Thrift Week 2025, Day 7: Giving

So far this Thrift Week, I've only looked at the money that the wealthy spend on themselves. But they also spend a non-trivial portion of their income on others. According to the latest Consumer Expenditures Survey, Americans earning over $200,000 per year devote more money to "cash contributions" than those with lower incomes—both in absolute dollar terms and as a percentage of their income. But the gap isn't as big as you might expect. The top income group devotes an average of 3.7% of its budget to charitable donations, as compared to 3.1% for Americans overall. Even the poorest Americans, those earning under $15,000 per year, manage to give away 1.5% of that.

If happiness economists are to be believed, wealthy Americans are making a sound investment when they give to charity, and probably missing a trick by not devoting a bigger share of their spending to this purpose. Multiple studies have shown that spending money on others gives people a bigger happiness boost than spending it on themselves. Wealthy people, who presumably have all the necessities of life already, stand to get more satisfaction out of their money by giving it away than by spending it on luxuries. And for those who aren't rich, giving money away is one of the easiest ways to feel like you are. Just the gesture of giving something, even if it's only a dollar to a sidewalk beggar, reminds you that you're better off than a lot of other people in the world. 

Even if your budget is so tight that you can't manage to squeeze that extra dollar out of it, there are other ways to indulge in what Louisa May Alcott called "the luxury of charity." You can: 

• Shop through charity portals that donate a small percentage of your purchase.
• Use a credit card that does the same thing.
• Raise money for a cause on GoFundMe.
• Donate food, clothing, or other household goods.
• Donate your time by volunteering.
• Donate blood (an especially valuable way to give right now if you live in New Jersey or New York, where blood banks are currently experiencing severe shortages).

Thus, I'm closing out this Thrift Week with a Treat for Today that's a treat both for me and for others: a donation to support SciShow, one of my favorite educational channels on YouTube. Hank Green, one of the channel's hosts (and, in my opinion, a total hottie), recently posted on Bluesky that to make accurate content, they rely on donations from one out of every 10,000 people who watches. So, to reward that special one percent of one percent, they are offering a deal: for a donation of $25, you get a postcard autographed by all the show's hosts containing art, facts, and a QR code linking to "one of four exclusive videos from me discussing my favorite frog facts." And for a donation of $60, you get all four postcards with all four frog videos. Such a deal!

Sure, that $60 is significantly more than I've spent on any of my previous birthday treats. But last year I donated $54 and got only one postcard, and all it had on it was a thank-you message with Hank's signature. So four whole postcards complete with frog videos for a mere $60 seems like a good value to me.

Oh, and I made an appointment to give blood next Tuesday. So even when Thrift Week is over, I can continue to treat myself—both with the warm glow of giving and with free cookies.

Thrift Week 2025, Day 6: Fragrance

Back on Day 3, I named Dom Perignon as a classic example of a luxury good, costing about $330 for a 750-mL bottle. But on a milliliter-for-milliliter basis, that stuff doesn't hold a candle to high-end fragrance. A 2023 article in (once again) Town & Country magazine lists a dozen perfumes that cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars per ounce. The most expensive scent on the list, Haute Luxe by Roja Dove, costs $3,500 for a 3.4-ounce (97-mL) bottle. That's $36 per milliliter—82 times as much as France's most iconic bubbly.

According to T&C, these pricey perfumes are "worth every cent." While the editors concede that "your signature scent doesn't need to cost an arm and a leg," they also claim that an "ultra-luxury fragrance" offers benefits a more "attainable" one can't, such as:

• The "finest ingredients in the world" that went into it.
• The skills of the "master perfumer" who created it.
• The design and "natural materials" of the the bottle.
• A "one-of-a-kind scent" that most people won't have.

All that sounds impressive, but really, a fragrance only has to do one thing: make you smell good. If it doesn't do that, then the luxurious ingredients, the fancy bottle, and the efforts of the master perfumer are simply wasted. And, conversely, if you can get a much cheaper scent that smells just as good to you, then the lack of fancy ingredients and "craftsmanship" matters not one whit. The proof of the perfume is in the sniffing.

So, if you want to "find your signature scent" without spending a bundle on it, where do you look? Well, you could disregard T&C's guide in favor of this one from Cosmopolitan, which recommends the best "affordable fragrances that smell luxe." But its definition of "affordable" is up to $70, which is still a bit much to risk on a scent you don't actually know you'll like. So if you want a chance to try before you buy, you could pick up a few test vials from Microperfumes, which sells tiny samples (just 0.75 mL) of different fragrances for as little as $3 apiece. Or, if you already know what fragrance you like but you don't like the price tag, you can search for a knockoff version at a site like Perfume Parlor. With a quick search there, I found a duplicate of that $36-per-milliliter Haute Luxe that costs only 56 cents per milliliter (with a 2-mL test vial available for just $4). 

Or, if you want a truly "one of a kind scent" that no one else is wearing, you can do what I do and make your own. My signature scent is a blend of three essential oils—sandalwood, vanilla, and cinnamon—mixed with a carrier oil in a little roller bottle. Last summer, the tiny bottles of essential oil that I bought back in 2020 finally started to run low, so I restocked with some bigger bottles from an online supplier: 2 ounces of sandalwood for $4, 1 ounce of vanilla for $6, and half an ounce of cinnamon that looked like an unbeatable value at just $1. Unfortunately, when I cracked it open, I realized why it was so cheap: it had a weird, acrid smell that was nothing at all like cinnamon. Thus, for the past few months, I've been making my perfume with just sandalwood and vanilla—all about those base notes, with no middle or top.

So, as my Treat for Today, I ventured out in the brisk January air to go to the local Rite Aid and drop $9 plus tax on a new bottle of cinnamon essential oil. (As Rite Aid is going through a bankruptcy right now, its shelves are looking a little picked over, but fortunately this particular essential oil is still well stocked.) It's a 1-ounce bottle, so at the rate I use it, I'll still have half of it left when my new bottles of vanilla and sandalwood oil run out. (At that point, I'll have to decide if I want to replace the sandalwood oil, which I've recently learned comes from a rare and over-harvested plant, with something more sustainable—like, ironically, a synthetic fragrance oil.)

