This Sunday, April 22nd, its Earth Day around the world. In honour of that, I’m issuing a challenge to everyone who reads this blog post – think of one way in which you can reduce your environmental impact, and go out of your way on Sunday to do that. And whatever it is that you decide to do, I’d love to hear about! Leave a comment explaining what you did or are planning to do – you could be an inspiration to others! Not sure what you can do? Here are some ideas:
- Leave the car alone for one day and power yourself everywhere you need to go, by biking or walking.
- Lots of people like to go grocery shopping on Sundays, take reusable canvas bags with you and say no to plastic grocery bags.
- Instead of going to the grocery store on Sunday with those canvas bags, get on your bike and take them to a local farmer’s market to buy local goods straight from the farmers, and support your own community at the same time.
- Doing the laundry on Sunday? Don’t use the dryer – create a clothes line somewhere in your house or in your yard and hang all your clothes to dry!
- Contact your local politician and ask him/her what he/she is doing for Earth Day. Tell him/her that you want to see a renewed focus on environmental issues in your area. Make sure that being green is on his/her mind.
This is just a small sample of things you can do to lower your impact. But you don’t need to just do them on Sunday. Do something on Sunday and then keep doing it, see how long you can go before you switch back to your old ways, if you ever feel the need to.
Last week’s article about planning a green and frugal wedding, focused on invitations, was featured in several blog carnivals, including
- Yakezie Carnival, hosted by Money Q&A
- Carnival of Money Pros, hosted by Novel Investor
- Financial Carnival for Young Adults, hosted by 20′s Finances
- Carnival of Financial Planning, hosted by Thriftability
- I’ve been talking about weddings lately, specifically looking at food and invitations, so I was definitely interested in reading Mo’ Money Mo’ Houses’ post on 2012′s wedding trends and how they might save you money.
- Young and Thrifty talked about how having savings goals can help you achieve your life’s goals.
- Prairie Eco-Thrifter talks about what to look for in an ethical or green financial planner.
- I can procrastinate a lot when I need to get anything done, so this post by When Life Gives You Lemons, Add Vodka on how to motivate yourself to be more productive was particularly interesting.
- Canadian Budget Binder recommends that Canadian college and university start learning about personal finance issues now, before they start the next chapter in their lives.
- Digging Out and Up went to Planet Organic, an organic foods grocery store, with $35 – curious to know what she got for that? Surprisingly, quite a bit.
This past week, I completed my first ever freelance photography job, shooting the interiors of a small chain of local coffee shops. I had a blast and it paid reasonably well, though part of my income got eaten away when I had to replace a lens that broke on the first day of the job. Murphy’s Law right! I’m hoping this will lead to more freelance opportunities – while I was shooting one of the stores, a customer came up to me to ask about my rates. Apparently, he is looking for someone to shoot some portraits of him for his online dating profile. I gave him my contact info but haven’t heard anything from him. I learned a major lesson about freelancing from this one gig – freelance jobs don’t grow on trees. Getting freelance jobs is 10% skill on the job and 90% marketing yourself. I didn’t have any business cards with me or really any sense about how I wanted to sell myself to potential future clients. In fact, I was totally caught off guard by the entire situation. It actually didn’t even occur to me that someone might see me working on this job and inquire about my services. So for now, I’m hoping my 10% skill might get me another future job with this same customer, and in the meantime, I’m going to start working on the other 90%.
Do you ever have one of those days, when it seems like things just always go wrong. I’m writing this post in the aftermath of one of those days. I’m a big fan of Ultimate Frisbee. I try to play every weekend if I can with a group of friends. Usually, we play on a field near me, but today, we were trying a new field that was further away. So in an effort to be frugal, I decided to bike there. My first bike ride of the year. Bad idea. By the time I got to the field, my thighs were in agony, which made running for two hours pretty unenjoyable. Needless to say, my team lost both games. Later in the day, since I no longer had the energy to do much of anything, I decided to relax in a park and enjoy the beautiful day we had. About twenty minutes later, I saw something fall from the sky and land, ‘plop!’ on my jacket. Bird poop…wonderful! My lovely fiancee took me home to clean up, then while doing the laundry proceeded to drop my one of my shirts in the toilet. We hang some clothes to dry in the bathroom to save on money and energy from the dryer. It seems the environment has it out for me today. Sigh… At least, it isn’t actually raining.
