Ecofrugal Living

Putting nature back in gardening

2012-01-28T11:31:00.000-05:00

In keeping with one of my ecofrugal New Year's resolutions, I've been spending a good part of this week planning next year's garden: choosing crops, ordering seeds, and trying to get together the supplies needed to start my first seedlings. I started flipping through our various gardening books (Square Foot Gardening, Jeff Ball's 60-Minute Vegetable Garden) for advice, and I found myself getting really annoyed with their suggestions. Mel Bartholomew, for instance, says you should first run your seeding containers through the dishwasher to sterilize them, and then plant your seeds in vermiculite—not soil, not potting mix, but pure vermiculite, a mica-based mineral that's an entirely nonrenewable resource. Then, he wants you to put them in a "thermostatically controlled seed starter" and check them every day, and the minute they sprout, move the container into strong light—a greenhouse or a "heated sun box" or, at minimum, a table kept under fluorescent light for 12 to 16 hours each day. Jeff Ball agrees that artificial light is essential and recommends building a special seedling bench, setting it in an area where the temperature stays between 60 and 70 degrees year-round, and rigging up an adjustable light fixture that you can move up or down to keep it at the optimum distance from the tops of the seedlings.

At first, I thought this was annoying me because it all seems like so much work, or because it's so expensive. But I finally figured out that my real problem was the insistence on doing everything scientifically—in other words, not naturally. And the problem isn't limited to seed starting; gardening "systems" like these seem built around the idea that if you want to grow your own vegetables, then the first thing you have to do is stop relying on the inadequate resources provided by nature. Don't try to till your own garden soil to turn it into a decent growing medium; instead, build raised boxes and fill them with a mixture of vermiculite, peat moss (another nonrenewable resource), and compost (which you can make yourself, but you have to sift and sterilize it before use). Don't let the rain water your plants; instead, install a drip irrigation system that you can run underneath a layer of black plastic mulch. Don't rely on what nature provides; instead, invest time and money in a system that you can control absolutely. Whatever happened to "all it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground"?

At its most basic level, gardening is an almost magical process. You take seeds (which you can often harvest from last year's plants), put them in the dirt (which is all around), expose them to the sun and rain (which come down from the sky with no effort on your part), and eventually, you end up with edible plants. You get something for nothing—proof that there actually is such a thing as a free lunch. And now these "experts" come along and say that the right way to garden is to replace these free, abundant natural resources with heat-controlled boxes and fluorescent lights and a drip irrigation system that also dispenses liquid fertilizer. Yes, I understand that they're just trying to take some of the uncertainty out of the process—to produce more reliable, consistent results and better yields. And when you balance the long-term cost of all the equipment they want you to buy against the value of all the fresh vegetables you could grow using their methods, it probably is cost-effective to do it this way. But it still seems wasteful to me to let the sun and rain and soil that I can get for nothing go unused so that I can substitute something that's easier to control. Spending money and time on something that I could get for free, with no effort at all, seems to me the exact opposite of ecofrugality.

So I've decided I'm going to seek a middle ground. Since we haven't had much luck with our seedlings in the past, and since starting seeds is still more ecofrugal than buying plants, I'm planning to go ahead and invest some time and money in a proper seed-starting mix and some artificial light to supplement the sunlight. But aside from that, I'm going to stick to sustainable growing practices, such as

choosing crops that are well-adapted to our climate
using homemade compost, supplementing with bagged compost only as needed
letting Mother Nature do the watering, and watering by hand during dry spells
growing plants close together to keep the weeds down, and pulling those that do come through by hand
saving seeds for future use (storing them in the basement to keep them nice and cool)

And for future years, I'm going to look into more sustainable ways of starting my seeds, such as using renewable coir, or coconut fiber, instead of a peat-based mix. I'm also planning to try winter sowing techniques to avoid the hardening-off process, reduce water use, make better use of natural light, and possibly eliminate the need for a seed-starting mix altogether. I tried this method on a limited basis last year, and I got mixed results, but it seems like such a perfect example ecofrugality (saving time, money, and natural resources all at once) that I think it's definitely worth exploring further.

Thrift Week Day Seven: Use Community Resources Day

2012-01-23T21:15:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like Thrift Week is ending not with a bang, but with a whimper. I was going to call this final day Visit Your Library Day, but I decided to expand it to Use Community Resources Day to cover more of the bases. Unfortunately, that didn't actually increase my options all that much. Since it was a rainy day in January, visiting the park wasn't particularly appealing, and local festivals usually take place on weekends (or occasionally on Thursday nights, when we can't usually make it). I did stop by the library, but there wasn't anything going on there except story hour for the kiddies. Since we're still in the middle of our Netflix trial, I didn't want to pick up a movie, and I'd already checked out the one book I particularly wanted to read last Friday. (I would have waited until today to get it, just to make Use Community Resources Day more useful, but it had just been checked in and I wanted to snatch it up before someone else got it.) So I just hung out for a little while, paging through magazines, so I could at least say I'd done something. Not very impressive, I must admit.

Sadly, the follow-up to my Shop Secondhand Day purchase isn't very inspiring either. I took the jacket to the local tailor shop this afternoon to get the sleeves shortened. At first she said she could do it, but once she turned up the sleeves and took a look at the lining, she claimed that in order to do the sleeves, she'd have to replace the lining as well—for $85—and she didn't think it was worth it. (This is the same tailor who told me last fall that it would be impossible to reset the sleeves in my lightweight coat. Honestly, you'd think this woman was going out of her way to avoid paying jobs.) So I'm going to have to see if I can manage to piece the lining together myself somehow, using my extremely rudimentary sewing skills. And after that, I'll see if I can find someone who's willing to shorten the sleeves for me—I suspect that job is beyond my abilities. Sigh. This $2 secondhand jacket is turning out to be a costly purchase. And I'm growing disenchanted with my local businesses....

Thrift Week Day Six: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Repair Day

2012-01-22T11:18:00.001-05:00

I wasn't really sure what I was going to do to for Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Repair Day. I'd done plenty of things along these lines earlier in the month, as it happens: we reduced waste on our last several shopping trips by using the nifty new mesh produce bags that we got in our stockings last Christmas, and we reused by disposing of a lot of unwanted items on Freecycle. The items we've unloaded so far include a box of Sweet 'N' Low packets left behind by a visiting friend, a copy of Your Money or Your Life that I picked up off the "free" table at the last library book sale, and an old IKEA microwave cart that we hadn't used since we moved to this house. (To date, I haven't found anyone who wants the two books of British crosswords, the 2012 "American Landscapes" calendar from my insurance company, or the giant "super liter" plastic mug I got as a souvenir at my senior prom.)

Then, last weekend, I discovered a way to recycle something I'd previously thought was fit only for the trash-bin: textiles. There are plenty of outlets for disposing of clothing in usable condition, of course, including the local thrift shop I visited on Friday—but Brian and I tend to wear clothes until they're no longer wearable, and therefore no longer suitable for donation. Yet in many cases, there's still plenty of decent fabric left on them, stuff that someone with better sewing skills than mine could probably put to good use. My approach up until now has been to stuff all these items into a couple of drawers down in the basement in the hope that the fabric will come in handy for something (though I'm not sure what) one day (though I'm not sure when) when my sewing skills have improved (though I'm not sure how). But I finally admitted that this was an unrealistic hope and decided to find a way to unload them. So I did a little research and discovered that there's actually a recycling bin for textiles in the parking lot of the Edison public library, not two miles from our house. I pulled out most of the contents of one of the drawers, bagged it up, and stuffed it in this bin, from which—according to Repurpose New Jersey, the company that operates the bins—"All textiles are resold to a distributor with proceeds going directly to well-established local 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations."

But since I'd already done those things, I couldn't do them again, and I wasn't sure what kind of waste-reducing activity I could take part in on the day itself. And then, this morning, one of the window blinds in our office neatly answered the question by breaking when Brian tried to open it. Actually, it was just a tiny part of the shade that broke—the little plastic ring that holds the pull cord—but it's a crucial part, one without which the blind can't be raised or lowered. And as Brian noted with some irritation, the way the shade is designed, it's impossible to pull out the broken ring and replace it with an identical one, because both the ring and the loop it fits through are single, solid pieces. Clearly whoever designed this shade didn't really have long-term reparability in mind. (This seems to be a common problem with modern machinery—there's even a song about it by Martin Swinger, called "Little Plastic Part.")

So our best hope of fixing the thing was to patch the broken ring up with a bit of epoxy glue and then hope that it doesn't promptly snap again as soon as it's reinstalled. The epoxy join itself almost certainly won't break, of course, as the epoxy, once dried, will be stronger than the original plastic, but the ring could easily break on the other side. If that happens, we'll have to try and MacGyver a replacement for the ring out of a paper clip or a safety pin or some such device that can be split open, slipped through the fabric loop, and re-fastened. This will make our makeshift replacement device superior to the original, but if manufacturers insist on making these things so shoddily, what do they expect?

Postscript: After we got home from our dinner out, we reinstalled the shade, and it seems to be holding up for now. And, before going to bed, I did squeeze in one more celebration of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Repair Day. Since I ended up not spending anything for the home energy audit I'd requested as a birthday present, I decided that my new birthday gift to myself would be a Maggie Bag tote, something I'd had my eye on ever since my current handbag (a cheapo Merona purse from Target) started to fall apart piece by piece. Available in a wide range of styles and colors, these "eco-chic" purses are made from recycled seat belts, making them super durable as well as green. They cost considerably more than I'd normally spend on a purse (I don't believe I've ever paid more than $35 for one before), but on the other hand, my cheap bags usually wear out within a couple of years. These Maggie Bags, by contrast, come with a lifetime warranty. (It doesn't cover damage from accidents or spills, but the site faithfully promises that "defective or missing hardware, faulty zippers, and loose stitching of the webbing or lining of the bag will be repaired or replaced.") And since I found the bag I wanted on sale at Target, it only cost me around $70 total (including tax, with free shipping). Paying twice as much for a bag that will last ten times as long certainly seems like a good value to me—not to mention all the resources to be saved by buying one bag instead of ten. So with this purchase, I'm actually reducing as well as recycling—and treating myself as well. Happy Thrift Week to me!

Thrift Week Day Five: Leave the Car at Home Day

2012-01-21T17:43:00.002-05:00

This morning we woke up to three inches of snow on the ground, with another inch or so of "wintry mix" expected. At first blush, that made today an ideal choice for the Thrift Week event I'm calling Leave the Car at Home Day. After all, there's no place we urgently need to go today, and why would we make an unnecessary trip in this weather? But then I remembered that my parents were planning to meet us here this evening and take us out to dinner for my birthday. I could, of course, choose a local restaurant; we have plenty of choices here in town, from Greek to Thai to Peruvian. But would we really want to traipse through the snow to get there?

Then I started to wonder: would my parents even want to drive up here in this weather? The snow had stopped by noon, but they were still predicting slippery roads until around 5pm. So we discussed it and agreed to reschedule for tomorrow. Now, it may seem like a cop out to take credit for leaving the car at home when all we did was postpone a trip until tomorrow. But we're already taking the car to the dentist's office tomorrow, which will put us about halfway to my parents' house already—so by heading directly over from there, we'll cut the total miles driven in half.

True, it would be a lot more interesting if we'd chosen a day when we had lots of errands to run and then found creative ways to take care of them all without getting in the car, such as taking a bus or choosing local businesses so we could go on foot. But when you come right down to it, leaving the car at home by leaving yourself at home—finding ways to feed and entertain yourself that don't involve leaving the house—is just as effective, and can be just as satisfying. (Especially when your home-cooked meal is one of my husband's delicious homemade chicken pot pies—made with organic veggies and the leftovers from my birthday chicken—and your home entertainment includes anything available through a free trial of Netflix.)

Thrift Week Day Four: Buy Secondhand Day

2012-01-20T17:33:00.000-05:00

I must confess, I initially didn't have high hopes for today's Thrift Week event, Buy Secondhand Day. Our town's only used-book store just closed down (which, sadly, isn't that much of a loss, because the place was nice as a hangout but terrible as a place to find books). We do have a couple of secondhand clothing stores, but both have serious drawbacks. One is a high-end consignment shop that charges more for secondhand clothes than the cheaper chains do for new, and also carries hardly anything in my size. The other is a thrift shop run out of a dim and cluttered church basement, which has great prices (suit jackets for $2, shirts for $1, shoes for $2 a pair) but a limited and seldom-changing selection. It's also open only about 11 hours per week: Friday during the day and a couple of hours on Thursday and Saturday mornings. So I knew if I was going to make an attempt at secondhand shopping in my home town, it was going to have to be today, but I wasn't terribly optimistic.

Well, when I got there, I was pleasantly surprised. Apparently the staff had been at work tidying the place up, because I found that the whole space was much cleaner, brighter and better organized than I'd ever seen it before. There was plenty of room to move around, and I could see all the items at a glance instead of having to squeeze between the racks to paw through them. I glanced over the shirts and trousers and then decided, just for the heck of it, to have another look at the women's blazers. This is an item I haven't worn on a regular basis in years (when you work at home, every day is Casual Friday), but it has often occurred to me that it would be a useful thing to have for emergencies, and right now the only one I own is an ill-fitting black thing that I picked up for five bucks at a discount store. I'd looked through the jackets before with no luck, so I wasn't expecting much—but to my surprise, I found a black, two-button jacket, originally from Ann Taylor, in a reasonable size, which I was sure I'd never seen before. It fit beautifully except for the sleeves, but I figured those could always be shortened if necessary; it'll just be a follow-up to Tuesday's Support Local Business event. And even if it costs me $20 to alter a jacket that I only paid $2 for, that'll still be only $22 total for a jacket that probably cost $150 or more when it was new.

So, for two dollars, I've acquired both a new-to-me jacket and a useful lesson: never give up on a local business, even one that's been in bad shape for years. So long as it's still in business, it always has the chance to improve. (Too bad it's too late for the bookstore.)

Thrift Week Day Three: Conserve Energy Day

2012-01-19T23:23:00.001-05:00

I've decided that the third day of Thrift Week is to be Conserve Energy Day, since this is such a perfect example of ecofrugality: you can cut your utility bills and your carbon footprint at the same time. You can visit any site devoted to energy use and see dozens of suggestions for simple, easy ways to conserve energy without a big up-front investment, such as

replacing all your incandescent bulbs with CFLs
installing a low-flow showerhead to save hot water
weather-stripping around doors
turning down the heat at night (or installing a programmable thermostat that will turn it down automatically)
washing your lightly soiled clothes in cold water only

...and so on. The problem is, since steps like these are clear no-brainers, we've already taken them all. And having gathered all the obvious low-hanging fruit, I was left uncertain as to what to do next to give me the biggest bang, in terms of energy savings, for my buck. Which is why I decided that my birthday present to myself this year was going to be a home energy audit. Up until this point, the high price tag (a few hundred bucks) had deterred me, because I wasn't sure whether the audit itself would identify enough potential savings to pay for itself. But I finally decided that it was worth it to me to know for sure.

So, today I bit the proverbial bullet and called up New Jersey Home Energy Solutions, a vendor that had been passing out coupons at our local "Earth and Health Fair" last spring. I talked to the proprietor, who informed me that yes, my half-price coupon was still good—but then he added that perhaps I might not want to use it. He explained that if I opted for a full-scale home energy audit, he'd be legally obligated to carry out a whole bunch of tests, most of which wouldn't actually tell us anything likely to bear fruit in terms of energy savings. So he suggested that I let him come over first and do a free "walk-through," examining the various parts and systems in the house to see which areas might be most likely to benefit from improvements—and then, based on the results of that, I could choose to have further tests if they were likely to be helpful. (I'm still not sure why he told me this, since it seems like he had nothing to gain by it—in fact, he'd just cost himself 200 bucks—but maybe he just finds the energy audits to be a time-consuming and not very profitable part of his job.)

So, realizing that my energy evaluation might turn out to be an even better bargain than I bargained for, I said sure, come on over. Within ten minutes he showed up and started off the walk-through by asking to see last January's utility bill, to get an idea of what we currently pay for heating. (Not a lot compared to most people in our area, apparently.) Then he proceeded to examine our ancient boiler, inspect the windows, admire the Shepard Fairey print hanging in our downstairs room, praise the job we'd done insulating the attic four years back, and finally offer the following conclusions:

If we hadn't already added insulation to the attic, his first suggestion would be to go up there and seal up all the cracks in that area to stop air infiltration before adding more insulation on top. But to do that now, he said, would require removing all the insulation we'd already installed, which wouldn't be cost-effective.
Likewise, if the downstairs room weren't finished, we could try to stop air leaks from the bottom rather than the top by sealing up cracks around the ceiling joists. But taking out the ceiling to do that, once again, wouldn't be worth it. The unfinished portion of the basement could benefit from a bit of sealing, but he quite candidly admitted that that was a job we could pretty easily do ourselves with a tube of that foam-in stuff from Home Depot. (Side note: Not Lowe's. We're currently boycotting Lowe's over their decision to cave in to pressure from right-wing groups and pull their ads from a TV show about a Muslim family in America. Other sponsors have also announced that they won't be renewing their ads, but their stated reason was because the show, frankly, isn't very good. That, I have no problem with. But Lowe's admits that the reason they dropped their sponsorship is that the show as a "lightning rod" for anti-Muslim sentiments, and they didn't want to get singed. Well, if they're worried about losing business, they can worry about losing mine.)
Although our boiler is ancient—probably original to the house, which we think was built around 1970—we're unlikely to benefit from replacing it because our heating bills are so low as it is. He notes that since it's a gas boiler, not an oil one, as long as it's kept tuned up there's no reason it can't run as efficiently as a basic gas boiler of modern vintage. Newer high-efficiency boilers, which include condensing units to recover lost heat, can do better—but because they're more complex, they're also more repair-prone. So he said there was no reason not to keep this boiler running until it reaches the end of its natural life, by which point (a) some of the bugs in the new high-efficiency models might be worked out, and (b) they might be the only available replacements, due to tightening federal efficiency standards. So actually, the longer we can keep this old boiler running, the better our chances of being able to replace it with a reliable high-efficiency one when it finally dies.
As it turns out, we did the right thing when replacing our water heater a couple of years back by going with an old-fashioned, but reasonably efficient, tank heater rather than an on-demand heater. With hard water like we have here, he explained, the on-demand heaters need to be flushed yearly with acid to keep running at peak efficiency—a procedure that costs about $150, which, he pointed out, is more than we probably spend on all the hot water we use in a year right now.
There's no good reason to replace our windows, which he said were in good shape and snugly installed. In fact, he noted, replacing windows is almost never cost-effective unless the old windows are totally shot.
While we can't block air coming into our house from the bottom or escaping out the top, we can do a bit to keep it from leaking into the living areas by sealing off gaps around the baseboards (for which he recommended a water-based caulk) and insulating our electrical outlets. So those are two fairly cheap fixes that might help a bit with our day-to-day comfort, even if they don't make a big dent in the fuel bill. (He noted that most of the small do-it-yourself projects that home energy auditors recommend, such as weather-stripping around doors, are recommended because they're easy to do and have a low up-front cost—not because they make a big difference in fuel bills. They can make a big difference in comfort, he added, because they stop the drafts that are easy to feel—but the bulk of heat loss is through the multitude of smaller air leaks that are harder to feel and more costly to eliminate.)

So, all in all, I think this free walk-through was a highly informative experience, and more than worth what I paid for it. :-) It's a little disappointing to know that there's not much we can actually do to lower our heating bills any further, but on the flip side, it's comforting to know that we're already doing just about everything right. And it's also nice to see that there are some honest contractors out there who will tell you candidly when you don't need their services. The guy from Home Energy Solutions concluded his visit by advising me to save my money and pass the coupon on to someone else in the area who might have more energy leaks to plug. (Note to readers in the central Jersey area: Anyone want it?)

Thrift Week Day Two: Eat Sustainably Day

2012-01-19T00:01:00.002-05:00

Today's blog entry poses a bit of a dilemma. On the one hand, it's day two of Thrift Week, but on the other hand, this is also the day when sites all over the Web are going dark as a protest against two pending pieces of legislation, SOPA and PIPA, that could be used to censor pretty much anything on the Internet. As best I can tell, these are well-intentioned bills meant to stop Internet piracy and copyright violation, which are legitimate problems—but they've been crafted by people who don't really understand how the Internet works. I don't really understand it either, but I've been reading what the folks who do have to say on the subject, and they claim that these bills won't succeed in stopping piracy but will impose massive, costly restrictions on content providers everywhere. So I'd like to show solidarity with the folks opposing the bill...but this is still Thrift Week, and that isn't an event that can just be postponed. So I'm compromising by writing this entry today, but scheduling it to post at midnight, on the 19th instead of the 18th. The seven days of Thrift Week will still be covered, but two of them will be lumped together on one day.

So with that out of the way, let's talk about today's event, which I'm calling Eat Sustainably Day. Sustainable eating, as I see it, takes several forms, most of which I've discussed on this blog before. Sustainable food can be any of the following:

Seasonal, because food that's in season doesn't have to be shipped long distances, or grown in hothouses, or kept in cold storage, all of which require energy).
Locally grown, because fewer "miles to market" means less fuel burned, less CO2 emitted, and fresher food, to boot.
Organic, because using fewer chemical inputs (fertilizers and pesticides) means less pollution and healthier soil.
Fair-Trade, because a truly sustainable food system has to protect the interests of those who grow the food.
Low on the food chain, because plants produce less waste and greenhouse gases than animals, and small animals produce less than big ones.
Humane, because the animals we eat (or eat the products of) are part of our food system too.

I tried to come up with a nifty mnemonic for all that, but I couldn't seem to spell anything with the letters SLOFLH.

I'm observing Eat Sustainably Day in several ways. The main course of tonight's dinner will be a free-range chicken from Whole Foods (given to me by my best friend as what was, I must say, the single most practical birthday present I've ever received). It receives a score of 2 on the 5-point Animal Welfare Rating scale used by Whole Foods, which means that the animals can be kept indoors as long as they are "provided with enrichments that encourage behavior that's natural to them." (This isn't quite up there with living on pasture year-round, but it's a darn sight better than what your typical supermarket chicken has been subjected to.) This will be accompanied by a salad of organic greens, which, remarkably enough, were priced exactly the same at the supermarket as the conventional ones—and when Brian got to the checkout with them, actually rang up for less than the price marked, making them even cheaper. (Is it possible that organic farming is actually turning out to be more cost-effective for some products than the "traditional" methods that came into fashion in the last century?)

But the real pièce de résistance of tonight's frugal menu will be my after-dinner activity: planning my vegetable garden for next year. After all, you can't get more local than your own back yard, and now is the time to choose my crops and get my seed order in if I want to be able to start my seedlings in February. I know I'll definitely want some sugar snap peas, lots of tomatoes, and two—but no more than two—zucchini plants, but beyond that I'm uncertain. I'd love to grow some winter squash, but all my previous attempts to plant it in the actual garden (as opposed to letting it run wild in the side yard next to the compost bin) have been abysmal failures. I've had good luck with arugula, mixed results with lettuce, and no success at all with spinach; my green beans produced only a small crop, even when I managed to keep the groundhog from getting at them; and my cucumbers did great the first year and were anemic the next. So I'm at a bit of a loss. Maybe I need to try new varieties...or maybe I should consider other crops I haven't grown before. Any suggestions?

This post postponed

2012-01-18T18:45:00.000-05:00

My post marking day two of Thrift Week has been postponed as a gesture of solidarity with other sites on the Web expressing their opposition to Internet censorship. The entry for day two, along with that for day three, will appear tomorrow.

Thrift Week 2012: The green version

2012-01-17T17:50:00.000-05:00

Happy Thrift Week, everyone! When I first instituted the celebration of Thrift Week here on the blog two years back, I noted that the 20th-century version of this holiday included different themes for each day of the week (Have a Bank Account Day, Invest Safely Day, Carry Life Insurance Day, etc.) When I was trying to think of topics for this year's Thrift Week series, my first idea was to take these old themes and talk about ways to update them for the 'teens (such as changing Have a Bank Account Day to Dump Your Big Bank for a Credit Union Day). But last week, I came up with what I think is a much better idea while shopping. What, shopping? Well, allow me to explain.

It happened like this: A new comic-book and game store just opened up here in town, so naturally I had to stop in and browse. (What can a comic shop possibly have to do with thrift? Just wait, I'm getting to it.) During that first visit, I ended up spending ten bucks on a small game—something that's out of character for me, since I definitely didn't need it, hadn't been actively looking for it, and hadn't shopped around for it. But I soothed myself with the thought that even if it wasn't strictly necessary, it was worthwhile to support local business. From there, it was but a short step to, "You know, that really ought to be some sort of national holiday, Support Local Business Day." And then, with a flash of inspiration, I realized: wait a minute, there's already a perfectly good national holiday going unused, with seven whole days in it that could all be devoted to different aspects of the ecofrugal life.

So that's the theme of this year's Thrift Week celebration: instead of focusing on specific topics related to money management, each day will focus on a specific topic related to the ecofrugal life. Moreover, this year, I'm planning to do more than just talk the thrifty talk: I'm going to walk the thrifty walk as well. Each day this week, I'm actually going to go out and do something specific in keeping with that day's theme. And we'll be kicking off the week with the one that started the whole idea in the first place: Support Local Business Day.

What exactly is ecofrugal about supporting local businesses? Well, first of all, it means less driving. In a town like ours, you can shop for a lot of things—food, toys, office supplies, some kinds of clothing—without getting in a car at all. Even if you live in the boonies, though, the more local your businesses are, the less you have to drive to reach them—and that means less gas burned and less CO2 emitted. Also, supporting local businesses helps keep them afloat, which helps ensure that there will still be businesses in walking distance in the years to come. And in a more general way, having places to shop in town helps tie a community together, and close-knit communities are better at providing a lot of the amenities of the ecofrugal lifestyle (a topic we'll be discussing more on day 6 or 7).

So how did I celebrate Support Local Business Day? Well, I could have gone out and bought yet another new game, but that would be kind of stretching the definition of ecofrugality. So instead, I ran a more practical errand and brought my watch, which was in need of a new battery, over to Jimmy's Watches on Raritan Avenue. This little hole in the wall not only sells watches but actually repairs them, a service that's becoming increasingly difficult to come by in the modern world. With many local businesses, better service comes at the cost of higher prices and smaller selection, but Jimmy's is a rare exception; this tiny store actually has more choice and better value than I've seen anywhere else in our area. I popped up there on foot, handed over my stopped watch, and walked out with a working watch in five minutes. (From there, I went on to visit my local Baskin-Robbins, but that doesn't really count as supporting a local business, since I didn't buy anything; I just stopped in to pick up my free cone, courtesy of the Birthday Club. Birthday freebies—my favorite kind.)

So, that's how I celebrated Support Local Business Day; how about you? (It's a bit late for today, but Thrift Week lasts until the 23rd, so you can make a local shopping excursion at any time this week and still count it as part of the event. Then leave a comment to say how it went, and we can all celebrate together.)

The siren song of the dollar store

2012-01-15T17:56:00.000-05:00

An amusing article in last Wednesday's New York Times tells reporter Jesse McKinley's story of his growing addiction to shopping at dollar stores. McKinley says that far from being solely purveyors of useless plastic junk, dollar stores now offer a wide assortment of useful and attractive objects, such as spices and herbs, canned goods, cleaning supplies, dishes and glassware and various kitchen gadgets. However, he also mentions the chief peril of dollar store shopping: it's easy to find yourself throwing everything into your cart willy-nilly, buying things you don't actually need and will never use, because what the heck, it's only a dollar. However, he doesn't mention another, less obvious hazard: the fact that for some items, at a dollar a pop, you may actually be paying too much.

The thing about a dollar store—a traditional dollar store, that is, as opposed to the "$1 and up" stores starting to pop up in various areas (what kind of selling point is that, anyway? Everything in the store costs at least a dollar? How is that a bargain?)—at a traditional dollar store, everything costs a dollar, regardless of what it would cost elsewhere. A dollar is such a small amount these days that it's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that this is the best deal you can expect to find on anything, but in many cases, it just isn't so. Consider:

At the dollar store, a one pound-box of baking soda costs a dollar. At Aldi, a discount grocery chain, it costs 50 cents.
At the dollar store, canned goods of all kinds cost a dollar apiece. At the supermarket, some of those items might cost more than a dollar, but others might cost as little as 75 cents. (Not to mention that supermarkets have sales and dollar stores don't—so if you bought a dozen cans of veggies at your local dollar store this week, you'd pay twice as much for them as you would at the Shop Rite, currently in the middle of its annual "Can-Can Sale" on all types of canned goods.)
At the dollar store, a bottle of aspirin costs a dollar—but it may contain as little as 20 tablets, for a per-pill cost of 5 cents. At your local chain drugstore, you could pay as little as $4 for a bottle of 500 tablets, which works out to less than a penny a pill.

Then there's cleaning supplies, which one dollar store owner describes as the "gateway product" that gets many of their customers in the door. Surely you can't expect to do better than a dollar for a bottle of knock-off Windex, right? Well, not at your local grocery store—but if you just save the empty bottle you've just used up and fill it with a 50-50 mixture of vinegar and tap water, it'll do the same job for significantly less. (In fact, as my latest Tip Hero newsletter notes, there's a homemade version of just about every cleaning product imaginable, most of them mixed up from common—and cheap—household ingredients like vinegar, baking soda, rubbing alcohol, and hydrogen peroxide.)

None of this is meant to knock dollar stores. Dollar Tree is one of my favorite chains, and I'll frequently poke my head in there when I'm just passing by, even if I'm not looking for anything, just to enjoy scavenging through the shelves for unexpected bargains. But while I think dollar stores are great for treasure hunting, I wouldn't treat them as a one-stop shop for all my needs. I'd still expect to find better prices and selection for groceries at the grocery store, drugs at the drugstore, and hardware at the hardware store. I'd only make the dollar store my first stop for household doodads—picture frames, coffee mugs, shower curtain liners—that don't need to be of particularly high quality. Because let's face it, while it may be possible nowadays to find some decent-quality of merchandise at dollar stores, it's still a lot easier, even now, to find useless plastic junk.

