Claymont Mansion, near Charles Town, WV. Photo courtesy of Troy Tolley.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it. – Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

When I was younger, I spent a lot of time visiting my aunt and uncle, who lived within walking distance of our house. My aunt was always a barrel of fun. She would play endless games of Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly with me, always had some sort of curiosity to show me when I would visit, and would lend me her encyclopedias when I was curious about a topic.

One project I fondly remember working on her with was the “blueprints” for my dream home. It covered eight sheets of paper, with each sheet representing a floor. Yes, the house was seven stories tall. It featured an elevator to help take people from floor to floor, as I wanted it to be handicap-accessible.

It featured somewhere around sixteen bedrooms, a library that would have been somewhere around 2,000 square feet in size, and countless other features. It had a six lane bowling alley in the basement. All told, the house would have measured around 28,000 square feet of floor space, as each floor would have taken up about 3,500 square feet and there were eight floors.

This was my dream house. It had everything I could imagine that I would ever want in it. Who could want anything else?

* * *

Over the past few years, Sarah and I have been sketching out our actual dream home. It’s actually surprisingly small, maybe only a few hundred square feet bigger than our current home. The bedrooms are slightly larger, and there’s an additional bedroom so each of our children can have their own room. There’s a small office for writing. The kitchen is perhaps slightly bigger. There’s one less bathroom and the family room and living room are essentially merged into one.

We’ve discussed a few other optional things, such as a game room/library, but every time we think about an addition, we find ourselves thinking about the time we’d have to spend maintaining that extra space and the time we’d have to work paying for the extra heating and cooling, and we find ourselves realizing that we’ve already designed the house we want.

What’s far more important to us is location. We want to live in a rural area surrounded by trees, but with enough open space for our children (and eventual grandchildren) to have space to play in. We’d like to have a small barn or a large shed for storage of garden implements, a snowblower, and other such items. We want to live relatively near our family and closest friends.

* * *

Dreams change. Goals change. People change. The ideas we hold onto in our childhood transform into the dreams of our teenage years. Those blossom, too, into the ideals of early adulthood, and again shift as we approach middle age. I fully expect my dreams to shift again as my life continues forward.

How do you plan for these ever-shifting dreams? If the big elements of our lives are so open to change and transition, how can we ever really plan for anything?

One major step a person can take is to keep their plans and preparations for their goals as multi-purpose as possible, particularly in the early stages. If you’ve started moving toward a goal only to find out that, as you grow older, that goal no longer has appeal, it’s useful to find that your preparation actually has use in other areas.

How do you make that happen? Minimizing your financial obligations is one part of that. A solid financial foundation makes almost any goal easier to achieve. If you don’t have any debts, your monthly bills are going to be much lower than those of a person with debts. Lower monthly bills means that you need less income in order to survive, which means you’re going to be more able to jump on board the opportunities that come along.

Hand in hand with minimizing obligations comes maximizing cash on hand. This means saving up your nickels and dimes, whether in a savings account or in other forms of investing. As always, the more resources you have to draw on, the easier it is to achieve your goal, whatever it might happen to be at the time.

You should also stock yourself up with a wide variety of transferable skills. Transferable skills are ones that people find themselves using over and over in life, no matter what the situation. They range from things like public speaking and written and verbal communication skills to abilities like plumbing and carpentry. The more skills you have like these, the easier it will be to achieve anything in life.

Another key asset is a large and diverse social network that you keep in contact with. By “in contact,” I don’t mean just friending on Facebook and then ignoring. I mean actually connecting with them on a regular basis by asking them how they’re doing and what they’re up to. Even better, when you have an opportunity to help someone out, just do it. That kind of goodwill is invaluable when you’re working towards a goal – and you might just find that the unexpected people are the ones with the keys to the kingdom when you refine your goals later in life.

* * *

The dreams you had as a child have changed as you’ve grown into adulthood (at least, they have for almost all of us). Those dreams are likely going to change again as you move through your life.

