reduce

23 Effortless Ways to Go Green (and Save Money, Too)

Dr Penny Pincher — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 08:00:09 +0000

Believe it or not, going green and saving money often directly align, since consuming fewer resources results in less pollution and costs less, as well. Here are a few ways to help the earth by spending less — or even by spending nothing! (See also: 12 Green Living Habits That'll Save You Every Month)

1. Eat less meat

Eat less red meat and move down the food chain for cheaper food and less environmental impact. You could also incorporate a meat-free day of the week to scale back on meat consumption, while also helping the environment and spending less on groceries. (See also: 35 Slow Cooker Recipes for Busy (or Lazy) Vegetarians)

2. Fight food waste

The best way to spend less on food is to throw less food away. Shop carefully to avoid overbuying, and preserve excess food items to reduce food waste going to the landfill.

3. Drink tap water

Infrastructure is already in place to provide drinking water to your home, so why pay extra to have drinking water bottled and shipped hundreds of miles or more? (See also: 8 Things We Keep Buying That Are Killing the Planet)

4. Resist fast food

Cut down on fast food with its wrappers, bags, boxes, disposable cups, and plastic straws. You'll keep waste out of the landfill and save money, too.

5. Catch water with a rain barrel

Use a rain barrel to provide water for your plants with no chlorine or other added chemicals. This saves the energy of pumping water out of the ground, and you'll save on your water bill.

6. Create a no-mow zone

Consider creating a natural space in your yard that does not require mowing. This will save time and energy mowing, and provides a habitat for wildlife in your yard. (See also: Turn Your Backyard Into a Wildlife Refuge for Under $40)

7. Drive a gas-sipper, not a gas-guzzler

Get the most fuel-efficient car that meets your daily needs. If you occasionally need more capacity, you can borrow or even rent a vehicle and still come out ahead. You'll spend less on gas every day and add less pollution to the air.

8. Air up your car tires

Keeping your tires fully inflated is the easiest thing you can do to improve your fuel economy. Air up your tires for a couple quarters at the gas station to save money — and gas — every time you drive.

9. Walk whenever possible

Everyone knows you can save money and burn less gas by walking or riding a bike instead of driving. If this is not feasible, try to combine trips to reduce how much driving you need to do.

10. Use public transit or carpool

You may be able to have someone else drive you to work, freeing up some time to read and relax on the ride while saving gas, too. If you do not have convenient mass transit in your area, see if your employer has organized a carpool, or start your own.

11. Send email, not snail mail

Use email rather than snail mail for letters, paying bills, and sending greeting cards to reduce the carbon footprint from trucking mail around. Plus, you can also save money on postage.

12. Avoid gratuitous tech upgrades

It takes a lot of resources and energy to produce a technology device. Before you get rid of your current device and pay extra get the new model, consider whether the upgrade is really worthwhile.

13. Use rechargeable batteries

If you find yourself throwing away a lot of batteries, pick up some rechargeable batteries you'll save money and reduce waste from spent batteries going to the landfill.

14. Resist Ctrl+P

Work to reduce the amount of printouts and paper copies of documents you make. Save paper, ink, toner, space, and money but cutting back on printing.

15. Reduce A/C and heating

In summer, turn off the A/C and open the windows (and maybe turn on a fan). In the winter, turn down the heat and put on a sweater. You'll end up saving fossil fuel and money.

16. Replace furnace filters

Regularly replace your furnace filter with a clean one so your heating and cooling system runs at higher efficiency, saving money and energy.

17. Reduce wasted electricity

Turn off unused lights and unplug appliances when you're done using them to reduce your electric bill and your demand for electric energy production.

18. Dry clothes on a clothesline

Use free solar power in your yard to dry clothes on a clothesline. Save money, electricity, and wear-and-tear on your clothes dryer.

19. Use LED bulbs

An easy green upgrade is to replace your incandescent light bulbs with LED light bulbs. This will save you money on your electric bill and reduce your energy consumption to light your home.

20. Reduce disposable products

After realizing how many plastic spoons and forks I was throwing away at lunch, I took a set of silverware from home to work and use it every day. Try to identify disposable products you are using and replace them with reusable products instead.

