Open Your Home

    The gift economy is a really helpful concept for the budget-conscious, and it can help you, too. It may be time to reexamine everything you thought you couldn’t do and see if there is another way. Vacationing is a good example- you can trade homes and explore what you could not afford before, while offering the same in return. This free accommodation exchange will give you a really unique and much more personal view of a new place as well as a way to connect with people who live there. The idea is not new; Servas International (servas.org) was founded in 1949 and is recognized by the United Nations as a hospitality network. Check out the wildly successful and well organized CouchSurfing (couchsurfing.org) and Hospitality Club (hospitalityclub.org). And take time to look around the web; there are  many similar, smaller initiatives online catering to the budget traveler or people wanting to take a volunteer vacation in another hemisphere.

Start a Changepot

    This is exactly as it sounds: a pot for change. If you don’t mind stopping in the middle of a sidewalk or side of the road, pick up loose change that has fallen to the ground. Add your findings to the same pot and after a few months, see how much you have collected. If you’re strapped for cash, spend your findings on a nice meal for your family. If you are fairly stable financially, donate the money (anonymously) to a good cause.

Making Sure She Has a Night to Remember

    Did you know that many teen girls long to attend their high school prom but end up missing out on the tradition simply because a fancy dress is not in the family budget? Help these girls out by visiting glassslipperproject.org. Donate your old prom dress and shoes to the delightful folks at the Glass Slipper Project, a nonprofit organization that gives free prom dresses, shoes and accessories to high school juniors and seniors. Generosity can be very glamorous!

True Love Does Not Require a Diamond

    Precious gems and metals leave a horrific trail of pollution and human rights abuses. Not much more needs to be said about this one without getting into some seriously depressing territory, but we cannot discuss jewelry without acknowledging that many people pay a steep price in order to mine, produce, and export all those shiny little rocks we coyly call “a girl’s best friend.” There are so many ways to show your love and no suffering should be involved. Ever.

Hydrated and Saving the Planet

    Give up the bottled water. Please? Not only is it ridiculously priced and horrifically wasteful, but also it fails to offer any benefit over tap water. Many brands draw their water from a municipal supply- as in, the same water that comes out of your tap for free. Additionally, bottled water companies aren’t held to the same stringent standards as public waterworks. And, adding final insult to injury, plastic bottles can often leach harmful chemicals into the water and then languish in landfills for thousands of years if not properly recycled. It’s better for everyone involved if you carry a jar or reusable water bottle to fill up instead. Drinking from a Mason jar is the ultimate in chic, too!

Making the Most of a Rainy Day

Get a rain barrel:

• Install the rain barrel at least six feet from your house. Locating it near an area you’ll be watering the most makes for convenient use later
• Ensure that your rain barrel has an overflow at least as large as your inflow-for example, if you have rigged it so that water is collected directly from your eaves’ trough downspout, your overflow valve should be as large as your downspout as well. This will allow your rain barrel to get rid of excess water as fast as it collects it, which might be necessary if you live in a city with crazy, unpredictable weather like my brother does.
• If you are using the rain barrel to water your garden, consider using a soaker hose. You can attach the hose to the rain barrel and then run it through your garden so that it covers the area you’d like. Now, every time you see a rain cloud, you’ll get really excited!

Eat for the Environment

    Cutting back on meat consumption is good for the environment, your health, and your wallet. Producing one pound of beef puts as much carbon dioxide into the environment as driving a typical car 70 miles! Read “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” the 2006 UN paper about the effects of the meat industry on the environment and human populations, at fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e00.HTM

Go Solar

    Solar ovens are inexpensive and easy to use, and you’ll cook for free every time you use one. Since it doesn’t require electricity, fossil fuels, or propane, a solar oven is perfect for your emergency supply kit. They also pasteurize water for drinking. Check out solarovens.org to see the great work this nonprofit is doing with solar ovens in developing countries. Go solar and really worship the sun.

I Love Big Bags and I Cannot Lie

    Bring reusable shopping bags when heading to the store. Whether you are grocery shopping or heading out with friends to splurge on clothes, take your own bags with you. Many stores have totes and reusable bags for a few dollars by the checkout lines that are more durable, hold more objects, and last much longer than those flimsy paper and non-biodegradable plastic bags. Reusable shopping bags help the environment by using less plastic and cutting down fewer trees.

