One of the sad, boring truths of environmentalism is that sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing. I don’t mean ‘do nothing’ as in roll over and die, but rather ‘do less’ by traveling less and buying less stuff.
To celebrate the great environmental strategy of doing less, my husband and I are going to go on a one-month spending freeze starting on March 1st. Now this will be like a government spending freeze, that is to say, not much of a spending freeze at all. We’ll still pay our mortgage, which is the huge bulk of our expenditures, pay bills and buy groceries. But it will still be interesting to see how life goes for a month with zero discretionary spending.
According to my weekly budget, I should save about $175 per week with no eating out, travel, etc. And just what am I going to do with all this money after the spending freeze is over?
I could go to Disneyland, but that would defeat the purpose of the spending freeze. So instead, I’ll be using it to provide matching funds for OurJoules donations. This way my money will be spent on products that, over their lifetime, save/produce more energy than was used creating them.
So, wish me luck and stay tuned here for my non-spending adventures!
If you are matching donations – does that mean you only have to raise $250 before that guy gets to write your Facebook statuses for a week?
No, he has to raise $500 not counting the matching funds. It’s gonna be pretty tough because he still has $336.51 to go!