Flame hazard

2012-01-12T09:01:00.001-05:00

We may be about to see some "flame" messages on this blog. That's because, perhaps foolishly, I included a link to it when I posted a comment on another blog, this one belonging to Green America, explaining why I was not planning to lobby the Obama administration to oppose the extension of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Here's what I wrote:

Although I agree that it is important, in the long term, to reduce our dependence on oil, I cannot oppose the Keystone pipeline on those grounds. The fact is that this oil *will* be extracted, one way or another; it’s worth too much to leave in the ground. So the only real question is, will the oil thus extracted go to the U.S. (where it will reduce our dependence on oil from uncertain allies in the increasingly unstable Middle East), or to China (traveling there by tanker, a process that will create more emissions than the pipeline will, not to mention the risk of spills)?
We must face facts. Our nation is going to remain heavily dependent on oil for the near future, and putting the kibosh on this pipeline is not going to change that. All it will do is ensure that the oil we do use comes from less reliable sources, while Canada’s oil goes abroad. Sorry, I can’t help you on this one.

I have a feeling these comments, although made in what I hope was a respectful manner, are not going to sit well with regular readers of the Green America blog, who may choose to pop over to this blog to express their disapproval. And I'm perfectly happy to discuss the topic with them in a reasoned and respectful manner. But I fear that some of the responses may not stick to these guidelines, so I wanted to give regular readers of this blog fair warning: it might get hot in here. (I've just checked and found that I do have the ability to delete comments on this blog—it's never come up before—so I'll remove any that I think are really over the line, but I might not get to them immediately.)

Can money buy happiness? Sometimes.

2012-01-09T12:17:00.000-05:00

This weekend's Washington Post had an interesting article on "happiness economics," a hot new field in which researchers try to apply modern methods of analysis to the age-old question, "Can money buy happiness?" The best answer they've come up with so far, apparently, is "Yes, up to a point." But it's the ifs and buts surrounding that answer that make it so intriguing. The article cites several specific discoveries the happiness economists have made:

Increased income does correlate to an increase in "day to day happiness," up to around $75,000 per year. Beyond that, there's no link between more money and more happiness.
However, "life satisfaction" does go up with increased income, no matter how much you were making to start with, because getting a raise makes people feel more successful. This is a pretty startling conclusion when you think about it: beyond the $75,000 cutoff, more money doesn't actually make people happier, but it makes them think they must be happier. Thus, people may continue to pursue ever-increasing incomes, even beyond the point when working longer hours to earn more money actually starts to impair their quality of life.
While people may increase their "life satisfaction" as a result of making more money, they won't increase it by spending more money on material goods. Humans' amazing ability to adapt to new situations means that we quickly adjust to any change in our standard of living, for better or worse. This is good, because it means that when we suffer a financial setback, we get used to it pretty quickly and our reduced circumstances don't seem so bad. But it also means that when we buy a new toy, the pleasure we get out of it is pretty short-lived. Then we adjust to the new situation and start taking it for granted. Or, as my favorite financial guru, Andrew Tobias, puts it, "A luxury once sampled becomes a necessity." (Well, if it's a luxury you actually like, at least. No matter how many times I sample fine wines, they all just taste to me like grape juice that's gone off.)
However, people can get long-lasting pleasure by spending their money, not on stuff, but on experiences. That's because, first of all, they can get pleasure out of recalling and discussing them with friends in a way that they don't tend to discuss, say, a new TV set; and second, it's harder to make direct comparisons between your experiences and someone else's. If you've bought a new large-screen TV and your neighbor goes out and gets one that's even bigger, you may no longer feel as happy with yours—but if you went backpacking in Utah while your neighbor went surfing in Malibu, who's to say whose experience was "better"? It's easier to enjoy looking at each other's vacation photos without seeing it as a competition, so your satisfaction is enhanced by sharing, rather than diminished.

The Post article ends rather abruptly, without drawing any sort of conclusion from all these findings, but I think I can trace out an ecofrugal moral to this story: the satisfaction you get from making money isn't matched by corresponding satisfaction in spending it, especially in spending it on stuff (which requires resources to produce, transport, and eventually dispose of). So we frugal types, who choose to spend less than we make, are actually getting a bigger happiness bang for our bucks than those who go out and squander their savings on new toys. And in many cases, our money-saving choices—like our decision to fix up our downstairs bath ourselves, rather than "have it done"—turn into experiences, which provide more long-lasting happiness than purchases anyway. Going ecofrugal—the key to happiness? Maybe that's what the happiness economists should study next.

(Postscript: talking of the downstairs bathroom, the final piece that was missing—a threshold for the door—finally fell into place last weekend. Well, it didn't so much fall as Brian put it there, with the help of his new power saw and some cement screws. But the point is that we now have one entire room in our house that is actually, totally done—after being "almost done" for more than nine months. Yay! Only eight more "almost done" rooms to go...)

...and an ecofrugal new year

2012-01-07T23:22:00.001-05:00

Happy 2012! Our winter holidays had a few ecofrugal highlights of interest:

our purchase of a bargain-priced pressure cooker, discussed in my last post of 2011;
a couple of ecofrugal-themed posters received as Hanukkah presents from my mom (one reading "Make Gardens, not War" and one on the ABCs of green living);
a trip to Half-Price books, where I found a secondhand copy of a live David Wilcox album for only six bucks (woohoo!);
caroling around the piano on Christmas day, a nice family-centered celebration that didn't cost anything or even require electricity;
a gift we received of three reusable mesh produce bags, which should be somewhat more elegant than taking home produce in reused bread bags;
a gift we gave to our six oldest nieces and nephews that went over big: "magic cloths," which are basically my homemade equivalent of Playsilks. Rather than spend $15 each on real silks, I just bought six yards of sheer fabric in different bright colors from a very nice seller on Etsy.com, and I composed a short poem to go with them, explaining how these magic cloths could take any form from a superhero's cape to a princess's gown to a ship's sail. The kids all got lots of Christmas presents, some of them quite elaborate, so it was very gratifying to see that our very simple, imagination-based toys still got plenty of playtime.

Now, as we leave Christmas behind, it's time to move on to New Year's resolutions. This year I've made several that fit the ecofrugal theme of this blog:

Get organized about my garden. Last year family affairs disrupted the planting process in May and June, and I never really got back on track. This year, I want to stick to a proper schedule and get all my seeds ordered, my seedlings started, and my young plants in right on time—and then I want to stay on top of gathering them when the harvest rolls around, so that I don't end up with dozens of cherry tomatoes falling right off the vine before I get around to picking them.
Get an energy audit for our house. I told Brian this was what I really wanted this year for my birthday, and he agreed to let me spend the $200 (half the regular price, thanks to a special promotion) for the full audit complete with recommendations. Maybe I can learn a way to keep warm while I work without resorting to wearing a jacket indoors.
Practice acoustic music. One of my gifts from Brian was a ukulele (whee!), so I've vowed to learn at least three songs on it well enough to perform them in front of strangers. One fertile source of material I've discovered is the page of ukulele arrangements at the "Alligator Boogaloo" website. (Calling this ecofrugal is a bit of a stretch, but it qualifies by virtue of being low-cost, at-home entertainment that doesn't use any electricity.)

Anyone else out there have any ecofrugal resolutions, or any ecofrugal holiday gifts and/or experiences, that they'd like to share?

What passes for extravagance

2011-12-27T10:32:00.000-05:00

OK, I know I said I wouldn't be posting during our vacation, but this is just a quick post to let you know about what passes for extravagance in our ecofrugal household:

The latest issue of Mother Earth News contained an article about pressure cookers that piqued my husband's interest. By cooking food with high-pressure steam, these nifty tools dramatically cut cooking time, thereby saving energy as well. (My parents had one of these years ago—I still remember the little valve on the top rocking hypnotically back and forth as the broccoli cooked—but lately they seem to have fallen out of favor with the rise of the microwave.) Although it sounded intriguing, he had to admit that we didn't really "need" it, and it probably wouldn't be worth investing $50 or more in a new "toy" for the kitchen.

On Christmas Day, however, the newspaper brought a plethora of fliers advertising after-Christmas sales, including one from JC Penney that showed a five-quart pressure cooker marked down to $20. And, on top of that, the sale flier included a coupon good for $10 off any purchase of $25 or more on the 26th and 27th. Spending the extra $5 wouldn't be a problem, since Penney's is Brian's preferred supplier for underwear, which he actually did need (and which happened to be on sale as well, with a buy-one-get-one-half-price offer). And the Penney's store was in an area that we wanted to visit anyway, to go to Pennzey's Spices (a local store that's a great source for intriguing spice blends, specifically a veggie soup base that makes just about any meatless soup taste richer and more flavorful) and the local Half Price Books (self-explanatory)—so we wouldn't even need to make an extra trip.

We did have a moment of indecision in the store itself, when we discovered that the 5-packs of undies were considerably more expensive than Brian had remembered, and he realized that the underwear purchase alone would put us over the $25 limit to take advantage of the coupon. Since we didn't actually need to buy the pressure cooker to get our discount—even though that was what had brought us to the store in the first place—he thought perhaps it would be too frivolous to buy it. But in the end he decided, hey, it's Christmas—it's okay to indulge ourselves. By spending ten dollars (after coupon) on an energy-saving, time-saving, money-saving device for the kitchen that will probably be used primarily to cook dry beans and brown rice.

This is how the ecofrugal lifestyle distorts your perceptions after a while. I truly think Brian felt as extravagant and devil-may-care buying that $10 pressure cooker as other men his age do dropping $30,000 on a little red sports car. And I suspect that, in the end, he'll get just as much pleasure out of it.

Frugal meets elegant

2011-12-20T19:36:00.001-05:00

This will probably be my last post for a while, since we're off to Indiana soon to celebrate the holidays with my in-laws. I have a whole list of profound, serious topics I could write about for this farewell post, such as why Europeans save more than Americans do, or whether the celebrated female love of shopping is nothing more than a response to social disempowerment, or whether working less and spending less could be the key to a longer, happier life. But the fact is, the topic I really feel most drawn to right now is holiday parties. Specifically, how to have one without spending a ridiculous amount of money.

This is actually inspired by an article that appeared three years ago in the New York Times, in which the writer challenged David Monn, party planner to the stars, to help him "design a transcendent holiday dinner party for eight at my West Village apartment on a recessionary budget — say, $30 a head." When this link turned up in the budget-oriented Tip Hero newsletter, the bulk of the responses were along the same lines as mine: "$30 a head is cheap?" Several respondents also found it ludicrous that the best the celebrated event planner could do with this austere budget was twice-baked potatoes for a main course, a store-bought cake for dessert, and paper snowflakes (like the ones you made in grade school) for decoration. How, the group wondered, did he ever manage to spend $240 on that?

So I decided to pose the same challenge to myself and see just how much more cheaply I could do it. My normal idea of a great holiday party is a potluck supper, caroling, and board games, but to make it a fair test, I challenged myself to plan the same type of party the author of the article wanted: an elegant dinner for eight, complete with holiday-themed decor. Since the closest thing our house has to a formal dining area is in our large downstairs room, guests would have to pass through a good bit of the house to get to it—so the decorations would have to cover not just the dining area itself, but also the living room, hall, and kitchen, to keep the mood going from the time guests walk in the door.

Fortunately, since tasteful holiday decorations tend to be natural and understated, they are easy to make quite cheaply. A Google search for "balsam centerpiece" reveals a variety of pieces ranging in price from $25 to $55 (plus shipping), but our local Christmas tree vendor will be glad to let you gather up an armload of trimmed-off evergreen branches for nothing, and pine cones are easily found under any convenient clump of pine trees. I can also gather clumps of red berries from the sidewalk near my neighbor's house, where a large holly tree obligingly drops them throughout December, and red pillar candles are just $2.50 each at IKEA. That means that for just $7.50, I could put a holiday centerpiece on the dining table and smaller ones in the living room and kitchen—and to keep the festive mood going along the the hallway, I'd deck out each of the doors with a single jingle-bell ornament (available in packs of six from the dollar store) hung from a length of colorful holiday ribbon (also from the dollar store). Total cost for decorations: $10.50 (or $12.50 if I give a tip to the tree sellers).

David Monn also spent some of the $240 budget on prettying up the table, using a $13 roll of what the article called "quilting batting" (though the audio slideshow calls it "bunting," which is probably more accurate) as a tablecloth. We happen to have a nice white tablecloth already that fits our dining table at full extension, but we don't have a matched set of eight napkins—and while we do have eight matched dinner plates, they're Corelleware, with a blue-and-green pattern that isn't particularly elegant or Christmasy. But no problem; I could just borrow my mom's china, a nice white with a simple gold rim that would fit into the holiday decorating scheme just fine. (She'd probably be happy to see it put to good use, since it just sits in a cabinet most of the year.) I might even decide to invest ten bucks in a set of marked-down napkins from Pier 1, since none of ours are Christmas-appropriate.

Which brings us to the all-important question of what to serve. This is the area where I won't skimp: I'll keep the meal as frugal as I can, but not if it means compromising on delicious. (No store-bought cake for me, thank you.) Consulting our recipe files, I found a main dish that's both elegant and frugal: butternut squash cassoulet, from Cooking Light magazine. To fill out the "transcendent" menu, I'd start with the citrus spinach salad from The Clueless Vegetarian, and conclude with one of my husband's famous homemade apple pies. Grocery list:

2 bunches spinach (organic): $5.00
4 large oranges (about 1.5 pounds) (organic): $2.25
1 Vidalia onion: $.50
1 head garlic: $.26
4 ounces bacon ends (from the Amish market, $4.00/lb): $1.00
2 yellow onions: $.22
1 butternut squash (about 2 pounds) (organic, sale price): $2.50
2 pounds dry white beans: $3.00
4 large Granny Smith apples (about 1.5 pounds) (organic): $3.00
1/2 lb. sugar (organic): $.80
1/2 lb. butter (sale price): $1.00
1 lb. flour (store brand): $.36
1 container vanilla ice cream (store brand): $2.50
Total: $22.39. This doesn't count the little bits of other ingredients—olive oil, vinegar, veggie broth, Parmesan cheese, herbs, spices, corn starch, and lemon juice—so if we tack on a couple of extra dollars for that, we can estimate that $25 will cover all the food.

The party in the article also included six bottles of Three-Buck Chuck, which seems like an awful lot of wine for eight people, especially if six of them are driving home. We're not really wine drinkers ourselves, but assuming that our guests are, we'll add on just two bottles for the six of them, to ensure that they can enjoy themselves and still make it home in one piece. So that makes another $6 for wine—or about $7 with tax.

So, tallying up the cost of my frugal party:
Food: $25
Wine: $7
Tableware: $10
Decorations: $12.50
Total: $54.50—less than 25 percent of what the couple in the Times spent. And I think my frugal menu and decor are every bit as elegant as David Fancy-Pants Monn's.

And on that note, I bid you all farewell for the time being, and happy holidays!

Holiday freebies

2011-12-16T19:30:00.001-05:00

Just a quick post to say that Amazon.com is once again running their "25 Days of Free Holiday Music" giveaway. This musical advent calendar offers a different holiday-themed track each day, in a variety of genres. Selections to date have included "Greensleeves" as rendered by Mannheim Steamroller, Bing Crosby's version of "Adeste Fideles," and a version of "Deck the Halls" by, I kid you not, Twisted Sister. Even if you don't like the songs, reading the user comments can be highly entertaining: a remixed version of Duke Ellington's recording of "Jingle Bells" prompted such comments as "A good song ruined," "The worst holiday mistake made since colorizing It's a Wonderful Life," and "This took talent...I didn't think anyone could make Duke Ellington sound terrible."

Happy frugal holidays!

Last harvest

2011-12-11T14:01:00.000-05:00

Today marks another milestone on the wheel of the year: the last harvest. We went out this morning and cleared away everything from our garden beds. We got several small clumps of broccoli off our broccoli plants (which never yielded a single compact head but instead grew into massive baobabs with tiny little heads of edible broccoli) and a whole big bowlful of arugula (which had apparently been growing there quietly all autumn, concealed by the weeds, until we cleared them away). After pulling out all the dead tomato vines and (we hope) all the dandelions, we made the beds nice and snug for winter with a six-inch blanket of leaves—gathered from our neighbors' curbs, since our own yard doesn't get enough leaves to fill even one bed—and, to bring in the winter properly, filled up the bird feeder. And so here we are, all settled in for winter—and if we start craving a taste of summer during the long dark nights ahead, we'll have a nice batch of arugula pesto all stashed away in the freezer.

Oh, SNAP!

2011-12-11T11:57:00.000-05:00

That's "SNAP" as in "Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program," the program formerly known as Food Stamps.

In its latest newsletter, the Community Food Bank of New Jersey talked about the difficulty of feeding a family on SNAP benefits and invited people to take the "Food Stamp challenge" for one week. The challenge is to get by on "about $4 per day worth of food or $30 per week– the average food stamp benefit." My initial reaction to this was, "Hmm, $30 a week, that's difficult," and then my almost immediate second reaction was, "Oh wait...is that $30 per person?" Because if so, our average weekly food budget for the two of us (roughly $55) already falls within this limit—and that's including all meals eaten out, which aren't covered under SNAP. For groceries only, we spend about $48 a week, which is well within the limit.

However, in order to keep our food budget this low, we use a variety of strategies that it's impossible to use when you're following the challenge for only a week. We buy certain items in bulk, for instance (such as my Fair Trade/organic coffee and cocoa, which we buy five pounds at a time from Dean's Beans), and stock up on others when there's a really good sale. But under the rules of this challenge, you must purchase all the food you eat during the week with your $30; you can't use any food you already have, and you can't accept any free food "from friends, family, or at work, including at receptions or briefings." (I really don't get that last one—do they really think that if you were on food benefits, you would refuse a free doughnut at a meeting?)

These limits mean that you can't:

Buy anything in bulk. Powdered milk costs a lot less per quart than fresh milk, but it comes in a 20-quart box for $10, which would eat up a third of your $30 budget. So you have to buy a gallon of fresh milk instead for $4, paying $1 a quart instead of 50 cents a quart.
Wait for a good sale. We would not, for example, be allowed to use any of the cheese we have stockpiled in the fridge, which was purchased on sale for $2 a pound; we'd have to go out and buy more specifically for the week, paying the regular price of $4 a pound or more.
Use any vegetables from your garden. SNAP benefits do cover garden seeds, but obviously a week is not long enough to buy seeds, plant them, let them grow, and harvest the crops—so anything grown prior to the start of the challenge is off limits. (I assume that foods you can forage for, such as dandelion greens, would still be allowed.)
Go out to eat at any time during the week, even just for a cup of coffee, because restaurants do not take SNAP.
Accept any invitations during the week, because that would be taking "free food from friends." I'm not sure whether that means you can't even bring your own food to a potluck; it seems to me that if you made your own contribution with food you purchased out of the SNAP funds, that should mean that you have the right to share your dish with others and eat from whatever they've brought. But the organizers of the challenge might still consider this to be accepting free food, since the only dish you actually paid for is the one that you brought.

In other words, living on $60 worth of food for just one week is a lot harder than sticking to a $60 weekly food budget for an entire year. And it would be practically impossible to do at any time during December, because the month is so packed with parties that you'd have to turn down invitations left and right to keep an entire week of your calendar free from them.

So, I've decided that if I'm going to tackle this challenge at all, I should do it in January, after all the holiday fuss is over—say, January 2 through 8. But I still haven't made up my mind whether it's worth it at all to take a "challenge" that seems so unrealistic as this one. What do you think? Is it worthwhile taking this contrived challenge just to prove that I can do it, or is it better to stick to my regular grocery buying practices, which actually save more money over the long run?

A modest ecofrugal proposal

2011-12-07T08:44:00.000-05:00

Here's another quick post, this time to tell you about a story in today's Washington Post: "Recycle homes to fix America's housing crisis." The author, Nancy Welsh (founder of an organization that rehabilitates abandoned houses) points out that there are 3 million American homes now in foreclosure, and there are millions of Americans who lack affordable housing. Some are struggling to pay the rent, some are bunking with family or friends, and some are literally on the street. So rather than tear down the homes in an effort to reduce supply and drive up property values, why not restore these homes as affordable housing for the millions who need it? This plan, Welsh notes, "would also save millions of pounds of construction debris from our nation’s already overburdened landfills," as well as "deferring" millions of tons of CO2 emissions that would be produced by building an equivalent number of units from scratch.

Since ecofrugality is all about avoiding waste, recycling entire houses seems like ecofrugal thinking on a truly massive scale.

Ecofrugal spirits in the material world

2011-12-06T17:23:00.000-05:00

Just a quick post today to link to this cute little video produced by the Center for a New American Dream: "The High Price of Materialism." It's about the ways in which materialistic values and a lifestyle that centers around money are harmful to individuals and to society as a whole. One of the points it makes is that the more emphasis a society places on materialistic values, the less it places on "pro-social" values. That is, the more people care about money, the less they care about other people and about the environment. By the same token, when people focus more on "intrinsic values" such as "personal, social, and ecological well-being," they become less interested in materialism. This struck me as a very concise illustration of why the "eco" and "frugal" halves of frugality are natural allies: less spending means less waste and less damage to the environment.

It also, apparently, means a higher quality of life. In the video, psychologist Tim Kasser explains that the more people value money and material goods, the less happy they tend to be with their lives. By contrast, building a life that "expresses your intrinsic values"—more time with loved ones, meaningful work (even if it comes with a lower salary), and involvement in causes you care about—boosts quality of life in ways that more income, more expenses, and more material goodies can't. In fact, the research cited in the video indicates that not only is "eco" a natural companion for "frugal," but also that the word "frugal" itself, in its truest sense, refers not to deprivation, but to enrichment. In the modern world, frugality really does live up to the ancient origins of its Latin root, frux, meaning fruit: a frugal life is also a fruitful life, filled with joy and abundance that mere "stuff" can't provide.

Fair Trade gets a bit less fair

2011-11-28T08:52:00.000-05:00

For a few years now, I've been buying organic, Fair Trade certified coffee in bulk from a supplier in Massachusetts called Dean's Beans. By buying five pounds at a time from them, I was able to keep the price down below $10 a pound—which is still pretty expensive, but the best deal I'd ever managed to find for Fair Trade. (On the off chance that anyone reading this blog isn't already familiar with Fair Trade, the idea behind it is to ensure that farmers and craftspersons are paid a fair price for their goods. Various organizations offer Fair Trade labels, which certify that they have inspected the farm and ensured that it meets basic standards for worker treatment, sustainability, and so on. The international umbrella organization for such groups, Fairtrade International, has more information.)

On my most recent visit to the Dean's Beans site, however, I made two distressing discoveries. First, the cost of both coffee and shipping has gone up, pushing the price per pound to nearly $11; and second, in a possibly related development, Fair Trade USA (the most prominent certifier of Fair Trade goods in this country), has just split off from Fairtrade International and has lowered its standards to certify products with "as little as 2% Fair Trade ingredients." In other words, the familiar "Fair Trade Certified" logo is about to become all but meaningless. The folks at Dean's Beans predict that brands like Starbucks and Green Mountain will soon proudly promote themselves as "100 percent Fair Trade Certified," even though their actual supply chains won't have changed one bit.

Frustrated by these developments, I decided to check out the selection of Fair Trade coffees at Trader Joe's. I wanted to find out, first of all, whether they still offered any Fair Trade selections that came in at under $10 a pound, and second, whether their coffees were legitimately Fair Trade. The good news is that the answer to both questions was yes: Joe had several types of joe bearing Fair Trade labels, and all of them were marked as complying with the international standards—not the newly lowered standards of Fair Trade USA. And while not all of these coffees were under $10 a pound, several of them were. The bad news, for me at least, was that not one of these selections was available in decaf. So, for coffee drinkers who want the buzz—and a Fair Trade standard with some teeth—Trader Joe's looks like the way to go. But for those of us who can't handle the caffeine, it looks like Dean's Beans Mexican Chiapas decaf, at $45 for 5 pounds (plus $9 for shipping), is still the best deal in town.

Respect the Bird!

2011-11-20T17:14:00.002-05:00

The Washington Post has an article today about a subject that's long been a pet peeve of mine: "Christmas creep." This phrase refers to the tendency of retailers to try and extend the Christmas shopping season as long as possible, often putting up their holiday greenery before Halloween. This sort of thing happens at other times of year as well (back-to-school sales start before school is even out, and fall decorations appear in mid-August when the mercury is at 92), and it always disturbs me to see just how much modern society has lost touch with the natural cycle of the seasons. However, Christmas creep is a particularly egregious example because it means that another perfectly good holiday, Thanksgiving, gets glossed over as if it didn't count. The grocery stores do take a bit of notice, but since food is pretty much the only thing people buy for Thanksgiving, all other retailers tend to ignore it and skip straight on to Christmas, with all its glitz and goodies. In fact, the very thing that makes Thanksgiving one of my favorite holidays—the fact that it's all about family and isn't a massive purchase-fest—is what leads most businesses to give it short shrift.

Well, it appears I'm not the only one who feels this way. A campaign called "Respect the Bird" is now taking shape on Facebook, urging people to give Thanksgiving the attention it deserves—and specifically, not to let the holiday weekend be "gobbled up" by Black Friday shopping. And while some stores are trying to push Black Friday sales as early as possible, actually opening up their doors on Thanksgiving Day itself, at least one—Nordstrom—is pushing back, with a tasteful sign explaining that you won't see any holiday decorations there until November 27, because "we just like the idea of celebrating one holiday at a time." (This pleases me so much that it almost makes me want to go out and buy something at Nordstrom just to support them in their stance—but unfortunately, my ecofrugal instincts still rebel at their prices.)

The video that accompanies the article makes the point that "Thanksgiving is about being grateful for what we already have, while Christmas [at least the way it's often presented] is about going out and getting more." And especially in this economy, it seems like we could all do with a lot more of the former than the latter. (On a related note, those who object to having Christmas itself turned into a consumer-fest might like to take a look at the Simplify the Holidays campaign run by the Center for a New American Dream. The website offers a list of suggestions for ways to take the emphasis on "stuff" out of the winter holidays and refocus them on family, friendship, and, for the true believers, faith.)

Getting rid of "stupid plastic"

2011-11-15T12:55:00.001-05:00

Recently, the blog at GreenAmerica.org ran an entry about the evils of plastic. Most of it was stuff we've all heard before—it's ubiquitous, it's toxic, it kills baby sea turtles—but the author did concede that "There are a lot of great things that plastic has made possible, like artificial hearts, lightweight glasses, and Kevlar vests for police officers." So she summed up her position on plastic in the words of an activist interviewed in the documentary Bag It—"We’re not saying no to all plastic. We’re saying no to stupid plastic"—and announced that each Monday the blog would feature a new post on "how we’ve gotten stupid plastic out of our lives, and where we’re facing challenges." (In yesterday's post, for instance, she talks about the difficulty of eliminating plastic food packaging for someone who hates to cook.)

I like the idea of targeting "stupid plastic," rather than trying to eliminate all plastic (a goal that's almost certainly futile and quite possibly counterproductive). But it did kind of raise the question of just which plastics can be considered "stupid," and how you draw the line. Some products are easy to identify as "stupid," such as single-use grocery bags (which can be eliminated entirely with a single, reusable canvas bag). But other cases are trickier. Some products are clearly necessary (clothing, for instance) but don't necessarily have to be made out of plastic. But does that mean that products made of alternative materials are automatically better? Some readers of the blog seemed to think so, bragging about their wooden toothbrushes and metal toothpaste tubes. But I had to wonder: what about the environmental impact of cutting down trees to make those toothbrushes, and raising the pigs used for the bristles, and mining and smelting the metal to make the toothpaste tubes? Don't we have to take that into consideration? And if so, just how do we figure out which type of material is least harmful to the environment?

There's also durability to consider. Is a wooden toothbrush that gets tossed in the compost bin and replaced every three months a better choice than a plastic toothbrush with replaceable heads that gets used year after year, with only the heads being replaced? What about a nylon shopping bag that wears better than a cotton canvas bag? And let's not forget the impact of shipping. Glass bottles may be less toxic than plastic ones (though not necessarily safer, since they can break) and easier to recycle, but they're also a lot heavier. So if all soft drinks were still packaged in glass bottles, how much more fuel would be required to ship them around the country? How would the amount of petroleum used in transporting the heavier bottles compare to the amount used in producing the lighter ones? Is it even possible to calculate?

I don't pretend to have the answers to these questions, and I'm not sure anyone does. So speaking for myself, I'm going to continue to focus my anti-plastic efforts on the "stupid plastics" that I know are stupid: namely, the ones that can be eliminated completely with no negative impact (and in many cases, a positive impact) on my quality of life. So here are a few examples of plastic items that I have no doubts about giving up—and others that I'm going to be holding onto for a while:

As mentioned above, single-use plastic grocery bags are a definite "don't need" for me. However, I have no plans to give up my polyester ChicoBag, which I think more than makes up for its own modest plastic content by being so portable that it's easily tucked in my purse, ensuring that I'll never be caught out without a shopping bag and need to bring home a disposable one.
I'm also not planning to give up plastic garbage bags (what would I replace them with?). However, I do cut down on the use of them by producing less trash, so I only need to take it out every couple of weeks.
I have never bought bottled water, which, as I mentioned in this post over a year ago, is neither healthier nor, according to most taste tests, better tasting than tap water, which is virtually free. (However, rather than invest in a $20 eco-friendly aluminum flask for carrying tap water on the go, as some green organizations recommend, I simply bought a $1.50 glass bottle of Snapple, drank the contents, and rinsed it out.)
I'm certainly not giving up my computer, printer, and other peripherals, with all the plastic parts they contain. However, in the seven years I've owned my (now ridiculously outdated) HP inkjet printer, I've bought only one plastic replacement cartridge for it, thanks to an ink refill kit that has paid for itself many times over. And, by keeping all my equipment so long past what most would consider its expiration date, I'm reducing the demand for new plastic stuff.
I plan to continue buying orange juice in plastic bottles (the good stuff) whenever it's on sale. The #1 plastic bottles are recyclable, while the cardboard cartons have to go in the trash. (Frozen OJ concentrate does have less packaging, but even it has some that's nonrecyclable—and it's actually more expensive than the good stuff purchased on sale.)
I get most of my music in digital download form these days, so I don't need to fill up my house with more polycarbonate CDs. We do buy the occasional DVD, but more often we borrow them from the library, or find free stuff to watch on Hulu and other sites.