Thrift Week 2025, Day 5: Beauty

Another way the very rich are different from you and me: They don't age as visibly. Partly, of course, this is because they can afford more nutritious food (see Day 2) and better health care. But also, they can invest in luxury skin care, spa treatments such as facials, "tweakments" such as Botox and fillers, and even plastic surgery. All that stuff decidedly doesn't come cheap. According to Real Self, a site that reviews beauty treatments, you can expect to pay an average of:

• $35 for a prescription skin-care product containing Retin-A (tretinoin), which can gradually brighten your skin and improve elasticity if you use it regularly for at least 4 to 6 weeks
• $208 for a HydraFacial, which reduces the appearance of fine lines for 1 to 3 months
• $535 for a syringe of Botox, which can smooth away wrinkles for 3 to 4 months
• $1,112 for a "vampire facial," which uses tiny needles to inject your skin with platelet-rich plasma pulled from your own blood, smoothing away skin damage over the course of multiple treatments and lasting 9 to 18 months
  
• $3,229 for a "liquid facelift" that combines Botox with dermal fillers, improving wrinkles and moderately lifting sagging skin for up to 2 years
  
• $16,690 for a full facelift—the most expensive option, but the only one that will last 10 years or more
  

None of these, obviously, will fit into a tight budget. Even the $35 topical treatment, with its modest effects, will run you $420 a year if you restock monthly. The rest, if you keep them up regularly, will most likely cost a grand or more per year. 

The most economical approach to beauty, obviously, would be to decide to love yourself wrinkles and all. But I'll admit that's not easy. Throughout my late forties, I found myself growing more and more dissatisfied with the face in the mirror, which didn't look like the way I thought of myself. I kept browsing the list of pricey treatments on Real Self, but I could never convince myself that any of them would be worth the money.

Finally, on my 50th birthday, I decided to spring for something that looked like it could give me just a little bit of a boost. I invested $150 (on sale) in a mini microcurrent device that claimed it could "significantly improve skin firmness & elasticity" in just a few minutes a day. The evidence for the effectiveness of microcurrent wasn't terribly strong, but I'd seen a few studies suggesting it could have at least a small benefit, and even if it didn't help at all, I wouldn't be out as much money as I would for a pricey professional treatment. I did a little research first to make sure that it would work without the expensive serums the company sells to go with it and found that a homemade conductive gel made from aloe vera gel with a bit of ordinary table salt could get the job done.

So did it work? Well, you can judge for yourself. Here's the "before" picture I took of my face in January 2023 (shot in the bathroom mirror because I'm hopeless at selfies):

And here's the one I took in May, after a few months of using the device nearly every day.

It's not a dramatic difference, to be sure, but many of the before-and-afters on Real Self are just as subtle, and for treatments that cost considerably more.

Another beauty booster I considered was collagen supplements. Once again, there were some studies suggesting that taking them regularly could improve skin texture and elasticity. But there were two problems: first, most brands contain bovine collagen, which isn't vegetarian-friendly, and second, even a relatively inexpensive brand like Vital Proteins costs around $1.25 a dose—over $450 a year if you take it daily. (You can get "marine collagen" made from fish instead, which would work with my flexitarian diet, but it's even more expensive.) Searching for a vegan alternative, I happened on some research about the benefits of aloe sterols found in plain old aloe vera gel. I found an aloe vera supplement that cost only pennies a dose and started taking that daily. Once again, the effects are subtle at best, but it certainly isn't doing me any harm, and it could potentially have benefits for my blood sugar as well. So, for such a low cost, I see no real downside to keeping it up.

The latest addition to my low-budget beauty routine is my Treat for Today: a little bottle of plant-derived squalane oil. This stuff is derived from squalene, a natural oil produced by your skin, and Cleveland Clinic reports it's good for hydration and can "slow the signs of aging." This little bottle from The Ordinary cost me only $10, and a little of it goes a long way; just five or six drops is sufficient to moisturize my entire face and neck. I use it in the evening, after using the microcurrent device and before applying my rosacea meds, and I don't need any additional moisturizer on top of that. It hasn't miraculously firmed up my skin, but it does leave it nice and soft, and for less than ten cents a dose, it adds an affordable touch of luxury to my evening routine.

Do I truly have the skin of a rich person? Almost certainly not. But is my budget beauty routine keeping me in pretty good shape for 52? Almost certainly yes. I mean, hey, Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Garner don't look that much better without makeup than I do, and they're the same age I am now.

Thrift Week 2025, Day 4: Clothing

When you picture a rich person, how are they dressed? Designer labels from head to toe? According to the Washington Post (gift link), Town & Country magazine, and the Style Theory channel on YouTube, that's a bit wide of the mark. There certainly are well-to-do folks who dress that way, but the really rich tend to go for "quiet luxury." Their clothing doesn't bear any obvious brand labels; in the words of O. Henry, it "properly proclaim[s] its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation." You'd have to look at it very closely to notice the details that make it so expensive: the luxe fabrics, the impeccable stitching, and crucially, the flawless fit. They often have garments altered, made to measure, or even custom made to fit them exactly.

So how do you get this look for less? The Style Theory video suggests starting with off-the-rack garments from mid-tier brands like Banana Republic or J. Crew, then getting them tailored for "an additional $20 or so" to give you that custom-fit look. But several comments on that video argue for my preferred approach: starting out with thrifted garments. In the first place, secondhand clothes from those same medium-priced brands will cost less than new ones; in the second place, they'll most likely be better made, as all but the highest of high-end clothing lines have cut back on quality in recent years to churn out clothing faster and more cheaply. You can take those secondhand clothes to the tailor and end up with a custom-fitted garment for the same price as you'd have paid for a lower-quality new garment straight off the rack. (This is also a handy strategy for those of us who have trouble getting a decent fit in new clothing. Rather than hunting all over for that elusive pair of pants that fits over the hips without gapping at the waist, we can just buy one that fits in the seat and have it taken in to close the gap.)

Now, while this thrift-shop-plus-tailoring approach costs a lot less than buying high-end brands to start with, that doesn't mean it's cheap. As I recently discovered, high-quality secondhand garments can actually cost significantly more than new ones from cheaper brands (though they may give you more quality for your dollar). Also, depending on what you want done, tailoring can cost quite a lot more than the $20 benchmark quoted in the Style Theory video. I was originally planning to have my Treat for Today be taking an item to the tailor: a red sundress I'd bought for $19 on eBay that was too big in the shoulders. I'd managed to make it wearable by pinning up the straps and loosely basting them into place, but the excess fabric made an awkward lump that I had to hide under a jacket. I figured for around $30 more, I could have the straps professionally adjusted and get myself a perfectly fitted dress for under $50 total. But when I got the dress to the tailor shop, they informed me that this simple alteration would actually cost $50 all by itself. (I also inquired about the cost of adding pockets to the dress, and that would have raised the price tag to $100.)

At that price, I wasn't sure this alteration would really qualify as an affordable luxury. So, before springing for it, I brought the dress back home and did a little investigation to see how hard it would be to shorten the straps myself. When I found a YouTube video showing a method that didn't require a sewing machine and looked well within my modest abilities as a seamstress, I decided to take the plunge. 