21. Buy stuff that lasts longer

The initial cost of higher quality products may be higher, but the overall cost of ownership is lower over the life of the product. Longer-lasting products are greener than products that need to be replaced after a short life, as it requires less resources to meet a lower product demand.

22. Just say 'no' to excessive packaging

Choose products that minimize packaging, and therefore waste. For example, use refillable dispensers for items such as hand soap and laundry soap that you can replenish from an efficient bulk container. The bulk supply is often cheaper than buying a new dispenser each time, too.

23. Use reusable shopping bags

Paper or plastic? How about neither! Some stores offer a discount if you bring your own shopping bag. For example, a local store near me offers 10 cents per bag discount, or you can donate it to charity. Plus, I find that my reusable bags are sturdier and better protect my items than disposable plastic bags.

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This article is from Dr Penny Pincher of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Best Money Tips: Ways to Reduce Vet Bills

Ashley Jacobs — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 09:00:29 +0000

Welcome to Wise Bread's Best Money Tips Roundup! Today we found some amazing articles on reducing vet bills, living without a car, and haggling for a better price on everything.

Best Money Tips: Ways to Reduce Your Water Bill

Ashley Jacobs — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 10:08:59 +0000

Welcome to Wise Bread's Best Money Tips Roundup! Today we found some stellar articles on reducing your water bill, cutting wedding costs when you are the guest, and keys to success.

10 Ways to Reuse Common Household Items

Janey Osterlind — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:00:22 +0000

If you’re anything like me, you’re throwing out too much with the trash. Even though I recycle, I often think that I could surely be doing more to cut down on waste. With a little creative thinking, I’ve come up with a list of 10 household items I could be saving rather than tossing out. Here they are, along with some of the ways they can be reused. (See also: Garbage Into Gold: Great Ways to Recycle Old Containers)

Dish Soap Bottles

Use an old, thoroughly cleaned dish soap bottle (or any squeeze bottle) to dole out a perfect amount of pancake batter onto a hot griddle. You can also use a squeeze bottle as a convenient way to fill an iron with water or water out-of-the-way plants.

Egg Cartons

Used egg cartons (preferably well-cleaned Styrofoam ones) are excellent for freezing individual portions of all kinds of things — cookie dough batter, meatballs, homemade herb-butter patties. You could also use the cartons as convenient Jell-O molds for fun treats. They're also a great way to start seedlings for your garden. And if you have enough, use the cartons to store golf balls or organize change, which is especially convenient for garage and bake sales.

Floor Tiles

Make a beautiful piece of mosaic art. Gather up unused remnant tiles (or ask for some from your local home-improvement store), break carefully into pieces in a cloth bag, and arrange in a pattern on any solid surface. Adhere with floor-tile adhesive, and use a putty knife to push grout into the cracks after the adhesive dries. Wipe excess grout away with a damp cloth before it sets. You can also make a mosaic table or use large tiles to make an old tabletop new. Smaller tiles can be used for trivets.

Old Socks

Use the lone socks that the sock gnome left behind to keep small toys organized or to keep odds and ends like screws and paper clips in one convenient location. You could also put old socks over your shoes when doing something messy (like painting), or when your shoes are a wreck but you need to run inside for a minute. Feel free to hand them out to maintenance men and repairmen who tromp through your house, too. Try using others as dog or cat toys — put a tennis ball in one for the dog, or catnip in the cat’s, and sew closed. (See also: 10 DIY Dob Toys You Can Make for Pennies)

Old T-Shirts

When your husband’s fraternity T-shirts have more holes in them than the family colander, it’s time to retire the man-jersey. Pay homage to his favorite tees by sewing them into a pillow (for the man-cave), or just throw them into the dog’s crate. Better yet, use those babies for cleaning rags or to wrap breakables when moving. Your husband will appreciate his old shirts being given new life. Maybe.

Paper Towel Rolls

Keep your plastic bags contained by stuffing them in an empty paper towel roll. And while you’re at it, keep extension cords untangled by rolling them up and putting them through a paper towel roll. You can also organize hair bands and hair clips, roll your linens around paper towel rolls to keep them crease-free, or make boot trees so your over-the-knee boots won’t get unsightly creases in them after spending the summer slouched over in the back of your closet.