Just because your dreams change doesn’t mean that dreams are unreachable targets or that it’s a waste of time to prepare for them. It simply means that you should spend your time building a firm and solid foundation of finances, relationships, and skills so that when the right chance comes along, you’re able to jump on board and live out your dreams.

One of the biggest challenges I have when writing articles for The Simple Dollar is finding a balance of usefulness and audience.

What do I mean by that? Well, if I tried to write a personal finance article that would reach out to everyone who read it, it would be completely devoid of content. There’s no personal finance information that’s applicable to everyone in the entire world who might be reading this article.

On the other hand, if I write a personal finance article that’s just about my specific situation in incredible detail, it’s incredibly useful – but only to me. The more I dig into my own specific situation, the less applicable the entire thing becomes to anyone but me.

Instead, what I try to do is find a happy medium. I try to base the article on a few assumptions that I think a significant portion of my readers have and give advice based on those assumptions. Obviously, I can’t match every reader with every article – that’s an impossibility. What I can do is focus on areas that I know from my own life – like personal finance planning for parents, time management, building a career, escaping from debt, handling money issues and relationships, and so on – that match up with the information that others need.

So, how is that idea useful to you?

First of all, in order to find useful personal finance advice – here or anywhere else – you’ve got to discard some of what you read. Some of it is simply not going to be applicable to you because of the assumptions made by the person giving the advice. If you’re a retiree looking for frugality tips and you come across an article outlining ways to save money on a college campus, you’re probably not going to find too much that’s useful in that article. At the same time, for frugal college students, that article is very useful.

So, what can you do? Don’t be afraid to skip an article that doesn’t apply to you. Don’t be afraid to skip specific tips that don’t apply to you, either. Skip them, or better yet, pass them on to someone who might actually find value in that information.

Second, know how to identify what’s useful to you. Read the article – particularly the first paragraph – and ask yourself who exactly the article is being written for. If you’re still unsure, you can get clues from the rest of the website as well as the previous writings of the author of that article.

Also, use more than one source for your information. No writer is going to know everything – and that, most definitely, includes me. Writers are writing from different perspectives, have different sources for their own facts, and have different ideas about what’s important and what isn’t. Sometimes, writers are also flat-out wrong – and that certainly includes me, too.

There is no excuse for not getting multiple sources of input on any topic that you plan on investing your time and money into. Don’t base your retirement planning solely on The Simple Dollar or anything else. Major personal finance choices need to have some time spent understanding those options, and the best way to do that is to read multiple sources of advice on those topics.

Where do you go for this advice? Obviously, I hope that The Simple Dollar is one source, but I also hope that it’s far from the only source. Read other websites. Even better, read some books. Your local library is a giant treasure trove of great personal finance information.

There’s one final tactic, and it’s a big one. Always ask yourself if the person giving you the advice has a conflict of interest. I am very hesitant, for example, to trust advice given to me by a mutual fund company when it comes to buying mutual funds because they have a conflict of interest there. They make money by selling me mutual funds, not necessarily by giving good advice. I’m similarly hesitant to get my information about insurance from an insurance salesman.

You can’t always know whether someone has a conflict of interest when giving you information, but you can protect against it by eliminating the obvious ones and also by using multiple sources of information, as suggested above.

If you follow these tactics, you’re bound to find the information you need for your situation, validated by multiple sources. That’s the kind of rock-solid information upon which you can make personal finance decisions, career decisions, and other life decisions.

Good luck.

I can still remember how it felt to get my first real paycheck at my first real job after college. It came in the mail, and I stood by the mailbox at my old apartment building ripping open the envelope as soon as I realized what it was and holding that check in my hand. It was more money than I had ever seen at once in my life.

I splurged with it – and with the next check, too. I felt like I was celebrating actually becoming an adult with a real job and a real career path.

Before long, though, I had established a pattern of normalcy that involved spending quite a bit of money. The ramen noodles I had eaten in college were no longer good enough for me. Eating the $3 special at the Chinese restaurant near where I lived no longer satisfied my desires. Used video games from three years ago were quickly replaced by the newest releases. My old shirts, accumulated over the years of college, quickly vanished and were replaced by crisp new clothes.

