Smart Strategies for Enjoyable Frugal Living
When one hears the phrase “frugal living,” it is often associated with a comprehensive penny-pinching lifestyle that comes with an underserved social stigma. Images of freakishly miserly people reusing toilet paper, or wearing clothes made out of recently recycled trash.
Truth be told, we all should be keen on conserving resources, especially since the global population numbers are going nowhere but up. With more people needing to take a slice the resource pie, each piece will be progressively smaller as the number of people that share it grows.
Could there be a way to be smart with resources without incurring a peculiar reputation? Fortunately, it is becoming more and more chic to be frugal, and the following policies below should grant you the benefits of conserving resources and cost cutting without weirding out the general populace:
Recycling
This is already a very mainstream way of reducing your impact on the world’s resources, and with good reason. Any move to reduce the amount of material we throw into the environment is a sound policy, as even biodegradable materials can have a negative impact on the surroundings.
It is not just about collecting recyclables and turning them over to recycling centers. Look at every object you have in your household, whether it be a food product, packaging material, or whatever else. If you can find a use or function for it that results in you keeping the item in your household for a little longer, then it may just be the right thing to do.
Tuning Down/Off and Using Less
This applies to most electronic devices gadgets, and appliances in your household. Most of us are often guilty of keeping them running even if there is no practical reason to do so other than our sheer laziness. We are also fond of turning things up to their highest setting, thus wasting more electricity without a real-world benefit.
Motor vehicles, air conditioners, heaters, lights, audiovisual systems, the water faucet, and a lot of other devices in your house need not be on all the time, or operating at their highest settings. Examine your daily lifestyle and activities, and find opportunities to use a little less of our world’s resources by turning usage levels down without compromising on your comfort and lifestyle.
Buy Surplus and Second-hand
Not everything has to be acquired brand spanking new, and just because an item has been preowned doesn’t mean that it is less than functional compared to a new version of it. Buying second-hand not only extends the use of the items being bought, it also reduces the need to produce new goods, conserving energy and resources.
Many consumer durable goods are available from brick-and-mortar swap meets, garage sales, pawnshops, and nowadays, many online sales and auction sites are performing the same functions. While some are general sales/auction sites like eBay and Amazon, there are also more specialized venues in which a specific set of products are available, such as Next Truck, a site that caters to the sale and auction of trucks and truck parts.
With these ideas in mind, I encourage everyone to become more thoughtful in their use of our world’s precious resources.
About the Author
Stacey Thompson is a professional writer, marketer, entrepreneur, and a lover of weird little animals. She is based in San Diego, California, and is also into smart resource usage; she has some ideas of her own for that topic in her gang’s blog, Word Baristas.
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Category: Frugality