Plastic Shopping Bags

You already know how to keep plastic shopping bags contained in an empty paper towel roll. Now put the bags to use by lining bathroom waste cans with them. If you collect enough, plastic bags make excellent packing material in place of those awful packing peanuts. They’re also great for keeping flour and sugar from spilling all over your pantry shelves.

Shoe Boxes

Being a small-time shoe diva myself, I’ve collected more than my fair share of empty shoe boxes over the years. I put the boxes to good use by making them into storage bins for my closet — rather than spend a fortune on matching boxes, I’ve wrapped them all in similar wrapping paper and printed off labels for easy identification. I also use empty shoe boxes as dresser-drawer organizers. You might also want to use your empty shoe boxes for, well, shoe storage. Take pictures of your inventory and tape them to the outside of the boxes to quickly spot the pair you’re looking for in the closet.

Shower Curtains

I know this is a surprise, but I have somehow accumulated a number of old shower curtains over the years. I plan on using some as tablecloths for an outdoor gathering, while others I’ll use as drop cloths the next time I paint the walls. Another will be reused as a windshield cover to prevent frost build-up. Simply cut the shower curtain to the size of your windshield and hem in magnets to keep the cover in place. The magnets should stick to your car's metal windshield frame (see this windshield cover for an idea of how it should work). (See also: 3 Cheap and Easy Formulas for Homemade Windshield De-Icer)

Wine Corks

Don’t just toss all the wine corks you’ve accumulated over the years! Make a floating keychain to keep track of your keys the next time you set sail, or use another to safely store knives in a drawer. Use some to make a stylish wreath for your front door. You could also make an actual cork board to hold messages and important pieces of paper. (See also: 25 Things to Do with Used Corks)

What about you? Are there any household items that you reuse in a creative way, or do you have another use for one of these items? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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This article is from Janey Osterlind of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Preparing for a Recession

Philip Brewer — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:14:06 +0000

I don't know if a recession is coming. Nobody does. We may dodge the bullet for a while. On the other hand, the economy may already be in recession. You don't need to know the future, though, to make some wise moves.

Recessions hit everybody differently, so we'll take a look at how things tend to play out for people in different situations. First, though, it helps to understand what a recession is. (See also: The Recession Glossary)

What Happens in a Recession

A recession is a reduction in the total amount of business done in the economy.

When conditions are right for a recession almost anything can set one off — anything that prompts businesses to decide to produce less, or prompts consumers to decide to buy less. High oil prices, for example, may lead consumers to cut back on food and clothing purchases so they can afford enough gasoline to get to their job. A credit squeeze may force businesses to scale back, because they can't borrow enough to buy all the raw materials they need to keep their factories running at full capacity.

Once a recession gets started, it tends to spread. Every business that sells less also buys less — meaning their suppliers are doing less business. Pretty soon, all those businesses are laying off employees — meaning a bunch of would-be consumers no longer have any income, so they're buying less as well.

How It Affects You

A slowdown in business hits you directly if you own a business. It hits you one step removed if you work for a business (or want to) — jobs will be harder to find, raises will be smaller, layoffs will be more common.

A lot of people don't work for a business. Some work for governments (federal, state, local). Others work for institutions, large and small: colleges, universities, hospitals, orchestras, art centers, food pantries, land trusts (any of which may be purely independent or government-sponsored to some extent). People who work for governments or institutions are a second step removed from the impact of a recession, but that doesn't make them immune. The decline in business activity always reduces tax receipts to governments, leading to cutbacks especially at the state and local level. A general decline in prosperity often reduces charitable donations, leading to cutbacks at private institutions. Again: fewer jobs, less secure jobs, smaller raises.

There are also, of course, people who don't work in the money economy. Putting aside children and non-working spouses (who face the same circumstance as their family breadwinner), I divide these people into two groups — the ones who are actually out of the money economy (subsistence farmers, freegans, prisoners), and the ones who are are in the money economy but their income doesn't depend on the work they do (the wealthy, retirees, people on welfare).

It's an important distinction, because people in the second category are depending on promises — the income from investments, pensions, social security, welfare, and the like — which are at best only as sound as the finances of whoever is paying the money. In a recession, that soundness is threatened.

If you live on promises, remember that promises get broken — especially in a recession.

What to Do

So, what can you do to soften the blow if a recession hits?

