There are so many ways to save money, and the least effective one is finding things on sale. We have to learn how to find and use what we already have. It’s a talent lost in our present culture of wanting more. Find a few ideas below to stimulate your own creativity to do what fits for your own family and household.
We have been recycling paper for many years, as many others have, but we’ve found that many folks don’t think about using the paper before recycling it.
Do you realize how much junk mail junk haulers sacramento passes through the home or office that has printing only on one side?
We keep it and use it in our printers. Most of what we print is for ourselves and for our files, so we save having to buy reams of paper. We also do this when we print something for somebody else that we know, so it will be a topic for conversation, which gives us the chance to teach that recycling and concern for the environment is important….and that frugality can be fun and not embarrassing. We set the example and that opens the doorway to teach that it’s okay to choose voluntary simplicity instead of ‘keeping up with the neighbors.’
While we’re discussing paper for printers, you must check out the refill options for those ink cartridges…it’s much too expensive to keep buying new ones.
We also save all those envelopes included in junk mail. It costs more for a label than it does for an envelope, so it’s not frugal to use them in place of envelopes for mailing and the post office doesn’t like it either. However, we’ve used envelopes for sorting things, dropping off a night deposit at the bank, passing a note or a check payment to somebody. We cross off the address with a squiggly, creative flair and write the name of the person we are going to give it to. You can file canceled checks in them or coupons by different categories. I’m sure you’ll think of more uses for them. This also sends a message of “waste not, want not” to our nation of in-debt families.
If you like spiral notebooks because of the hard surface, find a pocket portfolio and put junk mail in it to use. It’s actually nicer than the spiral since you can arrange the papers/notes in any order you want and still have them orderly in the portfolio.
We never buy note paper. We have little boxes sitting by the telephones and put any scraps of paper that we find with a clean side up to write on. Some paper isn’t the right size for a printer. There are all kinds of different scraps of paper to provide for your note paper box: extra deposit slips, the backs of receipts, small junk mail envelopes, the backing on check pads, etc.
Just begin the process and you’ll find many opportunities for free paper and you’ll feel good about saving money and trees. You can lay sheets by the phone and while you’re on one of those long conversations, you can tear them into note size making good use of your time while listening to a friend. Feel good using some of the junk mail instead of just recycling it!
Do you know that many people have eliminated trash pickup by recycling garbage in a compost pile and recycling almost everything else they use.
You can keep a large trash can outside with a plastic bag inside that will take a month to fill….and then you can haul it off to the community dumpster which is free, thereby eliminating trash pickup fees which have really become high in most towns.