Killing Batteries

Oh, look! Another voter-driven, who-to-follow travel Twitter list!

So, here’s the fundamental problem with these voter-driven lists: they’re far more reflective of existing popularity and the willingness to campaign by the contenders than appreciable talent. Sure, voter-driven Top Whatever lists serve a vaguely useful purpose, even if that purpose is often a distant third to page views and link bait. And in this instance, credit where credit is due, several people from the original list of contenders are performing much better on Twitter these days, in my opinion, than the last time I checked in on/unfollowed them, so there’s something to be said for that welcome revelation which I probably wouldn’t have otherwise experienced.

That said, when/if a who-to-follow travel Twitter list is at all necessary, I feel that readers are far better served by a list that’s been carefully cultivated by someone with highly selective, exacting taste, along with a few words explaining why those travel Twitter personalities merit following.

(Who, me? OK, I’ll do it.)

For the sake of disclosure, the attributes I most appreciate (and personally aspire to) in travel twittering are: a pleasing balance between informational, evocative, entertaining and reasonable self-promotional tweets, dispensed, when space allows, with style and wit.

Here’s the problem, or perhaps it’s just my problem… Lots of people do a couple of these things admirably well, but surprisingly few manage to consistently deliver the entire package. Far too many people burden their followers with an overabundance of tedious, off-topic tweets, wearying self-promotion and/or operate as if Twitter is an instant messaging application. A little of this is fine and expected when one engages on Twitter, but there’s a threshold and, frustratingly, too many people have no idea when they’ve galloped through that threshold on their non-stop, express trip to Suckville. These failings, and my daily struggle to manage distractions, are why I have been and continue to be so fastidious with my Twitter feed management.

With that in mind, and in no particular order, the following are some of the travel people who, when I’m hurriedly skimming Twitter, I always stop and read due to the high probability that they’ve tweeted something great. Of course, this isn’t remotely comprehensive, so anyone that wants to point me toward similar feeds, please leave a comment.

David Whitley: The Grumpy Traveller’s Twitter feed is chock full of travel wisdom, frank opinions and hilarity, with an endearing self-effacing touch. The man is a veritable tornado of freelancing activity, so there’s rarely a moment when he isn’t on a trip, planning a trip or just grumpily returning from a trip. Though he’s recently threatened a direction change, I’ve long been a loyal fan of his blog for its insightfulness and, usually deserved, lambasting of various travel industry shortcomings that every writer, PR person and traveler should absorb.

Ryan Ver Berkmoes: Though Ryan mostly ignored Twitter in the beginning, over the past year or so he’s been active and totally nailing it. He managed the difficult trick of cultivating strong Twitter content without the usual newbie mistakes and now his careful link selection, reliable one-liners and the fact that he’s seemingly on the road for 300 days a year for Lonely Planet, make his feed uniformly exceptional.

Grant Martin: Grant has forgotten more about flying and flight booking than most of us can ever (honestly) claim in our bios. He somehow serves as the editor-in-chief at Gadling while still holding down a fulltime, frequent traveling job requiring him to look at stuff in giant microscopes. He’s also not afraid to publicly call people out on concerns/infractions when necessary, which, of course, I love.

Annemarie Dooling: In a sign of how I’m sometimes alarmingly closed off from great people on Twitter, I only started following Annemarie about six months ago. Holding down what seems to be five or six different blogging jobs is probably why she always seems to have a finger on (and tweets from) the pulse of digital and print travel media.

Mike Barish: More “character” than “personality,” Mike’s feed is eclectic and fun, though his affection for SkyMall products is cause for mild concern. Mike’s showmanship, wit and gift for quippy commentary were seemingly made for Twitter, often out-shining whatever link he happens to be tweeting.

Jamie Pearson: My interest in the mommy blogging genre is just a whisker below my interest in kitty fashion shows and just above my interest in NASCAR. So that I find Jamie’s feed to be consistently smart and entertaining is a testament to her personality and tweet selection, even when they are mommy tweets.

Jodi Ettenberg: I’ve spent some time with Jodi and know this isn’t (literally) true, but based on her Twitter engagement, I like to imagine her Blackberry is Velcroed to her forearm, runner style. Her relentless, yet engaging feed, documenting her ongoing vagabonding and peppered with reliably clickable links on a large variety of topics, many of them #longreads, is endlessly impressive and fascinating.

