"Buy Nothing Year" 2 Roommates Saved $55,000 and free time on leisure rather than chaining self to cliche: work hard, burn money

(quote)

Forbes: The Buy Nothing Year: How Two Roommates Saved More Than $55,000
A little over a year ago, Geoffrey Szuszkiewicz, a 31-year-old accountant in Calgary, began analyzing his monthly spending. What he saw, he says, was eye-opening: “I was spending so much every month, no matter how much I made it never seemed like I was getting ahead. It was typical lifestyle creep.”

Around the same time, his good friend Julie Phillips, 29, a communications advisor at the University of Calgary, was about to move into a new apartment when it fell through. “Geoff said, ‘You can move in with me, but I only have a bedroom for you to rent,’” she says. “The rest was packed with his stuff. So I got rid of over 80% of my stuff within three days.” (She was thinking she might move in a year and if so, she’d have to get rid of many of her belongings then.) But then she had a meltdown. “I was like, ‘Oh my god. What did I do?’ And then I was like, ‘Why do I need things anyway?’”

Over their first bottle of wine as roommates, they questioned their need for the objects that had drained their bank accounts, and, on a whim, decided to spend a year not buying anything. The domain name and Twitter handle for the obvious designation, Buy Nothing Year, were available. Within a week, they became a national news sensation. They suddenly realized that with the country watching, they had to follow through.

They spent the first three months (August through October) phasing out all consumer items, such as household objects, electronics and clothes. Then, they cut out all services, including dining out, salon haircuts, and gas and instead began hosting lots of dinner parties — and biking or walking everywhere, even during Calgary’s long, cold winter. (For his 35-minute walk to work, Geoff would don long johns, winter boots, scarf, mittens and a hat. Though he was already fit when the year began, he lost an additional 10 pounds. When he had to go especially far, he took the bus.) They made their own laundry detergent and surface cleaners, but made a concession for store-bought dish soap, since the homemade version left a gross film on their dishes.

They had also saved a lot of money: Geoffrey amassed $42,300 (46,000 CAD) and Julie set aside $13,800 (15,000 CAD). (Julie’s explanation as to why Geoffrey squirreled away so much more: “As much as Geoff saved, I don’t make per year.”) Here’s how they achieved their feat, how the project changed their lives and what habits they’ll retain. Plus, the slide show contains their top tips on having a Buy Nothing Year of your own.

EyeWitnessNews: save money on laundry: The average family does 400 louds of laundry per year. A Consumer Reports study found the six most common money wasters. Those costs add up. You're paying for water, detergent and energy, not counting the washer and dryer. The first money waster in the laundry room is using too much detergent. Detergents are super concentrated now. When you use too much, you're not just wasting detergent, it can trigger your washer to use an extra rinse cycle. "It takes longer to do your laundry and it wastes water, very often you can't even see the lines in the cap," Pat Slaven of Consumer Reports said. "If you mark it yourself, you use exactly the amount you need."

Consumer Reports found that as much as 90% of the energy spent on a wash load is for heating the water. Instead choose the cold-water cycle. Your clothes will come clean, and you probably won't see a difference.

Wash only full loads of laundry. It saves wear and tear on your machine. If you must wash a small load, adjust the load size. And whatever the size of your load, use the highest spin setting your fabrics allow. "This reduces the amount of moisture in your clothes. Then your dryer will have less work to do, and save you energy," Slaven said.

Don't dry your clothes using the timed-dry setting. Choose the "auto-dry" setting on medium and let your dryer's moisture sensor decide when the load is dry. And fabric softener sheets can gum up the sensors in your dryer, making it run longer. Wipe them monthly with rubbing alcohol. Lastly, you won't get the cleanest clothes if you stuff everything in at once. It's more energy efficient to wash and dry similar items together, like just jeans or just T-shirts, so everything will dry evenly. Another thing that many people forget or don't bother to do is to clean out the lint filter on the dryer after every load. It keeps the air circulating and it will take less time to dry your clothes, saving even more money.

