Green, Fit, and Frugal Wedding Planning Challenges

Being of green, fit, and frugal mind, I am in the process of trying to plan a wedding with these factors playing a major role. Is it working? You be the judge.

As far as the fit part goes…well, let’s just say that the holidays and my wedding planning demands are currently very much in the way of me being in top shape for this grand event. However, I have five months, and I have never had more of a reason to act on some New Year’s Resolutions. (Perhaps I’ll do a post on this later…)

For the other two, I am having even more difficulty being both green and frugal.

In the wedding world, there is no such thing as “budget”. You might hear this term muttered by parents shelling out their life savings or brides and grooms forking over paycheck after paycheck, but I am starting to wonder how many brides actually stay within the budget they started out with. I sure haven’t. And guess what comes into play next? Sacrifice. Oh, and the green part.

I had every intention of making this an environmentally-conscious event. I wanted to use paper products that are all recycled/biodegradable materials with soy-based inks, use natural (if not living) items as favors, and choose organic and minimal carbon-footprint menu items. Guess what? Those are the things that drive up the cost of this whole thing.

How do I justify another $800 for special ink printing versus printing on my laser jet at home? Or another $3 per invitation for special recycled paper that only comes in white, off-white, and brown? I did contemplate using the seeded papers so everyone could plant flowers once the piece completed it’s role in my wedding…but you can’t read anything printed ON it so it still needed a blank piece of paper to accompany it in order for people to know who is getting married.

Mini-trees and seed packets for favors? It’s a nice idea, but not if 70% of your guests are from out of town and will need to lug those things on the plane. Assuming they even take it with them and it doesn’t get left on the table to be thrown out by the venue staff during cleanup.

And the menu – have you tried finding a location you are in love with that doesn’t require you to choose “menu option A, B, or C” that does not include anything locally grown or organic, let alone vegetarian? (“It comes with vegetables on the side, doesn’t that count?” No, it doesn’t.)

So far the FRUGAL is dominating my GREEN and FIT, and at this point I think I am doing a great job with several do-it-yourself type projects for centerpieces, invitations, etc.

Have you found any easy solutions to reach goals in any (or all!) of these categories? Suggestions welcome!

This is subject to change. Stay tuned!

GreenFitnFrugal Gift Giving Guide 2009

It’s that time of year again. No, not tax time. Not Arbor Day either. OK, I’m doing a poor job of masking the obvious. Of course it’s getting closer to that time of year when you spend way too much time trying to find a parking space at the mall than planning those sentimental words you will write in a card for your dry cleaner. (I know you just sign your name.)

For all of you readers who appreciate a green, fit, and/or frugal lifestyle, I thought this would be a great time to kick off the holiday season with some gifts relevant to each of those lifestyles, if not a combination of them all.

In addition, if there’s more to your gift-giving plans than just these categories, I have partnered with several other travel-related blogs that are providing gift suggestions for other niches in our lives, so hopefully you will check them out too. After all, who knows where you’ll find that perfect gift that will keep the back-packing hippie cousin in your personal fan club for the next twelve months?

Gift Categories and Partner Blogs:

Holiday Gifts for the Adventure Traveler
Holiday Gifts for the Guy Traveler
Holiday Gifts for Women Travelers
Holiday Gifts for the Sports Traveler
Holiday Gifts for the Budget Traveler
Holiday Gifts for the Travel Writer

And here are my recommended goods:
Go Green with Gifts for the Eco-Conscious Companion:

• CamelBak BPA-Free Water bottle ($8-24) – Not just for gym enthusiasts, these bottles will keep you hydrated wherever you go, and you won’t have to worry about Bisphenol-A contamination.
• Eco Coffee Cup ($10.99) – That friend who can’t live without their Starbucks? Help them out with this reusable and microwave-safe coffee cup that looks just like their landfill-destined current option.
• Energizer Rechargeable 15 Minute Battery Charger ($28.98) – This set of chargers works at home, in your car, and at the office to charge AA and AAA batteries within 15 minutes.
• Suncast Recycle Bin Kit ($49.96) – It’s a lot easier to get on the recycling train with these bins helping you sort your recycling materials. Who do you know who could use a little assistance in this area?
• Kindle Wireless Reading Device ($259) – Besides being handy, portable, and instantly able to access over 360,000 books, an electronic reader like this Kindle is the more environmentally-friendly option over paper after only seven books!