That's all that comes to mind at the moment. Would anyone else care to weigh in with examples of plastics that are definitely "stupid"—or not so stupid?

Eco Thanksgiving vs. frugal Thanksgiving

2011-11-11T16:29:00.000-05:00

The latest batch of supermarket fliers to arrive at my door included one from A&P that prominently advertised frozen whole turkey at an amazing 49 cents a pound. I remember my dad describing 59 cents a pound as a good price for turkey when I was a kid, back in the 80s, so 49 cents a pound today seemed like a truly incredible deal, and it got me thinking: with all the talk about how much food prices have risen lately, just how cheaply is it possible to put together a Thanksgiving dinner if you buy everything on sale? Three years ago, in a post on the Dollar Stretcher forums, I calculated the cost of my family's traditional Thanksgiving meal—turkey, stuffing, gravy made from the drippings, potatoes, veggies, cranberry sauce, and apple and pumpkin pies, for about 10 people—at about $34. Would it still be possible to get the meal for that price?

After examining all the store fliers, I concluded that the deal I'd spotted at the A&P was the best available price for turkey. ShopRite store was offering a free turkey, but you had to spend $300 at the store in a single month to get it, while the A&P deal had no strings attached (except that you could only buy one bird at this price). Using the estimate of 1.5 pounds per person (before cooking), I concluded that a 15-pound bird would be enough to feed 10 people. Thus, at this price, the turkey would cost only $7.35, and that would include the cost of gravy made from the drippings.

However, Shop Rite appeared to have the best deals on all the other components of the meal. I figured that with a little planning, it should be possible to hit both stores—if not in one trip, then at some point during the week—so as to combine the cheap turkey with these other deals:

Stove Top stuffing is 99 cents for a 6-ounce package. This is possibly not as cheap, and certainly not as tasty or healthful, as homemade stuffing—but it makes the math a lot easier if I just assume that the stuffing will come from a box. Two boxes, which should feed 10 people, will cost $1.98.
Cranberry sauce, on the other hand, appears actually to be cheaper if you buy it in a can. Store-brand cranberry sauce costs only 77 cents a can, or $1.54 for two cans, while whole cranberries cost $1.99 a bag, not even counting the cost of the sugar.
You can get either sweet potatoes or white potatoes for $2.50 for 5 pounds (which would work out to 8 ounces of potato per person). Ironically, this makes the potatoes marginally more expensive per pound than the turkey.
For veggies, you can get fresh broccoli crowns at 99 cents a pound. Figure on 2 pounds for 10 people, making $1.98.
Lastly, we have the pies. I tried to calculate the cost of making the pies from scratch, as we always do, but I couldn't find sale prices in the flier for some of the ingredients, such as canned pumpkin. (Perhaps the pumpkin shortage has driven up the price to a level the stores don't care to advertise.) So I took a shortcut here and just used the price for Mrs. Smith's Pies: $2.24 each. One each of apple and pumpkin would come to $4.48, quite possibly less than it would cost to make them from scratch.

So, the total cost of the meal—not counting extras, such as drinks and ice cream or whipped cream for the pies—comes to $19.83. This is pretty impressive, especially considering the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) today estimated the cost of Thanksgiving dinner for 10 at $49.20—nearly 2.5 times as much.

However, there's one snag. The ultra-cheap Thanksgiving meal I've described here is one that I wouldn't actually eat, because I only eat meats that are humanely farmed. I also prefer to buy organic produce when possible (though I don't do so exclusively), and I have a preference for homemade dishes (stuffing, cranberries, pies) that don't contain a bunch of unpronounceable chemicals. So this raised a new question: what's the lowest amount it's possible to spend for a virtuous, organic, free-range Thanksgiving meal that even hard-core liberals like Lou and Peter Berryman's Uncle Dave wouldn't turn up their noses at?

This question is, of course, trickier to answer than the first one. My grocery store fliers didn't include organic versions of most items, so I had to do a little research. I found that prices on humanely farmed turkeys, at least in our area, vary considerably. A 15-pound turkey from Griggstown Quail Farm costs a jaw-dropping $149.85 ($7.99 per pound plus a flat $30 per bird), yet Stolzfus' Poultry at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers' Market offers "fresh-killed farm-raised turkeys" for only $2.69 a pound, or $40.35 for a 15-pound turkey. Although this is less than a third as much as the Griggstown Farm turkey, it's still more than 5 times as much as the cheap one from the A&P. So for an organic and humane Thanksgiving dinner, it looks like the bird alone will cost more than twice as much as the entire meal for the ultra-frugal Thanksgiving.

Fortunately, the markup for the other ingredients isn't as high. I checked prices for these at our local Stop&Shop, Trader Joe's, and at the Whole Earth Center in Princeton. Here's what I found:

Organic sweet potatoes are $3.69 for 3 pounds at Trader Joe's. We'll say we can make do with one bag, since there will be stuffing as well.
For veggies, we can get organic frozen peas for $1.99 a pound at Trader Joe's. Assume we'll need two pounds to feed everyone, so that's another $3.98.
My dad makes a stuffing based around brown rice. A two-pound bag of organic brown rice is $2.99 at Stop&Shop, and we'll probably use about half of it, for $1.50. I'm going to cheat and not do the calculations to figure out the exact prices of the other ingredients (apples, onions, celery, chestnuts, and mushrooms); I'll just guess that it's another $2 or so.
I didn't find organic cranberries anywhere, so I had to go with the price for canned organic cranberry sauce at the Whole Earth Center: $2.79 a can. That comes to $5.58 for two cans.
Although I did find canned organic pumpkin at Whole Earth, I couldn't find organic versions of the other ingredients (specifically, evaporated milk). So I decided to change the menu to include two apple pies. Organic Granny Smith apples at Trader Joe's are $2.49 for 2 pounds; for two pies, we'll probably need two bags for $4.98.
We also need flour, sugar, and butter for the pies. Organic white flour is $1.50 a pound at Stop&Shop, and organic sugar is $1.65 a pound. I'm guessing we need a pound of each. Organic butter (for the pie crust) is $4.79 at the Stop&Shop; we'll use probably half a pound in the two pies, for $2.40.

That brings the total for all the other ingredients to $27.28, and the grand total for the meal to $67.63. This is more than 3 times as costly as our rock-bottom budget Thanksgiving meal, but interestingly, it's not even 50 percent more expensive than the AFBF's estimate. So while frugal folks who are used to buying everything on sale may experience major sticker shock when they try to go free-range and organic, those who normally pay full price may be pleasantly surprised to find that an organic version of the same meal needn't be that much more expensive.

The other takeaway from this exercise, I think, is that the organic markup is much higher for meat than for most other products. With our eco-Thanksgiving meal, the turkey accounts for nearly three-fifths of the total cost; for the budget Thanksgiving meal, it's less than two-fifths. In fact, a vegetarian version of the organic meal—all the "trimmings" without the turkey—would cost barely more than the ultra-cheap meal complete with the bird. Of course, Thanksgiving comes but once a year, and maybe for this one occasion it's worth paying extra to have the traditional meal in all its glory. But certainly on a day-to-day basis, eating vegetarian is the most obvious way to go organic without taking a big hit to the wallet.

Teach your children well

2011-11-08T15:07:00.000-05:00

The latest Dollar Stretcher newsletter had a story in it I thought might be appealing to parents who read this blog: "A Frugal Money Lesson." The summary is that when this mom's two kids (ages five and eight) started asking why they didn't have enough money for some activity they wanted to do, the mom decided it wasn't too early to teach them a lesson about budgeting. She asked them to think of a job they'd like to do when they grew up, and then she wrote down the monthly salary for it, along with a list of expenses that would have to be paid out of that income. Then she showed them how spending more money in different categories (e.g, renting a big apartment instead of a small one) left less for other things. (The eight-year-old did the sums to see how each decision affected her budget, while the five-year-old counted out his expenditures from a stack of Monopoly money.) The outcome: both kids learned a vital financial lesson, and as a bonus, "my five-year-old learned to count by 20s."

This struck me as an incredibly useful exercise. It would be especially handy for home-schoolers, who can use it to combine a math lesson with a life lesson, but really, I think all parents could make use of it. I suspect that many American adults have never really learned to grasp the concept of opportunity costs (i.e., "doing x means you have less money for y"), and would be much better off if they'd been exposed to the idea while they were young and impressionable. Parents who teach their kids this lesson would be doing them a lifelong favor—and they would benefit themselves in the short term, as their kids might stop pestering them for goodies that don't fit into the budget. (Or at least, if they do, they'll have to accept the logic of the answer, "Buying you a new toy will leave us less money for food, remember?")

Generic house

2011-11-07T10:29:00.000-05:00

This weekend we went to visit a friend whose house has lots of what can only be called "character." I mean this in both the best and the worst sense of the word. The house has lots of interior detail—a stone fireplace, solid wood paneling, exposed beams, vintage doors and doorknobs—but it also has crumbling tile in the bathroom, acoustic tile falling off the ceiling, and a stove that hasn't worked for over a decade. I often find myself feeling frustrated in this house, because it's such a neat house in so many ways and it's not being shown to advantage.

I think the reason this bothers me so much is that our house is almost exactly the opposite: it's solid and well-maintained, but it has no detail whatsoever. In fact, I can't even identify an architectural style for it: when we bought it, the listing described it as a ranch, but it doesn't have the open, sprawling feel of a ranch at all. It almost feels more like a Cape Cod, with its rectangular shape, small rooms, and central hallway—but it it lacks the steep roof and central chimney that are the hallmarks of this style. Basically, it's just a snug, plain little postwar box, with no distinguishing features of any kind.

This makes it frustrating for me when I try to plan any kind of home improvement project, because I'm a big believer in working with the existing architectural style of a house, adding on in ways that enhance rather than disguise its original design. Yet with our house, I feel like I really have no style to work with. Suppose, for instance, that I want to add on a covered front entrance: what kind of addition would be in keeping with the style of the house? I can't come up with an answer to that, because the house itself is so plain that it seems like the only way to work with the style is to leave it plain and add no adornments at all.

Maybe I should just think of it like vanilla ice cream: since it's not a strong flavor itself, you can add anything you like to it, from fresh raspberries to creme de menthe. So if you have a house with no basic style, you can add on any style you like and it won't clash. But would trying to make our postwar box into a Craftsman bungalow just look pretentious?

First Snowday

2011-10-29T12:59:00.000-04:00

If the beginning of spring—or at least the beginning of the end of winter—is marked by First Washday, then I guess we've just hit its counterpart at the other end of the year: First Snowday, the first snowfall of the year. Here in New Jersey, this event usually comes in November or December, but this year, for some reason, it's arrived before Halloween. Currently, they're predicting accumulations of one to three inches by tomorrow morning. Fortunately the temperature is supposed to stay above freezing tomorrow, so with any luck the neighborhood kids won't have to go Trick-or-Treating in the snow on Monday. But sheesh, what is up with this? I expect to be raking leaves in October, not shoveling snow.

Built from scratch

2011-10-23T16:17:00.002-04:00

Just a quick post to show off Brian's latest woodworking project: a second bookshelf for the living room, to accommodate our inexorably expanding collection of books (and some of our videos). Like the one next to it, this one is designed to fit a particular set of specifications:

to maximize the use of space, it has mostly small shelves that will just fit a paperback book (or a video), with one big shelf on top for bigger books;
the top shelf is within my reach (not much over six feet); and
the bottom is specially designed to fit over the baseboard heater without blocking it. (This is the main reason we had to custom-make these bookcases instead of just buying a Billy the Bookcase from IKEA.)

This adds one more item to our ever-growing list of furniture pieces we own that have been either built from scratch or modified in some way. In fact, I once went through and figured out that pretty much every room in our house contains at least one item we've built, refinished, or fixed up in some way:

In the living room, we have these two bookcases and the futon frame (bought unfinished), plus the shelves that hold our media computer and the computer itself. Also, a little bracket that Brian built to hold the curtain pull-cord when the original bracket it came with broke.
In the office, we have my desk (basically a plywood top rigged to sit atop a yard-sale-purchased cabinet at one end and a small chest, originally a nightstand, at the other), as well as our nifty homemade cat scratching post and a little track-thingy (the technical term) that Brian made to hold the sliding doors, because they kept popping out of the original track-thingy.
In the back room, there are a couple of wooden crates we bought at Michael's and refinished to hold our recycling. (These are sitting on a beautiful homemade table we got from my father-in-law, originally built to fit into a specific spot in our old apartment's kitchen where it effectively doubled our counter space, but that piece doesn't count since we didn't make it ourselves.)
In the kitchen, we have our spiffy new rolling pantry shelves, a couple of other shelves we added to various cabinets, a rolling cart from Ikea that we bought unfinished, and a spiffy glassware rack that Brian made. Also, all the cabinets themselves, which we refinished, and the little tilt-out drawer Brian installed under the sink.
In the upstairs bathroom, there's the vanity, which we redid from top to bottom, refinishing the wood parts, replacing the hardware, and painting the countertop. (I take a particular pride in this piece since it's the only one I did mostly myself.)
In the big downstairs room (which we still don't have a good name for), Brian constructed all the windowsills and window jambs from scratch, as well as refinishing the shelf that sits alongside the stairs (which you can see in the picture at the top of this blog page). We also installed the paper floor, and in one corner there's the modified corner shelf from IKEA that Brian adjusted to fit over the baseboard heater.
And in the downstairs bath, there's the new vanity, the refinished mirror that we stripped off the old medicine chest, the repainted corner cabinet, and the covers Brian built for the heaters. Not to mention all the other pieces we installed ourselves, even if we didn't build them from scratch: the new sink and toilet, the tile floor, the repaired and repainted walls, the exhaust fan, and all the lighting fixtures. Basically, there's hardly a part of this room we haven't altered.

That leaves only the bedroom with nothing in it of our own device. (Now, what could we add to rectify that situation? Maybe I should learn to quilt.)

Repair or replace revisited

2011-10-15T18:21:00.001-04:00

Over the past few months, I've done a series of posts on the question of "Repair or replace?" I discussed a series of decisions I've had to make about various items (an old bike, a computer, a pair of shoes, a coat) that needed repair, and how I went about deciding whether it was better to fix them or just go ahead and replace them. In one of these posts, I bemoaned the lack of any useful rules of thumb that can help with this decision (except for specific items, like cars and major appliances).

Well, it looks like I should moan no more. Jeff Yeager, the self-dubbed "Ultimate Cheapskate," has published a post on this very subject at The Daily Green, in which he proposes several guidelines for the repair-vs.-replace decision. According to Yeager, you should repair an item if:

1) the cost of the repair is not more than half the cost of a replacement item (he calls this "the 50 percent rule"),
2) the item itself is likely to appreciate in value over time (e.g., antiques of any kind), or
3) the repair is a fairly trivial one (e.g., replacing a faulty electrical cord or a missing shirt button).

On the other hand, you should opt to replace it if:

1) the cost of the repair is more than half the cost of a replacement,
2) a replacement will pay for itself in reduced running costs (e.g., a more efficient appliance), or
3) the replacement is fairly inexpensive (e.g., non-designer clothing items), so you don't stand to save much by doing the repair.

In light of Yeager's rules, it appears that our rather fumbling decision-making process did lead us to the correct choice in most of the cases I mentioned. Repairing my husband's old bike was the right decision, because we could do the repair for about $80, while a new bike (judging by what we saw at the bike shop) would cost at least $500. Replacing my old Mac, by contrast, was the right decision, because the slowness of the old computer was actually costing me money (by making it take longer to complete work assignments that involved a lot of Internet research, and thus cutting my hourly wage). Replacing Brian's old shoes was the right call, because the new ones were cheap (around $35), actually less expensive than repairing the old shoes. And by the same token, I'm better off replacing my old coat rather than trying to repair it, because the repair would cost as much or more than a replacement and might not work at all.

All that makes sense from a purely economic perspective. But what about the environmental costs? Shouldn't I try to factor in the resources (materials and energy) that will be used to make the replacement items, and the problems associated with disposing of the old ones? As soon as I put the question to myself in those terms, the answer became obvious: only if I actually do dispose of them. If I simply pass them on to someone else, then there is no waste created—and the resources used in the manufacture of a new item will be saved down the line, because someone else will be buying (or otherwise acquiring) a secondhand item who might otherwise have had to buy one new!

So, I can buy myself a new computer, and Freecycle the old one to help out some impoverished student who just needs a reliable machine to type papers on; I can buy myself a new coat, and give the old one back to Goodwill (where I got it in the first place) to be bought by someone with bigger shoulders than mine; Brian can buy a new pair of shoes, but hold on to the old pair as a backup (thus extending the life of the new ones). In all these cases—counterintuitive as it seems—buying a new item is the best choice from an ecofrugal perspective; it saves the most money and, in terms of other resource use, it's a wash. Who woulda thunk it?

Hershey the enslaver

2011-10-14T09:00:00.003-04:00

So, for the past year or so I've been boycotting Hershey's chocolate because of its use of forced and child labor on cocoa plantations. Yes, I know this is a problem everywhere in West Africa, and the other major chocolate manufacturers have been involved in it too. But ten years back, they all signed the Harkin-Engel Protocol, committing to clean up their supply chains and address these abuses. To date, all the other chocolate manufacturers have taken at least some steps toward complying. All except Hershey. In fact, they refuse even to say who their suppliers are—so there's no way for any third party to find out whether they are using slave labor or not. The company's recalcitrance has made it the target of a campaign called "Raise the Bar, Hershey" that is petitioning the company to (for a start) trace its supply chain, ask its suppliers to stop using forced labor, and add at least one Fair Trade-certified chocolate bar to its lineup. (You can read more and download a detailed report on the company's practices here.)

It was only today that I learned that Hershey is also exploiting workers right here in the United States. Oh, not American citizens, of course—not people who might actually be able to do something about it. These are foreign students here as part of a "cultural exchange" program to experience American culture. Instead, they're working long shifts in a Hershey's warehouse and being threatened with deportation for failing to meet production schedules. The money they're making isn't even enough to cover the cost of the visas they paid for to take part in this "cultural" experience.

What's interesting is that Hershey's approach to this labor problem on American soil is pretty much the same as the one it's taken with its chocolate: know nothing so you can deny everything. In the case of the student workers, they claim that this particular plant was being managed by a vendor and they knew nothing about the abuses taking place there. And with regard to the folks who grow their cocoa, they simply refuse to trace their supply chain so that they can claim they don't know a thing about any abuses taking place on the cocoa plantations. In other words, they simply refuse to look.

I've generally tried to avoid being too overtly political in this blog, but this has pushed me over the edge. I am going to go against my usual practice and ask outright: will you, all you folks who read this blog, join me in my boycott and spread the word to others? Ultimately, I think nothing but a direct hit to the pocketbook is going to get Hershey to take any action.

Oh, and in case you're wondering what the alternative is (since buying nothing but Fair-Trade-certified chocolate would make this a pretty expensive Halloween): M&M/Mars has committed to get 100 percent of its chocolate from sustainable sources by the year 2020, and they're on track to meet the 10 percent mark this year. So to encourage this positive commitment from a major company, I'm getting little Snickers bars for Halloween this year. (The fact that I really like Snickers bars is just a minor bonus.)

Technical difficulties

2011-10-10T09:32:00.000-04:00

I've just heard that some users are having trouble posting comments to this blog. I don't know how many people are affected by the problem or how long it's been going on. To help me gather more data, could I ask my regular readers to try writing comments in response to this post and see whether they go through? And if you try to post a comment and it doesn't work, could you e-mail me (those of you who have my e-mail address) and let me know? Thanks.

The high cost of living apart

2011-10-09T16:26:00.000-04:00

Back around Valentine's Day, I wrote a post about the ways in which it's cheaper to live as part of a couple. I noted that couples can also have some expenses that singles don't (gifts and "romantic dinners," for instance), but they pale in comparison to the cost of maintaining two separate households instead of one. Now, a recent article in the New Brunswick Star-Ledger speculates that this may actually be one reason why good old New Joysey has the lowest divorce rate in the nation: "because up here, well, it's just too expensive to break up."

There are other factors involved, of course. The article mentions several: couples in the Northeast are likely to wait longer to marry than Southerners, for instance, and they're more likely to live together before marriage (reducing the chances of a hasty decision). But the financial factor appears to be a significant one. One interviewee says the "half a house" he now rents in Somerville, NJ costs $500 more per month than the mortgage on his old house in Atlanta—meaning that the cost of maintaining two homes adds up to "thousands of dollars a month." The fact that average incomes are higher also adds up to "more money to fight about." A lawyer quoted in the article says that when she tells clients how much they're likely to end up paying in alimony, "their faces turn stone white and they look at me as if it's the second coming."

So I'd like to offer this addendum to my original post: while it may indeed be cheaper to live as a couple, getting married in order to save money is definitely not a good idea. Marrying in haste is a good recipe for a short marriage and an expensive divorce, and that's far costlier than staying single in the first place.

A no-money economy

2011-09-26T16:08:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine recently e-mailed around a link to an article about the invention of money, which contests the popular view that money originally developed as a more efficient alternative to a barter system. The author, David Graeber, points out that present-day societies that don't use money typically don't use barter either: "What anthropologists have in fact observed where money is not used is not a system of explicit lending and borrowing, but a very broad system of non-enumerated credits and debts." In other words, instead of "I'll give you a good cow for a dozen fur pelts," it's "I'll give you this cow today, and then you will owe me a big favor, which I can call in when I need to." Where barter does occur, he says, it usually takes place "between strangers, people who have no moral relations with one another"—not members of a community who can count on social forces to back up their mutual obligations.

This interested me because I realized that I happen to be part of just such a money-free "economy": my local Freecycle group. Within this group, goods are only given and received, never exchanged. Some basic ground rules are that

you can never ask for any sort of compensation for any item you offer,
you're supposed to offer at least one item before you start requesting items for yourself, and
it's considered rude to ask for anything too big or expensive (i.e., "don't ask for an extravagant item like a diamond ring which we'd all like to have").

So there is a sort of vague notion of reciprocity—you're supposed to do some giving, as well as taking—but no one is keeping an exact tally. More to the point, your transactions—giving and receiving—won't necessarily involve the same people (in fact, they almost never do). But you offer stuff to the group, and you receive stuff from the group, and in this way some sort of karmic balance is achieved. In other words, we have apparently reinvented one of those pre-monetary societies Graeber is talking about, in which other social factors play a much bigger role in any transaction than the notion of giving and getting tit for tat.

In fact, Freecycle just might be a near-perfect Marxist economy: "From each according to his ability and to each according to his need." It's not a complete economy, of course: the goods people have to give away aren't enough to meet all the needs of all the group's members. But within its own limitations, it lives up to this ideal quite well.

Another ecofrugal home show

2011-09-23T15:14:00.000-04:00

Home-makeover shows, like the ones on HGTV, are one of my guilty pleasures. However, after a few episodes, I often find myself getting frustrated at how wasteful their approach to home design is. With a few exceptions (like my all-time favorite, Wasted Spaces), it seems like the only way they know to redo a room is to tear everything out, throw it away, and replace it with new stuff. Sometimes there's no mention at all of how much all that is costing—and even with shows like Bang for Your Buck, which is supposedly all about spending your money wisely, the families featured are often working with five- or even six-figure budgets for a single room. For most of us living in the real world, that's not merely unrealistic, it's outrageous.

So when I came across a few episodes on the A&E network site of a show called "100 Dollar Makeover," you can imagine how my ears pricked up. I watched the first episode, and it did not disappoint. This is a show where a team of three experts—a home organizer, a carpenter, and a designer—goes into a badly cluttered home and fixes the problem areas for just $100 per room. To stay within this ultra-slim budget, they use a variety of ecofrugal strategies, such as:

Building from scratch. The carpenter shows off his skills by designing and building a custom-made piece to fit the space for only the cost of the lumber.
Creative reuse. Furniture pieces that don't work in one space may find a new home and a new purpose in one of the other rooms. Not only that, but they go rummaging through the rest of the house to find other items they can use in building their custom pieces. (In the episode I watched, they scavenged medium-density fiberboard, vinyl-covered cushions that they recovered for their new seating area, and a set of twin sheets that they turned into a window treatment for the bedroom.)
Buying secondhand. Though they do make some items themselves, their three-day schedule doesn't allow them to construct everything from scratch, so some items get purchased from a big secondhand store (possibly a Habitat for Humanity ReStore or some local thrift shop). They even manage to talk the seller down on the price.

Another plus for this show is that all the members of the three-person team actually seem like real people—down-to-earth, humorous and occasionally a bit frazzled. Since many home shows have overly perky hosts with perfect teeth and made-for-TV personalities, who somehow manage always to sound like they're reading from a script even when they're ad-libbing, a show hosted by three regular humans is very refreshing.

The only down side: as far as I can tell, there are only three episodes on the A&E website. Maybe I can find a friend who gets A&E...

The DIY question

2011-09-22T12:03:00.000-04:00

Last week's Tip Hero newsletter (which I'm only just getting around to reading) has a handy article addressing the question, "To DIY or Not to DIY?" In a nutshell, it says the times to hire a professional are:

(1) when doing the job yourself could get you killed (e.g., roofing or major electrical work);
(2) when doing the job yourself would take way more time than you're prepared to invest; or
(3) when doing the job yourself would require the purchase of expensive tools that you might never need again.

I would add to that list (4) when doing the job incorrectly could result in damage that would cost far more to repair than the original job itself. Other than that, I agree with the recommendations in the article, both general and specific. It explains why we used to change the oil on our old Honda (hard to mess up) but didn't attempt more major repairs (too big a risk of causing serious damage), and why we did all the work on our basement remodel except the wiring (too time-consuming—it would have taken us months to do what the professional did in one day). We have, on the other hand, done nearly all the projects the article lists as "Things You Can Definitely DIY."

The little video that accompanies the article is cute, too. I've never had to deal with a broken light bulb, but if I ever do, I'll definitely try the potato trick.

When it pays to pay more

2011-09-21T22:15:00.000-04:00

In the reports I write for ConsumerSearch, we usually identify both a "best" product and a "budget" choice. The best product, as a rule, is the one that does the best in professional tests and gets the most positive reviews from users—in short, the best one money can buy. The budget model, typically, is one that doesn't perform as well as the top-rated model, but still does a respectable job for a significantly lower price.

As a consumer, I'm generally more likely to go with the budget model than the best one. One of the usual principles of my ecofrugal lifestyle is never to pay more for anything than I really need to, and so I'll choose the best-priced product that meets my minimum standards of quality. However, in the past week I've realized that there's an exception to this rule. When it comes to goods, I'm inclined to compromise on quality to get the best price—but with services, it's the other way around.

This came home to me last week when I went to my dentist for a filling. Once the Novocaine wore off, I found it hurt to bite down on that tooth (which was particularly annoying, because it was a tooth that hadn't hurt at all before the filling was done). I went back to the dentist and he adjusted the height of the filling—which hurt like blazes, though he didn't seem to notice when I yelped—and said that if that didn't fix the problem, it meant that I "couldn't tolerate" composite fillings and would need to have it replaced with an amalgam filling. That sounded pretty strange to me, since I'd had composite fillings done before with no problems, so I decided to go to my old dentist, Dr. Brown, for a second opinion.

From the minute I sat in the chair, the difference between him and my new dentist was like night and day. He examined the tooth (something the other dentist hadn't actually bothered to do) and told me that part of the tooth that was causing me pain wasn't the filling; it was the exposed dentin around it. This could have been sealed over at the time the filling was done, but to do it now would mean redoing the filling. So he put on a fluoride treatment to speed up healing and advised me to give it a couple of weeks to recover—and he didn't even charge me for the consultation. Based on this experience, I decided on the spot that not only would I go back to Dr. Brown if I needed the filling redone—even if it meant paying out of pocket—but that I would also switch dental plans next year, so that I could start going to him on a regular basis. The traditional dental plan, which lets you choose any dentist, costs more than the DMO we're on now—but if the extra money can save me another experience like the one I'm having with this filling, it will be well worth it.

When I told my dad about this experience, he applauded my decision. He said that although he and Mom are a bit tight-fisted themselves (I come by it honestly), they "would never cheap out on health care." I thought this over, and I came to the conclusion that this rule holds true for other services as well. It's worth paying more to get work you can count on, not just from your doctor or your dentist, but also from your auto mechanic, your hairstylist, the contractors who work on your house—basically, from anyone who's doing a job that it's important to you to have done right. And since another principle of my ecofrugal lifestyle is "Don't pay someone else to do a job you can handle yourself," that description applies to pretty much every service professional I hire.

So I no longer feel guilty—even a little bit—that when we needed our side stoop repaired this spring, I hired the contractor with the highest bid (but the most competent assessment of the problem), rather than the one with the lowest bid (who kept changing his mind about what needed to be done, and his quoted price along with it). At the time, I thought maybe I was going against my ecofrugal principles by paying more than I needed to. But I just hadn't come up yet with the corollary to that rule: "If you do need to pay more to get what you really need, then don't hesitate to do it." It's money well spent if it saves you from major headaches down the road.

The pantry project, part 2

2011-09-12T21:15:00.000-04:00

The pantry project is now complete! We had one lucky break when the existing shelves came out more easily than expected, so the wallboard was left intact. Brian concluded that instead of building a whole plywood box to insert into the existing cavity, he could simply screw wooden slats into the studs to support the new rolling shelves, which would make the whole project both faster and cheaper. We did have one setback when his extra-careful measurements of the space turned out to be a bit too precise—the drawer fit exactly, but it was so tightly wedged in that it couldn't move. So we had to rip out one of the 3/8-inch support slats, patch and repaint the wall, and then install 1/4-inch slats along that side instead. But we still managed to get everything done within a week: drawers finished, supports built, drawers installed, and all the food out of its temporary digs and back onto the shelves.

I'm actually a little surprised that the finished pantry doesn't hold more. Since we added one new shelf and extended the length of all the shelves, I would have expected it to accommodate a lot more stuff than the old pantry. But what you see in this picture is merely everything we pulled out of the old pantry, plus two cereal containers that used to sit on top of the fridge and a few extra boxes of pasta. The contents are better organized now, however, and a lot more accessible. And we expect the organization to improve more over time, as we adjust to and make modifications to the new system.

Ironic that it took us four years to get around to tackling this project, but once we actually got started it was done in a week, with less than $300 spent. I wonder how many of the other big projects we've been putting off could be completed as easily once we get up the gumption to do them.

