To continue with my nostalgic theme of the past few days, I am typing this from an old Chromebook that I purchased back in 2013. I’m a bit addicted to devices, and I get attached to the ones I’ve owned. I spend most of my day working off a PC laptop, and an Apple laptop hooked up to external monitors and each with its own set of peripherals. I thought it would be nice to have a smaller and more portable laptop to do some light browsing and jot down some thoughts. Then I remembered that I had had the same idea several years ago that led me to buy the Chromebook I am writing on now. I decided to dust it off, look for its power chord, and power it on. To my surprise and delight, it has held up pretty well and works flawlessly. Aside from a few graphics-intensive websites, it loads everything reasonably fast. The screen does seem a little pixelated compared to the retina display on my Macbook Pro. However, if I remember correctly, this little machine was purchased for about $200, which is less than a tenth of what I paid for the Macbook Pro. So that’s a pretty good bank for the buck. In terms of usefulness, I would still rank the Apple laptop as having the greatest return on my investment given that I’ve used it consistently for different jobs and through graduate school since I bought it almost 6 years ago. The PC laptop is provided by my employer, so there was no out of pocket cost there.

As all of this was going through my head, I decided then that this was as good a time as ever to review the many subscriptions I have to cut unnecessary costs. It was something I had been meaning to do for a few weeks now. So I opened an excel spreadsheet and started to calculate my monthly and yearly savings by making some adjustments to the subscriptions I have been accumulating. I had initially intended to make this cost-trimming exercise the topic of today’s post, but instead, I thought it best to write about what inspired me to find more ways to save money: a post about this remarkable little laptop that is still going strong.

P.S. I even made a payment on my student loans even though no payments are being collected and no interest is being accumulated during the pandemic. Sometime in the next week, or perhaps even this weekend, I want to put together a spreadsheet to calculate just how much money I can save by making payments on my student loans before they start charging interest again. It will require a far more complicated spreadsheet than what I created today, but it will be worth seeing the potential savings.