Middle Path Finance

Fight for your right to line dry

My mom likes to show my friends an embarrassing picture of me. I’m 3 years old, hanging on to my favorite blanket as it’s drying on the line.

Laundry hanging on the line, drying in the breeze, was a frequent part of my childhood, and probably yours too. I didn’t even think about it. It was just something that everyone did.

But when I hung a laundry line in my own backyard this summer, I realized that hanging laundry outside has become a hot button issue, not just in my neighborhood, but all over the country. Two hours after I hung my first load, there was a knock on my door. A neighbor I had only met once was on the porch, arms waving, furious. He was disgusted that we had hung a laundry line. He said we were bringing down property values and that only “poor white trash” would resort to hanging their socks and T-shirts outside in the breeze.

I was flabbergasted. But also confused. I might have believed that I was junking up the neighborhood, except that the line was in my back yard, not visible to the street, and visible to this one neighbor from only one room in his house.

After some research, I realized that many people share his sentiment. Homeowners associations all over the country have banned laundry lines, saying they disturb neighbors and bring down property values. Considering almost 57 million Americans live in a subdivision governed by a homeowners association, it is tantamount to an all-out attack on a staple of frugal living– the laundry line.

It seems the simple laundry line has fallen out of favor, now that more than 80 percent of all Americans think a clothes dryer is a necessity. How far we’ve come from summer afternoons hanging laundry in my grandmother’s backyard. And, from the days when an iron clothesline secured in a concrete foundation was a staple in most backyards.

Simply put, homeowners associations and municipalities that have clothesline restrictions associate laundry lines with poor people. After all, the thinking goes, only the poorest Americans don’t have access to a dryer and if you have a dryer, why wouldn’t you want to use it?

I guess I’m old fashioned. I thought line drying just made my clothes smell nice. Why pay Tide or some other company for dryer sheets that try to mimic the smell of outdoors when you can get the real thing for free?

Plus, in an era when households are loaded with consumer debt and are watching their energy bills spiral upwards, line drying is an eco-friendly, simple way to save money.

If you are like me and love your laundry line, take heart: you aren’t the only one left. Some are taking up the mantle of line drying. The states of Vermont, Connecticut, and New Hampshire have proposed legislation protecting residents’ rights to have and use laundry lines. A nonprofit, LaundryList.org, has sprouted up to fight for those whose right to line dry are under attack.

Even if you live in an homeowners association, you can lobby to have the rules changed. But you have to convince your neighbors that your socks swaying in the breeze won’t bring down their property value, which can be a hard argument to make in a shaky housing market.

I’m lucky that I don’t live in a neighborhood governed by a homeowners association. I just have a neighbor with some very particular ideas about what I should or shouldn’t do on my property. I refused to take down the line and eventually he gave up.

That fight has saved me about $100 a year in energy costs and makes my clothes last longer. Dryers are really hard on fabrics. Where do you think all of that lint comes from?

I am convinced that everyone needs to fight for their and their neighbors’ right to hang their laundry out to dry. Why should you fight for your right to line dry? Because you are also fighting for your right to lead a simpler life, and in most cases, a more frugal and earth-friendly life. How can you afford not to?

Netflix vs the library: the fight for our entertainment dollars

I am convinced Hubby and I are one of three households in America who do not have cable. I bid adieu to that spendy luxury when I moved away to college at 18. After that, I couldn't even afford a TV until age 24 (and it was an in-kind exchange from a boyfriend who owed me money. Romantic), let alone a cable package.

Lately, with long days taking care of our 10-month-old, the daily hours of cleaning up after ourselves and said baby, long days trying to work, and plenty of working nights that begin the minute baby goes to sleep at 9:30 p.m., I've been seriously yearning for some mindless entertainment. Mostly, sitting in front of the TV vegging out for an hour or two.

We considered cable. Too spendy. Cheap runs thick in our blood. We don't have enough time to veg out to rationalize spending $60 or more on cable every month. That's when I started secretly lusting after Netflix. It started like a casual affair. I started walking by the site, throwing casual flirty glances at the monthly subscription prices. Then, it grew into a full-fledged affair, roping me in with its generous list of 1960s B movies and Bollywood classics. (Who would have guessed they had Corpse Grinders II??)

