In Praise of Freecycle

Brian and I are doing a little reorganization in our kitchen--a subject I might discuss at more length in another entry, but for now I only mention it because part of the process is clearing out the cabinets and getting rid of unwanted items. Getting rid of stuff is always difficult for us, because we both just hate to throw away anything that's "still good," even if we know we'll never actually use it. But luckily for us, this is where Freecycle comes in.

In case there's anyone out there who doesn't already know, Freecycle is a worldwide network of online communities that help people reuse unwanted stuff. If you have something you want to get rid of, you post an entry like this:

Title: OFFER: left-handed golf clubs
From: Lobelia
Date: 13:39, 26 Oct 2009
Location: Hobbiton
Description: Set of left-handed golf clubs. I don't play golf and I'm not left-handed. Don't ask me what I'm doing with them. Quick pick-up preferred.

And within a day, usually, you will get at least one request for the unwanted item from another member. In fact, it's not unusual to get a deluge of requests within the first couple of hours. (You can choose to give it to anyone you wish, though I usually follow a first-come, first-served policy.) In the past five years, I have successfully used Freecycle to get rid of many items, including:

• an eight-year-old Macintosh computer
• several old textbooks
• a reel-type lawn mower with a wheel that (as I stated quite openly) didn't stay on very well
  
• a Weed Whacker with a motor that was (as I also stated quite openly) on the verge of burning itself out
• an old CRT monitor
• a surplus of rubber bands

We have also acquired a few items from Freecycle, including books, videotapes, and most notably, the "jungle adventure" tent that turned out to be the most successful gift we gave to any of our nieces and nephews last Christmas. And while we've never actually used Freecycle to request a specific item, I have seen people ask for and get all kinds of things, from computers to out-of-print books.

So, if there is anyone out there in cyberspace who does not yet belong to a Freecycle group: try it, you'll like it.

Thrift Week, Day Seven: Clothing

Well, we've finally made it to the end of Thrift Week. (Whew! Writing an entry every day is harder than I expected.) Our topic for the seventh and final day is clothing--or, as the Consumer Expenditures Survey puts it, "apparel and services"--which costs the average household $1,801 per year. Not surprisingly, clothing for women and girls accounts for the largest share of this expense ($718 per year), followed by clothing for men and boys ($427), footwear ($314), and "other apparel products and services" ($248). I assume "services" refers to dry cleaning and the like. The smallest item in the clothing budget is clothing for children under two, which costs the average family only $93 per year.

I'm going to hazard a guess that the reason clothes for young children cost so much less than clothes for older children and adults is not just that little bitty clothes require less fabric and therefore cost less; I suspect that many children under two years old are clothed largely, or at least partly, in hand-me-downs. Children this young grow out of their clothes long before they wear out, so naturally it makes sense to pass them down to a younger sibling or an acquaintance. However, what's less obvious is that many adults and older children, for one reason or another, also discard clothes before they're worn out. Kids over two may continue to outgrow their clothes while they're still in good condition; adults, as I can sadly attest, may also outgrow their clothes, or in other cases, shrink out of them. Also, picky adults may discard clothes in good condition because they're not the latest style, or because they've just grown tired of them. As a result, buying (or otherwise acquiring) secondhand can help adults and older kids dress themselves just as cheaply as the little ones. And as always, buying secondhand is a sustainable choice as well, because it saves resources and prevents waste.

The best way to find secondhand clothes will depend on your particular wardrobe needs. If you work in corporate America and need to look natty when you show up at the office, you may need to stick to the higher-end thrift shops and consignment shops. You may pay as much or more for a secondhand garment at one of these stores as you would for a new one at a cheaper retail store, such as Sears or J.C. Penney, but the piece will probably be of higher quality. (You can at least be sure that it won't fall apart after the first washing, since it's already had one.)

If you work in a more, ahem, casual environment, as I do, you have a wider range of options. No-frills thrift shops, like Goodwill, offer a wide range of clothes at anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of what they'd cost new. You do have to look each item over a bit more carefully before you buy, as it might have stains or other damage that would cause a consignment shop to reject it. Clothes at yard sales can be even cheaper--one or two dollars per garment or even less--but you usually can't try them on, so you have to size them up by eye only. (Of course, if it doesn't fit, you're only out a dollar, so "when in doubt, buy it" can be a reasonable approach.)

