Sustainable Ways to Reduce Your Spending
Date Posted: March 13th, 2009
Here’s a quick post on things you can do to reduce your monthly credit card bill without increasing the burden on the Earth. All of the things on the list are doable since I’m currently doing them. Enjoy!
Get a Roommate
From what I’ve read on sustainability, getting a roommate is one of the most significant ways to help out the environment. Single family homes, while comfortable, are usually pretty wasteful. Rooms don’t get used. You have to heat and cool the whole thing. By getting a roommate you not only cut down on your monthly bill, you make better use out of your resource.
Buy Used Everything
This is something Aaron and I do all the time. For the most part our furniture comes from three sources: IKEA, our family, and thrift stores. Our living room couch is from Craig’s List. Our kitchen table is my parents’ old table that’d been collecting dust in their basement for years and years. My desk is a hand-me-down from my cousin. Our waffle-iron (among other things) is from Kiwanis Thrift Sale. Our coffee table is from Aaron’s grandparents. We have some pots and pans from The Salvation Army. There’s a painting in the living room we got from Treasure Mart. The filing cabinet in my office is from the Reuse Center. There’s a lot more stuff too that I just can’t think of off the top of my head. It’s all stuff we’d buy anyway, we just purchase it used instead of new.
There’s no shame in buying used, and in fact for kitchen gear I’d highly suggest it. Why buy a brand new, expensive mixer when you don’t know how much baking you’ll do?
Buy Factory Refurbished Electronics
They look like new. The work like new. But they cost a fraction of the retail price.
Case one: KitchenAid Professional 600 Series Mixer
Case two: Brother Digital Copier and Printer 
Pretty significant savings, and it’s similar to buying used. It’s stuff that would normally get thrown away.
Bus or Carpool
I think we all know that this suggestion is both a money and environment saver, but I’ve found that it’s really hard to regularly use the bus or carpool when the car is so nice and available. The only times I’ve been able to use the bus consistently have been when I haven’t had a car around to tempt me. For instance, last month I got into a car accident and it took a couple weeks for the car to get fixed. During those two weeks I had no trouble whatsoever getting to the bus-stop on time. Before that, I got there…uh.. most of the time.
If that scenario sounds familiar and you’d like to use public transportation more regularly, I’d suggest fasting from your car for a month or so. Park it at your parents’ house or give the keys to your significant other with the rule that he/she decides when you can use the car. Without the car around to tempt you, you’ll be amazed at the ways you’ll find to get wherever you need to go. Hopefully by the time you’re done fasting you’ll have established a habit of using public transit and saved a bit of cash.
Bike
Exercise + No gasoline = synergy. Need I say more? Well, actually, I will say a bit more. The usefulness of biking is highly dependent on where you live. In suburbia where it takes one mile to get out of your subdivision and another three miles to get to the grocery story, a bike might not be all that useful. On the other hand, if you live near the downtown of your city, you’ll probably find that it takes as long to drive to certain places as it does to bike, and biking costs less since you don’t have to pay for parking. We live less than a mile from downtown, so biking for us makes a lot of sense.
Plant a Garden
Think healthy food is too expensive? Grow a garden. A packet of seeds costs only $2.00 and you get a lot more than two dollars worth of food. Of course, there are some start-up costs like wood and soil and whatnot, but those still pale in comparison to the yield you get from your crops.
As for the earth, the benefits should be obvious. At the very least, you can get your tomatoes from your backyard instead of across the country. That gasoline savings alone is pretty major.
This year Aaron and I are going to plant a Square Foot Garden. It’s allegedly very inexpensive and easy to maintain, but neither of us has first hand experience with it. I intend to blog about the process so you all can know if it’s as wonderful as advertised or at least you can learn from our mistakes. 
Use The Library
If you regularly spend a significant amount of money on movies and books and want to cut back, use the library. I’m willing to bet that most of us don’t read many books more than once, so does it really make sense to buy a book and let it collect dust on the shelf? Plus it’s wasteful.
Libraries these days (at least in Michigan) have just about every book you might be interested in, and if your local library doesn’t have it you can usually acquire the book you want through inter-library loan. For books you intend to read or reference only once there’s really no reason (aside from impatience) to not get them from the library.
That’s it for now. I’ll be going to either Home Depot or Lowes this weekend to buy supplies for our garden, so you can expect a post about that very soon. 
