Weekly Wrap-Up: Is it worth your while to turn off the lights, and car sharing

 
A couple of weeks ago, The Simple Dollar wrote an article about how much it costs to leave lights on. He concluded that if it takes him two minutes to turn off the lights in his house (he must have a big house! I think my almost-2,000-square-foot house would take less than a minute – [...]

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A day in the life …

Several bloggers are jumping on board a “day in the life” theme, and I thought I’d join them. Be forewarned, it’s full of thrills and spills.
 
I picked yesterday, which turned out to be not so typical with a last-minute doctor’s appointment for Mr. Cheap that involved a lot of chauffeuring on my part. So we’ll [...]

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Deal of the Week: What nobody’s buying after Thanksgiving …

I stopped in at our local supermarket this morning to replenish our cupboards, which were bare (or, in the case of the vegetable bins, moldy … argh) after our trip over Thanksgiving.
I peeked in at the meat section, because Mr. Cheap had requested I purchase some meat and garlic as his part of the groceries, [...]

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Thanksgiving travels: Not cheap, but surprisingly green

This weekend, we hit the road for a break from everyday life. We drove from Denver to Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico, for a few days. The trip wasn’t exactly (OK, not in any way) a money saver, but it was a much-needed respite from the daily grind — and turned up several surprisingly [...]

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Deal of the Week: LED Light Exchange

I think everyone knows Boulder is ahead of the curve when it comes to saving energy, but this takes the cake (or the Christmas cookies).
At Boulder’s light exchange, you can bring in up to 5 strands of working regular holiday lights and swamp them for one strand of LED lights each for $5 per strand. [...]

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Eco-quandary: LED Christmas lights vs. getting rid of perfectly good lights

Well, not too much of a quandary here. We bought new LED lights last night for our Christmas tree. By various accounts, they save 80% to 98% of the energy used by conventional holiday lights. Guilt-free festivities, at last — now pass the sour cream dip.
 
Our biggest challenge was that first we bought four packs [...]

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Where’s the (local, natural) beef?

Our household eats some meat. Not a lot. I was a vegetarian for 10 years, and when I married Mr. Cheap, a real carnivore, he used to get his meat fix out of the house.
I remember once, we wanted some chicken. I bought a package of chicken breasts at Wild Oats and felt like I [...]

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Weekly Wrap-Up: What people spend on food, retroactive late fees and computer recycling

Earlier this week, Simply Thrifty http://www.simplythrifty.com/what-people-spend-on-food/ linked to this site that looks at what families around the world spend on food per week — with pictures of what they spend their money on. The photos are from Hungry Planet, which is a fantastic book and a sequel to another book about people’s possessions. I [...]

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My weekend of (money-saving) accomplishments, including a dish decision

I had a great weekend. This was the first weekend in a while that we had hardly any plans — just had some friends over for dinner, which was fun, rather than a hectic commitment.
That means I actually had a chance to get things done.

1. I installed a dishwasher.
I started on Saturday by forcing my [...]

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Weekly Wrap-Up: Food and laundry … everyone’s favorite repeating chores

Starting with a couple of takes on food this week.
Is it a good idea to hide veggies in regular foods for your kids? A couple of new cookbooks say sure, it’s a great way to get additional vitamins into kids’ tummies. But a food writer howls that doing so is robbing the taste buds to [...]

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