I was making good money. I had to live like it, right?

I established a pattern of spending enough so that I was living paycheck to paycheck. I was buying far more stuff than I actually needed, but it was all necessary for the standard of living that I had adopted.

Then my student loans went off of forbearance.

Then I needed to buy a vehicle and car payments began.

Then my wife and I had a first child and the costs of diapers, formula, and child care began.

The problem was that my lifestyle had inflated beyond what my paycheck left me with after these expenses, and it led us almost into disaster.

It was a long and difficult path to recovery from this situation, but I know now that it would have been far better off had I never allowed my lifestyle to inflate in the first place.

Over the past several years, we trimmed our lifestyle down so much that there has often been temptation to enjoy some degree of lifestyle inflation once again. For the most part, we’ve avoided that temptation. Here’s how we’ve done it.

We’re conscious of lifestyle inflation. It’s a phenomenon we’re aware of and one that we talk about regularly. We watch for examples of where our regular spending has gone up and we talk those examples to death, usually finding that we’re better off keeping our spending low.

We stick with the things we enjoy. If we have fun going on a family walk in the park, why do we need to suddenly be taking our kids to FunLand and drop $20 or buy them a bunch of stuff to play with at home? If we enjoy our home-cooked meals around the dinner table made with simple and tasty ingredients, why do we need to start going out all the time and dropping $50 per meal? If we love playing an old familiar board game with our friends after a potluck dinner, why do we need to add expensive options to our social schedule? If the eight year old car we bought off of Craigslist serves our needs quite well, why buy a new one?

We splurge with enjoyable activities, not things. I mean this with all seriousness: my biggest splurge nowadays is a free uninterrupted hour or two of reading or playing a game. If I find that my daily tasks are done and I have an hour to crack open a novel or play a game of League of Legends or something, I really feel like it’s a splurge. Time is truly the valuable commodity in my life.

Beyond that, when we do open up our wallets, it’s usually for a special activity, usually our summer vacation. I enjoy going to Gencon each summer, my wife often visits her family in Seattle, and we usually take a family trip, too. Those are our biggest annual splurges.

We keep a lot of options on the table. One thing I’ve found is that once you start inflating your lifestyle, you stop really looking at certain options. Usually, free and inexpensive things are immediately off the table because, after all, you’re above that, right?

When we’re looking for something to do, we don’t start with movie listings or expensive events. We look at things like our local community calendar or the parks and recreation schedule. We look around our house at the multitude of things to do at home, from board games and art projects to books and home improvement tasks. There are more cheap and free things to do than we ever have time to get done, so why spend a lot of money on expensive things?

We maintain friendships with people who have similar values. Our closest friends have (more or less) the same values on lifestyle inflation that we do. All of us make a solid income, but our social events together are usually potluck dinners with board games afterward.

Most of the rest of our social circle consists of people that we’ve come to know thanks to free activities through our local parks and recreation department, mostly parents of children of similar age as our own.

We also live in a neighborhood where most of the people seem to have roughly the same standard of living that we do. Yeah, a few people have nice cars, but of the families nearest us, I can quickly see a pair of used vans and an ancient compact car. None of the houses are particularly nicer than ours, either.

Simply put, we don’t have the social pressure to engage in lifestyle inflation, and we’re happy to keep it that way.

A lot of our income is automatically transferred away before it reaches our hands. We pay almost all of our bills automatically. Beyond that, we also transfer away money for each child’s college savings plan, savings accounts for many of our future goals, and accounts for irregular bills like property taxes. We simply don’t leave behind enough for us to inflate our lifestyles very much.

Avoid lifestyle inflation. You’ll be happy you did.

Over the past five or six years since my financial turnaround started, the single most significant change that has happened to how I view the world is a switch to what I call “long term thinking.” Simply put, I evaluate most of my life choices primarily through a long-term lens.

In other words, when I look at things like how I spend my money, how I spend my time, who I choose to interact with, and so on, I’m often not thinking as much about immediate pleasure but how my choices will impact my life in, say, five years.