Fit & Healthy Help for the Fitness Fanatic:

• Women’s Health Magazine, 1 year subscription ($14) – With new studies and reports being published daily, a healthy magazine is a necessity for keeping the exerciser in your life on top of the latest and greatest in workouts, products, and news.
• Quick Dry Towels ($16) – Great for the gym, for travel, or in your bathroom, these towels are great for soaking moisture from your skin to keep your complexion healthy and help you continue with your workout.
• Nintendo Wii Fit with Wii Balance Board ($94.95) – Complimenting your Wii game system, this board helps you perfect your poses all in the privacy of your own home, tracking your progress and monitoring your personal improvements.
• FitFlop Women’s Inuk Boot ($189-199) – This line of calorie-burning shoes continues to expand past flip-flops, and these boots are both stylish and useful.

Frugal Finds, Deals and other Stocking Stuffers for the Cost-Conscious Friend:

• Purse Size Deluxe Coupon Holder ($6) – For those of us who cut coupons (and we all should!), this coupon holder makes saving money more stylish, aside from keeping you organized.
• Greatest Secrets of the Coupon Mom ($6.99) – Stephanie Nelson runs an interactive website on grocery shopping secrets, and this book will share those and other useful tips for helping you stretch your household dollar.
• Eagle Creek Nylon All Terrain Money Belt ($14.95) – Your uncle has spent so much time making sure he gets the best deals. Help him secure those dollars when he’s on the move with the secret compartment in this everyday belt.
• Target Gift Card ($50) – Can’t decide what to get the penny-pincher? A cash gift is sure to be allocated to bills, but gift cards? More likely to be spent on something fun – especially at Target!
• Quicken Deluxe 2010 ($80) – Know someone who has trouble staying within their budget? This software makes it easy for anyone to know their net worth at a moment’s notice.

Not finding the perfect gift yet? Check out my full list of ideas and recommendations here. Happy shopping!

Time Management Goes Awry

I hope I am not the only one.

I can’t be.

Have any of the rest of you let life get in the way of your best blog posts? …I am guilty of this. I have been away from my posts for a whopping two months. I know. Let me have it. For all I know, you have been wandering the streets aimlessly drinking out of styrofoam cups, choking down Twix bars, and paying <gasp> retail prices.

I could give you my excuses – the new job, the marriage proposal, and most relevant: the crashing of my laptop. But I won’t. I’ll just do my best to get back into the swing of things, and hope that you’ll be there to pick up some tips along the way!

Help A Planet Out

It should seem obvious that it would be very challenging for you to have great personal health if the environment around you is not in the same state. You are also probably excessively familiar with the millions of “Save the Earth” type of campaigns that have swept through society for as long as any breathing human can remember. These two occurrences are tied together – it is in our personal interest to do what we can to preserve what we have now in hopes for a better tomorrow.

This is not an informercial. Or a rally to support a special cause. This is a call to that place inside each of us that inspires you to do good. Depending on your situation, that may be done through financial donations to causes that are important to you. Others will do this through environmental behavior changes, such as recycling, to help preserve the health of the physical world.

Another option is through volunteering. Volunteering gives every capable human an opportunity to make a difference by helping someone or something in need. The best part about this option is all that is required is your time, so anyone can do this. The most rewarding part of this type of donation is getting the opportunity to see the immediate results from your time. My sister has a big heart for infants so her personal favorite is always volunteering to rock the newborns in her local hospital. I have a lot of love for all types of animals, so I have taken many an afternoon to walk dogs at shelters, help clean living conditions at zoos and shelters, and pick up trash along beaches to prevent damage to ocean life. I have several friends who have been able to continue their love for a sport through coaching and teaching children to cultivate their own talents.

