Green Minded Wallet

I, like most people I know, take medication on a regular basis (and I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing). But given all of the news about the high level of pharmaceuticals in our water, I have been thinking about just how much medication we take nowadays. Not only that, I have also been thinking about how quickly I take my doctor’s advice on which medication to take (or even to take a medication at all). It’s not that I think that doctors are giving out bad advice, but it just seems strange to me that as someone that deliberates on the environmental and financial impacts of just about every decision, I would so blithely make a decision that could impact my body, finances, and perhaps even drinking water for decades to come so readily. Part of the challenge is determining the best way to get information so that I am making an informed decision, especially since individual physiology can play as much of a role as the pharmaceutical in question. While internet message boards can be informative, you often only get the extremes. Friends and family can often be a useful source of information, but are sometimes biased and may not be able to offer assistance in all areas. I do feel however, that given the potential side effects of many drugs and their ability to vastly outweigh benefits it is definitely something that I am going to consider more carefully.

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I would be flat broke. Seriously. I feel like I start off the week with a manageable number of tasks and plenty of time to get them done, and yet somehow some things always get squeezed out. To make matters worse, it’s always the same things that get squeezed out, like blogging and cleaning and organizing. And I like blogging, I really do. Truth be told I don’t even mind cleaning and organizing within reason, but somehow they get pushed down the priority list. I think a lot of it has to do with guilt and the feeling that I’m not going to live up to some expectation. If I don’t clean my room, no one has to deal with it but me and the dog (and I’m really not that concern with her feelings on the matter). But if I don’t put full effort into an assignment what will my professors think of me? I realize that it’s silly and that prioritizing your time (just like any other resource) requires that you make some sacrifices. I also think that no matter what you choose, someone is going to be disappointed: I’m not talking about them being let down because you didn’t do something that you were supposed to do, more that you didn’t do all that they thought you could (and therefore should do). If this is truly the case, then I guess I need to learn to deal with the guilty feelings (i.e. get over it).

Fortunately I think my problem is not that I have too many activities, but that some areas of my life (classwork, triathlon training) seem to squeeze everything else out. The nice part about this is, that I don’t have to quit anything, I just have to scale back. And I’m trying, it’s just going to take some time. Perhaps I could set a maximum amount of time per week for everything related to that particular activity including travel and additional research to make sure that all of the little unexpected tasks don’t continue to encroach on other areas. We’ll see.

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There is a block that I have to walk (sometimes run) down in order to catch the bus into school. There are six houses on the block. Today a new ‘for sale’ sign went up which means that three of the six houses are now for sale. What’s more, two of the other houses sprouted ‘for sale/for rent’ signs last year (both were rented). Now I happen to know that the two houses for sale are not distressed sales (at least not yet), but there were young people who bought into the neighborhood despite being in school and not planning to stay for more than a few years. I don’t know much about the third house for sale. The two houses that rented this fall have been rental properties for a while. Still it’s a lot of turn over for one block. I wonder what the people in the sixth house think? What happens if one of the rental houses goes up for sale again; I wonder if it would scare off potential buyers?

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So, I mentioned awhile back that I was currently paying $14/mo for each of my three prescriptions. Well I found out that one of my allergy medications recently started being sold over the counter, and since I know that some insurance companies stop covering medications once they are sold over the counter I went to our school pharmacy to find out if my insurance would still cover it. The over-the-counter cost at a local pharmacy is around $19/mo so if I had to pay for it out of pocket it would cost an extra $5 more per month. But it turns out the our student insurance will still cover the medicine if you buy the generic with a prescription (the generic became available the same time that the medication went over-the-counter), so instead of paying $5 more per month I get to pay $7 less! I think that I will take my new-found savings and put it towards the ‘additional medical costs’ category in my budget.

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So when I got back from my Christmas trip back east, I noticed that one of the ceiling tiles in my bedroom was soaked and sagging ominously. I promptly called my landlord and after a few phone calls I learned that I was in a queue as a small backlog had occurred due to the holidays. When I called back a few days later, I mentioned that I had also noticed a little drip in my bathroom sink and one in the kitchen sink as well. A few days later when the maintenance service man finished I ended up with quite a few new ceiling tiles, a new bathroom faucet, a new bathroom showerhead, and a repaired kitchen sink. It turns out that there were a few cracks in the aged bathroom appliances that caused them to run extra water, but I was just so used to them that I didn’t really pay it much attention. Anyway, they’re fixed now so I should be able to save a bit more water in the bathroom. It did make me feel a bit ashamed of the fact that I’m always looking for more painstaking ways to conserve but there were some really simple problems that could have been solved earlier with a simple phone call.

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If you do business with a company and they mess something up, do you give them a second chance? Does it make a difference what type of institution it is, i.e. are you more liking to forgive a department store or salon versus a mechanic or bank? Do you consider how the problem is handled in part of your decision? Here’s why I ask:

Earlier this year I had to take my car into the mechanic’s and it turns out the problem was that the company who changed my oil hadn’t replaced the filter correctly. Now it was a little problem when I took it in, but it could have turned into a big problem (destroyed engine). When I contacted the other company, they gave me and my mechanic the run around for months. Since then, I’ve heard from my mechanic that they have had other customers come into their shop with the exact same problem due to the continued negligence of the “Oil Change Shop”. Now the Oil Change Shop has not only lost me as a customer, but I warn everyone I know about them and I believe a letter to the Better Business Bureau is in order.

On the other hand, I had a problem with online access to a online bank account just before New Year’s. The people were really nice but there was no one who could help me get access to my money for over 36 hours. Needless to say, this did not make me happy. On the one hand you would think that online banks would have better tech support, but I hear that many seem to take the help yourself approach. At the same time, they did fix the problem courteously once their little holiday was over and I do like having my money in a separate account. So now I’m trying to decide if I should just stick with it barring no more problems while keeping my eye out for better opportunities or stick the money back in to my main bank’s savings account (which pays quite a bit less interest). I think that part of the problem is that I am so accustomed to outstanding, readily available support from my main bank that I get easily frustrated when dealing with other financial institutions. I guess they just totally have me spoiled!

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