These days I can’t pass a piece of litter without thinking WWJD. Not What Would Jesus Do but What Would Judy Do. Judy is my mother.

I don’t equate litter with my mom because she was an extreme litterbug when I was growing up. It’s because she was the exact opposite–someone who felt morally responsible for keeping the sides of roads clean, and would often go out as her own one-woman litter patrol (much to my teenage embarrassment) whenever she spotted a particularly litter-strewn section of roadway. This was long before companies and celebrities like Bette Midler could participate in roadside cleaning efforts via Adopt-a Highway. Back in the day my mother would recruit whomever she could to join her on her litter-busting missions. I can still remember a Girl Scout meeting, when my mother was the leader, taking our troop out on a litter patrol.

Another Girl Scout memory involves our troop doing some sort of “green” skit–I was cast as a landfill that would continue to grow and take over the town if people didn’t start recycling. I can still smell the rubbery plastic of the black bathing cap I had on my head and the sticky slickness of the black garbage bag I wore over my body to make me look like a garbage blob. Everyone laughed when I entered stage left, and I believe I broke down in giggles, too. So much for hitting people with a strong message about recycling.

Perhaps it’s because my mother spent more than two decades as an elementary school teacher that she was always coming up with clever ways to communicate her green message, such as the aforementioned Girl Scout skit. I think she would be thrilled to hear about a Minnesota elementary school that recently held a recycling relay fundraiser. It included all kinds of fun activities for the kids that also helped students understand the importance of the three R’s–reduce, reuse, recycle. The kids had to sort plastic bottles and cereals boxes, and then make sure they ended up in the right recycling bin. They also got to participate in trivia games about solar energy and other green topics.

My daughter’s middle school recently started an environmental club that aims to spread the green word. Maybe I should help them plan a recycling relay event. Gosh knows that we wouldn’t have to invest in any materials to make this happens, since I’m sure there are plenty of water bottles and used paper lying around the school that needs recycling.

This event would definitely be a win-win for all involved: the students could clean up their school, the administration could ensure that things are properly recycled, and, in the process, everyone could raise funds for future activities. If this event became a reality, I think I would make my mom so proud. I just hope I don’t end up inspired to don my garbage blob costume once again. That would definitely embarrass my 7th grader–and, truth be told, myself, too.

“I don’t remember Annie getting new carpet,” I think to myself as I step into my 10-year-old daughter’s room. All the shades are pulled and the lights are off (for once), so it’s dark as I pad across her surprisingly padded floor. When I reach her desk and flip on the desk light, right away I see the culprit: Annie doesn’t have new carpet–she’s got a collection of all of our bath towels spread across her floor. No wonder I’ve had to dig out the pool towels to dry off after my own showers: Annie’s been keeping a colony of towels in her room.

I crouch down to perform my own unscientific sniff test, which should determine how long these towels have been in here, and if they need an immediate washing. I notice that most are still damp to the touch. My nose confirms my suspicions: not only does Annie have a towel colony in here, she’s got a burgeoning mildew colony, too.

I gather the towels one by one and hang them over my bent arm. I count eight towels, all of them musty and dank. I hold my breath as I make my way down the hall to the laundry room. Once there, I drop the towels on the floor, and exhale like Ariel from “The Little Mermaid,” after she’d traded her voice for legs, couldn’t breathe underwater, and needed to rush to and breakthrough the water’s surface so she could breathe again.

To get all of these towels clean and smelling normal again, it’s going to take a couple of really long laundry loads, plus some bleach (or vinegar, which I’ve read gets rid of mildew odors in laundry).

It’s pretty painless to do multiple loads of laundry in our new house. Our laundry room is upstairs, next door to the master bedroom. There’s plenty of space to store dirty clothes and hang up the clean ones to dry. And the washing machine that came with the house has a decent capacity, even though it’s a top loader. What I don’t like, if industry averages are right, is that it uses about 40 gallons of water per load.

Right now that’s not an issue for us, because we are using well water. However, we are hooking up to our town’s public water within the next few months, meaning that very soon, we are going to have to start paying for water. With 40 gallons of water down the drain for each load of laundry, and me doing two to three loads of laundry a day, our water bill is going to quickly add up. Actually, a Grist Magazine article says that the average American household uses 16,000 gallons of water each year, and that’s just to wash clothes. Sorry for the pun but that’s quite a lot of drops in the bucket.

