Buy Nothing Challenge

April 1, 2009

I have decided to do a buy nothing challenge for the next 30 days.

Today I found The Story of Stuff and it got me thinking about ways to make my personal finances greener. If you click over, you can watch the 20 minute video about our stuff and the way the supply chain for material goods really works.

The Story of Stuff is a very thought-provoking video which got me thinking about ways I could make my footprint smaller when dealing with my money.

Here are the ways I came up with to help the environment when dealing with my own personal finances.

Green Personal Finance Goals

1.) The Buy Nothing Challenge. I have challenged myself to not buy anything new for the next 30 days, starting today, April 1. April fool’s day is a good day to start a 30 day challenge.

To add to the difficulty, I’m going to include food. I just went to the supermarket this week and figure that I can definitely make my food last until the end of the month. I am excluding gas only because I can’t stay home for 30 days because I’d lose my marbles.

2.) Set all bank accounts and bills to electronic statements. This way there isn’t paper, postage and ink produced to deliver a bill that I’m ultimately going to throw away and not even enjoy receiving in the mail.

3.) Set all bank statements and bills to automatic bill pay. While I’m reducing waste, I’m also cutting mental clutter because then I don’t have to see the email from the company, think about paying the bill and possibly forget. Automating cuts a lot of steps from the system. I won’t get charged late fees because I won’t be late.

4.) Recycle all shreddings from my paper shredder. In the past I have been lazy and chucked these in the garbage. Not anymore.

5.) Stop turning on the heater at night. I live in Southern California. I know this isn’t practical for a lot of people in the winter, but it is here. I have plenty of perfectly good sweaters that I’m not wearing all at once. I’m going to start.

6.) Plastic grocery sack magic. Instead of reusing my plastic grocery bags as lunch bags and then throwing them away, I’m going to use a reusable lunch sack every day for my lunch. I’m going to recycle the plastic bags I have already accumulated. Once my 30 day challenge is up, I’m going to get a couple reusable sacks for the supermarket and stop using plastic grocery sacks for good.
Current Green Habits
7.) Pack a lunch. This stops me from driving to get food, using styrofoam and creating extra packaging waste. I have some food containers that I wash out, so I don’t buy or use plastic bags except for the plastic sacks from the grocery store that I made plans for in tip #6 above.

8.) Skip bottled water. Not using bottled water was a hard habit to break, but when I did, I realized that I really didn’t see it adding any value to my life. I have a water filtration pitcher that I keep in the refrigerator and means I drink more water because its there and already cold. Drinking water is more healthy and also saves a lot of money on other beverages.

9.) Avoid soda and juice. Soda and juice are also packaged and don’t add anything nutritionally. As for juice, it is better and more satisfying to eat the whole fruit.

10.) Creative leftover cooking. When I have no good ideas for what to cook, I put my leftover ingredients into the recipe finder at www.leftoverchef.com and get ideas. Another great method to clean out your cupboards is to play kitchen whatsit, which is combining a bunch of ingredients and making creative entrees. I’ll be doing a lot of this in April because of the buy nothing challenge.

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