Saling, saling

2011-09-11T15:05:00.000-04:00

This weekend is the annual town-wide yard sale in Highland Park. The normal fee for a yard sale permit is waived, and a local Realtor helps to publicize the event, providing signs and maps showing where sales can be found. It's one of my favorite events, since it concentrates such a large number of yard sales in a relatively small space that you're practically guaranteed to find something of interest. Admittedly, we've never been able to duplicate the haul we brought home four years ago, when we'd just moved into this house and we loaded up on tools, including a push mower, a circular saw, and a pair of pruning shears. But we can always manage to find at least a book or an article of clothing, which is more than we usually come away with from a randomly encountered sale.

This year, we didn't do too badly. We set out Saturday morning right after breakfast, and we managed to find a new guitar case for me (to replace the old one that succumbed to mold), a couple of carpet samples that we can use as needed to refurbish our homemade cat scratching post, a book, a puzzle, and a few random gifts for nephews and nieces before hunger, sore feet, and an unexpected squall of rain sent us home again. We also had ample opportunity to see many yard sales, and to observe the difference between a good sale and a bad one. Here's a short list of general rules I've come up with for running a decent, user-friendly yard sale. (Of the many sales we saw yesterday, almost none had followed all of them.)

Arrange items so people can see them. If you have clothes, either hang them up or lay them out side by side on a table, not in a huge pile. If you have books, put them on shelves, or arrange them in boxes with their spines facing up so people can read the titles. If shoppers have to rummage through boxes just to see what's available, most of them won't find it worth the effort.
Group like items together—all clothes on one table, kitchen items on another, tools on a third. Some of the sales we encountered seemed to be nothing but boxes of randomly grouped items, perhaps just hauled down from the attic that morning.
Give people room to move around. Some sales we visited looped round from the front yard to the back, up a driveway or a narrow walkway lined with tables so that there was barely room for one person to stop and look, let alone for others to pass by.
Put prices on items. This was the rule most frequently ignored at yesterday's sales. I think we only saw one sale that actually had every item priced. It was a real nuisance having to ask the price of any item we had an interest in—assuming we could find someone to ask. Which brings me to the fifth and most obvious rule:
Have someone there at all times who is obviously in charge. If buyers can't find anyone to take their money or answer their questions, they'll walk away empty-handed (or perhaps even walk away with stuff they haven't paid for).

As a side note, another interesting lesson we learned from our morning of yard-saling was that if you walk around carrying a guitar case, even if there's no guitar in it, people are a lot more likely to strike up a conversation with you. Before we bought the case, we mingled among the other shoppers more or less unnoticed; afterwards, when Brian was carrying the guitar case around with some of our smaller purchases in it, someone at nearly every sale we visited called out, "Hey, where'd you get the guitar?"

Repair or replace, part 3

2011-09-10T13:53:00.000-04:00

You know, this whole question of whether to repair things or replace them hinges on the idea that it's actually possible to get them repaired. I'm beginning to wonder whether that's true anymore.

A couple of years ago, I bought a fall coat at the Goodwill store—a short one to wear during the months when my winter coat was too heavy and a sweater not heavy enough. The sleeves were too long and it had big, ridiculous 80s-style shoulder pads, but it was made of good, dark-grey wool and fit me well in the torso, so I figured it was still a good deal for six bucks. I just took out the shoulder pads, rolled up the sleeves, and wore it like that for two years.

This year, with the chilly weather approaching, I decided to take the coat to a tailor and see how much it would cost to alter it so that it would fit me properly. It might seem silly to spend $40 on alterations for a $6 coat, but I figured it would still be cheaper and less wasteful than buying a new one. So on Wednesday afternoon, I took the coat to a tailor shop I'd passed by often, about half a mile from my house—only to find that it had gone out of business. I remembered another shop a few blocks away, but when I got there it was closed, with a sign in the window saying that during the month of September they'd be open only from 8am to noon. (What kind of business closes at noon?)

This was starting to get frustrating, but I decided to give it one more try. The next morning, I showed up at the tailor shop well before 9am, carrying my coat. I showed it to the seamstress and explained what I needed done to it, and she said, in effect, "That can't be done." As best I could make out from her broken English, the only way she knew of "taking in" a coat was to remove fabric from the back seam, which would make the coat too tight and leave the shoulders as big as ever.

Well, I knew that what I was asking for wasn't impossible. I don't have the skill to reset a sleeve myself, but at least I know that it can be done. So I took the coat down the street to a dry cleaner that had a sign in the window saying "tailoring and alterations." Once again, I showed the coat and explained the problem. This time, the proprietor didn't actually say it was impossible, but she said it was "probably no good." Her English wasn't very good either, so I didn't quite understand what the problem was, but I did manage to grasp that the whole job would cost me $80 and they still couldn't guarantee the coat would fit afterwards. Given that I could buy a whole new coat that would definitely fit for less than $80, that didn't seem like much of a bargain.

The whole experience left me feeling sort of baffled. I admit, I find it frustrating that it should cost more to repair an existing coat than to buy a whole new one, materials, labor, and all. But I can at least understand why it's the case: the new coat is made by unskilled workers earning a pittance for their labor in Thailand or someplace, while the repair is done by skilled workers here in the U.S. who expect a reasonable fee for their efforts. But can it really be possible that these skilled laborers don't even exist anymore? That nowadays, people who call themselves tailors and charge $80 for a repair can't even manage to reset a pair of sleeves? Has our society really come to the point where, at least where clothes are concerned, throwing it out and buying a new one is the only option?

The pantry project

2011-09-03T13:00:00.001-04:00

One thing I've wanted ever since we first bought this house, four years back, is more pantry space. Although we have a lot more space now overall than we used to have at our old apartment, one thing I was very sorry to give up was a huge, sunny pantry that ran the full width of the kitchen, with floor-to-ceiling shelves that made our entire assortment of food visible at a glance. Our current kitchen, though better in most respects, offers only a narrow, deep closet with four shelves for food storage. We installed a small wooden cube at the bottom to make a fifth shelf, which helped a bit, but the biggest problem with it is that the stuff toward the back isn't easily accessible. You can't see what you have (one of the reasons we found it necessary to create our "canventory" to keep track) and even if you know what's back there, you may have to pull out several intervening items to get to it.

The best way we could think of to solve this problem without embarking on a major kitchen remodel was to install sliding shelves in the pantry. These would both give us more square footage (since we could easily squeeze in a sixth shelf in the available space) and make all the space more usable. And now, after four years and a number of other projects, we've finally decided it's time to go for it.

Since our pantry apparently isn't a standard depth, Brian originally intended to make custom-built shelves that would use every square inch of the available space. However, when he looked into the cost of the hardware that would be required, he discovered that building the shelves from scratch would cost as much as or more than buying them ready-made. So we decided to sacrifice an inch or so off each shelf in exchange for the convenience of having them arrive ready-built, as well as the knowledge that they'd all be a uniform size. There are many sites on the Web selling these, but a little research revealed that they all offer pretty much identical models, so we decided on the standard sliding shelf from KitchenShelves.com, which offered the best price. They arrived yesterday, neatly packed in two large boxes, and now all we have to do is stain them, finish them, and—the tricky part—install them.

The reason the last part is tricky is that in order to install them, we have to dismantle the original pantry. First we need to remove the doors and the cabinet frame, ideally without damaging it, since we'll want to put it back at the end. Then we need to rip out the old shelves, which probably won't come loose without a struggle and will end up taking some portion of the wall with them. And after that, depending on where the studs turn out to be, we will most likely have to build a plywood box to fill the whole pantry space so that we will have a secure base to attach the shelf hardware to. (This is not unlike a project Karl did in the first season—in fact, possibly the series premiere—of Wasted Spaces.)

So this is how we expect to spend most of this holiday weekend (and possibly some additional weekends to come). In the meantime, our food is living in temporary digs on bricks-and-boards shelving in the spare room. As the project progresses, I'll keep you posted on the (we hope not too) gory details and the big reveal at the end of our (we hope) spacious, finished pantry.

Repair or replace, part 2

2011-08-27T12:26:00.000-04:00

The ecofrugal lifestyle rests on a few basic principles, one of which—to invert a phrase from Aldous Huxley—is "mending is better than ending." In other words, repairing an item is usually both cheaper and greener than replacing it. Usually. But as I noted a month ago in my "Repair or replace?" post, the decision isn't always that straightforward. Sometimes the cost of repairing an item exceeds that of a cheap replacement, causing the "eco" and "frugal" halves of ecofrugality, which normally go together like chocolate and peanut butter, to come into conflict.

This week we came across another example. My husband's sturdy workboots became damaged beyond repair—the sole completely split in half, and since it's a molded sole, we couldn't just resole them. We couldn't complain too much, since the boots were free in the first place (gleaned from a pile of stuff our former neighbors discarded when they moved), but since they were his everyday footwear, he needed something to replace them. So our first thought was to try repairing an old pair of shoes that he'd owned for nearly 20 years but had worn very little in the past ten because all the tread had worn off the sole, making them slippery in the rain. I figured that for around $20, we could resole these and possibly make them last another ten years.

Ha ha, silly me. When I took them to our local shoe shop, they informed me that this type of sole cost $60 to replace. I might have thought it was worth the money to extend the life of an otherwise good pair of shoes, but we'd already done a little poking around in a Famous Footwear and found that a new pair of shoes in the same brand and similar style would only cost around $70. So the cost of repairing a 20-year-old pair of shoes, with who knows how much life left in the uppers, would be 85 percent as much as a whole new pair. Eco says repair, frugal says replace...help, mental overload!

In the end, we went to Sears and bought him a new pair of sturdy work shoes, which cost $35 on sale and have proved to be very comfortable. But we still haven't come to any firm decision about what to do with the old pair of shoes. Since they have sentimental value as well as usefulness, he doesn't want to throw them out, so it seems like we might as well repair them so they can be used. But on the other hand, is it really worth $60 to give him what would now be only a secondary pair of shoes, since he has a decent pair for every day? Will spending the $60 now save us money in the long run, eliminating the need for future $35 stopgap shoes that might only last a year or two? Or will it be money down the drain, since the uppers will soon go the same way as the soles? Is it truly ecofrugal, in this case, to repair them, or are we better off just keeping them as an extra pair to be worn on sunny days only until they finally fall apart completely?

Spend where it counts (or, a $45 band on a $13 watch)

2011-08-14T18:55:00.000-04:00

The watch I wear every day is a cheap Timex Carriage model that I bought nearly ten years ago at Target. I think I paid $13 for it, on sale. I chose it at the time because it met my fairly basic requirements:

1) A dial face with an hour hand, a minute hand, a second hand, and all twelve numbers. (You'd be surprised how hard this last feature is to find in a women's watch.)
2) A bracelet-type metal band. (Cloth ones wear out too quickly, and the metal "expansion bracelets" always seem to snag the tiny hairs on my arm.)

Those were the only features I specifically wanted, and they're pretty much the only features I got. The watch does also have a little built-in night light that has turned out to be handy. But other than that, it's got no bells and whistles: no calendar, no calculator, no stopwatch. It's just a very basic watch—about as close as you can get to the Platonic ideal of a Wristwatch.

For a cheap watch, it's held up surprisingly well—or at least, the timepiece itself has. After a few years of everyday use, however, the plating on the two-toned metal band wore completely through, exposing the base metal underneath, which gave me a rash as it rubbed against my skin. My first attempt at an ecofrugal fix for this problem was to paint over the exposed metal with nail polish, and that kept the watch wearable for a while—but eventually, the links got clogged with dried polish. So I replaced the band with a similar one, but within a year, the plating on the new band started wearing off just as the old one had. Rather than buy another cheap band, I went back to the store and asked if they had one made of solid stainless steel. They did—but it cost $45, more than three times what I'd originally paid for the watch. And I had to make a hasty decision: is it really worth it to put a $45 band on a $13 watch?

My conclusion: not only is it worth it, it's the only choice that really makes sense. What I need from a watch itself is extremely simple: all it has to do is keep good time, and a cheap watch does the job just as well as an expensive one. A cheap band, by contrast, doesn't meet my needs, at least not for very long. Buying a new, cheap watchband every year would cost more in the long run, and surely be more wasteful, than investing $45 in a good one. For my needs, a cheap watch and a high-quality band is simply the best combination.

It seems to me that the same principle applies to most purchases. It almost always makes sense to spend money on the features you want and skimp on the features you don't want. For example, if you have an old car you're happy with, but it lacks some new feature you want (say, cruise control), it makes sense to spend the money to have it added, even if it's more than the value of the old car itself. It will still cost less than a whole new car, so why trade in an old car you're happy with for a new one with lots of features you don't want just to get the one that you do?

Of course, sometimes in order to get the one feature you want, you have to accept some others as well, because the manufacturer doesn't give you a choice. On a new car, for instance, a feature you want (such as extra airbags) may be available only as part of an "option package" that also includes power windows and GPS and other assorted bells and whistles. But by looking carefully at all the alternatives, you should at least be able to avoid taking any features you actually prefer not to have. For example: as some of you may remember from my "Repair or Replace?" post, I recently bought a new computer. All I wanted was more memory and faster processing speed, but buying a new Mac Mini meant that I also got all the additional "features" of the Lion operating system—such as a complete lack of back-compatibility with all existing PowerPC applications. Besides having to abandon my beloved Eudora mail client for a new one, I couldn't use my existing version of Office, and the new version I was forced to "upgrade" to crashed all the time. So I sent it back to Apple and then, after a bit more research, bought last year's Mini instead from a reseller called PowerMax. (Note to anyone in the market for a computer: I recommend them. Their prices are good and their customer service is terrific.) In my case, this "downgrade" was actually an upgrade.

So now I'm happily settled in with my one-year-old Mac, running seven-year-old software, hooked up to an eight-year-old monitor and printer. Because after all, if all I need is a better band, why replace the watch?

Weather permitting

2011-08-06T19:48:00.001-04:00

It occurred to me yesterday, as it has before, just how much of the ecofrugal life is contingent on the phrase, "weather permitting." For example:

Yesterday Brian rode his bike to work (having just finished installing the new rear wheel and brake line). He usually bikes to work during the warmer months, unless he needs to get in particularly early or to stay particularly late. But he can't do it during the winter, because it's too cold and, more to the point, too dark. And he has to skip it on those summer days when the temperature is over 100 or there's the threat of a thunderstorm. So although biking to work is an undeniable win-win-win in ecofrugal terms—a way to save money, help the environment and get some exercise all at once—it's also a habit that depends on the weather and climate.

I did a load of laundry yesterday and hung it up on the line. I generally use the clothesline during the summer, even if it means having to put off doing the laundry until the forecast calls for sunshine. But I can't do it in the winter, because the clothes would just freeze solid. (I've heard of people who do it anyway and claim that they're "mostly dry" once they thaw. But I have my limits.) So once again, even though drying clothes for free with sunlight, rather than paying to do it with fossil fuels, is an ecofrugal no-brainer, it's still a practice that only works when the weather allows it.

I also took a walk in the afternoon, as I do on all but the very hottest or coldest days. It was a particularly ecofrugal walk, as I stopped in at the local farmer's market and, after that, at the nearby thrift shop. Locally grown peaches for $2 a pound and pants in good condition for $2 a pair—a definite ecofrugal triumph. But it's a trip I wouldn't have been able to make in the winter or the spring, because our local farmers' market is only open from July through November. (It's also only open on Fridays until 4pm, which means it's really only available to those of us who don't work bankers' hours, which has always struck me as a bit annoying. But I guess they can't really do it over the weekend, because there are other markets to set up in neighboring towns on Saturday and Sunday.) So this particular ecofrugal habit is one that's only available at certain times of year. (The thrift shop is open year-round, but only for a very few hours a week; I'm much less likely to pass by there at a time when it happens to be open if I'm not on my way to the farmers' market.)

Finally, in the evening, we went to a free concert at the park in Hopewell. This happened to be Broadside Electric, a band we particularly know and love, but we've gone to other outdoor concerts like this in our area without knowing the band, simply because they're fun and free of charge. But this ecofrugal form of entertainment is—once again—only available in the summertime. Even if it weren't too cold for outdoor entertainment in the winter, the light wouldn't last late enough to make it practical.

Basically, what it comes down to is that it's a lot easier to be ecofrugal in the summertime than it is in the winter. And that's true not just of a few special events, but of our whole lifestyle. We generally manage to get through the summer without using air conditioning more than two or three times, but we'd never get through the winter without heat.

Perhaps if I want to take my ecofrugal lifestyle to the next level, I should be concentrating on ways to save money and natural resources during the colder months. So far, all I can think of is canning and freezing garden surplus (which would be a great idea if we ever had any surplus) and wearing layers to stay warm (which I already do, and I still can't seen to tolerate any temperature below 68 degrees). So maybe, like a squirrel storing up nuts, I should really make a start now on gathering nuggets of ecofrugal wisdom to get me through the winter. Does anyone out there have any nuggets to contribute?

Self-employment, self-sufficiency

2011-07-28T09:10:00.000-04:00

Thought for today: working from home is a big help with living an ecofrugal lifestyle. The time that I don't spend commuting, for instance, can be used for hanging a load of laundry—so I save on gas for the car and gas for the dryer at the same time. And since I set my own hours, I can run errands on foot in the middle of the day and get a bit of exercise at the same time.

Of course, the down side is that if I didn't have a husband working full-time, all the money I save with my little ecofrugal habits, and a lot more, would be eaten up by private health insurance. I'm sure hoping the state health pools that kick in three years from now will fix that.

Repair or replace?

2011-07-25T17:36:00.000-04:00

[Note to readers: Once again, apologies for the long lag time between entries. Our last two weekends were completely booked up, the last one with family and the one before that with friends, and during the intervening week our free time was partly filled up with evening engagements and partly drained away by the brain-frying effects of last week's record-breaking heat wave. So this entry, originally started a week ago, is only now coming to press (changing somewhat in the process to reflect the events of the past week). We now resume your regularly scheduled blog.]

My husband's old ten-speed bike, originally cobbled together by his dad from the parts of three other old bikes found at police auctions, looks like it may be on its last legs (or wheels, as it were). The brakes aren't functioning, and the rear wheel has four broken spokes—more than the bike shop is willing to repair. So we're faced with the age-old question: repair or replace? Is it worth trying to fix it, or is it time to give up and send it to the landfill?

Naturally, we tried first to figure out if there was a way to do the former on the cheap. I put out an APB on Freecycle for a 27-inch bicycle wheel from a ten-speed, but the only response we got was from a guy in another town who said, "Will an old and rusted one do?"—and then didn't respond to my "We'll try it, when can we pick it up?" We might have more luck looking for a whole non-working ten-speed bike, rather than just the rear wheel—but then we'd have the rest of the bike to dispose of.

Next we looked into the cost of repairing the bike with new parts. Brian checked with the local bike shop and found that he could get a new wheel and a new brake line for $70 (plus $20 if he wanted them to install it). But it isn't really clear whether this is a more ecofrugal option than picking up an entire bike secondhand. Is it better, environmentally speaking, to keep our old bike on the road with new parts, or to keep someone else's old bike on the road and scrap ours? I checked on Craigslist and found several used 10-speeds for around $65, a bit less than it would cost to repair the old one—but in each case, we'd have to drive an hour or more to pick up the bike (and we might find after looking at it that it wasn't worth the money).

It seems clear that either buying used or repairing with new parts is the best option, but just to get a complete picture, I also checked to see how much a basic new bike would cost. I checked the ConsumerSearch report on "comfort bikes" (that is, bikes suited for commuting and other light use) and found that their top pick in the "budget" category costs close to $500. This, clearly, is the least ecofrugal option of all; it would cost more than five times as much as repairing the old bike, plus the environmental cost of all the new materials and energy required to manufacture it.

And yet, I must confess, there's a part of me that wants to choose this option. Why? Because we recently went through this same decision process with my ten-year-old Macintosh computer, and the verdict in that case was "replace." So we have just spent about $700 on a new Mac Mini for me (along with the various cables and bits of software we had to replace because the creaky old versions I've been using won't work on the new machine). And even though this computer was a genuine need and not a want—even though my old computer was ten years old, and so slow at Web surfing that it was impeding my ability to do my job, probably costing us money because it took me so much longer to finish each work assignment—even though it's at least partly a business expense that I can deduct on my taxes, and even though I made a good-faith effort to repair the old one first by adding more memory, only concluding that I truly needed a new one when the upgrade failed to speed the machine up significantly—even so, still I can't help feeling somehow that if I got to buy a whole new computer, Brian shouldn't have to settle for repairing his old bike. If we just spent a big chunk of money on me, in other words, we should spend a comparable chunk of money on him.

I know this is an incredibly stupid way to make this decision. I guess the problem is, I don't really have a good sense of what would be a smart way to make it. If I had a straightforward "repair or replace" formula in my head (e.g., [cost to replace] / [cost to repair] * [annoyance factor of current item] / [annoyance factor of repaired item]), I could just apply it and feel confident that I'd always made the right decision. But this seems to be one of those choices that you have to make at least partly based on emotion, and emotional factors (such as "how much do I hate this old computer?" and "how much do I love the new one?") are much harder to quantify. The few formulas I have seen for making repair-or-replace decisions have all been fairly limited in scope—for example, "replace your old car when the cost to repair it exceeds its book value"—and even those seem flawed to me. The cost to repair the car may be more than its book value, but chances are, if you replace the car, you will not be replacing it with a used car exactly the same age, make, model, and condition as the one you have. Even assuming you could find such a car, it still wouldn't be identical to the old car; you wouldn't know how it had been driven over the past several years, or how carefully it had been maintained. (Thus, when we had the accident that totaled our old Honda, we decided to keep driving it, even though the insurance company thought the repairs would cost more than the car was worth. They were, but they were still less than it would cost us to buy another car that we could trust the way we trusted the old one.)

Or, to take an example offered by Consumer Reports, "If your appliance is eight or more years old, usually it makes sense to buy a new one. If you have a favorite high-end, older appliance, you may want to repair it...But skip any repair that costs more than half the price of a new product." This may be a nicely calibrated break-even point if you're doing the calculation purely in dollar terms, but what about environmental considerations? Shouldn't you factor in how much it's worth to you to keep your old appliance out of the landfill (and, on the other side of the equation, the potential energy savings of replacing it)?

Has anyone out there ever heard of—or thought up—a simple, useful rule for determining when it's best to repair an item, and when it's time to replace?

Savings in the bag

2011-07-09T22:22:00.001-04:00

The other day, as I walked out of the supermarket carrying one bag of seltzer in my reusable, folding Chico Bag, it occurred to me, as it has several times before, that when I buy only a single item, the nickel I get knocked off for bringing my own bag is actually a significant percentage of the bill. And then I started wondering just how much I actually save in a year by bringing my own bags. Of course, carrying reusable bags is something I would do anyway, even if it didn't save me a cent, because it's such an eco-friendly move. The materials and energy that go into making a reusable bag are presumably more than the amount used to make a single disposable plastic bag—but that plastic bag is good for only one use (or two, perhaps, if you count lining a trash can with it), while the reusable bag will give years of service. But now that so many stores have started giving cents-off discounts for bringing your own bags—anywhere from two cents to ten cents per bag—it's a true ecofrugal no-brainer. Save money, save energy, and prevent waste, all at the same time—can't beat that with a stick.

So, how much does that savings actually amount to? To answer that question, I started checking through my past year's spending records to see how many trips I'd made to different grocery stores. Here's what I found:

The store we shop at the most often is our local Stop & Shop, less than a mile down the road. Since I generally take a walk in the middle of the day anyhow, I frequently stop by there along the way to pick up just one or two items that I happen to need. Thus, on a typical Stop & Shop trip I use only one bag (generally the little Chico Bag, which I carry with me in my purse so I can never be caught without one). Stop & Shop gives a nickel discount for each bag, so that's 5 cents off per trip—and in the past year, I've made 113 trips to the Stop & Shop. So that's $5.65 right there.

The store that gives the most generous bag discount of all those we visit regularly is the Whole Earth Center, a natural foods store in Princeton. They give a dime off for each container you bring from home—not just the grocery bag itself, but also all the bags you use for your produce and all the containers you use to carry items from the bulk bins. (This produces the interesting result that if you buy a very small amount of something—for example, a spice—the amount you save on the bag may actually exceed what you spend on the product. I don't know whether anyone has ever made a serious attempt to exploit this loophole.) I estimate that on a typical trip to the Whole Earth Center, we use around five containers, including the shopping bag. So at 10 cents each, that's 50 cents per trip. That means our 31 trips to the Whole Earth Center in the past year have earned us $15.50.

Another store we visit frequently is the Shop-Rite a few miles away. It doesn't have the best everyday prices, but it tends to have the best sales in our area, so we stop in once or twice a month to stock up on sale items. Usually, we take only one bag on these trips (not the Chico Bag but the big string bag I bought years ago from the Whole Earth Center, which can expand by a larger amount than you'd believe possible). This one bag gets us a nickel off on every trip, so on our 21 trips in the past year, we've saved $1.05.

We also stop by the Aldi once or twice a month to stock up on staples that are cheapest there (such as cereal and orange juice). Unlike most stores, Aldi actually charges for bags—ten cents each, according to this post on mommysavers.com. When we shop at Aldi, we usually load up the handy folding plastic crate that lives in the trunk of our car; if we didn't have it, we'd probably have to use two shopping bags at a cost of 20 cents per trip. So over the course of 16 trips per year, we save $3.20.

At the bottom of the list, savings-wise, is the Pathmark, which we visit a few times a year for sale items, using an average of one bag per trip. Pathmark is less generous with its bag discount than other retailers—only 2 cents off per bag—so in 6 trips a year, we save a measly 12 cents.

The other grocery store where we shop often is Trader Joe's, which we visit every couple of months to stock up on the items that are cheapest there (such as raisins, 100-percent-postconsumer-recycled toilet paper, and cruelty-free toothpaste). However, Trader Joe's doesn't give you a discount for bringing your own bags; instead, they offer you an entry into a drawing to win a gift card. Since I've never won it, I assume that bringing my own bag there 9 times in the past year has gained me nothing but personal satisfaction.

So, adding it all up, I find that bringing our own bags has saved us $25.52 over the course of the past year. It's not a big number, but look at it this way: bringing our own bags all year long gets us the equivalent of one bag of groceries for free. Or, to put it another way: a $7 Chico Bag could potentially pay for itself more than three times over in its first year of use.

Adventures in Freecycling

2011-07-05T22:12:00.001-04:00

I've been having very mixed results with Freecycle in the past week or so. I've been involved in seven different transactions involving nine different individuals, some of them very easy and others extremely frustrating. Here's a play-by-play:

Transaction #1: I posted an offer for a book called The Complete Cheapskate that I picked up off the free table at our library book sale, just on the off chance that it had any useful advice in it I hadn't already heard many times over. (It didn't, and it was written with a heavily Christian slant that I found a bit oppressive.) I got a request for it within one hour, and it was picked up the next day. Result: success.

Transaction #2: I posted an offer for "unidentified tomato plants" in an effort to get rid of the volunteers that popped up in the vicinity of our compost bin. (The squash plants have been transplanted to our regular garden area, where they seem, after an initial rough patch, to be settling in okay.) Three people respond, and I say yes to all three, since there are plenty of tomato plants to go around. One of them (the same one who took the book) shows up as scheduled and takes several plants. The second one gives me a runaround for several days, never actually committing to a specific time, and finally stops responding. The third one offers to come on Monday but will not commit to a specific time, does not show up on Monday because "something came up," suggests coming on Friday but still will not commit to a time, finally agrees to come on Sunday between 11 and 12, and shows up around 2:30 after I had given up on her. At this point, I assumed that the half-a-dozen remaining tomato plants would end up in the compost bin, but the first Freecycler (the one who actually came when she said she would) contacts me again and asks if there are any tomato plants left, as hers didn't survive transplanting. I tell her that she is welcome to all the ones that are left, and she shows up promptly and takes them. Result: eventual success, but with considerable frustration in the process.

Transaction #3: I respond to another Freecycler's request for a microwave cart, offering an old white one that's been sitting unused in our basement. Freecycler responds promptly with, "I can pick it up today," but then writes back saying "Sorry something came up last min" and asks if he/she can pick it up on Saturday after 5pm. I respond in the negative and propose a couple of alternative times, and I also give out my phone number to facilitate scheduling. The Freecycler does not respond and is never heard from again. Result: failure.

Transaction #4: I post an offer for three incandescent bulbs Brian unearthed while cleaning out our basement. At this point, I am feeling a bit disillusioned with Freecycle, so I'm astonished to get a response within the hour, proposing a specific date and even a specific time for pickup. I agree to leave the bulbs out on the porch (the usual method for transferring items between Freecyclers), and they are picked up more or less on schedule. Result: unqualified success.

Transaction #5: I post an offer for a "joystick with four classic arcade games." This is a little toy we picked up for a buck at a yard sale a few years back, which plugs directly into a TV set and has four 1980s-vintage video games hardwired into it. Since then we'd offered it to several friends, but no one was interested. Assuming we won't get any replies immediately, I then head out to a 4th of July party. When I get home, there's a response offering to pick the joystick up "within the hour if not spoken for." Fearing I may have missed my window, I respond that the joystick is available at any time. The Freecycler offers to come get it that very evening if I will leave the item out on the porch. By morning it is gone. Result: unqualified success.

Transaction #6: I respond to an offer for some "woven wood shades" from a Freecycler in a neighboring town. This Freecycler, apparently wary as a result of experiences like mine over the course of the week, asks me to commit to a specific time before giving an address. I suggest 7pm, and the Freecycler agrees. Brian and I pick them up and find them to be suitable for our small back room (which has gone through the past four years with no window treatments of any kind). Result: success.

Transaction #7: Earlier in the week, as Brian was cleaning out the basement, he discovered that my guitar case (which had been sitting untouched for months if not years) had developed mildew. The guitar itself was okay and is now sitting out on a stand in the downstairs room (where I might, with luck, remember to pick it up and play it once in a while), but I thought it might be handy to get a new case for it—so when I saw an offer for a new but slightly damaged case from a Freecycler right here in town, I immediately offered to take it. The Freecycler agreed and left it out on the porch for me. Unfortunately, as soon as I picked it up, I knew it was too bulky and too heavy for me. I barely managed to lug the thing home. Now it's just sitting in the back room waiting to be relisted for some other lucky Freecycler to pick up. Result: a successful transaction, but an unsatisfactory result.