First, I turned the dress inside out, put it on, pinned the straps up to the right length, and stitched them in place. Then, I added an extra step not shown in the video: I turned the dress right side out again and tried it on to make absolutely sure I had the shoulders adjusted correctly. I knew once I took the next step—cutting the fabric—there would be no going back, so I followed the old carpenter's rule: measure twice, cut once.

Then I took the dress back off and, with some trepidation, made the fateful cut. I stitched the fragments of fabric down as shown in the video, then did the same on the other side. And when I turned it back right-side out and put it on again, lo and behold, it fit! With my rudimentary sewing skills, about a quarter's worth of thread, and about half an hour of work, I'd managed to make a perfectly respectable job of an alteration that would have cost $50 to have done professionally. My work may not look quite as neat as the tailor's would have, but you'd have to look quite closely at the straps to notice it, and how likely is anyone to do that?

So this is my actual Treat for Today: an elegant summer dress that fits me perfectly and only cost me $19 plus half an hour of work. In fact, I'm so encouraged by this success that I might just take a crack at adding those pockets myself, too. But that looks like a job that requires the use of the sewing machine, so I'll probably want to practice my machine skills a bit first. (And yes, I realize the dress looks a bit silly worn with a winter hat and long johns, but give me a break, it's January.)

Thrift Week 2025, Day 3: Drink

It was perhaps a bit misleading for me to call the theme of this year's Thrift Week "Champagne tastes on a beer budget," because actually, I'm not that big a fan of bubbly. I'm happy to drink a toast in it to celebrate someone's wedding or graduation, but it's not a drink I'd choose for myself. I prefer alcoholic beverages (and, for that matter, nonalcoholic ones) with a bit of sweetness to them, like a nice tawny port.

However, a high-end tawny port doesn't exactly come cheap either. Some of the top-rated tawny ports at Vivino sell for over $300 a bottle, rivaling the price of Dom Perignon. So while it's not literally a champagne taste, it's one that could be equally pricey to indulge.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be. The tawny Brian and I like best, Hardy's Whiskers Blake, sells for as little as $14 a bottle. It's not technically a port since it's not made in Portugal, but as far as I'm concerned, its dark, velvety flavor leaves nothing to be desired. Wine Spectator, which awards it an impressive 94 points out of 100, describes it as "Succulent and smooth...tremendously complex...layered with caramel, walnut, coffee, almond and orange peel flavors, long, elegant and spicy in the mouth." The highest-priced tawny on that same site, a 40-year-old Taylor Fladgate that costs $210, gets only 90 points, so I think we're missing nothing by choosing this bargain bottle.

The only problem with Whiskers Blake is that it's a little hard to find. The only store anywhere near us that carries it is in Somerville, half an hour's drive from here—a bit far to go just for a bottle of wine, particularly in weather like we're having this weekend. So instead, my Treat for Today is a tipple we picked up on our last trip to Trader Joe's: Joe-Joe's Peppermint Wine Cocktail. It's a sweet, creamy drink with a strong peppermint flavor. The bottle cost only $8.99, and a little of it goes a long way. Because it's so strong, I tend to sip it slowly, so I can easily nurse a couple of ounces over the course of an hour or two while curled up on the couch watching Critical Role or Taskmaster. And a dollop added to a cup of hot cocoa, along with a puff of coconut whipped cream, turns an everyday sip into an indulgent treat.

By the way, if your tastes actually do run toward Champagne, don't worry: there are budget-priced picks for you too. Sparkling wines from outside the Champagne region, such as Prosecco, Cava, or Cremant, are much cheaper than the real thing and just as fizzy and fabulous. Check out Gear Patrol and Reverse Wine Snob for recommendations costing as little as $8 a bottle.

Thrift Week 2025, Day 2: Food

When you ask people to name a luxury good, many of them will probably think of traditional rich-people foods like caviar or lobster. And thirty years ago, this would indeed have been an accurate reflection of a multi-millionaire's diet. According to a 2018 story in Quartz, the 1991 Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook featured these two luxury foods right on the cover, alongside such other delicacies as chocolate-dipped strawberries and capital-C Champagne in crystal goblets. But in the years since, the article notes, the lifestyles of the wealthy—including their food choices—have changed dramatically. Today, rich-people food is all about "wellness": cold-pressed juices, organic produce, "fermented lamb and local lichens" served at a high-end restaurant on a remote Scottish island.

Healthy whole foods like these are indeed more expensive than processed foods, especially if you're looking for local and organic produce and the green halo associated with it. (As it turns out, this halo is mostly illusory; local and organic foods have roughly the same carbon footprint as conventionally grown ones. Some reputedly earth-friendly foods, like grass-fed beef, are actually significantly worse than their cheaper equivalents.) But the cost doesn't have to be prohibitive—particularly for those lucky enough to live near a Lidl store. 

Over the course of our two most recent visits to Lidl, we picked up ten pounds of mandarin oranges, a cauliflower, half a pound of Brussels sprouts, three bell peppers, a pound of mushrooms, two eggplants, an avocado, a head of broccoli, a bunch of scallions, a bag of red onions, and an English cucumber, all for a grand total of $25.86. That works out to $12.93 per week—slightly less than the $13.06 per week the average low-income household (under $15,000 per year) spent on fresh fruits and veggies in 2023. (To be fair, we also bought some produce from other stores, but our total food spending was still less than half the limit set by the USDA's Thrifty Food plan.) And if you're looking for more traditional luxury foods, like caviar, Lidl carries those too—at prices that, while a bit steep, won't break the bank.

Which brings me to my Treat for Today: a half-pound of smoked salmon, purchased on our most recent Lidl trip for $8.39. Admittedly, anything that costs $16.78 a pound is still an extravagance, but as extravagances go, it's a pretty affordable one. Served on Brian's home-baked no-knead bread with sliced cucumber, accompanied by a salad of red leaf lettuce with walnuts, dried cranberries, and our favorite honey-garlic balsamic vinaigrette, it's a meal that wouldn't look out of place in the pages of a modern Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook. And you don't have to be either rich or famous to enjoy it.

Thrift Week 2025: Champagne tastes on a beer budget

One of the biggest challenges of writing about frugality is that so many people associate the word with phrases like "tightening your belt" or "doing without." In other words, deprivation. Even people who are trying to promote a frugal lifestyle sometimes fall into this trap. Scroll through the underconsumption core videos on TikTok (quickly, before the ban goes into effect), and you'll see people showing off their broken phone cases or trash-picked dishware, provoking cries of outrage in the comment section. This kind of content may play well with folks who are already fully on board with the idea, but it doesn't make a frugal lifestyle look appealing to those who enjoy their little luxuries and don't want to give them up.

