“She’s making us walk that hill again,” my 10-year-old daughter Annie huffed as I dropped her off at camp today. According to her camp counselor, this has been Annie’s refrain every morning since camp started. You see, I’ve been making Jane and Annie walk to and from camp nearly every day. And why wouldn’t I? We live exactly .5 miles from the camp (I logged it on one of the rainy days when I drove them–I’m not that crazy), which happens to be in a local synagogue which happens to be situated on top of a very steep hill. Yeah, it’s a workout to go up that hill (twice a day for me!) but I’m guessing we’re all going to have great glutes by the time camp is over.

I’d always dreamed about living in a place where we could walk to everything–camp, the supermarket, school, religious services, you name it–and this new house has made those dreams come true. Today, I had a big list of errands I needed to run, and I walked them all–making a deposit at the bank, getting stamps at the post office, picking up a gallon of milk and loaf of bread at the market.

Aside from the physical fitness that walking provides, I know that we’re doing the environment good. Did you know that when you start a car that’s been sitting idle for more than an hour (or in the case of camp mornings, overnight), you create more pollution than when a car is warm? With a two-minute drive to camp or stop-and-go driving for around-town errands, I just can’t justify the toxic effects. Plus, it’s a waste of gas.

I recently discovered some other clever ways to save gas, besides not driving at all. The most intriguing concept is something called “hypermiling.” Matt Bell, editor of the Money Purpose Joy newsletter wrote about this concept in June. It’s about squeezing every last drop of mileage out of your gas tank. One hypermiling tips, which has stuck with me, is the notion of pulling through a parking space so that you can pull right out forward. Who knew this could save gas, but when you think about it, it makes sense. When you have to back out of space, you’re using twice the gas to get out of your parking spot. Other, less surprising tips that are still worth repeating include driving the speed limit (my daughter Annie, recently dubbed, Officer McSpeedy, likes keeping taps on the speedometer) and keeping your tires inflated.

Maybe the environmental gods wanted to ensure that we save gas by walking this week–last Friday a large tree branch fell on our older car, shattering the windshield and denting the hood. No one was hurt but we while the car is in the body shop this week, we are down to one car. Sure, I could get a rental (insurance would cover 80% of the cost) but being forced to walk everywhere and/or curtail my going out will benefit both the environment and my bank account–oh, and OK, my butt, too.

For many Americans buying a first car is a rite of passage. Perhaps it’s because I spent my formative years living in a place with abundant public transportation, I didn’t own a car until I was 26. Rite of passage, my foot. The only reason my (then new) husband and I bought a car was because he almost got mugged many times on his way to work on the aforementioned public transit.

For us car ownership sucked, beyond the car payments and gas we had to buy. There was the hassle of parking on the street, break-ins (someone smashed the passenger-side window the first night we owned the car to steal our Ford-issued stereo system, with AM-FM radio only), and basic maintenance. But our little red Ford Escort served its purpose. For at least two years, it got my husband safely to and from work, which was why we became car owners in the first place.

Fast forward a few years, and we were ready to buy our first new car. We had a baby on the way, no airbags to speak of in our used car, and the clutch was doing a bad job of letting us shift gears. Nothing like having to rely on gravity to get your car started in the morning–not a great option when you’ve parked facing upwards on a hill. Just like before, we had a specific reason for buying a car that was all about practical and nothing about ego–we needed a safe car to drive our baby home from the hospital in. We opted for another Ford Escort (this time the station wagon), which had all of our required safety features of the time and it got decent gas mileage.

Since those first Ford Escorts, we’ve owned a number of other cars. We’ve never paid more for a car than a teacher’s starting salary, and that’s been good for our bottom line. Our requirements for cars have stayed pretty much the same over the years–get us from point A to point B, provide safety for our children (and their friends we might be driving) and, if at all possible, deliver decent gas mileage.

