Comments by "" (@Green__one) on "Two Cents" channel.

I have to question some of these numbers. I've never seen an incandescent bulb that expensive, nor an LED bulb that cheap. The assumption of having 40 bulbs that are on for 5 hours a day each is also pretty extreme. It's far more likely that there are 40 bulbs, but that you only have a couple on at a time, not all 40. Making the more likely break-even period on the order of years, not months. A much better thing if you wanted to save both money and the environment would be to turn off some of those bulbs. Having that many lights on is pretty much inescusable. For electric vehicles, the maintenance thing is way overblown. sure, no oil changes are needed, but most of what is needed is WAY more expensive than on an internal combustion engine car. 7 year old leafs are starting to need $15000 batteries. You could go with a vehicle that has better battery longevity, like say Tesla, but then your maintenance costs just skyrocket. My Model S is hands down by far the single most expensive vehicle to maintain that I've ever owned ($2000 windshield, $1400 parking brake calliper, $3000 for a suspension component (that's under recall in china, but not here!)) I don't know what jurisdiction they're talking for Solar, but 5kw array saving $100/mo is highly unreasonable. With ideal placement it would generate maybe 850kwh/month, which would be about $100 at the $0.13 quoted earlier, but that would require both ideal placement which is highly unlikely, and that either you consume all that electricity locally (which means you use a lot of daytime electricity, unlikley), or more likely, that your provider is willing to pay you the full $0.13 for it in a full net-metering arrangement. Around here I pay $0.13 for my electricity, but I we have bi-directional metering, not net-metering, so I can only get $0.04 back for electricity sold to the grid. So even with ideal placement (which is unlikely in the real world) I'm only talking about $34/month in savings for a 30 year payback. That same money in a savings account would earn me 2/3 of that much, and properly invested would earn me more than the electricity savings, not to mention that these systems generally have a quoteed lifespan of less than that 30 years. Again, a much better way to save both money, and the environment, would be to turn off some of those 40 lightbulbs. And then we don't even touch on "greenwashing" by companies who often tout things that are actually not at all green as being so. Also, organic farming which is advocated for in this video is an environmental nightmare. it requires vastly more land, which usually means destruction of forests, just to feed the same number of people. If you care about the environment, organics are the last thing you should advocate for.
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Exactly! My Model S is the most expensive vehicle to maintain that I've ever owned, and not by any small margin either! Even the leaf they mentioned is questionable, 7 year old leafs are starting to need $15000 batteries.
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@christophersie7938 2 points. First, if we're comparing it to a high end German car, it falls flat in quality in every way. But even if we give it that, I had a Mercedes S class before my Tesla, and it was way cheaper to repair than the Tesla. I've never had a vehicle that costs more to maintain than my Tesla model S. Funny how the fanboys always want to compare the price to a high end Mercedes, but never the build quality.
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Massively worse for the environment due to the needed land use too. Just never a good idea that.
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That's what happened to me. I got a rental increase notice for a 55% increase in my rent, and immediately went shopping for a house. The end result was a mortgage cheaper than what the new rent would have been. Now utilities are slightly more, and property tax has to be accounted for, plus property insurance and maintenance, but I also went from 650sqft to over 2000sqft, and I don't smell the neighbour's marijuana or hear their kid bouncing balls off the common wall anymore. The big thing that usually gets left out of these videos is that rent vs buy is not really a financial decision, there are some financial aspects to it, but it's a lifestyle decision more than a financial one. I don't mind doing home maintenance, cutting the grass, and managing a bunch of bills in exchange for more space, and more autonomy. But some people prefer the lower maintenance that comes with renting, they don't want the big yard they have to mow, or to have to worry about a burst pipe or crumbling roof. Some people want to move around every couple years. Renting is a different lifestyle to owning. You can't look at it purely from a financial point of view.
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What about the many places where you can't sell back to the grid at all? or if you can, only at significantly reduced rates? those places make solar instantly unaffordable (I live in one unfortunately) As for geothermal, I ran the numbers on that too. A ground source heat pump would have to exceed a COP of 5.6 just to break even for me, (the best closed loop systems seem to be about 5.4) nevermind to pay off the upfront costs. That's how much cheaper my existing natural gas heating is than electricity to run the heat pump.