Let me give you a few examples of what I’m talking about.

Most mornings, my children wake me up and I’m pretty groggy at first. After a minute or two of swimming up out of a sleep state and into a basic comprehension of the world around me, I’m faced with a choice. I could either shamble along in a half-awake state, mumbling incoherently at my children, or I can will myself to be energetic and help them get ready in the morning. The former is far more pleasing in the short term, but I often find myself jumping up and down several times and splashing my face with cold water so I can get going immediately and get right on the task of making sure the kids are dressed, talking to them about their day, and making sure they have a great breakfast on the table. That little bit of discomfort each morning will lead to more well-balanced children in several years.

I stop by a local boardgaming night and try out a new game that I really enjoy. The store has it on sale for $40. I’m faced with a choice. If I buy it, I’ll probably play it a few times with my friends. If I don’t buy it, it won’t prevent me from spending an evening playing games with my friends. So, the upside of buying this isn’t a new social event. It’s just more stuff on my shelf. On the other hand, another $40 in my bank account means an easier road to financial freedom.

Buying a cup of coffee from Starbucks in the morning might give me a quick jolt of energy. Of course, if I do that, then I become just a bit more used to having that jolt in the morning, making me more reliant on coffee instead of a glass of water in the morning. A consistent diet of Starbucks isn’t really a good thing for my long term health, either. Not drinking that cup of Starbucks leads to a trend of less spending on morning coffee and better health. I’ll leave it as a rare treat.

This is a hard switch to make. Our immediate wants and desires scream with urgency next to longer-term concerns, and it is incredibly easy to just let the short-term thinking rule the day. I used several tactics to start making the transition (and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not 100% at thinknig this way).

I spent time thinking about my common decisions away from the moment where I made those decisions. Thinking about things in the heat of the moment often leads a person to make the short-term beneficial decision rather than the long-term beneficial decision.

Thus, I started spending some time each day thinking about the decisions I made that day, particularly ones I would often see myself repeating. Outside of the moment, I’d look at the short term benefits of my options as well as the long term benefits and I’d decide independently what the best long-term choice was.

I spent time figuring out exactly what I wanted from my future. I often mention drawing a five year sketch of your life and a ten year sketch and maybe even a twenty year sketch. What I mean by that is simply laying out what things you’d like to have in your life at that point. Obviously, those things won’t perfectly come to pass, as life often hands us unexpected things.

The reason for doing this is to figure out what things you can control to make those dreams come true. I can control the money I spend. I can control the food I eat. I can control the time I spend. I can control what I read and what I learn. What choices can I make in those contexts that lead to the five year sketch of the life I want?

I spent less time with people who would tempt me to make short-term decisions. People who constantly encourage you to buy things you don’t need are ones that will cause you to constantly sacrifice your future for your present. I spent a lot of years hanging out with people who did just that and it led me almost into the poorhouse.

My current circle of friends are almost all rather frugal. We have potluck dinners for our social engagements and usually wind up playing board games. We trade a lot of tips on saving money and sometimes clip coupons for each other and send each other deals. We take pride in our good financial moves – buying land is far valued over buying a new car, for example. These are friends that will encourage you to think for the long term.

I set up situations where the beneficial short term choice and the beneficial long term choice were the same choice. An easy example of this is throwing out all of the unhealthy snacks in your house so that you can only choose among healthy ones, but you can do the same thing with lots of different aspects of your life.

For example, you can choose a commute that doesn’t take you by temptations to spend money or eat unhealthily. You can delete distracting computer games from your computer. You can unplug the internet router for a while, making it much more difficult to get online (and instead easier to get other things done). If you make the path of least resistance one that helps your long term future, you’re setting up a great life.

I accepted some short-term choices as splurges. Splurges turned from just spending money into making choices for the short term. So, for example, playing a computer game is often a splurge for me. It’s fun in the short term, but has virtually no positive impact in the long term.

The key is that I recognize that it’s a splurge. It’s something that I know isn’t the best choice, but it’s okay to do every once in a while. It’s part of the spice of life, and I savor those splurges.