That's why I've decided to make this year's Thrift Week all about ways to live the life of a rich person on a modest budget. Each day, I'll look at one particular category of luxury spending, then explore ways to enjoy the same kind of luxury while spending much less. And I'll put my money where my mouth is by treating myself to one of the cheap luxuries on my list each day—giving myself a whole week's worth of birthday presents in the process.

One thing that rich people definitely spend money on is entertainment. The latest Consumer Expenditures Survey shows that as folks move up the income scale, they spend larger sums on entertainment—not just in dollar terms, but as a percentage of their total spending. That makes sense, since it's a non-essential expense that folks on tight budgets would be likely to cut back on. And lots of really high-end entertainment experiences, like tickets to the Super Bowl or a Taylor Swift concert, cost thousands of dollars—an expense only the well-to-do can afford to shoulder on a regular basis.

Now, according to happiness economists, this is a sound decision. Their studies show that spending a given amount of money on an experience generally produces more happiness than spending a comparable sum on material goods. Which is all well and good, but I haven't seen any studies that suggest that the more you spend on a specific experience, the more you enjoy it. Yes, a Swiftie will probably get more happiness out of paying $4,000 to go see Taylor with her mom than she would out of spending the same sum on a diamond necklace. But will she get four hundred times as much happiness out of buying those tickets as she would from paying $10 for a one-month Disney+ subscription and having a watch party with her friends? 

Based on our experience going to our first big stadium show, I kind of doubt it. We spent a total of $241 on that show, including transportation and food, and still found it to be, at best, only marginally more enjoyable than watching at home for free. Granted, we could have paid a lot more than that, and maybe if we'd shelled out $500 for VIP tickets and another $200 for parking and concessions we would have enjoyed the show more. But then again, maybe not. A lot of the things that made the show frustrating—the venue's bag policy, the long lines, the late drive home—wouldn't have been any better no matter how much we'd spent.

By contrast, we can go to the Troubadour concert series on any given Friday night and see a good show—possibly even a great one—for only $15. And that's exactly what my Treat for Today was: a $15 ticket to see Cheryl Wheeler at the Troubadour. (Brian didn't buy a ticket, but he volunteered to bake, so he got his admission for the cost of a $3 pan of home-baked brownies. On top of that, by volunteering tonight, he earned a "tick" that he can use to get in free for a future show. Most of the time, when we go to the Troubadour, Brian bakes and then uses one of his previously earned "ticks" for me, so we both get to see the show for that same $3 worth of brownie ingredients—a truly unbeatable deal. But we knew tonight's show was likely to be a sellout, so I had to pony up for a real ticket to be sure of getting a seat.) Cheryl was a trip as always, and the opener, Kenny White, turned out to be an unexpected treat who would have been worth the price of admission all by himself.

Granted, this particular entertainment bargain only works if you happen to be a folk music fan living in New Jersey. (And if you are in that category, you should definitely take advantage of it.) But the Troubadour is just one of many smaller, lesser-known venues across the country that are putting on terrific shows at reasonable prices, often featuring artists you've never heard of but should have. Try looking for listings of events in your local paper, if you still have one, or on your city or county website. Check out nearby colleges and even high schools. Check your local library. You may be surprised at how many live shows you can attend for cheap, or even free. They may not be as exciting as Taylor, but they deliver a lot more bang per buck.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 7: My sewing kit

The last item in this Thrift Week series is probably the one that's given me the biggest bang for my buck. But it's also the hardest to calculate the exact impact of, so I'm going to have to guesstimate.

The item in question is my trusty sewing kit. I don't remember exactly when I bought this, but it was somewhere between ten and twenty years ago at a local estate sale. It included a full set of basic sewing supplies: needles of various sizes, straight pins, safety pins, a pincushion, a box of odd buttons, a pair of fabric scissors, and dozens of spools of thread in assorted colors. The entire box cost me a quarter.

In the years since, I have used these supplies more times than I can count. I have replaced buttons on shirts and pants, mended holes in sweaters, sewn patches on jeans, and darned countless socks. I've made Brian a belt pouch and a hat to wear to Renaissance fairs, using only scrap materials. I've made several oversized garments wearable by shortening pant legs and taking in waistbands with either elastic, hooks, or simple stitching. I've even repaired a damaged pair of shoes with a few well-placed stitches. And I did nearly all of it with only the supplies that came with this 25-cent box. (I've bought a few notions like buttons and elastic, and a year or so ago I finally had to spend $4 on one new spool of thread to replace a color that I'd used up. But most of those repairs were covered by my initial 25 cents' worth of materials.)

So how much has this purchase actually saved me? It's impossible to say exactly, because I haven't kept track of every single item I've repaired with this sewing kit and how much it would have cost to replace. But let's take a wild stab and guess that I've repaired at least one garment every month, on average, in the years since I bought this sewing kit. Let's also assume that I've had it for fifteen years, making a total of 180 repairs during that time period. And let's finally suppose that those garments would have cost, on average, $5 each to replace. (Some of them, like socks, would undoubtedly have cost less, but others, like Brian's heavy wool cardigan that I mended just this week, would have cost significantly more.) That works out to $900 in savings, which means that my 25-cent sewing kit has paid for itself 3,600 times over.

Of course, this estimate could be wildly inaccurate. But even if it's off by a factor of ten and this sewing kit has only saved me $90 over the years, that's still a really impressive return on such a tiny investment.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 6: Glad Rags

Today's item is one I've already covered in a previous Thrift Week series: my Glad Rags, a set of reusable feminine napkins. In that post, I observed that the average American woman spends $7 a month, or $84 per year, on "sanitary products," known to the less squeamish as tampons and pads. Meanwhile, I have now successfully made it all the way to menopause with just half a dozen cloth pads that probably cost me around $50 in total. (A comparable set of the same brand purchased today would cost around $110, but there are also numerous other brands available now from stores like Walmart for as little as $10.)

I bought my first set of three cotton Glad Rags some time around 1996 or 1997, and within a year or two I was using them almost exclusively (eked out by a few disposables for travel or tampons for swimming). To make the math simple, let's say that I used them for exactly 25 years. At $7 a month, that means they saved me a total of $2,100 for a one-time cost of $50. That's a hell of a return on such a small investment.

The only problem I've ever had with these is what to do with them now that I no longer need them. I can't quite bring myself to dump them in textile recycling, since most of them are still in usable condition even after 25 years of use. But I hesitate to list them on Freecycle because I think even people who wouldn't be squeamish about reusable pads—and I suspect many women would be—would draw the line at using secondhand ones.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 5: A $30 lock on a $15 bike

To put this Thrift Week post in context, I need to provide a little background. This is a story I never got around to discussing on the blog when it happened, partly because it was a bit embarrassing for us. I told you about how, when Brian's old junker of a bike finally bit the dust in 2012, we bought him a nice, new bicycle to replace it. It cost us $400, but we thought it was a good investment, since he expected to be using it for many years to come. Here's the part you didn't hear: within a year after we bought it, that nice, new bicycle was stolen from the bike rack at his workplace. 