Earlier this month, our oldest car, a 1999 Ford Windstar, stopped fulfilling requirements one and two. Things were breaking on it left and right, and since the car was up for inspection at the end of the month, we knew it was time to figure out if continuing to own the car would make more financial sense than trading it in. In addition, now that we were living in our new house, on a dirt road and up a hill, we knew that come winter, this van, which was front-wheel drive only, would be useless to us.

We started by getting an estimate of how much repairs were going cost to get the car up to code to pass inspection. Then we figured out the Kelly Blue Book/trade-in value of the car, given its age and mileage (over 96,000 miles). Then we did the math.

In a perfect world, we would replace the van with a hybrid vehicle that would be good to the earth and our pocketbooks, by saving us on gas money in our $3+ a gallon world. That’s about the same sentiment that 69 percent of Americans in the market for a new car revealed in a recent CNN.com/Money poll–in buying a new car, they would get one with better gas mileage.

But we–meaning my family and I–don’t live in a perfect world. We live in suburbia, with bad winters and carpools to drive. And we’re on a budget.

Just as we had requirements for that long-ago Ford Escort purchase, we had newer and different requirements for any car we were going to purchase. These included:

* 7-passenger seating for carpooling
* front and side airbags for keeping my kids and everyone else’s kids safe
* AWD or all-wheel drive for icy winter days and nights
* affordable sticker price (hard to fathom in a day and age when minivans cost more than what my parents paid a year to send me to NYU)
* decent gas mileage

We spent a couple of days and many, many hours researching on the Internet and then sitting in and testing driving various vehicles. We looked a foreign and domestic cars. We looked at new and used vehicles. We looked at our budget again and again to figure out how much car we could afford to buy. My husband even created a fancy schmancy cost-per-mile spreadsheet so we could compare cars in an apples-to-apples way.

In the end we bought a used Ford Freestyle, a crossover vehicle that gives us the room of a minivan with the handling of an SUV. It met every single one of our requirements, including on pricing and gas mileage. (It’s in the 20s on the highway. Sure, that ain’t hybrid-style mileage but it ain’t Hummer-style mileage either.) We even got a few extras we hadn’t planned on, including a DVD player–which has already cut down on the “she’s touching me” cries from the back seat–and a five-year warranty.

I’ve yet to fill the car up with gas, because I’m trying to walk more and drive less to save money and cut down on my family’s carbon footprint here in our suburban town. But it feels good to know that I’ve got a safe and affordable vehicle in my driveway now that, come winter, won’t leave me stranded—physically or financially.

Kermit the Frog was wrong. These days it IS easy to be green. People were waiting months to purchase the popular Toyota Prius hybrid car, townships are requiring residents and stores to recycle paper goods like never before, and one of the biggest trends in building and construction is doing so in a green way.

My green life actually started when I was a child, when my mother would take me with her to the recycling plant on the weekends. I would help her tear the covers off of magazines and the labels off of mayonnaise bottles before we’d throw them into the recycling machine. None of my friends quite understood what I did on the weekends with my mother–”What’s a recycling plant?” I remember them asking. “Is it for your garden?”

I grew up composting our food leftovers–my mother still does it to this day. God forbid you attempt to throw away a cantaloupe rind or anything else once edible in her house. Do it, and like a silent alarm in the garbage can, Mom comes running to rescue the recyclable food from its potential landfill purgatory. As a kid, if I wanted to get rid of a piece of paper, I was only allowed to to do so once I’d used every inch of it for writing down a shopping list, phone messages, or math problems I needed to solve for homework.

I still refuse to get rid of paper unless it’s been used on both sides, and as a magazine writer and book author, I get a lot of paper mailed to me—in the form of press kits. I will disassemble these kits and “harvest” clean paper that I can reuse in my printer. I recycle our cardboard and cereal board boxes—so much so that the recycling men have actually complained to us from time to time about the amount of recycling we put out. And I have to work hard not to cluck my tongue and judge my neighbors when I see them throwing out with the trash items that could easily be recycled.

