Green Minded Wallet

I’ve been avoiding my local Freecycle list lately for two main reasons. First, the community has grown tremendously over the past year and as a consequence there is a lot of correspondence (and I just can’t possibly keep up with all of it). Secondly, I have found that since joining I have acquired more things than I’ve managed to give away. To make matters worse, most of what I’ve acquired doesn’t really fit into my main hobbies or lifestyle, so I don’t even have time to use it. Personally, I think that there’s something about ‘free’ that draws people in; why else would you (well I) do a flexed armed hang for a Marines larnyard? I can honestly say that I would not have spent any money to acquire one, and I really don’t have much use for it (though it might make a nice gift for one of the little kids in my family). Perhaps once school’s over I can take some time and find someone who can actually use some of the stuff that I’ve acquired. There are two benefits to that scenario: (1) it won’t end up in a landfill and (2) I can stop tripping over it.

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So I started a post on my financial goals for 2008, well at the start of 2008, but I never quite got it finished. Since however the first quarter is already over (yikes) I thought I would post what my goals are so that perhaps before the year is halfway over I can post on how well I’m progressing. Here are my goals:

1. Reduce the principal balance of my student loans by $1500
2. Save $1200 for long-term savings (I don’t have a specific goal in mind but I might have need of money for a car or wedding in the (fairly distance) future)
3. Increase my emergency fund by $1000

These are in order. If you’re wondering why the emergency fund is last it’s because I already have more than four months of savings specifically dedicated to an emergency fund as well as other savings that could be used in an emergency. At the beginning of the year I felt that these were fairly ambitious; if however I manage to meet them all, I’m not quite sure what I will do with the “excess”.

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It seems that lately natural cleaning products, like vinegar, are all the rage. In magazines, books, and on the internet everyone is telling you that you can just use all these simple home products to clean naturally and effectively. But here’s my question: many of these products (like vinegar and boric acid) have been around for years and have been used as cleaning products for years; if they’re so amazing why did we come up with so many other cleaning products and why are those products so popular? Don’t get me wrong, I do employ natural cleaning products on occasion and there are some situations where I find certain natural solutions to be just as effective as the standard household chemicals, but I haven’t found natural products to be a panacea for household cleaning solutions. My guess is that others have found the same thing given the proliferation of “non-natural” cleaning products. Furthermore, just because things are natural doesn’t mean that they are necessarily safe or non-volatile. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try to find more natural alternatives, but I am saying that sometimes we can get caught up in being “green” or “natural” and fail to realize that natural solutions aren’t necessarily the end all, be all.

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