The only thing better than cheap, of course, is free, and there are several ways to get free clothes. Single garments or batches of items often show up on Freecycle, but of course, you don't get to try them on--or, in most cases, even look at them--before deciding whether to take them. Still, if you're willing to pick up a batch, keep what you like, and re-list the rest, you can get stuff you like this way without paying a penny. If you need to see what you're getting, you can get free clothes by having a clothing swap. (Some folks call these "naked lady parties," but there's no reason men can't have them too.) Just pull a bunch of items you don't want anymore out of your wardrobe, then get together with several friends who have all done the same, and pick out new-to-you clothes from what everyone's brought. The leftovers can go to Goodwill or some other organization.

A few other ways to save money and resources on clothing:

• As much as possible, avoid clothes that require dry-cleaning. A dress that looked like a great bargain in the thrift shop may more than double its cost with the first cleaning. And the chemicals used by most dry-cleaners are appallingly toxic.
• Give a darn! That is, repair holes to keep garments usable longer. Try to catch the holes while they're little--a stitch in time literally does save nine.
• If you don't sew, or if an item is beyond your abilities to fix, consider taking it to a professional tailor or seamstress for repairs. You can also get a professional to alter clothes that no longer fit you and extend their useful life. It may not seem worth fixing a secondhand garment if the cost of the repair is more than what you originally paid for it, but it may look better if you compare the cost with what it would cost to replace. And even if it costs as much to fix as it would to replace, you're still saving natural resources. Repairing shoes is even more worthwhile--a good pair of shoes that's molded to your feet is a real treasure, something a new pair really can't replace.

Well, that wraps up our celebration of Thrift Week. Hope you've all enjoyed it. We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging.

Thrift Week, Day Six: Insurance

Today's topic is insurance, which I realize I actually should have covered back on Day Four, because it's the fourth-largest expense in the average household budget ($5,605 per year, or 11.1 percent of total expenditures). What's odd is that this figure covers only "personal insurance and pensions." It doesn't include health insurance (which is covered under medical expenses), auto insurance (under transportation), or homeowners/renters insurance (under housing). Instead it covers "life and other personal insurance" and "Social Security and pensions." This makes it a tricky topic for me to address, because we actually don't have a entry in our budget for these expenses. They either come out of Brian's paycheck before he lays hands on it, or they get lumped in under taxes and savings. So these are sort of "invisible" expenses for us.

In fact, I have to admit that I don't really think of these as "expenditures" as all. I mean, an expenditure is money that you spend--you pay it to someone, and you (presumably) get something in exchange. But Social Security contributions aren't an expenditure; they're part of your taxes. Taxes aren't so much an expenditure as a force of nature, like the weather. You may not like the weather, and you may not like the way your tax money gets spent, but in either case, there's not a whole lot you can do about it (not directly, at any rate). So you pretty much just have to live with it.

As for "pensions," well, I'm not entirely sure what they mean by that. I think of a "pension" as a kind of guaranteed benefit that you get from your employer or, in some cases, from the government--not one you pay for yourself. But it sounds like the Bureau of Labor Statistics is using the term to include all types of retirement funds. The thing is, contributions to a retirement fund aren't really an "expenditure" either. You're not spending that money; you're saving it for the future. True, that means you don't have it right now to spend on something else, but the money isn't gone. It's still your money, just set aside for retirement.

So as far as actual expenditures go, areas in which you could save money by making smarter choices, that just leaves life insurance in this category. And that's an area about which I know little to nothing. I've never actually paid for a life insurance policy in my life. I've never needed it because there's never been anyone dependent on my income. And the basic life insurance policy that comes with Brian's work benefits would be quite adequate to take care of me if he died unexpectedly. So I guess the only useful advice I can offer about life insurance is to figure out how much you need, and carry that much and no more.

Here's how my favorite financial writer, Andrew Tobias, put it in his The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need:

If you're single with no dependents, you need little--to assist with burial expenses and, posthumously, pay off debts--or none. The great push to sell college students life insurance is not entirely unlike the selling of ice to Eskimos, except that a lot more insurance is sold that way than ice.

If you're married, with a hopelessly incompetent spouse, a family history of heart disease, and a horde of little children, you should carry a great deal of insurance. Less if your spouse has a reliable income. Less still if you have fewer children or if those children have wealthy and benevolent grandparents. And still less as those children grow up.

If you are very rich, you need no insurance at all, except as it is helpful in providing liquidity to settle your estate. If you live richly off a high income but own outright little more than a deck of credit cards and some cardigan sweaters, it will take a lot of insurance to keep from exposing your dependents to an altogether seamier side of life when you are gone.

I guess you can probably tell why he's my favorite financial writer. How many other financial writers are actually fun to read?

Thrift Week, Day Five: That's entertainment!

