I have to admit:  I wasn’t brought up by hippies.  I wasn’t always a “save the environment” fanatic.  I was only in it to save my wallet.  But it feels pretty good to save the environment by things that I’m already doing, and it’s already caught me.

Frugality and doing more with less lessen your impact on the environment.  Jacob talked about people living in mansions and driving military-style vehicles a while ago, and it really struck me that it’s true.  The guy driving the Hummer is the first one to honk at me when I’m pedaling down the road to the local grocery store.  I’m not really sure why he’s honking at me.  Maybe he’s scared.

And my McMansion is bleeding me to death through electricity bills.  I plan on cutting our living space to one-third of what we live in now at our next home.  When DS came to live with us (he’s adopted), we still lived in our first house (667 square feet) and that was fine.  We were all cozy.  I know we can do it again.

All of this amounts to less things used and a greener environment.  So, I have to come clean and tell the truth…I didn’t come into this expecting to save the world (by saving the environment).  It’s just a side effect.  But now I will spend more money if something is green, because it fits into my value system.  Does it make me a bad person if I’m a late bloomer?

This is simple.  Because we drive everywhere in the U.S.  It amazes me here (I’m overseas) how beautiful the people are just because they walk everywhere and don’t spend their  whole entire day at a desk or in a car or on the couch.  My next house is so going to be in the center of a city.

I think most of my friends are supporting a move back to city life.  For the past 50 years it has been a move from the cities into suburbia for a better family life.

But this improved family life leads to longer commutes to get to anything and increased time in the car, which I abhor.  Do you enjoy the time you spend in your car?

Living in the city, you can get to attractions more easily, walk places, and save money, all in one!

I am constantly out of town, which makes it difficult for me to stay in contact with my family.  I have an excellent relationship with DH and DS, but they already understand that it’s not always possible for me to contact them.  Here are some things that I do to make them feel better:

1.  Tell them each time I leave that I will probably not be able to contact them frequently.  This is key for DS, so that he understands and gets told repeatedly that I am always thinking about him, I just can’t contact him.

2.  Take the soaps from the hotel home to DS.  I used to buy him a gift each time I went on a trip, but I found out he really likes to have a bag full of soap.  It’s strange, but free, so I don’t really care.  He’s got a whole drawer of soaps, lotions, shampoos, etc. in his bathroom.

3.  Try to get to email ASAP when I arrive at my destination, if I don’t have cell phone coverage.  Our cell calls are free, but I don’t have overseas coverage.

4.  Let DH know before I leave how much my per diem will be.  This makes him realize how much money I can save by travelling.  He knows I’m a blackbelt at saving money on trips.

5.  Try to follow up with regular emails.  I get busy when I don’t have home details to distract, so I have to set an alarm on my watch daily to email DS and DH.

6. Get automatic bill pay.  Seriously, it makes your life so stress free.  DH doesn’t even work, but he knows how to get into the bank account and fix problems and is conscious of our money situation, even though I’m the money handler.  Automatic bill pay lets us both relax.

7.  Have a friend back at home that will help your family out on your behalf.  Be willing to do the same for him/her.

If you follow these ideas, you can probably minimize some of your worries.  They will never completely go away until you are “at home” to control the situation, but you can at least minimize them.  What do you do to help your family out while you’re on trips?

When you’re in a foreign country, there are many ways to save money.  Here are some examples…

1.  Speak a few words of the language.  If the locals see that you are trying, they will be more willing to barter with you.  Speak all the language, even better!

2.  Go to the grocery store.  Don’t eat out of the hotel mini-bar.  The prices in the mini-bar are more exorbitant than American prices!  Buy some local fruit and filtered water.  Your body will thank you for it.

3.  Eat the free breakfast at the hotel.  I need to work on this.  Getting out of bed in the morning would help.

4.  Always take paper and a pen with you.  This will help so you can draw pictures if you don’t speak the language.  The price is 4.500?  Write 3.500 on your paper and look at the merchant with questioning eyes.

5.  Take money out of the ATM.  Exchange rates are better there than at the exchange or hotel desk.

6.  Try Western Union for safeguarding.  Our credit card got blocked on our first trip to Honduras, but DH and I had each sent each other a Western Union for $300.  $600 goes a long way in Honduras.  It was enough for three weeks and a call to our bank to fix the credit card.

7.  Find an Internet Cafe.  I’m not sure if they have this in other places, but Central and South America have found VOIP, and with this, you can call back to the States and possibly Europe for around 5 cents a minute.  Or set up a Skype chat in your room if you’ve got that.

What are some things that you’ve done to save money in a foreign country?

There is something about pulling a brand new thing out of its package.  It feels like Christmas.  There is no replacement for that feeling.  Something feels good about pulling a full cart of food up to the cash register at the grocery store and paying for it yourself.  The package in the mail that you’ve anticipated from Amazon, with a fresh book with the just-published smell.

These things are not sin in my book.  I understand that other people need to feel consumerism at times.