Reduce Your Expenses

The first key, whether your income is tied to a business or not, is to reduce fixed expenses. High variable expenses can be tolerated, as long as there's an income stream to pay them. But high fixed expenses will wreck your finances very quickly if the income stream dries up. This means reducing debt and avoid new obligations (fitness center memberships, burglar alarm contracts, etc.). For businesses, it means postponing hiring (hire temps instead) and postponing raises (instead, offer bonuses conditioned on profits).

Increase Your Emergency Fund

The second key is to boost your emergency fund. A temporary income shortfall doesn't need to become a financial catastrophe, as long as you have enough cash on hand to tide yourself over. Resist the temptation to rely on credit as your emergency fund. It can be tempting to figure that paying down revolving debt frees up part of your credit line for use in a future emergency, but that's not the same as an emergency fund. At any time, but especially during a recession, lenders can cut credit limits, refuse to extend further credit, or simply get out of the business entirely. Have an emergency fund that doesn't depend on someone making you a loan. (After all, the classic reason to tap an emergency fund is when you've just lost your job — which is exactly the time that a creditor would be especially likely to cut off your credit.)

Diversify Your Income

The third key is to diversify your income sources. If your goal were maximum total income, diversity would probably be the wrong choice. There's almost certainly one income stream that would give you the highest total income if you put all your effort there. The problem is, that's not a stable strategy. A better choice, especially if a recession is in the offing, is to try to arrange several income streams, some of which don't depend too much on a thriving economy.

Reduce Your Dependence on Money

The fourth key is to reduce your dependence on money economy. This is the one sure way to protect your family from recession — provide for their needs without having to spend money. It seems unnatural in today's world for people to grow their own food and make their own clothes, but, to the extent that you can do so, you're in a position to just ignore the ups and downs in the economy. All the other options are just stop-gaps — they help you keep things together until the economy picks up again. This one actually solves the problem.

Same Strategies, Different Balance

Wise Bread readers will recognize these four strategies as the same core principles that we talk about all the time, so I'm not telling you to do something new. Rather, I'm suggesting that you alter the balance. The downside of all these strategies is that in good economic times they result in a lower standard of living than you could achieve if you followed more mainstream personal finance strategies. In bad economic times, though, these are the winning strategies.

In good economic times, a business that refuses to use debt to grow will inevitably fall behind its more aggressive competitors. In bad economic times, the business that avoids debt will survive while the others will fail. For individuals, the calculation leans even more away from debt.

On top of that, a recession provides many opportunities for someone with ready cash. When no one else is buying, someone with cash in hand can get some terrific bargains — enough to catch up with years' worth of "lost opportunities" for growth.

We don't know for sure that bad economic times are coming, but the threats to the economy (housing collapse, credit crunch, spiking prices for oil and food) are as great as they've been in a long time, and the potential missed opportunities from an excess of caution are smaller than during a boom.

Now is the time to go with these strategies — accepting the slower growth and lower standards of living that go along with them as a small price to pay for security and a reasonable shot at some big opportunities ahead.

Remember, a recession is a time when promises get broken. Business fail, leaving both their debts and their employees unpaid. Tenants don't pay their rent. People who have always paid their bills on time suddenly can't. Sales fall through. Wherever your income comes from, it is at some risk. Arrange things so that you can face that risk.

Update: The National Bureau of Economic Research, the group that makes the "official" call on the beginnings and ends of recessions, announced on December 1st, 2008 that a recession began in the US in December 2007, the month this post was written.

This article is from Philip Brewer of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Poem on opting out

Philip Brewer — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:21:50 +0000

A while back I wrote a piece on Opting out of the money economy, a topic I've long been interested in.

Because of that long interest, the poem "Getting By" by Gary L. Lark caught my ear when it was on the most recent Writer's Almanac.

I started picking ferns, barking chittam
and selling mushrooms; made spinners
and tied trout flies; got used to getting by.

It's a powerful piece. If, like me, you have a sneaking suspicion that it might be more fun to "just get by" than to spend the rest of your life working for the man, follow that link and savor the poem. (Maybe even buy the book: Men At the Gates.)

This article is from Philip Brewer of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Opting out of the money economy

Philip Brewer — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:27:11 +0000

It's a quirk of mine that I've always found the idea of opting out of the money economy to be interesting.

I've got a bunch of books on the topic. Books like Possum living: How to live well without a job and with almost no money and How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle.