It almost turned adulterous when I filled out the membership information. Hovering over the send button, I just couldn't do it. For once, I was giving myself a bonafide Cheapache. Usually it's hubby who does that.

I was moping. Dreaming of DVDs dropping through the mailbox this week. We've had 12 inches of snow and for several days the city has been virtually shut down.We are under a level II snow emergency, which means everything is closed, and we can't drive anywhere. Miraculously, or sadly, Larry the mailman has faithfully delivered our junk mail flyers and tax forms every day this week, despite being knee deep in snow. Wistfully, I thought, he could be delivering our NetFlix videos, too. How awesome would it be to snuggle up with a movie now that we are trapped at home?

Only last night, when the snow stopped and the city started to dig out did I start to feel mildly better. I pulled on my boots. I needed to trudge to the public library to pick up Judith Levine's "Not Buying It." I have a story due next week on super frugality, and I am interviewing her on Monday. It's always better to read the book before you interview the author. Don't want to sound silly, after all. 

The basement of my local libary is wall to wall videos. I used it a lot when I was too pregnant to do much but get off the couch, but hadn't given it much thought since then. With more snow in the forecast, I thought it would be wise to peruse the selection and grab a handful of videos to get us through another potentially snowbound weekend.

Standing there, in the As, I made a pact. I would not pay for or sign up for a Netflix membership until I had watched all of the videos in this library. No, any video just because it's there, but all the movies I want to see, missed at the theater, were vaguely interesting, or would inform me of some piece of cinematic history or the cultural dialogue. I would make all of this more palatable by organizing library movie nights around themes, to make it more fun for me and the hubby I was going to drag reluctantly into this orgy of popcorn, quantity alone time, and free DVDs.

Tonight is French & Saunders night. A little BBC comedy from the creators of Absolutely Fabulous will set a nice tone, and give us a good cheering up. Saturday night is 1970s camp: Cannonball Run and Every Which Way But Loose. Hubby watched zero television growing up, and missed out on these <ahem> classic films. Now he'll have something to talk about with our friend Brian the movie buff, who is also the author of "Wild Beyond Belief: Interviews with Exploitation Filmmakers from the 1960s and 1970s."

He needs to have something to talk about with my friends, right?

Luckily, it looks as though we will have fuel for many theme nights to come. Next week? Diane Lane. Yes, the library even has a copy of "Streets of Fire."  

I'm sure Alfred Hitchcock night and Charlton Heston night will be part of our not too distant future. It looks like the library has trumped Netflix. At least for now.

Food gardens that pay dividends

Last August, I drew out this plan of what I wanted the gardens on our half-acre lot, surrounding our 1957 ranch house, to be like. I live in the city, on a typical used-to-be-suburbs but now I'm in the city limits lot. I grew up in the country, in wide open spaces with plenty of sunny room for a garden. Not so here, but despite its limitations, I am determined to convert as much of our land to agriculture as possible.

I was discussing this last night with a friend who has never had a yard. He grew up in a condo, with no grass, and said he didn't understand why he felt compelled to grow things. He dreamed often of farming. It makes perfect sense to me. For thousands of years, people grew food. It's only the last two generations or so who have been so far removed from where dinner comes from. You can't breed such an important trait out of a species in only two generations.

So yes, our plan is ambitious. I dug about half of the new beds in September. With a shovel. Every night when hubby would come home, I would hand him the baby and head outside to dig beds. Our first two summers in this house we had only one row of tomatoes on the right side of the house, and a small bed that holds Peonies and sage that is hemmed in by a concrete sidewalk. Considering how many beds I have left to dig, I have made the executive decision to rent a sod cutter in April to clear the rest.

The real question now has become: How do I make the most of the garden? I can only make the beds so big, because I have to consider the neighbors. It has to be pretty and feed us. Our backyard is pure shade, thanks to two beautiful silver maple trees that keep spitting out saplings faster than I can dig them up and post them on freecycle. (Three silver maples have gone to new homes thanks to the local freecyclers.) The backyard garden is out, unless something unfortunate happens to my trees.

Now, with seed catalogs in hand, I must decide what to plant. Our system may help you make the most use out of your limited growing space as well.

My first stop is Bankrate.com. They have a handy article about home gardening and a list of what fruits and veggies cost the most at the grocery store.

This list is quite handy if your primary goal is to lower your grocery bill.Here are the spendy veggies and fruits.