The parable of the broken window is a theory that if the shopkeeper’s son breaks his window, it stimulates the local economy by forcing the shopkeeper to pay the glazier to fix his window.  In turn, the glazier has money to buy bread or get his shoes fixed.

It is a fallacy.  Do not think that you are stimulating the economy by spending your stimulation check or your hard-earned cash.  Step back and think for just a moment about what you are not spending your money on:  your future.

So, if the shopkeeper’s bratty son had not broken his window, the shopkeeper would have more money to invest in goods to sell and earn even more money.

Or he could have invested it and earned even more money.  Have a look at Jacob’s current post on money earning money.  Or is it money-earning money?

Don’t just spend money to stimulate the economy.  Spend responsibly and the whole economy will be raised by it.  Now, if everyone else would just take that advice…

For more data on the broken window parable, have a look at the Wikipedia article.

Free money is easy to come by if you’re creative.  What are the limits of your creativity?

I motivate myself to get just one more use out of my things by telling myself that I am lowering my cost per use.  Example…if I take five minutes to remove a stain from a shirt, I might get 10 more uses out of it.  Considering that I have gotten 10 uses out of it and plan on getting 10 more, if I bought it from a thrift shop for $5, then my cost per use is 25 cents.

If, on the other hand, I get a stain on a shirt, bought it from Macy’s for $25, and decide not to fix the stain myself, and I have already gotten ten uses out of it, my cost per use was $2.50 - ten times the cost!  If your house cost ten times as much, would you probably reconsider?  Then why won’t you do it with a shirt?

It gets better, though.  If you are a bit creative, and watch Freecycle for a deal, you might get the shirt for free.  Cost per use = $0.

The second part of the equation for me is putting off buying something new.  If I save the shirt and use it until I cannot use it anymore, I won’t have to buy another shirt for awhile, saving the amount of shirts I have to buy over a lifetime.

Let’s say over the course of a regular lifetime, I have to buy 200 shirts.  If I make things last longer, I can probably get by with half the shirts, saving half my shirt cost over the course of a lifetime, plus whatever kinds of sales or free shirts I can get!

I try to treat my life costs like a business.  How do you use these principles?

This all seems like free money to me, because you would have to spend the time to go to the mall anyway, try on the shirt, find the shirt, etc.  It is worth any extra five minutes I may have to spend to go through the thrift store racks or treat my clothes nicely (by line drying them) to get the extra usage.

Once you pay off your last credit card and get done exclaiming it to the world, you may have a letdown.  Because what life is there after debt payoff?!?!  Just joking - you can easily continue to live a simple, frugal life and payoff your mortgage, leaving yourself with little liability each month and a great feeling of freedom.

Here is how I paid off my first mortgage in 15 months….

1.  Find the cheapest house that you can stand.  A smaller house in a good neighborhood is perfect.  Our first home was only 667 square feet.  And we lived there…no problem.

2.  Lowball the seller.  The market that we have right now allows you to be more in control of the transaction.  We offered $70,000 in 2005, which was a seller’s market.  They wanted $75,000.  The sellers refused our offer, and we were good with that.  They took it 24 hours later.

3.  Don’t fall in love with the house.  You can make any house you buy your home, not just a certain one.  This is an investment, and you want to buy low and sell high.

4.  Get pre-financed.  Bankrate.com has good calculators to get your lowest mortgage rate.  We always just go to our credit union because DH wants the ease of walking into a brick-and-mortar building and making the payment if I’m not at home.

5.  Get a 15 year or lower loan.  There are 50-year mortgages out there, but there are also the reverse of that; 10- or 15-year mortgages.  Go for it.

6.  This one is a personal preference, do it at your own risk:  Take out an ARM for the amount of time you want your deadline set for.  For example, if you want to pay off your mortgage in 3 years, take out a 3-year ARM.  This only makes sense if the ARM has a better rate than the fixed-rate mortgage.  This plays a game with my head and sets a deadline for me to pay it off, because I don’t want it to adjust on me.

7.  Take all the money you were throwing at debt and put it toward your mortgage.  If you were making $1000 a month payments toward your car note or credit card and it’s now paid off, put that thousand toward the mortgage.  Every thousand I can put toward our mortgage pays off about 4 months of our loan (remember, that’s 1/3 of a year!).  That also means all bonuses, all raises, and any rebate money or cashback you get in any deals.

8.  Compete with yourself.  Try to figure out how to pay $10 more each month toward your mortgage once you reach a plateau.  Right now, we’re on a reverse budget - everything is cut to the nub and the leftovers go to the mortgage.  Last month’s payment was $6200.  Pretty good for leftovers, hunh?  But this still is not my best mortgage payment ever, so I continue to look for ways to cut costs.

These little tricks can end up saving you thousands in mortgage interest.  If you have a low loan already, and do not get a mortgage interest reduction on your taxes, it might be worth it for you to look into paying off your home.