Good luck!

A couple days ago, I watched a program on TLC called Extreme Cheapskates, which featured people doing things like using reusable toilet paper and cooking goat’s heads in order to save money.

It was pretty obvious after just a few minutes of watching that the point of the show was to make frugality look ridiculous by choosing to profile tactics that violate other social customs and norms. In some cases, the people were aware of it, but in others, they seemed completely oblivious that they were doing things that others would see as … well, “extreme.”

While watching it, I received a couple emails from readers who were also watching it. One in particular stood out at me:

Is this really the kind of thing you do at home? Some of this stuff is just sick. Some things are worth a dollar or two more.

Simply put, the outcome of this show was to paint a socially uncomfortable face on the idea of frugality. By highlighting people who take frugality to an extreme, they manage to cast a negative glow over anyone who proudly practices frugality.

Here’s the thing, though. This type of negative highlighting happens all the time with all kinds of things.

Focusing on the practices of the Hutaree and the Christian patriot movement casts a false negative light onto Christians, most of whom are wonderful people who try to live their day-to-day life in a positive fashion.

Focusing on the practices of a few large banks that received TARP money and also have consumer unfriendly practices casts a false negative light on all banks and credit unions, most of which do really great work for people.

Focusing on groups like al Qaeda casts a false negative light on Muslims, most of whom are wonderful people who also try to live their day-to-day life in a positive fashion.

The list goes on and on. When you define a large group by the actions of a small, extreme element of that group, you’re almost always making a mistake.

This brings us back to frugality and Extreme Cheapskates. Frugality is not the extreme actions represented on this show.

What you’re actually seeing when you watch Extreme Cheapskates are people who have a overall value set that’s significantly different than yours. It’s the same thing you see in the extreme cases mentioned above.

It does not mean that the larger group these people claim to represent shares their values.

I consider myself frugal. I even consider myself a cheapskate in terms of things that just affect me. I make my own laundry detergent. We make a lot of the Christmas gifts we give away. I drive a used car I bought off of Craigslist. We save leftover vegetable scraps to make vegetable stock, then compost the leftover scraps from that.

At the same time, I don’t do things that are rude to others or unhygenic or dangerous to my health.

Frugality isn’t about squeezing every penny out of everything. It’s about maximizing the value of the things you’re doing, and “value” doesn’t always strictly mean money. Money often plays a significant part in it, but so does time and so does health and so does the relationships you have with the people you care about.

Frugality simply means that you take the time to figure out those relative values for yourself. Have you actually thought about the relative value proposition of buying generic laundry detergent versus making your own versus buying Tide? If you have and you’ve come to a conclusion on the issue, you’re probably frugal. You’ve thought about what you value – money, time, hygiene, relationships. You’ve obtained information on the issue. You’ve come up with a conclusion based on the information that balances what you specifically value.

That’s actually what these “extreme cheapskates” are also doing, but their values likely differ significantly from yours. That doesn’t mean that being frugal or being a cheapskate is weird. It just means that the “extreme cheapskate” puts an extremely high value on the “money” part of the value equation (or an uncomfortably low value on the “hygiene” part or some other part of the equation).

It also means that when you see a list of frugal tactics, you’re seeing tips that represent different levels of value on things like hygiene and time and food quality (and so on), and that you need to filter those lists based on how you value things like hygiene and time and food quality.

Be frugal and smart and live by the things that hold value in your life. Do that and you’ll always win.

For the rest of this week, I’m going to discuss the goals I’m setting for 2012 and the plans I have for achieving them.

Every single time I engage in some form of community service, I feel extremely happy about what I’ve done. I feel like I’ve caused some sort of positive change in my community and made someone else’s life better.

The problem is that it’s incredibly easy for me to put aside some of the things I could do related to community service and instead do other things. I could head over to the food pantry… or I could make chop all of the vegetables for a great ratatouille. I could pack up the children and help remove snow for elderly people… or I could go inside, make some hot chocolate, and watch The Incredibles with my kids.

