Queercents

Category: Frugality

  • Simple Living in a Nutshell

    Simple living is reducing the clutter of life and space down to the essentials of what is important; allowing what remains to stand out and bring value. Kind of like the picture to the left, if there were many other colored flowers around the yellow one you would see beauty of ALL the flowers, but…

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    ~Dawn

  • Learning about the smart car: save gas, space, clean air and money

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    ‘œI know that I am partly to blame, by insisting that cars run on trash.’ ‘“ Al Gore on SNL Last weekend after touring the Project 7 Ten house (a Platinum LEED Certified home); we continued our eco-romp around Venice Beach and stumbled upon the smart house several blocks away. The smart house isn’t really…

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    Nina

  • Spend or Save? Live in Comfort with Fewer Wants

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    There was a good article a while back from bankrate.com called Waste not, spend not or spend a lot that has some good thought- provoking points. I will highlight a few, but read the whole article for more detail. ‘œHas ours become a throwaway society? Maybe we should be conserving our resources. On the other…

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    ~Dawn

  • Traveling Abroad: Travel Partners and Car Rentals

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    Having a travel partner can be challenging. You want to tour the house where John and Paul wrote over a hundred songs together; he’d rather see the Beatles museum. You want a salad; he wants a hot dog from a vendor. There isn’t time for everything, and there certainly isn’t enough money for everything. The…

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    Aundi

  • Light Bulb Laws: The CFL Lobby vs. Personal Choice

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    If you read any personal finance blog, you will eventually come across a post recommending you save money by switching from incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescents (CFLs). It’s a no-brainer – CFLs use only about 25% of the energy of incandescent bulbs, and they last longer, so you end up saving money despite the…

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    Bill

  • Blog Action Day: The Toilet will Teach Them

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    If it’s yellow, let it mellow If it’s brown, flush it down. This saying was believed to have been started by former (75-83) California Governor Jerry Brown as a way to conserve water. And I still see it around on different ‘œgreen’ blogs. I was trying to figure out how much water is used in…

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    ~Dawn

  • Blog Action Day: Stop Using Plastic Bags

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    ‘œUse it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.’ ‘“ New England proverb About a year ago, I wrote a post called Making Peace with Plastic Grocery Bags and some suggested I should quit using altogether instead of just focusing on ‘œrecycling’ plastic bags. One reader wrote, ‘œPlastic is just bad news…

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    Nina

  • Sleeping With Money: Programable Thermostat Can Save Budget & Relationship

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    Admittedly, I’m a beach girl. I’d prefer to live in shorts on a beach near the equator than in wool on snowy mountains. Being comfortable temperature wise is important to me. I get irritated easily and can’t focus if I’m too cold. And unfortunately, Northern California never gets hot enough for me. When I lived…

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    Allison

  • How to Make a Free To-Do List

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    I was standing in line at Target recently and while waiting for the lady ahead of me to pay for the 10 packs of bottled water, my eyes dropped down to the right side, to the things hanging in the “impulse buying” area. There was a nicely packaged batch of papers that had “To Do”…

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    ~Dawn

  • Food Budget: Eating on a Shoestring

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    ‘œWorries go down better with soup.’ ‘“ Jewish Proverb Back in May, Ben McGrath at The New Yorker wrote about Eric Gioia, a city councilman from Queens and his Food Stamp Challenge. What’s the Food Stamp Challenge? According to McGrath, it’s eating only what someone could afford on a week’s worth of food stamps, or…

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    Nina