Open Source

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Many of the things I write about detail sustainability and sustainable living.  I’d like to take this post to discuss sustainability on a technological level.  Previous posts have described my frustration with computers and the next new thing.  Clearly, constantly eliminating technology in replace of newer hardware where the old hardware is simply thrown out isn’t sustainable.  But, what would an alternative be?  Open Source software that works with hardware of many ages is one such option.  Open Source software also speaks to a philosophy of shared knowledge, which in many circles is an underlying aspect to sustainability.

Canning

I’ve wanted to learn to can vegetables for quite some time.  I’ve grown tomatoes for three years (not consecutive), and my husband and I are slowly working out our routines.  We have been to the u-pick farms more this year and have had a greater variety of fruits, although I don’t believe we’ve yielded the same quantity as last year.  Regardless, we are slowly learning, and slowly we are working our budget down and eating more home-prepared foods.

House Hunting

It started, I mean really started, with a house being sold for $122,000.  I’d done the estimates.  I know our debt-to-income ratio.  I know how much we can afford, as in what’s 38% of our net income.  $122,000 was certainly feasible, and I knew this without talking to a bank.  So, after some pestering from Peter, I called a realtor.  I heard good things about one company, and they were supposed neighborhood specialists, so we made an appointment.  We were encouraged, strongly, like to the point of not being able to see the $122,000 house without one, to get a preapproval.  So, we called the recommended mortgage broker.

House OKs 90% Tax on Bonuses from Bailout Firms

I laughed when I read the headline to the article in the Oregonian, as reported by the Associated Press.  A psychologist explained on Talk of the Nation back in September that we (the American people) are experiencing a desire to “stick it to them”, which is why many of us would like to see these large companies fail rather than getting bailed out.  What’s the average mean income in the US for example?  According to the census, in 2007, it was $50,233.  Now, how much are these folks receiving bonuses getting in their annual salary?  Six figures?  A six figure salary greater than $100,000 a year?  That’s more than 2 times the median family income in the U.S.  We live off of $30,000 a year before taxes.  So, I laughed when I read that their poor little bonus of $1 million or more would be taxed at a rate of 90%.  Poor baby-AIG-failed-employees (remember, these guys are getting bonuses for doing bad work) are only allowed to keep $100,000 of every million they were issued.  How will they ever survive?

(Wow, that’s three times our annual income!  How will they survive?)

But I stopped laughing when I read one small, not very clear paragraph on how this all could have been avoided.

Republicans took Democrats to task for rushing to tax AIG bonuses worth an estimated $165 million after the majority party stripped from last month’s economic stimulus bill a provision that could have banned such payouts.  It would apply to any such bonuses issued since Dec. 31.

Did I read that correctly?  The Democrats took out instructions to forbid bonuses?  Democrats took out instructions to forbid bonuses, and when a bonus occurred, they went back to rescue, or play hero offering a solution to fix the problem… Interesting… It almost sounds as if they are creating their own job security by excluding things that would have fixed the problem to begin with…

Notes

Income – http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/income_wealth/012528.html

Oregonian article – http://tinyurl.com/cmbp6e

Frugal Food Prep

With the advent of social networking, I’ve been able to keep in touch with some high school friends.  One friend, Mackenna, wanted to contribute some ideas to the frugal side of life.  Here are some tried-and-true tips she uses or has gathered from the wisdom of her parents and grandparents.  Visit her blog at http://deliberate28.wordpress.com.

