Have you ever wondered where the money you use every day came from?

The other day I found myself thinking about how it came to be that a piece of paper was a fair trade for something as big and useful as, say, a house or a car. Who came up with that idea?

Is money something that just doesn’t make a lot of sense to you? Do you sometimes feel disconnected from your finances or find it hard to save money even though you make enough of it?

If you do, you’re not alone. The money system that we use today is not intuitive. It disconnects us from the resources that made it valuable to begin with.

A quick look at how the system developed shows how the path we’ve taken removes what we really find valuable from money and can have a real negative effect on you, me and, as a result, our environment.

The Barter System

Before we established governments, currencies, and trade systems, if you wanted something that someone else owned, you had to have something of equal or greater value to trade for it. If you raised pigs and needed a carriage for transportation, you had to barter with a carriage maker.

The carriage maker knew exactly how much work it took to build his carriage and how much food he needed in return if he were to sell it and build another.

You knew exactly what it took to raise a pig. This was central to your way of life.

But what if the carriage maker didn’t need a pig? What if he needed a cow? You’d have to go barter your pigs with a cattle farmer and then trade your cow for a carriage.

The value we placed on the things we traded were extremely intrinsic, but also highly inefficient.

So, we found a precious metal, gold, that was coveted for it’s rarity and began using it as a broker for transactions.

The Gold Standard

Gold turned out to be a pretty good medium for facilitating trade. Everyone wanted it, so you knew if you had some, you could trade it for something you needed.

Even if someone didn’t want it, they’d accept it anyway because they knew they could quickly trade it with someone else that did.

So now we have gold as a worldwide currency. Rock on.

However, as population grew and transporting large masses of gold became more difficult, we came up with a clever idea.

We didn’t need to actually carry all that weight around. We could just make certificates that represented the gold and our lives would be much easier.

The government would guarantee that this paper used as payment could be traded for a specific amount of gold whenever necessary.

Problem solved! All that gold could sit in banks and we’d just carry around some paper to trade for the stuff we needed.

Now, we don’t really know how much these pieces of paper are worth, but we know we can trade it for gold anytime we want and gold is really valuable.

Well, at least we know those pigs we’re raising are worth bit of it. How many degrees of separation is that?

But now population is growing substantially. This gold that backs up our currency is getting scarcer and scarcer as more people compete for it.

Poverty is creating misery, we can’t mine enough gold to keep up, and we need more money to keep those Commies from turning our great nation all red!

Fiat Currency

So forget the gold! We don’t need it anymore!

Somewhere down the line, we decided that if we couldn’t accumulate enough precious metals to back up all the money we needed, we’d just abandon it all together and start printing more of it.

Now all that’s left is a piece of paper. But don’t worry, your government will put it’s money where it’s mouth is and let you pay your taxes with it.

Today, we live in a world of fiat currency. What this means is that the pieces of paper that we pay our debts with has value because (and only because) the government says it does. There is no physical object that it’s related to anymore. No gold. No nothing. Just the proverbial handshake of Uncle Sam.

If we decide that more money is needed to benefit our economy, we just print more. If there’s too much, we can collect and destroy it.

All of a sudden, the value of our currency is decided on by a select group of people who make decisions about how much of it should be in circulation.

When they decide to print more money, each bit becomes less valuable through dilution. When they decide to print more, the opposite is true.

Your Finances & The Environment

So what effect does all this confusion of a fiat currency have on your finances and how is it affecting our environment?

It seems to make it more difficult to decide how much we should be paying for something.

We still know how much our pigs are worth and we have an idea of how much that carriage we need is, but the vehicle we use to exchange them can now fluctuate wildly on the whim of a few people, making it harder for us to gauge how many dollars (or whatever unit of currency) should be needed to make that transaction happen.

Since a fiat currency system relies on the general principle that we’ll slowly but steadily add more money to the system to keep it growing and thriving, money loses value over time, requiring more of it to buy the same thing later.

This is called inflation and it rewards spenders while punishing savers.

Why save money when what you’re saving for will just be more expensive once you think you’re ready to buy it?

Inflation existed when gold was the currency of the world, but to a much lesser extent since mining more of it quite a lot harder than just cutting down more trees to print more money.

There’s a finite amount of gold to be found on this planet, whereas, we can always plant more trees to print more money.

This is where the credit industry has made a killing.

When used wisely, credit can be a great tool in a fiat money system to buy something now and pay for it later at a lesser realized expense to you.