Funny thing is, all of my green habits from childhood have saved us money–and I’m sure that was my mom’s thinking way back in the 1970s. Yes, she was being good to the earth but she also had our family’s bottom line in mind. For example, my habit of reusing paper? Well, thanks to it I can’t remember the last time I bought a case of printer paper. I’m sure most Americans go through a case in a couple of months, especially if they run a home office like I do. (According to one website, Americans use 700 pounds of paper per person each year.) Me, I don’t think I’ve purchased a new case of paper yet in 2007.

One thing is about to change in my recycling habits, though. I hope that very soon, I won’t be putting any more water bottles in our recycling bin. Yes, our family is still going to drink water but now we’re using reusable bottles instead.

We’re following a trend, I guess, that folks like San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome have started. He recently banned the use of bottled water in his city, and for good reason: it seems that bottled water is one of the worst things for our environment. Something like only 20% of bottles actually end up getting recycled (the rest go in landfills), and the making and transporting of bottled water uses petroleum like nobody’s business: the bottles are made of a petroleum-based product, and then trucks use gas to get bottles from the bottling plants to the stores that sell them.

I think that this new habit will end up savings us money as well–no longer will I have to spend about $5 a case for water to pack with lunches or take with me on walks. Instead, recently I made a one-time $4.99 purchase (times four for the four of us) for reusable water bottles, with insulation, that I can fill from the tap.

It’s a small step in the right direction, I hope, for green mankind and my frugal budget.

Anyone who owns a dog or a cat (or any other creature for that matter) will tell you that soon enough, these four-legged friends become like children to you–even if you have “regular” children. And like your children, you want to do your best in taking care of them by giving them the best things that you can afford. This includes medicine.

Since we got our cocker spaniel/golden retriever/beagle mix five years ago, I’ve been buying his medicines (heartworm and flea/tick prevention) from the vet, simply because it was the easiest thing to do. But yesterday I got a catalog in the mail called Doctors Foster and Smith that showed the same flea/tick prevention I paid about $50 for at the vet for only $35. Considering you get only three applications per package, I could be spending a little over $100 for a year’s worth instead of $200+ at the vet. Ouch, that hurts.

Once I started checking around I discovered that there are a number of legit places on the web where you can buy your pet’s meds, including the appropriately named website petmeds.com. There, the same package of flea/tick prevention is almost $45, not a great bargain, but it does stock the heartworm medicine I need for $33. (The other catalog does not.) Again, this would be a huge savings over the vet, which charges $53 for a six-pack of heartworm medicine. I understand from my fellow pet owners, though, that unless you order enough to qualify for free shipping, you forego great savings. Over at petmeds.com, I have to spend $39 only for free shipping. Heck, that’s one box of Frontline Plus, and I’m good!

On a related matter, while searching for pet meds on the web, I couldn’t believe it when I came across websites selling poop bags. You’re kidding, right? People spend money on the thing they use to pick up their dog’s poop? Thanks to my mother’s cheap Yankee roots, I’ve been doing what she did when I was a kid and we needed poop bags for walking our dog: stockpiling plastic grocery bags, empty bread bags, the little bags the Sunday paper comes in and anything else that’s plastic and shaped somewhat like a bag, and that’s what I’ve been using for doggie doodie duty.

Even before I adopted our frugal ways, I couldn’t fathom paying for poop bags, but obviously tons of people do it. Why else would a Google search using the words “poop bags” yield 43,000+ hits?

Think about it this way: my stockpiling method not only saves us money but it also helps us do something a little bit good for the environment by reusing something that normally would have just ended up in the trash.

Despite our newly frugal ways, we did slip up a bit and go on a vacation to London last week. My husband Bill was already there on business, meaning his company was picking up the tab for our lodging and per diem meals. All we had to do was get there and enjoy ourselves. Thankfully, we were able to secure a great last-minute fare for the three of us, and off we went.