•	Mushrooms.	•	Blackberries.
•	Collard greens.	•	Raspberries.
•	Cherry tomatoes.	•	Cherries.
•	Green peas.	•	Blueberries.
•	Okra.	•	Apricots.
•	Turnip greens.	•	Strawberries.
•	Asparagus.	•	Pineapple.
•	Mustard greens.	•	Grapes.
•	Kale.	•	Plums.
•	Cauliflower.	•	Avocados.

Of course, there is no sense growing foods your family doesn't love, no matter how much they cost in the store. But the list is a handy guideline. Several of the things we'd like to plant this year are on the list, which simply reinforces our decisions.

How do you grow a garden that will pay you dividends?

• Plant the foods that will save you the most money, or will provide you with a food that you like but normally don't purchase because it is too expensive. Growing foods that can be preserved for winter use, such as hot peppers, potatoes and tomatoes, can help you stretch your grocery budget well past the summer season. Plant foods that can be frozen or canned, and don't waste anything that your garden produces. By mid-September, it can be tempting to let those last green Roma tomatoes rot on the vine. That is not the way to make your garden pay off.

If you, like me, are just starting your food garden, remember that some foods take a long time to pay off. For instance, fruit. Raspberries and blackberries can be faithful fruits for small backyards, but generally take at least a year to bear fruit. If you plant a fruit tree, it can take three years or more for you to collect your first juicy dividend.

Asparagus is another patience-tester. Asparagus can take two to three years to produce a decent crop, but once established, that bed will produce for another 20 years. Strawberries take two years to produce a good crop.Fill in the wait by planting a variety of annuals that will provide a good harvest this summer, like peppers and tomatoes. 

It is important to remember

• The garden is a work in progress. You probably won't be able to accomplish everything in the first year, nor will you necessarily be happy with the choices you make in the first year. Through the seasons, you will learn what grows best on different parts of your property. For instance, we grow tomatoes on the right side of the house. When we tried green peppers in that spot, they didn't do well. It's almost as if they got too much sun. When we moved them to the less sunny left side of the house, the peppers did very well.  The beauty of the home garden is that every spring is a chance to start fresh.
• You must mix instant gratification with long-term production. Annuals can be great if you like replanting your entire garden every year (and paying for plants every year).  Me? Not so much. So I am mixing annuals with perennials and longer-term plants like fruit trees, because in 5 years I hope to have a varied harvest, and a garden where something new ripens every couple of weeks.
• Don't spend a fortune on your garden if you plan to move, or if your main goal is to save money. Don't skimp on bargain seeds. Buy good ones, yes. But don't go crazy and spend $500 or more on tools and gizmos. That can get out of hand quickly, and eat up your profits.
• And when you are picking what to plant, don't discount something just because it's very cheap at the store. Cheaper foods like potatoes can be worth growing. Chances are anything you grow at home will taste a lot better and be more nutritious than what you can buy at a grocery store. And, you can choose to grow pesticide-free as well, an added health bonus.It all depends on why you want a garden and what you hope to accomplish.
• Be creative in your use of space. The aforementioned potatoes can be grown in a space saving trash can, if you don't have room for a long row of them.
• If you are going to do this well, you have to visit the National Center for Home Food Preservation web site. If you grow anything that you hope to eat after summer is over, it helps to know how best to preserve it. Freezing isn't always as simple as just tossing stuff in a Ziploc and putting it into the freezer.
• Make room for animals and insects in your habitat. It's always good to plant something for the honey bees, the butterflies, and other denizens of your habitat. The goal should be to tread lightly. You may also want to refrain from using pesticides. You might be surprised at how well your garden does without chemical assistance.

Now that I have said all of that, I'll tell you what I am going to plant on my modest lot, in the flower beds I have reclaimed from lawn.