At $2,835 a year, entertainment accounts for 5.6 percent of the average American household's spending. The Consumer Expenditures Survey defines entertainment rather broadly; it encompasses "fees and admissions" (presumably to movies, shows, museums, and so on), "audio and visual equipment and services," "pets, toys, hobbies, and playground equipment," and a catch-all "other" category. Rather oddly, however, it does not include "reading," which falls into a category by itself. Tack it on to the entertainment budget, and the total rises to $2,976 per year, nearly as much as health care.

The cost of reading materials--$116 per year--is dwarfed by the $1,036 per year that the typical household spends on "audio and visual equipment and services." This might suggest that most Americans do more TV-watching than reading, but there's another explanation as well; books, newspapers, and magazines can often be enjoyed a lot more cheaply than audio and visual media. If you are lucky enough to live near a good public library, as we do, you can find many, if not most, of the books you'd like to read without having to pay a cent (and without having to find shelf space for them when you're done). And if you have a fast Internet connection, you can read many newspapers and magazines online--along with some other content that doesn't exist in paper form. In fact, this article on the Consumer Expenditures Survey site suggests that increasing numbers of Americans may be doing just that, as consumers spend more each year on Internet service and less on newspaper and magazine subscriptions.

However, all those folks using the Internet to save on reading might not realize that it could help them with those "audio and visual services" as well. As I noted earlier, with our little media spud, we can get pretty much all our TV through the Internet, using some combination of Hulu and downloads from the network sites. At some point, we might spring for a Netflix account to get access to the more obscure shows that we can't get for free--but at $9 a month, it's still a lot cheaper than $55 a month for a basic cable package with 90 channels, only 5 of which we would ever watch.

Similarly, the local library can be a way to save on those "fees and admissions." Our library's selection of videos and DVDs may not be as large as you might find in a Blockbuster Video, but it's a lot more interesting. Most of last year's movies that were of interest to us--including Up, Slumdog Millionaire, and Julie and Julia--can be found there. And we've discovered that we actually enjoy the whole experience of watching them at home more than we enjoy seeing them in a theater. There are no screaming children (or screaming adults on their cell phones), and we don't have to sit through half an hour of advertisements and trailers for films we would never want to see before we get to the film itself. (Digression: What on earth makes the theater owners think that if I show up to see, say, the latest Harry Potter movie, that means that I would be interested in all manner of action films composed mostly of explosions? And don't get me started on the stuff they subject you to if you show up to watch an animated film.) The seats are more comfortable, the popcorn is free (or at least cheap), and if we have to pee, we don't have to climb over several hostile strangers (twice) and miss ten minutes of the movie.

As for "pets, toys, and hobbies"--well, that would be a whole entry in itself.

Thrift Week, Day Four: Health care (or the lack thereof)

The scheduled topic for day four of Thrift Week is health care, which costs the average American household $2,976 per year, or 5.9 percent of total spending. Of course, this average figure is misleading. Some people pay far more, as this conversation on the Dollar Stretcher forums reveals. Our annual medical expenses, by contrast, come to less than half the national average.

So, you may ask, how do we do it? What thrifty strategies do we employ to keep our health-care costs so low? Answer: pure luck. For one thing, we are lucky enough not to have any serious health problems. But also, Brian is lucky enough to work for an employer that provides a very generous health plan, for both him and his spouse, at a very reasonable cost. If he were ever to lose this job, we would be forced into the private health-care market, and our annual expenses (including premiums, copayments, and medications) would more than sextuple overnight.

So I can't offer any advice about how to be thrifty in the area of health care. Basically, the US has an absurd, arcane health-care system in which the quality of the care you receive and the amount you pay for it are determined almost entirely by luck. If you're lucky enough to have a good employer, or a good union, you will probably have a good health plan; if you're unlucky enough to be unemployed, or employed by a small company that can't afford a good plan, or employed by a big company that refuses to pay for a good plan, you won't. And because of the outcome of the Massachusetts election, there is pretty much no hope that this expensive, inefficient, and unjust system will change any time in the foreseeable future.

Thrift Week, Day Three: Food

The topic for day three of Thrift Week is food, glorious food. The average American household spends $6,443 a year on food, plus another $444 on alcoholic drinks. Together, they account for 13.7 percent of the household budget.