London just happens to be the second most-expensive city in the world (Moscow is number one). Needless to day, we experienced a bit of sticker shock the first time we opened our wallets and had to shell out almost £2 (or almost $4) for a small bottle of water or £7 (close to $14) for a day-pass on the Underground. (By comparison, a one-day “Fun Pass” on New York City’s subway system is $7.)

Obviously, we were going to have to figure out how to stretch our dollars, er pounds (£, FYI), in London if we were going to return home with only souvenirs to speak of and not too much debt. Once we got our frugal bearings about us, we figured out the following money-saving schemes, many of which I think would apply to travel to other international locations as well.

1. Exchange Currency on the Cheap
Currency exchange shops were everywhere in London, seemingly outnumbering newspaper vendors and taxis. These places make their money by surcharging you for any currency exchange they do for you–often cutting in quite a bit to how much money you actually pocket after the transaction. We quickly discovered that the cheapest place to exchange currency in London was at the post office, known there as the Royal Mail. When we visited the main branch of the Royal Mail near Kings Cross railways station, the clerks there were happy to give us pounds for our dollars with nary a surcharge in sight. In other words, they did it for free. Given the current exchange rate, where you have to spend about $2 to get one pound, every penny–or pence–counts.

2. Use ATMs and Discover How to Avoid Bank Surcharges
Still on the topic of currency, we discovered that withdrawing money from an ATM was also an excellent way to get money in our pocket without paying a hefty exchange rate. However, we were still subject to ATM commissions, which often add up to one to two percent of the withdrawal amount. Thankfully, these commissions are one-sided only (the banks in London), because we are “crown” members of our bank back home. That means that they will waive two ATM withdrawal fees at non-member banks each month, and since we made only two withdrawals in London–and hadn’t used up our quote henceforth–we didn’t have to worry about having extra fees tacked on. You may want to look into upgrading your back account status before leaving on a foreign trip so you, too, can reap these ATM benefits.

3. Public Transit Isn’t Always the Cheapest Option
As I mentioned earlier, we paid £14 pounds for a day pass on London’s Underground. That was for each person. Thankfully, we got a cheaper rate for Jane, who at age 11 could get a day pass for £2. Annie, being only 10, rode for free. Nonetheless, we were spending £30 in a day to ride a train. We did use the Underground quite a bit and probably got our money’s worth. However, it was a bit sobering one evening when we “splurged” and took a taxi back to our hotel. For the four of use to ride, clear across town, we shelled out £15 only. (Of course, walking is my favorite mode of transportation and always free. It was our number one fall back when the Underground or a taxi just wasn’t worth it.)

4. Your AAA Card Works Abroad
We discovered (after the fact, sadly) that our hotel would have given us a AAA Discount on our room. Who’d have thunk that an American Automobile Association membership would have been worth anything at all overseas? In fact, the AAA website offers a “search for savings” option that includes international destinations.

5. Remember Your Dollars and Sense
It’s very easy to forget all about exchange rates in a foreign country when pound signs (£) seem to have become interchangeable with dollar signs ($). You start to believe that you are getting good deals on things, because they “seem” to cost less than they do at home. We had to keep forcing ourselves to double the price on anything we wanted to buy as a way of reminding us that, no, £19.99 (or nearly $40) was not a good deal on a street vendor’s pair of earrings. This doubling reality became doubly real when I stepped into a Gap store and saw that Gap jeans, which I’ve purchased for $49.50 in the US, cost £49.50 in London. Holy markup, Batman, that’s almost $100 for a pair of Gap jeans.

I’m happy to report that we arrived home safely yesterday with a suitcase half-filled with trinkets, souvenirs and even some clothing (the £5 rack at Harrod’s department store was our best find!). More importantly, we arrived home with our wallets half full as well. Hey, that’s better than totally empty!

Long before I became a homeowner, pocket change played an important role in my life. As an apartment dweller, I needed quarters for laundry and parking meters. Other change was useful if I needed to purchase something from a vending machine or, put on your time travel suits, to make a call using a pay phone.