• Mary Washington asparagus. An heirloom variety, to establish a bed.
• a hot pepper garden, so that we can dry them and use them to flavor our food all year long. We have chosen to grow Kung Pao hybrid, long red slim cayenne, false alarm hybrids and hot lemon heirloom peppers. We'll also plant one or two green pepper plants.
• five each of heritage everbearing red raspberries and royalty standard purple raspberries.
• red pontiac potatoes. We will be 'forcing' these in a trash can, like my grandpa used to do. By stressing the plant you can get great yields without wasting precious space.
• six Roma tomato and six cherry tomato plants. I don't know what variety, as we buy these from my former grade school every year during their plant sale fundraiser. They have always been good producers.
• the herb garden will consist of cilantro,pesto perpetuo basil,and Greek oregano.
• a patch of Ozark beauty everbearing strawberries.
• bloomsdale spinach and nantes carrots, for my raised bed and fall coldframe. I use these to extend the growing season. This will be my first year trying to extend the fall harvest into winter with the coldframe.
• green beans of a yet undetermined variety, at the request of hubby, who could live on these alone.
• the obligatory zucchini plant, also from the school fundraiser. I may get ambitious and plant two, even though I know I'll be up to my neck in zucchini. I have two new recipes for zucchini, and it always makes a great extender for sauces and such, so maybe I can keep up.
• A butterfly garden, including five varieties of echinacea, two types of bee balm, and some butterfly weed. I will frame this flowerbed with butterfly-friendly annuals, and maybe with lingonberries, which are delicious on Swedish pancakes, unusual, and look like an ornamental plant.
• Luffa. Yes, the luffa sponge is a squash, not something that is plucked from the ocean. This will be a fun experiment. They grow as a vine, so with staking shouldn't take up too much space in the garden.
• English lavender, for its aromatherapy qualities.

Of course, the seeds aren't ordered yet so this could change. It is overly ambitious, I know, and I haven't even included the two sweet dwarf cherry trees I'd like to plant. But through clever use of space, we hope to grow all of these things in abundance in our small garden, in plain view of the neighbors, without raising their ire.

No discussion of an economical garden would be complete without suggesting ways to save money in the garden.

• We use rain barrels to collect water for our plants. It saves money and the collected water is better for the plants because it doesn't contain the chemicals in treated water.
• We compost. You don't need an expensive set up, but you do need patience. It can take a year or two to turn waste into rich compost, but when it is ready, your garden will pay you back with lots of love, disease resistance, and delicious fruits.
• Save seeds, or at least let a few veggies and fruits fall into the dirt. This netted us some lovely volunteer cherry tomato plants that sprung up and gave us tomatoes just like the plants we bought every year. 
• Skip the pesticides and fertilizer. We have never once used either in our garden. Instead, we try to take good care of our dirt via mulch and compost, and we don't get too upset if a slug eats a tomato or two. There is enough for everyone.
• Don't waste a single veggie or fruit. Last year, I had two marathon sessions turning Roma tomatoes and green peppers into pasta sauce. I froze about a dozen bags of it, which will feed my family all winter. You will have to have some marathons too, whether you are in the mood or not, to get the most pay off from your money-saving garden.

A personal energy plan for the new year

This year, I wanted to do something a little different with the New Year's plan. I set the typical goals:
Put money in the savings account, fund the Bean's 529 plan. Pay down $3,600 on the student loan. Lose that 10 pounds of baby weight that is holding on to my belly for dear life.

But I wanted to do more. Something sufficiently green to try to get our day to day life more in line with our values. After some thought, we decided to generate a list of earth-friendly resolutions as well. Or rather, an earth-friendly plan.

1. Reduce our electricity usage by 10 to 20 percent by the end of the year.
The next electric bill we receive will set the benchmark we will use to gauge our progress. It lists our month-to-month usage for the past year.

Hubby and I both would like to put solar panels on our house, but frankly, our electric bill is enough to make your jaw drop. That's not particularly conducive to solar panels. The first thing the installer will tell you is "Conserve." It saves you money on your solar installation because you'll need a smaller system to cover your needs, and it's much cheaper and easier to save energy than it is to generate it.It'll also save us money on our bill, and considering our utility plans to raise rates 45 percent in the next three years, why not start now?

The question now becomes how do we reduce our usage? We have developed a short plan, that I am sure we will have to add to later.

