Clean Wash, Zero Toxins

Awhile back this blog featured a three-part series on Necessary Household Basics for keeping a clean house by concocting your own soaps, scouring powders, metal polishes, starches, fabric fresheners, bug repellants, etc. The list of ingredients were all common, inexpensive substances like salt, vinegar, borax, baking soda and corn starch. Saving serious money on soaps begins with saving the last of the bar soaps (and motel bar-lets) and turning them liquid by dissolving them in water.

Part 2 of that series offered some easy recipes for making the useful products. Like making an excellent metal polish by mixing vinegar and salt into a paste, or a fine scouring powder by mixing borax and soda. And of course, if you haven’t enough liquid soap to produce the laundry detergent or diswashing soap, you can always go ahead and purchase a jug of good ol’ Dr. Bronner’s organic liquid soap for making your mixtures. It’s not the cheapest of ingredients, but it’ll certainly go a long way! The money savings are significant all around.

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15 Real Ways to Save Money on Gasoline

As the ever-rising price of fuel puts a serious dent in consumer budgets (and summertime vacations), it’s a good time for remembering good advice from the past as well as new advice for the present on how to keep your shoestring budget from being hopelessly busted.

1. Mass Transiting
If you live in a city or suburb with access to mass transit, USE IT. The cost of bus, train or subway fare is less than the cost of gasoline plus wear-and-tear on your vehicle for those same miles. Plus, if you can test on the means criteria, you can get subsidy for mass transit to and from work every day.

Plus many cities offer “express” transit from suburban hubs to the inner city (bus main depot and transfer station). This means the bus doesn’t stop every 4 blocks along the way, and you can get to work or home often in about the same time it takes to commute in your car during peak traffic hours (the express buses generally use less congested routes).

2. Carpooling
Carpool to and from work if you can. Big employers often have bulletin boards in the break room where people can request for carpooling, and many metropolitan areas provide relatively ‘safe’ long-term parking lots along freeway entrances reserved for carpoolers or express mass transit. This means the people you’re pooling with don’t have to pick everyone up at their homes, but can just pick up and drop off the participants at one location. Regular buses stop at these locations as well, so you can bus to the pick-up and home again.

Carpooling requires out-of-pocket expense just like mass transit does (unless your employer happens to provide the van and gas). It is as cheap or cheaper than driving yourself, as everyone shares the costs. Even if you share a ride with a single co-worker living nearby your costs go down by half.

This requires firm work-scheduling so your participation doesn’t get screwed by your petty tyrant middle-management boss, but many workplaces are beginning to understand that unless they want to give employees a big enough raise to cover transportation inflation, they’d better be accommodating. Some localities offer municipal bulletin boards on the ‘net that allow you to hook up with others who live and work in your area (but not the same place) for carpooling.

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The Poor Get Poorer Still

Last month I asked the question, Is It Depression Yet? and linked quite a few opinions of economic pundits about when the recession no one in DC cares to admit we’re in will turn into a full-fledged depression.

In going down the list of ominous signs that we’re going down for the third time, the key ingredient apart from a burst credit bubble was rising oil prices. Well, this last weekend gasoline went over $4 a gallon, and diesel was pushing $5. So while families and workers in cities can start taking mass transit to work and school and just stay home this summer instead of driving to the Grand Canyon, the price of diesel – which runs all our shipping fleets, trucks and trains – is going to cause swift inflation in the price of food as well as everything else that is transported from here to there. It is no longer a wild conspiracy theory that oil will go to $200 a barrel, now projected by the end of this year and possibly right around election time. It could hit $150 this month and no one will be shocked.

Thus I read with interest an article in the June 9 New York Times entitled Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average. A survey by the Oil Price Information Service did a survey which showed that the price of gasoline has its biggest impact on rural areas, particularly in the Southeast, and that for the people euphemistically called the “working poor” the cost of just getting to work and to the store is quickly eating as much of their income as food and housing. Since their incomes are not rising and aren’t likely to rise, the situation for people in rural areas of the south, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas will soon become a choice between food and transportation.

