When I was in gradeschool, we talked a lot about conservation and taking care of the resources we have. Now we call it being green. Either way, there are a lot of good reasons to go green. Frugal families have been applying many “green” principles for years because those principles save money. We shop at thrift shops, turn off lights, use weatherstripping. We also try to teach our children the same thing. Suddenly, we are trendy.

In our family, we try to talk about trade-offs with the kids. If we save money on electricity or turn in recyclables or reuse something instead of buying new, we have money left over to do something else. I find that the children are willing to go along with the idea, especially if one of the things we have extra money to do is something they are interested in.

For example, we use a balanced payment plan for our electricity, so every month the bill is the same, and it is reviewed every few months and adjusted. Our most recent adjustment period led to a reduction in our overall monthly bill. We will be talking with them about celebrating that somehow. My suggestion is to use that $30 a month that our bill went down and put it into a trampoline fund. We’ll spend our energy money to give our kids another way to burn off energy.

This week, I was reading about setting up a charging station at home at Green Boot Camp. My husband did this a couple weeks back just to get things together in a central location. With all the chargers in one place, it is easier to unplug them when we are not using them. I hadn’t thought of using a power strip instead as Leah suggested. Right now we just have all the chargers in one place and we plug/unplug as needed. There is no point in spending money on electricity we are not even benefitting from.

Later today we will be visiting a thrift shop to fill in the holes in our snow gear. We may end up buying a few things new, but we’ll save on the big stuff. I usually buy our sleds in the summer and store them until it is time for a snow trip, so we have all of that, but kids grow, gloves and hats get lost, and there are a few items we are missing. A few years ago, a friend also shared the idea of using bread bags as boot liners to keep little feet warm. My kids tell me it works great, so we’ve got a drawer full of bread bags to pack on our next snow trip.

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