Frugal Green Living: Save $1000 Using These 6 Tips

Thanks for adding in how you arrived at your numbers. I'm always very suspicious when writers don't include how they got to thier mathematical conclusions.

Very practical tips! Keep up the good posts.

I would like to echo the first post - thank you for the calculations - they lend a lot of credibility to your article.

Thanks for the great post! it's almost too bad I do most of these (telecommute, bike everywhere, don't really eat meat and always have the thermostat at the minimum setting I can to keep pipes from busting)

The only problem I have with this is I'm not convinced it's as cheap as you say for eating more veggies. Vegetables have a much lower caloric density, so in order to get the same amount of calories every day you would need to buy a lot more pounds. This graph might be more appropriate: http://www.wired.com/special_multimedia/2007/st_infoporn_1601

One (not so quick) note about the diet change - the numbers are in terms of price per pound. While we purchase food by the pound, we tend to consume by the Calorie (kilo-calorie for our friends across the pond). What is the cost per Calorie for meat versus vegetables?

From nutritiondata.com, a 125g apple has approximately 65 Calories, which is ~ 236.4 Calories/pound. Roasted beef, on the other hand is 54 Calories/ounce, or 864 Calories/pound. Taking the numbers from above, we get meat ~ 0.48 cents/Calorie and Veggie ~ 0.30 cents/Calorie.

Replacing the caloric equivalent of 8oz of meat is ~29.2oz of apple (about 4 large apples). $2.08 in beef goes to $1.30 in apple. Over the course of the year, at one meal a week, that is a total of $40.56.

Now, these numbers have a couple flaws:
- Apples have a high energy density relative to most fruits & veggies, so the total savings is probably inflated.
- Regardless, it doesn't mitigate concerns of energy used to cultivate & deliver the food to market
- Finally, at least for Americans, a little caloric restriction may not be such a bad idea since we eat 3900 Calories a day on average (*reference). For that matter, simply cutting our daily food intake to "normal" levels would lead to an incredible savings in and of itself (that is, unless you're highly active and tend to burn ~ 3500 Calories/day like me)

*http://www.dietitian.com/calories.html#14

-polymath

Some alternatives that I use:

instead of the 4 day work week, you can always brown bag it. If you're not bringing astonishingly highly processed foods like TV dinners, you save at least 50% on lunch. If you bring leftovers, then you save even more.

You can also save considerably on the coffee by making that at work too.

I'll also admit that I live so close to work that commuting on foot takes all of 5 minutes. That takes out a huge chunk of money otherwise spent commuting (at least $98 a month for my old bus pass, more for insurance and gas if my nonexistant car were paid for).

What I really don't get is how baking soda and vinegar are supposed to be cleaners. Vinegar alone, I could almost understand because it's an acid. But the combination of the two just make CO2 (or more accurately, carbonic acid, which quickly breaks down into CO2 and water) and salt (in this case NaC2H3O2, or sodium acetate, rather than the Sodium Chloride we have in table salt), resulting in basically salty water after all the fizz is gone. How is that supposed to clean things?

Andrew beat me to it!
Using the graph he linked to, and keeping the equivalent caloric intake, you'll actually spend more money eating produce - 8oz beef = $2.16 = 432 Calories = $8.64 in veggies. That would lead to an increase of $449.28 per year in food costs.

Again, with the increased energy cost to produce and deliver meat over produce, and the more important fact that most Americans could stand to simply cut out the 8oz piece of beef *every day* (saving ~$800)...

-polymath

You don't have to have sun to air dry clothes although sunlight is a decent bleach and a great sterilizer. I use hangers and wooden laundry drying racks in my apartment. Believe it or not I picked the drying racks up off the street and cleaned them in my bathtub. You save a LOT more than $70 a year if you have to use a laundromat to do your drying and you would also save more than $70 if you didn't buy or replace a dryer in the first place.

My impressions from my trips to the US were that vegetables are much more expensive and meat is much cheaper than in Germany. So it should save you even more money to go slow on meat in Europe :)

Hey Ernie: I understand your worries about mixing vinegar & baking soda. As anyone knows, acid+basic=salt. But the trick is to use proportions DIFFERENT FROM ESTECHIOMETRIC ones. Just try several and use them. I tell you: it works!

Great point Joerg. I traveled through Europe for 3 months about a year ago. It seems everywhere there vegetables are much cheaper compared to meats, so the balance might work out differently. The best, and cheapest, meals I had I would just run through the produce sections, grab essentially one of everything and then saute it all with some live oil and red wine vinegar.

I used just baking soda, a sponge and elbow grease to clean a VERY dirty bathtub/shower once. It shined like never before, literally.

I read somewhere that the crystalline structure of baking soda makes it act as a tiny scrubber?

I use it for deodorant, too. It really works, better than any of the other "natural" stuff I've tried. Thing is, it chaffs if you use too much. After some adjustment, I think I've nailed it.

I was psyched when I saw this headline, as i'm pretty broke right now, but i'm a bit disappointed after reading the article. I spent about $2-3/month drying my clothes at the laundromat when I don't hang them up to dry, but otherwise I already do alll these things (I dont' have a thermostat, but dont' use air conditioning) I'm not saving any more money from reading this. You've got to have some more tips.

Also I've found that baking soda & vinegar clean pretty well independently. Baking soda with a little salt and arrowroot powder worked great in place of toothpaste, my teeth even got very white, but baking soda is a bit abrasive and long term use can wear down your teeth.

Get ride of the car and save $9,000 a year after tax. Once one accounts for the time spent earning money to pay for the car, most people would be better off working less and walking, cycling or taking public transit everywhere.

These are great tips, thanks.
My girlfriend and I are vegan. Not eating meat saves money, there is no question. We were vegetarian first, that saves the most money. Alternative milk, like soy, adds up quickly.

The thing to remember about vegetables is that they are a direct food. In terms of being green, you grow a vegetable, you eat a vegetable. When you eat an animal, first you have to grow it a lot of vegetables, much more than people eat. Then you give it a lot of water. Then it goes to the bathroom which ends up in groundwater. All of these negatives are avoided when we grow and eat food directly. Visit farmsanctuary.org or goveg.com for great info.

We are also in the process of building a small wind turbine for our yard to help cover our electrical needs. Everything helps!