However, credit is easily abused and many people thinking they need something now find themselves in a tangle when they don’t realize they couldn’t afford it.

It goes without saying that this “gotta have it now” mentality that is fostered by a money system like this is incredibly damaging to our environment as people attempt to collect more and more now to hedge against higher future prices only to end up bankrupt, starting over again.

And an apparently unending supply of money provides the fuel of this vicious cycle.

I am all about maintaining a mindset of abundance, but based on the cycle that we seem to be set on, a lot of people appear to be doing it wrong.

What do you think? Is it too late to go back to a gold secured currency? What else could be used to connect our money with what the Earth has to provide?

~~~~~

Want to get even more out of Frugally Green? Share this post with your friends, leave a comment, or get free updates.

Connect with me on Twitter: @FrugallyGreen

Monopoly money image by rutty

I’m posting extra early today just in case you woke up at 4 Am sitting on the fence about whether or not you’re going to participate in today’s train wreck of a shopping tradition affectionately known as Black Friday.

For many of you it’s already too late.  You’re standing in line right now just waiting to push someone’s grandma down and elbow your way to the front of the line for a free doughnut and some cheap socks.

But it’s not too late for you.

If you’ve got your Christmas buying list sorted out and it requires a trip to a big box retailer,  then godspeed.

If, on the other hand, you’re headed out just to see what kind of deals you can get, for god’s sake, quietly step away from the computer, get in bed, and get back to dreaming about the enormous meal your body is still struggling to digest.

They don’t call it Black Friday for nothing and, just like Vegas, they don’t keep all those lights on by giving things away.

~~~~~

If you’re interested in really stepping up your anti-Black Friday game, you might want to join in on the worldwide campaign, also known as buy nothing day.  You’ll be in good company as Aldra over at Consciously Frugal will be participating and so will I.  Though, I have to admit my efforts will be mostly passive since nearly every day is buy nothing day for me.

Colin at No Impact Man put together a list of his articles that give explicit instructions for how to improve  your sustainability.  There’s something in there for just about anyone. Give it a run through and pick a few that look interesting to you.  This is a great jump start if you’re looking for new ideas.

Just in case you don’t get enough of my and everyone else’s opinion every day, Beth at Smart Family Tips asked 14 environmental bloggers, “What do you think is the most important thing people can do to act in a more environmetally responsible way?” Well, I’m really glad she asked, and I’m even more glad that she asked me. 14 heads are better than 1, I always say.

Finally, if you’re resisting the urge to do any shopping today, but still want to get in on the spending orgy, Josh at The Lazy Environmentalist was kind enough to assemble a small list of the best green gifts for green gadget lovers.  Every family has a gadget lover, so why not hook them up with one of Josh’s recommendations for Christmas?

That’s all for this week.  See you on Monday as we all recover from a nice long weekend. In the meantime, here are a few carnivals that Frugally Green was featured in this week.  Check them out at your leasure:

• The Financial Blogger presents The Festival of Frugality

• The Mighty Bargain hunter put together the Carnival of Money Stories

• The Carnival of the Green was hosted by The Evangelical Ecologist.

~~~~~

Want to get even more out of Frugally Green? Share this post with your friends, leave a comment, or get free updates.

Connect with me on Twitter: @FrugallyGreen

Black Friday image by Croixboy

This is a video update.  If you are reading via email and cannot view the video, please click here to go to the site.  A short text summary is also included below. Enjoy!

Happy (early) Thanksgiving

Happy early Thanksgiving everyone. I hope wherever you end up tomorrow, it’s with people you love.  Don’t forget to take a second between bites to think about all you have to be thankful for.

I know what I’m thankful for: readers like you.  There are days when I come home tired and don’t want to work on the site, but remembering that you’re out there reading reminds me that I have nothing to complain about and everything to be grateful for.

So, thank you. You are what keeps me going day in and day out.

A Thanksgiving Guest Post

I did, in fact, write a full post for today. It is a guest post that is up right now at Get Rich Slowly, another blog that I am very thankful for.  It’s titled Giving to Receive: What Legacy Will You Leave? and discusses the idea of social responsibility and how you can succeed by helping others.  Feel free to leave your comments there, or come back here to leave them if you’d prefer.

Whatever you do, I hope you read it and take a moment to consider the message.  I think it’s important.

Thanks again for being part of Frugally Green.  I wouldn’t be here without you.

What do you have to be thankful for this year?

~~~~~

Want to get even more out of Frugally Green? Share this post with your friends, leave a comment, or get free updates.