Besides the added cost of paying for water, we really have to think about the energy our top-loader uses. Energy Star estimates that by switching from a washing machines built before 1994 to a more energy-efficient model, we could save about a $110 a year in electricity costs. Well, the good news is that the previous owner bought this General Electric washing machine in 2000 (I just found the original paperwork.) The bad news? The washing machine totally doesn’t qualify as an Energy Star appliance. In fact, it looks to be a real power sucker with a zero rating.

So the decision we need to make is this: does it make more financial sense for us to get rid of our perfectly good–yet inefficient–washing machine, and spend money on a new washing machine that will use less water (new front loaders use 18 to 25 gallons of water per load) and cost less in electricity to run? Or do we just keep the darn thing until something catastrophic happens? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what our water bills look like once we make the switch to public water.

In the meantime I’ll continue to watch the Sunday circulars for sales (though an article in the October 2007 issue of Working Mother magazine said that April/May, not September, are when retailers are most likely to discount appliances), and practice what I hope is my small way of saving money and energy use when I do laundry. What I do includes:

* Always washing using cold water.

* Letting laundry soak inside the washing machine for an hour or two, then resume washing using the “light” cycle. I believe that you use less water and energy overall, and my clothes seem to come out cleaner.

* Never skipping the spin cycle. The washing machine acts like a centrifuge by spinning and sucking the excess water out of clothes. They’ll dry quicker in the dryer, and then I don’t have to run the dryer as long.

* Whenever possible, hanging up clothes to dry. I don’t have a clothes line so I hang stuff up in the laundry room. Here’s my system: place well-spun, wet laundry in the dryer on high for five minutes. Then, one by one, pull out articles of clothing, shake out the wrinkles, and hang up on plastic or wood hangers. (Metal might rust and stain your clothes.) If you don’t have the space in your laundry room, you can hang the clothes in a bathroom, basement or wherever you have room.

This is probably green blasphemy, but I think this notion of people still pushing work-related carpooling in 2007 is completely out of touch with today’s realities. Don’t get me wrong–I love what carpooling attempts to accomplish, with fewer cars on the road, less emissions and money-savings for the driver and the riders. However, these days, most workers don’t all live in one place and commute to a single location where they work traditional hours. In my old neighborhood, for example, I knew about a dozen folks who all worked for the same pharmaceutical or financial company, and even though they had these things in common, carpooling still wouldn’t have worked for them.

Let’s start with the fact that they worked in different offices the company owns in the area. Then there was the issue of the work hours themselves–some worked 7:30 to 3:30, others the traditional 9:00 to 5:00. Finally, these folks all had divergent after-work commitments, such as coaching or graduate school. On paper these folks should have been able to form a carpool. In reality, that just wasn’t possible.

That’s not to say that carpooling doesn’t work in certain situations. There are plenty of people nationwide that post their carpooling needs on websites like Carpool Connect and the “rideshare” subsection in “Community” on Craigslist (those these posts are more about one-off ride needs rather than long-term carpooling). I know that a friend who lives in a Washington, D.C. suburb used to pick up “slugs” (strangers who act as carpool buddies) at a centralized location right before a Beltway entrance ramp. By having these extra people in the car, she could drive in the HOV lane, drop these folks at a single Metro station in the city, and still get to work faster. But Slug Lines, as they’re called, are unique to DC.

Here’s what I think we can all do, even if we can’t carpool to work: we moms should make the effort to carpool to our kids’ activities as much as possible.

Some benefits of this kind of carpooling are similar to work-related carpooling, in that you put less mileage and wear-and-tear on your car, you don’t use as much gas, and so on. But there are social benefits as well: your kids get to “commute” with their friends, which makes the ride to and from an activity fun for them; and you, the parent, don’t have to spend most of your afternoons and weekends acting as Mom’s taxi.

Currently, we carpool to my daughter’s swim team, which holds twice-weekly practices. Because there are five families involved, it works out that I drive only once or twice a month. In addition, we have just started carpooling to religious education, something I remember my own mother doing in the 1970s, when the gas crisis introduced this newfangled concept of carpooling to mainstream America.

Wow, I really am becoming like my mother. First there was my enthusiastic embrace of recycling, then composting and now carpooling.

How do you make carpooling work for you in your real world?

It’s week three of composting, and I’m amazed at how much less trash we have. When you’re not tossing cucumber peels, watermelon rinds, apple cores, coffee grounds and bread crusts in the garbage can, it really adds up. According to an Environmental Protection Agency website on composting, food scraps and yard waste make up almost a quarter of our country’s landfills. Imagine if everyone could start composting like we have and what a difference it would make.