It's mostly the idea that I find appealing. When I look at the details—the hard trade-offs involved—I find that I come up short of wanting to live that way. But there's a lot to learn from these people, their books, and their lifestyle.

Alternative Economies

The money economy is the default in the western world, but it's hardly the only economy out there.

Bartering

Bartering predates money and has never gone completely out of style. It has resurgences now and then, especially during times of inflation and deflation.

In a severe inflation the money becomes worthless, forcing people into a barter economy, but even in a more modest inflation barter becomes attractive—when prices are changing quickly, it's a lot of extra work just to stay informed about what's a fair price. Inflation also produces phantom profits with the attendant taxes due. As far as the IRS is concerned the taxes are still due even if the transaction is by barter, but the barterers are in a much better position to avoid the phantom parts of their profits.

In times of deflation the money has value, it's just that most people don't have any. Again, people fall back on barter as a way to get what they need when they can't just go to the store and buy it.

The gift economy

In the gift economy, instead of exchanging money for goods and services, people just give one another what they need and help one another out.

To someone used to the money economy it sounds preposterous, but in fact almost everyone has experienced a gift economy—their family. Parents give their children what they need to survive. Many families are an almost pure gift economy, with every member of the household contributing to the extent that they can—doing chores and helping out in other ways. Other families begin to monetize that sort of work, but most of them do so as a way to teach younger members about how the money economy works and not because each family member is trying to maximize the economic value of his labor.

Outside the family the gift economy becomes less common, but it still exists in various restricted forms. The classic "barn raising" is a gift economy thing—everybody helps their neighbors out. There's an expectation of general reciprocity to the community as a whole, but no expectation of specific reciprocity to the people who showed up to help. In the more modern context, lots of young people rely on the gift economy for help when they need to move.

The gift economy works well when resources are abundant so that everyone can contribute without seriously depriving themselves. They also work best when everyone knows everyone else and a reputation as being generous or stingy can make a difference in how people view you.

Open-source software is often viewed as a gift economy, as is the creative commons.

Self-sufficiency

If you can produce everything you need, you can opt out of all the economies. Virtually no one is in this situation today, but just a couple hundred years ago it was common for frontier families to be largely self-sufficient: through a mixture of gardening, hunting, fishing, and gathering they produced their own food. They made their house out of local materials. They spun fiber into yarn and wove their own fabric for clothing. They might need to go to the money economy to get specialty items like spinning wheels or cast iron pots, but with a modest amount of capital in the form of such items, they could be self-sufficient (albeit at a fairly low standard of living).

Others

There are plenty of other economic forms. The command economy, where some central authority tells everyone what to produce and how to produce it. (Corporations and armies tend to be command economies internally. Some have mock-market economic structures internally, but even when they go through the motions the command structure is lurking in the background.) In the feudal economy, strong tradition dictated who made what and who got it.

Opting Out in the Modern World

Opting out of the money economy really comes down to a few strategies that are simple to describe however hard they may be to actually do.

Reduce and reuse

If you can get by without something, or you can repurpose something you've already got, then you don't need to buy it.

Localize

If you get something from a giant corporation, then you're pretty much stuck paying for it with money. The more of your needs you can satisfy locally, the better your chance of satisfying them in other ways. Your neighbors are much more likely to engage in barter. Your neighbors are much more likely to share the bounty of their garden. Your neighbors are much more likely to let you borrow (or have) things they aren't using.

Produce

Anything you can make yourself, you don't need to buy. Garden. Learn a craft. If you can make things that are useful or beautiful, you can give them away or use them for barter.

It's worth noting the similarity between these strategies and those for greener living: reduce, reuse, recycle. Producing locally can be either low-impact or not, depending on what you do, but at least it's up to you and not up to some corporation whose impact on the environment is a dark secret.

Avoid debt

There are a few things that absolutely trap you in the money economy; things like debt, taxes, and utilities. They make completely opting out impossible, but they can be managed.

Taxes, at least in the US, are not much of a problem. If you're not in the money economy (i.e. you're earning little or no money), then you won't owe any income taxes and will owe little or nothing in payroll taxes. If you own land, there's no avoiding property taxes.