The reason this is embarrassing for us is that it's possible we could have prevented it. At the time we bought the new bike, we didn't invest in a new lock for it, because Brian was pretty confident that the old, heavy chain he was using was sturdy enough to prevent theft. But he was thinking in terms of casual theft, and the thieves who actually came for his bike were professionals. They drove up in a big, black van, parked it in such a way that it blocked the view of the bike rack from security cameras, and then systematically removed all the bicycles from the rack and drove off with them. As far as I know, none of them were ever recovered. His beautiful new ride probably ended up being stripped down for parts. And since its value was less than our insurance deductible, there was no way to recover any of what we'd spent on it.

Well, after that, we weren't about to spend a lot of money on another nice, new bike. Instead, I searched Craigslist and found a seller in Princeton offering not one, but two bicycles in rideable condition for $30. We drove down, checked them out, paid in cash, managed to get both bicycles into the back of our little Honda Fit, and brought them home, giving Brian one bike for everyday use and a spare for parts. (We've since acquired yet another one from Freecycle, which explains why there are three bikes—or more precisely, two and a half—crammed into our back room.)

After that, we had to replace all the equipment that had been on the old bike when it was stolen—including the lock that had so dramatically failed to protect it. So we went back to the same shop where we'd bought the previous bike and invested $30 in a top-of-the-line Kryptonite lock—a purchase that, if we'd made it sooner, might have been enough to deter the thieves and save Brian's old bike. (Professional thieves can get through one of those too, with the right tools, but it takes time, and they might have decided it wasn't worth it.) Thus, Brian's current ride is protected by a lock that cost roughly twice as much as the bike itself. This gives him two layers of protection: a lock that's hard for even professional thieves to get through, and a bike so cheap that it's not really worth the effort. 

This $60 set of equipment—riding bike, spare bike, and lock—is a major money-saver. Each time Brian rides his bike to work or to the grocery stores, he saves money on gas, as well as and wear and tear on our car. One way to estimate the total savings is to use the IRS's mileage reimbursement figure, which is currently 67 cents per mile. Brian's daily commute to work is about four miles each way, and he makes the trip an average of twice a week (roughly four times a week in the summer, about once a week in the winter, and varying amounts in between) for 50 weeks a year. That's a total of 100 eight-mile round trips, or 800 miles, and he probably makes another six-mile round trip to the grocery store every two weeks or so, adding about another 150 miles. That makes 950 miles at 67 cents per mile, for a total of $636.50 in savings every single year.

To be fair, this number is probably a serious overestimate. In the first place, the IRS's mileage reimbursement is based on the average vehicle, and ours is much smaller than average. In the second place, Brian no longer drives to work on most of the days he doesn't ride the bike. The pandemic established that his job could reasonably be done from home, so now he's only required to go into the office once a week. The rest of the time, he only goes in to work on days when he can reasonably ride there. So he's probably only saving himself around 40 trips to the office (the one day a week he would otherwise have to drive, assuming weather permits him to make the trip by bike 80 percent of the time). But according to the government's fuel economy calculator, the gas alone for that trip costs him about 80 cents each way, or 20 cents per mile. So even if Brian is only avoiding 470 miles of driving per year, that's still a savings of at least $94 per year on a one-time investment of $60 nearly 12 years ago. I'd say it has clearly paid for itself many times over in fuel savings alone—not even counting what it could be saving us on medical bills by helping Brian stay in better shape at 53 than he was 30 years ago.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 4: Chromecast

When streaming video first became a thing, sometime in the late 2000s, Brian and I used to watch it by hooking up his laptop to our TV set. When that laptop died in 2010, he built a dedicated media computer with around $325 worth of parts. That served us well for several years, but eventually it started to struggle. We'd have pauses of a few minutes each in the middle of a tense moment on Critical Role as the machine struggled to keep up.

Sometime in 2017, we decided to give one of the nifty new set-top streaming boxes a try. We started out by hazarding $5 on a secondhand Roku at the townwide yard sales, but it turned out to be incapable of streaming from Twitch or YouTube, the two sites we relied on most. This experience made us more cautious about which model to choose as an alternative. We realized that products made by certain companies, such as Apple or Amazon, would probably give us easy access to their own content and make it difficult, if not impossible, to watch anyone else's. So we eventually settled on a Google Chromecast, which was capable of streaming anything that a computer could display. (True, it required a computer or other device to stream from, rather than being a self-contained unit, but that wasn't a problem for us.)

In the six years since, our Chromecast has certainly saved us more than the $30 or so we spent on it. But exactly how much depends on what you compare it to. If you consider it to be the thing that allows us to live without TV service, then it's saving us around $40 a month, the price of Optimum's cheapest plan. Even if you deduct from that the $5 to $15 a month we pay for streaming services (depending on which ones we're using at any given time), that's still a savings of roughly $30 per month—over $2,000 for the approximately six years we've been using it.

But it's probably a bit of a cheat to calculate this way, because it's unlikely we'd be willing to pay for TV service under any circumstances. If we couldn't use Chromecast to watch our various shows, we'd have spent $400 or so on a new media computer instead. That's a much more modest savings, but still a pretty good return on a $30 investment.

It's only fair to point out that just like its predecessor, our Chromecast now occasionally runs up against a problem it can't handle. For instance, it can no longer cast episodes of Critical Role on Twitch from Brian's laptop to our TV—quite possibly because Twitch has now been acquired by Amazon, which doesn't like to play nicely with its competitors. This is, of course, exactly the problem we were hoping to avoid by choosing the Chromecast, which was supposed to be able to cast from any browser window, but perhaps Amazon has found a way to block this capability. (Brian can manage to get the "cast" button to appear by opening up YouTube in a separate tab, but when he tries to cast the screen showing Twitch, it simply quits.) 

However, if the behemoth is hoping to force us into buying a new Amazon Fire Stick to stream "its" content, it's going to be disappointed. We've found not one but two work-arounds: we can either cast from the Twitch app on Brian's phone, or we can skip casting entirely and watch Critical Role on the tiny screen of Brian's laptop instead. It's not ideal, but we'd rather sit on the couch and peer at a tiny screen than give even $30 of our hard-earned cash to Amazon.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 3: Costco membership

Brian and I spent a few years waffling over the issue of whether to become Costco members. In 2012, while visiting the store with my in-laws, I was impressed with its prices on eco-friendly staple items like Fair Trade coffee and organic sugar. But the Costco coffee turned out to be terrible, and the following year I found a cheaper alternative at IKEA. I revisited the idea from time to time, perusing articles with titles like "9 Items that Will Single-Handedly Pay for Your Costco Membership" to figure out if we could get our money's worth out of joining, but the answer always seemed to be no.