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Necessary Household Basics: First Aid

Clean, Green Living in 3 Cheap, Easy Steps

Part 3: Discouraging Bugs, Treating Boo-Boos

In this last installment of the series examining inexpensive and natural alternatives to the many household products people spend so much money on through the year, I want to look at the basic summertime first aid kit.

My family lives in the “deep woods” that Deep Woods Off^TM was invented to de-bug. We have lots of company during the summer season, adults and children. There’s not much one can do about nasty encounters with aggressive poisonous snakes (copperheads are much more aggressive than timber rattlers, who live in the area but are hardly ever seen) or bone breaks or serious puncture wounds or cuts. Those just have to go to the ER, best thing to do is make that happen as quickly as possible. But there are a host of lesser injuries and situations that can be treated adequately at home, without the fancy, expensive products that contribute so much to a weekly grocery bill.

In the first installment of the series I listed the basic ingredients to purchase – brand name or generic (I get generic, but brands aren’t that much more expensive) borax, baking soda, rubbing alcohol, white vinegar, basic soap flakes (or liquid soap made from your disintegrating bath bars), and added ammonia. In the second installment I gave some recipes for laundry soap, kitchen and bath scouring powders, drain cleaner, surface disinfectants, etc. Now, using the same ingredients (plus a few things from the garden) let’s make the first aid kit and general insect management substances…
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Necessary Household Basics: Recipes

Clean, Green Living in 3 Cheap, Easy Steps

Part 2: Keeping Things Clean

In Part 1 of this 3-part series I listed some basic ingredients to purchase that can do double or triple duty in your home cleaning, disinfecting and treating small first aid issues while saving you big money and at the same time NOT polluting your home or our collective environment.

In this part of the series I’ll list some easy recipes for mixing your basic ingredients into useful household products. This doesn’t take a lot of time or heavy effort, and can be done on a weekend afternoon easily once every month or two (as they get used up), or mixed on the spot for particular jobs.

In The Laundry Room: Everybody must do laundry. Whether or not you’ve got an infant in diapers (cloth is best!) or small children who love to make mud pies, or older kids who sweat a lot, or just working adults who must wear good clothes or uniforms daily in their jobs, you’re going to have to wash clothes. And while the price of food and gasoline keeps rising out of sight, most people already know that good laundry products are a significant chunk of change out of the budget.

I mentioned in Part 1 how to make liquid soap out of the dregs of bars that melt all over your tub and sink by just putting them in a container with water and letting them dissolve. That’s good hand soap that can be put into a dispenser, but can also provide the basis of laundry soap if you’ve enough of it. I have a friend who must travel for her job, and who collects those little motel soaps through the year, gifting them to me at Christmas so I’ve got sizeable baskets of rock-hard teeny-soaps still in their wrappers. I use these to make liquid soap, and liquid soap to make laundry soap. Alternatively, you can use Fels Naptha laundry soap bars, which are inexpensive and go quite far. The three bar package can make about 6 gallons of laundry soap, which should get most households through at least that many months even if there’s a lot of laundry to do! Ivory soap bars or flakes work very well for baby laundry, and is still among the least expensive of basic soaps you can buy.
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Save Big Money On Necessary Basics!

Clean, Green Living in 3 Cheap, Easy Steps

Part 1: The List of Ingredients

Now that it’s late May, it’s time to stock up for the summer – and our many summer visitors – on things like bug repellant (we really do live in the Deep Woods), anti-itch solution, insect sting remedies, poison ivy treatments, cut and scrape treatments, etc. The basic summertime First Aid Kit, all ingredients of which will be used as regularly as the usual household cleaners, deodorizers, detergents, polishes and disinfectants get used all year round.

Might as well get items that do double or triple duty as household cleansers and disinfectants as well as personal skin and hair care products too. I’ll use this post to make the basic list of things to buy, and later posts will give specific recipes and hints on how to use them to best advantage. And the best thing about these products? They’re Green and Eco-Friendly to boot!

Baking Soda: It all starts with good old baking soda. You can purchase generic or the primary name brand we recognize (Arm and Hammer). It’s cheap either way, and the same product though generic will tend to clump and solidify quicker and easier. Compared against the multitude of specialty chemicalized products you could be buying to do many of the same tasks, you could save hundreds of dollars a year with a cleaner, fresher house and a healthier family to show for it!