Looking over the list, it's clear that my transactions have, on the whole, been more positive than negative, so I guess I really have no cause for complaint. But the week has made it abundantly clear that the course of free shopping does not always run smooth.

Green and Greener

2011-07-04T13:11:00.006-04:00

Earlier this week I saw an ad online for a company called "The Check Gallery" that calls itself "the green choice for checks." Their checks, they claim, are all printed on recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. If I still used checks on a regular basis, I might have been tempted to pay the $13 for a couple of boxes of these. But I go through checks so slowly these days that I'm still working my way through the box my husband and I got when we opened our current checking account more than four years ago. (We changed addresses shortly after that, but I couldn't bring myself to throw out a practically new box of checks and order new ones; I've just been crossing out our old address and writing in the new one on every check I use for the past four years.)

The reason I use so few checks now is that our bank offers free online bill payment, and so nearly every bill we receive on a regular basis—phone, cable, credit cards, utilities—gets paid that way. I use a check four times a year to pay our water bill, and once in a very great while to pay a merchant who doesn't accept credit cards. Even my taxes now get paid electronically. And as far as I can tell, this option is not only quicker and cheaper than paying by mail with a check; it's also greener. There's no paper waste, and no fuel used for mailing the stuffed envelopes (or for manufacturing new checks and shipping them to me). Admittedly, I do presumably use some electricity to run my computer for the minute or two it takes to log on and pay a bill—but considering that my computer is on nearly all day anyway for work, I'd say the extra electricity used is negligible. (In fact, if I weren't taking a break from work to pay my bills, I'd probably just take a break to play solitaire and keep the computer on anyway.)

This got me thinking about how many other things that are touted as "green" choices are actually less green—and in many cases, less frugal—than other alternatives. Here are a few examples I was able to come up with:

Paper bags rather than plastic ones. Actually, in terms of their overall resource use, it's not altogether clear that paper bags are greener than plastic—but it is decidedly clear that neither one is as green as a reusable bag, which also nets you anywhere from two to ten cents off each time you shop.
Household products, such as cleaners, that are marketed as nontoxic and eco-friendly. Some of these are genuinely green and some not obviously so—but pantry staples, such as baking soda, vinegar, and salt, are decidedly nontoxic and much cheaper than either the "green" cleaning products or their conventional equivalents.
Clothes made from hemp, bamboo, and other sustainable fabrics. These are probably greener than new clothes made from conventional cotton (the most pesticide-heavy crop on the planet) or petroleum-derived synthetics, but they can't compare to secondhand clothes, which require no materials and no energy to produce.
Recycled-paper products such as tissues (not as green as reusable handkerchiefs) and copier paper (not as green as one-side-used paper that would otherwise go straight into the bin).

Those are all the examples I could come up with off the top of my head. Can you think of any others?

Land of the Free

2011-06-28T19:24:00.000-04:00

I've already posted more than once on this site about my fondness for Freecycle. Its many benefits include

finding a new home for your unwanted stuff so it doesn't end up in a landfill;
finding stuff that you can use at no cost; and
saving the resources used for making new stuff by keeping old items in circulation.

However, it does have a couple of drawbacks. One is that my local group draws from such a broad area that often I'll see things listed that I think I could use, but it would take an hour or more of driving to pick them up, and the time and gas used would cancel out any potential savings. Another is that receiving individual e-mails for each item that's posted would quickly drown out all the other messages in my inbox—but receiving the "daily digest" of 25 postings at a time instead, I often don't see the listings for desirable items until they've already been taken. And of course, there's the problem that with Freecycle postings, you usually don't get to see items before you request them, so you can't be sure they're really what you want. In fact, in many cases you can be pretty sure they aren't exactly what you want; people who have multiple items to give away often list a whole box with the direction, "must take all," so you have to take a bunch of unwanted items to get the few that you want. Of course, you can just turn around and re-post those unwanted items for others to take, but you can never be sure anyone will want them—or, for that matter, any other item that you post. And there is always the problem of "no-shows," people who say they'll come at a particular time to pick up a particular item and then leave you waiting by the door.

So what would be the perfect way to keep all the benefits of Freecycle without any of the drawbacks? This month's Green American has an answer: a free store. These range from actual storefronts to folding tables set up under a tarp, where you can drop off any unwanted items and pick up anything that looks useful. According to the article, this business model does not, as you might think, encourage people to sweep in and grab everything on the shelves, the way some extreme couponers have been known to do during extremely good sales; since everything that's free today will still be free tomorrow, there's no particular urgency about nabbing the bargains before they disappear. Of course, it's apparent that a store where everything is free does not generate any income, and a store is bound to have higher operating costs than a Freecycle group, so these store rely on outside funding, generally in the form of grants, to pay their overhead. (Interestingly, though, a free store in Portland, Oregon is managing to operate on a for-profit basis by charging $20 a year for membership, which is probably a good deal if you consider how much you could save in a year by "shopping" there.)

Free stores of various types are operating successfully in several U.S. cities, including Portland, Baltimore, and San Francisco. (Historical note: the free-store movement in the US was actually started in San Francisco by a hippie group called the Diggers, who took their name from the 17th-century English farming collective celebrated in the folk song "The World Turned Upside Down.") A quick Google search didn't turn up any free stores in New Jersey, but there is an informal one in New York City (which has apparently, and bizarrely, been the target of repeated arson attempts). Also, Philadelphia recently hosted its first Really Really Free Market, a gathering at which individuals can swap services as well as goods.

Unfortunately, I don't know if I'll have a chance to get up to Brooklyn any time in the near future, and it certainly isn't something I could do on a regular basis. But those of you who live or work in large cities might find it worth your while to do a quick Google search on "free store, city name" and see what turns up. The location may not be terribly convenient, but you can't beat the prices.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

2011-06-25T23:25:00.000-04:00

The first year after we built our compost bin, some "volunteers" popped up in front of it in the spring—a couple of tomato plants that had apparently seeded themselves from tomato remnants that we'd tossed in the bin. We put up tomato cages around them, but the vines quickly grew over the tops of the cages and sprawled all over the side yard, making it nearly impossible to walk past. We got a fair number of tomatoes off those volunteer plants, but they weren't particularly good tomatoes—no better than what you'd buy in the supermarket—and I decided that even for no-cost, no-cultivation tomatoes, they weren't worth the trouble.

So the following year, I ruthlessly pulled out all the tomato plants that popped up in the area around the compost bin. And what should pop up in their place but a massive butternut squash vine that sprawled clear across the asparagus beds and even managed to thrust its way through the fence into the back yard, its huge prickly leaves nearly obstructing the path. That plant gave us close to a dozen squashes—our entire crop, as it turned out, since the ones I actually planted in the garden didn't produce anything—but I still found it a major pain in the butt. I figured that if squash could grow that well in the side yard, we ought to be able to grow it in the actual garden with a bit of effort, rather than putting up with interlopers spreading themselves all across our path.

So this year, what happens? What else—we get tomatoes and squash, filling up the entire space between the compost bin and the asparagus bed. And if I don't do something about about them soon, I can expect them to turn into the Vegetables that Ate Cincinnati. Help!

Two updates

2011-06-24T13:51:00.000-04:00

Today, a couple of quick updates to posts I made last month. First of all, back on May 23 I posted about how we'd refinished an old corner cabinet to go in our downstairs bath, and the only thing missing was inserts for the cabinet doors. Well, that problem is now fixed. My first thought was to pick up some stiff translucent paper from Michael's, but it turned out that they sell this stuff in the scrapbooking section, and it's only available in 12-inch sheets—too small to fit the doors. Then I thought we could try parchment paper, the kind used for baking. I bought a roll of this, but we found it too flimsy to be any use; we couldn't get it properly secured in the door panels because it kept popping out. So we finally decided to try cutting up an old lace curtain that was hanging up in one of the windows when we first bought our house. We didn't like it at all for a window treatment, but rather than throw it out, we stowed it away in case we might one day have a use for it. And now, that day had come. We simply doubled over the fabric, secured it to the inside of the door with a staple gun, and cut away the excess. And I must say, this jerry-rigged job doesn't look half bad.

Second, on May 24 I posted about a family of robins that had moved in just outside our kitchen door, on top of the light fixture. In that post, I mentioned that the baby birds were growing fast and would probably fly the coop soon, and sure enough, within a few days they were gone. After a couple of weeks, when it became apparent they weren't coming back, we removed the empty nest from under the awning. And no sooner had we done so than a new nest appeared to take its place, and a new mama bird took up her post. This one's another robin, a bit smaller than the previous one, and with a somewhat smaller and trimmer nest. The picture's a bit fuzzy—I couldn't get too close for fear of scaring her off, so I had to zoom in as best I could—but you can make out her little head poking up over the edge of the nest and peering at me.

Looks like at our house, everything old is new again.

Lowe's en espanol

2011-06-21T17:48:00.000-04:00

We've been thinking for a while that it might be time to replace our old refrigerator. We don't know exactly how old it is (it came with the house), but based on the data from our Kill-A-Watt meter, we know it uses about about 500 kilowatt-hours a year (about 50 percent more than a new Energy-Star-certified model). So on our trip to Lowe's last weekend (the one on which we picked up the defective window shade), I picked up a flier that I spotted in the store advertising an Energy-Star-qualified, 15-cubic-foot Frigidaire for only $389, which seemed like a great price. Upon taking a closer look at it, I found that I'd picked up the Spanish version of the flier. I could still make out most of the information, but when we went back to Lowe's to return the window shade, I figured I might as well grab a copy of the English version.

However, when I picked up the English flier, it didn't include the $389 Frigidaire. The two other fridges featured in the Spanish flier (a $900 side-by-side Whirlpool and a $1700 French-door Whirlpool in stainless steel) were the same, but the third model listed was a $2400 Samsung. Checking over the two fliers side-by-side, I found that although most of the pages were identical, wherever they differed, the Spanish version featured cheaper products. It seems that Lowe's is assuming Spanish speakers are interested in cheaper products than English speakers

This strikes me as discrimination of some kind, but I'm honestly not sure who the victims are. On the one hand, it seems somewhat unfair to assume that Spanish-speaking customers can't afford high-end products--but I must admit, as an English speaker, I'm pretty ticked off that I'm not getting to hear about the good deals. I mean, is it really fair to assume, just because I don't speak Spanish, that I must want a fridge no smaller than 25 cubic feet and that I'm willing to pay upwards of $900 for it? Are all Anglos supposed to be spendthrifts?

I can't think of many times in my life when I've actually felt discriminated against, but this really gets my goat.

Make it do or do without

2011-06-19T20:17:00.000-04:00

First of all, apologies for being incommunicado for the past couple of weeks. We've been doing an unusual amount (for us) of traveling, and until this week we weren't home for more than a few days at a time—just about long enough to get caught up from the previous trip before leaving on the next one. So it's taken me until now to scoop a free hour out of my schedule to attend to the blog. I hope to make it up to you with a longish post today and a slew of short ones in the days to come.

An old saying from the Depression goes, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." In today's "disposable society," where it's often actually cheaper to replace things than it is to fix them, that attitude has largely fallen by the wayside. But just in this past week, I've had a couple of vivid demonstrations of how "making it do" can often be a better option than throwing it out and starting over.

The first occurred when my blue canvas moccasins—my go-to shoes for daily wear in the spring and fall—started to wear out beyond the point of repair. At first it was just the soles, and I thought I could make them last another year by patching them with Shoe Goo; then the linings went, and I thought maybe I could come up with some way to patch them; but when I found holes in the uppers themselves, I reluctantly concluded that I'd have to give them up. Unfortunately, I couldn't simply buy another pair just like them, because the manufacturer has discontined this style. Shoes in this general shape are easy to find, but only in leather, which I, being an animal-friendly type, won't buy (except secondhand).

So I did a little searching online and found a slip-on shoe in synthetic leather at Payless, which I thought would probably do—but since I have hard-to-fit feet, I thought I'd better go into a store and try them on in person before buying. Lucky I did, because once I got my feet into them I found that they were about the most uncomfortable pair of shoes I'd ever had on. Every single bump and contour seemed to be in exactly the wrong place, and I couldn't imagine keeping them on my feet all day, let alone walking three miles in them.

Next I tried a Google search on "canvas shoes," and a brand called TOMS looked promising (though a bit pricy), until I found that (1) most of their canvas shoes have a suede lining, and (2) most of their vegan shoes don't come in wide widths, which are an absolute requirement for me. Grasshoppers offered somewhat more selection, but nothing that was exactly what I had in mind, and I was still skittish about buying anything without being able to try it on first.

So I started wondering whether maybe, before spending $40 or $50 on a new pair of shoes, I should see whether there was any way to fix up my old ones—not the blue moccasins, but the brown suede pair I had before those. I'd bought these secondhand at the local thrift shop for two bucks, even though they were about half a size too big, thinking, "Well, I might still be able to use them"—and I ended up wearing them regularly for about two years. By that point, they'd gone through three sets of insoles, the lining was patched with moleskin, and the heels had developed holes too large for Shoe Goo to cover. However, I'd held onto them anyway, using them for grubby jobs like gardening so that I wouldn't mess up my "good" shoes, and now I wondered whether I might be able to stretch them out a little bit longer. So I invested $2.50 in a fresh pair of insoles, re-patched the lining, and found them wearable—certainly more comfortable than the ones from Payless. I still haven't figured out what to do about the holes in the heels, but I figure I'll see what the local shoe repair place has to suggest—and even if they can't do anything, I'll still have something tolerable to wear until I find something better, which was more than Payless could provide.

The second example was our old bedroom windowshade. It was obviously a veteran already when we bought the place four years ago, and by last winter it had frayed so badly around the bottom that we'd tried trimming off the last few inches and re-attaching the slat with hot glue—only to see the repaired shade fray just as badly in the same place. So we figured it was time to give in and replace it. We found one in Lowe's that was labeled as "room-darkening" and marked at $7.50, and after spending several minutes hunting down an associate who could cut it down to size for us, we took it up to the checkout. There we encountered our first disappointment with our new purchase, as we found that the price marked on the shelf was apparently wrong and the real price was $20. But we told ourselves it was worth it, since we clearly had to have a new shade.

So we got it home and encountered, in quick succession, three more disappointments. First, although we'd measured the old shade very carefully, the new one—supposedly cut to the same size—wouldn't fit in the old brackets. Brian ended up having to move one of the mounts, only to find that the shade was not in fact "room-darkening"—or at least, not nearly so room-darkening as our old one had been. But the last straw came when he tried to open the shade and found that it wouldn't roll up. It wasn't just that there was a trick to it; no amount of pulling, tugging, or twitching had the slightest effect on the thing. Back to the store it went, and Brian set about trying to repair the old one. First he trimmed several inches of material off the bottom—removing not just the torn part, but all the section that had become yellowed (and presumably brittle) with age. He reattached the slat with hot glue, as before, and then reinforced it with a strip of duct tape running all the way across, which hopefully will prevent our fingers from poking holes in it when we miss the slat and grab hold of the thin plastic instead. He also taped the top, which had come unstuck at one corner, securely onto the roller and re-hung it (fortunately, he was able to squeeze it in without having to move the mounts again). The finished product is just long enough to cover the window, with only an inch or two to spare—but it blocks out the light and it goes up and down, which is more than the new one could manage.

Mind you, I'm not trying to argue that making do with what you've got is always the best policy. One of the other purchases we made at Lowe's, a new laundry basket, is decidedly superior to our old one, which—in addition to having its handles held on with duct tape—was a big, unwieldy shape that I'd always had trouble wrestling up and down the stairs. But it does appear that in some cases, at least, patching up an old piece of equipment isn't merely "good enough"; it's actually better than you can do by buying new.

A traditionally built footprint

2011-05-25T18:49:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in my Earth Day post, I like to regularly (some might say obsessively) check my ecological footprint through websites such as Carbonfund or MyFootprint. And just as regularly, I'm frustrated to find that, even after taking virtually all the steps in 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth, I'm still an energy hog by global standards. Last time I checked my footprint on Global Footprint Network, the site informed me that if everyone on Earth lived the way I do, it would take over 3 planets' worth of resources to support us all. I went back and tweaked my answers, trying to see what would happen if I ate fewer animal products or drove a bit less, but nothing seemed to make a significant difference.

As I tried to figure out just what I was doing wrong, it occurred to me that maybe it's not me, individually; maybe it's my whole country. In other words, maybe any American is bound to use more resources, simply because of the way our society is structured. So I tried running a sample footprint for a 100 percent virtuous American—someone who was making the most ecologically responsible choices about everything, from food to home to transportation. And what do you know, I found that even my hypothetical Lady Virtue was using up more than three Earths' worth of resources.

So I decided to try the same experiment with a fictitious character from a different country. Lately I've been reading my way through the delightful Number One Ladies' Detective Agency series, by Alexander McCall Smith, which is set in Botswana. So I decided to make Precious Ramotswe, the heroine of that series, the star of my new hypothetical scenario. Mma Ramotswe, as she is known, lives in a small house with electricity and running water. At first she lives alone; later she shares the house with a husband and two foster children. She drives a vehicle described as a "tiny white van," and her diet includes plenty of fresh produce, but also meat, dairy, and lots of tea and fruitcake. I decided to enter her moderately virtuous life just as it's presented in the books and see how it registered on the Earth-o-meter. Data for Botswana isn't available on the Global Footprint Network, so I had to approximate using its nearest neighbor, South Africa, and make educated guesses about how much electricity, gasoline, and other resources Mma Ramotswe's lifestyle would use. The result? Mma Ramostwe, though a "traditionally built" lady (size 22), apparently treads much more lightly on the planet than I do. If we all lived as she does, the website claims, we could all manage with just over one Earth.

So what's to be learned from this? Not, presumably, that we should all move to Bostwana if we want to reduce our environmental impact. More likely, that the most important changes eco-conscious Americans can make to reduce their environmental impact need to take place on a societal, rather than an individual, level. Not just choosing renewable energy in your own home, but promoting the wider use of renewable energy across the country; not just eating local produce, but pushing for changes to the way farms are run in America. And in the meantime, perhaps, not beating ourselves up too much over getting a score of three-plus Earths on the footprint quiz. Marked on a curve, it's not as bad as it seems.

Meet our tenants

2011-05-24T21:23:00.000-04:00

Although our house is a modest one, we do have, at present, a few tenants sharing it with us. Take a look:

They're right outside our kitchen door, on top of the light fixture, which means that for the past week or so we haven't been able to turn on that light (for fear of overheating the nest) or go out that door (for fear of scaring off the mama bird). This was not my idea, by the way. I think if they aren't even paying us rent, then our convenience should take priority over theirs. But my big tough husband appears to have a soft spot for little baby birdies.

Anyway, it may not be a problem for long, because it's amazing how fast these little guys grow. I could swear that two weeks ago, those little birds hadn't even hatched yet, and as you can see, they're still wee nestlings in this picture I took just two days ago. But today I spotted two of them perched on the edge of the next, and one of them flew away when it saw me coming (bonking its head on the awning in the process, but it didn't seem too fazed by that). So perhaps within another week or so, we'll have the house to ourselves again.

Furniture mods

2011-05-23T23:25:00.000-04:00

As regular readers of this blog will know, we recently completed a complete redo of our downstairs bathroom. Or rather, we almost completely completed it. One thing still lacking was shelving. We were making do with an old corner étagère from Ikea, but the little open shelves weren't really the most practical thing for storing spare towels and extra rolls of toilet paper. So we were trying to figure out what else we could construct that would fit into that awkward little corner area, and our eyes fell on the old corner cabinet that used to sit in that same space before we redid the room. The medium-toned wood finish was totally incompatible with the new color scheme, and the piece wasn't in such great shape anyway, so we'd been assuming it would just end up on Freecycle. But at some point we said to ourselves, "Well, if we're just going to get rid of it anyway, what do we have to lose by trying to paint it?" Nothing but a bit of white paint, and we knew we'd be needing some of that at some point anyway to touch up the woodwork upstairs, so the leftovers wouldn't go to waste.

As you can see from this "before" picture, what we had to work with wasn't terribly promising. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so we started by removing the doors and taking out those funny sort of bubble-patterned plastic inserts from the top ones (breaking one of them in the process, so we couldn't be tempted to put them back in when we were done). The scalloped trim pieces on the top came off too, and the one on the bottom got sheared off to a plain edge. We didn't dare sand the piece before priming it for fear the existing varnish would bleed into the white paint, so we just slapped on a coat of primer and forged ahead.

Two coats of white paint later, here's the not-quite finished result. As you can see, we haven't yet found anything to replace the inserts in the upper cabinet doors, although we've thought that some translucent paper or fabric might do the trick. We even painted the black-finished hardware with a can of silver-toned spray paint (which we'd bought earlier for another project that ended up going nowhere) to make it a closer match for the rest of the hardware in the room. The finished piece may not be exactly elegant, but it's presentable and certainly functional. And the top makes a nice place for displaying my little collection of cobalt glassware, which had been sitting boxed up in storage ever since we moved into this house four years back.

So that left us with the old étagère. We assumed this piece would now be the one to end up on Freecycle, since we didn't have another empty corner in the house that could accommodate it. Our house has baseboard heat, so there aren't many corners in which you can actually place a set of corner shelves without blocking a heater. But Brian took another look at it and, once again, thought, "Well, if we're just going to get rid of it anyway..." So he decided to take a stab at modifying this piece too. And here's the result, with the legs scooted forward so that it can fit right over the baseboard heater and tuck neatly into a corner of the big downstairs room.

Waste not, want not, at least where furniture is concerned.

Shame on Starbucks

2011-05-15T16:05:00.000-04:00

The other day, I decided to walk across the river to the nearest Starbucks and treat myself to a Frappucino, simply in honor of its being such a beautiful May day. Now, every other time I've gone for a Starbucks run in recent years, I've remembered only just as I was walking in the door that I should have brought bring a reusable cup with me, on the general ecofrugal principle that it's always better to reuse anything (a cup, a grocery bag, a handkerchief) than to use a disposable equivalent and throw it away. But this time, for a change, I actually remembered it before I left the house. So I tucked my cup in my big handbag and set out, curious to see how the baristas would react to it.

Well, the result was a big disappointment. The cashier wasn't too fazed at being presented with a reusable cup; I got the impression that my request was a bit unusual, but she did know how to deal with it. She stuck a little sticky note on my cup, wrote my drink order on it, and queued it up behind all the other marked-up plastic cups. From where I stood, I could watch its progress through the line, and I watched as the barista started mixing up my drink. Rather than putting it directly into my cup, he measured out the mix in a disposable Starbucks cup, dumped it in the blender, whipped it up, and poured it from there into my cup—tossing the one he'd used to do the measuring into the trash. So it turns out that bringing my own cup was not only a waste of effort; it was actually counterproductive from an environmental standpoint. It resulted in exactly the same amount of waste, plus the water required to wash my reusable cup—and the plastic cup the barista used ended up in the trash, rather than coming home with me and going into the recycling bin.

So, two lessons learned: 1) I shouldn't bother bringing a reusable cup to Starbucks, and 2) if I really want to reduce waste, I should get my coffee fix at Dunkin' Donuts instead, where they not only know how to reuse cups but also use Fair Trade certified beans in all their espresso drinks.

Eco-makeover

2011-05-08T14:26:00.001-04:00

One of the storefronts on our town's main drag has, like so many others, recently lost its tenant. And like many other buildings in this position, it's being given a bit of a facelift to prepare it for a new tenant. What's different about this one is that instead of just sprucing up the building's looks with a fresh coat of paint and new lighting, the owners seem to be giving it a top-to-bottom energy-efficiency makeover. There are new solar panels on the roof (which you can't see in the picture), and I got a glimpse of some traditional fiberglass insulation inside—but the most unusual part of this building's transformation is that they have actually been sheathing the entire building, on the outside, with sheets of polystyrene.

Yep, all those white squares covering most of the outside of the building: that's what they are. Even the decorative trimwork that's being added around the edges is all made of smaller pieces of foam. (Here's a close-up so you can see.) They've got most of the building covered now, and they're in the process of covering the polystyrene with some sort of primer, which I assume will in turn be covered up with stucco. It's a pretty innovative way to make a building more energy-efficient, I guess, and it's probably a lot easier than ripping out the walls to add insulation from inside—and whatever is less labor-intensive is probably cheaper and thus more frugal. But I have to admit, it's not an appropach that would ever have occurred to me. I'll be watching with interest to see how this project turns out. (One thing the builders have working to their advantage is that this particular building could hardly end up looking worse than it did to start out with.)

My desperate landscape

2011-05-03T21:51:00.006-04:00

Some time last week, my mom recommended that I check out a show called "Desperate Landscapes" on the DIY Network. The premise is that the producers pick out a house that's got the worst yard in its neighborhood, and in a single day—while all the neighbors are off at work—they transform it into the best-looking yard in the neighborhood. I watched a couple of episodes on Hulu, and while I found it somewhat interesting to watch the transformations, I quickly found myself getting annoyed with it. Basically, this show has the same problem as most of the shows that focus on interior redesign or remodeling: they're working with an essentially unlimited budget, so they don't have to make any choices about how to spend their money most effectively. They can just put in anything they think will look good. And the result is indeed a yard that looks good, but it's a $25,000 yard that looks good—not something an ordinary homeowner can aspire to.

Unless, of course, they can win the contest that I just saw announced in the Star-Ledger. Submit photos or a video of your own desperate landscape, and you, yes, you, could be the lucky recipient of a $25,000 yard makeover and the subject of a one-hour special episode. (Well, actually, you probably can't, because the deadline is tonight. But someone will.)

Now I admit, our yard has plenty of problems. The "foundation" shrubs are so overgrown that they're starting to block the windows, while the "lawn" is basically a monoculture of dandelions. And since we absolutely refuse to use herbicides, pretty much the only way to get rid of the weeds is to replace them with something that can grow better than they can—no easy task for a site with full sun and clay soil so dense it could easily form bricks without straw.

But even with all its flaws, when I go over my checklist of things I'd like to do in the front yard—or even the front and back put together—I honestly can't come up with $25,000 worth of stuff that needs to be fixed. With that budget, they'd have to replace absolutely everything (lawn, shrubs, walkways, walls, driveway, everything) just to get the money spent. And I don't want to replace everything. I certainly don't want them tearing out my little cherry tree that we planted together for our anniversary, or all the creeping phlox that I've taken such pains to plant, weed, and divide over the past several years. In fact, it would be about as anti-ecofrugal as you can get: deliberately trashing stuff that's still good in order to spend more money.

So I decided, instead, to enter the other contest covered in the Star-Ledger article, called the "Yard Smart Intervention." This one, sponsored by yard equipment maker Briggs & Stratton, has a smaller grand prize of $1,500 (plus some power tools and a one-day consultation with their landscaping expert). This amount would be enough to cover everything I'd like to do in the front and back yards put together—or at least, everything except the front steps, and those aren't an urgent priority. Plus, I have a much better chance of winning this one, since they're actually picking three prize winners, one each in May, June, and July. For an ecofrugal homeowner, three chances to win $1,500 worth of improvements are better in every way than a single chance to win $25,000 worth of improvements that you don't really need or want.

So, my entry is now in the running, and voting starts in 13 days. Wish me luck.

April is the weirdest month

2011-04-27T17:30:00.004-04:00

April is a singularly perverse time of year. T.S. Eliot called it "the cruelest month" for the way it reawakens our desires after a long, sleepy winter, but what I find far crueler is the mind games it plays on us with the weather. Only a week ago we had flannel sheets and a heavy blanket on our bed; today they're out on the clothesline, drying in the hot sun, while I'm sitting here with a fan pointed at my head.

Spring is supposed to be such a beautiful season, and so it would be, if it would just settle down and be spring for more than one day at a stretch. But instead, it seems to sway wildly back and forth between winter and summer. The magnolia trees, my favorite part of spring, bloom for only a week or so, and many years there's not a single truly temperate day during that week to enjoy them. It's either far too cold outdoors to sit down for five minutes, or else it's pouring down rain—and by the time we get one perfect, sunny day, the magnolias are overblown and scattering their petals in a slippery mess over the sidewalk.

Sometimes I wonder if it was always this way. Is my memory just playing tricks on me when I remember the lush, beautiful Aprils of my youth? Has April really become less lovely and less temperate than it used to be? Is global warming to blame? Or am I just imagining it?

Green Ideas

2011-04-22T16:42:00.006-04:00

As usual, Earth Day this year feels like a bit of a letdown. Every twenty-second of April, I feel like I should make some kind of bold, dramatic gesture: planting a tree, swearing off bottled water, or maybe even starting a recycling program in my community. But our yard already has all the trees it can comfortably hold, our town already has an excellent curbside recycling program, and we never buy bottled water as it is. So as usual, I'm forced to settle for a bunch of tiny little gestures—most of them things that I do on a regular basis already.

However, it occurred to me that some of the green steps that are routine for me might actually be less so for some of you, and vice versa. So instead of posting about a big new thing that I'm going to do this Earth Day, I'm going to post a list of ten things that I've already tried, and that you might like to try too. And if you folks respond in kind in the comments section, maybe I can actually get some new ecofrugal ideas that I haven't already tried. So here is my list of Things to Try for Earth Day:

1. Check your carbon footprint. There are tons of carbon footprint calculators on the Web, each of which seems to use a different algorithm for calculating your individual or household CO2 emissions; when I tried calculating our household emissions a couple of years back, I got results ranging from 5.2 tons a year to 31 tons. However, while the sites all differed as to the actual number, they were pretty much in agreement that it was on the low side for an American household. So even if the number you get is only an approximation, it can at least give you a good idea where you fall on the curve. And some sites, such as Carbonfund, give you the option of immediately purchasing carbon offsets to match the exact amount of emissions you produce. Or, for a more complete picture of your environmental impact, you can check out a site like MyFootprint or Global Footprint Network.

2. Visit your local library. We go to ours all the time, although these days we seem to check out more movies than books. But that's okay; either way, borrowing them is much more earth-friendly than buying them. We also take advantage of the events our local library hosts, such as film screenings, poetry readings and the annual used book sale. A trip to the library is a great green alternative to a trip to the mall (and for many of us, it needn't even involve getting in the car).