• Buy meat from local farmers.  You can get half a cow, etc. this way and many farms are organic nowadays.
• When you have a turkey roast or ham roast or whole chicken, use the remainder of meat by making soup or stew with it.  I use the ham-bone and 4-6 red potatoes and a little milk, garlic, salt, pepper, minced onion and parsley (along with a few dashes of flour) to make a mean pot of ham & potato cream soup that will feed my family for 2 more meals than just tossing the bone. When I’m done with that I take the bone and give it to the dog. I do the same with chicken and add some egg noodles and canned carrots if I am out of fresh.  I make turkey soup with whatever veggies I have lying around or in the freezer (frozen veggies are great for soup).  Well, all of it but give to the dog. They can’t have poultry bones.
• If you make dinner from 1.5 pounds of burger and only need >1 lb, cook up the rest separately, mark and freeze it, and use it later for a fast dinner.  Saves you on prep time when you only need enough meat for spaghetti sauce, etc.
• Enter into a ‘food trade’ with friends or family occasionally.  You know that stuff that is in your pantry but seldom used?  I will clean it out every 3 months or so and swap food items with my mom.  “We just haven’t been eating x,y or z thing lately… want to trade it for anything you aren’t eating there?”
• Use dried beans, legumes and barley to compliment your soups.  They cook up fresh and go a long way in filling up your family, so you can get farther for your buck.  Even adding 1 cup of dry barley into my soup makes it go so much farther.
• Stir fries are a great way to throw everything into a pot and go.  You have lots of misc. leftover little baggies of frozen veggies, you can combine them all this way.
• Create a list of every single thing you can cook that your family likes.  Then, make a menu plan for 2 weeks based on how frugal you need to be (some times are more strained than others), what you have in the house, what you have for coupons, etc.   I fed my entire family (WELL) for the last 2 weeks and I only spent $140 at the grocery store.  That included 2 cans of formula, a huge box of diapers, wipes, and baby food (I tried making my own but  my kid won’t eat most of it, so I have to supplement it with store-bought).  That included making a dish to pass at a family event and lunch and dinner on both sets of weekend days.
• Make your own French fries with oil and potatoes.  If you can grow your potatoes, it’s even cheaper, but I can buy a huge bag of potatoes for $2.50.  I plan for them in my meals and separate them out over the 2 weeks and usually have some leftover at the end.  This time I made soup, fries, baked potatoes and still have 4 left.  I make my own French fries in a frying pan with a thin layer of oil and a dash of salt.  My family likes them better than the Ore-Ida kind anyway.
• As I said before, canning is a limitless opportunity to save money.  While I haven’t’ canned in some time, I am going to get on that bandwagon this year without a doubt.  It means 3 busy weeks in the fall, but an entire year of lovingly cooked food for my family and a huge cost savings.
• Refill your water bottles [use something sturdier than #1 plastic from the store for health reasons].  Many people buy distilled water jugs at the store.  The stores will let you refill them.  It costs less and it is more environmentally sound.  Also, with little to go bottles, do the same.  Refill them from your tap.  It’s just water – it’s not like you’re going to get Ecol-i from it or anything if you re-use them.  We can make a case of 12 waters last a month or more by just refilling them.

Check out my green guide for the next two weeks to see a day-at-a-time installment of some green cleaning tips, also from Mackenna.

Free Debt Reduction Calculator for Excel

Free Debt Reduction Calculator for Excel.

I’ve been writing lately about being frugal and what it means.  I’ve even stated some authors I’ve read to help along the way, Dave Ramsey & Larry Burkett.  Tonight, after working on a project with Open Office, I was browsing through their add-ons . I noticed this Free Debt Reduction Calculator.  Since my Student Loans are coming due now, this is of utmost importance to me.  So, I had to check it out.

This FREE calculator is very cool!  You can list up to 10 debts, plug in the amounts, minimum payments, interest rates, choose how you’d like to pay off the debt, and how much money you will put towards the debt per month.  You can choose between “no option”, debt snowball, highest interest first, or a few custom choices.  Then, it will tell you how long it will take to pay of each debt and how much interest you would pay!

So, if we can put $2,000 a month towards my debt, we can have my debt paid off by June of 2011.  And that is exciting.

