all those "latte factor" discussions that just won't go away.

With the ~12-15% tip I typically give at coffee shops, each of my flat whites, lattes, or matcha lattes cost ~$5/each, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, depending on my exact order and which shop I'm visiting. In an "ideal" month, where I'm happy with how often I'm indulging and feel like I'm using the drinks as a slightly special treat rather than, er, an unthinking habit I'm getting a bit dependent on, I'm visiting a coffee shop around ~2x/week and spending ~$42/month. (Keeping in mind that between Starbucks rewards, redeeming all my Drop cash-back for Starbucks gift cards, and "get one free for every 10 or 11 purchases" loyalty cards at my smaller, local coffee shops, I'm generally getting ~1-3 free drinks a month.) So ~$42/month is my "happy medium" baseline number. 

In a more typical "not so good" month in the past, I'd generally be visiting coffee shops around ~3-4x/week, and spending more like ~$62/month. That's when I start feeling like "okay, I'm maybe starting to buy these espresso or matcha drinks more out of habit than actual enjoyment," which is not my favorite thing. Whenever I've fussed about indulging in too many lattes in the past, that's generally what was happening. 

This month has been a more unusually indulgent one, where my average is looking more like 4-5x/week, resembling that "visits Starbucks every workday" stereotype that most people who think the "latte factor" is a real thing like to talk about and deride. I think it's because I'm a bit more caffeine-addicted than usual, want my dose earlier in the morning, and the office coffee isn't hitting the spot quite as much. This is a slightly new phenomenon for me, and maybe I'll cut down on it sharply in short order by regularly making homemade cold brew again, so I'm not quite sure yet what this month's actual spend will be, but if things kept up, it'd likely be ~$85/month, ~$43/month more than my "happy place" baseline.

That's getting to a fairly significant amount of added spending for the month if it's going to be a recurring issue, but the conditions of contemporary American life are also such that this extra $43/month might not mean much. Given recent changes with how my insurance company covers my choice of contraception (which is also an important, even essential, part of my acne-fighting regime), the price for me now holds steady at a monthly co-pay of $39 and change (or, more specifically, that's per 28-day supply). And because the pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, and  pharmacy benefits managers ("PBMs") all act in ways that have resulted in upward hikes to the price of acne-oriented and other dermatology prescriptions, I also now have two other medications with $75 copays per 3-month supply. Oh joy! So the extra spend from when I feel like I'm way overindulging at coffee shops by going every workday covers my contraception each month with less than enough for another latte left over. That's significant, but I can't see how it apparently turns into a life-changing number each year for most localities in the US.

And I still don't quite know how my bank gets its number for $100/month savings by "turn[ing] your latte into something grande" and saving all your coffee shop spend in a high-interest savings account instead, as going every workday doesn't get me that close to $100 a month. Maybe adding in a pastry once a week would get me there, but it's the rare coffee shop that stocks pastries that are particularly tasty (I'm admittedly very picky, as I ultimately prefer savory foods to sweet). I suppose I might also be a bit above average in my ability to turn my frequent purchases into free drinks through loyalty cards, Drop cash-back, and Starbucks Rewards.

On Free-Cycling and My (Really Slow) Minimalist(ish) Journey

When we first moved in to our current apartment...

Despite all my years of closet decluttering, both via KonMari method and otherwise, I've never tried reselling any of my unwanted clothes or shoes by listing items individually on eBay, Poshmark, or what have you. I'm sheepish about this too, because I know full well that there are many reasons to try reselling, from both the frugality perspective (potentially recouping part of the cost is a good thing, even if, in many instances, one's used things don't have much value) and the minimalist-ish perspective (among many other things, from a waste reduction standpoint, it seems logically sound that the best chance for an unwanted item to have a meaningful second life is by reselling it directly to a buyer who specifically wants it, rather than donating it for a highly uncertain outcome).

Regardless of all the reasons why I really should make more of an effort to resell my many items that are still in reasonably good condition, but won't get any further use in my hands, it's simply not possible for me to routinely find the time or energy for high-effort resale attempts. If, in my current line of work, I can't even reliably make time to cook a Hello Fresh meal (~20 minutes of active work and ~20 minutes of passive waiting time in most instances), I won't be finding the time to continuously keep re-listing my (not particularly exciting or desirable) items on eBay.