Power Down

    Switch off lights when you leave a room, don’t leave the faucet running if you’re not actively using it, use energy-saving light bulbs, opt for blankets over turning on the heater and choose portable fans over air conditioning… All of these will lower your utility bills and help preserve the planet. It just makes cents (get it?). If every household in the United States replaced one regular light bulb with one of those new compact fluorescent bulbs, the pollution reduction would be equivalent to removing one million cars from the road.

Cloth Napkins Are Nicer Anyway

    On average, an American uses around six napkins each day- 2,200 a year! If every American used even one less napkin per day, more than one billion pounds of napkins could be saved from landfills each year.

Planet-Positive and Paperless

    Try paying bills online. By some estimates, if all households in the US paid their bills online and received electronic statements instead of paper, we’d save 18.5 million trees every year, 2.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and 1.7 billion pounds of solid waste (50waystohelp.org).

Save the Planet, One Tree at a Time

    Buy an artificial Christmas tree. People love my blue and silver disco tree which I got at a yard sale a few years ago. It is very festive! On average, over 30 million Christmas trees are sold in the United States each year-those are trees we could be saving and using for oxygen, housing material, and paper products rather than as decoration for a small amount of time. When you purchase an artificial tree, you will save money within the first few years and they look just as nice without the mess of pine needles! For more information on the history of the Christmas tree, go to urbanext.illinois.edu/trees/facts.cfm.

Saving the Planet One Paper Towel at a Time

    Do you really need to use so many paper towels? One roll will last me at least one month at home. I have a whole shelf of well-used dish rags that started out their life as a nicely embroidered fabric and now are much more useful to me and the planet! Ditch the paper towels and facial tissues. Tea towels and dishcloths work pretty much everywhere you’d use a paper towel, and you can employ newspaper for the truly gnarly messes. As for facial tissue, toilet tissue works just as well at a fraction of the cost and without separate packaging. Why buy something twice?

By Your Hand

    Use a dishwasher. This might surprise you, but washing dishes by hand uses six times as much water and twice the amount of energy as built-in dishwashers.

Don’t Be Idle

    Turn off your car if you’re going to be idle for more than 30 seconds (unless you are stuck at a red light). This will help save gas money, lessen air pollutants, and improve your car’s fuel economy.

Lighten the Load on Our Environment

    Laundry can be a costly business, both financially and environmentally. Expensive conventional detergents and laundry aids are mostly derived from petroleum and often contain chemical fragrances and phosphates, which are known to deplete water of oxygen. This has devastating effects on fish-they basically starve and die. Eco-alternatives are much cheaper, just as effective, and so much better for our world. 

    At the store, look for phosphate-free, eco-friendly laundry detergent powder. The green brands use a soap base instead of petroleum, which works just as well without the deadly chemicals. You may even find that strange allergies and discomfort goes away as you eschew heavily chemical-laden soaps.

National Thrift Shop Day

    Donate to and shop at thrift stores. You’ll be recycling gently used items, supporting the local economy, and save money along the way. There are so many thrift stores working for charity but my favorite is this one in Denver that I discovered a couple of years ago while at a trade show: Denver-Cancer-Charity.org. What they are doing is so cool! The Cancer Cache Thrift & Gift Shoppe is operated as a not-for-profit charity that raises funds to provide free hats, wigs, scarves, and medical equipment to cancer patients. When I was undergoing treatment, I could never have afforded a wig or even a very nice hat, so these fabulous Rocky Mountaineers get my business every time. 

Open Your Home

    I think that once the pandemic is truly over, it's time to start thinking about treating ourselves to vacations. The gift economy is a really helpful concept for the budget-conscious, and it can help you, too. It may be time to reexamine everything you thought you couldn’t do and see if there is another way. Vacationing is a good example- you can trade homes and explore what you could not afford before, while offering the same in return. This free accommodation exchange will give you a really unique and much more personal view of a new place as well as a way to connect with people who live there. The idea is not new; Servas International (servas.org) was founded in 1949 and is recognized by the United Nations as a hospitality network. Check out the wildly successful and well organized CouchSurfing (couchsurfing.org) and Hospitality Club (hospitalityclub.org). And take time to look around the web; there are many similar, smaller initiatives online catering to the budget traveler or people wanting to take a volunteer vacation in another hemisphere.

Your Conscience Will Be Cleaner!

Save water by taking shorter showers.