Saving a Little Money...

In our household budgets, we can often find ways to save a few dollars here and a few more there. By saving a few dollars in a few places, we can often finds ways to save a significant amount of the total budget.

For example:

At Starbucks you can go green and buy a reusable plastic cup for a dollar. Not only do you help save a tree, but they will give you a $0.10 credit each time you use it. After 10 cups, you're money ahead. Or you can buy your beans there (assuming you go there because you happen to like their coffee) and brew your own at home, saving many dollars over a daily stop. (I have a friend that refers to them as Four-bucks, because he says that's what it generally costs him to stop.) I've done both of these and am enjoying some home brewed Starbucks Anniversary Blend as I write.

A short time ago, we purchased a Soda Stream soda making machine. Using it over buying sodas saves enough to offset the initial cost, saves our earth by using refillable bottles, is better for me because my drinks use sucralose instead of aspartame, and I end up drinking less soda and spending less on a daily basis.

I know, I know. we're talking a few cents here and there. Even in a small household budget it's small. But, it does add up.

A few days ago, I wrote about our legislative reprehensatives kicking the fiscal can further down the road and asked for some cost saving measures that we could share with our fellow countrymen and minders of the federal purse. A few of my fellow federal employees have managed to find $500k to 750k that could be saved in our small facility by following some simple common sense. I've forwarded these to my Senators and Congressman along with a few other cost savings or income producing ideas. While that may be a mere drop in the bucket, somebody once said, "...a million dollars here, a million dollars there, before long you're talking about real money!"

Maybe the US Army doesn't really need to sponsor a NASCAR team at a few million dollars a season or own and maintain 234 golf courses around the world at an undisclosed amount of money that is estimated to be in the billions of dollars. These would be cuts in the defense spending that would have no impact on the mission of our military. Certainly there are areas that everybody can look at and agree that these are not good uses for our tax dollars.

The other day I saw a man that had just cashed in two plastic coffee containers that he had filled with loose change. The total was a few hundred dollars!

What if our government officials quit kicking the can down the road and instead used it to collect a few dollars of savings here and there. It really doesn't take much to start to add up to some serious money.

To illustrate:
A friend of mine recently posted this picture. It doesn't sound too difficult, and the  rewards seem to be well worth the effort.

I know that we need more than baby steps to solve the monster of a problem that we have created. But we have to manage to slow this train down and get it turned around without bringing it to a crashing stop. Why are there so many reasonable cuts that nobody wants to look at?
Let's look at everything.

Tweet your Senators and House representatives your ideas. E-mail them. Call them. Hold them accountable.

John <><