Unclaimed Money

Going green is the popular thing to do now. Everywhere you look merchandise is promoted as being green, earth friendly, or environmentally responsible.  Politicians, celebrities and government agencies encourage us to reduce, reuse and recycle.

Frugality, however, it isn’t so popular. Have you seen any full sized newspaper ads or TV commercial spots lately promoting frugality? Besides bloggers, who is leading the charge, encouraging people to be frugal with their resources? Frugality gets a bad rap. It seems to imply cheapness, sacrifice and overall scrooge like behavior to many people, but is being frugal really that far from being green?

If you look at two people, one who considers themselves frugal and one who would call themselves green, they very likely would be engaged in many of the same activities. They may both use cloth diapers, ride their bike to work, keep a vegetable garden, use cloth napkins, hang their laundry on a line, recycle their cans, cook from scratch or set their air conditioning a few degrees higher than last year. Their motivations may be different, but the outcome will be the same. They will both save money, and they will both lower their impact on the environment.

Call it what you want. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Make do with the things you have, and conserve your resources. Be fashionable and call it being green. Be practical and call it being frugal. They really go hand in hand. Just do it and help your budget and the earth.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 20th, 2007 at 2:37 pm and is filed under money, saving money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.