Connect with me on Twitter: @FrugallyGreen

We’re all different and that’s what makes life beautiful, right? Growing up, we all navigate different avenues, make different decisions that impact our lives, and draw different conclusions from the same information. The culmination of all these differences are what come to make us uniquely “us.”

This is largely related to the fact that everyone possesses their own unique learning profile, meaning that we are naturally inclined to learn better from specific types of inputs and are predisposed to perform better at certain tasks than others.

This is something that we all recognize intuitively, but have you ever considered that it might explain why you’ve got a knack for understanding and caring for the environment, but have thousands of dollars in credit card debt and can’t seem to dig yourself out?

8 ways to be a genius

There’s a gentleman by the name of Howard Gardner who understands this. From 1983 to present, he’s developed the Theory of Multiple Intelligences to challenge the generally accepted measurements of intellect.

According to Gardner’s studies, there are 8 ways that a person can express the intelligence that they naturally possess. They are:

• Linguistically – People with linguistic intelligence have a natural affinity for reading, writing, speaking and listening. They’re often good at explaining and teaching.

• Logically – If you possess logical intelligence, you’re probably good with abstractions, numbers, and complex math.

• Spatially – Those with spatial intelligence usually have a talent for visualizing and manipulating objects and ideas. This is a common trait of the artistic.

• Bodily-kinesthetically – If you’re good with your hands or find that you learn the best by doing an activity, you probably have a strong kinesthetic intelligence.

• Musically – People with a strong sensitivity to sounds, rhythms, and tones usually have a great musical intelligence.

• Interpersonally – If you have interpersonal intelligence, you’re likely extroverted and can easily read others’ moods and temperaments. You probably work well in groups.

• Intrapersonally – People with a very strong sense of self and internal understanding have what’s called intrapersonal intelligence.

• Naturalistically – Those with naturalistic intelligence are highly aware of their environment, can understand how ecosystems work, and can be talented with communicating with animals.

Interesting list, no?

Now consider for a second the relevance of each of these intelligences to understanding how you and the natural world work versus, say, the manmade construct of money. I’m not insinuating that you have to be primarily a logical learner to understand money, but it sure would help, wouldn’t it?

What’s your learning profile?

So what are you supposed to do if you’re not naturally inclined to understand and appreciate the math behind the conventional rules of personal finance?

I suppose it would help to begin by understanding your learning profile. Most of us probably have at least an idea of how we learn best, but it might help to have an idea of our other supporting intelligences to help us gauge the best way to approach what feels like a complex topic.

There are a lot of tests out there that aim to give you a snapshot of your learning profile. I know because I spent all day finding and taking them.  I recommend this test from the Learning Disability Resource Community. I liked it the best for these reasons:

• At 80 questions, it felt very comprehensive.

• I felt the results were accurate.

• The questions were worded in ways that made it easy to select appropriate answers.

• No email address or other personally identifying information was required to get my results.

Speaking of results, here’s a snapshot of my learning profile:

As you can see, I’m highly musical and kinesthetic. Also, I’m not very interpersonal or naturalistic. It’s true, this stuff doesn’t come naturally to me.

On improvement

To this day, personal finance and money, when they’re taught at all, are still taught with very mathy overtones. This is a roadblock for most of us.

So what could a guy like me do if I wanted a better grasp of my personal finances? I would need to find a way to relate it to the musical and kinesthetic intelligences that I already possess.

When I developed my first budget, I started tracking how much money I was spending on CDs, records, and recording equipment.

As it turns out, it wasn’t all that much and I had other parts of my life that needed a lot more attention, but relating money to music was the first step I had to take to get my brain to even accept the fact that money management was now going to be a part of my life.

It’s what got me to say, “Hey, I can do this!” I couldn’t have begun to understand it any other way.

From there, I went to an all cash budgeting system and almost entirely stopped using my credit card. Taking the physical dollar bills out of my wallet and counting them out each time I bought something really played to my kinesthetic intelligence.

Removing the barriers to successful personal finance and working from basic concepts with my natural intelligences gave me the sense of understanding that made me want to keep improving.

Putting it all together

Today, I’m on an all-credit, fully-automated budget tracking system that works perfectly for me, but starting out with what made sense at the time is what it took to get here.

Money, budgets, and personal finance were scary words not that long ago. Music and handwork were comfortable and familiar.

The human mind is a complex organ with all kinds of built-in roadblocks. Learning to connect with yourself and your natural strengths will help you to address foreign ideas and concepts with less fear and hesitance.

