Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Save Money with Buy Nothing Groups

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Save Money with Buy Nothing Groups

Have you joined a Buy Nothing group? You can find these groups on Facebook. Simply enter the name of your town or area and “Buy Nothing.” You likely find a group or two near you. Then, get ready to discover the joy of all the ways you can save money with buy nothing groups!

Save Money with Buy Nothing Groups

You save money in two ways:

Getting Rid of Your Stuff

You can easily get rid of stuff you no longer use with a buy nothing group. Take a picture and list your item in the group. You’ll likely have several takers. All you have to do is place said items outside your home, and the person will come to take them.

Using a buy nothing group to get rid of your stuff saves you gas because you don’t have to drop the items off at a donation center. You can also save on the cost of disposal if you want to get rid of a larger item.

Gaining New Stuff

The true beauty of these groups is when you are in need of items. Buy nothing groups never charge people for the items they’re getting rid of, so if you get an item from the group, you will pay nothing.

Some of the Best Items Our Family Has Received

When my son was in elementary school, he was obsessed with magic. Our local buy nothing group had a magic kit listed, and I got first dibs on it. My son was thrilled with his new-to-him magic kit, which was in excellent condition. About five years later, my daughters needed bicycles. Although it took me a few months, I was able to get both girls bicycles for free from our Buy Nothing group.

How to Make the Most of These Groups

How to Save Money with Buy Nothing Groups
Photo by Anna Kumpan on Unsplash

To make the most of these groups, you need to be flexible. You may want something, but you need to be patient. Sometimes you have to wait weeks or months for someone to list something you need. Also, be flexible with what you need. If you let go of rigidity, you may find what you need. For instance, let’s say you want blue plates. If someone offers up white plates, be flexible enough to take those instead, knowing that your need was met, even if it wasn’t in the exact way you had planned.

Another Bonus

Besides saving money with buy nothing groups, you also reap another benefit. You help keep unused items—either yours or someone else’s—out of landfills! You cut down on consumerism and live the motto of reduce, reuse, and recycle.

One Caveat

If you search for buy nothing groups in your area and don’t find anything, try searching under “freecycle” or “Neighbors helping neighbors.” Another option is to search “Free.” I found several groups in our area under these different terms. Hopefully, you’ll be able to find one.

Final Thoughts

If you haven’t heard of buy nothing groups or you haven’t utilized one before, what are you waiting for? Now is the perfect time to join. You’ll likely be pleased with the items that you need that you can get for free and that you can save money when giving your own items away.

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How Much “Stuff” Do You Own?

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Every few years or so the discussion in my house comes back around to how we’ve seemingly outgrown our house.  It’s about 12oo square feet, and there are currently 2 adults and 2 children living in it.  It can get cramped.  Sometimes more than others.   But, I try to remind myself that the people we bought the house from somehow managed to raise 4 children in the home.  How?  I have no idea.

We have a bunch of “stuff”

I think that one of the major differences between the couple that lived here before us raised their children in a different age.  It was an age of far less consumerist tendencies.  And, even with our increased awareness of consumerism, we still seem to accumulate stuff regularly.  I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I contribute almost as much to the problem as anyone else.  I’m frugal to a fault, but there are plenty of things that I accumulate that fit within those frugal means.  Books would be the primary culprit.  I’ve been better lately, buying books for my kindle more often, but I still have quite a bit of books that are hanging out on shelves.

Aside from the books, we’ve also got an entire shelf full of DVD movies.  We probably only watch about 4-5 of them with any sort of regularity.  And they’re all kids movies.  I can’t tell you the last time any of the adults here watched any of the adult DVDs.  It’s hard enough for us to find our time to watch The Walking Dead.

There’s so much other “stuff” that we just don’t need.  Every so often, we go through and clean a bunch of stuff out, and minimize a whole bunch of “stuff” out of our lives.  And, slowly, it all creeps right back in.  Either through gifts, or through replacement with other new things, it eventually grows to the same size.  I suppose it’s because it’s not really a “necessity” that we keep the minimalism up.

It’s nice to have a certain level of creature comforts around.  Things that we simply don’t need, but that we use once in a while.

