Buy Nothing but Necessities for a Month

We’ve been getting word from various sources around the web of people with a common goal: trying to purchase nothing but absolute necessities for one month. Not only would it help you save money, but it could really teach you a lesson in how much unneeded junk you purchase without really even thinking about it.

Necessities are basically the things you can’t get by without – rent, utilities, credit card payments, student loan payments, basic groceries, medicine and basic toiletries (i.e., no gourmet goods or cosmetics). It’s basically a month without unnecessary shopping – no DVDs, electronics, knick knacks, home décor, Starbucks, and all those other little things that we tend to drop money on every now and then. Depending on income, participants have reported saving as much as $600 in a single month, which would add up to an awful lot of money over a year’s time if you wanted to stretch it that far.

I had my own little experiment with a ‘buy nothing month’ earlier this year, albeit unintentionally, during a dry month while in the midst of changing jobs. One thing I can tell you is, once you realize how easy it is to get by without all of those little purchases, it’s really easy to keep it going. Afterward, I was far more conscious about thinking before I buy – as in, “Do I really need this?”

MSN Money reports that in their own investigation of the ‘buy nothing month’ experiment, some people reported feeling deprived:

Concerns about feeling deprived were pretty common, at least in the early days. Many participants confessed they often spent money to ward off boredom or to lift a bad mood, or to socialize with friends, and wondered how they’d cope without that outlet.

A New York woman, Vanessa, dropped out early in the experiment because continuing, she wrote, would have meant being too lonely. New Yorkers socialize by going out to eat and drink, rarely entertaining in their shoe-box apartments.

In truth, there are so many free things to do out there. Go for a stroll. Read a book in the park. Get up close and personal with your community.

Buying stuff isn’t bad – but losing that zombie-like tendency to unthinkingly put things we don’t need would certainly be worth a month of participating in the experiment. It really lifts you out of that consumer mentality of buy, buy, buy – which would be a good thing for all of us.  Try it for yourself this month!

Link [MSN Money]
Photo credit: Flickr user sylvar

Buy One House, Get One Free

Top sign the housing market is still going downhill: when you purchase one McMansion, you get a smaller yet still ‘luxurious’ row home free. No kidding. One San Diego real estate developer has clearly gotten very, very desperate to sell homes.

From the LA Times:

We thought, ‘Why does it just have to be on Pop Tarts and restaurants? Why not buy one home, get one free,’” Dawn Berry of Michael Crews Development told 10 News in San Diego.

More: “Michael Crews Development is offering new, 2000-square foot cityscape row-homes worth $400,000 in Escondido for free — if you buy one Royal View Estate home in San Pasqual Valley starting at $1.6 million. ‘You know it’s a straight-up legit deal; no prices have been increased, there are no hidden costs. Michael is just giving away a free home for people that buy at Royal View,’ said Berry.”

“Adam Rossman of Michael Crews Development added, ‘People have been coming in saying, ‘How can you do this?’ Well, it’s our way of dealing with current market conditions to move some inventory.’ “

Another real estate development company, Toll Brothers, posted a $93.7 million dollar loss last quarter, so clearly things aren’t going so well, even in previously booming areas like Southern California. In previous years, when the real estate market in such areas was so hot that it was incredibly difficult to find an affordable home, developers like these saw their bank accounts growing distended as they built more and more subdivisions, condos and retail space with the assumption that all units would easily be sold.

Considering the greed in the development industry, I think it’s poetic justice that they’re finding the rug pulled out from under them – how many times did they find loopholes in laws and ignore the public’s wishes so they could build a mini mall on natural, untouched land?

Link [LA Times] + [Huffington Post]

Reuters Reporters Can’t Believe Billionaire Oilman Is Investing in Wind to Make Money

With a name like T. Boone Pickens, Jr., how could you not grow up to be a billionaire oilman?

80 year old T. Boone made his billions over the decades by growing his oil company through a flurry of mergers and acquisitions and is now setting his sites on the wind. His plan calls for spending $10B to build the worlds largest wind farm in Texas.

I found this news in a Reuters story, author Chris Baltimore seems blown away that someone actually expects to make money by doing something green. Check out:

But Pickens is not out to save the planet. He intends to make money.

Golly gee, a businessman invests in a green business and isn’t doing it to make the world a happier and shinier place? He actually will make money? Stop the presses, 1999 wants it’s storyline back.

Link [Reuters]

Green Vaporwear, Hucksterism, and Electric Cars- Wired Magazine Unloads on Zap!

Holy crap did Wired Magazine just unload on electric car company Zap!. It sounds like the company is run by a couple of shady hucksters who have enriched themselves at the expense of their customers, employees, and franchisees while screwing things up for all the real green car companies with their constant over promising and under delivering.

Here’s an snip, head over and read the whole article which Wired was kind enough to post in full to their site.

Over the years, ZAP has taken millions from investors and dealers eager to see the company’s line of green cars hit the road. But that line has never materialized. Of nearly a dozen groundbreaking eco-vehicles ZAP has promised in public announcements and on its Web site, only the Xebra and its sibling, a truck version, have ever made it to market. As a result, fans of electric cars have grown disillusioned, while individuals like Youssef have been financially devastated. What’s more, investment firms around the country have become cautious about financing electric vehicles after being repeatedly misled by one of the industry’s most visible companies.

