Same. When I was at a point where I was skipping a meal a day to save for rent, it was the boots problem. If I could get the nicer, more durable thing, it was always worth it in the long run but not usually affordable up front. But sometimes there are easy wins. I found my first and only cast iron skillet I’ve had in the last 15 years covered in grease & surface level rust next to a dumpster on the way home. Some oven cleaner and flaxseed oil and it has been good to me ever since.

It started then by saying no to eating out bc it’s unaffordable, now it’s saying no to eating out at a lot of places bc they have awful food, service, and management treats their workers like crap. Starbucks wasn’t worth it to me for a long time before the anti union stuff, now I have two reasons (actually more) never to go there again.

Conscious consumption! I like it. It’s a big part of what they advocate on the Frugal Friends podcast. Just need to figure out the “we have McDonalds at home” of fossil fuels. Hybrids & bikes can be a good first start.

I recently traveled and I brought my old iphone 6 and made sure my physical SIM was compatible with both and checked with my carrier as well. One issue I keep running into is that the digital boarding pass and email communications for updates from the airline just make issues like flight delays, reroutes, lost baggage, or missed flights so much faster to deal with, especially if there are minute by minute updates and a time crunch in an airport I’m not familiar with. I guess the best answer there is to have a dedicated email address for airline comms and make that the only connected account for your backup smartphone.

Qwant off of Orion on iOS. Don’t bother with Kagi. There are better options if they switch to graphene.

EDIT: SearXNG is perfect in every way except for consistently returning useful search results.