Vacationing on a Shoestring Budget

Since the subject of tourism has been mentioned in the context of affordable necessary medical care, I thought I’d go ahead and mention some cool new developments in vacation tourism for those who may be thinking of what they’re going to do with the family this summer when the kids are out of school.

People who are living frugally don’t have to stop having fun and don’t have to stay home all the time. They just have to weigh their choices more carefully than people who have a lot of money to spend and don’t mind spending it. While it’s true that many of us consider a trip to visit family members in another state to be an actual vacation, but not necessarily because the people we’re visiting are all that fun and interesting. Usually it’s because the cost of gasoline, necessary vehicle upkeep, motels along the way and restaurant meals for the whole family for days or weeks at a time can easily eat up every cent of your vacation savings or tax refund, leaving zip for trips to Six Flags or ski resorts or Disney World - places our kids think of as actual vacations.

There’s a new partnership movement afoot in my state that takes great advantage of the many scenic, historic and educational wonders that make this state a tourist destination for millions of people every year. I strongly suspect there are many other states doing much the same thing, and the information’s not that hard to find. It’s called “Agritourism,” and it’s offering benefits to farmers, rural communities and artists of all varieties via partnerships with arts councils, agricultural extension services, state and federal parks services and small tourism operations in established tourist regions.

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Medical Rationing and Medical Tourism

Something a lot of people in this country don’t know is that the various state and federal health care plans for the poor do not cover most poor people or their children. In other words, you may be on unemployment and food stamps, but if your state has a fixed budget for Medicaid, SCHIP and other programs, you probably won’t get health care coverage. In my state the cap has remained in place for years, so in a region (southern Appalachia) where 3 out of every 5 people qualify for state and federal aid because their incomes are below the poverty line, 1.5 of those 3 won’t get any aid at all.

Then there are the “working poor” - those who work as many hours a day as is possible at as many jobs as they can get, but whose income still falls to poverty level or below. These people generally have no health insurance and no state/federal coverage. Not because they choose not to purchase expensive insurance, but because it’s simply not available to them. And on top of this are all those in the “lower middle class” who may have junk insurance through their employers with deductibles so high they simply cannot afford health care, or whose insurers routinely refuse to cover any and all claims.

And on top of that there is the whole rest of the middle class, who have exactly the same problem with their insurance companies - they simply refuse to pay for health care, leaving all but the very rich (who can pay out of pocket) without usable access to health care and one accident or illness away from bankruptcy.

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Craig’s List: Great Resource or Scary Place?

A good friend read my post It’s Better than Cheap… It’s Free! and mentioned Craigslist as another very useful resource for the sale and exchange of items, along the lines of the Freecycle Network. I had never made use of Craigslist and wasn’t very familiar with how it works, so in this post let’s look at what it actually has to offer those of us trying to live well on limited budgets.

Craigslist is a lot broader in scope than the Freecycle Network, which maintains local sites devoted exclusively to the exchange of ’stuff’ for free - you advertise what you have to give away or want someone to give to you, and responses are routed through the administrators (sans personal information) to facilitate the exchange. In contrast, Craigslist advertises community news, businesses and services, housing, personals, for sale items and job openings (or wanteds), just like your local newspaper’s want ads - but much, much moreso!

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Bread: The Staff of Life

As the recession kicks in - and looks to be a long, deep one extending well beyond this fall’s elections and possibly through 2009 as well - the health and wellbeing of all our families are going to be something at the top of the list of “important” considerations. Worse, there are strong hints of a coming Worldwide Food Shortage caused by expanding droughts in grain growing regions as well as diversion of cropland and crops for the production of ethanol.

So in this post I want to talk about bread. That generally most ignored of foods in the modern world, turned into nutrient-sapping paper maché paste by giant food processing conglomerates. Yet bread is traditionally known as “The Staff of Life,” the most important staple food for human beings since ancient prehistory.

My father was a big fan of “meal bread,” what he called breads that form the belly-filling ‘meat’ of a day’s diet to supplement any vegetables or cheeses that are available. Breads that sop up the “pot likker” liquids left from boiling greens or stewing meats, breads that offer complementary proteins to spreads like nut butters or flavored oils and butters, breads a person can live on if need be while not causing drastic shortages of necessary nutrients.

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It’s Better Than Cheap… It’s Free!

The Wonderful World of Freecycling

Way, way back in 2004 Grist Magazine published an article entitled Give It Away, Give It Away, Give It Away Now about a cool new environmentally friendly idea called “Freecycling.” Begun in 2003 by Deron Beal, a recycling program worker in Tucson, Arizona, freecycling is a network of people with ’stuff’ they don’t want to throw away to take up landfill space, but don’t want to keep either. It’s a way of getting rid of stuff by giving it to someone who wants it, and you’d be surprised at some of the great stuff there is to be had for free!

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15 Real Ways to Conserve (and save money!)

Since we’ve been looking at ways to avoid spending money on things we don’t really need, let’s look at some ways to save money on things we really DO need. Like, say energy to heat and cool our homes, cook our food, keep us (and our clothes) clean, etc., etc., etc. Energy - in the form of electricity, gas, heating oil and such for use in our homes is not getting any cheaper, and the generation technologies are contributing greatly to global warming. Water is another diminishing resource we cannot live without. Learning to consume less water is vital for our collective future. One of the best things we can do for our world and our pocketbooks is to learn how to live on less. USE less, NEED less, and be proud of our small footprints on the earth!

Here are some of the best ways to conserve energy and water that are being touted at present. Some of you can put to good use right now, and some of you will want to seriously consider through the coming year as your income allows you to replace things or renovate for a more efficient lifestyle. If you can save a couple thousand dollars a year on your electric and water bills, you’ll have that much more money to spend or save! Check ‘em out…

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A Non-Consumerist Way of Life

Habits of thought that won’t cost you a thing…

My last post offered some Tips for Avoiding Pressure to Shop, mostly in the context of getting out of the usual “girls’ day out” type of expensive, mall-hopping, credit card fueled frenzy that way too many people in the modern world view as entertainment. At least, until the bills come due. Sad statistics demonstrate that if medical costs from an accident or illness in the family don’t lead to bankruptcy, credit card debt will. These are the two biggest contributors to middle class bankruptcies in the U.S. at this time, and as the mortgage crisis becomes ever worse, it’s not going to get any better.

In this post I’m going to offer some ways of thinking that can become habitual without too much trouble, that will help keep you out of debt by not going into debt in the first place. Not everyone can put these to good use, but those who can will find that their shoestring budgets go a lot farther in covering necessities.

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Tips for Avoiding Pressure to Shop

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been much of a good consumer as that designation has come to signify in and out of recessions in this capitalist-based economy. I don’t “shop ’til I drop,” I don’t buy much of anything new, and whenever friends or sisters try to talk me into tagging along for a bout of binge buying at the mall I come up with every excuse in the book to beg out of it.

And now that I live on a mountain rather far from town (and any sort of mall), I’ve managed to keep from making friends who believe that frivolous spending of vast amounts of money is a competitive sport. I like that about the people here in the southern Appalachians - they’re not nearly so concerned conspicuous consumption as they are concerned about the quality of their natural habitats. Perhaps that’s true of rural areas all over the country, where people are simply not accustomed to spending money as an ingrained habit or mere way to pass the time of one’s life. When we lived in a city of a million-plus people in Florida, there seemed to be at least one strip mall for every household, and they were all making a living!

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