• Insulate the garage door. We have an electric heat-pump furnace (a geothermal system, so it's the most eco-friendly you can get, but it still burns a lot of electrity.). It runs constantly in the winter, in part, because the garage chills our kitchen to the bone. We have only a hollow-core door standing between the kitchen and the freezing garage. Step one is to replace that door with a solid door, and step two is to insulate the garage. It should cost us about $200 to $300 to do this, and will increase our comfort in summer and winter.
• Replace three windows with Energy Star windows. Last winter, we replaced most of our single-pane aluminum windows with Energy Star replacement windows. But, being finance geeks, we only do what we can afford to pay cash for, and we couldn't afford to do all of them. We chose three windows that had the least impact on our energy bills, and decided to wait on those. This is the year to finally replace those three windows. We have put in the order, and it is going to cost us $1,644 to have those windows made and installed.
• Invest in a Kill-a-Watt and use it to find out what our biggest energy drains are, and address those.
• Tackle vampire electricity. The energy your appliances and electronics suck on when they are supposedly turned off is probably adding a huge sum to our energy bill. We have a lot of electronics, so the plan is to hook them all to power strips and shut the power strips off when we aren't using the electronics in question. This will probably seem like a hassle until we get in the groove.
• Replace our washer with an Energy Star, front-loading washing machine. When we bought this house, we were living out of a storage space and recovering from Hurricane Katrina. Our house didn't come with any appliances, so we had to buy all of the big-ticket items at once: fridge, washer, dryer, etc. I admit I probably didn't buy the most efficient on the market, because I had to keep an eye on the price tag. Now that we are settled, I want to replace our washer with a more efficient version (a la scratch and dent to save money).
• Add laundry lines to the basement and the backyard. Dryers eat up a lot of energy. They don't even have Energy Star dryers. Hubby loves to line dry. Me, not so much. I guess I hate having crunchy towels and underwear. Call me old fashioned.But I do recognize that dryer use adds up, and to encourage line-drying I need to make it easy and ample. As an added bonus, every time we line dry I will add 25 cents to the vacation fund.
• Switch from compact flourescent to LED lights. This may not be practical in every lamp and socket, but one by one I'd like to change out the bulbs that make sense. It may also be a slow project, as LED bulbs are very expensive. There comes a time when we can even do better than compact flourescent bulbs. They are a great technology but if you want to go greener, you've gotta move to LEDs.
• Pay for an energy audit. I'm sure we've missed something. We may be able to insulate or plug up leaks and do even better. 

We also have some other green goals for the year. 

• Produce 100 pounds of veggies and fruit. I want to grow a lot of organic, lovely veggies at home this year. We enjoy eating out of the garden and it'll be good for the Bean to see where food comes from. I'd like to plant dwarf sweet cherry or apple trees for future fruit production, but I'm not sure where to put them. I want to  build planter boxes for the front porch, which will be used for a kitchen herb garden. My goals is also to preserve or freeze everything we grow this year. No waste. This will mean I have to learn some new skills, but it should be interesting.
• Plant a row for the hungry. I will plant extra veggies and donate it to the Mid-Ohio Food Bank. I also hope to get my neighbors involved, by asking everyone in my neighborhood to drop off excess produce at my house twice a week, and I will then drive it to the food bank. I don't know if they will be willing, but it can't hurt to ask.
  
• Add three more rain barrels. If I can find food-grade barrels at low cost, I will attempt to make these myself. If not, I will buy them. Water rates are rising 10 percent next year, which is added incentive
• Make a second composter. One composter isn't enough. We have had to throw away compostable material while we have waited for our current batch to finish. I'm not sure if we did something wrong, but hey, it was our first try.
• 
• Foster habitats for native species. The only way I know to do this is a butterfly garden, and making a bat box. I will search the OSU extension office Web site for more tips.
• Further reduce plastic bag use. We need to be super vigilant and remember to take reusable bags with us everywhere. This may mean acquiring many more reusable bags and stashing them everywhere, so no matter where we are, we have a bag. My favorite so far are the DIMPA bags from IKEA. They are strong, cheap, pretty and hold TONS of stuff.
• Reduce the amount of garbage we produce. Can we do better? Probably. This means thinking more about packaging, about reusing before we recycle, buying in bulk, etc.The composter will help with this, but it's not the only solution.
  

Do you have any eco-goals for 2009?

Confession of a (closet) dumpster diver.

2009 may be the year that I once again embrace dumpster diving. My sister gave me an out-of-print book "The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving" for Christmas. After a quick read through, I realized I was already thinking about which of my local dumpsters might contain a treasure-trove of things me and my family can use. You could even say I was fantasizing about it, the way Ralphie fantasized about Black Bart and his Red Rider BB Gun.

