When it comes to saving the planet, many people focus on the "three r's:" Reduce, reuse, and recycle. I also focus on all three of these things. I try to reduce the amount of stuff that I purchase, reuse things until their useful life has run out, and recycle whenever possible. As a personal finance writer, I realize that reducing and reusing are the most important out of the three r's to help save money. I also realize that recycling is good, but it doesn't help us to save money and it isn't enough to save our planet.
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19 Ways We Saved Money on Our Hawaiian Vacation
Traveling to Hawaii can be a once in a lifetime trip. And if you take your whole family there, it can be a trip that you end up paying for many years after you get home. As a matter of fact, a family of 5 (like mine) could easily spend $15,000 or more to go to Hawaii. I knew that we wouldn't want to spend this much money to travel anywhere besides space or maybe Antarctica, so I worked hard to save a lot of money on this trip. I even wrote about how we saved $7,264 on the trip, before we even went. While we were on this trip,…
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How Much Electricity Does a Space Heater Use?
I never really asked the question, “How much electricity does a space heater use” when I owned my first house. The house was energy efficient and relatively new, so electricity was pretty cheap. However, after my wife and I purchased our second house, we quickly found out that it wasn’t very energy efficient. I discovered this when I was fixing a hole in the wall and found newspapers that were acting as insulation. Needless to say, our heating bills were pretty expensive! Besides the newspaper acting as insulation, the other reason that our bill was expensive was the window in our front room. It didn’t really close well and it…
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Become Wealthy By: Using the Library and Your Own Coffee Pot
I know that it is really fun and easy to go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble to buy books. Both of these retailers have millions of books that can allow us to get lost in a fantasy world with Harry Potter, walk on the Appalachian Trail with Bill Bryson, or learn about the workings of the universe with Stephen Hawking. And, like so many people, I love reading: from huge fiction collections like Game of Thrones to non-fiction thrillers like Into Thin Air. Books, blogs, and magazines can both help us escape from reality or figure out how things work. I absolutely love books! Over the past few months,…
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The Easiest Money Saving Challenge Ever!
My wife and I always seem to make a lot of big life changes at the same time. For instance, in the span of 40 long hours, we each started new jobs, sold a house, bought another house, and moved. That was probably 40 of the most difficult and exciting hours of my life. Even when we first got married, we waited only two weeks after our wedding to buy our first house. Just like any young, newly married couple, we did not have a lot of money saved (we had not participated in the easiest saving challenge ever). We also were not extremely experienced at fixing things around the…