What are your primary natural learning styles? How can you incorporate them to improve your understanding of personal finance?

~~~~~

Want to get even more out of Frugally Green? Share this post with your friends, leave a comment, or get free updates.

Connect with me on Twitter: @FrugallyGreen

Light bulb image by Caveman 92223

Well, it’s nearly official:  My TV is for sale on Craigslist.  This is kind of a big deal for me.  To be honest, I haven’t watched much TV at all in years and, in fact, I don’t really enjoy it much when I do.  But until now, I couldn’t bring myself to just get rid of the damn thing once and for all.

Though I truly need it for nothing, letting it go feels like the day my mom finally took my baby blanket away – cold, quiet and scary – much how I envision the end of the world will be.  My TV is a psychological baby blanket. Thoughts are running through my head: What will I do without it?  What if there’s something I want to see?  How will I watch movies?

These question are all easily and logically answered with a little perspective: I’ll do other, way more interesting things! I’ll watch it on the internet! I’ll use my laptop!

I didn’t want to answer them, though.  I wanted an excuse to keep my baby blanket around because that’s what made me comfortable.  However, in order to grow, it’s so important to step outside of that comfort zone.

What seems like an itty bitty change can still take a lot of courage when you’re dealing with an ingrained habit, and courage isn’t something you get before you take a leap, it’s what comes afterwords.

~~~~~

A very wise wolf once told me, “Buy on a whimper, sell on a howl.”  I had no idea what he meant until I ran into an article titled Stock Market Correlations With Moon Cycles.  Now it all makes sense.  Could market peaks correlate with full moons?  Could valleys correlate with new moons? Some would like you to believe it. Don’t take this too seriously, though.  There have been all kinds of funny stock market correlations studied over the years and this is just another fun one to read about.  However, we have spent centuries studying how the moon cycles affect human behavior.  I wouldn’t mind it if this theory got a little more attention.

Pop culture can be awfully interesting, especially old advertisements. Check out this oil ad from 1962 that was published in a magazine touting the product’s wonders – Oil: Enough Energy to Melt Glaciers.  It was published by Humble Oil, which later merged with another company to form Exxon.  As the author points out, the irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife.  Grin and bear it, folks, grin and bear it.

How much house do you need? It’s an age old question that has been answered over and over again with a resoundingly firm “more.” That is, until now. Over at Get Rich Slowly, April points out that the average new home size is finally shrinking for a change. She reports on ways to find your “Goldilocks Home,” or the house that is just right for you.  The advice is to go through each room in your current house and decide if it feels too big or too small for its function, measure it’s actual size, and then adjust accordingly.  Add them all up at the end, and there’s your warm bowl of porridge.

You should be glad to know that Hal, the murderous computer from Stanley Kubrick’s film, 2001: A Space Odessey, has been successfully rehabilitated and reintroduced to society as Earth’s savior as reported by Eco Geek with this headline – Fastest Computer in the World Focused on Climate Change.  Apparently his new street name is Jaguar XT5 and he’s spending his new found free time “creat[ing] models and simulations for predicting regional climate change, studying enzymes for developing better ethanol and writing algorithms for fast nuclear reactors that would produce less waste.” Glad to see you’ve changed your ways, Hal, but we’ll never forget your disturbing past.

Finally, just for fun, here’s an article from Treehugger about the benefits of trading in your weed whacker for a team of goats.

~~~~~

If you’ve got some energy left, be sure to take a look at some of the carnivals that Frugally Green participated in this week:

My Trader’s Journal hosted the Carnival of Financial Planning

The Eco Salon organized the Carnival of the Green

The Amateur Financier put together the Carnival of Twenty Something Finances

Gather Little by Little curated the Carnival of Money Hackers.

One Family’s Blog curated the Road to Financial Independence Carnival.

~~~~~

Want to get even more out of Frugally Green? Share this post with your friends, leave a comment, or get free updates.

Connect with me on Twitter: @FrugallyGreen

Dead TV Image by rickremington

This is a really, really, REALLY important lesson.  Anytime you decide to take on a challenge, you should spend some time up front identifying the tools you need in order to succeed.

I’m not going to lie to you.  If you fail to take this step upfront, you may very well still succeed.  The problem is, you’ll be so exhausted and annoyed by the time you reach it, you may not care anymore that you made it.

Heed my warning, for I know of what I speak.

I am writing this post at 10:00 PM on Tuesday night, furiously pounding the keyboard to create something useful, insightful, and witty for you to read when you wake up in the morning.

