This post is part of a 13 money resolutions for 2013 series. You can check the first post for an updated list of the following ones.
This is actually a shop… I was looking for car parts in Morocco.
As you look at all the areas of spending in your life for ways to trim the fat, look for possible ways you are wasting money. This waste is just as bad and should be eliminated with little effort.
Food
I am still on a zero food waste resolution that was hard to keep over Christmas, but am back on track since New Year. BF had brought lots of food from the capital city that he had kept at his home for 10 days and were already in bad shape, plus when I have guests I overcook…. No more wasting food now, it is a very important matter for me, I simply hate it. When you throw food out, your lose money. And even a couple of dollars worth of vegetables per week still amounts to $100 a year.
Buy what you need and optimize your grocery shopping. Grabbing a pack of gum at the checkout line of the supermarket is no big deal if you enjoy gums anyway. Buying 48 cans of tuna that will go bad in your pantry because tuna is not really part of your diet but ”the price was too good to pass” is wasteful.
Energy
I hate wasting energy too, what drives me crazy is when people stare at the fridge for half an hour, leaving the door open. Here there is no need for heating, and we only have hot water in the shower, limiting the potential energy waste to kitchen appliances. With a little attention, you can lower your bill without lowering your level of comfort.
Shut the windows if you are heating or have the AC on.
Turn off the lights when leaving the room
Open the fridge once when you start cooking and once when you store your food after the meal.
Stop the oven 5 minutes before your meal is ready and leave it inside until you eat.
Cook bigger portions and freeze them, using the oven for 12 portions instead of 2.
Check your water meter before you go to bed and when you wake up to spot a leak.
Lower the thermostat until you are uncomfortable, to determine your minimum temperature of comfort.
Cover your pots and pans when you are cooking so the heat stays inside and cooks your food quicker.
Wear a sweater at home and throw an extra blanket on your bed instead of turning up the heat.
Car and gas
Drive your car when you absolutely need to.
Carpool, cycle, walk the rest of the time.
Run errands once a week, all at once.
Stop for gas on the way, do not make a detour.
Check gas prices online.
Do maintenance on time to avoid costly repairs.
Like buying too much house, buying too much car is wasteful. A single person living in a big city doesn’t need a big SUV. Consider getting a car that fits your needs when you change it.
Stuff
Stop buying stuff and clothes for the sake of it, or because you are down and want to feel better. Your problem will not be solved and you will have two more problems, clutter and debt.
Try finding a new life to old things.
Give them a little TLC and try to repair, reuse, re-purpose anything you want to throw away.
Try to spend your money consciously. Do you NEED that? Will you use it often, or enjoy eating it? Do you need that much storage space and RAM on your new computer? Do you have to change phone every year?
Time
Does wasting time really have to do with money? Yes, time IS money. Try to have meaningful activities, or do nothing on purpose. I really have to work on that one. If you have 12 productive hours a day, 8 at your day job and 4 on personal projects, you still have 4 hours for fun, 1 for chores and 7 to sleep. Throw in procrastination and your goals will stagnate.
By reducing waste you will find additional room in your budget to work towards your money goals quicker. And since it is waste you shouldn’t miss it if it’s gone!
How do you eliminate waste from your life?
We put some of the lights in our house on timer switches to save electricity, like the light in the garage. Now even if you forget about the light switch in their, we typically keep the timer on 5 minutes, so it’ll go off in 5 minutes instead of hours.
That is a great idea, I’ll have to look into one of those!
I am assuming the lights are activated by a sensor when you walk in to the room. Otherwise it will be pretty irritating to turn on the lights every time. Have you switched to low energy bulbs?
We use CFLs for pretty much all the overheads – when those start to die, we’ll probably consider replacing with LEDs.
The switch doesn’t have a sensor – just a button you push to turn the light on or off…. It’s hard to explain, but this is a link to it.
http://www.lowes.com/pd_314811-1571-RT1WCCV4_0__?Ntt=314811&UserSearch=314811&productId=3066983&rpp=32
Good post Pauline! We’ve cut our food waste quit a bit through having a meal plan, a good list and managing when we go to the store. We used to have quite a bit of waste in regards to food, but thankfully have been able to make a significant cut over the last year. I am also a big proponent of saving time. We have so many things going on that it’s essential for us to streamline things.
Thanks John. I think to save time you have to spend time first, trying out systems and what works and doesn’t, then you can optimize your day. With a busy life you certainly need that or you won’t sleep until your kids are 18!