Take us as a small sample of change. We used to put out a minimum of two bags of garbage in each of our twice-weekly trash pick ups. Now that we’re composting, we’re lucky if we’ve got two bags for the entire week.

Unlike our trash cans, our compost bin is filling up quite nicely. The grapes have turned white and green with mold, and the banana peels are brown and look quite slimy. We haven’t got any soil yet, though. I wonder how long until we’ve got bona fide dirt from our discarded food. Right now, it’s a festival of fruit flies, which my mom, the queen of composting, tells me is perfectly normal. I guess they’re part of the great circle of life in breaking down food scraps into soil. Maybe down that these fruit flies have got a place to buzz around outside, they’ll leave our bananas inside alone.

Before I began devoting my life to being green and frugal, I focused a lot of my writing and speaking on gifts and etiquette. One trick/tip that I shared over and over again in interviews was the notion of having a gift closet. This doesn’t have to be an actual “closet” but rather a place where you stock all-occasion gifts you can grab when you need a hostess gift or a thank-you present. It just dawned on me that sharing my advice on gift closets was relevant for my frugal readers. You guys want to find great deals no matter what, right?

Well, now is a great time to start stocking your gift closet. That’s because soon enough the holidays will be here, and that’s when you’ll receive the lion’s share of party invitations, all of which you should show up at with some kind of gift for the host.

Visit any retailer near you, and chances are, though it’s only mid-September, the shops are fully stocked for Halloween. Soon enough they’re going to have to make room on the shelves for Thanksgiving and the December holidays, and the best way to “make room” is to start putting items on sale.

At the same time you can probably still find some super clearance items from summer or back-to-school, which could also work for a gift closet. For example, recently I needed to return some of the back-to-school supplies I’d purchased for my oldest daughter. While in the store, I checked out the clearance rack. (I always do this.) There I found lovely boxes of notecards, some with toile designs on them, others with festival florals. Turns out they were 50 cents for a box of 10. I snapped up all four boxes, and with only $2 spent, now I’m set if I want to give a hostess gift of notecards, or if I want to use this stash for writing my own thank-you notes in the future.

Some of my other favorite items to keep in a gift closet include bags of whole-bean coffee, savory bottles of olive oil, picture frames, bottles of wine, and serving or decorative bowls. I make sure that I pay close to nothing for everything in my gift closet. In fact, it’s been a couple of weeks since I checked out the end caps (the shelves at the end of aisles, where stores stock sale items) of my favorite big-box stores. Think I’ll add that to my weekend’s to-do list.

What about you guys? Do you keep a gift closet? If so, how does it mimic or differ from mine?

I was just catching up on my celeb gossip (yes, this green mama does that from time to time), and I read something on The Daily Green that made me guffaw: “Zac Efron arrived at last month’s Teen Choice Awards in an eco-limo.”

A what?

An eco-limo? If that isn’t a misnomer, I don’t know what is. I mean, can you imagine a stretch Hummer or something that considers itself ecologically sound?

Turns out I had the wrong impression of exactly what an eco-limo is, something I discovered after I Googled, what else, “eco limo.”

In reality, EcoLimo is a California transportation company with a fleet of earth-friendly cars–or as earth-friendly as you can get in the luxury car category. There are seven kinds of cars to choose from: four hybrid (gas/electric), two biodiesel (smells like French fries) and one CNG-fueled (compressed natural gas–hey, isn’t that what cows make that has burned a hole in the ozone layer? Just kidding…) The cars themselves range from a Lexus SUV (gas/hybrid) to a Mercedes sedan (biodiesel).

Of course, Zac Efron isn’t the first celeb to show up at an awards show in an environmentally friendly car. That honor would likely go to Ed Begley Jr., who is greener than the Jolly Green Giant, and has been driving an electric car since 1970. Other celebs arriving at awards shows in good-for-the-environment cars include Cameron Diaz and Tim Robbins, both of whom opted for a chauffeur-driven Toyota Prius as their ride to the 2003 Oscars.

Back to EcoLimo: the next time I’m traveling on business to Los Angeles, San Francisco or Washington, DC (where EcoLimo has locations) and need to book a car service, I’m going to seriously consider giving this company a call. I just hope that their good-for-the-earth approach isn’t bad-for-my-budget.