Avoiding utilities completely can be tough, but living "off the grid" is possible for some people in some situations. Even when that's not possible, the use of utilities can be kept to a minimum, and most utilities are regulated in ways that make basic services available at a fair price for people with low incomes (which people outside the money economy usually are).

Debt is the killer that forces you into the money economy. You really can't opt out while you're in debt, which is just another reason why debt should be avoided.

Opting out for the short term

It used to be quite common for people to opt out of the money economy temporarily.

In the days before student loans were ubiquitous, a new college grad might well have nothing but a new diploma and the clothes on his or her back--but had enormous flexibility. Many authors and artists were able to start their careers by living in the gift economy—sleeping on a friend's couch or staying at someone's vacation home for a few months in the off-season, making do with whatever clothes and tools they already had. That level of generosity was pretty easy to come by, at least for long enough to produce, for example, a first novel.

Now that all but the wealthy graduate with student loans, very few new grads have the choice of trying to make it on their art. (A friend who'll let you live in their RV from Halloween until Arbor Day is a lot more common than one who'll make your student loan payments for six months.) They have no choice but to enter the money economy long enough to pay off their debt. By the time that's done, they usually have spouses, kids, a work history that would lose substantial value if they put it aside for a year or two. They're trapped in the money economy.

It makes me mad every time I think about the great art and literature that our student loan system has cost our society.

Opting out for the long term

Now we finally come back to those books that I mentioned at the beginning. If opting out of the money economy appeals to you, track down those books and others like them.

Opting out for the short term is pretty easy, if you have no debt and you already own the basic goods of a functioning household. Opting out for the long term is much harder. It's not what I want to do, and it's probably not the right choice for most people. But bits and pieces of the strategies that work for opting out of the money economy can make it much easier to live well on small budget.

If you know you can get by with little or no money, then you have the flexibility to follow your own path, to take risks, to refuse to knuckle under to people who don't have your interests at heart. That's why it has always fascinated me.

This article is from Philip Brewer of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Life Without Toiletpaper - Bum Deal?

Andrea Karim — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:53:53 +0000

How far would you go to save the world?

Upon reading the New York Times article about the Beaven-Conlin household in Manhattan, I started to get a little queasy. The article delves a bit into the lives of a couple and their young daughter, yuppies who live affluent lives in New York City. They've taken the idea behind The Compact, and then taken it a LOT farther. They are trying to live for one year with absolute minimal impact on the environment.

Their toddler wears organic cotton diapers. The family eats all organic food, grown within a 250-mile radius of the city. They bake their own bread, take the stairs instead of the elevator, and don't buy much outside of groceries.

That sounds responsible, right? Then it gets better. They don't use toilet paper (the details of how they avoid this are not pretty, and no, they did not have the good sense to invest in a bidet). They compost INSIDE their apartment. They use no spices but have made an exception for salt, which they apparently think of as an indulgence in baking rather than something that humans need in order to survive.

I think that the idea behind what the Beaven-Conlin family is trying is wonderful. And even though we all agree that we should use less, buy less, and pollute less, how many of us really do much of anything to accomplish this?

The dishwasher is off, along with the microwave, the coffee machine and the food processor. Planes, trains, automobiles and that elevator are out, but the family is still doing laundry in the washing machines in the basement of the building. And they have not had the heart to take away the vacuum from their cleaning lady, who comes weekly (this week they took away her paper towels).

I consider myself an environmentalist, but I just ate a sandwich out of a styrofoam container and then threw it away, because you can't recycle styrofoam in Seattle and I got tired of hauling bags of it to my parents' place across the mountains for recycling.

I drive 20 miles to work, because my job is located quite far from the job that I had when I bought my home (telecommuting is not an option with this firm, and taking the bus would take me close to 2.5 hours each way). If there is anyone who eats food grown farther from where they live, I don't know who it could be. I have a ridiculous appetite for tropical fruit and exotic spices.

In the NY Times article, Colin Beaven states that the experiment that his family is trying is "also very urban. It’s a critical twist in the old wilderness adage: Leave only footprints, take only photographs. But how do you translate that into Manhattan?"

