The other day I asked the question, “Should you rent or buy a house?” Today I thought I’d go over the pros and cons of renting. There are plenty of good reasons to rent, and several reasons not to.

1. Pro – You aren’t tied down to an area. If you need to move for a job you don’t have to go through the hassle of selling your house. Alternately, if you just want a new place you also don’t have to worry about selling the house.

2. Con – You don’t own it. There is just something about having a place to call your own. You can paint and remodel and make changes to the yard and you don’t have to ask permission.

3. Pro – It is cheaper. In the long run it may not be cheaper, and we’ll get to that, but on a month to month cash-flow basis renting is cheaper. You don’t have to pay for the insurance, property taxes, PMI if applicable and anything else associated with owning the property.

4. Con – You have to deal with a landlord. They may or may not be pleasant to deal with.

5. Pro – You can get by with a smaller emergency fund. If the heat or AC goes out, it isn’t your responsibility to fix.

6. Con – No equity. When you are paying a mortgage, at least some of the payment goes towards owning the home. Rent is gone as soon as you pay it.

7. Pro – Can’t lose money on it. Many people consider houses to be an investment, which they can be, but in general they are a place to live. As an investment, houses can go down in value as many people have learned recently. While renting, you don’t have to worry about a house being underwater.

8. Con – Potential cost of damages. If you break something you may have pay for it at the end of the lease. There are no guarantees of how much it will cost.

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What is a loss leader? Essentially it is something that a store will sell either close to or even below cost to get you in the door. For example, a tech company will advertise a Blu-ray player at cost, and then hope to make up the money on all the Blu-rays and HDMI cables it can sell you as well. This works for grocery stores as well. Each week they have certain items on sale, and they hope these things will entice you to buy everything you need there.

Use this to your advantage. Generally the way people grocery shop is they decide what they want to eat that week, and then they find their recipes and write down a list of all the things they will need. Then they go to the store and get all of the things on the list. Many people will tell you this is a way to save money on groceries, as opposed to just going to the store and getting random stuff that looks good. It could, especially if you happen to be hungry when you go, but it still isn’t the best.

Instead of making a list of what you want to eat and then shopping for the ingredients, turn the process around. Take the flyer for your local grocery store each week, and find out which ingredients are on sale. From that, you should be able to find recipes to fit the ingredients instead of the other way around.

Food is not something we are too frugal with. We have worked hard to get out of debt and save up an emergency fund, and we for the most part now we eat pretty well. Our budget is less than some I know, but certainly much higher than what you could eat on reasonably. For those that are wondering, our grocery budget is approximately $75 a week for the two of us. That being said, I still like to save money where I can, and I think this is a great way to do it. After all, we can always use the money we save to help pay off our mortgage early.

A few weeks ago we got the flyer and put together some of the ingredients that were on sale. Things like ground beef, pasta sauce, tomato sauce, diced tomatoes, and Velveeta were on sale. Out of those, you can pretty easily think of some cheap meals that can be made. We had spaghetti with meat sauce, chili, and chili-cheese dogs for starters. The chili I made was a huge pot, and not counting the leftovers I froze, it accounted for dinner 3 separate nights and about 4 lunches. Overall, shopping this way we spent around $90 for 2 weeks of food. That’s a pretty significant drop from $150.

If you haven’t tried it, give it a try this week and let me know how it works for your. Make your grocery list based on the ingredients for sale instead making a list to fit what you want to eat this week.

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The idea of sustainability can be applied to anything. It can be applied to your shopping list, your home and your car in any situation where you need to obtain resources reliably. It can even be applied to your home insurance in the sense of “How to make your home insurance consistently affordable”. Usually, the best way to make something sustainable is to cost it and lock in a reliable source.

Lifestyle and sustainability

It’s probably fair to say that the reason sustainability becomes an issue in anyone’s lifestyle is mainly cost, but that also applies to where goods and services are obtained. A favorite thing may be difficult to get, expensive, hard to find, or even more annoyingly easy to run out of, meaning you have to put a lot of time and effort into getting it.

The sustainable approach is based on making things accessible, usually on a reliable cost basis. In terms of lifestyle, it’s definitely a better option than mindless compulsive, no-choices consumption. You can even make holidays sustainable and luxury items affordable, if you know how to do it. Christmas is the same time every year. Plan ahead and save money throughout the year and you can sustain the hit to your budget in November and December.