I’ve got a big smile on my face because I love writing, but damn it, I’m grumpy.  I’m grumpy because I decided to install a new dishwasher in our house on Saturday. By install, I mean rip the old one out and then wander around town looking for a new one.  When I finally found the right one for us, it wasn’t available until Monday.

“Oh, that’s fine,” I told the salesman as I clenched my teeth.  That was a lie.  While pulling the old dishwasher out, I damaged the water line, making it impossible for me to reconnect it while I waited for the new one.  The shut off valve is old and wouldn’t close all the way so my girlfriend, Jessie, and I spent the weekend bailing water out of the kitchen with a well placed plastic tub.

I picked up the new machine Monday night only to find that the fitting was different than what I had existing.  A 10:00 PM trip to Home Depot fixed that.  What it didn’t fix, though, was the fact that all of my tools are currently at a friend’s house, 50 miles from home.  Glad I remembered that before I got started.

Refusing to be deterred, I completed this daunting task thanks to a pair of pliers, a kitchen knife, a wrench I found in my driveway, and several youthful summers spent watching reruns of MacGyver.  If I had taken a second in the beginning to compile a budget and a schedule, I can assure you I would be well over on both.

So, you see, the task is complete – a success.  But is it really?  Jessie and I are irritable because it took a long time to finish, I cut my finger pretty well, and you have to listen to me ramble on about a dishwasher because I didn’t give myself the time to write the post I really wanted to (next week, of course).

Do you have an urge to change something about your life right now?

Maybe you want to build a compost tumbler. I’m all for jumping right in and getting dirty, but don’t forget to think for at least a few seconds before smashing your thumb with a hammer about why you’re going to smash it and what you’re going to need to smash it with.

Want to save $10,000?  Sure, you can do it without much planning, but with an average 3% rate of inflation, how much is it going to be worth when you finally get there at retirement age?

We green frugalistas are always looking for another project to complete that will boost us to the next level of enlightenment. Well, we can do any damn thing we want without much thought, but doing it well and doing it happily are more difficult results to come by.

I’m no rocket doctor, but even I could have taken five minutes to get out a note card and jot down the tools I would have needed and the order of operations to follow to make this project a happy success.

No doubt about it, my dishes are now impeccably clean.  My language over the last few days was not.

Have you ever found yourself in over your head due to poor planning?  How do you make sure you’ve given yourself the right tools for the job you want to complete?  What’s your favorite swear word when everything goes wrong?

~~~~~

Want to get even more out of Frugally Green? Share this post with your friends, leave a comment, or get free updates.

Connect with me on Twitter: @FrugallyGreen

Image of woodworking tools by Robert S. Donovan

One of my favorite blogs right now is Naomi Dunford’s Ittybiz.  She writes about ethical marketing for small businesses without marketing departments.  She also has a buzzed haircut and swears like a sailor.  Awesome.

Go ahead and take a second to ask yourself what the hell that has to do with Frugally Green and then I’ll continue.

OK, enough postulating. The answer, interestingly enough, is “everything.”

I’ll prove this by asking you a few questions:

• Do you enjoy saving money and improving the environment?
• Do you sometimes wish that other people enjoyed saving money and improving the environment, too?
• Have you ever had someone ask you what this “green movement” is all about?

If you answered yes to those three questions then, whether you realize it or not,  you’ve had to market your frugally green lifestyle to someone else.  If you’ve ever stumbled over your words and left them with a puzzled look then, unfortunately, you’ve marketed poorly. But that’s okay, we can fix that.  I know you never wanted to be a marketer, but as long as you have to be one, you may as well be good at it, right? That’s right.

On the other hand, if you answered no to those questions, I’m not quite sure why you’re here.  Maybe you aren’t, either.  Hmm…awkward.  Feel free to stick around anyhow.

Anyway, I know a lot of us hanging out in the anti-consumerism camp have a strong distrust of marketers.  We think they’re constantly conspiring to find new, slimy ways to convince us to buy junk we don’t need. Well, yeah, a lot of them are.  But some of them aren’t.  Some of them find a deeper meaning in connecting people with ideas and products that will truly change their lives.  That’s the kind of marketer Naomi is and I know that’s the kind of marketer you want to be.

The other day, Naomi taught me about the difference between selling features and selling benefits.  As environmentalists, I think this is one of the most important lessons we can learn about getting and keeping others interested in the movement.

Features

We care about our environment…a lot.  Sometimes we care about it more than we care about other people.  In fact, sometimes we create an adversarial relationship between our environment and other people because we’re so passionate about it.

That’s why, when people ask us why we “sort our garbage” (sometimes also called recycling), we answer with something like, “Because we’re running out of space in our landfills.”

That’s why, when someone wants to know why we ride our bike around town instead of driving, we retort with, “Because it emits less carbon dioxide into our suffocating atmosphere.”

That’s why we say, “Because it clears our mind of the consumerist culture,” when someone asks us why we don’t watch TV.

These are all examples of selling the features of environmentalism.

Benefits

Technically, they’re all true, but the problem is that all these “other people” we’re trying to get our message out to don’t care about features.  They care about benefits.  Benefits are what they get out of making the changes we want them to make.  Benefits are more compelling to people than features because they can tangibly relate them to their personal life.

Ideas like landfill depletion, carbon emissions, and the consumerist culture are too psychologically far away, too disconnected from the every day goings-on of normal people.  They can’t relate to them in the way they can relate to the benefits they see when they make a change that affects these ideas.  Does that make sense?

So, the next time your neighbor asks you why you sort your trash, instead of going on about landfill depletion, kindly inform them that you call it “recycling” and doing it can save them a bunch of money each year on trash hauling that they can use for something else they care about.

When your co-worker wants to know why you would ride a bike instead of take a car to the grocery store, let him know it’s because it’s fun and the exercise you get saves you money on a gym membership.

If your sister wonders why you got rid of your TV, tell her it’s because you’ve found that it allows you to exercise your creative mind by finding new ways to spend your time and the money saved from the cable bill helps fund your new hobbies.

As backwards as it might sound, true environmentalism is about people before it’s about the environment because, well, what good is a clean, beautiful world without anyone to appreciate it?

What do you think? Is marketing an important part of our “job”? Are people more important than environment?