Paul Clammer: Lonely Planet author, NGO worker and baffling appreciator of what I call “unleisure travel.” Paul’s guidebooks include Sudan, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Dominican Republic and Haiti, where he’s currently living, volunteering and firing off evocative tweets.

Zora O’Neill: Yet another seemingly in perma-transit Lonely Planet colleague, with a particular talent for sharing factoids, clever insights and food tweets wherever she washes up.

David Farley: In addition to being an extremely talented travel writer, Farley is the author of one of history’s most bizarre pieces of travel narrative nonfiction, “An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church’s Strangest Relic in Italy’s Oddest Town.” He’s also one of the most (sometimes) brutally honest people I follow on Twitter, which can be both gratifying and sometimes scary.

Remember Slackerology? My probably best-selling, award-winning, religion-changing, planet-saving book proposal may have fizzled out on the desks of 26 editors, to the detriment of all society (history will vindicate me), but I’m still living and honing the theory every day.

[If you need to get up to speed on the modern, minimalist lifestyle I’ve cheekily labeled ‘Slackerology’, you can read about it in great detail here, here, here, here and here or read an incredibly condensed explanation here.]

Further to that, I recently had the occasion to do a detailed calculation of my annual living expenses for the first time (oddly) since moving back to the US and, while I knew the number would be low, the total shocked even me.

My base annual expenses came in at almost exactly US$25,000. Add in the expenses for a few, longish, non-work trips and I’m pegging my annual sustainable income needs at about 28 grand.

How the Bachmann do I do it? Before I tell you, one little thing…

This blog post is entitled “How I live on $25,000 a year,” not “How you can live on $25,000 a year.” Every person and living situation is going to be different. So, those of you who are already getting tuned up to post a comment like “Dear Pompous Ass, what you’ve said here just isn’t feasible when you’re from [place with an inordinately high cost of living] and live 10 miles from work, so thanks for the useless information, but I can’t blah, blah, blah, lame excuses, blah…” can save yourselves the effort. I do not care and I will probably mock you. However, I’d be overjoyed if you gleaned and applied even one or two ideas from this post that could potentially make a difference to your annual living expenses.

OK, my base annual living expenses are comprised of the following list:

•    Mortgage/condo association fee – I live in a 606 square foot (56.3 square meter) condo in a non-flashy building, in the dead-center of Minneapolis, a city that happens to have reasonable property prices. And I have space to spare. As I’ve proselytized previously, people don’t need very much space to live comfortably. My mortgage and condo association fee (which pays for everything except electric, internet and phone) comes out to roughly $1,120 a month.

•    Electric – My small living space and modest lifestyle mean that my electric bill stays low, averaging $32 a month over the past 12 months.

•    Internet – Non-fluctuating, non-debatable expense, $45 a month.

•    Phone – I only have a cell phone (no landline), with voice and data service. No text messaging. Why no text messaging? Because it costs an extra $10 a month and my Android has email, five kinds of instant messaging/chatting software and, oh yeah, makes phone calls. Remember phone calls? Also, text messaging is destroying in-person social interaction (I’m speaking of those people who send/receive one text message for every six waking minutes of their day and give those texts priority over the people sitting right next to them) and greatly increases the chances that idiots will hit me with their cars. But my friends are hard to train and they still send me texts now and then, which cost 15 cents each. So, my cell phone bill fluctuates between $59 and $61 a month.

•    Groceries – I typically spend $40-55 a week on groceries.

•    Transport – This is the estimated, seasonally fluctuating expense for my rechargeable bus/train pass and the maintenance for my bike. I work from home and rarely ride public transport in the warmer months. I estimate that I pay roughly $300 a year.

•    Entertainment/food/alcohol – A generously padded fund. I don’t go out for lavish dinners of lobster burgers and foie gras dogs very often, but I do more than my fair share of brunches, food trucks, happy hours, drinks, burgers, burritos, delivered pizzas, and movies. Also, I enjoy the occasional (case of) wine and cider. I’ve allotted $4,300 a year.

