Good points. Some animal shelters (we adopted a cat from one in a small town in PA) will let you return an animal if you have to. Although I would feel guilty about doing that without giving another donation. We were happy with the cat by the way, so that didn't come up. Some people manage to foist pets off onto friends or relatives with an excuse like "my new baby is allergic", we got a cat that way. I suppose "I didn't know what I was getting into" would be a much harder sell, unless you have dog-lover friends, in which case maybe not so hard. Having an exit plan would probably be a good idea.
What can I purchase with $100 that will be the best thing I can buy to make my life better?
I've decided to budget some regular money to improving my life each month. I'd like to start with low hanging fruit for obvious reasons - but when I sat down to think of improvements, I found myself thinking of the same old things I'd already been planning to do anyway... and I'd like out of that rut.
Constraints/more info:
Background:
This is a question I recently posed to my local Less Wrong group and we came up with a few good ideas, so I thought I'd share the discussion with the wider community and see what we can come up with. I'll add the list we came up with later on in the comments...
It'd be great to have a repository of low-hanging fruit for things that can be solved with (relatively affordable) amounts of money. I'd personally like to go through the list - look at candidates that sound like they'd be really useful to me and then make a prioritised list of what to work on first.