Pauline, I think that the most important thing to do is re-evaluate your priorities, which really starts with time as you mentioned at the end. I have been extremely busy and it has worn me down over the past few months, making me question various ways I spend my time and whether it is aligned with my priorities. In all honesty I need to spend more time with my wife and less time working…but I also need to keep paying down debt…how can that all work in tandem? The answer is cutting out anything that is not necessary.
As far as food, it’s important to buy only what you will eat. I love eating healthy but it’s so frustrating whenever anything goes bad! Planning is really the only solution to this.
Yes you can certainly pay debt and spend time with your wife, you could have a common free hobby or a common side job, she could help you with your consulting… ok, it is not ideal quality time but at least you get to see each other!
I am also of the zero waste mentality! I like the ‘stop buying stuff’ approach too! Happy New Year again! 🙂
HNY!
I’ve been contemplating getting a new job where my friend works and since it would be a 45 minute commute, we’re considering carpooling. I’ve never carpooled much so it should be interesting.
Being wasteful really drive us nuts as well. Wasting time and money both bother me and just speaks to the carelessness and the excess we have here in the States.
We are a society of spoiled kids and I don’t know how it got so much out of control. I am not perfect but my waste is really limited when I read people throw out 30% of the food they buy I don’t get it. Good luck with the new job!
Very true Pauline. One of our ways to cut our grocery bills this year is to cut our food waste. I have good intentions when I buy groceries for the week to cook at home. But something or the other happens, we end up eating out and my vegetables go waste. As a start, I have been going over our fridge every few days and if I see I won’t be using as much that week, I have been cutting them up and throwing them in the freezer for later use. Now we have plenty of veggies for soup. Hopefully I can keep up with this practice. It is a shame how much we waste!
Great idea about freezing the veggies that will go bad soon. I also have them on the most obvious shelf of the fridge to keep thinking about them. And I try to shop just a little under what I need for the week, so if life happens I am not left with bad food. If the week goes as planned, I can unfreeze some extra food to avoid another trip to the supermarket.
Great post Pauline. Eliminating waste is something that I am going to be working very hard on this year. I hate wasting time/money/energy on anything that doesn’t produce results.
Wasting time on purpose to
relax and do nothing once in a
while is good for the mind,
but like anything, with
measure. Good luck with the
rest!
Oh, I absolutely hate having to go back out after I’ve gotten home. It’s probably my biggest pet peeve.
There are very few things that can drag me out if I am already comfy and warm at home. Getting back knowing everything is taken care of is a great feeling.
Doing regular maintenance on things is such a great tip but often the hardest for me. It is so easy to fall into the mindset of not putting money into something if it is not broken. But if you maintain cars, A/C unit, etc., you can so easily eliminate some huge expenses in the long run. Great tips.
Thanks Kyle. Without going all the way with extended guarantee, a little TLC and maintenance schedule can do wonders.
Goof one, Pauline. Let me address three of those in turn:
1) Food – we used to waste a lot. What helped us is making weekly menus and buying for what we will cook (in fact making the menus monthly saves time at different levels but I am worried about becoming too disciplined).
2) Energy – I am becoming my father. He used to annoy me but now everytime my son leaves the lights on I remind him that it is ‘selling my labour’ or my life energy we are talking about :). Sad, I know!
3) Time – I still waste rather a lot of this and love it! Trashy novels is my absolute favourite. Need to pay attention, I suppose.
There is a cool option at tesco online that allows you to write the recipe you plan on making and it will add the ingredients to your cart. Don’t know if they still have it but it saved quite some time.
I will try the life energy thing on my BF!
It drives me crazy when someone leaves the room/house and doesn’t turn off the lights! 🙂
Right! I try to remember that the biggest energy drain is actually turning the light on, so if you leave the room for 5 minutes, it may actually be worth it to leave the lights on. I’ll have to check back the exact time when it stops making sense.
Love this long detailed list of great tips! Have never heard of “stop the oven 5 minutes before your meal is ready and leave it inside until you eat.” I have an insane fear of food poisoning so I might be a bit hesitate for this but will try.
For turning down thermostat, we also put in a programmable one so it dips even further up (or down, depending on weather) when we are gone and sleeping & moved the thermostat out of sunlight so it wasn’t confused on what the temperature actually was.
As for the water meter, you might also want to have a talk with your pets. This isn’t my video but my favorite about the water bill: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yccBHtnjk2M
haha! Thanks for sharing! If you cooked something for 40 minutes, there is almost no added risk to turn the heat off a few minutes before. Say you stop the oven for 5, but leave the food inside without opening the door for another 15 minutes, the result will be the same. Pork is the riskiest meat, but beef could be eaten raw so you don’t risk much by doing that.