•    Health insurance – I happen to be an exceptionally healthy and (attention ladies) virile 41 year old. With my history of indestructibleness, I have made what seems like a sensible gamble and only purchased basic, individual health insurance which costs $87 a month.

•    Miscellaneous – I landed on $1,800 a year. An admittedly arbitrary, but I believe safe, number for irregular purchases such as clothes, books, DVDs, presents and, every third year or so, a new laptop and smartphone, among other things.

That’s it. That’s 25 grand.

Now, you may notice a few, glaring omissions from that list, including:

•    Car – As I’ve already described in wretched detail, car ownership is second only to shelter in daily expenses and one of the leading time-consuming maintenance burdens and hair-yanking stress triggers for most people. Admittedly, this choice is especially easy for me because I work from home and I’ve located myself in a walkable neighborhood that also happens to be my city’s main public transport hub, but there you go. Not owning a car means approximately $9,000 that I don’t have to raise each year to keep it physically and legally running.

•    Gym membership – My condo group shares an embarrassingly basic, but perfectly passable fitness center. Nevertheless, most of my neighbors maintain gym memberships elsewhere, because they’ve convinced themselves they’ll get a better workout if there are more sweaty people around, white towels everywhere, a different, refrigerator-sized apparatus for every muscle group and cardio equipment with cable TV that constantly measures 16 vital signs and sperm count. Even without my pitiable fitness center, I’m confident that I could get a perfectly good workout by purchasing a few, small, key pieces of equipment (about the same price as maybe two or three months of gym membership fees), educating myself on do-it-yourself cardio and muscle isolation exercises and good old fashion discipline.

•    Dental – I’m one of those medical tourists you read about. I get my teeth checked out in Romania every summer while doing guidebook research. A check-up costs about US$15. I’ve had a few very old fillings drilled out and refilled in recent years, which, with x-rays, costs about US$20 each.

•    Pets – Disclaimer that pet owners should read before sending hate mail/comments: I am already acutely aware that I approach life with what is apparently an especially high level of critical logic and common sense. Imagine a high-functioning Rain Man, but with better taste in food and TV. People behaving in a manner seemingly devoid of logic and common sense is a source of endless bafflement and frustration for me. At the top of this list is any action/behavior/philosophy motivated by religion, followed closely by how utterly useless nearly all politicians have become, but pet ownership is probably in the top 10. What pet owners see as emotionally uplifting companionship, cuteness and I don’t know what else, I see as an unnecessary output of resources. Never mind that caring for pets requires mild (goldfish) to substantial (dogs) time and energy, not to mention the ongoing disposal of fecal matter, vomit and the logistical management for whenever one wants to leave town or even have a long day away from home if Fido/Fluffy shits/barfs on the carpet if he isn’t attended to every six hours, but those extra expenses add up quickly. Especially so when the pet gets old or sick. Even in a year with no pet emergencies, those expenses mean all the more hours you have to be at work to raise the money to keep that pet alive, as well as time away from work/friends to care for the pet when they get into the dark chocolate or tin foil. If you have the debilitating craving for non-verbal companionship and the daily clean-up of another entity’s excretions, go volunteer at a hospital ICU or animal shelter or something.

•    Shopping – I don’t shop. Correction: once or twice a year, someone close to me corners me with a shotgun, binds my hands, injects me with a sedative, throws me into the trunk of a car and drives to an Old Navy. This is how I get new clothes. Apart from that, I don’t shop. This is largely due to the fact that my job/social life do not require dressy attire or even all that much variety. Lastly, “de-crapify your life” is one of the base tenets of Slackerology, and idle shopping – clothes, knickknacks, whatever – does not mix with having less crap. Plus, shopping makes me sleepy and hungry.

That’s pretty much the gist of it. A low-impact, comfortable, well-fed, frequently inebriated lifestyle for 25 grand a year, what many people could earn in a low-stress, part-time job – or full-time freelance travel writing in a shitty economy. Add two vacations in foreign lands each year and bump it up to 28 grand. Any additional income you want for savings/investments is up to you. (Obviously, adjust for the cost of living and income in your area.)

So, please help this high-functioning Rain Man understand, why do people sacrifice free time, friends, family, health and a decent night’s sleep to earn double or triple that much and more?