I was suffering from a little case of writer’s block a minute ago, looking around for something - ANYTHING to write about.  Then, I realized it:  this saving money thing is so second nature to me that I don’t even notice it.

I’m in my office, where we have the dinosaur computer (too expensive to buy a new one), an old desk chair that we got at a secondhand shop in California, a crappy desk that we bought at Menard’s on sale for $16 but we take good care of, so it works, the Christmas wrapping paper storage (all the Christmas paper we salvaged after opening presents carefully), a bunch of wrappers to sell stuff on eBay (I save the wrappers that I receive things in), my favorite sleeping bag that I conned my dad out of, an old radio that we trash-picked, an equally old printer that has a refilled cartridge in it, and DS’s favorite chair that he waited and asked for for Christmas from his grandma.

When you look at these things, it is not obvious that they are old.  They all still fill their purpose, that is, they work as intended or in more ways.  So why do people snub using old things?

Having health insurance is important for people who work from home, especially if it is in real estate since they need to keep checks on all insurance deals, particularly the car insurance.

Yesterday, I was enjoying a strange day off today in a sunny location with excellent weather.  I had just gotten done commenting back to Mrs. Nespy at my post about No Free Lunch, about how “the girls (a whole two of us)” in my office occasionally take our brown bag lunches to the park and “eat out” for lunch.  These are the same peanut butter sandwiches that I eat for lunch every day, but there’s something special about a sunny day with fresh air.

DH and I spent our first 4th of July (Independence Day) together at the beach with thousands of other people.  We packed a cooler with lunch meat sandwiches and chips and watched fireworks over the ocean on an old blanket on the sand.

When we lived in Texas, we were on a debt diet and didn’t spend any money.  My hours were extra short at work and DH wasn’t working.  We went for a walk everyday to the Mexican store, bought two paletas (popsicles - the Mexican ones are the best - with little pieces of fruit in them - coconut or strawberry) for 50 cents and walked to the park to get out of the hot apartment.  We only turned on the air conditioning a few days of that summer at night so that we could sleep.  We didn’t die, and those lazy days at the park were integral in our relationship.

What are some of your happiest free memories that have lead to your debt freedom?  Do you doubly enjoy your free experiences because they are so cheap?

I’ve decided to scale back a bit and only go over ten blogs each week in the blogroll.  This way, each blog will be featured, and it will be easiest for me to ensure the blogroll is up to date with quality content!

Here are the articles, in no particular order:

Iwillchangeyourlife.com gives us a way to get gradual order in our lives.  I’m a clean freak, but I’m disorganized, which leads to occasional outbursts of excessive cleaning, especially since I’m never home.  My poor husband…he’s a saint.

Hustler Money Blog has some funny stories of how he got hustled.  Be warned:  some of the content is not….er, family-friendly, but is, nonetheless, hilarious!

My favorite for the week:  Scratch Beginnings from Get Rich Slowly.  I hated the book Nickel and Dimed that Dreamy and I just reviewed, so this was a breath of fresh air for me.

Supermom saved $115 by doing a simple repair at Getting Out of Debt.  These things are always so daunting until you get down in the wickets and start working on it.

Krystal has started a February-March lunch challenge over at Give Me Back my Five Bucks.  I never eat out for lunch, so I’m not a very good participant for this challenge, but it would be a great place to start!

10 Ways For College Students to Costs Where it Counts is a good article over at Grad Money Matters.  I especially liked the idea of “Be a Hot Girl” to get free alcohol.

Green Panda Treehouse has a great article up on how to cut ATM costs.  The practice of charging to take out my own money drives me up the walls!  This is constantly happening to me when I travel, so I should just plan ahead better.

Brian Lee blogged about another favorite topic of mine:  Five Ways to Stay Connected, Informed, and Entertained Without Cable TV over at Genius Types.  Posts like this make me realize the Internet is very close to overtaking the television realm.

Matt Wolfe let everyone know that How I Will Be Rich will be back up and running like normal soon.  This also serves as a reminder that if you do not post for a month or more, you will be removed from the blogroll here at Dollar Frugal.

Generation X Finance has an impressive list of items that will help to improve your credit score.  Even though I’m almost done with my mortgage and I bought both our current cars with cash, we still will need a mortgage if we move to California or buy a more expensive house next.

Carnivals and Festivals

Common Sense Wealth Carnival #5 at LocoMono

Carnival of Money Stories #47 at College of Cash

Festival of Frugality at Mighty Bargain Hunter

Carnival of Personal Finance #140 at The Financial Blogger

Carnival of Everything Finance #13 at The Everything Finance Blog

I noticed that Locomono mentioned that he would liked to have seen a more in-depth article about how to pay off a mortgage early for his carnival.  I have been keeping my articles short because I thought that people were too busy to read more in-depth articles!  I will rewrite this article with more details, but I am always looking for ways to improve this blog.  Please keep the ideas coming!

One last note:  Lulu interviewed me this week for an ongoing project she is doing to feature one writer each week.  Take a look at her blog and wish her luck while she’s undergoing her surgery!