“Stop the oven 5 minutes before your meal is ready and leave it inside until you eat.” YOu gave so many good ideas, I have never even thought of this one though! Wonderful Idea. I am all about not wasting food, I really have always been that way. I think it stems from coming from a large family and all that. Even now, when I make lots of soup, if I get tired of it, I freeze it or give it away. I hate to throw away food!! I go thru my fridge almost daily to see what needs to be used. Great post!!!!
My grandma raised 7 kids on food rations after the war so I hear you on big family stigmas! I prefer to freeze the soup or any big batch straight away then unfreeze if I feel like eating more, to keep it as fresh as possible and because it is easy to forget how old the food is.
The “turning off the oven” 5 min. before something is done is a good one! I’ve done that many times. It helps! Also I am a big proponent of more sweaters and blankets. Save money where you can, right? 🙂
Little bits add up!
These are some great ideas. We close the doors to the spare bedrooms when they’re not in use. The ducts are closed in those rooms so we’re not heating them as much as other rooms in the house.
Great tip! Having a small house I tend to forget about extra space 🙂
There are some great tips in there that I would have never thought of. I try to unplug almost when I go to bed. I’m not sure if it saves much, but I feel better when all the little lights are off for the night.
Several years ago, we thought we were saving money by buying food in bulk at Costco. However, we were buying a lot of perishable food that would go bad over time. We continue to be huge fans of Costco but now focus our efforts primarily on the non-perishable items. The bottom line is that you only save money when buying in bulk if you actually use all of the product.
Very true, what looks like a saving can be a big waste if thrown away.
The one I’m focusing on right now is food waste. I’m trying to get better about it. Everything else is splitting hairs for me. Like I get cold so easily so I like a warm house…not gonna lie. But at least thankfully I don’t pay for gas, and I live in a tiny place so I feel less guilty about my carbon footprint. Another area I need to work on is use beauty products up before buying new ones.
It is not wasteful if you use things, or really enjoy them, like your warm cozy house. Wasteful would be leaving the heat on and go away for a week!
I like the wasting energy item. Sometimes our problem isn’t that we aren’t going after something, it’s that we’re taking too many things on that aren’t really adding the right value to our lives.
well said MMD, changing a simple habit can add a lot of value while going through tremendous effort can result in nearly the same result.
I really like how you mentioned time here. So many people will do things that are wasting time but not think about it…meanwhile, they might worry endlessly over a few dollars. Time is money, and actually I think it’s more important. We can always make more money, but we can not make more time.
true. The same goes with putting two hours efforts into saving a couple of dollars, when you could work instead and earn so much more.
I remember you making a conscious effort to stop wasting food a few weeks back. That is really wonderful. And it seriously drives me bananas when we have company staying over and they stand in front of our fridge for five minutes, just poking around. If only more people were aware of some of these small but very useful ways to conserve on energy usage.
”company” deserves a sticker on the fridge that you will get mad if the door stays open for too long! I kicked ass in November as far as food waste, only half an onion went bad but it was harder in December. Back on track for 2013!
Great Post Pauline! I saw on the next last night that the US wastes 2 BILLION tonnes of food every year, and, in the US, 25k people still die of starvation related illnesses every year….WHY?!?!?!
I guess people who starve have no idea about how to get help, like food banks, charities, churches, food stamps… even dumpster dive! It is sad to see so much waste, even supermarkets throwing food and putting chemicals on the food to make sure people won’t grab it.
We’re pretty good at not wasting food because we live close to many great markets. We only buy enough fresh stuff for a few days. Everything else goes into the cupboard or the freezer. I am working on using my kitchen more efficiently though. As you mentioned, it’s more efficient and cost effective to cook a big batch once than several small things throughout the week.
You’re lucky to have easy access to a fresh market! I shop twice a month and those vegetables look pretty depressing on the last days.
Reducing waste is one of my priority projects. I hate waste! I often freeze leftover food for “fast food” later. Having a supply of cooked chicken strips (that I cooked) in the freezer makes for real convenience food with so many ways to use it.
When I’m tempted to buy more stuff, I clean out and organize a closet instead. It’s almost like shopping and lots cheaper!
Thanks for this series; I’m enjoying it Pauline!
Thank you Maggie! Great idea about the chicken strips, I keep a lot of frozen meals in portions but I like the idea of having different meats and veggies just ready to pick to supplement a recipe.