The point is to find a cause you are passionate about and find a way to get involved with that cause. Please do not talk yourself out of volunteering by telling yourself you have no time. You do. Take an hour once a week – a month even – to walk dogs at a shelter near your office during your lunch hour. Ask your local community theater if they need volunteer ushers during shows. Knock on the door of your aging neighbor to see if they need anything on your trip to the grocery store. (You do know your neighbors, don’t you?) Visit websites like Volunteer Match to search by your area of professional expertise and find an organization that will be ecstatic for an hour of your time, saving them money they do not have to hire and train an employee.

The goal with volunteering is to pay it forward. Everyone needs someone else’s help at some point in life. Tomorrow it could be you. Help someone else today, and start generating some karma.

Pale is Cool

I was up in the Washington D.C. area visiting my parents recently and accompanied my Mom to her standing nail appointment at her salon. She introduced me to the man who performs magic with her fingertips as “her other daughter, from Texas” (insert guilt here for not visiting as much as my sister who had apparently already met this V.I.P), to which he responded, “Texas? Why aren’t you tan?”

Throughout the years I have sometimes been asked this rude question while traveling and a local finds out where I live. My last several hometowns have been Houston, Phoenix, and Fort Lauderdale – all places known for their abundance of sun. I love the sun and the outdoors and almost everything that goes with them. The additional factors here are that I have fair skin, and a brain.

I inherited my father’s skin tone which tans eventually, but is more likely to burn within the first five minutes of being outside. I recall living in the mountains of Colorado when I was a kid and the ghastly sun bubbles I would find on my cheeks after being in the summer sun for so long with minimal SPF at maximum altitudes.

Too much sun exposure causes horrible things to happen to your skin, each worse than the last: Sun spots. Sun blisters. Wrinkles. Cancer. Having lived in these places I have seen how horrible this damage can be. I have friends who were cursed with preventable skin cancer before they turned 30. Because of all these things, I put SPF 85 on my face every time I know I’ll be outside more than 10 minutes.

We know more now than we did back then. It is challenging to buy a skin product nowadays that does not carry some amount of SPF in the bottle. Which is a great reminder – put it on every time you leave the house.

I won’t tell you that I no longer want a deep golden tan reminiscent of my lifeguarding summers in high school. I do. I feel more self-confident and healthy with a tan, even if the opposite is true. And to combat this, I can say from personal experience that there are some great self-tanning sprays and lotions available on the market. They may take some trial and error to find the one you prefer, but they are excellent for preventing the pale skin blindness of those around you.

If you have embraced the pale skin lifestyle, I envy you. Famous women like Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anne Hathaway and Katy Perry are doing a great job of making pale “cool” and I hope that trend along with the healthy- and green- movements continues.

Oh, and my answer to my Mom’s nail technician? “That’s because I prefer to have healthy skin.”

Your Life on a Budget

If you are like many, putting together a finely-tuned budget has been a part of your household chore list in recent months. A budget is typically designed to help save more and spend less, versus the other way around. This means that you have reviewed your spending habits and separated the “have to haves” from the “want to haves”. Unfortunately, the “want to haves” end up getting limited as much as possible – leaving eating out, vacations, retail shopping and other joys of life on the budget cutting room floor.

But you don’t have to spend the rest of your days staring at the wall, relishing the fact that you are building financial security from your lack of a life. There are plenty of ideas for still finding those budget-friendly restaurants, shows, and steals that will keep you going. Here are a few:

Eating Out
There are a few suggestions that will keep your meal tab at a minimum. If you must eat out – go at lunch. Most restaurants have the same selections in a more reasonable serving size, and with a much more reasonable price tag than their dinner menu.