Sustainability is also a lifestyle and ethical motif. Many people use sustainable products on the basis of their personal beliefs, environmental consciousness and common sense. Sustainable lifestyle products are generally higher quality, safe, non-toxic and sourced from natural products. This means by definition a much cleaner environment both in the home and in the wider personal context.

What’s not generally known about sustainability and lifestyle is that it can also be a lot of fun. Mainstream consumer products have a bad habit of being major ordeals to handle both economically and when in use. A simple organic throwaway product can be thrown away safely, and doesn’t require a chemistry degree to use properly.

For example, if you’re a gardener, a lot of pesticides and herbicides are extremely dangerous. Most expert gardeners gravitate to the cheaper, safer and far more sustainable organic products. The lifestyle effect is that you can enjoy your garden without risking your life or anyone else’s. Many insecticides used in the home include chemicals which are particularly dangerous to human beings, including neurotoxins. There are many alternatives which are far cheaper and infinitely safer. To save money in this area just google things like “DIY fill in the blank” and you will get plenty of results for things like cleaners or gardening chemicals.

Getting yourself sustainable

It’s actually pretty easy to create a whole suite of sustainable products and practices for yourself which will probably save a lot of money as well as improving the cost and safety factors of simply living. The fact is that most sustainable products and concepts basically involve doing things more simply and more efficiently. The things contained in the name brand products are simple and easy to combine. There’s no need to spend lots of extra money for the name on the label.

One of the easiest ways to get yourself sustainable is to simply remove costs and issues from the weekly budget. What definitely costs too much? What can be replaced with something better and cheaper? What are the things you don’t like doing for which you would prefer to have either an alternative or not to do it all?

Sustainability is in many ways a decluttering exercise, focusing on personal preferences and better ways of doing things. Ironically, it’s the ultimate form of consumerism, meeting your own demands. Think of it as “contents insurance” for your lifestyle. Finding cheaper ways to do things will widen the gap between your income and expenses and help get you to the ultimate in sustainability, financial independence.

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I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. -Philippians 4:12

This is a major problem in our society in my opinion. We have become a society where nobody is content with what they have. We always have to have a bigger better house, newer car, more stuff. Everything seems to be a race to keep up with the Joneses.

Watching or reading the news they tell me that consumer credit is down, and that’s a bad thing for our economy. Really? Our economy is such that it can only function by everyone going into more debt than they can afford? It seems that people going into more debt than they could afford is what caused this recession. The savings rate is now up to about 6%. We actually had a negative savings rate a few years ago. Seriously. Our country as a whole spent more than we made. Now the savings rate is up to a whopping 6%. This is also apparently bad. Our economy needs you to go out and spend every dime you have.

This is really frustrating to me. We need to be content with what we have, and start saving some money for a rainy day. You probably don’t need a brand new car. You probably don’t need a bigger house. You also don’t need more junk to fill up the house you have that is probably already bigger than you need.

Our economy should not be built entirely on everyone spending more money than they make. That is unsustainable growth. That is not a healthy economy and that is what caused our recent collapse. Our increasing savings is really encouraging to me. It should really be much higher though. It may cause a little bit of pain in the short term, but in the long term it would help so much. For example, think about Social Security and Medicare.

Currently we don’t have the money to pay for Social Security and Medicare. Right now we are going to have to have some really painful changes take place to make those solvent. If everyone saved 15% or more it would be much less of a problem. People would be able to take care of themselves instead of relying on the government.

Be content with what you have. If you can be a bit more content now, you will be much better off later. Would you rather have a huge house, an extra new car, and a boat all of which sit mostly unused because you have to be at work to pay for them? Or would you rather live a simpler life with a smaller house, an older car, and no boat, but with the ability to retire at 40 to spend more time with your family? I know which one I would choose.

You say you don’t want to be cheated. You want to have fun now and all the time. Who said you have to spend money to have fun? Sure it helps sometimes, but there are plenty of ways to have fun without spending a ton of money. Do you feel cheated now that you are 65 and still have to work because you never saved any money? Be content with what you have and start saving more money today. I can’t wait to see what the pundits say when the savings rate hits 15%.

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