I even briefly hatched a plan to drive by the Steve & Barry's when it closes, because I suspect they will be throwing away the store mannequins now that the entire retail chain is going bankrupt. I could use those mannuqins in my craft business, I uttered under my breath.

You must think I am crazy by now. Let me preface by saying I am not the kind of gal who will cut open trash bags and sift through people's old credit card statements. No siree. But if you leave a chair on the curb, watch out. I'm might just grab it.

When I was in college, my roommates and I didn’t think twice about picking sofas, coffee tables, and housewares out of other people’s trash. Don’t get grossed out. We always gave them a good scrubbing and disinfecting when we got home. We were definitely tried and true dumpster divers, mostly because we were too broke to buy what we needed. You couldn't beat the price tag.

I used to never pay for anything I had even a remote chance of getting for free on garbage day, especially when I knew the city's semi-annual big stuff pick up ( a primo time for furniture) was around the corner. Then something happened. When I started making even a little bit of money, I started buyin things instead of waiting until I could dumpster dive them. I fell prey to our natural American tendency for instand gratification, and I lost my patience. It's easier to go buy what you need than look through the trash for it. And, you guarantee you get something closer to what you actually want instead of relying on what you happen to find.

Sadly, looking back, I feel like I lost something in the process. Maybe I lost the thrill of the hunt. But I think it's bigger than that. I lost patience and I have indeed fallen prey to instant gratification.

Now that I am trying to come full circle back to a financially simpler, ecologically more sustainable, and more "Christmas doesn't come from a store" mentality, thoughts of dumpster diving have once again entered my mind.

I had a roommate when I was 19 who was a hard core dumpster diver. She was a freegan, meaning she didn’t pay for anything unless absolutely necessary. She would search for bags of discarded donuts and bagels in the dumpster of the local bagel shop. She would pull boxes of perfectly good, unspoiled pasta and fresh produce out of the dumpster behind the health food store three blocks from our apartment. She once salvaged a CD player from the dumpster behind an out-of-business electronics store, working except for the pause button, and reams of paper from behind a defunct office supply shop.

I’m still pretty skeptical of salvaged food. I've seen the inside of too  many  food dumpsters to eat anything outside of a safe, hermetically sealed tin can that I can wash off in the sink.

But can I take a page from her playbook and apply it to my current, not-broke-college-student and now mid-30s-homeowner-mom-career-gal life?

I admit I never truly stopped dumpster diving, I just toned it down a lot. In the past 5 years I have salvaged a lovely skillet from a can in the Garden District of New Orleans and a magician's illusion box complete with wooden swords (don't ask...) from the garbage after an estate sale. But could I do better?

Can I take a page from the freegan playbook? 

After some thought I realized freegans and frugals have a lot of common ground. They don’t spend any money they don’t have to, and they deplore waste. Maybe it’s time for us frugal folks to think about incorporating some freegan-inspired (or freegan-light) ways into our lives. For example:

Dumpster dive: It doesn’t have to be for food. You can pick usable household items out of other people’s trash. Rental properties, college dorms at the end of Spring semester, and people who are moving are great spots for this. Or, like my friend, you could look through dumpsters behind major retailers looking for usable throwaway office supplies and housewares.

Get as much as you can for free: If you want free stuff but don’t want to dig through trash to get it, turn to Craigslist and Freecycle to fill your needs at no cost. On the flip side, post your unwanted items or discards on Craigslist or Freecycle, and keep it from going into the trash. I like getting and giving things away for free. 

Freecycling has half-salved my desire to dumpster dive. I have given away a lot of things through local freecycle groups, but I have yet to actually get anything back. It seems like I am never fast enough to reply to the posts. Some folks must be poised over their keyboards waiting for those new messages to pop up.

Intercept food before it goes into the trash: At my last office job, there was always a pot luck or a birthday cake somewhere. I noticed that half of it just ended up in the trash, so I started stashing Tupperware in my desk. After everyone was finished eating and the clean-up began, I’d ask if it was OK if I took something home and would stash it in my container. As long as you ask, most people are happy the food is going to a good home.

Swap: Get all of your friends together and host your own swap meet. Ask everyone to look in their closets and on their bookshelves for things they no longer want or need. everyone brings a box of stuff, and hopefully ends up trading it for something they need or will really use. Send any leftovers to charity. Swap parties sometimes work better the more people you have. Swap parties work really well with plants and garden items.