Once we moved into a home, pocket change sort of became the metallic version of pocket lint: it was something you found in your pants’ pocket when you dug your hands in, and when you pullled it out, you carelessly tossed it aside. We no longer had any need for quarters, because we had a washer and dryer right in the basement, and could park for free in our driveway. At the same time, cell phones had become commonplace and pay phones were on the decline.

Then Bill and I decided to go all “moving on up” (cue “The Jefferson’s” theme song), and suddenly I realized that pocket change could be valuable again. Once I started looking for it again, I noticed it everywhere–on top of the dryer, in my desk drawer, and on the floor of the car, among other places. I bet that if we scraped together our pennies–and nickels, dimes and quarters–they would really add up to something.

This past spring I spent a day collecting all of the loose change I could find. I knew we wanted to roll all of the coins so we could bring them to the bank for paper dollars, so I had the girls help me put it into piles on the kitchen table. (Great math lesson, by the way.) Sure I could have brought the change to may local supermarket, which has one of those coin counters in it, but you pay a service fee to use that machine–unless you’re converting your change into a gift card. Me, though, I wanted the cold hard cash.

Then we started counting. It turns out we had $58. Fifty-eight dollars. Now, that’s no chump change. This pocket change ended up providing enough money for a half week’s worth of groceries. Wow!

Since I hadn’t counted pocket change since we moved, I figured it was a good time to give it another go.

Today, I uncovered $24. Not quite as good as the last bounty but not too shabby either.

Have you considered going on a pocket change hunt as a way of finding unexpected spending money? If not, I would suggest you give it a try. Then let me know how much you found. I think that when you’re living on a budget, you simply cannot treat pocket change as pocket lint anymore. In my mind that would be frugally foolish.

A couple of years ago I stopped food shopping at the nearby supermarket for a two reasons. I wasn’t convinced that it offered me the best prices, and I knew that its produce was less than perfect. So many times I would come home from grocery shopping, and a day later the cucumbers were mush, the cantaloupe smlled like a skunk, and the strawberries had mold growing on them.

I started driving 20 minutes out of my way to another supermarket where I felt the prices weere fair but, more importantly, I never had to toss produce in the trash.

Now that we’re living our suddenly frugal lifestyle, I’ve started to question the value of driving 20 minutes to grocery shop–especially when gas is about $3 a gallon. Last week, when the shopping circulars came out in the mail, I did a cost comparison of four grocery stores, based on what was on sale, and the old supermarket came out on top. Thinking convenience and about savings, I decided to shop there. Big mistake.

The watermelon I brought home, “fresh” out of the barrel, was crumbling in the middle when I went to cut it up yesterday afternoon. There went $5.99 in the trash. This morning, I cut up a cantaloupe (2 for $3.49) for my daughter, and there was that familiar skunk smell again. So into the trash that went. I noticed that the bread ($1.99 a loaf) I made for toast seemed a bit stale, too, though its expiration date isn’t until next week.

This was all a painful (in the wallet) reminder that while it’s important to save money, you aren’t actually saving any money when you a) have to throw out what you’ve already paid for but can’t use and b) have to go back out to replace whatever it was that you had to toss.

This doesn’t just happen with food, of course. My friend Allie recently decided to buy herself a new pair of prescription sunglasses, and since she fancies frames from an expensive, European-inspired store, she figured she would save a few bucks and get her sunglasses from one of those mall glasses chains. Sure, Allie saved hundreds this way, but the minimum wage workers employed there didn’t seem to understand the subtleties of lenses for people with an astigmatism (which Allie has) and so she’s had to go back to the shop twice now to have her lenses redone because they still can’t get it right. No, Allie hasn’t had to pay more money for these fixes but she’s spent plenty in the amount of time she’s had to devote to this inexpensive pair of sunglasses.

Bottom line: I’m all for saving money. But sometimes it’s worth it to pay a bit more. Now excuse me while I go to the grocery store I trust for a new watermelon and cantaloupe, and maybe a loaf of bread.