Although the “right” choice here is very fulfilling, it’s often hard to do in the face of temptation.

This year, I’m simply striving to make the “right” choice more of a routine.

What areas am I focusing on?

I hope to spend some time helping a couple local food pantries with odds and ends that need done, such as restocking shelves and preparing bags.

In the winter, I’m going to pack up a shovel and do some volunteer snow removal where it’s needed.

In the spring and summer and fall, I’m going to do some volunteer work for the local parks and recreation department.

There are also a couple local charity groups that have some computer needs that I can help fulfill, so that their normal workflow can go much more smoothly.

What I’m essentially committing to is about four hours per week – on average – of such volunteer work, with a couple weeks for travel and the like.

I’ll be keeping track of this time in a spreadsheet, just so that I know I’m keeping pace with this goal. If our winter turns snowy, it’s likely that I’ll get significantly ahead earlier in the year. This does provide some breathing room for periods in the summer when there are reduced opportunities and different time constraints.

Why do this? Volunteer work makes a better community, and a better community makes a better life for those who live in it. It also leaves me feeling better about myself every time I do it. That’s reason enough for me.

One of the most common issues that I get asked about is how someone can convince someone else that they care about to care more about their finances and life situation. My answer to them, for the most part, is that they can’t make someone care about something they don’t care about. You can convince someone to put on a good show for a while, but without some internal motivation, it’s hard to create any lasting change in life.

I have a friend that I’ve known since I was very young. He’s got two children, a wife, and a felony on his record for a mistake he committed over a decade ago when he was young and stupid. He’s quiet and unassuming and can be an incredibly hard worker when you get him focused on a task – he can work me under the table.

Recently, he lost his job. He had worked for several years at a pretty good factory job, but he lost it when an uncontrolled event caused him to miss his alarm and show up late at a key time.

His family lives in a modest apartment that they should be able to keep, but they’re also facing some debt.

Right now, he just seems kind of lost. I think he’s just content to draw his unemployment insurance and let the next few months just go by.

From my perspective, this is an opportunity for him. Why not get the foundation in place for a lawn care business or something similar in the area? Why not simply look for any service that the community needs and start fulfilling it? I have many friends that have simply done that – they’ve just started fulfilling a need that they’ve heard about. Why not go out there and throw an application at any job available?

The ingredient that’s missing is the motivation to improve his situation.

I’m honest enough to recognize that he’s simply lacking that key ingredient. He’s got the basic things that he wants out of life – a roof over his head and enough food to keep his belly full – and he doesn’t have the fire to do what it takes to build more than that.

You can’t start a fire without a spark.

On the flip side of that coin is someone I’m going to talk about in detail on The Simple Dollar in a week or two. She’s a young woman who has come from a background pretty similar to mine – a small town and a family that didn’t earn a whole lot of money as she was growing up.

Right now, she’s a full time college student, working a part-time job to minimize her college bills, and trying to jump-start a small business at the same time. Sometimes I wonder when she sleeps.

She wants to build something big for her life – or at least something more than what she has now. She has passions and dreams and plans and is willing to chase them.

She has the spark. Will the fire follow it? The possibility is there, at least.

That spark is the difference between these two stories. It comes from within. It comes from a desire to change yourself. It comes form having dreams and actually putting forth action to chase those dreams.

The spark is pretty obvious if you spend much time around a person. It’s egither there or it’s not. Are they setting goals for themselves? Are they actively taking on real challenges in their life? Or are they just walking through life with whatever is handed to them?

When you see a spark, nourish it. Offer all the advice in the world. Offer any assistance you can give. I don’t encourage giving friends or family loans, but I do encourage gifts and grants.

If you don’t see a spark, there’s not much you can do. The support you give won’t bring about change. It will merely continue the behavior you already see. Give love and care, but recognize that pressure for change won’t bring it about and support for change won’t change a thing unless they’re making the change already by themselves.

You can’t create that spark. They either have it or they don’t, and it’s usually pretty clear from watching how they act. The best thing you can do for both yourself and for them is to react to the path they choose.