3. Prepare a meal with seasonal ingredients. Around here (USDA Zone 6), seasonal produce at this time of year includes the earliest asparagus, spinach, and rhubarb. Those of you in warmer climates may have more to choose from. Bonus points if your ingredients are actually locally grown; double points if they're organic.

4. Better yet, try growing your own. Currently poking their heads above the ground in my garden are broccoli and cabbage seedlings, snow peas, and some wee tiny little sprouts of arugula. It'll be a couple of months before any of that is ready to eat, but it makes me feel nice and self-sufficient knowing it's there. If you haven't got a yard, consider starting a container garden with a couple of tomato or pepper plants on a porch or balcony. Even a sunny window is sufficient for a pot or two of fresh herbs.

5. Go thrift shopping. This is actually a frustrating experience for me most of the time, because there are only two thrift shops here in town. One is a very smart, upscale consignment shop with a selection of very fashionable clothes from well-known designers, but the prices are higher than at low-end retail stores like Sears or Target, and there's practically nothing available above a size eight; the other is a dark, cluttered basement that's only open two days a week and has a fairly frumpy selection of goods that seldom changes (although on the rare occasions when gems do show up there, the prices are great). So if I want to have a real thrift-shopping extravaganza, I have to make a special trip to the nearest Goodwill store, which has a good-sized selection and fairly decent prices, but is twenty minutes away in an area we seldom visit for any other reason. So this tip may actually work out better for you than it usually does for me.

I was planning to try going for ten Earth Day ideas, but those five are the only ones that came to me right off the top of my head. Perhaps I'll post more tomorrow if any come to mind. In the meantime, please comment and tell me all about your favorite green activities. What am I missing out on?

Eco-freebies

2011-04-15T13:38:00.003-04:00

Just a quick post to let you know that this Earth Day (Friday, April 22) you can get a free coffee at Starbucks if you bring in a reusable mug. Free coffee and no paper waste—an ecofrugal bingo.

A restaurant called Evos is also offering an Earth Day freebie (a free organic milkshake), but this chain seems to be confined to the Deep South: Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. (Sustainable culture takes root in the red states?)

Some less green, but equally tasty freebies will be available for Tax Day (Monday, April 18): free Cinnabon Bites (two to a customer) and mini ice cream sundaes at Maggie Moo's between 3pm and 6pm (with the caveat, "while supplies last"). And afterwards, you can go burn off the extra calories with a free workout at Bally Total Fitness. (If you're already a member, you can get a free half hour with a personal trainer.)

Thanks to Tip Hero for posting these.

Coupons revisited

2011-04-13T10:00:00.005-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the results of my coupon experiment, in which I found that a $2 local newspaper would not pay for itself in useful coupons. Based on this experiment, I concluded that for me, couponing was not the best strategy for cutting the grocery bill. However, in the past week or two I've had cause to revise this position slightly, as I've had a run of better-than-usual luck with coupons. My recent (pardon the pun) coups:

First, last week Coupons.com spat out several coupons that looked potentially useful. These included a 50-cents-off-two coupon for Land O' Lakes butter and a $1-off-three coupon for Birdseye frozen veggies. I clipped these just on the off chance that I'd be able to stack them with sales—and lo and behold, this week's sale flier for the Shop-Rite revealed that both these items were on sale, the butter for $1.99 a pound and the veggies for 99 cents apiece (for packages averaging around 12 ounces). So I ended up getting two pounds of butter for $3 (the coupon doubled) and three bags of veggies for $2. That beats our usual price of $2 a pound for frozen veggies from Trader Joe's (though admittedly, theirs are organic), and even our usual stock-up price of $2 a pound for butter, by a significant margin.
The same sale at the Shop-Rite included 8-pound bags of World's Best Cat Litter for $6.99 apiece. That's still more than we pay for our regular Swheat Scoop litter, but I have sometimes wondered about trying World's Best to see whether it might be less prone to "tracking" (i.e., ending up all over the house). And what do you know, last week's TipHero incuded a link to a product rebate for World's Best, good for a free 7- or 8-pound bag. So assuming they honor the rebate (and if they don't, I'll sic the Better Business Bureau on them—I've done it before and never failed to get satisfaction), I'll have gotten about a month's supply of cat litter for 44 cents' worth of postage. (Well, and 30 cents for photocopying. I always keep documentation for these things because I'm paranoid.)
Coupons.com also provided two coupons for General Mills cereals: one for $1 off three boxes and one for 75 cents off one box. And once again, ba-da-bing, a sale popped up to stack with them, this time at the A&P. They were offering four boxes for $6, "must buy four." This is a deal that normally would be good but not quite good enough, since the largest box available as part of the sale was the 14-ounce Wheat Chex or Corn Chex, and a 14-ounce box for $1.50 still doesn't quite meet our normal 10-cents-per-ounce cutoff for cold cereal. (I came up with this guideline after calculating that it's roughly the cost of the ingredients for homemade granola, and I've never revised it because it just makes the math so easy.) However, my $2.50 in coupon savings (since the 75-cent one will double) reduces the total cost of the four boxes to $3.50—87.5 cents a box, or 6.25 cents per ounce—making this deal a definite bingo. Unfortunately, when we stopped by the A&P we found they'd been cleaned out of Wheat Chex and Corn Chex, probably by shoppers who had the same idea we did. So we had to take a rain check, but that's okay—as long as we can get back to the store before the coupons expire on the 24th, we're golden.
And finally, my Rite Aid Wellness Plus newsletter included a link to a store coupon for $5 off two Mitchum deodorants. Since Mitchum costs $4 for a small and $5 for a large at the Rite Aid, this works out to $1.50 each for the small size or $2.50 for the large. This would be a pretty good deal by itself, but what makes it a great one is that I also happen to have two 75-cents-off manufacturer coupons (one from my regular Smart Source insert, and one from the duplicate insert I got with the newspaper, which may end up paying for itself yet). So with these, I can get the small ones for 74 cents apiece or the large ones for $1.74. Not too shabby (and not a moment too soon, since the deodorant I bought during my last trial membership at BJ's is about to run out).

So with these minor triumphs, I've been rethinking my position on coupons a bit. And I've decided my new position is something along these lines: coupons can be worth the effort, but only if you don't have to pay for them or otherwise go out of your way to get them. In practical terms, this means that in future I'll give more careful consideration to the coupons I can get for nothing (from SmartSource, Coupons.com, and other freebie newsletters). Rather than dismissing them out of hand, I'll print out all those that I can see any potential use for (meaning those for which I'd be willing to take the product at any price). Then I'll examine my sale fliers more carefully to see if I can stack any of the sales with coupons I have to turn a so-so deal into a good one, or a good one into a great one. In other words, I'll follow pretty much the same strategy I've used in the past—just a bit more carefully.

Unnecessary objects

2011-04-08T10:26:00.003-04:00

Some mail-order catalogues make me feel a lot like Diogenes. He was the ancient Greek philosopher who believed that the key to happiness was to eliminate all desires, so he lived like a beggar with no belongings. According to one story, he once went walking around a country fair, looking at all the things for sale, and marveled, "How many things there are in the world of which Diogenes has no need!"

Now, I don't believe in taking simple living to the same extreme as Diogenes, but I do often see products in catalogues or on websites and wonder what kind of person would actually believe that these objects would make him happier. This is even true, more often than not, of "green" products that are aimed specifically at eco-conscious consumers. For example, yesterday I got an e-mail from Green America (an environmental and workers' rights group of which I'm a member) that offered a 25 percent discount on an assortment of "natural home products." The items featured in the e-mail were all attractive and, as far as I could tell, well-made, but I couldn't actually see myself needing any of them. They included:

A $30 stainless-steel compost crock. This might be useful if your compost pile is located a fair distance from the house, so that you want to collect a big batch of scraps before making the trek out there. In that case, although you could just use any old container for your kitchen waste, you'd probably prefer something that will look decent sitting out on your counter, with a nice tight-fitting lid to contain odors. But since we put our compost bin right outside the kitchen door, we can just toss the scraps right in as soon as we've finished preparing a meal—even in the middle of the winter. And if we did need a larger, sealed container, we'd probably go with an empty bucket from paint or joint compound (something we have lots of on hand) and just stash it under the sink between meals.
Reusable mesh bags for fruits and veggies ($5 for a set of 5), so that you don't need to take plastic bags from the grocery store for this purpose. These make sense in theory, but the thing is, a certain number of plastic bags invariably find their way into our house anyway—from bread, bagged produce, newspaper inserts—and so it makes a lot more sense to reuse these than to buy special, reusable bags and throw the plastic ones away.
Bamboo-handled, stainless-steel kitchen tools, including a pizza wheel, bottle opener, and spaghetti server ($5 to $7). We already have one of each of these, so I don't really see how it's green to discard a perfectly good tool and replace it with a new one just because it has a bamboo handle. Not to mention that it's perfectly possible to slice pizza with a knife, open bottles with a fork, and serve spaghetti with two forks.
A $5 bamboo "trivet" (which isn't technically a trivet, because it doesn't have any feet; it's simply a table protector). We already have several table protectors that we've received as gifts, but if we didn't, we could put hot dishes down on top of a potholder, a placemat, or a napkin—or just leave them on the stove and serve ourselves from there.

How many "green" things there are in the world of which an ecofrugal person, with just a little bit of imagination, has no need!

Looking for cover, part 2

2011-04-05T17:04:00.008-04:00

Those who have been reading this blog for a while may recall my consternation last June on the subject of ground covers. I was trying to find a suitable ground cover for our small front yard, which is a real nuisance to mow because of its placement (up a flight of stairs from the back yard, where the mower is stored). The problem was that every plant I could find was in some way ill-suited to our yard, which has a western exposure (meaning full sun in the afternoon) and rich, but heavy clay soil. The few I found that were capable of tolerating these conditions (such as creeping jenny and blue-star creeper) were all described as invasive by at least one source.

Well, I've done some further research on the subject, and I've come up with a few alternatives that look like they might be workable. None of the choices is perfect, but they look like the best of a bad lot. The candidates are:

1. Herniaria glabra (commonly known as green carpet or rupturewort). This plant is native to Europe, but it's described as a fairly "sedate" plant that's easy to keep under control and unlikely to become invasive. Although it's slow-growing, sources indicate that it will eventually form a nice, dense, low-growing mat that will do a good job keeping out unwanted intruders. It can grow in just about any soil, is drought-tolerant, and, according to some sources, can handle foot traffic nearly as well as grass. And, as a bonus, it provides "winter interest" by turning a nice reddish hue in the fall. Its only drawbacks are that (1) it's not a native plant, (2) its "sedate" growth means that it will probably take quite a while to become fully established in the yard, and (3) despite its many advantages, it's not that common as a landscape plant, which could make it hard to find. I might have to order it online and hope the plants don't suffer too much in transit.

2. Barren strawberry (Waldsteinia fragarioides). Like the rupturewort, this plant forms a dense, low-growing carpet that can stand up to foot traffic. It can tolerate clay soil and grows in full sun or part shade. Some sources describe it as drought-tolerant, while others say it requires consistently moist soil. It's evergreen and produces yellow flowers from spring through early summer, which is a nice feature, although not quite as nice as adding winter interest (since blossoms aren't in short supply at that time of year). This plant actually is native to the northeastern U.S. and thus can't literally be described as "invasive," but one of my garden guides, The Philadelphia Garden Book, describes it as a "relentlessly overbearing" plant that shouldn't be grown outside a container. On the other hand, that aggressiveness could be a benefit in some ways, since I'll be trying to grow it in such unfavorable conditions. Like the rupturewort, this plant doesn't seem to be widely available, and the sources I've found online charge $5 or more for a single plant, so planting the whole yard with it could get rather expensive.

3. Lastly, we have the humble Dutch white clover (Trifolium repens). Many gardeners view this plant as a troublesome lawn weed, but others love having it in the lawn because it grows easily and is a nitrogen-fixing plant that serves as a natural lawn fertilizer. I do have some clover in my yard already, so this is the one plant of the three that I know for a fact will grow in my soil. It does indeed produce nice, lush, green growth, and it doesn't get too tall to walk on. Like the barren strawberry, it flowers in the spring, although I don't consider its blossoms very attractive. Some sources say it can't take a lot of foot traffic, but I'm not planning to ride a horse across it; I just need to be able to step on it occasionally while pruning the cherry tree or weeding the flower beds, and it seems to be able to handle that much. It's also the cheapest option of the three, since it's fairly easy to grow from seed. White clover is native to Europe (although it has naturalized throughout the entire continental U.S.), and the USDA warns that it "can be weedy or invasive." However, the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health describes clover as being a "troublesome weed" only in certain southeastern states.

So, ecofrugal readers, I put it to you: which of these is the best choice? Is an aggressive native plant a better choice than a non-aggressive, non-native plant? Is the inexpensive, easy-growing clover an ecofrugal choice, or is it an invasive weed? Which one will make the best carpet for my yard? Or is my best option to buy some of each, plant them all together, and let them try to cover all the ground among the three of them?

April snow

2011-04-01T11:44:00.002-04:00

Between the date on the calendar and our first harvest of spring greens on Tuesday, I guess I got to thinking it must be spring. April Fool!

First Picking

2011-03-30T08:40:00.003-04:00

Just about a month after First Washday, we celebrated another spring milestone: First Picking, or the first meal of the year to contain something harvested from our own yard. If you think late March seems awfully early to be harvesting anything from the garden, you're quite right; our garden beds are still empty, except for a few holdovers from last year (a stubborn parsley plant and a few leeks that finally decided to germinate this spring after I'd given them up for lost). Even our perennial crops, asparagus and rhubarb, have only just begun to show their heads in their separate little beds, and it will probably be a few weeks at least before any of them are ready to pick.

No, the edibles harvested from the yard for last night's dinner weren't actually planted there; they grew up all by themselves. In fact, they're probably growing in your yard, too, whether you want them to or not. I'm referring, of course, to the lowly and much-maligned dandelion. This tough little weed is the bane of many gardeners because it will grow anywhere and is practically impossible to eradicate. However, as the saying goes, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade—and when your garden gives you dandelions, make salad.

Dandelion greens are supposed to be at their best this time of year, when they're young and tender. Picking them is tricky, because if your yard is anything like ours, the dandelions are mixed in on the ground with twigs and crabgrass and fallen leaves, all of which you have to pick out of the dandelion leaves before you can use them. The greens also come out covered in mud, so you have to wash them very thoroughly. I put them all in a big bowl of water and then completely drained and changed the water three times before I considered them clean enough to eat. I also had to remove the roots, the blossoms (you can eat those, but it's a different recipe) and the tougher stems. However, once you've done all this prep work, the actual cooking is pretty easy. We used a recipe gleaned from Mother Earth News, although it's basically just a variant on the generic recipe for greens that appears in Mountain Cooking, a collection of traditional recipes from Appalachia:

Chop four slices of bacon (in our case, certified humane bacon from Trader Joe's) and fry it until crisp. Pour off all but a tablespoon of the drippings (Note: if you don't eat bacon at all, you can just heat up a tablespoon of olive oil) and add a diced red onion, or a couple of chopped scallions, to the skillet. Stir in 2 teaspoons of brown sugar and 2 tablespoons of cider vinegar, then pour the hot dressing over your greens to wilt them. Toss, and add salt and pepper to taste.

And there you have it: fresh, organic, extremely local (less than 100 feet), seasonal greens for free. Can't get more ecofrugal than that.

Before and Almost

2011-03-24T11:49:00.005-04:00

So, the downstairs bath isn't really 100 percent done yet. The old floor molding, which Brian went to so much trouble to salvage and refinish, turns out to be not quite flush with the not-quite-even walls, so it will have to be replaced with some smaller shoe molding. The threshold isn't in place, the doorframe still needs to be finished off with some quarter-round, and eventually, we'll want to replace the old set of corner shelves with something that matches the rest of the room a bit better. But enough of it is done that I thought I could produce a reasonable set of before and after pictures to show just how big a transformation this room has undergone.

So here, to start with, is the "before," taken on the day we first came to look at the house. Now, there are a lot of problems you can't really see in this photo. For example, you can't see the cracks in the old shower surround that were causing it to leak all over the floor, the cracks in the old sink, or the truly hideous old light fixture hanging up over it. You also can't tell that the ventilation fan in the ceiling is both improperly wired and improperly vented, so it doesn't work at all. And from this angle, you can't see the big hole in the wall directly opposite the door, put there for a perfectly valid reason—to provide access to the main "stack" (plumbing drain)—but awful to look at. But you can see enough of the old fixtures, ghastly institutional-style vinyl tile, and haphazardly arranged items on the wall to realize that this room was obviously going to take a lot of dealing with.

Now here is the "after"—or to be more accurate, the "almost there." Observe: old, leaky shower enclosure replaced with new one-piece shower surround and nifty blue-and-yellow shower curtain; walls repaired and repainted golden yellow with a lovely tone-on-tone effect; new slate-look tile, courtesy of the Habitat ReStore; new toilet, sink, and vanity (built from scratch); new covers for the heaters, which serve the additional purpose of covering the hole in the wall; entirely new lighting; wiring and ventilation problems fixed; old wall-mounted medicine chest removed, but the mirrored door salavaged and refinished; hole in the upper wall covered with a handy little plug made from scavenged materials; doorframe and door refinished; new artwork hung up; and new "jewelry" (towel rack and toilet paper holder, not visible in photo) and towels. The result: what was unquestionably the ugliest room in the entire house (at least, of all the rooms that are actually used for living space) has been transformed into possibly the nicest-looking of all.

All told, this project took us about eight months from the time we first set to work in earnest on the room. ("Slow and steady wins the race" is our motto when it comes to home renovation.) We've spent a total of $875 (this does not include the new shower surround, which our lawyer talked the seller into installing for us before we bought the place). It's more than I had originally hoped to spend, but it's still less than half the amount the bloggers at Young House Love spent on their full bath remodel, and they were delighted to come in at $1819 (especially considering that two contractor friends of theirs had independently quoted them a figure of around $10,000 to have the whole room professionally redone). So on the whole, I think our drawn-out DIY bathroom remodel can be considered an ecofrugal success.

Ecofrugal word cloud

2011-03-22T11:46:00.004-04:00

This is cute: I used Wordle to make a word cloud showing the frequencies of the words used in this blog over the past 15 months.

Unfortunately, since I'm on an ancient Mac running OS 10.4, hooked up to an almost equally venerable HP Deskjet printer, I can't get it to print. I had some notions of framing it and hanging it up in the office for a piece of ecofrugal artwork. Humph.

The Coupon Experiment

2011-03-21T16:43:00.007-04:00

Tightwads seem to be deeply divided over the issue of coupons. Many, if not most, money-saving guides mention coupons as a key strategy for saving money on groceries. My Tip Hero newsletter recently ran two stories on "couponing," one on the basics of coupon use and one on the more hardcore practice of "extreme couponing." Both articles include videos showing coupon veterans ringing up whole cartloads of groceries for a trivial sum.

It's hard to argue with results like that, and yet the comments on the stories are mixed. While some readers say they coupons have helped them take control of their finances, others complain that they are all but useless. The arguments against them include:

Coupons are only available for name-brand products. In most cases, the store brand will be cheaper, even with the coupon savings factored in. (You can get around this problem by combining coupons with sales, but that only works if you happen to have a coupon available for a sale item.)
Coupons do not offer significant savings unless they are doubled (or tripled), and many stores do not do this.
Most coupons are either for non-food products or for unhealthful, highly processed foods. There are few or no coupons available for fresh produce and other whole foods (the stuff Michael Pollan says we should be eating).

At least one noted tightwad, the redoubtable Amy Dacyczyn of the Tightwad Gazette, considers coupons to be of limited use. In her article "The Scoop on Coupons," she compares the regular price on several products with their price after double coupons, and then goes on to show how each product could be acquired for even less using a different strategy (e.g, buy the store brand, cook from scratch, or substitute a reusable product for a disposable one). She also notes that since most coupons are for convenience foods, using them could result in "acquiring a taste for these more expensive and less healthful items," leading to higher grocery bills down the line. And she also makes the ecofrugal point that since most of these highly processed foods are also overpackaged, they are inherently wasteful even when they cost nothing.

In the past, I've generally come down on the side of the coupon skeptics. I don't subscribe to a newspaper (reading the news online, which is free and results in less paper waste, appeared to be the more ecofrugal choice), so I haven't had access to the Sunday coupon inserts that sites like About.com Frugal Living and Couponing 101 say are the best source of coupons. However, I do get some coupons free each week in the "Smart Source" insert that comes with my local store circulars, and I diligently click through each week's offerings on Coupons.com. In each case, I seldom find more than two or three coupons that I think I might be able to use. The rest are for products I would never use, either because I don't like them, because they're not healthful, or because I can make them so much cheaper from scratch. And of those I do clip, most end up in the recycling bin because they never happened to stack up with a sale on that particular brand good enough to make it cheaper than a store brand.

Still, when I see videos like the ones shown on Tip Hero, I can't deny that there are obviously some folks out there who are significantly cutting their grocery bills with coupons—in some cases, cutting them down to nothing, or very nearly. So I find myself wondering: why does this work for them and not for me? Am I just looking for my coupons in the wrong place? Would it actually be worth subscribing to a Sunday newspaper just to get the coupons?

I've generally assumed the answer to this question would be no, simply because I've had so little luck with coupons from other sources that I can't see how the savings from coupons could possibly be enough to offset the cost of the paper. Yet many articles insist that the savings from coupons should easily be enough to pay for the cost of the paper and then some. Trent of The Simple Dollar claims that "We usually find about two to three coupons per paper worth clipping, and the savings is usually enough to pay for the paper and a bit more."

So I finally decided it was time for an experiment. I would buy one Sunday paper at the newsstand price, extract all the usable coupons, see how many I ended up using, and then calculate my net savings. Based on the results, I could determine whether or not a Sunday newspaper subscription would be a worthwhile investment.

My ecofrugal instincts recoiled as I shelled out $2.00 for yesterday's issue of the Sunday Star-Ledger (Middlesex Edition)—and then recoiled a second time as I pulled out the coupon insert and dumped the rest into the recycling bin after only a brief glance. My first discovery was that most of the coupons in the Sunday paper are the same ones I already get for free in the "Smart Source" packet. I did find a few coupons that I hadn't already seen, but as with the free coupons and the online coupons, most of them didn't look usable. I even tried expanding my definition of a useful coupon, asking myself, "Would I take this item if it were free?" For the majority of the coupons, the answer was no. (I'm holding on to the coupon packet just in case, as I've heard that if you wait a month, you'll often find your coupons matching up with sales. Perhaps these items will start to look better to me if they're actually free. But I'm not counting on that.)

In the end, I clipped only two coupons (barring a couple of duplicates that I'd already extracted from the Smart Source flier): one for $1 off two boxes of Chex cereals and one for $1 off two boxes of Cheerios cereals. Since these are $1 off coupons, our local store will not double them—so I will have to use them both just to make back the money I spent on the paper. So I can't possibly do better than break even. Also, in order to make it worth while using those coupons, I would have to combine them with a sale that reduced the cereals in question from their usual price of around $4 a box to no more than $2 a box, and sales like that, while not unheard of, are extremely rare. It seems highly doubtful that one will pop up in the five weeks before the coupons expire.

Thus, the preliminary results of my coupon experiment appear to be that (1) coupons will not pay for the cost of a Sunday paper, and (2) coupons of any kind, paid or free, will not save me significant amounts on my grocery bill. So I guess the bad news is that I'll never be able to reduce our grocery bill to pennies on the dollar like those "coupon queens" in the videos—but the good news is that I can just stick with the relatively simple strategies I'm using now (buying store brands, cooking from scratch, and looking for sales), rather than spending several hours a week on couponing.

Happynomics

2011-03-14T11:09:00.000-04:00

Roger Cohen writes in Saturday's New York Times about British Prime Minister David Cameron's proposal to develop a "national happiness index" for his nation. Although many Brits have mocked the plan, Cohen appears to approve of it. He points out that gross domestic product may have been the most useful measure of a nation's success back when "the issue for many was survival," but today "most people have enough — or far more than enough by the standards of human history," and more money won't necessarily increase their well-being.

Cameron's idea isn't entirely new. There's already one nation on Earth that measures its citizens' happiness: the South Asian kingdom of Bhutan. Its index of Gross National Happiness, or GNH, includes indicators in nine different categories: time use, living standards, good governance, psychological wellbeing, community vitality, culture, health, education, and ecology. Of these, only one (living standards) is purely economic, covering questions like "How well does your total household income meet your family's everyday needs for food, shelter and clothing?" and "In the past 12 months, did you postpone urgent repairs and maintainance of your household?" The other indicators cover questions ranging from "How often do you experience frustration?" to "Do you know the name of species of plants and animals in your local surrounding?" to "How much do you trust your neighbours?"

What makes people happy may, of course, vary from one country to another. For instance, Cohen notes in his column that "Brits link happiness to bird song, knowing themselves, the environment, responsible pet ownership, contributing to society, going out into the wild and reading Socrates." (Digression: how they're supposed to read the works of a philosopher who left no writings, I'm not sure, but perhaps it makes them happy to think they're reading Socrates.) Certainly, we in the West might have a problem with some of the measures on the GNH index, such as "Do you consider karma in the course of your daily life?" Nonetheless, it does seem pretty obvious when you think about it that, by measuring our well-being solely in terms of economic factors, we're overlooking an awful lot of other factors—factors that may be just as important, or more important, in determining how good people's lives really are.

When I first came up with the term "ecofrugality," I was trying to articulate a broader, more inclusive idea of frugality than the simple concept of spending as little money as possible. I wanted to take the word "frugal" back to its Latin root, frux, meaning "fruit," and show how frugality can be part of a fuller, more "fruitful" life in ways that go beyond money. And the heart of ecofrugality, to me, was the idea that less can sometimes be more—that it's possible to have a fuller, richer life while spending less money. Now it seems like a couple of world leaders, at least, might be on the same page.

The Paradox of Efficiency

2011-03-09T09:02:00.006-05:00

John Tierney's column from Monday's New York Times, entitled "When Energy Efficiency Sullies the Environment," raises a disturbing possibility: that in some cases, stronger energy efficiency standards can actually lead to increased global warming. This is so completely counterintuitive that it sounds like it can't possibly be right, but stay with me here:

Suppose that some category of product, such as cars, becomes more fuel-efficient across the board. You might expect the outcome to be that someone who now drives 12,000 miles per year in a 30-mile-per-gallon car will start driving 12,000 miles per year in a 40-mile-per-gallon car, saving 100 gallons of gas. But according to Tierney, what tends to happen instead is that the driver with the 40-mile-per-gallon car will start driving more. If he drives an extra 4,000 miles each year, that will totally wipe out the gas savings from increased fuel efficiency, in what's known as the "energy rebound effect." And this effect, Tierney claims, is often so large that it more than offsets the savings from energy efficiency, resulting in higher total energy use. It's like the case of a dieter who sees that baked potato chips contain only 1.5 grams of fat per serving and thinks, "Great, I can eat a whole bag of these for the same amount of fat as just a handful of regular chips," and consequently takes in far more calories overall.

Now, I can see how the rebound effect could potentially lead to higher energy use, although I should point out that Tierney doesn't provide any actual data to show that it does so in reality. (The closest he comes is citing two studies that say rebound effects "could sometimes erode all the expected reductions in emissions.") But I have to say, I'm not really sold on this argument. It's true that a person who's bought an energy-efficient car might start driving more—or, at the very least, might not make as strong an effort to drive less. But most people I know don't have all that much flexibility as to how much driving we do. The daily commute, for example, is usually of fixed length. Someone who lives 10 miles from work, and consequently drives 20 miles a day (or roughly 1,000 miles a year) getting to and from work, will use less gas driving those 1,000 miles at 40 mpg than at 30 mpg. True, that person will now have less of an incentive to bike to work or carpool as a way of saving gas, since the amount of gas used on each trip will be less. But I suspect that people who bike to work now aren't suddenly going to stop doing so just because they've bought a more fuel-efficient car. ("Well, on the one hand, I do get more exercise this way, and it's better for the environment, and I can steer around traffic jams—but on the other hand, this car is so efficient, it seems a shame not to use it.")

Tierney also argues that more fuel-efficient cars pose another drawback: their smaller size makes them less safe. "Because of the smaller and consequently less safe cars built to meet federal fuel-efficiency standards starting in the 1980s," he claims, "there were about 2,000 additional deaths on the highway every year, according to the National Research Council." I have one word for this argument: hogwash. Today's cars (and I do mean cars, not SUVs) are both much more efficient and much safer than those built fifty years ago. Check out this video made by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in which a 1959 Chevy Bel Air (which got about 17 mpg at highway speeds) is crashed into a 2009 Chevy Malibu (30 mpg). The before-and-after photos from the crash show that the passenger compartment in the Bel Air is crushed, while that in the Malibu remains intact. Clearly, it is possible to make cars more efficient without making them less safe.

Ah, but, Tierney points out, there is an "indirect rebound effect" as well. Even if drivers don't respond to increased fuel efficiency by driving more, they may opt to "use the money they save on gasoline to buy other things that produce greenhouse emissions, like new electronic gadgets or vacation trips on fuel-burning planes." Again, I think this connection is highly doubtful. For one thing, wouldn't a driver with a more fuel-efficient car be more likely to opt for driving as opposed to flying? (Actually, if this article is to be believed, that's not really an improvement—but that's a subject for a separate entry.) And also, aren't the type of people who buy fuel-efficient cars also the type of people who would be more likely to invest the savings in other products that benefit the environment, like organic produce or better insulation? (Or is Mr. Tierney going to argue that insulating your home is a bad idea too, because it will only encourage you to turn up the heat and strip down to your shirt sleeves? He does apparently think that buying more efficient light bulbs will only encourage you to increase the light level in your home, as he points out that "we spend the same proportion of our income on light as our much poorer ancestors did in 1700," even at much less per lumen. But does it follow from this that if I go out and buy a dozen compact fluorescent bulbs to replace less efficient incandescents, I'll look at my lower electricity bill the next month and think, "Wow, at these prices, I could put strobe lights and a huge disco ball in the garage"?)

