Dress yourself for free: How to host a clothing swap

I spend almost nothing on clothes. According to Mint, I've spent $199.50 to clothe my family of five this year. They say the average U.S. household has spent $1258.62. That's more than six times my spending.

It's been years since I walked into a clothing store, tried on styles I liked and bought myself a new pair of jeans. That doesn't mean I'm content to dress like a slob, or wear the same tried-and-true favorites season after season. I change up my wardrobe every few months with a huge shopping spree — from my friends' closets.

The Clothing Swap

My friends and I hold clothing swaps at least once a season. We all clean out our closets of anything we don't love that's still in good condition. We get together and swap our cast-offs around. I'm a walking advertisement for the aphorism, "One person's trash is another person's treasure." Continue reading...

More about...Clothing, Frugality

The 50-Percent Solution

When I started getting serious about frugal living, my husband dredged up one piece of juicy financial advice he recalled from his grad school days: Use half of what you normally would. He was talking about consumable goods like shampoo and dish soap. The idea is to reduce by half the amount of these things you use by doling out smaller portions. Normally use a quarter-size dollop of shampoo? Try cutting back to a dime.

There's no need to stop at half, actually. You can keep scaling back your usage gradually until you hit a point where you actually don't have enough, and then creep back up to the last place it felt good. Maybe that dime-size drop of shampoo isn't enough for your hair, but a nickel-size portion gets the job done nicely.

This approach works. I bought a large container of dish soap at Costco in March of 2009 and have not run out yet. This is not for lack of doing dishes: There are five people in my household, and we do all of our cooking from scratch. We make a lot of dirty dishes, and we wash a few sinkfuls a day.

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More about...Budgeting

Living The Examined Life: Personal Data Collection is a Powerful Tool for Change

Machines are, in some respects, much smarter than we are. Specifically, their ability to collect data about us far outpaces our own ability to know who we are and what we do.

Your computer can't tell you why you eat, spend money, sleep, or watch TV. But it can tell you with much greater accuracy than your own memory the minute, often embarrassing details of when and how you do those things.

Any regular reader of this blog is familiar with the importance of tracking the money that moves through your life. It's the first principle of many money gurus, and a nearly religious commitment for some of us who do it (myself included).

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More about...Uncategorized

The business of marriage: Five things you should do before tying the knot

I'm at a friend's wedding this weekend, traveling with my own husband and kids. The wedding invitation labeled the event as a "triumph of hope over experience". It is that, and I'm honored to be invited as a witness. But it's also a business arrangement, something I'm sure my friend (a respected economist) is well aware of. I haven't pried into the monetary details of their union, but I'm sure they've talked about it.

There are myriad good approaches to the business of marriage. J.D. often mentions that he and his wife, Kris, don't share finances. By contrast, my husband and I have completely merged our money: Both of our names are on every bank account, asset, and debt we have. We share every penny, and every decision about what to do with those pennies.

Whether you choose to go all in like we did or hold onto your independence, you live with your spouse's spending choices — for good or ill. If you have kids, they'll inherit the fruits of your shared financial life. And while research suggests money isn't as responsible for divorce as many experts believe, it can certainly sour goodwill in a relationship. Trust me on this one. Continue reading...

More about...Planning

Can You Afford to Go Green?

As soon as you start thinking about how to live more lightly on the earth, your eyes start opening to the myriad ways you can do that. You can eat only organic food. You can bike to work instead of driving. You can insist on high-efficiency appliances. You can line dry your clothes.

Some of these lifestyle shifts will save you money. Others are expensive. Often, I hear cost used as a reason not to "go green". In fact, environmentally damaging products and lifestyle choices are only affordable because we're not paying the full cost of them. While you enjoy your cheap plastic toys, people in the developing world are paying the price in terms of pollution, exploitative labor, and natural resource consumption.

Most of us want to do right by the environment. We'd love to have pesticide-free homes and diets. We want our spending to support small farms, local businesses, and fair wages for workers in the developing world. That doesn't mean we necessarily have the available cash to do what our values dictate.

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More about...Uncategorized

Struggling with Time-Debt

I recently found myself, late one night, staring at my computer screen with a sinking, hard feeling in my stomach and a bad taste in my mouth. A familiar bad taste. The taste of debt. But I wasn't looking at my bank statement — I was looking at my calendar.

I'd borrowed a few hours from my normal work routine to do something special with my kids, and then cancelled a date with my husband to make up the work hours, and then tried to reschedule with him but ran into a doctor's appointment I'd forgotten about.

Time-management coach Thekla Richter says I'm not alone. “Everybody has that problem,” she says. “No matter how good we are at time managment. We want to do more things than we have time to do. It just means that we have lots of desire and lots of imagination.”

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More about...Productivity

The high cost of clutter

Do you have piles of papers lurking on your desk? Mountains of laundry looming beside your bed? Shelves double-stacked with knick-knacks? I have a bit of a clutter problem myself. The other day, I spent an hour looking for the vacuum cleaner, which eventually turned up buried under a pile of laundry almost as tall as I am.

All that clutter isn't just annoying. It's expensive. That's right: Excess Stuff can keep costing you money even after it's been bought and paid for.

How expensive is your Stuff? Professional organizer Jen Hunter of Find Your Floor in Boston says clutter can cost us real money in a lot of ways:

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More about...Side Hustles

How to talk with your spouse about money

This article was written by Sierra Black, a long-time GRS reader and the author of ChildWild, a blog where she writes about frugality, sustainable living, and getting her kids to eat kale.

Talking about money is one of the great taboos of our culture. I know more about my friends' sex lives than I do about their bank statements. Many of us find it hard to discuss finances under the best circumstances. When we're stressed about money, we tend to clam up even more.

If you're married (or living with a partner), you don't have that luxury. Financial success is not a private affair. You need to talk to your spouse or partner about your money. This is vital for both the health of your relationship and the health of your bank balance.

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More about...Relationships

Give your wealth away: An argument for a secular tithe

This article was written by Sierra Black, a long-time GRS reader and the author of ChildWild, a blog where she writes about frugality, sustainable living, and getting her kids to eat kale. Previously at Get Rich Slowly, Black told us about sweating the big stuff and the pitfalls of buying in bulk.

My mother's family is Catholic. They're working class people from Buffalo: nurses, drugstore clerks, steel mill workers. Even though they never had a lot of dollars, they always gave 10% of what they had to the church. Like taxes, that 10% was just something they paid out before spending a dime on themselves.

As an adult I became the first college graduate in my family and adopted the position most of my educated, liberal peers seemed to hold toward charity: give a little, when you can, and feel guilty about not doing it most of the year.

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More about...Giving