Recycle: Yes, that’s part of the freegan ethic and it should be part of yours too. If you are frugal and hate to waste, it’s logical to expect you not to waste, as in perfectly good recyclable paper and packaging. So please, hand over your leftovers to the recycling center. If you need more incentive consider taking your aluminum cans to the metal yard. It’ll net you a few dollars for your effort.

Go to or host a “free” market: This is just like what it sounds like: a market where all the goods and services are free. San Francisco, Flagstaff, AZ, and Carrboro and Raleigh, N.C., and Philadelphia are all home to free markets. If your city doesn’t have one, consider organizing your own. This is a variation on the personal swap meet, only on a community-wide scale.

Participate in a community garden or plant your own garden: In their effort to reduce waste, Freegans often grow their own food in community and personal gardens. What better way to save money, reduce the number of miles your produce has to travel from farm to table, than to grow it yourself? Some freegans also plant guerilla gardens, where they plant veggies or flowers on either abandoned overgrown lots or on public medians, to make use of otherwise wasted spaces.

My best friend, Becca, whom was one of my broke roommates and has helped me heave more than one throw-away chair and rug into the back of a car is still growing things, she has a few pots of seedlings on her balcony.

The truly freegan lifestyle isn’t for everybody, but we can all learn something from freegan ways. Isn’t it time Americans stopped sending so many perfectly good items to the landfill? With the current economic crisis and many families feeling the pinch of falling home values, rising energy prices, and job loss, it may be time to revisit the idea of salvaging everything we can.

Stacking rewards to stretch the budget

LizaJane over at SavingAdvice.com recently bought a laser printer from Staples. That's not that interesting, but how she used her money certainly was:

"I signed onto Staples via Ebates, which had a 2% cash back reward instead of the usual 1%. My printer was $199, plus I bought a cord for $25 and an extra black toner cartridge for $57 (and then got $30 off because I combined it with the printer purchase), so the grand total with tax was $263. My 2% back will be $5.26. Ebates also has a $10 bonus, which this should qualify for. So, I should get $15.26 total back there.

The $100 Staples Easy Rebate will come in the form of a Visa gift card. Then, because I have a Staples rewards card, there should be some rewards money due to me at the end of the quarter. And, on top of all that, I used a credit card that pays me cash back. It's a small percent, but the small bits and pieces add up!"

Now that an uncertain economy is upon us, job security is even more tenuous than before, and the nation is grappling with shrinking home equity and plummeting investments, are more people using creative rewards strategies to get ahead?

Preliminary research seems to point to yes.

Colloquy, a Cincinnati, Ohio, retailer rewards consulting company says the average American family participates in 12 rewards programs.

And it appears many people are now combining rewards programs and coupons to get the best deals possible. One rewards company exec told an industry magazine, "What was more American than double-dipping?"

Columbus-based BIGresearch recently released a study indicating that 37 percent of adults
planned to use more coupons and 63 percent were unwilling to make a purchase without
a deal attached.  They say this is the first time in 16 years that coupon redemption has not dropped from one year to the next.

Gas discounts offered by grocery stores also seem to be working. The number of people getting gas at the grocery store jumped from 13 percent in 2007 to 22 percent in 2008.

Personally, I have been known to milk my rewards programs. On a recent Sunday, I went to the local grocery chain with a sales flyer in hand. I bought only loss leaders, used my store card for discounts, used a few coupons, and paid with a rewards credit card. Then, I went outside and put gas in my car. I got a discount for buying groceries at that chain, and once again I paid with a rewards credit card.

DisneySteve is also using perks wisely:

"We went out to lunch today at a local restaurant that we like. They were having a special deal on gift cards: buy $100 worth and get $20 free. So we did just that. Not only that, but I charged them to my Discover card which has a 5% cashback bonus at restaurants through December, so I'll get $5 back on the purchase. That means I actually spent $95 and got $120 worth of gift cards. Coincidentally, our meal today came to exactly $25.00 which means the meal was basically free. We spent $95 (after the Discover cashback), got lunch for the 3 of us and walked out with $95 remaining on the gift cards."

How do you use rewards programs to stretch your budget? Have you gotten savvier in recent months, as the economy has gone south?