Now, I'm not trying to dispute Tierney's conclusion, which is that energy efficiency standards alone are not sufficient to make a dent in global warming, and we also need to "consider alternatives like a carbon tax." Certainly, when facing a problem as massive and as threatening as global warming, we need to use every available tool. But I do confess myself skeptical that efficiency standards are, in and of themselves, destructive. They're not going to solve global warming by themselves, I grant that freely. But it's going to take more solid data than Tierney provides in his column to convince me that they're actually harmful.

Tinkering

2011-02-27T17:51:00.013-05:00

We've devoted much of today to doing little odd jobs around the house. We haven't tackled any really big projects since the triumphant completion, two weeks ago, of the new vanity (at right), which Brian built and installed with his very own hands in the downstairs bath. Today, however, as Brian tackled several smaller jobs in that room and various other parts of the house, I was struck as I've been struck on previous occasions by my husband's ingenuity, and by just how many problems it's possible to fix with materials you already have lying around the house.

Job #1 was installing the mirror above the new vanity. This mirror was salvaged from the front door of the old medicine chest that used to hang above the old vanity. The chest itself was small, unattractive and not very functional, but the door was a good-sized mirror in a sturdy wooden frame that we thought might look very respectable with a bit of refinishing. Brian contrived to get it loose from the metal cabinet, and all the time we've been working on the rest of the bath, it's been sitting in the workshop, waiting for us to get around to it. This past week, we scrubbed it, sanded it, and refinished it using the stain and varnish we had left over from the vanity. Brian then replaced the old backing, which was very heavy, with a lightweight piece of fiberboard he had left over from another project. However, all that proved to be the easy part: the difficulty was figuring out how to put it back up on the wall. Even with the new back, it was still too heavy to mount with standard picture hangers. Rather than head for Home Depot to look for some sort of heavy-duty hanging hardware, Brian shut himself up in his laboratory (pronounced la-BOR-atory, as all evil and not-so-evil masterminds like to say it) for a while and cobbled together an ingenious solution with materials we had on hand. He affixed to the back of the mirror a length of this sort of steel tape punched with holes, like this...

...and then built a pair of picture hangers consisting of screws threaded through a series of washers, like this...

...so that now the screw holds the big washers in place, and the washers hold the big mirror in place.

After solving this knotty problem, he didn't rest on his laurels. He went back into the la-BOR-atory to work on Job #2, building a tilt-out drawer for the kitchen sink. You may have seen these before: in place of the purely decorative front panel that normally conceals the sink from view, there's a little drawer like this, which you can use to keep your sponge and scrubber neatly stowed away. I've been wanting one of these for a while, but I couldn't see my way clear to paying $26 for a kit that was basically just a little plastic box and a pair of hinges. So Brian finally turned his ingenuity to the problem and built this out of scrap wood. The tab on the end is secured with a screw, so you can turn it to slide the drawer into place and then turn it the other way to hold it there so it won't fall out.

And he also found time for Job #3, reupholstering the cat's scratching post with a new carpet patch that we found at a discount store in New Brunswick. The post itself isn't a new construction, but the fact that he was able to reupholster it as he did proves just how clever a design it is. A year or so ago, we got tired of throwing out the cat's scratching post every year or two, after she'd worn it down to the bare wood, and shelling out $15 for a new one. I'd read a tip saying you could extend the life of the old post by removing the carpet and winding the wood around with sisal twine, but Amélie wouldn't touch the stuff and took to scratching the rugs instead. So Brian came up with a very simple design for a new scratching post: two lengths of two-by four, attached back to back, to form the post; a square piece of plywood, neatly stained, to make a sturdy base; and another scrap of two-by-four, also neatly stained, to cover the top. The only part we actually had to buy was a two-dollar carpet swatch to cover it with (secured with heavy-duty staples), and when the cat wears through it, we just buy a new two-dollar carpet swatch to replace the old one, rather than having to throw away the whole post. Less cost, less waste, and as you can see, a much more respectable-looking post than the ones they sell at PetSmart.

So, here in the pages of this blog, I would like to hereby award my husband the title of Master Tinkerer. Three cheers, Brian, and keep up the good work!

Happy First Washday

2011-02-18T08:58:00.006-05:00

It seems to be a natural human instinct to create holidays to celebrate the turning of the seasons. The modern pagan calendar marks not only the quarter-days (solstices and equinoxes) but also the cross-quarter days that fall in between, making one holiday to mark the start of every season and another to mark its midpoint. The Christian calendar includes its great winter and spring festivals, and the Jewish calendar ushers in fall with the High Holy Days. Even allegedly secular holidays get roped into the act. The official "summer" season, defined as "the period when it's okay to wear white shoes," is bounded by Memorial Day on one end and Labor Day on the other, even though neither holiday technically has anything to do with the time of year. And the change from fall to winter is unofficially pegged to Thanksgiving weekend, even though that weekend's weather—at least here in the Mid-Atlantic states—is sometimes as balmy as June.

But there doesn't seem to be any holiday that marks the official start of spring. Sure, we have the religious festivals of Easter and Passover, but they move around the calendar so much that it's hard to pin the season to either one. We even start looking for signs of spring in February with Groundhog Day, even though there may still be a foot of snow on the ground. But it doesn't matter what we do; spring just comes when it comes. It's marked by events that don't appear on any calendar: the melting of snow, the appearance of snowdrops and crocuses, the first day it's warm enough to go out without a coat. We can't predict to a day when these events will happen—but they are holidays, all the same. They are festivals, days to celebrate, whenever they arrive.

So I hereby declare today, February 18, 2011, to be First Washday—the first day it's been warm enough to hang a load of laundry up on the line. There was a vague threat of possible showers in the weather report, but I wouldn't let that deter me. Today is First Washday, and I intend to give the event all the honor it deserves. It may be back below freezing by tomorrow night; it may even snow again on Monday or Tuesday; but none of that can change the fact that First Washday has come at last, and a joyous occasion it is.

Does "frugality" always include "eco"?

2011-02-14T12:04:00.003-05:00

Just a quick post today to draw attention to an ongoing discussion in the Dollar Stretcher community that I found interesting, about just what it means to be frugal. What struck me about it was just how many of the responses made some reference to frugality as part of an overall value system. Some people specifically mentioned the environmental benefits of frugality, others talked about giving to charity, and some spoke more generally, about spending money in a way that's "ethical" or "matches your values." One of the most common ideas in the responses was that frugality simply means not being wasteful—which means that it's worth practicing even when money is no object.

So, in short, it appears that what I'm referring to in this blog as "ecofrugality" may, to many people, be no different from "frugality."

Savings and costs for couples

2011-02-08T10:44:00.005-05:00

Today I came across an article on Bankrate.com that supports my argument in last Wednesday's post that couples with shared income can save money more easily than singles. This article, "Marrying for Richer Rather than Poorer," notes that in a 15-year study of married and single people, singles were able to save about $11,000 of wealth over the 15 years, while "people who got married, and stayed married, accumulated about $43,000 in 10 years of marriage." The article then goes on to point out some of the reasons why married people may find it easier to save. For instance, while it isn't strictly true that "two can live as cheaply as one," it certainly is cheaper to maintain one household than two. You can save on food by buying in larger quantities, and you're less likely to pay someone else to do outside jobs (such as housecleaning) when there are two of you to share the burden.

Tax breaks and other financial perks are a significant issue as well. While some people make a big deal about the "marriage penalty," the fact is that this penalty only applies to couples whose two incomes are roughly equal; if one partner makes more than the other, then filing as a married couple will most likely mean paying less in taxes. Moreover, there are certain tax breaks that are available only to married couples. And in addition to paying less in taxes, married couples can also inherit each other's retirement assets and collect on each other's Social Security. (In fact, given the various ways the government discriminates in favor of married couples, it's hard to swallow the argument that it isn't discrimination to prevent same-sex couples from marrying—but that's a whole article in itself.)

Now, lest you single folks start fretting about how much you could be saving by tying the knot, I should point out that another Bankrate article points out the costs of couplehood. A romantic dinner for two at Delmonico's, for example, costs about $300. A dozen red roses runs anywhere from $35 to $90 (including delivery), and an engagement ring can run into the thousands. And while this article doesn't go into the costs of an actual wedding, the popular wedding site TheKnot.com puts the average cost at an eye-popping $27,800. (Needless to say, frugal individuals can avoid a lot of these costs, or cut them considerably. It is quite possible to eat out for $30 rather than $300, and I can safely say that you can have a perfectly nice, if not lavish, wedding for $2780 rather than $27,800.)

In some ways, it seems like the way to have the best of both worlds—at least in financial terms—is to share a household, but not with a romantic partner. By living with a friend or a sibling, you can share household expenses and chores without being expected to bring flowers on Valentine's Day. True, you don't get the tax perks, but then, you also don't have to explain away the lipstick on your collar (unless your roommate is the one who does the laundry).

Another semi-ecofrugal idea

2011-02-04T10:45:00.007-05:00

The same TipHero article that led me to yesterday's discovery of carbon credits for individuals today steered me toward another site that appears, on the surface, to be a model of ecofrugality. The company is called Terracycle, and what it does is collect trash that can't be recycled—juice packs, candy wrappers, Ziploc bags—and "upcycle" it into new products. Most recycled materials end up being "downcycled," or turned into a new product with lower value than the original (for example, office paper and cardboard being shredded for use as packaging material). Terracycle's products, by contrast, are allegedly worth more than the waste materials they're made from. Among the products for sale on their site are a cork board made from used wine corks, a backpack made from Capri-Sun pouches, and an insulated cooler made from Starburst wrappers. The waste materials they use are collected by individuals across the country, who get rewarded for their efforts with a semiannual check to a school or charity of their choice.

I don't deny that this is a very clever idea, and at first blush, it seems very ecofrugal as well. After all, they're taking waste and turning it into useful products, right? Isn't preventing waste the very definition of ecofrugality? Yet the more I browse the site and learn about its products, the more I'm convinced it's not for me.

The first problem I have with it is that so many of the waste materials they collect are for specific name-brand products, such as M&M/Mars-branded candy wrappers, Aveeno beauty product packages, and Neosporin tubes. This means that an ecofrugal person like myself, who prefers store brands, will have a hard time collecting enough of anything to fill a container. And many of these branded packages get upcycled into new products that still bear the brand's name, like Oreo three-ring binders and Clif Bar pencil cases. So Terracycle products are actually a form of advertising for the companies whose materials they use. They serve to promote brand loyalty, which in turn undermines the ecofrugal habits of choosing store brands and cooking from scratch.

Second, even the materials they collect that aren't branded tend to be in some way wasteful. They don't ask for a specific brand of juice pouches, for instance, but all juice pouches, regardless of brand, are absurdly overpackaged. It's much cheaper to buy juice in a big bottle, or better yet in a tube of frozen concentrate to be mixed with water, and both options produce far less packaging waste. I can't help thinking it must be better, in terms of full-cycle environmental costs, to avoid excess packaging in the first place than to assuage your guilt by sending off the wasteful packages to be made into new products. Even if the juice pouches stay out of the waste stream, they still require more materials and energy to produce, ship to stores, ship back to Terracycle, and upcycle into new products than other, cheaper alternatives.

Admittedly, there are some products here that an ecofrugal person might use, such as zip-top plastic bags. There are always some occasions when reusable containers aren't practical. But most ecofrugalites would prefer to save money and resources by rinsing and reusing the bags, and continuing to reuse them until they develop holes. Perhaps they could still be Terracycled at that point, but it does seem like encouraging people to send their bags to Terracycle for "upcycling" after just one use is tacitly discouraging reuse at home (which is much easier to do and wastes no energy on shipping).

My final quibble, and perhaps the most serious, is that many of the products sold by Terracycle don't actually seem to be that useful. Turning a bunch of candy wrappers into a pencil case isn't really preventing waste if the person who buys that pencil case didn't need it in the first place. On the contrary, it's just adding a new level of wastefulness, because now in addition to the materials and energy used to produce and ship the original candy wrappers, you have the energy (and probably some additional materials) required to produce and ship the pencil case to a new owner who was doing just fine without it—not to mention the waste of money on a product that isn't really necessary. Admittedly, some of these products are necessary, like a backpack or notebooks for school—but wouldn't it be more ecofrugal to buy a sturdy canvas backpack and keep it for several years, repairing it as needed, than to buy a new cheap backpack every year, even if it does have recycled cookie wrappers in it?

Perhaps I'm not being really fair to TerraCycle. After all, the majority of consumers probably are going to buy candy bars and juice pouches anyway, and replace their school supplies yearly—and given that, it's probably less wasteful for those candy wrappers and juice pouches to get turned into new school supplies than simply used once and discarded. (I say "probably" because, without an accurate tally of the complete life-cycle energy costs, there's no way to know for sure whether these upcycled products actually require less material and energy to make and ship than would be used in simply landfilling the wastes—or incinerating them to recover some of their value as energy.) But I still feel convinced that those of us who are truly ecofrugal—who already take steps to save money, avoid packaging waste, and buy durable products that will last—will have very little to gain by either sending waste to Terracycle or buying products from them.

Carbon credits for individuals

2011-02-03T18:04:00.002-05:00

I just learned about an interesting idea for combating global warming: carbon credits for individuals. As you probably know, companies that fail to meet carbon emissions standards can meet their obligations by buying carbon credits, and companies that do better than the requirement can make money by selling them. But now, the somewhat unfortunately named website myemissionsexchange.com allows individuals to get a piece of this action as well. You start by submitting copies of your own utility bills for the past year, and then if you significantly reduce your energy use over the next year, you can sell a Voluntary Emissions Reduction (VER) and earn anywhere from $10 to $25. (Presumably, the site itself makes its money by taking a cut of this.)

This is an intriguing idea, but I can't help wondering how much good it will really do. True, the site gives people a sold financial incentive to reduce their carbon footprint, but in most cases, people already have such an incentive: lower utility bills. In fact, the site itself, to encourage people to sign up, talks about how much they can save rather than how much they can earn—suggesting that the potential savings from lower energy use are much a much bigger prize than the potential earnings from selling the carbon credits. So it seems hard to believe that people who weren't motivated to save energy already are going to be motivated by the lure of carbon credits. And even if this site does encourage more households to start cutting their energy use, by selling the carbon credits, it just makes it easier for big companies to avoid doing the same. So it doesn't actually promote energy savings across the board: it just shuffles the savings around, giving one person credit for another's work. (Of course, this is a problem of the cap-and-trade system as a whole, not the site itself. To be honest, the sale of carbon credits reminds me a bit of the sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages: "Go ahead and sin if you want; just pay some money up front and we can make it go away.")

On the other hand, since the carbon credit market exists anyway, there seems no reason why individual households shouldn't get their own little piece of it. My only real gripe with this site is that it's of no personal use to me. It would be great for someone who's been meaning to take more steps to conserve, but keeps putting it off: the credits would provide a bonus for taking action. But in our case, there just isn't that much left to cut. We've already taken most of the steps the site suggests ("Switch to Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs," "Install a Low-Flow Shower Head," "Hang your clothes out to dry once a week"), and I'm not sure how much more we could reasonably save. True, there are some steps we haven't taken in the past because I found, after crunching the numbers, that they wouldn't be cost-effective, and perhaps with the added bonus from the carbon credits they would be. For example, we chose to replace our old water heater with an efficient tank heater, rather than a super-efficient tankless heater, and maybe the carbon credits would have been enough to make the tankless heater a reasonable choice. But given that we've already replaced the old heater, it's a bit late for that now. Similarly, it's too late to get any credit for adding more insulation to the attic, which we did two years ago. In other words, as far as energy savings go in our house, we've already harvested all the low-hanging fruit—and the steps we haven't taken yet (like upgrading all our windows) would certainly be costly enough to dwarf the potential benefits of a $15 credit.

However, if you should happen to be in a different situation yourself—for instance, if you've just moved into a new home and haven't yet made any energy upgrades—then by all means, try the site and let me know how it works out for you.

Who saves the most?

2011-02-02T13:59:00.006-05:00

Today, while cruising the Dollar Stretcher forums, I ran across a link to an interesting article: "How to Save a Third of Your Income." It's an interview with Kimberly Palmer, the author of a book called “Generation Earn: The Young Professional’s Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back.” She says that she saved a third of her income throughout her twenties, mostly because she and her husband "continued living like college students" throughout that period. Now that they have a house and a baby, she says they're only saving about half as much, though she hopes to return to saving a third of their income when their child is older.

One response to the article said, "I think it's an interesting realization that it it is so much easier to save when you are young and don't have liabilities." I'd heard this argument before: Amy Dacyczyn, author of the Tightwad Gazette newsletter and books, claims that of all the money she and her husband managed to save up for a down payment on a house, the largest portion was saved during the first year of their marriage, before they had kids.

I thought this over, and my reaction was "It is an interesting argument...but I'm not sure I buy it." I know for a fact that my husband and I save a much larger percentage of our joint income now than I did when I was young and single, and the reason is obvious: I was making barely enough to live on. After college, it took me 6 months to land my first job, and my starting salary was around $18,000. It took me another six months just to find an apartment that I could afford on that. Once I was out on my own (with two roommates), I always managed to make ends meet, but I didn't save anywhere close to a third of my income. I actually thought I was doing quite well to be saving anything at all.

But today, my husband and I have two incomes, and our expenses, while they're certainly higher than one single person's, are nowhere near as much as two single people would spend living separately. Despite my unpredictable freelance income (a couple of years, I've actually made less money than I did at that first job), we've always been able to live comfortably and still save well over one-third of our combined income. Even with a mortgage and a house to maintain, we still have much more slack in our budget than I had during those early years.

Of course, I had to admit that our situation might not be typical. Our combined income is probably above average, and unlike many couples, we have no kids. (Not as many as you might think, though; as of the 2000 Census, there were more married couples without children than with them. On the other hand, this refers only to children under 18, so the figure also includes empty-nesters whose kids have moved out. Still, it's clear that couples without children are not as rare as some people imagine. But I digress.) So I decided to try and dig up some statistics to answer the question: how do the income and expenses of the average single 20-something compare to those of the average married 30-something with children?

After a little poking around, I found what I wanted at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These statistics are all from the 2009 Consumer Expenditure Survey, Table 3: "Age of reference person: Average annual expenditures and characteristics." This table compares the expenses of "consumer units" (which translates roughly to "households") based on the age of a "reference person" (that is, one of the heads of the household). In households where the "reference person" is under 25 years old, the average number of children under 18 is 0.4. Since you can't have less than one child, this means that most of the young folks in this group are childless. In these households, the average annual income is $25,695 ($25,522 after taxes), but the average annual expenditures are $28,119. So the average savings for this group is actually negative; the average person in this group lives beyond his/her income.

Contrast this with the average household of 25-to-34-year-olds. These folks have, on average, 1.1 children, and their expenditures are naturally higher: $46,494 a year, on average. But their average income is also much higher: $58,946 before taxes, or $57,239 after taxes. So this household can save an average of $10,745 a year—about 19 percent of their after-tax income. Move up to the 35-to-44-year-old age group, and things look even brighter. The average household in this group has 1.3 children, and their expenditures have gone up to $57,301. But their income is now $77,005 before taxes, or $74,900 after taxes. So they are saving $17,599 a year, or 23 percent of after-tax income.

Now, I'm not trying to argue that any of these "average" households is representative of how much it's possible to save. My own experience, as well as Kimberly Palmer's, shows that some people are able to save much more than these averages, both in their youth and into middle age. But if we look to these statistics for an idea of what's typical, I would have to conclude that while it may be possible to save money as a single person in your early 20s, it's definitely easier when you're older and part of a two-income household—kids or no kids.

Thrift Week, day seven: Lust

2011-01-23T17:53:00.010-05:00

And so we come to the end of our Thrift Week celebration, which concludes with the always interesting topic of lust. There's no shortage of examples in which lust, in its most literal sense, can be costly: we can see plenty of cases in the news of men in high places being brought down by sex scandals, but even among ordinary folk it's clear that the inability to control sexual impulses can lead to costly affairs, costly divorces, and in some cases, costly habits such as prostitution or pornography. For young women, the consequences can be even more serious, since they're the ones who generally bear the financial burden of unintended pregnancy. Early childbirth can mean abandoning college—perhaps even not finishing high school—and being stuck on welfare or in dead-end jobs. It's hard to think of any other mistake a girl could make that's so likely to trap her in poverty. And, of course, people of both sexes can be financially harmed by lust—or even love—when it leads them into an imprudent marriage with a partner who has expensive tastes or wasteful habits.

To me, however, it's still more intriguing to consider a less literal interpretation of the word lust. As I noted in the first post of this series, the sin now known as lust or lechery was identified in the original Latin as luxuria, a term more literally translated as "extravagance." The author of the TipHero piece on the seven deadly sins also took this angle on lust, talking about how often people "fall in love" with some luxury item and just have to have it, regardless of the cost. This figurative form of lechery—what we might call "consumer lust"—bears a strong similarity to the more literal kind. Think about how often people talk about "falling in love" with a house, for instance, so that they're willing to go completely out of their price range to satisfy their longing. Or consider how cars, another big-ticket item, are often discussed in sexual terms. The fabled "new-car smell," in particular, seems to be a more potent aphrodisiac than any perfume. (In fact, if they could find a way of bottling that elusive scent, a woman could probably make herself more irresistible to men with it than with any fragrance now on the market.)

Though this form of lust is often treated as an exclusively female affliction, a moment's consideration makes it obvious that it isn't really anything of the kind. Women may be most vulnerable to the attractions of clothing, footwear, and furniture, but page through any electronics catalogue and you'll see in a minute that the newest and priciest items are being marketed as toys for boys (of the grown-up variety). In fact, according to this article, a five-year-old study done at Stanford shows that shopping addiction (which is now recognized as a genuine mental disorder), is nearly as prevalent among men as it is among women. And even when shopping isn't actually pathological, men are by no means immune to temptation. Another survey dating from around the same time shows that while women may spend more time shopping, men actually spend more money, at least during holiday sales.

And here's another, less obvious point: according to this article, referenced by Doug in response to Thursday's entry, sometimes consumer spending actually is linked to lust in its more literal form. According to this 2009 article, "men in the mating condition" are more inclined to spend money on "conspicuous luxuries" than men who aren't looking for a mate. The article went on to note that men seemed likely to spend in order to impress women only "when the potential mating situation is a short-term hook-up rather than a long-term relationship"—in other words, when lust rather than anything that might be called love is the driving factor. (Women, interestingly, don't seem as inclined to spend in order to attract a mate; they're more likely instead to engage in "conspicuous pro-social volunteering." In other words, men show off for women by spending money, while women show off for men by being active in the community. The article didn't say how well these strategies actually work; personally, I can't help wondering if trying to attract a mate through volunteerism is likely to do much good, especially with men who are looking mainly for "a short-term hook-up.")

So, to sum up, lust can drive spending in three ways:

spending money on people we're attracted to;
spending money on stuff we're attracted to; and
spending money on stuff in order to attract people.

And which of these is the most destructive? That will obviously depend on the people involved—as well as the stuff.

And with that, we conclude our Thrift Week series. Talking about sin all week, I have to say, hasn't been nearly as entertaining as I'd hoped. Maybe next year I'll come up with a juicer topic, like tax strategies.

Thrift week, day six: Sloth

2011-01-22T19:29:00.002-05:00

And so we come at last to sloth, the sin that gave me the idea for this whole series in the first place. What inspired it was this comment from my friend Laura on my "Canventory" entry, in which she commented on the absurdity of buying pre-peeled onions for $2.49 apiece when a whole bag of plain white or yellow onions costs much less than that. She thought the people buying these must be "ignorant" about onions, but I suggested that perhaps they were just too lazy to peel an onion themselves (or perhaps too lazy to do the math and figure out just how much extra they're paying someone to peel that onion for them). And I pointed out that there are all sorts of other convenience foods that basically charge you a premium for the right to be lazy, some of them healthful (e.g., pre-washed salad greens) and some not (e.g., Tater Tots). And of course, the ultimate example of this is the complete meal prepared by someone else in a restaurant—for which, as I pointed out in yesterday's entry, you'll pay 2.5 to 4 times as much (not counting the tip) as you would to make the identical meal at home.

Of course, the ways in which laziness can cost you money aren't limited to food. Any time you pay someone to do a job you could do yourself—cleaning your house, painting your living room, changing the oil in your car—you're likely to pay a lot more for it than you would by doing the same job yourself. (Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. If it's a job that requires special skills you don't have, you'll quite likely spend less overall by hiring someone to do it right the first time then by tackling it yourself and making a mess that you'll have to pay someone else to clean up.)

Laziness can also cost you money when it leads you to put off a job that you do intend to do yourself—later. To take an example that we heard on "Car Talk" this morning, if you put off going to the gas station until the fuel gauge is on empty, you risk running out of gas and having to a) trek to the gas station to pick up a can, or b) make an embarrassing call to the auto club for help. (Assuming you've paid your auto club dues, this shouldn't cost you any extra money, but it will cost you plenty in lost time and lost dignity.) Or, to take an example inspired by yesterday's mail, which contained several tax forms: if you put off doing your taxes until the last minute, you risk missing the deadline and having to pay a penalty. And if you put off doing regular maintenance on your car, you could end up paying a lot more to fix some crucial part than you would have paid to replace a much smaller part.

Of course, the most obvious example of losing money through sloth is being unwilling to work to earn a living. Benjamin Franklin, in whose honor Thrift Week is observed, was particularly fond of pointing out the perils of idleness:

Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad or sits idle one-half that day, though he spend but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings besides.

But on this point I don't entirely agree with old Ben. Suppose I have an assignment to complete that will pay me $600. Say that if I work at a nice, easy pace, it will take me six days to get the job done. I'll make only $100 a day, but I'll also have plenty of time to do other things: run errands, cook meals, get some exercise, visit with friends, and just relax. Say, by contrast, that if I absolutely knock myself out, I can get the job done in four days. I'll make $150 a day, but my house will be a mess, I'll be short on sleep, and the stress will have me constantly on the verge of tears. When I compare those two options, I have to conclude that to me, the extra $50 a day isn't worth it. And that's one reason I care so much about being frugal in the first place: because the less money I spend, the less I need to worry about how much I make. Through frugality, I can buy myself a luxury that only the wealthiest can normally enjoy: the freedom to work no more than I want to. Paradoxically, the harder I work at pinching my pennies, the less I have to worry about money.

Thrift Week, day five: Gluttony

2011-01-21T20:12:00.002-05:00

So, where were we? Oh yes, gluttony. This is an interesting one, because according to Wikipedia, gluttony—at least as defined by the theologians of the Middle Ages—doesn't simply refer to eating too much. Instead, it can involve any kind of unreasonable obsession with food. Thomas Aquinas identified six distinct forms of gluttony:

Praepropere - eating too soon.
Laute - eating too expensively.
Nimis - eating too much.
Ardenter - eating too eagerly (burningly).
Studiose - eating too daintily (keenly).
Forente - eating wildly (boringly).

Obviously, the one that's most likely to hit your wallet hard is laute—being a gourmet rather than a gourmand. Of course, eating too much will also have some effect on your grocery bills, but how much you spend depends a lot more on what you eat than on how much. (In fact, it's possible to spend less on a high-calorie diet than on a healthful diet, because lots of fattening foods are relatively cheap to buy.)

However, if you happen to have a taste for fine cuisine, there are ways to gratify it without spending an unreasonable amount of money—which means you won't be "eating too expensively," and Thomas Aquinas will have no reason to get annoyed. For example, you can cook your own gourmet meals at home, rather than eating out. Yes, you'll still have to shell out for the fancy ingredients, but you won't have to pay for the service and the atmosphere, which accounts for the lion's share of the cost. (According to this 2007 article from Forbes, aimed at people who are thinking of starting up a restaurant, only 25 to 40 percent of the cost of a restaurant meal is for the food.)

As for those fancy ingredients, there are ways to trim costs there, too. Here are just a few we've stumbled on over the years:

Shop around. We've found that no single supermarket in our area has the best prices on everything, but there are several stores that offer great bargains on a few specific things. The Whole Earth Center in Princeton sells mushrooms in its bulk bins for $2.29 a pound, much less than the packaged shrooms at our local Stop & Shop. But its prices on fresh herbs are exorbitant—as much as $3 for a tiny package. So now we get our parsley and cilantro (when we're not growing them in the garden) for a dollar a bunch at the H-Mart down the road, and we get so much for that dollar that some of it's likely to end up in the stock bag.
Use substitutes. We have a recipe for a wild mushroom soup that's absolutely delicious, but it calls for two cups (!) of dried porcini mushrooms and half a pound of "fresh wild mushrooms." If we followed the recipe to the letter, it would cost something like four dollars a bowlful. So we compromise by using a combination of plain white button mushrooms from Whole Earth, as mentioned above, and flavorful shiitake mushrooms, which we can get reasonably cheap by buying them dried at the aforementioned H-Mart and reconstituting them. The soup admittedly has a rather different flavor with these changes to the recipe, but it's still mighty tasty.
Grow your own. When choosing crops for our garden, we devote extra space to the ones that are expensive to buy at the store (arugula, snow peas) and skip the ones we can buy relatively cheaply (potatoes, onions). Yes, I have heard that home-grown potatoes really don't compare to the supermarket variety, but when you've only got 100 square feet of garden space to work with, you have to make the most of it.
Go veggie. Or at least partially veggie. Meat is the priciest part of most meals, so leaving it out—or choosing recipes to make a little meat go a long way—will give you more bang for your grocery buck, and leave you with extra cash to spend on all those other delicacies.

And of course, avoiding the more common form of gluttony and taking smaller portions will help you get more meals out of one recipe.

(Hmm...I seem to have a lot more personal experience to draw on when talking about food than when talking about more abstract concepts like envy and pride. Why is that, I wonder? :-))

Thrift Week, day four: Wrath

2011-01-20T23:02:00.003-05:00

This entry is going to be a rather short one, I think, because it's late and right now I'm feeling more in tune with sloth than with wrath, my allotted subject for today. It was kind of poor planning on my part to schedule wrath for a day when I would have less time than usual, because it's probably the hardest of the seven sins on the list to link to finances. The only way I can really think of to make the connection is to think about it in terms of negotiation. One of the key rules of negotiation is to stay calm, because you're more likely to get what you want if you ask for it in a polite, reasonable way. (Side note: actually, there are exceptions to this rule. Miss Manners, in her Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millennium, relates an incident in which she called up a newspaper office several times to complain that her paper wasn't being delivered, without result. An employee finally explained to her that it was the company's policy not to take any action unless the complainant "could be characterized as irate." Miss Manners reports that she "asked timidly if he would be so kind as to put her down as having been loud and obscene, and he gallantly promised to do this.")