What tipped us over the edge was Brian's discovery, in 2017, that he needed progressive-lens eyeglasses. He wasn't prepared to trust an online seller for a prescription this complicated, and Costco's prices were miles ahead of any other brick-and-mortar retailer's. The price they quoted us on a pair was over $180 less than our local optician's—enough to pay for a $60 membership more than three times over.

Once we'd become members, we quickly learned which of our staple items were the best deals at Costco. Some, like oats and raisins, were only slightly cheaper than at other stores where we shopped; others, like walnuts and organic sugar, were ahead by a country mile. In addition to these savings, we got considerable value out of our Costco credit card, which earned us 2% cash back at Costco itself, 3% back at restaurants, and 4% gas stations, all paid out annually in the form of Costco store credit. In 2019, I tallied up all these savings and concluded that our Costco membership was paying us back roughly three times as much as it cost us each year, even when we didn't happen to need new glasses.

Mind you, just because Costco membership has proved to be a good deal for us, that doesn't mean it would be for everyone. Some folks we know have tried it out and found that the prices on most items they buy weren't significantly better than the supermarket's. But for us, just these few staple items, plus the cash back from the credit card, are enough to make it a worthy investment.

Thrift Week 2024, Day 2: Raspberry canes

The second item in my "seven purchases that have paid for themselves" series is the topic of one of my most popular posts ever: our raspberry canes. We bought these in January 2013, planted them in March, and began harvesting our first few berries that summer. By September, I calculated that we were collecting about a pint of fresh, ripe, organic raspberries—roughly a $6 value—every week. At that rate, I figured, we'd get back the $41.50 we paid for them and then some in their first year alone, and we'd continue to harvest the same amount year after year.

As it turns out, that was a gross underestimate. The berries were more productive the second year than the first, and more productive still after we switched to a two-crop system. Production varies from year to year, but over the past three years, these canes have produced a total of 47.5 pints of berries. Meanwhile, the price of organic raspberries has more than doubled, reaching $13.85 per pint. That means in the last three years, we've harvested $658 worth of berries—about $219 worth per year. And we're just now getting to the point where we think we might need to replace a few of the 11-year-old plants.

The crazy thing is, these aren't necessarily the most productive crop in our garden. Last year, our plum trees yielded more than 94 pounds of fruit in total: 37.75 pounds of Opals, 21.15 pounds of Mount Royals, and 35.5 pounds of Golden Gages. The local farmers' market was charging about $2.61 per pound for plums at that time ($6 for a 2.3-pound basket), so our harvest was worth roughly $246, exceeding the value of the raspberry crop. 

However, the plums aren't as consistently productive as the raspberries; they seem to have fallen into a pattern of giving us one good crop every two years and nothing at all in the off years. Also, the three plum trees cost more up front than the dozen raspberry canes, and it took them several years to become productive. So we've definitely gotten more bang for our total buck from the raspberries than we have from the plums, though both have repaid our original investment (in money and time) many times over.

Which brings me to that popular post that the raspberry canes inspired. Most of it was about the process of building a trellis to support the canes so that we could more easily reach the fruit (and I'm pleased to say that after six years, that structure is still holding up just fine). But at the end, I waxed philosophical for a bit about the pleasure these raspberry canes had brought into our lives:

I was heading into the house with a bowlful of fresh raspberries I'd just picked for my lunch, and I was struck once again by the thought, "How incredibly lucky am I to have fresh berries there for the picking, right outside my door? What did we ever do to deserve this kind of bounty?"

Only this time, I realized immediately that I knew the answer to that question perfectly well: what we had done was to plant and tend the raspberry canes. With our own hands, we dug the bed; with our own hands, we planted them all in one chilly spring day; with our own hands, we mulched them and watered them and trimmed them and gave them a fresh dressing of compost every spring; and with our own hands, we built this new trellis to support them. And whenever we want to eat some, we go out and pick them with our own hands as well, braving the scratches for the sake of the berries. We earned this blessing.

And that, I think, sums up the ecofrugal life in a nutshell. It's a life full of blessings that have been earned. Home-baked bread, home-cooked meals, home-grown produce, hand-picked flowers, an abundance of clothing and furniture and books acquired by carefully picking through the offerings at yard sales and thrift stores. And I don't feel I appreciate these blessings any the less for knowing that I've worked for them, instead of having them gifted to me by some gracious and unseen Providence; on the contrary, I think being able to recognize in them the loving labor of my own hands makes me value them all the more.

I'll be back to count more of my ecofrugal blessings tomorrow, as Thrift Week continues.

Thrift Week 2024: Purchases that have paid for themselves

Since last year's abbreviated Thrift Week celebration focused on the least ecofrugal products money can buy, I thought it would be only fair for this year's to go the other way and look at some of the most ecofrugal products. Each day, I'll be looking at one specific purchase Brian and I have made that has paid for itself many times over. And I'm starting it off with one of the first purchases I ever discussed here on the blog: our pressure cooker.

When we bought this back in late 2011, it was kind of an impulse purchase. While visiting Brian's folks for Christmas, we saw an ad in the paper for a 5-quart pressure cooker on sale for $20 at J.C. Penney. On top of that, there was a $10-off coupon that reduced the net price to just $10. Even then, we came very close to passing it up, since we didn't "need" it, but we decided $10 wasn't too much to risk on a gadget that might be able to help us with a wide variety of cooking tasks.

Well, in the 12 years since, we have used this little pressure cooker countless times and gotten far more than our $10 worth out of it. In 2017, I was even inspired to write an article for Money Crashers about all the ways it has saved us money. For instance:

• It saves energy on cooking. It can make all kinds of things—rice, potatoes, barley, quinoa—much faster than a regular pot on the stove, reducing the amount of gas we need to burn for cooking. And the faster cooking time also means we heat up the kitchen less in the summertime.
• It helps us use dry beans. We used to use a lot of canned beans because dry beans, though cheaper, were too much hassle. In addition to requiring an overnight soaking, they needed over an hour of cooking to get them tender enough to eat—far more time than we could spare most nights. Now, we can soak the beans right in the pressure cooker in the morning, turn it on in the evening, and have them ready to use in as little as half an hour. Besides being cheaper, the dry beans produce far less packaging waste, and they take up a lot less room in the pantry.
• It makes homemade applesauce. Another product we used to buy fairly regularly was applesauce to go with potato kugel and other potato-based dishes. Not only did this produce a lot of packaging waste, but often the applesauce itself would start to grow fuzzy before we'd finished the jar. Now, with the help of our trusty pressure cooker, we just whip up a fresh batch of applesauce to go with every kugel. Pound for pound, this homemade stuff isn't necessarily cheaper than the kind in a jar, but it's definitely cheaper than buying a whole jar and having to discard half of it. And it tastes much, much better, even when it's made with the cheapest apples the store has to offer.
• 
  It doubles as a space heater. On cold winter days, Brian often fills up the pressure cooker with plain water in the morning and lets it come to a boil. Then he moves it to the office, where it sits on a trivet atop my desk and radiates heat throughout the day. It takes all day to cool off fully and allows me to stay comfortable without turning up the heat.
  