Eat something small before you leave the house. Order appetizers instead of entrees. Avoid the cocktails or go during happy hour. In fact, look up your destination online and check out the specials. Due to the economy, most restaurants have incredibly discounted food items and cocktails during happy hours. (I recently went to Happy Hour at McCormick & Schmicks – a high end seafood restaurant – ordered a buffalo chicken sandwich, fries and two glasses of wine, and the bill came to $12. TWELVE. DOLLARS.) Several restaurants are even doing prix fixe menus that include a complete meal that is selected by you for a discounted price.

If you haven’t used Restaurant.com yet, get over there. Hundreds of restaurants in your local area offer $25 coupons for only $2. Just remember to read the fine print so you are well aware of the variety restrictions (minimum purchase, food only, restricted days and times, etc.).

Entertainment
Again because of the economy, entertainment businesses are reducing prices to entice people to come back again. If you have kids or are personally big on theme parks, you can’t go wrong with season passes. An individual ticket to Six Flags Over Georgia in Atlanta is $39.99, while the season pass is $59.99. That pays for itself in two visits.

Have time on weekdays? Museums and theaters offer deeply-discounted tickets, if they aren’t free altogether. It is a great way to get some culture, get out of the heat, and not stay home staring at that wall again. On Wednesdays, entry is free into the New York Botanical Garden, and on Friday evenings you can enter the famous Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) without spending a dime.

Concert events can be pretty pricey for big name artists, especially if you need to be ripped off by – I mean order tickets through – Ticketmaster. Those “convenience” charges get out of hand and end up costing as much as the original ticket price. Check smaller venues for better deals. The House of Blues has opened in several cities now, and though they do involve Ticketmaster, the ticket prices are much lower than those at large stadiums. Also look into locations off the beaten path. Last night I attended the Counting Crows concert at Sam Houston Race Park, and for $45 my boyfriend and I enjoyed quick and convenient parking, and two tickets to a great show, with seats mere feet from the stage. You can’t beat that. Always check craigslist.com too – many people who have bought tickets and can no longer go need to unload theirs for whatever price they can get, oftentimes less than face value.

Sporting events have a variety of prices for the different seating options. It varies from sport to sport and venue to venue to even game to game, so do your research. The Seattle Mariners had field box seats available for only $17 – a fantastic deal, but don’t feel you need to be in the best section to have a good time. The same field also has bleacher seats for $7 each – and you get a chance to catch that homerun ball!

Vacations
You may have heard the term “staycation” lately to define the new trend of remaining at home for relaxation versus heading to an exotic and expensive locale for the same purpose. If you can avoid the pricey requirements of traveling to a destination, your budget will thank you. Planes, trains, and automobiles all add up to costs that will fall into the “want to haves” instead of the “have to haves” and if you can avoid at least some of these, your wallet will thank you.

That being said, if you still need to get away, plan accordingly. Travel prices are directly related to the time of year that you go. If everyone else is headed where you are, prices will be high in order to take advantage of the demand. Go in the off season whenever possible. Look for online discounts, group packages, previous customer coupons, and other creative ways to cut back on charges. If you live near a cruise port, chances are there are great discounts for local residents. Please note you cannot show up at the dock on the date of a sail with your bags packed and purchase your vacation on the spot due to Homeland Security purchases. That “secret” is indeed an urban legend.

As much as watching the grass grow can be exciting, there are more entertaining ways of passing the time. Life is short – don’t let that budget keep you down.

Coupon Queen

When I was twelve, I was struggling for cash. I had reached that age where the generic version of anything was no longer good enough; I wanted the Gap jeans – not the JCPenney ones. I wanted Keds – not the imitation white shoes without the famous blue label in the back. My mom brilliantly required me to pay the difference between what she would pay and what I wanted, but this very quickly became a challenge for my amateur income status. My $10-a-week allowance was not cutting it. I also happened to live so far out of town in rural Connecticut that the proverbial lemonade stand was not an option. I babysat as much as I could, but I was still looking for any available method to obtain that financial success I had discovered I needed.