But in general, being polite gets you better results than being rude. If you're dealing with customer service, for instance, if you lose your temper and start yelling insults, they're not going to want to deal with you; they'll just hang up, and you'll be no closer to solving the problem. By contrast, if you stay calm but determined, they'll be more willing to hear you out. (They still may not fix your problem, but at least it won't be your own fault.) Or if you're trying to persuade your neighbor not to use power tools in his yard in the wee hours of the morning (and you're defining the wee hours as anything earlier than 10 am on a weekend), he's more likely to agree, or at least consider a compromise, if you ask him politely than if you barge up to him shaking your finger in his face and threatening to call the cops on him for disturbing the peace. In any negotiation—financial or otherwise—keeping your cool is a better way to get what you want than going in hot (which is likely to get the other party heated up as well, causing the whole situation to boil over).

I'm sure there must be more to say on this subject, but I can't think of anything at the moment, and anyhow, it's bedtime. Tomorrow we can have fun with gluttony.

Thrift Week, day three: Avarice

2011-01-19T21:35:00.003-05:00

Continuing our ongoing Thrift Week parade of sins, today we come to the topic of avarice. This one may seem a little counterintuitive: sure, being too fond of money can hurt you in a variety of ways, but how exactly can it hurt you financially? Won't piling up your money invariably make you richer? Well, no, not necessarily. There are actually lots of ways in which being too attached to your money can actually hurt you. Let's look at a few examples, which we'll illustrate with a character we'll call...let's see...Bill.

Bill's car starts making a funny squealing noise. He hesitates to take it to the mechanic, because he doesn't want to spend the money to have it looked at when it might be nothing. (Deep down, he's even more reluctant to have it looked at and find out it really is something—something that's going to cost a bundle to fix.) So he just ignores it and hopes it goes away, and one day it does—only to be replaced by a horrible grinding noise that turns out to be the scraping of the metal plates in his brakes, forming the percussion line to the tune of hundreds of dollars in repairs. If he'd attended to the problem early on, he could have just replaced the brake pads; now he'll have to repair the rotors as well.
Bill has a huge old dinosaur of a refrigerator that positively guzzles electricity. He's thought about replacing it, but when he looks at the price of a new one, he turns pale at the thought of shelling out seven or eight hundred dollars all at once. So instead, he just keeps shelling out 15 extra dollars each month on his electricity bill, even though the energy savings on a new fridge would be enough to pay for it in just a few years.
Bill hears about a hot new stock that's sure to take off. He promptly puts every penny he's got into it and loses his shirt when the stock tanks.

These are just a few examples; once you start thinking about it, you can come up with lots more. Bill's problem is that his eagerness to make as much money as possible, and his unwillingness to part with what he's got, isn't tempered by rational judgment. There's nothing wrong with wanting not to spend money when you don't have to; it's only a problem if you blindly hold on to your cash without stopping to think about whether it's really in your interest to do so. Sometimes, refusing to spend money now will just cost you more later; in other cases, spending the money will bring you other benefits that are really worthwhile, even if they can't be measured in dollars and cents. (Giving to charity is one example; spending money on something you truly love to do could be another.) To put it another way: the difference between being financially savvy and being greedy is whether you're controlling your money or it's controlling you.

Am I just stating the obvious here? Well, perhaps. But the obvious can be worth stating sometimes, I think. Anyhow, tomorrow I'll see if I can come up with any more interesting observations on the subject of wrath.

Thrift Week, day two: Envy

2011-01-18T19:40:00.004-05:00

Another day, another deadly sin. Today's topic in our Thrift Week symposium is envy and how it can hurt you financially. (Never mind emotionally and spiritually—that's beyond the scope of this blog.) The dangers of envy are somewhat similar to the perils of pride; it's just the motivation for them that's different. Both of them can lead you to spend too much, trying to maintain a lifestyle you can't afford. To illustrate this, let's introduce a character called Ivy (because she's green with envy, get it? Ah, sometimes I amuse even myself.)

Ivy is a recent college grad who's just landed her first job: an entry level-position at a high-class firm. But instead of being happy to have a firm footing on the corporate ladder, she's discontented because all her colleagues make so much more money and lead such extravagant lifestyles. She thinks, "I'm just as talented as these bozos! Why shouldn't I get to wear designer clothes and drive a Mercedes, too?" And so to assuage her feelings of resentment, she loads herself down with debt, taking out a massive car loan with the tiniest of down payments and giving her credit card regular workouts at high-end boutiques. She doesn't actually need a luxury car—she can get to and from work just fine on the subway—and she could put together a perfectly presentable, professional wardrobe at consignment shops, but she thinks she "deserves" the same lifestyle her colleagues have, even though she isn't yet earning the salary to support it.

Like Leo, Ivy's an extreme case. But just about any of us can fall victim to the occasional attack of "I deserve it" and wind up shelling out money for something we didn't really need, and might not even have wanted if someone else didn't have it. After all, sowing this kind of discontentment with our lot is more or less the whole purpose of advertising, whether it's for shampoo (your hair isn't pretty enough!), cars (your car isn't exciting enough!), or breakfast cereal (your cereal doesn't give you superhuman strength and unearthly beauty!).

Interestingly, studies show that what makes people feel rich or poor is not how much they have in absolute terms, but how much they have relative to those around them. For instance, a study at Harvard (cited in this story on the public radio show Marketplace) found that most respondents would rather earn $50,000 a year at a company where most of their colleagues earned $25,000 than earn $100,000 a year at a company where most of their colleagues earned $200,000. They would feel more content with their lot making only half as much money, as long as it were twice as much as everyone else made. Some scholars speculate that this response shows it isn't really about the money; people just want to earn more than their coworkers because they see the salary as an indication of how much they're valued in the workplace. But even so, the need to feel more valued than all their colleagues—to be, in effect, at the top of the grading curve—does smack of envy, and it does carry this basic disadvantage: that no matter how well someone like Ivy does at work, how fast she climbs, much she earns, how extravagantly she can live, she'll never be satisfied as long as there's someone else who's doing even better. Even if she reaches the very top of the corporate ladder, she'll always have to worry about someone else coming along to challenge that position—just like Snow White's stepmother constantly checking her mirror to make sure that she's still the fairest of them all.

Speaking for myself, I don't think I'd really be happy with either of the hypothetical jobs described above. I wouldn't like to make twice as much as all my coworkers, and I wouldn't want to make half as much either. I'd be much more comfortable in a work situation where everyone made $50,000 a year, because then I could interact with my coworkers on even terms, as equals. Given the choice, I'd prefer neither to envy others, nor to be an object of envy to them. Neither one really seems to make for a healthy relationship.

By the by, I've just realized that I've managed to get Marlowe's list of sins a bit out of order, because I confused "covetousness" with envy when it's supposed to be avarice. So I'll go back and pick up that one tomorrow.

The Seven Anti-Frugal Sins

2011-01-17T09:17:00.007-05:00

Happy Thrift Week, everyone! (For those who missed last year's explanation of what Thrift Week is, you can read it here.) This year's celebration of Thrift Week is inspired partly by a comment my friend Laura posted on last week's entry, and partly by an article published last summer in Tip Hero, "How the 7 Deadly Sins Warn Us to Live Frugally." Since there just happen to be seven deadly sins and seven days of Thrift Week, I thought exploring this topic in a little more detail might be an appropriate theme for this week's entries.

First, I refer you to Wikipedia for a little background on the concept of the seven deadly sins. It appears the list most people are familiar with, as presented in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (pride, covetousness, envy, wrath, gluttony, sloth, and lechery) has evolved somewhat over time. The original list, developed by a fourth-century monk, contained eight sins rather than seven: gluttony, fornication, avarice, despair, wrath, discouragement, vainglory, and pride. To modern readers, of course, that list seems to have a lot of overlap, as well as at least a couple of items that are no longer generally recognized as deadly sins. In the sixth century, Pope Gregory I revised the list down to seven, but even then they weren't the same seven we're familiar with: the first item on the list was "extravagance," followed by gluttony, avarice, discouragement, wrath, envy, and pride. If this were still the list today, it would be very easy to kick off this week's entries by showing how extravagance is a wasteful habit: in fact, it's more or less the literal opposite of frugality. But over the years, extravagance was replaced with lust and discouragement modified to sloth, giving us the list we know today.

So where to start on this list? I think I'll take them in the same order as Marlowe, since a) pride is a particularly easy one to tackle and b) it saves lust, which is the most entertaining, for last.

First of all, let's be clear on what we mean by pride. Nowadays, the word pride is often considered a positive term: we talk about being proud of our country and proud of our children, and we encourage those children to be proud of themselves when they do well at something. But this use of the word pride is more or less a synonym for satisfaction, pleasure in your own accomplishments. The sin of pride, by contrast, is closer in meaning to hubris, or arrogance: thinking that you are, or deserve to be, more important than everyone else. (While these two emotions can certainly go together, it's also clearly possible to be pleased with your own achievements without concluding that you're too good for everyone else.)

It's easy to see how this kind of pride can be costly. If you care a lot about your image, you're going to spend a lot of money maintaining that image. Let's make up an example character to illustrate this: we'll call him Leo. Leo cares a lot about how other people see him, so he decided to become a doctor—not because he really likes medicine, but because he wants to make plenty of money and have people look up to him. Unfortunately, medical school left him with a lot of debt to pay off, so even with a hefty salary, his expenses still exceed his income. Because he has an image to live up to, he has put himself still further into debt buying a big house in a fancy neighborhood. He leases a car, even though it's the most expensive way to drive, because he can't afford a new car and can't afford to be seen driving a used one. He also has to shell out for at least a couple of new designer suits each year—since clearly he can't be seen in last year's styles—and have all the latest gadgets. He's making a lot of money, but he's spending more than he makes, saving nothing, and working at a job he doesn't enjoy.

Leo's lifestyle isn't just expensive; it's wasteful as well. He has to heat and cool that big house with only himself in it; he has to keep buying new clothes instead of keeping the old ones; and he has to keep replacing his computer, cell phone, and other electronics with the latest models, and sending the old ones—with all their toxic components—off to the dump.

Most of us aren't Leos, but we can still keep an eye out for smaller, subtler ways in which pride might be hurting us, financially or otherwise. For example: say I've got a leaky faucet in my bathtub. I don't actually know how to fix it, but I'm too proud to ask for help with a job I think I should be able to do myself. So I just put off dealing with it, while 11 gallons a day drip down the drain. If I keep neglecting it for three months, I'll waste 132 gallons of water and bump my water bill up into the next tier, costing myself about $14. (Granted, a visit from a plumber would cost a lot more than that, but swallowing my pride and asking a friend to show me how to put in a new washer would cost almost nothing.)

Got any more good examples of how pride goeth afore a massive credit card bill? Feel free to share them below. And tune in tomorrow for another exciting episode, in which we'll meet Ivy, the embodiment of envy.

Canventory

2011-01-09T14:56:00.002-05:00

Brian and I just hit Shop-Rite's annual "Can Can" sale, where all manner of canned goods (and some other products as well) are available dirt cheap. Since this year marks the 40th anniversary of the Can Can sale, several items were on sale for 40 cents, including beans, tomatoes, and pasta. We loaded up to the limit on these products, then got them home and were faced with the problem of how to cram them all into our woefully small pantry. Eventually we concluded that some items would have to go into overflow storage downstairs, so we started sorting through the entire contents of the pantry to figure out what should go where. The biggest problem was making sure that the stuff downstairs didn't become a case of "out of sight, out of mind" and get restocked prematurely, so we hit on a solution that I have dubbed the "canventory."

The canventory is simply a list of all the canned goods and all the pasta boxes we have, sorted by type. It shows the size of each package, the number of packages we have, and where they are stored. A typical entry looks like this:

Beans, kidney, dark 15.5 oz. 2 cans 2 upstairs 0 downstairs

I've entered the full list into an Excel spreadsheet, which can be easily updated on an ongoing basis and will automatically re-tally the number of cans or boxes we have left. So now all I have to do is pull up the list to see at a glance how many we have of any given item, so that we don't buy too many or too few of anything (like the big 20-quart box of powdered milk we just brought home from the Shop-Rite, not remembering that we already had an unopened box stored away in the pantry).

So how is this system ecofrugal? Simply put, it allows us to make better use of three available resources: space, time, and money. We use space more effectively by storing the foodstuffs we're most likely to need where they'll be most accessible, and keeping everything else in reserve. We save time because we don't have to hunt through two different storage areas to see what we've already got. And we save money because we can take better advantage of massive sales like today's without fear of overloading on any particular product. (In fact, after a moment's consideration, I've just added a new column to the canventory: "Last price paid." That column will show how much we paid for a particular product last time it went on sale, so we can evaluate future sales to see just how good a deal they really are.)

I'm hoping this same system will prove useful later in the year to help us keep track of our (I hope) abundant garden produce. For that purpose, I'll probably have to add another column to the inventory—expected shelf life—to make sure everything we grow gets eaten while the eating is good. But of course, that particular point is moot until I figure out what I'm actually planting this year, and where—about which, more in a future entry.

Dreaming of a green Christmas

2011-01-02T10:36:00.005-05:00

Happy New Year, everyone!

One of my New Year's resolutions last year was to update this blog at least once a week. Looking back over the past year's entries, I see that I met that goal most weeks, but not quite every week. So I'm aiming to be more consistent this year (and also to build a website for my business, finish the downstairs bathroom, and do a better job planning my garden than I did last year).

The main reason I didn't update the blog last week was that I was away for most of it, visiting the in-laws for Christmas. As I observed last year in the old blog, the holiday season is all too often the least ecofrugal time of the year—a period of unbridled consumerism and waste. So I thought that this year, I'd take a moment to focus on the positive and consider the ways in which our holidays actually were ecofrugal. To start with, here's a list of some of the most ecofrugal gifts we got and gave this year:

Several secondhand or discounted books. Brian's gifts to me included two volumes of cryptic crosswords, purchased on Amazon.com, which I was delighted with. (Note to Mom: don't worry, I like the one you got me too, and it wasn't a duplicate.) My gift to him was a cookbook called $3 Slow-Cooked Meals, bought from a wonderful discount bookstore in Indianapolis called Half-Price Books (though this particular volume was actually marked down to well below half its original price). This gift was an ecofrugal two-fer: not only did it cost very little, it will also help us be more ecofrugal all year long by making better use of our slow cooker. I've already requested the "Apple-Raisin Pudding Cake" for my birthday in two weeks.
Several secondhand toys, mostly from yard sales, for our nieces and nephews. These included a Brio building set for our niece (which her dad also seemed to find entertaining) and this wooden shape sorting clock for our nephew (which we know got played with by someone, because three of the pieces were lost almost immediately. Oh well.)
Cow and pig sprinkles from the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmer's Market for my brother-in-law's girlfriend Jessica, who loves to bake. Not an extravagant present by any means, but she found them hilarious.
A new set of cloth napkins (the ecofrugal alternative to disposable paper) and matching placemats from my in-laws.
All manner of homemade goodies. As usual, we gave cherry cordials to my mother-in-law, but because Brian made them himself, he was able to fill up a whole bucket with them for approximately the same amount we'd have spend on a small box from the local chocolatier (and his dad claims that Brian's are better). We also received lots of scrumptious homemade treats, including chocolate truffles from Jessica, a jar of apple butter that Brian's sister and her husband made from their very own apple trees, and an assortment of cookies and candies from our friends in Washington.
A soft-sided cooler from Brian's sister and her husband, which she suggested we could take to the farmer's market in hot weather, but which I think will be more useful for stocking up on frozen foodstuffs at Trader Joe's (free-range chicken legs only $2 a pound! Organic veggies same price as the conventional ones at the supermarket! Yee-haw!) and humanely farmed meats at the aforementioned Amish market.
A beautiful homemade cribbage board, also from Brian's sister and her husband. I don't think the wood came from their very own apple trees, but it's very cool all the same.
And from Brian's dad, several things that weren't officially gifts, but will come in very handy all the same: two more glass-topped canning jars (like those shown in the picture at the top of this page), several heads of garlic (he bought in bulk and offered us the surplus), and a big jar of baker's yeast that he opened before realizing he already had some. We will not need to buy yeast for months, if not years.

Other ecofrugal moves we made over the holidays:

Singing carols with Brian's family, a cozy group activity that costs no money and uses no electricity.
Making the trip in a fuel-efficient car (38 miles per gallon on the highway! Yee-haw again!). Driving with two people in a car is less carbon-efficient than traveling by inter-city bus or train, according to energy maven Michael Bluejay, but it's cheaper and a lot more practical for us—and it's still way cheaper, as well as more efficient, than flying.
Bringing our own food in the car to save on highway fare and reduce the number of stops needed.
Reusing wrapping paper and gift bags whenever it was practical.
Decking out the house with our usual simple decorations: a single strand of LED lights (much more efficient than the old incandescent type, and less of a fire hazard), trimmed-off evergreen boughs from the tree vendor at Home Depot (who let us take all we wanted for free), and two spools of red-and-silver holiday ribbon from our local dollar store (which we've been reusing for the past several years now and managed to keep in decent shape).

Here's hoping that in 2011, we'll be able to make the holidays even greener, even as global warming—ironically—increases the likelihood that Christmas will be white.

Merry Christmas to All

2010-12-20T18:47:00.000-05:00

Once again, this is a bit off topic, but I had kind of an annoying experience today. My "Tip Hero" newsletter, which is a weekly compendium of frugal tidbits, included an article called "Christmas Spirit and Frugality." It talks about classic holiday movies and how they show the true spirit of Christmas, which is "A time of joy, celebration, peace and love - all things that you can't buy." It was kinda sappy, I'll admit, but its heart was in the right place. However, it was not well received by readers. The first response it got was:

"One BIG problem: Christmas is about the CHRIST! The word Cgristmas [sic] reflects it! The scriptures proclaim it! It is not about you and me and family and feelings, it is about HIM! God who condescended to robe Himself in flesh and give us what we need most: salvation! Pick another time to feel warm and fuzzy or look at cartoons or other of your "meaningful" stories. This story has been written already and it's not up for grabs so you can have joy, celebration, peace and love without HIM! There is no Christmas without Christ - PERIOD!"

Now, I have no problem with anyone celebrating Christmas as a religious holiday, and I can even sympathize with those who feel that the holiday has moved too far from its religious origins and plead to "keep Christ in Christmas." What I do have a serious problem with is folks who get up on their high horses and declare that everyone else is celebrating Christmas wrong. Hey, you, cut out all that celebrating and bonding with family! Knock it off with the "warm and fuzzy" stuff! It's about Jesus or nothing!

Do these people actually think this is a "Christian" attitude to take? Honestly, do they think their faith requires them to condemn other people's feelings of "joy, celebration, peace and love"? (It reminds me of this 10-year-old story from The Onion: "Religious Cousin Ruins Family's Christmas.")

So, in what I hope is a more appropriate Christmas spirit, I'd like to offer this little playlist of Christmas tunes that show the holiday in all its aspects—sacred and secular, positive and not so positive. (By the way, I tried to publish this as an iMix, but iTunes wasn't being cooperative, so I'm just listing the titles and artists instead.)

Shepherds Arise (Finest Kind)
Twelve Days After Christmas (Caltech Chamber Singers)
Wachet auf (Canadian Brass)
Jack Frost and the Hooded Crow (Jethro Tull)
River (Joni Mitchell)
Gaudete (Steeleye Span)
Chiron Beta Prime (Jonathan Coulton)
Straw Against the Chill (Bob Franke)
A Christmas Carol (Tom Lehrer)
O Holy Night (Studio 60 Soundtrack)
Homeless Wassail (Broadside Electric)
Christmas Trilogy (Finest Kind)
Oh Come Emmanuel (Aliqua)
Fairytale of New York (The Pogues)
Christmas / Sarajevo 12/24 (Trans-Siberian Orchestra)
Home By Another Way (Grant Baynham)
Christmas Letter Song (Lou & Peter Berryman)
This Mountain (Hugh Blumenfeld)

And as Tiny Tim says: God bless us, every one.

Buying the label

2010-12-17T12:37:00.000-05:00

The most recent Freakanomics Radio podcast, available on the New York Times website, poses the interesting question: "Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?" It's worth listening to the entire story, but in a nutshell, the answer seems to be: yes, but only if you know they're expensive. When people know the price, they overwhelmingly prefer more expensive wines. But in blind taste tests, cheap wines actually do slightly better than pricey vintages. And that holds true across all groups of people, from wine-club newbies to highly trained sommeliers.

Now, I'm not a wine drinker, so I can't comment on this story from personal experience. But I have seen similar studies that highlight the same phenomenon for other products. For example, as I observed back in September, tap water is just as good, objectively speaking, as bottled water—it's just as clean, if not cleaner, and it does as well or better in blind taste tests. Yet bottled water drinkers consistently claim that bottled water in general, and their brand in particular, tastes better than tap water. In an episode of "Penn and Teller: Bullshit!" (which you can see here on YouTube) patrons in a fancy L.A. restaurant discourse at length about the differences in taste among bottled waters, even though each made-up brand is really the same L.A. tap water in a different bottle. (Amusingly, one of the varieties is called "L'Eau Du Robinet"—French for "tap water." You'd think at least a few of those highbrow diners would have been tipped off by that.) Also, Vance Packard reported sixty years ago in The Hidden Persuaders that most cigarette smokers are loyal to a specific brand, yet the majority of them can't correctly identify their own brand in a blind taste test.

And when you think about it, this same kind of misplaced brand loyalty really applies to all kinds of products, not just the ones you can taste. The Mercedes first became a status car because old-money types chose it for its reliability (eschewing the flashier models that were status cars at the time). But the Mercedes models of today no longer have a particularly good reliability record, yet people continue to buy them just for the name. And I've already mentioned how little premium in you get in terms of style or quality by buying designer clothes.

So what's the moral of this story? Well, there are probably all sorts of conclusions you could draw from it about social class, how expectations influence experience, the nature of brand loyalty, and the dangers of putting too much faith in of so-called experts. But for me, the most useful lesson for us ecofrugal folks is: the best snobbery is inverted snobbery. It's a lot cheaper than the other kind, and just as much fun. So if you're a wine fancier, I urge you to go pick up one of the best cheap wines and serve it at your next party. Depending on your inclinations, you could put it in a decanter and wait to surprise your guests with the name, or openly flaunt the cheap bottle (or box) and chat about how remarkable it is what a great wine 12 bucks will buy. "I just don't understand why some people pay hundreds of dollars for a bottle of wine," you can muse as make the rounds with the bottle, dressed in your best thrift-shop togs. "I mean, it's really just the label they're buying, isn't it? People who really appreciate wine only care about the taste."

What a crock!

2010-12-06T20:29:00.000-05:00

I thought of something else that should go on the list of Stuff Ecofrugal People Like: slow cookers. We used ours a few nights back to prepare a mushroom-barley soup that we've made many times before, a delicious and hearty soup with only one real drawback: it takes about an hour and a half to cook. As a result, it's always been a weekends-only recipe. But last Friday we decided to just throw all the ingredients in the Crock-Pot and see how it came out, and behold, it was good. Brian actually thought the long slow cooking made it better, because the flavors had more time to blend.

Okay, that's all very nice, but what's so ecofrugal about it? Simple: by making it easier for us to cook at home on nights when we're busy, our slow cooker helps us avoid falling prey to the temptation of restaurant meals or convenience foods. And that's only one way that a slow cooker can contribute to the ecofrugal lifestyle. It can also:

make it easier to use dry beans instead of the pricier, more packaging-intensive canned beans. The biggest barrier to cooking with dry beans is the prep time involved: they have to be soaked overnight, then drained, rinsed and cooked for at least two hours before you can use them in your recipe. A slow cooker doesn't eliminate the need for advance preparation, but it does eliminate most of the active work involved. You can just throw the beans in the crock the night before, cover them with water, drain and add fresh water in the morning, and set the pot on low. By the time you get home in the evening, the beans will be ready to use in whatever you're cooking. And if you cook up extra beans, which takes no extra work, you can freeze the rest and have beans in your freezer, ready to use (after just a few minutes in the microwave) on those occasions when you can't soak and cook them ahead of time.
help you make your own veggie stock. This is a trick we learned from The Clueless Vegetarian (my favorite vegetarian cookbook and one I highly recommend for newcomers to vegetarian cooking). Basically, you keep a bag in your freezer in which you store all the vegetable scraps that you would normally discard: potato and carrot peelings, cut-off ends of onions, the innards of green peppers, mushroom stems (very flavorful), celery leaves, etc. When the bag gets full, you just dump it all into a pot of boiling water and cook it down. Normally, this would keep you tied to the house for two hours while the pot boils away on the stove, but with a slow cooker, you can just throw the veggies and water in first thing in the morning, set it on low, and strain it in the evening. (Or, if you prefer, you can throw everything in before bedtime, let it cook overnight, and strain it in the morning.) This is an ecofrugal three-fer: you get something for free that you'd ordinarily have to pay for, you avoid the packaging waste involved with canned stock, and you get additional use out of scraps that would normally be discarded. And the boiled-down mush that's left after you've strained off the stock can still go into the compost bin—you've just given it a head start on decomposition.
make a small amount of meat go farther. We're not exclusively vegetarians, but we eat only meats that are humanely farmed, and those tend to be expensive. Roasting a whole chicken would run into money, but a single package of chicken legs makes several meals when cooked up with chick peas, onions, almonds and cinnamon in a Moroccan chicken stew. (Note: no tomatoes. Most recipes seem to call for tomatoes, but mine doesn't, and I like it without.) Stretching the meat out with other ingredients makes the meal much cheaper, and (since meat is more resource-intensive than veggies) greener as well. And, another bonus for meat-eaters: slow cooking is an ideal way to tenderize tougher, and thus cheaper, cuts of meat.

And those are just the ways I've tried personally. I've heard of other, less conventional uses as well, like setting up a batch of steel-cut oats overnight so you can have a hot breakfast in the morning. Cold cereal is one of the priciest items in our grocery cart, so eating oatmeal more often would certainly be a money-saver—and because it's less processed, it's greener too, not to mention chock-full of healthful whole grains. And the slow cooker could replace other convenience-type foods, too, like dessert. I've even heard of people baking cakes in it, though I've never quite understood how that works. Clearly, this ecofrugal tool has benefits far beyond my current knowledge—a rich field for further exploration.

Veggie Thanksgiving

2010-11-22T20:23:00.000-05:00

This question came up at dinner tonight, and I thought I'd put it to all of you: if you wanted, for some reason, to serve a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner, how would you do it?

This isn't the same thing, mind you, as serving a Thanksgiving dinner at which some vegetarians will be present. Nowadays, my folks get a free-range bird for Thanksgiving from Griggstown Quail Farm (they ain't cheap, but it's only once a year) so that I can partake, but before they started doing that, I used to manage quite nicely on the potatoes and veggies and dressing and cranberries and salad and, of course, pie. I never ran any risk of going hungry. But supposing that you had to accommodate a crowd composed mostly of vegetarians, or that you yourself didn't want to serve any meat, how would you go about it?

Would you try to create a new, vegetarian centerpiece for the meal to take the place of the turkey? (This is the approach a lot of vegetarian magazines seem to take, which gives them an opportunity to shoot gorgeous cover photos of some show-stopping dish.) Or would you have just the traditional side dishes that usually surround the turkey, as described above, but without the bird? Or would you throw out the whole idea of the traditional Thanksgiving meal and do something else entirely?

I think my favorite approach is a sort of middle ground. I wouldn't scrap the traditional Thanksgiving menu entirely, but I wouldn't be limited by it. So rather than trying to construct a meal with one big main dish and a bunch of sides, I'd serve several hearty, seasonable dishes that would complement each other: butternut squash soufflé, succotash, "half baked" potatoes (i.e., cut in half and then baked, so they get nice and crispy), and of course, cranberry sauce. Probably some sort of green veggie, too, like that wonderful sesame spinach someone brought to the last Folk Project Evening of Music (note to whoever it was: if you're reading this, please send me the recipe). I might do some sort of dressing (you can't call it "stuffing" if it's not served in the bird) in place of the potatoes, since that's normally my favorite part of the meal and I think I'd miss it if it weren't there. On the other hand, it's really not the same without any gravy. Perhaps I'd just make a mushroom gravy to serve with it.

What do y'all think?

The Gates of Heaven

2010-11-20T15:04:00.000-05:00

Well, it's official: I don't hate Bill Gates anymore.

I was already on the fence about him, because on the one hand, he turned Windows—which I loathe in all its forms—into the dominant operating system in the world, so that now even those of us who hate it have to use it in order to be compatible with everyone else. But on the other hand, he has taken the billions he made from this venture and invested them in things like worldwide vaccination and better agricultural techniques, helping to ward off famine and pestilence around the globe.

Then today, I read in my "Climate Minute" newsletter that Gates is devoting millions of dollars to the goal of developing carbon-free energy sources—the silver bullet as far as alleviating global warming is concerned. Here's a quote:

Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted—all the things you have in the house, the way industry works. I'm interested in making sure the poorest countries don't get left behind, so figuring out how they can get cheap energy is very, very important. Whether it's fertilizing crops or building housing, a lot of it comes down to energy.

Investigating further, I discovered that back in February, Bill Gates gave a talk about clean energy at the TED conference. One of the big technologies he highlighted in the talk was a new type of nuclear reactor that can run entirely on depleted uranium—something we already have enough of in this country to meet our energy needs for the next 100 years. The company in question is named TerraPower, and the new reactor it's developing is called a traveling wave reactor, or TWR. And Bill Gates is one of its biggest investors. So I'd definitely bet on it to be a financial success, because if that man can out-compete every rival with an inferior product, then just think what he'll be able to do with a truly superior technology. (I'd have bought some of their stock myself, but it's a privately held company.)

The point is, we're talking about a machine that can take spent nuclear fuel, something we desperately need to get rid of safely, and turn it into cheap, clean energy, something we desperately need more of. This is ecofrugality on a grander scale than anything I've ever conceived of before, and Bill Gates is the guy who's going to make it happen. How can I possibly go on hating him?

I still hate Windows, though.