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Mortgage ‘Crisis’ Got You Down?

Consider Squatting in Your Own Home

Today the New York Times reports that governmental expectations that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will somehow keep the housing market afloat is starting to look like a pipe dream. With defaults and foreclosures rising drastically, administration officials, regulators and lawmakers are starting to get very nervous…

Will the next big taxpayer bailout have to go to these government-guaranteed mortgage giants? Well, since we got to bail out private investment bank Bear-Stearns, I’d guess so. Too bad we can’t bail out the families losing their homes.

Speaking of which, I got to wondering what happens to the people who lose their homes, given that the rental market is in just the same trouble. Is anybody keeping track of the homeless population? And if the person who used to own the home is now homeless because it’s been foreclosed, what’s the new designation for that family if they decide to simply stay where they are?

I did a little searching and found lots of news and opinion about how neighborhoods decimated by the mortgage crisis are now hosting increasing numbers of “squatters”. Here’s a CBS News video on that issue:

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Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 3

Primary and Emergency Care

In response to increasing unaffordability of health insurance in America and justifying his repeated vetos of State Children’s Health Insurance Program [SCHIP] expansions, President George W. Bush declared during an appearance in Cleveland last July that:

“The immediate goal is to make sure there are more people on private insurance plans. I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

As if that weren’t clueless enough, the New York Times reports today (April 23) that one of the nation’s largest health insurers, UnitedHealth, announced disappointing first-quarter earnings (profits), saying the weakening Economy Has Dented Its Prospects. In short, as premiums rise, employers are dropping insurance plans for their employees, more employees are opting out, and rising unemployment is reflected in increasing numbers of uninsured.

The for-profit industry has also shot itself in the foot by increasing premiums to protect its profits over the quickly rising cost of care, not covering people who may have health problems, and simply refusing to pay for health care for the insured. Medical bills now account for a full half of all bankruptcies in the US, and ER treatment is NOT “free.”

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Inexpensive Health Care Tips – 2

Necessary Medicines

The New York Times reported on Monday, April 14 that Co-Payments Soar for Drugs With High Prices as the nation’s largest health insurers struggle to keep their profits high and their payments for health care low. The new pricing system forces patients taking name-brand medications to pay a percentage of the cost rather than a fixed co-payment of $10 to $30 a month for each medication they take.

The situation, and plans for a public demonstration in San Francisco during the AHIP annual meeting on June 19th are outlined in Insurers target the sickest: Say bye bye to $20 prescription co-pays.

This means that the burden of increasingly expensive health care now affects the insured, who may now have to pay thousands of dollars a month for medications in addition to their high monthly premiums and treatment co-pays and deductibles. America’s sickest citizens are once again being abandoned by a system that was originally designed to spread the costs of their care across a large pool that includes healthier people. Insurers say the new system will keep everyone’s premiums down, just at the time of year that Americans are discovering that they must pay double or more for the same health insurance they had last year. That’s not a very impressive system, considering that all other developed nations on the planet have universal health care.

Thus this installment of the series of inexpensive health care tips will offer some alternatives for obtaining drugs that may be beyond your ability to afford.

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Inexpensive Health Care Tips – Intro

A few months after moving to our mountain retreat I got bit by a tiny deer tick while working to clear the neglected garden for planting. Soon I had fever and swollen glands, seriously painful joints and a nasty rash surrounding the bite site. After a few weeks of this we finally got a little ahead on basics, so I went to the local doctor. He has a little clinic next to the grocery store, comes to town twice a week.

First thing was to check in and lay $60 on the counter up front before the doctor would see me, given that I had no insurance. If I’d had insurance, it would have been $10. Then the assistant took my vitals and I was asked to wait in an overcrowded room with a lot of obese locals and their obese children. I guessed immediately that the primary cause of illness in this rural area had to do with America’s basic poor-person bad diet. But that wasn’t my problem…

$150 worth of in-office blood tests and a ‘scrip for a week’s worth of antibiotic later (plus the original $60 just to see him), I found out I’d contracted Lyme disease. He made another appointment for his next in-town day, said he’d give me another week’s worth of antibiotics every week until I was cured. Ha!

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