An avid coupon cutter, I had always seen my mom clip the discounts relating to items on her grocery list. I’m not sure how I noticed my discovery – but I must have been in one of my “I’m bored” states of mind that mom reminds me I was famous for at that age. Have you ever looked closely at these coupons? Where the fine print is? I am not referring to checking expiration dates. On every one of those coupons it will say “Cash value 1/20 of one cent” or something similar. I bet you probably never noticed that. The day I happened to notice, I thought I had found my answer to my money issues. Free money? Sure, it would take a lot of coupons to amount to any real worth, but I could do it! I had the ambition! It was not until my mom found me cutting my own coupons into an already full shoebox of the same that she broke the news to me that I couldn’t actually cash those in at a bank.

Since then my relationship with coupons has cycled. I’m not sure if that was the moment prompting me to no longer think so highly of these slips of paper, but it was several years before I revisited the art of coupon-cutting. In college I went through a phase where I was definitely tight on money, but I was absolutely too proud to admit that I needed to save anywhere I could (and I should have been). Why was I embarrassed to hand over coupons to the cashier? Obviously thousands of people use these things or they wouldn’t exist in the first place.

Well, with the economy currently in the toilet and my income essentially non-existent, coupon cutting is a bright spot in my financial quandary that gives me hope that I can make ends meet every month. I have saved more than 30% off of several grocery bills thanks to these pieces of paper, justifying the 2 minutes it takes to collect them from the Sunday paper each week.

If you aren’t a coupon cutter, but you are reading this blog, you are missing out! Grab some scissors and get started – what have you got to lose other than excessive spending?

No More Excuses

I spent today making cakes. Lots of ‘em. I volunteered my amateur expertise – there’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one – to help out a local organization that is hosting a barbecue this weekend. Did I expect this task to be a workout? Not in the least, and yet, rolling that fondant just about kicked my butt.

The “I’ve got no time to workout” excuse just isn’t going to cut it anymore. It’s surprising how much exercise you can get without even trying. You don’t need a gym membership or fancy workout clothes. You don’t need two hours. You just need to get rid of that lazy attitude.

Do you drive around the parking lot for 15 minutes trying to find that spot closest to the front? I’ve seen people do this at my gym – and that, my friends, is pathetic. Park in the spot at the back of the lot and stretch your legs a little – it might take all of one minute of extra time.

Can’t get to the gym because you don’t have anyone to watch your kids? Though most gyms offer childcare, you don’t need to ditch your offspring to burn some calories. Take them out to the backyard for a game of tag, walk the dog, hook up the Wii – whatever gets the blood pumping…and this one even includes quality family time.

Cooking, laundry, baking, cleaning, yard work – all manual labor that we hate, but it can be good for your health (and your sanity). Hell, let’s take it a step further – the mall is the power walking headquarters for every senior walking club in town – and there’s a reason for that. I just hate to waste a good trip to the mall without a little retail therapy.

For now I will revel in my finished cake products (and the fact that throughout this process I consumed minimal amounts of frosting) and make a mental note to avoid an intense arm workout the day before I next need to repeat this process.

Sleeping Beauty

There are some understandable favorites that qualify for the top of my “Best Things in Life” list, such as food, love, chocolate (yes, chocolate is technically food, but I believe it spawns in me a specifically unique and untouchable desire that justifies it having its own exclusive ranking on my list) and many others. These are hankerings that are able to single-handedly save the day. When I’m at my lowest, they have the power to bring me to my highest; when I feel like reveling in a personal accomplishment, these items regularly come along for the ride.

What is funny to me though is when I think about this imaginary list, I wonder how it is that I have such a different relationship with one of my Top Five: sleep. For those of you new to the planet, sleep is that irreplaceable state of relaxation where your body unwinds, recovers, and lets you escape the chaos known as everyday life. And yet I’m pretty sure that I have spent my entire existence kicking and screaming (sometimes literally) to keep from having to go there.