I'm so attached to this kitchen gadget that if we ever replace our gas stove with an induction model, we'll have to buy an adapter plate so we can keep using it. We could find ways to replace or get along without most of our non-ferrous cookware—our aluminum saucepans, our double boiler, even our big stock pot—but giving up the pressure cooker would be a deal-breaker.

Thrift Week (in one day) 2023: Stuff Green People Hate

If you've been reading my blog for several years, you may have noticed that I did not run my usual Thrift Week series this past week, as I have done every January since 2010. And you might reasonably have suspected that after 13 years, I had simply run out of good ideas for a whole week's worth of related posts. But actually, that wasn't the problem; I still had several possibilities in the pipeline that could have worked. The fact is that last Tuesday, when my birthday (which is also Ben Franklin's birthday and thus the official start of Thrift Week) rolled around, I happened to be busy with other stuff, and I just forgot.

Having remembered about this just now, on what would normally be the last day of Thrift Week, it seems a bit silly to start a weeklong series at this point. So, for this year only, I'm going to compromise by condensing a whole Thrift Week into a single post. Instead of seven short-to-medium posts on a single ecofrugal topic, you'll get one long post covering all seven ideas in list form. And the topic I've chosen for this Thrift Week blitz is: The Seven Least Ecofrugal Things You Can Buy. (It's sort of the anti-ecofrugal counterpart to my Stuff Green People Like series.)

When I first jotted down this idea, I planned to lead off the series with a Keurig coffee maker. This seemed like the perfect example of an anti-ecofrugal product, since it's both expensive and wasteful. The machines themselves start at $80, while a drip or French press coffeemaker can cost less than $20. Then there's the cost of the K-cups: $19.99 for 22 K-cups of Starbucks Breakfast Blend coffee, or 91 cents per cup. Compare that with the cost of the same coffee in whole bean form at Walmart: $13.24 for 18 ounces, which works out to 25 cents per cup assuming 47 cups per pound. On top of that, the K-cups are neither recyclable nor compostable, while the leftover grounds and filter from a press or drip machine (or my trusty Aeropress) can go straight into the compost bin. And they don't even make good coffee.

But this week's Washington Post presented an article on the topic that contradicted this view. As I noted last week, you probably can't read the article if you're not a subscriber, but the headline sums it up: "Single-use coffee pods have surprising environmental benefits over other brewing methods." It points to an environmental analysis published in The Conversation (which you can read with no paywall) that compared the carbon footprints of different brewing methods and found that the biggest factors are the coffee itself and the energy used to heat the water. The least wasteful method, assuming you use the recommended amounts of both, is instant coffee (though taste-wise it has even less to recommend it than the pods). But the much-maligned pod machine actually comes in second, since it limits the amount of coffee and water used per cup. The most wasteful method is the standard drip machine, which both uses the most ground coffee per cup and uses extra electricity to keep the pot warm. (The analysis didn't cover the Aeropress, but it did list the amount of coffee used in each method: 25 grams per cup for drip, 17 grams for a French press, 14 for a pod machine like the Keurig, and 12 for instant. I just now measured the amount I use in my Aeropress and it was 15 grams, so I'm doing about as well as a Keurig without all the plastic waste.)

This just goes to show that figuring out a product's ecological footprint can sometimes be a tricky business. So for my Least Ecofrugal list, I'm going to stick strictly to things that are so clearly wasteful (of money and everything else) that there's no realistic chance some smart bunch of scientists is going to come along and prove otherwise. And by that strict standard, my seven choices are:

1. A high-end sports car. I was originally going to say an SUV, since these vehicles are not only gas-guzzlers but are also more expensive to own than most other vehicles. But I have to concede that the data shows they are indeed safer for drivers (though they make the road less safe for everyone else). Sports cars don't offer even that benefit. 

In a 2019 Insider article on the nine most expensive vehicles to own, five of the nine were sports models. And on a 2021 list of the least fuel-efficient cars you can buy, sports cars also dominate. Some models are more efficient than others, but unless you're going for an all-electric (and really expensive) Tesla, they're never going to compete with a fuel-efficient sedan.

2. A boat. Everything that's wasteful about cars goes double for boats. I'm not talking about a little canoe here, obviously, but a big boat that costs money to fuel, maintain, dock, and insure. A longstanding joke among the yacht set is that owning a yacht is like standing in a cold shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills.

How many hundreds are we talking here? Well, according to Deep Sailing, the cost of boat ownership can be anywhere from $450 for a speedboat to $250,000 for a big yacht—per month. However, Watercraft 101 puts the cost much lower, saying that a boat that costs $20,000 to buy up-front will probably cost less than $3,000 per year to own. And Born Again Boating splits the difference, saying that a 23-foot boat will cost around $30,000 in its first year and $15,000 per year after that. The cost seems to depend a lot on what kind of boat it is and how it's financed. 

But here's the thing: unless you fish or run a ferry for a living, you don't actually need to own a boat at all. Unlike a car, a boat is used mainly for recreation, not transportation. So both the cost of ownership and the environmental cost of the boat's emissions are entirely unnecessary.

3. Cigarettes. This one's a no-brainer. At an average cost of $8 per pack, a pack-a-day smoker would spend over $2,900 per year on cigarettes alone. But that cost is just the tip of the iceberg. Smokers also pay significantly more for health care, health insurance, and home insurance, and they're less productive at work, reducing their ability to earn. According to a WalletHub study, the lifetime cost of being a smoker can be anywhere from $2.2 to $4.1 million. And from an environmental standpoint, tobacco not only pollutes the air that nonsmokers have to breathe, it's also responsible for habitat loss; soil degradation; pesticide pollution; deforestation; significant costs in water, energy, and transportation; and, of course, discarded cigarette butts all over the place.

4. Diamonds. You know who came up with the "rule" that a diamond engagement ring should cost two months' salary for the groom? Big surprise: it was the DeBeers diamond cartel, which has kept the price of diamonds artificially high for decades by deliberately restricting supply. One hundred years ago, most engagement rings didn't have diamonds in them at all. Then DeBeers launched a successful campaign to convince husbands-to-be that the only proper ring was a diamond, and moreover, a diamond costing a month's salary. This was such a success that DeBeers later bumped the figure up to two months' salary in the U.S. and three months' salary in Japan.