Well, I'd argue that that's easier in Manhattan than a lot of other places. Because Manhattan is rife with foodies, you can find farmers markets open year-round. You can buy organic milk in reusable glass bottles. There aren't many places in the five boroughs that you can't walk or bike to. I used to live in Brooklyn and work in Chelsea, and I would walk from dinner with friends in Midtown back home. It took a while (and wasn't always voluntary; sometimes I'd run out of money and not be able to get subway fair), but it was very doable. Come to think of it, I never went to Staten Island, so maybe you can't get there by bike or on foot.

People who live outside of large metropolitan areas with stellar public transportation (you know, normal people who can't afford huge apartments, or even studios, in swanky downtown areas) don't have the luxury of riding their Razor scooters to work. Not only would that be impossible, but they'd probably get their butts kicked by their work buddies. Hell, my neighbors are very swishy, and I think they'd probably call me a sissy if I broke out a Razor scooter and started scooting around Seattle.

Now, the No Impact Family is not saying that everyone else has to live like this, and they are obviously trying it as an experiment. I think these kinds of revolutionary try-it-and-see experiments are brilliant, and I certainly applaud their efforts, even if I think the lifestyle might be too extreme for many of us (I am NOT making my own vinegar, thank you).

Also, I think some of the moves are a little odd. For instance, Ms. Conlin takes her lunch to work every day in a mason jar.

A mason jar.

What's wrong with Tupperware? Yes, it's plastic, but it's not like you throw it out. A mason jar is heavy and awkward and breakable. I love using mason jars for preserves and pickles, but it's not up there on my list of potential lunchboxes. Why stop at a mason jar? Why not just put your lunch in a soapstone box that you carved yourself and tie it up in leather than you tanned out of from Central Park squirrel hides? Think of the shoulder muscles you'd develop!

Also, she gave up coffee. Well, that's just plain sick. I mean, if you don't want to go to Starbucks or even an independent coffeshop every day, that's fine. But there's nothing wrong with a French press. It's French! The French love suffering (or is that Russians?), so it totally fits in with the lifestyle.

There was a telling little bit of the story that got me thinking, though:

Ms. Conlin... did describe, in loving detail, a serious shopping binge that predated No Impact and made the whole thing doable, she said. “It was my last hurrah,” she explained. It included two pairs of calf-high Chloe boots (one of which was paid for, she said, with her mother’s bingo winnings) and added up to two weeks’ salary, after taxes and her 401(k) contribution.

What? You know, maybe these people really need to try this. I don't know how much Conlin makes at Business Week, because she could be an intern, but I'm guessing from her apartment location and her good taste in boots that that was pretty much a $3000 shopping spree. That's a guess, yes, but still. Two weeks salary? Doesn't something like that sort of defeat the purpose of no impact living?

Perhaps I'm being too touchy on the subject because I realize that if I used one-tenth of the discipline that this family is showing, I could make a major impact on my life, but by golly, I hate the stairs.

And bidets are really, really pricey.

This article is from Andrea Karim of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

reduce

23 Effortless Ways to Go Green (and Save Money, Too)

1. Eat less meat

2. Fight food waste

3. Drink tap water

4. Resist fast food

5. Catch water with a rain barrel

6. Create a no-mow zone

7. Drive a gas-sipper, not a gas-guzzler

8. Air up your car tires

9. Walk whenever possible

10. Use public transit or carpool

11. Send email, not snail mail

12. Avoid gratuitous tech upgrades

13. Use rechargeable batteries

14. Resist Ctrl+P

15. Reduce A/C and heating

16. Replace furnace filters

17. Reduce wasted electricity

18. Dry clothes on a clothesline

19. Use LED bulbs

20. Reduce disposable products

21. Buy stuff that lasts longer

22. Just say 'no' to excessive packaging

23. Use reusable shopping bags

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10 Ways to Reuse Common Household Items

Dish Soap Bottles

Egg Cartons

Floor Tiles

Old Socks

Old T-Shirts

Paper Towel Rolls

Plastic Shopping Bags

Shoe Boxes

Shower Curtains

Wine Corks

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Preparing for a Recession

What Happens in a Recession

How It Affects You

What to Do

Same Strategies, Different Balance

Poem on opting out

Opting out of the money economy

Alternative Economies

Bartering

The gift economy

Self-sufficiency

Others

Opting Out in the Modern World

Reduce and reuse

Localize

Produce

Avoid debt

Opting out for the short term

Opting out for the long term

Life Without Toiletpaper - Bum Deal?