Think about it: As kids we were constantly begging Mom and Dad for one more hour – pretty please! – so that we might be let in on all that secret partying the grownups do once we are put to bed. In college we DID all that partying half the week to block out the all-night study fests pulled during the other half. I am positive I shrieked the phrase, “You can sleep when you’re dead!” anytime one of my friends was the first to suggest we cut out of a band party before the entertainment had gone home for the night. And now as a full-fledged adult (when did that happen, by the way?) I find myself closing my eyes later and later each night as I try to fit in one more email or one more chapter into an already jam-packed day. Let’s not even mention all those nights I still lie there in the dark with my thoughts racing about all the things I forgot to do that day that must be knocked out tomorrow.

I’m betting from a medical perspective, this kind of life is just plain terrible (as common is I’m guessing it is among all of us). The fact is, sleep is more than just a want – it’s a flat out need for survival. The National Sleep Foundation reports that the typical adult person needs seven to nine hours of sleep per night. When was the last time you slept that much? You probably already realize from experience that anything less than six hours results in a sharp decline in any cognitive performance expected of you the next day. I also just read that not getting enough sleep can more than double the risk of death from cardiovascular disease (incidentally, this occurs with too much sleep too – go figure). According to Professor Francesco Cappuccio (which is a great name, by the way) of the University of Warwick in London , “Short sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension, and Type 2 diabetes, sometimes leading to mortality; but in contrast to the short sleep-mortality association, it appears that no potential mechanisms by which long sleep could be associated with increased mortality have yet been investigated. Some candidate causes for this include depression, low socioeconomic status, and cancer-related fatigue. …In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is optimal for health, and a sustained reduction may predispose to ill health.” Or you could skip reading all that and be back to: get 7 hours a night. Period.

My boyfriend is now pointing out to me as I write this that he is getting his full allotment of sleep by what I have nicknamed “binge sleeping” when he can be frequently found in bed past noon on the weekends versus the five hours a night he gets during the week. Although dozens of cultures in warm climates follow large meals with regular “siestas” in the middle of the day – I do not think this is the same thing as sleeping UNTIL the middle of the day. However, this is known as sleep deprivation, which will lead to “sleep debt” – and that ups the chances of you falling asleep in a meeting at work. Not good.

And besides, when you slow down enough to admit it, sleep is a wonderful, comforting thing. A rainy Sunday afternoon is the perfect time to crawl into bed with a book, fully aware that the sounds outside your window will soon lull you off to sleep. I love how refreshed I feel when I wake up without an alarm clock, knowing my system got exactly the amount of slumber it needed.

Now if I can just quiet those reminder alarms going off in my head that are demanding I be more productive.

Check It

I am a planner. I am obsessed with checklists. I have even been known to add things to a To Do list that I have already completed – just to feel the satisfaction of checking it off. Strange? Maybe, but it gives me a sense of accomplishment and motivates me to take care of those annoying little errands or chores that I otherwise might ignore. Going by the post office to finally send that book I had promised to a friend feels a lot more satisfying when I can correlate the trip to me being productive.

So you can understand the frustration I will feel when a wrench is thrown into my plan for list completion. Today’s wrench is the fact that I spent all of last night pointlessly trying to talk my body out of rejecting its stomach lining and subsequently am confined to a sick bed today until I can at the very least swallow something other than Jello. Work out – no check. Plan and cook a healthy dinner – no check. Leave the house for anything whatsoever – no check, no check, no check. This one’s not actually on the list, but Shower – no check.

I still haven’t the faintest idea what has made me this ill – but I could probably attribute it to either an out of the ordinary meal I decided to enjoy throughout this past holiday weekend or a germ-infested surface area from a restaurant, store, or bar. Either way, today I have been struggling with the mental part of me that wants to at least check my email and the physical part of me that wants to curl into a ball and whimper quietly. So I am currently trying to do both – thank God for laptops!

I know getting sick is the body’s way of saying it needs a break – and there’s not much you can do about it. Sure, there were those times when I forced myself to suck it up for a meeting I couldn’t miss or an exam I would not be able to reschedule. But sometimes that doesn’t work. Sometimes you need to spend a day in your ugliest but softest pajamas and not go anywhere near a hairbrush. It helps, I swear. My checklist will be there tomorrow. Right now, though, I have a date with some grape Jello.