No More Junk Mail

I know Earth Day is over, but that doesn't mean we need to stop conserving. One way to painlessly reduce your environmental footprint is to eliminate your junk mail. The Center for a New American Dream offers this reference page on how to stop soliciters from sending you mail.

Environmental benefits: less paper, less fuel in shipment

Psychological benefits: less clutter!

I also try to send a nice letter to any charity to whom I've donated asking them not to send me donation solicitations by mail. I explain that I do plan to donate again, but I will do so online as my budget allows. Not only is it bad for the environment for them to send me stuff, it also costs THEM money which I would rather them be spending on programs. Sometimes these letters work. Sometimes they don't. Once again, though, small changes add up.

Please post a comment if you've cut off your junk mail!

My Writing Up Blog

Many of the articles I post over the next few days have been migrated here from my writingup blog. Writingup is a community for bloggers and freelance writers which, I fear, is going the way of the dinosaur. Lately it's been down more than it's up.

My blog on writingup was very esoteric, and I'm trying here to focus in on the areas of my life that I truly value. If you came from Writing Up, please drop me a line. It would be very nice to hear from you.

Scarcity and Waste

How do you drive your car when the fuel light is on? Personally, I turn off the air conditioning, slow down, coast to red lights and – depending on how far away the nearest refueling station is – even turn off my car when I’m stopped at red lights. What if I drove this way all the time? What if I rinsed out dish detergent bottles or turned ketchup bottles upside down, even if there was another bottle in the cabinet?

It seems that having a sense of scarcity causes us to conserve more than we do when we consider ourselves to be in a state of abundance. When we have plenty of something, we tend to be more careless and wasteful with it. It’s good to keep your gas tank above one quarter full, and it’s good to maintain a well stocked pantry of food and health and beauty items, but can these actions cause us to be wasteful? If I have 5 bottles of shampoo that I paid no more than fifty cents each for, I’m much more likely to be okay with some spilling down the drain or with using more than I need to wash my hair. In truth, though, this is a mistake. A stockpile or a pantry is there so that you don’t need to buy full priced items later, not so that you can use more than you need to. Waste is waste, no matter how much you spent on it and no matter how much of it that you have, but no matter how frugal you are, sometimes it is hard to get your mind around that.

Perhaps it is helpful to consider your goods in a larger context. In a global sense, everything is scarce. Our economy is based on scarcity. Increasingly, we, as a planet, have a scarcity of gasoline and plastics, we have a scarcity of food, a scarcity of clean and healthy water. No matter how easily the water flows from your faucet, no matter how much gas you have in your tank, no matter how much food you have in your freezer, these are still not expendable items. Wasting them is a loss to you and to the world. It’s really a shame.

So next time you come to end of a box or bottle, pretend it’s your last. When you’re on your way to work, pretend you’re almost out of gas. Enjoy the abundance in your life, but remember the scarcity in the world, and be frugal.

Stop Procrastinating Tomorrow

Right now I am in a state of contented unproductivity. You know that feeling when you wake up feeling warm and rested, particularly when you haven't in a long time, and you know that you aren't doing anything productive, but you really don't care? That's how I feel right now and I love it.

My other favorite state of mind is when I've just finished some big project and I'm so busy being finished with it that I couldn't possibly do anything else.

I swear, if there were a world championship in justifying procrastination, I'd be a finalist every single year.

I talk all the time about how money saved or earned is not actually valuable unless you then put it to good use rather than frittering it away, but the same is true of time. I save myself time by cutting back on laundry and precooking my meals so that I can spend it aimlessly surfing the web or mindlessly watching television. Not a good plan.

I am certainly not undermining the wonderfulness that is doing nothing. Doing nothing though should be an active process. Doing nothing means staring at a wall, lying in bed, cuddling with my honey. Doing nothing relieves stress. Mindless time wasters cause more of it.

I've tried before to make myself schedules and routines, to write them out, to track my time the way I track my spending, but none of these things really seem to work. The "do it now" plan seems to work for about a day. Any self-motivational plans I put into place fade away very quickly.

Truthfully, I really don't know why. I know in my head that I don't care about TV, that I don't value the time I spend on the Internet. I have a list of things that I want to do that I know I would both enjoy and value, things that would make me happy temporarily and in the long term. Still, though, everyday I find myself zoned out again and filling my brain with uselessness.

I'm not sure whether the solution is to examine why I do this to myself or to simply suck it up and make myself "do it now" every day until it becomes a habit. I need to do something, though, if I'm ever going to make progress toward the life I really want.

I'll start later, though. Right now, I'm enjoying drinking coffee in my pajamas in the middle of the day. In fact, I think maybe I'll go stare at the wall for a while.

Beyond Paycheck to Paycheck, or Why I work my Rear End off and Don't Buy Designer Clothes

I have to say, lately I'm working like a madwoman. I don't like it. I'm tired, I'm cranky, and I'm ending a lot of my days so tired that I can't keep my eyes open.

So why on earth would I do this to myself?

A co-worker of mine at job number one asked me to do something the other day and I said "I really can't, I'm pretty busy. . . " She didn't seem to hear this though, so finally I told her "Look, I have another job after school."

Her whole demeanor changed. She was embarassed, she looked guilty and apologetic. Not what I was going for.

I know I'm not the only person I work with to have a second job. We really don't make all that much money. The difference is, several of my (rather older) co-workers need to do this in order to keep up with their expenses. They can't pay their bills until they've gotten all of their paychecks for the month. They really NEED the money.

I don't.

I don't need my extra job money, or any money I make online, to pay my bills. We are always about a month ahead in our checking account, so that I can pay my bills before I get my paycheck. When I make my budget, I make sure that all of our monthly expenses can be covered by my full time salary and my husband's stipend. So why on earth would I work as hard as I am right now?

Because I never want to need the money that bad. I want to have choices, I want things to get easier as I get older. I don't want to be forty five, with teenage kids, working until midnight because otherwise I can't pay the mortgage. I want my debt paid off, my retirement savings underway, and my future planned while I still feel young and energetic, and while I still have few obligations. I would rather work hard now, and get ahead, so that later my life will be easier. The funny thing is, when you make money and don't spend it, you still have it later (with interest!)

The same co-worker who was embarassed at the idea of me working extra once talked about her designer shoes and handbags. "I deserve it," she said. "You can't take it with you." A few weeks later, she said "Can someone else drive? I can't put gas in my car until after payday."

All I could think to myself was how glad I was not to live that way.