BBC: Retrieving good food from trash as prices increase
Food is getting more expensive everywhere in the world. Even in the US, where there is low inflation, food prices have gone up by 2.5% in the last 12 months.

Driven by this and by environmental concerns, increasing numbers of people are becoming freegans - people who eat food they get for free.

In a city like New York, the greatest source of free food is often other people's garbage.

The BBC went dumpster diving with one New York freegan, Janet Kalish, who has been a freegan for almost 10 years.

A Frenchman is making his way from Paris to Warsaw surviving only on a diet of food he's salvaged from waste bins to show Europeans just how much they are throwing away.
Before he left on his 3,000 mile bicycle trip to Warsaw, Frenchman Baptiste Dubanchet thought he had a pretty good idea of how much perfectly good food European supermarkets, bakeries and restaurants threw away.

But the voyage, which is intended to raise awareness about waste, has even been an eye opener for him. "I really didn't think we were wasting as much as we are," he told the The Local. "Even when you know about it, it's still surprising to open a garbage can and find so many potatoes, so much fruit, yogurt, sometimes 500-litre or 1000-litre bins are filled with things that are still good enough to eat."

40 percent of food in the United States goes uneaten, which amounts to a waste of more than 20 pounds of food per person, every month
* U.S. families throw out about 25 percent of the food and beverages they buy
* Tips included for how to properly store your fresh foods so you actually get the chance to eat them before they spoil
* In addition to making sure your fridge is kept cold enough -- below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, or 4 degrees Celsius – a vacuum sealer can greatly extend the shelf-life of produce and other perishable food items

That old bunch of carrots or pot of soup that sat for too long in your fridge, then ended up in your trash, doesn't seem like much. But when translated over an entire year, and expanded globally, the problem of food waste transforms into one of epic proportions.
Unfortunately, Americans now waste 50 percent more food than they did in the 1970s, which means the problem is getting worse instead of better...

Americans Waste 20 Pounds of Food, Per Person, Per Month

In a recent report from the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), it's revealed that 40 percent of food in the United States goes uneaten, which amounts to a waste of more than 20 pounds of food per person, every month. This amounts to upwards of $2,275 in annual losses for the average U.S. household of four.2 So this isn't simply a matter of the food itself, but the waste it generates:

* $165 billion that is essentially "thrown out"
* 25 percent of freshwater usage, wasted
* Huge amounts of unnecessary chemicals, energy, and land use, also wasted
* Rotting food in landfills, which accounts for nearly 25 percent of U.S. methane emissions

The NRDC report also estimates: "...food saved by reducing losses by just 15 percent could feed more than 25 million Americans every year at a time when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food to their tables."

In all, it's estimated that U.S. families throw out about 25 percent of the food and beverages they buy. In the UK, about two-thirds of household food waste is due to food spoiling before it is used, whereas the other one-third is due to cooking and serving too much. This problem isn't only on the consumer level, of course, as significant food waste occurs at every level of the supply chain, including during:

* Production and farming
* Post-harvest, handling and storage
* Processing and packaging
* Retail and restaurant distribution

Is "Cheap" Food Creating Even More Waste?

The average American wastes 10 times more food than the average consumer in Southeast Asia. NRDC suggested this may be because food is relatively inexpensive, and typically widely available, in the U.S., which makes it seem like it has less value. They reported: "Cheap, available food has created behaviors that do not place high value on utilizing what is purchased. As a result, the issue of wasted food is simply not on the radar of many Americans, even those who consider themselves environment- or cost-conscious."

Unfortunately, the "faster, bigger, cheaper" approach to food production that the United States has mastered is unsustainable and contributing to not only excess waste but also the destruction of our planet and your health. Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and a number of other bestsellers, said it best: "Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn't paid at the cash register, it's charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it's charged to your health."

The average American household discards between $500 and $2,000 worth of food a year. But there are clever ways to minimize waste, by storing food carefully or preserving it at its peak to enjoy later, says Sherri Brooks Vinton, author of "Put 'Em Up," a book about preserving food.

(unquote)

Photo courtesy Kevin Jesuino / Forbes and Baptiste Dubanchet / The Local