What are your frugal and sustainable tips and tricks?

[TropicalBabies]

Here, it is $2,000 for a studio and you can buy a piece of garbage in the worst neighborhood starting at $600,000. A nothing special 2bdrm on a busy road with no ocean view, no mountain view... heck. Not much of any view lol is listed and will sell for $800,000
The "spec" housing killed the market. People from not here buying and selling. Really feel sorry for the local children as their future has been stolen. History rhymes.

 

[DickMidnight]

Who can afford $1700 a month for apartment?!

people would murder each other here for a $1700 apartment.

 

[SouthofFla]

How do you char it without burning it up? This sounds really interesting!

Smother the fire. If it's paper, don't bother blackening every bit before you just put out the fire with the back of your shovel or a boot or whatever. Some people have a metal box like an old grill and just shut the door to cut off the air flow and toast the paper good. If it's wood, get it going good and then lay something (wet leaves, wet straw, wet burlap, corrugated roofing, whatever) over it to cut off the air flow and let it smolder until it's charred. If you're doing a hugel bed, just start piling dirt on it. (Don't ever let it roar up enough to burn the life out of the soil.) Luckily, none of this has to be perfectly done.

 

[igorsMistress]

people would murder each other here for a $1700 apartment.

That’s pretty sad

 

[DickMidnight]

That’s pretty sad

just the realities of the market.

i have one bedrooms starting at $2200. two bedrooms are going for around $2500-2800 depending on location, and three bedrooms are renting for north of $3300.

 

[igorsMistress]

just the realities of the market.

i have one bedrooms starting at $2200. two bedrooms are going for around $2500-2800 depending on location, and three bedrooms are renting for north of $3300.

That’s absurd

 

[gtaus]

Pardon my ignorance but, why are people moving to the desert? I'd think that'd be the last place for human settlement. I wanna know what I'm missing in life. My neighbor talks about going to see his friend in Arizona once a year and how a lot of people are living an Rv/nomad lifestyle and I can't understand why.

Snow birds. I live on a lake in northern Minnesota. A number of my retired lake neighbors winter over in RVs in AZ. Cost of living is less and you don't have to heat your RV for most of the winter. My neighbors start showing up around the opening of fishing season, mid-May, and stay until mid-late October. Usually leaving a week or so before cold and snow is expected here in Minnesota.

 

[gtaus]

Burning it to ash would add carbon to the atmosphere. Charring and burying adds carbon to the soil and improves soil structure. It's a quick version of terra preta.

I have never heard of charring paper. I shred my paper products at home to make deep bedding for the chickens. When I clean out the chicken coop and dump the spent paper shreds bedding out into the chicken run compost system, it takes less than 3 months to compost. To me, that's pretty fast.

 

[gtaus]

Here is a frugal tip that has saved me lots of money over the years. Everyone knows that tool batteries are often more expensive than the tools themselves. But you can often find great deals and steals on last year's tool kits, with batteries, Post-Christmas and at the start of the new year. Pile on some store discounts and coupons and sweeten the deal even more.

I bought into the Ryobi line of tools about 18 years ago, but this concept of purchasing will probably apply to most brands. What I do is look for the end of the year value kits (with batteries) that go on clearance. I look for kits of tools I don't already own. Sometimes, you can really find good deals around Father's Day and Labor Day as well. The trick is to save up your money during the year and jump on the good deals when they go on sale. If you snooze, you lose. In my local Home Depot, you better be willing to buy that "special value" kit when it first goes on sale or someone else will snap it up before you come back next week.

Recently, I bought a 6 tool kit from Ryobi that normally sells for $299.00. It was on end of year clearance sale for $150.00. I used my military discount and a store coupon walking out of the store having paid only $110.00! The batteries alone in the kit cost more than that if purchased separately.

OK, so your batteries in the clearance kit are more than likely already 1 year old. But, in the case of Ryobi, they are still warrantied for 3 years from the date of purchase. So, be frugal and register your tools and batteries, keep that receipt, and don't be afraid to return anything for a warranty exchange if needed.

BTW, I have some Li-Ion batteries that are 13+ years old and still working. The "newer" Li-Ion batteries have a much longer shelf life than the old Ni-Cad batteries I started with many years ago.

If you want to be ultra-frugal, I guess you would not buy any new batteries until your old ones died. But I enjoy adding to my tool collection as I go along. It's one of my things to refresh my battery stock every year with a few new batteries and a new kit.

Also, no matter how many tool batteries you have, if you rotate their use they will all last longer. Each battery has only so many recharge cycles of life in them, so rotating the batteries can help prevent early retirement. I store my batteries on a shelf and take them off one side, and put the recharged batteries on the other. It's like a FIFO (First In, First Out) system.

I have bought some off brand "Ryobi" batteries from Amazon, but they were in no way as good as the original Ryobi batteries. I think they must use recycled battery cells in those off brands. I bought 2 "brand new" off brand 40v 4.0Ah batteries from Amazon and they had less runtime than my 5 year old 2.6Ah original Ryobi battery. I sent them back. Both of those off brand batteries only went down to "half-full" and then stopped working. I was not the only one to complain about those batteries. Fortunately, Amazon has a pretty good return policy and I did not feel at all bad about returning those batteries. That was my experience, anyway, and it was not good.

 

[YolkFolksHome]

Snow birds. I live on a lake in northern Minnesota. A number of my retired lake neighbors winter over in RVs in AZ. Cost of living is less and you don't have to heat your RV for most of the winter. My neighbors start showing up around the opening of fishing season, mid-May, and stay until mid-late October. Usually leaving a week or so before cold and snow is expected here in Minnesota.

Makes sense.