If your family holidays are anything like mine, you’re left with piles of remnants: torn-up wrapping paper, empty boxes, and extra food litter the house.

It might be tempting to throw it all away, but there’s a lot of value in those leftover items. Here are some of the things I’ve done with leftover Christmas items.

Wrapping Paper
1. I shred it and use it as packing material when I ship things or when I give gifts in the future.

2. I shred it and mix those shreds with paraffin to make some fantastic firestarters. The easiest way to do it is to take an old egg carton, put a few shreds of wrapping paper in each slot, and pour some heated paraffin on top. Then, tear the egg carton into individual egg-shaped slots (with the egg carton still attached to the paraffin) and you have yourself a dozen fantastic firestarters. This is a great use for camping.

3. I take large pieces of untorn used paper and turn them into a collage, which I then use for future gifts. A collage pattern on a gift looks really distinctive and interesting.

4. I take pieces of untorn used paper and cut shapes out of them, which I then attach to brown paper for future gift wrappings.

5. I take pieces of untorn paper and use it to teach my children basic origami, like a fortune teller or a dove or a jumping frog.

6. I shred it and use it for paper maiche projects. For example, we made a paper maiche Great Saiyaman helmet for our oldest son that he wears all the time (and which provided a centerpiece of his Halloween costume this year).

7. I take small pieces of it and use it to cut out snowflakes. Often, I’ll just fold them up so that they’re ready to cut, then store those folded pieces until next November for the following year’s Christmas decorations.

Empty Boxes
8. I reuse cardboard boxes over and over and over again. I just break them down so that they store flat in our garage, then use them whenever I have the need.

9. I convert leftover cardboard boxes into a dollhouse for my daughter. This gives her full ability to decorate the thing as she sees fit.

10. I cut cardboard boxes into strips and save them for campfire starters. This is particularly good for boxes that have been mangled enough that they’re not good for other uses.

11. I cut the cardboard into rectangles and use it for backing on framed photographs. Some frames come with the cardboard, but for those who do not, cardboard can be essential in preventing photos from slipping.

12. I convert larger boxes into “pet houses.” This can be a perfect way to enclose a dog’s sleeping area or give a cat a place to hide and play. Again, you can decorate them to your heart’s content.

13. I cut cardboard into tiny pieces and use it for garden mulch. It does a great job of minimizing weeds and then slowly decomposing into the soil.

14. I cut cardboard boxes into flats and use them for organizing smaller items in my closet, like CDs and DVDs. This makes it easy to see the exact contents without the items spilling everywhere. Just trim the box down to the height of the items you want to store.

15. If you still have leftover paper and cardboard, get creative with the reuse. I’d contact a daycare center or orphanage or even an elementary school in your area and see if they have any need for it, for craft projects and the like. Contact an animal shelter and see if they have any need for it as liners or bedding material. These options are far better than simply recycling them in your recycling bin.

Leftover Food
16. I just freeze as many of the basic ingredients as I can. Items like leftover turkey meat, leftover vegetables, and so on are perfect components for soups and stews and casseroles when you pull them out of the freezer.

17. I convert them into alternative dishes in the next few days. Leftover ham, for example, might become a ham-and-bean soup. Leftover sweet potatoes might become sweet potato pancakes.

18. I package it up and give it to holiday party guests to take home with them as something of a final gift. I’ll get a bunch of inexpensive containers that I don’t need back and allow them to have a meal at home.

19. I’ll prepare meals for shut-ins that I know and take the food to them. Several years ago, we lived near an elderly shut-in that we often took meals to and it was a very rewarding experience.

20. I use leftover vegetables and vegetable scraps to make vegetable stock and leftover meats and meat scraps to make meat stock. All you do is put the materials you want to make stock out of into a crock pot, fill it with water until there’s about three or four inches above the top of the food, then turn it on low and let it sit all day. Strain the liquid and save it – it’s a great starter for all kinds of dishes.

Don’t let holiday waste fill up your bins. Put that stuff to better use and save yourself a few dimes, too.