In spite of all this, the pair now running the company, Starr and CEO Steve Schneider, enjoy lucrative employment packages that have made them millions. Their compensation — and ZAP’s continued existence as a business — heavily depends on the continual issuance of new stock shares. And although ZAP has earned an annual profit only once in its 16 years of existence (even that was the result of a one-time debt conversion) and its stock has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, and the Pacific Stock Exchange, Starr and Schneider have managed to keep ZAP shares from becoming worthless. They’ve achieved this almost entirely through a relentless flow of press releases in which ZAP describes itself as “a world leader in electric transportation” and constantly claims to be on the verge of innovations and business deals that will yield breakthroughs in green transportation — claims that consistently fall short.

None of this would be possible without the optimism and naïveté of those eager to put their faith in the electric car future. When it comes to green technology, some people just want to believe. It’s easy to see why: Electric cars, after all, don’t run on gas, so they produce virtually no emissions. They do consume some fossil fuels, since they charge their batteries from the grid, which mostly uses coal and natural gas to generate power. But because electric cars are more efficient than gas cars at turning energy into miles, their carbon footprint averages out to be 50 to 90 percent less than that of traditional vehicles. (And that figure drops to nearly zero if the car is plugged into a renewable energy source like a solar panel array.) Electric cars could decrease dependence on oil, reduce global carbon emissions, and save consumers money. But while Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Ford, and General Motors all toyed with electric vehicles in the ’90s, these companies had effectively ended development by 2003, when California stopped requiring automakers to offer zero-emissions vehicles. Since then, electric car enthusiasts have been forced to pin their hopes on small independent companies — like ZAP.

“They tug at your heartstrings,” says Joseph Gottlieb, a ZAP dealer from the San Diego area who has filed an official complaint against ZAP with the Securities and Exchange Commission. “If ZAP was in any other business, the company would have been dead long ago. But they keep taking advantage of how much environmentalists — like me — want to see electric cars come to market.”

The lesson to be learned here: Greenies are easy to rip off if you tell them you’re trying to save the world.

Link [Wired] via [EcoGeek]

Video Shows Growth of Wal-Mart Matches Outbreak of Infectious Disease

This is awesome- Kiwi Tobes has a downright creepy video showing the growth of Wal-Mart since its founding. I’d be willing to lay a tenner down on the table betting that the growth of Wal-Mart is similar to the outbreak pattern of an infectious disease released from Bentonville- think Stephen Kings The Stand here.

It’s pretty damn clever how the video was put together. Here’s what Kiki Tobes says:

Freebase has a topic for every zip code, along with it’s longitude and latitude. Here’s one example. One query pulls out all the ZIP codes along with their longitudes and latitudes. You can turn longitudes and latitudes into graphical coordinates with some simple transformations (which will vary based on the region you’re plotting and how big your image is) — here are the ones I used:

x=(longitude+127)*16
y=(50-latitude)*20

If you plot all the ZIP codes using a library like PIL, you get a nice map with dots that roughly match population density, which has the advantage of looking a little bit like a night-time satellite photo of the United States.

Freebase also contains a list of Wal-mart locations, along with their addresses and the year that they opened. Here’s an example. One query pulls all of these out of Freebase.

To create the animation, I generated 30 images for each year starting with 1962. I spread all the Wal-marts that opened that year over the 30 frames. To show the appearance of a Wal-mart, all I had to do was plot a large white dot over the small yellow dot for the appropriate ZIP code. I turned the 1380 images into an animation using MEncoder.

Here’s a version I found on YouTube, but I like the one on Kiki Tobes much better. There’s something about seeing it spread out into the black and slowly trace the outline of the country, as if the ocean is the only thing holding its hungry growth back. Click over and watch the Kiki Tobes version, it’s worth the minute it’ll cost you.

Link [Kiwi Tobes] via [Boing Boing]

It’s a Long Way Back to The Office- A Pull Back in Work At Home Policies?

Tempers are likely to be rising high in offices around the country soon, as teleworkers are forced to rejoin the sheeple and go in to the office.

Intel recently began requiring many telecommuters in its information-technology group to report to the office at least four days a week. Full-time home-office workers now make up 1% to 2% of Intel’s 5,500 information-technology workers, down from less than 4%, a spokeswoman says; managers wanted “to keep the team spirit strong, which requires face-to-face interaction, impromptu dialogues, collaboration and mentoring,” she explains.

Here’s a few things former home workers need to think about before heading back into the office:

1. Personal Hygiene
2. No more Spontaneous Singing
3. No more Porn
4. Coffee
5. Computer allpaper
6. How to share the paper clips
7. YouTube
8. No more easy Dog Walks
9. Gotta be Discreet when shopping online
10. Household chores have to wait until after work.

In short, it’s going to be tough – who is going to want to give up all the perks of home working?
Not to mention the environmental effects of a zillion extra miles commuting to an office you don’t recognize, to interact with people you don’t like, causing higher levels of stress and various other forms of bad karma as workers are forced to regiment themselves into patterns of work they are not used to. Pollution, congestion, stress, millions of extra shirts to wash, gallons of extra coffee…
If office workers were meant to be together, the Flying Spaghetti Monster would have made office work enjoyable. It’s obvious when you think about it.

Our friends over at Web Daily Worker have some good home-working news – due to tax breaks, 135 businesses in Georgia have instituted new teleworker programs.

Do yourself a favor. Move to Georgia and negotiate yourself a nice four-day working teleworker job.

Then relocate yourself somewhere more interesting.

I hear Bermuda is nice at this time of year.

Link [Business Opportunities]

Photo by Flickr user WadeRockett