Plus, as someone who is semi-regularly in the secondhand market to buy the kind of clothing I'd have available for resale (mostly Ann Taylor or J.Crew-type items I barely ended up wearing), I'm well aware of how little my used things are worth, even when in excellent condition (which isn't a given; I generally tried to wear them for a while, and not all of them laundered well). If I wouldn't buy these pieces used for much more than, say, ~$35/dress, I could hardly list them for more. It just wouldn't sit right with me, I always roll my eyes so hard when I see eBay listings for unrealistic or unreasonable prices. To be blunt, the amount of money we're talking about (especially after factoring in how poor the chances are for actually reselling many of my rather unexciting things) simply isn't likely to be worth my time or energy to actively list individual items for resale.

And the things I'd want to sell generally are far less desirable or interesting than the very specific items I've previously been in the market to buy. The market for the type of run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen secondhand clothes and accessories I'd have to offer is oversaturated and competitive, both from other individual sellers and from ThredUp. Furthermore, given the near-constant 30% to 40%-off reductions on new merchandise and the more aggressive discounts on sale merchandise available at the stores in question (Loft, Ann Taylor, J.Crew, etc.), I'd even be competing with the retailers themselves! Incidentally, that's what makes me roll my eyes at some of those eBay listings, when people try to sell their used things for more than similar new items are going for in the stores right now. The stores even have the added advantage of mostly free shipping.

Those low prices and constant sales are, of course, symptoms of undesirable trends. These are all brands that are undeniably fast fashion in their manufacturing practices (seen partially in their frequent drops of large volumes of new products), and ones that have likely been undertaking ever-increasing cost-cutting measures (based on comparisons of the traits of current merchandise to those of typical offerings in years past), likely due to their generally well-publicized financial woes. The low prices are not, in any way, something to aspire towards. But, well, that's the market my listings would be competing in, if I made them.

The result is that things have only been leaving my closet in other ways these past few years. Even though I try to be as responsible or as ethical as I can when sending off my unwanted things, I'm very realistic and aware about how imperfect my efforts are: 

1. My best items that I think would suit my sister are saved for her. Because I know her tastes well, the things I send her way are generally put to good use for a long time after. Some of them even become staples in her wardrobe, which is a particularly gratifying outcome. (This is one of the many reasons why having a close-in-age sister is a wonderful thing.) If I had any friends who had remotely similar tastes in clothing and accessories, that'd be another place for my nicest, but underutilized, things to go. 
2. Over the years, I've sent many items to ThredUp. Back when it was easy to track how my things were selling, they even tended to do well! That being said, payouts for my items, mostly a mix from Ann Taylor, Loft, and H&M-type retailers, were never great for what they accepted (which was ~50% of what I sent over the years), maybe ~$4/item max, mostly less. Though frankly, I was so thrilled at how easy it was that I did not care. ThredUp's intake and payout policies have changed in the many years since I started reselling, so I'd expect significantly lower payouts now. I also have doubts about whether their business model will work long-term (if they've cut payouts significantly since they started, and are also pricing many items too high to sell, those can't be good signs) or whether they're actually better for the environment by significantly reducing waste (they started making and selling new items, which is bizarre), so I'm not sure I would continue with them as a reseller now. And anything they don't accept likely ends up in the same type of donation or textile recycling situation as item 4 on my list. 
3. This hasn't fully played out yet, but for some of my potentially more valuable used things that my sister wouldn't like, I recently dropped them off at a TheRealReal physical store for consignment. Previously, these items had languished for years on my list for possible future higher-effort resale. Most of them I already knew I wanted to resell before I even started this blog, and I certainly haven't worn or used them since, which means they've been sitting around collecting dust for a half-decade or longer!
4. Everything else has been going to the donation and textile recycling collection points closest to wherever I've lived in NYC. And yes, I'm painfully aware that donation is generally not a route to used clothes being put to good use by someone else, due to the extreme volume of donations constantly being made in the US. But I may be at a loss for a better solution for what remains after I've exhausted the other options. 
5. For the relatively few things that are in such poor condition that I know they truly have no chance of being a usable donation (like, say, the Wolford tights I shredded by accident), I do put them in the trash. Obviously, there's nothing redeeming about this, but I'm not sure I see another solution. 

Would you believe that I haven't even gotten to the main point of this entry yet? What I actually wanted to discuss today is another method I've added to the mix in recent months, though, as I'll explain, it's had little real success: free-cycling.