By 2021, according to The Knot, the average cost of an engagement ring in the U.S. had reached $6,000. (Granted, this figure may be skewed upward based on the magazine's readership.) And what do you get for that $6,000? Not an investment that produces any sort of return. Not an asset that you can sell for a profit, since the recipient is obviously expected to keep the ring as long as the marriage lasts. And definitely not a happier marriage, since a 2014 Emory University study found that the couples who spent most on their rings (between $2,000 and $4,000 in 2014 dollars) had a 30 percent higher risk of divorce than those who chose more affordable rings ($500 to $2,000). 

A big diamond ring is a pretty ornament and a status symbol, but it provides no tangible benefits whatsoever. And given all the environmental and human rights abuses associated with diamond mining, you're probably doing both the earth and your wallet a favor by choosing an old-fashioned ring with a different type of stone—or a modern one with a lab-created diamond. Or, if you're willing to break with this not-so-old tradition, doing what we did and skipping the engagement ring entirely.

5. An expensive wedding. You know what else that Emory study found increased the risk of divorce? Expensive weddings. Couples who spent between $10,000 and $20,000 on their weddings were 29 percent likelier to end up divorced than those who spent between $5,000 and $10,000; couples who spent over $20,000 increased their divorce rates by a whopping 46 percent. By contrast, couples who spent less than $5,000 (like us) actually reduced their risk. Couples who spent even less than we did—$1,000 or less—cut their divorce rate nearly in half. (Having a big wedding, with lots of guests, did not pose the same dangers: the couples with the most wedding guests actually had a lower risk of divorce than those with the fewest. Apparently, the real mistake is spending a lot of money on each guest.)

A frugal wedding like ours also eliminates many of the environmental costs associated with traditional weddings: elaborate invitations, single-use decorations, pesticide-laden cut flowers, gas-guzzling limos, and even one-use-only wedding attire. We didn't have any of that stuff, and we're still together after 18 years, so it clearly didn't hurt us any.

6. Marble countertops. I've complained before about the ubiquity and price of granite countertops, but marble is even worse. It's even more expensive than granite, at $15 to $190 per square foot, and even harder to care for. Since it's porous, you have to not only seal it but also use special, non-abrasive cleaners to avoid scratching it. It's also vulnerable to chipping and etching from acid. And it has all the same environmental problems from quarrying and transporting the heavy stone that granite does.

7. The latest smartphone. After many years of not owning a smartphone at all, I've finally come to accept that the benefits of these little gadgets outweigh their drawbacks. But there's a big difference between owning a smartphone and buying a new top-of-the-line phone every year. 

The financial costs are obvious. The latest, greatest iPhone has a starting price of $1,100; the latest Samsung Galaxy model costs $1,200. You could get around half of that price back by trading in last year's model, but you're still paying over $500 per year for new phones (not even counting the cost of the service). By contrast, my first smartphone, a bottom-of-the-line Motorola, cost $130, and I'd still be using it now if it hadn't developed a problem that I was unable to fix. 

But worse still is the environmental toll. Producing all those new phones requires a lot of rare materials like lithium, cobalt, and gold. Mining these materials is environmentally destructive, and disposing of them is hazardous. And while old smartphones can be reused and recycled, many users simply discard them when they upgrade.

It's clearly better for the environment to buy a decent phone, hang onto it as long as possible, and make sure it gets recycled when it finally becomes unusable. And it will clearly save you a bundle, too.

***

So there you have it: my selections for the seven least ecofrugal consumer purchases. If you think any of my choices are unreasonable, or if you think there's something even worse that I left off the list, let me know in the comments.

That's it until next Thrift Week, when I promise to be a little more on the ball about starting on the 17th. (This time, I'll get Google to remind me about it ahead of time.)

Thrift Week 2022, Day Seven: Share Stuff

And so we come at last to the final tenet of the Ecofrugal Manifesto...

Ecofrugal Principle #7: Share Stuff

When I say "stuff" here, I mean material things. It's nice, of course, to share feelings, or to share household responsibilities, or to share your wealth with others through charity, but none of that has much to do with ecofrugality. But sharing goods — that is, having one car, or one office, or one copy of a book for multiple people, rather than separate ones for each person — has everything to do with ecofrugality. Many people sharing one object means less cost for each person, and less cost for the earth than producing many copies of the same object.

Some examples of this include:

• Public libraries, which allow everyone in town to share the same books and videos 
• Other types of community "libraries" for sharing tools, toys, or seeds and seedlings
• Community gardens, which allow multiple people to garden on the same plot of land
• Ride sharing (other people giving you rides in their cars, so you don't need to own one), car sharing (many people sharing a fleet of cars, so they don't all need their own), and bike sharing (the same thing for bicycles)
• Coworking spaces, which allow people with different schedules to make use of the same office space
  

Of all the ecofrugal principles on my list, this is the one Brian and I personally make the least use of. We share with each other, of course, by having just one car, one TV, one tablet, and so on for the two of us. But we don't have as many opportunities as we'd like to share stuff with people outside our household. We do make extensive use of our local library, but we don't have access to any of the other cool "libraries" some towns have to offer, nor to a car sharing or bike sharing system that might allow us to do without a car or bike of our own. We have our own garden, so we don't have any need to join our local community garden. And even our local community cafe has now, sadly, converted to a normal payment model.

If I could change just one thing about our lifestyle, I think I'd like to have more opportunities to share stuff with our neighbors. It's not mainly about money (though we do, as I've calculated, save quite a lot by using the library, the one shared public resource available to us). And even the environmental benefits, though those could be significant, are secondary. What I really feel like we're missing out on is the opportunity to meet and interact with our neighbors, most of whom we don't really feel like we know. (We made a point of giving each of our next-door neighbors a bag of plums out of the crazy harvest we got last summer, but that was just a one-time exchange.)

Of course, even if we did have access to more shareable resources here in town, we probably wouldn't be allowed to use them right now. At the very least, they'd have safety protocols in place to prevent us from meeting and interacting with our neighbors there. So they wouldn't do much to lighten the social isolation of the pandemic.

But I feel like as 2022 progresses, as the omicron surge starts to ease off, as winter eases into spring and we can once again meet and mingle more outdoors, we should make more of a point of taking advantage of the community resources we do have. We should take more walks in the park, dine out at the outdoor community tables set up in the summer of 2020, go to events like the outdoor film series. In short, we should do all we can to be more involved in the life of our community. Getting to know our neighbors would be an added perk of living ecofrugally — and one that would make it easier to share knowledge about all the other aspects of ecofrugal living, too.