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Their sunk cost fallacy isn't completely right. What you need to mention is that it's only a fallacy if you wouldn't pay money to replace it. i.e. if you rent a bad movie, and watch it vs doing nothing, that's the sunk cost fallacy, but if the alternative is renting another movie because you didn't like the first, that's worse as you're spending more money than in the first case. Now in the movie example, it's probably worth just walking away from your lost money. But in a meal example at a restaurant, it's often worth having the bad meal, so you aren't hungry and pay for a second meal later. (From a purely economic standpoint. From the point of view of enjoyment or pleasure this may not be the case, and that too should be taken in to account.) I also have a small issue with their description of how "extra" money is handled. Yes money is, and should, be fungible. But if you're accounting properly, and have already covered your normal "buckets" of money with money from other sources, then treating yourself with any "extra" money you have isn't a bad thing. Of course you have to make sure you HAVE covered all your expenses (including funding for things like retirement and such) But if you've done all that, then it's not "dumb" to do something that makes you happy with extra money you weren't expecting.
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And why does she leave ALL of them on for 5 hours each day????
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And here in Canada we're paying $4.53 today.
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About the "hybrid approach". They mention each person putting in the same percentage of their paycheque. I didn't really feel that was fair either. The fact that my wife makes more money than I do isn't something she should be penalized for. We each put equal dollar amounts in to the common account each month (designed to be equal to our average monthly joint expenses like food/housing/utilities/vacations/etc). Whatever is left over is our own. I strongly believe that, assuming you both can be responsible with money, keeping your own individual accounts for individual purchases can really save your marriage though. Neither of us has to ask permission to spend our own money, no matter what size purchase, and neither of us cares what the other person does with that money because we know that the joint expenses are already covered. It helps that we each know that the other is putting a good amount away towards retirement too so that the split is sustainable. It's interesting though, because we each came from very different worlds there. I grew up in a household where there were no combined finances, my parents each had their own accounts, and there was a running total on the fridge of who owed who how much. My wife came from the opposite end of the spectrum with no individual accounts, only a joint account. We landed half way in between.
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It sure does have an effect on the environment, a massively negative effect due to the huge amounts of extra land required which usually leads to deforestation.
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@3of11 "time value of money" is a bit of a fiction for most people. Don't get me wrong, there is value to your time, but it's usually not monetary. My time is NOT worth my hourly wage when I'm not at work, my time is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. My employer isn't willing to pay for it after hours, so I don't have the option of making money that way. Similarly, the hiring out thing isn't generally done by most people even if they do have the longer commute as they simply can't afford it (a maid? who can afford that?). Side hustles are great, but the majority of people aren't making any money that way either. TLDR: If you don't have the option of working an extra hour at your job, or a similarly paid side-hustle instead of the extra hour of commute, your time isn't actually worth your hourly wage.
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you can't quite do that math that easily though. There are 2 types of fees, dynamic fees which changes depending on how much you use, and fixed fees that you pay just for being connected. Around here about half the bill is fixed and wouldn't decrease even if I turned off the main breaker and didn't use a single kWH. So your actual usage probably only accounts for around $0.13 or so as they estimated above. that's the part you can actually save on. Solar also can't touch that half of your bill unless you massively oversize your array, and invest in a ton of battery capacity. Possible, but extremely cost prohibitive.
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My city charges for both. But you don't have a choice about paying it. That said, you have to recycle, because they pick that cart up twice as often as the garbage one, and they will charge you extra if you can't fit everything in your garbage cart. Of course this leads to the expected behaviour. People just put their garbage in the recycling cart, or their neighbour's garbage cart to avoid the extra fees.
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When I bought my house, the PR ratio would have been in about the 11-12 range (Calgary, Canada). Today though, while rents have increased, not by nearly as much as house prices. So today's PR would be in the 25-27 range. (All PR numbers pulled from VERY rough estimates). Starting to wonder why anybody would be a landlord these days, the rents wouldn't even cover the mortgage on the property, let alone make a profit!
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@tailwinderic I'm not comparing the Tesla only to a Nissan leaf, my Tesla is orders of magnitude more expensive to maintain than my Mercedes S class was. My first year out of warranty cost over $7,000 in maintenance. It doesn't help any that Tesla has the highest shop rates in the industry, the most expensive parts in the industry, and an absolute prohibition on taking the car to anyone else for repairs. But the point is, that the leaf wasn't cheap to maintain either, their battery degradation is high enough that you're spending $15,000 on a battery for a car that's now worth less than that. Electric vehicles promise cheaper maintenance, but I've yet to see any of them that actually deliver on that promise. Don't get me wrong I love my Model S, and I would never want to go back to a gas vehicle, the cost of maintenance is simply not one of the selling points of any electric vehicle at this point, regardless of what the manufacturers claim.
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Actually, unless you take extremely long showers, the shower probably uses a lot less water than the bath. Try it some time, take a shower, but with the drain plug in. At the end ask yourself if the tub is really as full as it would have been for your bath. Most likely it's only ankle deep.
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