I last engaged in a significant bout of free-cycling when I moved out of student housing after law school, in order to send off furniture, kitchen items, and other home goods that would be made redundant when I moved in with K. I loved free-cycling back then, and a university campus is certainly an ideal place to do it. Other students took practically everything I listed, and I was pretty sure they'd happily and enthusiastically put all my things to good use, given how restrictive students' budgets often are. It felt like a great thing to do, to give away as much as I could!

Maui Trip 2019: Maui Chef's Table and Mama's Fish House

A scallop dish, the second to last savory course from our dinner at Maui Chef's Table. I think this might have been the best single dish I've ever had! (And I've been to some really nice places in NYC, mostly for work...) Sadly, I'm not a great talent when it comes to food photography (or iPhone photography in general), so my photos don't do justice to the food.

As promised, here is my second and last post about our recent family trip to Maui, focusing on some of the delicious food that my mom, my sister, and I got to try. 

In actuality, I'm normally not an extremely food-focused traveler: I greatly appreciate and value good food, of course, and particularly enjoy having tasty street food or hawker center food on my trips, but my travel plans generally don't prioritize food. We often don't have many specific restaurants we want to try, for instance. K and I will generally do one fancy meal on our longer trips (for example, I booked him a birthday lunch at Tin Lung Heen at the Ritz-Carlton Hong Kong a few years back), but that's about it. On this vacation though, some of our plans focused very much on food. Specifically, I booked reservations for us at two of the most popular fine dining attractions in Maui: We did the Maui Chef's Table, a once-a-week (usually Saturdays) tasting menu and fine dining experience and we also went to Mama's Fish House, a well-known local restaurant. 

First up, a few details about food expenses generally when traveling to Maui. As I mentioned in my last post, restaurants tend to be quite expensive, maybe a little more than I'm used to, even in NYC (~$15/meal at fast casual places and closer to ~$25/entree at nicer sit-down places seemed typical for Maui), at least in the tourist-focused areas we frequented (Lahaina, the Kaanapali Beach area, etc.). It's probably the first destination where I felt strongly that it would be a good idea to get a hotel room, suite, or other lodging with a kitchenette, and to rely in significant part on cooking food from grocery stores for at least a few meals, particularly breakfasts. There was a large Safeway in Lahaina that we stopped at a few times, and there's also a Costco near the airport that many tourists go to before driving out to where they're staying. 

That's not to say the restaurant food is a bad value! I enjoyed pretty much everything we had, whether from a fast casual place or a slightly fancier sit-down place. (More fast casual-leaning places we liked included Joey's Kitchen in the Whaler's Village shopping center food court and Ono Kau Kau.) It's just that the prices on the menus give such sticker shock, even to people used to very HCOL areas like NYC or the Bay Area, that one can't help but start thinking about ways to save on food costs during any future trips. Grocery stores and Costco in Hawaii also have really good poke, by the way, good enough that it'll ruin you for ever eating that dish again anywhere else in the world. (One of my favorite comic artists on Instagram, @dami_lee, recently made this exact observation in one of her comics.) 

Please follow the link below to read about our experiences at Maui Chef's Table and Mama's Fish House, both of which we greatly enjoyed.

Link List: On Shopping Diaries and Costume Design

My sister's dog is such a goof! I haven't been able to visit my sister for a while, as we spent our vacation time traveling to Maui together with our mom instead, so I borrowed/stole this photo from her.

It's been a while since my last link list post! K and I don't really have any further travels planned this summer, even though things tend to quiet down at the office (many of our colleagues try to get out early on Fridays to start driving out of the city for the weekend). Although work never fully stops with our biglaw and biglaw-ish projects, summer still tends to be a period where the pace of everything slows down because so many people, whether opposing counsel, our colleagues, or even the judge assigned to the case, will take vacation at various times.

I haven't really found any great long-form pieces to recommend in recent weeks, so this link list is a bit of a grab bag. Some of the most interesting things I've seen recently and that I want to discuss are actually based on comments from other people on Reddit or Corporette! 

1. // I thought this comment on Reddit about the social and economic pressures in the US that might lead so many people to multi-level-marketing ("MLM") or pyramid schemes was thoughtful and observant. I've done some work recently that involves reviewing MLM advertising material, and well, let's just say the language of it can start sounding a lot like the language used in some FIRE discourse online or on some money blogs (the more heavily commercialized one that I don't link to or recommend). While the recommendations made by each type of content are different, they share the trait of relying heavily on the siren's song of "financial freedom" and being able to spend more of your time on the things you care about rather than a 9-to-5 job, let's just say.