Food is another area in which the "eco" part of ecofrugal can sometimes come into conflict with the "frugal" part. Not always, of course. In many cases, the most sustainable food choices are also the cheapest. For example, the biggest-ticket items on many people's grocery bills--meat and prepared or processed foods--are also the ones with the biggest environmental impact. Replacing meat with beans and processed foods with whole foods will save money and help the environment at the same time. But in other cases, the sustainable choice can cost more. An obvious example is organic foods, which can cost anywhere from 20 percent to 100 percent more than their conventional counterparts. A much less obvious one is local, seasonal produce. Logically, if it's the middle of winter, then apples that were grown at an orchard less than 100 miles away and stored in a cold room for the winter should obviously be cheaper than nectarines, a summer fruit, that were shipped all the way from Chile. Yet thanks to the vagaries of supply and demand, it doesn't always work out that way. Here in the so-called Garden State, the big supermarkets (which tend to have lower prices) are more likely to carry imported produce rather than local produce. Thus, you can buy imported nectarines for $2 a pound in February at the Mega-Mart, but to get local apples, you have to go to the natural food store the next town over and pay $2.50 a pound. In a situation like that, what's the frugal choice?

My approach, as with transportation, is to look for the middle ground. Since organic foods cost 60 percent more than conventional foods on average, I've set that as my arbitrary limit on how much more I'm willing to pay for them. If the price differential is less than 60 percent, I consider the organic food to be a good value. If it's more, I'll choose the conventional version--with a few exceptions. For foods with high pesticide levels, like peaches, strawberries, grapes, and peanut butter, I'll always buy organic. The same goes for foods for which conventional growing practices are especially damaging to the environment, like sugar, coffee, and cocoa. (Actually, for coffee and cocoa, the working conditions are a bigger concern than the environment. So I buy Fair Trade, which usually means buying organic as well.)

For most people, eating 100 percent virtuous food may not be practical, or even possible. If you live in an area with a short growing season, there may be no way to feed yourself year-round with only local, organic foods. There are always compromises to make, so I guess it comes down to a question of deciding what you can live with. For me, that means striking a balance between the financial cost and the environmental cost--a balance I continue to adjust over time as circumstances (my own, and the world's) change.

Thrift Week, Day Two: Transportation

Welcome to Day Two of Thrift Week. Today's topic is transportation, the second-biggest item in the average American budget. For the average American household, transportation costs $8,604 a year, or 17 percent of total expenses. That includes the cost of automobile purchases, gas and oil, maintenance and repairs, and public transportation, plus a few miscellaneous expenses like drivers' licenses and auto registrations.

Transportation is a tricky area for the ecofrugal. On one hand, most forms of mass transit, like buses and trains, have a lower carbon footprint than driving--especially driving alone, as so many commuters do. But if you already own a car, it's probably cheaper to drive it than it is to take the bus or the train. After all, you've already paid (or are still paying) for the car itself and the insurance, so all you save by not driving it is the cost of gas. And gas has to get pretty expensive to make driving more expensive than transit, at least around here. As an example: back when I was single and living in Princeton, I used to ride a little train called the Dinky to my job in Princeton Junction. The trip was only a couple of miles each way, but it cost $3.75 round trip--$16.25 per week. At the time, I owned a very fuel-efficient compact car that got about 36 miles to the gallon, so driving that 40 miles per week instead would have used up a little more than a gallon of gas. At the time, gas was only about $1.50 per gallon, so I was paying about $14 extra each week for the privilege of riding the train. (I was willing to pay it because I found the 35-minute commute by train, which included a one-mile walk to the Dinky station and ten minutes of reading or doing crosswords on the train, so much more pleasant than the 20-minute commute by car, which included about 10 minutes of actual driving and 10 minutes of sitting in traffic and fuming.) Taking the Dinky might have been an economical option if it had allowed me to give up my car entirely. But I relied on the car to get me to places where I couldn't go by bus or train--places that literally had no bus or train stop within 5 miles. And this was in New Jersey, a state that has a better mass transit system that most.

So what are the ecofrugal to do? Well, there is some middle ground. For instance, Brian and I can't make do without a car--but we can easily make do with just one car for the two of us. At my old job, I could commute by train, so I didn't need a car most days; now that I work from home, I need one even less often. His job allows him to commute by bike in nice weather, which, unlike mass transit, doesn't cost any extra (the cost of maintaining the bike is only a few dollars a month, which is offset by the savings on gas) and offers a cheap, healthy alternative to joining a gym. Carpooling is another useful option. These days, our car makes very few trips of more than a few miles with only one person in it; usually it carries both of us, or the two of us plus a friend. This lowers the cost-per-person of driving, both in dollars and in pollution. And finally, living in a walkable community saves us money on transportation. We might have been able to find a cheaper home in a suburban area, but by choosing to live in a town with a real town center, we put ourselves within walking distance of the library, the grocery store, the drugstore, the post office, and most of the other places we might need to run errands in a typical week. So the extra money we spent on housing comes back to us in transportation savings, as well as health benefits and a better overall quality of life.

Anyone else want to share ideas about ways to be thrifty with transportation?