Credit Cave

I read a great article the other day in Entrepreneur magazine.  A CEO of a burgeoning company made the statement that he never throws away anything.  Its a concept straight out of the old days in the US straight out of the depression.

But its also a very practical suggestion.

When you keep all the stuff that you buy, make, build, acquire, inherit and more, you have a constant reminder of all of things you possess.  To control clutter, you build up a natural incentive not to buy more things that you do not need.  Plus, by keeping all of this stuff, you have lots of potential material to solve future problems or challenges with tools already in your possession.  That saves you money, it saves you from spending your cash and its very useful.

In this modern day and age, many people recycle a great number of items, from cardboard, newspapers, plastic, and aluminum cans to cell phones, cell phone batteries, clothing and more.  From the perspective of the global economy and environment this is good.

From the perspective of your personal finances however, why should you give this stuff away?  Take some time to find recyclers that reimburse you for these items as opposed to giving it away for free or paying to have it recycled.  The stuff usually has value.  If you find out how to extract this value, you might earn a little extra money.  Might pay for the fuel in your car a couple times of year.

Set it up as a chore for your children, let them learn the lesson of saving for financial reasons, and then these funds can offset their allowance or supplement it.  The price of aluminum along with many metals is very healthy right now, so don’t just kick the cans to the curb in a recycling bin.

Some paper can be recycled, but much of it can not.  Don’t just throw it away, if you have a wood burning stove, save it for the winter months and burn it.  Its going to be better for the environment to turn the paper to ash, than it will be to fill of a massive landfill with paper that will not biodegrade quickly as its mixed in with lots of other non-degradable garbage.

Plus, you will be helping the environment by using just a little less electricity or heating oil and reducing your heating bill too!  I find that a short fire during the winter months will take the chill off the house, and this decreases my motivation for notching the thermostat up an extra degree on those extra chilly days and nights.

So remember keep it for yourself, don’t throw it away and if you are going to recycle it, make a buck or two for your family in the process!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 10:47 am and is filed under General, 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.