For more information on the MLM side of things, I highly recommend The Dream podcast, which gets particularly good and interesting in the later episodes, though it's a bit of a slow burn at the start. You would not believe the people in high places who have been known to do promotional work for or otherwise profit from big MLMs like Amway. 

2. // I was surprised to see that so many people on r/blogsnark enjoy a popular Instagram account (things.i.bought.and.liked) that's basically just a shopping diary, albeit from someone with a witty sense of humor than the average, it sounds like! Then again, I really enjoy shopping diary-like content (in some lights, that's even what my blog is half the time), as long as I feel that I can "trust" the reviews of the person behind it to be "true" to who they are and their tastes. Sure, our tastes and shopping budgets will all be different, but ideally, after reading a person's writing and commentary over a few weeks or months, I get a sense of what they like, whether we're similar clothes or shoe sizes or have similar tastes for some things, and how much their recommendations will work for me. 

3. // This isn't exactly something I would only have learned about from Corporette, but one of the topics that came up recently was that silly non-story about some of the legal fees Senator Warren previously charged. The rate was $675/hour, which I can assure you was probably modest for someone of that  level of expertise, and was also "at or below market rate" for the nature of the work being done, as people attested to in legal filings contemporaneous with when those fees were charged. Representative Ocasio-Cortez had a good take on it (venture into the comments on that tweet at your own peril, however).  

Anyway, I can personally vouch for standard biglaw billing rates these days generally starting at ~$450/hour for freshly graduated first-year associates (though it may be that there are other arrangements between firms and their corporate clients that mean the clients aren't paying for every single hour worked by first-years) and ranging up to over $1000/hour for various partners, not all of whom even have the specialized experience or credentials she did. Incidentally, the last time I recall biglaw-ish legal bills being in the news was in connection to the seizure of Michael Cohen's files last year, where the special master (a former federal judge who'd retired to the private sector) charged ~$700/hour, which is, quite frankly, likely also below market for an attorney of her stature. What was unusual there is that partners typically don't spend that many hours working on any single matter in such a short time, as they delegate a lot of the time-consuming work to their associates (they supervise those associates closely, though). 

4. // Now this is a super-old story that I never got around to sharing, but I enjoyed this Vox piece about how a few different authors approached "designing" a particular outfit for their book characters. One of the authors featured is Kevin Kwan, discussing Astrid from Crazy Rich Asians.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how I would describe my personal style, and how to make sure new purchases fit into it, so that I will love and put to good use anything I buy going forward. I personally find it helpful to think about this from a more "costume design" perspective: What kind of character would I be if my life were a movie or TV show, and how do my clothes, shoes, and accessories reflect that? Thus, I found this particular article, from an actual costume designer about how she approaches her job, to be super-interesting. (Sadly, it didn't attract much discussion when shared at r/femalefashionadvice.) 

5. // A few fun links from other blogs I follow: Maja has raised a remarkable collection of houseplants; I definitely learned some new things when reading about Jess's home-buying process, sadly, it'll be quite some time before we can think about buying a home; and Bitches Get Riches wrote some good food for thought on what types of spending from their parents felt or didn't feel impactful on their childhoods. Though one challenge with trying to make plans around such ideas is that I'm not sure one can easily predict what will be helpful to a particular child. I hated sports and all athletic activity, and also didn't particularly enjoy the idea of being a "team player" over the pursuit of, er,  personal glory. But I feel like I'd have ended up learning some valuable new skills if my parents had pushed a team sport on me for at least a few years. I'd have shrieked and complained about it to high heaven, though, and would have hated it. I certainly wouldn't have had a chance of acknowledging or appreciating the benefits until sometime in my mid or late 20s, at the earliest!

I also enjoyed the discussion of people's favorite colors for their wardrobe over at Talia's. I don't have restrictive rules about colors. If it looks good on my skin tone and can be worn with the other things I own (that one's not too difficult, because most of my clothes are neutrals), I'll be happy to wear it. Of course, just having those somewhat open-ended two "rules" or guidelines can end up being quite restrictive in practice. A lot of the colors that get popular or trendy some years (anything pastel, almost all coral shades, and most colors in the orange or yellow families, even if one of my favorite coats is bright red-orange) tend not to work well on my skin tone. My wardrobe definitely ends up heavily favoring certain colors (neutrals, darker jewel-tones) over others. 

Does anyone else think about their personal style from a more costume design-type perspective? Do you shop for your closet with any "rules" or guidelines about colors in mind?