~~~~~

Want to get even more out of Frugally Green? Share this post with your friends, leave a comment, or get free updates.

Connect with me on Twitter: @FrugallyGreen

Used car salesman image by bonkedproductions

About two months ago, I decided to stop eating so much dang meat.  I started off by cutting my consumption down to no more than every other day.  It started off fine, with minor inconveniences here and there, but then fell into disarray when my life became overly busy again.

I’m happy to report that, since then, I’ve hopped back on the bandwagon and even recruited a partner.  My girlfriend, Jessie, has joined the journey and together, we’re forging ahead, stopping only to argue about which brand of tofu tastes best.

Jessie has revamped the system, as well.  The every-other-day diet was working ok, but clearly needed some attention if it were going to be sustainable.  We’ve switched to an every-other-week diet and coupled it with a weekly meal planning session.  If you knew me, you would laugh at the thought of me sitting down to plan my meals, but somehow I’ve taken to the idea.  I guess all I needed was partner because, well, it’s working.

Our new plan allows for the same number of meat and veggie days, but has the side-effect of increasing our vegetarian days since, during a meat week, we’ll tend to have a few veggie days anyway.  So if you’re struggling with this like I was, try getting a partner and spending a few minutes planning your meals.  Or, ya know, just do whatever the heck works for you!

Onto the Eco Links!

If you’re at a dinner party and you really want to discuss the impending oil crisis, but the term “peak oil” seems just a tad passé, try spicing up the conversation with one of these ten euphemisms for peak oil.  It’s always nice to have a few synonyms in your back pocket when you wear out your word of choice.

If you’re not a fan of dinner parties, you can still enjoy a nice meal at home, even if you hate cooking. Learning how to love cooking is something I could use a lesson in.  My favorite bits?  Turn up the music and grab a glass of wine! Once I’ve got those two elements all I need is a soft chair and I don’t really care about eating anymore.  Perfect!

I eat enough anyway.  We all do.  In fact, we all do and have enough of a lot of things.  There are enough “isms” these days to drive anyone mad, so why don’t we just pair life down to the most important one: enoughism.  I could tell you more about it, but I think I’ve written enough.

~~~~~

Take a gander at some of the carnivals that Frugally Green participated in this week.  You might stumble upon a few new writers that strike your fancy:

The Skilled Investor curated the Carnival of Financial Planning

The Carnival of Money Stories can be found at Foreigner’s Finances

Gather Little by Little hosted the Carnival of Money Stories

Check out this week’s Festival of Frugality over at Domestic Cents

~~~~~

Want to get even more out of Frugally Green? Share this post with your friends, leave a comment, or get free updates.

Connect with me on Twitter: @FrugallyGreen

Terrified Sandwich image by Sakurako Kitsa