How to Live Frugally Part 2

So, now that you’ve established your plan (expenses, budget, the plan), you’re ready to really start trimming the fat in other areas.  From what I’ve read (gurus and everyday moms like me), one of the first places to tackle is the grocery budget.  A pattern I see evolving in our own circumstances is as follows:

• Spring – plant
• Summer – tend to the garden
• Fall – harvest
• Winter – hibernate

In other words… whether you garden yourself or you buy your produce from the market, eating seasonally is one way to help your food budget.  Collect produce you eat regularly in the summer and fall.  Prepare them for canning and/or freezing, and then you are set up for the cooler (cold) winter months.  Similar trends are simply buying in bulk, divvying up the products and setting them aside for when you need them.

This is what we do so far.  I buy 25 lbs of sugar at a time, currently just brown, and when we run out of white, I’ll purchase a 25 lb of that too.  The 25 lb costs about $13, whereas a 10 lb bag of white cane sugar costs about $6.50, the savings are pretty clear.  I make our bread, and we buy 100 lbs of flour at a time right around $60 for the lot.  If you utilize a food buying club, chances are you could reduce the cost further to $40 per 100 lbs.  It takes about 4 lbs of flour to make 4 loaves of bread, or about 1 lb per loaf.  The bread I make is more comparable in nutrition to the spendier bread.  So, what I make at home costs us about 70 cents per loaf and would cost over $3 per loaf from the grocery store.

Buy local when and where possible.  When you buy local, you are not only putting money back into your local economy and helping to eliminate unneeded CO2 in the air, but you are probably saving money too.  We do a lot of our grocery shopping at a west-coast chain of restaurant supply stores that is open to the public.  We can get a 4lb bag of pasta for usually under $4.  If you were to buy that in the grocery store, it’d cost over $1 per pound.  And, often what we find is the distributors of the products we buy are a lot more local then many things Fred Meyer/Kroger carries.

Make food in bulk and freeze it for later.  Or get creative with your leftovers.  If you’re making chili and you use dried beans, cook extra beans for later.  If you’re planning a stir fry, make 4 cups of dry brown rice instead of 2.  Save the other 2 cups for another dish later in the week.  Have one big meal every week or every two weeks.

Being frugal takes dilligence, and it can sometimes be exhausting.  I found that even clipping coupons helps (every cent counts!), but that takes discipline, and sometimes I just don’t have that.  Thankfully, our shopping trends have allowed us no more than 2 major shopping trips per month in these wintery months.

Always keep in your head how you can save by questioning if you really need something.  Do you need that chocolate bar or is it a craving for something deeper?  Do you really need a new pair of socks, or are you just wanting to pamper yourself with a small purchase?  If you’re thinking of shopping at Nordstrom’s or Macy’s for wardrobe enhancements, consider JC Penney or Sear’s, or Old Navy, or Ross/Marshall’s/TJMaxx, or then Goodwill or other thriftstores.  Be cautious though, sometimes Goodwill will sell you a gently used pair of slacks for $7 and Target had a clearance pair (new of course) for $5.  Don’t forget about consignment shops or trendier second hand shops like Buffalo Exchange.

When considering how to save money on your vehicles, the first big step would be to consolidate your trips so you’re not making wasteful trips.  We often coordinate our errands so we make one giant circle.  For example, we’ll visit the library, Post Office, super market, restaurant shop, then home.  We rarely (thank the good Lord) run home in between these destinations.  Own your car, don’t lease, and buy used.  If you’re in the market for a car, make sure to check insurance quotes and maintenance estimates before you make the purchase.  You want to be sure the car you’re getting into fits into your budget in all categories.  If you’re having trouble figuring out how to get your vehicle fixed at the local garage, consider a community college.  Ask around and see which institution teaches people and works towards certification.  They (like beauty schools) need practice, and this could be a viable alternative to a spendy “name brand” mechanic.

Cut your own hair, or take longer between trims.  We purchased a buzzer for Peter, and I will just go in a lot less to get my locks trimmed.  The buzzer usually will pay for itself after 2 uses.

I’ll end with this, “Live simply so that others may simply live.”