[Tweet “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. – William Morris”]

Too Much StuffHow wonderful would that be?  Nothing that isn’t specifically useful, or that you don’t think is beautiful.  Of course, that means you’d have to find out how you define useful.  Beautiful is easy to define, even though it’s definition is a little different from person to person.  Useful, though?  That’s a different story.  At it’s simplest, you can probably define useful as something that you use daily.  Or maybe it’s something that you use weekly.  Or monthly?  Well, maybe it’s not so easy…

What You Want Balanced By What You Need

If you’re reading this article, you’ve likely read other articles.  And if you’ve read other articles, you’ve likely also read a few about people who live in incredibly small spaces.  Those are people who’ve really, really managed to discover just how much they really need.  The rest of us likely are living with so much “stuff” we don’t really need.  And, if we’re living with so much “stuff” that we don’t need, maybe it’s just the natural path of things.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to believe that it’s just “natural”.  I think we accumulate “stuff”, even if it’s subconsciously, just because we can.  Because we don’t have any good reason to live minimally.  That would require work.  That would require some commitment.

And frankly, work and commitment are something that most of us aren’t willing to give to our “stuff”.  We’ve got better places to put our time and efforts.  But, we can take small steps.

What steps do you take to make your “stuff” more minimal?

Do You Really Need that Stuff? Think Twice Before You Spend

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Americans love their stuff.  We can’t get enough of the latest doodad, the latest hot new product on the market.

We love stuff so much, research has been conducted on our behavior.  According to Boston.com, a team of archealogists spent 4 years studying 32 middle class Los Angeles families for their new book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century.  What they found was fascinating and depressing.

According to the study, ” The rise of Costco and similar stores has prompted so much stockpiling — you never know when you’ll need 600 Dixie cups or a 50-pound bag of sugar — that three out of four garages are too full to hold cars” (Boston.com).  And it’s not just the parents.  “The study found kids’ stuff everywhere, crowding out their parents’ possessions to such an extent that even home offices and studies (more than half of the 32 households had rooms dedicated to work or schoolwork) were crammed with toys and other child-related objects” (UCLA Magazine).

All the while, many Americans are swimming in credit card debt, which may be a direct result of the need to have more and more stuff, even as the stuff leads to less life satisfaction.  In fact, stuff creates stress for many people.

If you feel the need to buy more stuff, keep these things in mind:

The More Stuff You Have, the Less Satisfaction You Have

Do you really need all that stuff?We often think that if we get the latest and greatest item, we’ll be happier or life will be easier, but that isn’t often the case.  In fact, having less stuff leads to all sort of important changes.  If you have less stuff, you can live in a smaller space.  Live in a smaller space, and you pay less for rent or your mortgage, and utilities are also less expensive.  You may need to work less to afford your lifestyle, and instead have more time to enjoy life, which brings greater happiness.

The New York Times states, ” New studies of consumption and happiness show, for instance, that people are happier when they spend money on experiences instead of material objects, when they relish what they plan to buy long before they buy it, and when they stop trying to outdo the Joneses.”

Tammy Strobel, the blogger behind Rowdy Kittens, downsized her life, and now she and her spouse live in a tiny house with minimal possessions.  Because of this lifestyle change, she was able to quit her job and support herself and her spouse when he was in school on just $24,000 a year that she made as a freelancer according to The New York Times.

Your Stuff Is Worth Nothing

Besides considering the improved life satisfaction you will have without more stuff, there is another important reason to curb your consumption of stuff.

While stuff can cost you dearly in out of pocket expense, once you have it, making any money off of it, should you choose to downsize your life, is very difficult.  Yes, you can sell your stuff on Craigslist or Ebay or have a garage sale, but in general, you only recoup 10% or less on the original purchase price.  How is that for depressing?

Just visit a garage sale in the summer and see the huge spread of stuff to be sold.  How much money does all of that stuff represent?  That is money that is just gone, never to be recouped.

If you want to improve your life and your financial situation, just stop buying stuff.   You’ll be amazed how much better you feel when you have less stuff in your life to manage.

Source image credit:My Dad’s a Hoarder, By Simon Scarfe, on Flickr