Given my recent post about my magazine junkie-ness, it probably doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that I’m also a book junkie. Where ever my husband and I have lived, we’ve always had to have plenty of space to store our books and other printed materials. I’ve still got my high school copy of J.D. Salinger’s classic Catcher in the Rye, and we’ve got two dog-eared copies of Strunk & White’s Elements of Style, both from our respective college years, among many, many other titles. I was so proud to be able to hand down my boxed set of Little House on the Prairie books, though these days my daughters would rather read about magical wizards and orphans facing unfortunate events.

Every time we’ve moved (and that would be six times during 15 years of marriage) we’ve tried to thin our book collection, just so we would have fewer boxes to pack and schlep to the new place. Over time it’s gotten harder and harder to thin these collections, especially since our local library frowns upon book donations due to its small space.

So what’s a charitably minded girl like myself supposed to do when she wants to donate books instead of tossing them in the thrash? If you find yourself in a similar situation, here are some solutions I’ve found and you may not have considered:

* Bring children’s books to a pediatrician’s office
Like the cliche of finding decades’ old magazines in the doctor’s office, pediatricians’ waiting rooms aren’t always much better with stocking newer books. A few years ago, when my daughters graduated from picture books to books with words and chapters, we asked their pediatrician if she would like some of our picture books for the waiting room. “Absolutely,” she replied, and off we went to the doctor’s office with two healthy kids (no sick visits that day) and two boxes filled with used children’s books.

* See if a teacher needs to build his classroom library
At back-to-school night this week, my daughter’s 5th grade teacher gave us a list of volunteer opportunities within her classroom. The one that caught my eye, because it was so unexpected, was the request for donations of books and magazines (G-rate, natch) for the classroom. Naturally, I’m kicking myself just getting rid of 12 Magic Tree House books–they would have been great to give to my daughter’s teacher–but I’ll be sure to troll my kids’ bookcases now for any books that have fallen out of favor and that her teacher might like to adopt for her classroom library.

* Ask if you can donate books with clothes and household items you give to charity
For years I’ve been relying on the Purple Heart to take away items that we no longer need or use, and that are still in good enough shape for someone else’s closet or home. What I love about the Purple Heart is that they come to your house to pick stuff up, and what makes me love them even more is that they take books.

* Give them away to friends, family members, neighbors or Freecyclers
I have two girlfriends that I can always rely on to provide me with hand-me-down books that they’d recently read in their book group. (I’m just not a book group kind of person. I’ve tried three different times, and I just couldn’t deal with the commitment.) Two gems I still remember their giving me were The Kite Runner and I Don’t Know How She Does It. Both were great books, which I eventually handed on to other friends, but the best part was that we were keeping books out of the trash and saving ourselves money. You can also put an “offer” posting on your local Freecycle list for any books you’re looking to get rid of, and I’m sure someone will be by to take them off of your hands.

OK, I’ll fess up right now that suggesting trading books is a bit of sacrilege since I’m a book author and rely on book royalties to live. I realize that people borrowing each other’s books doesn’t really help in the royalty realm, but in a frugal and green world it makes sense, right?

What are some other creative ways you use to get rid of used books–without throwing them out?

Now that my radar is tuned into everything green and frugal, I’m amazed at how many more terrific resources and tips I find on the web. For the longest time, the most frequent green, money-saving tips you heard revolved around changing out your regular lightbulbs for the compact fluorescent kind and turning off the lights when you left a room. But with folks becoming more aware of the importance of green, I’m finding that there are a ton more terrific tips out there these days.

Here are a few more nifty suggestions I’ve picked up lately:

* Give laundry the cold shoulder
Washing your clothes in cold water is the best way to save energy, resources and money–even if it you have a water-guzzling, top-loading washing machine, so writes Eileen Smith in her recent Courier Post money column. (Smith also has a fun blog about shopping called Shop ‘Til You Drop.) So is making sure that your spin cycle really whips out the extra moisture in your clothes so that they’ll need less time in the dryer. Another wash cycle suggestion: let your clothes soak for an hour or two, then restart the washing machine on the light cycle. You’ll need less time to wash them because of the soaking, meaning you’ll use less energy in the process.

* Have a dryer dry spell
If at all possible don’t use the dryer as much, and you’ll save energy. In our house, clothing spends five to 10 minutes in the dryer, then I pull items out and hang them up on a drying line in the laundry room. (I can’t dry clothes outside due to pollen and my allergies.) Another benefit to this drying method: my clothes last longer, which is a money saver in and of itself, so says the Consumer Reports GreenerChoices.org website.

* Ditch the answering machine
I don’t believe that any of my friends and family members still have answering machines (all have moved on to the modern equivalent, voice mail), but it seems that a lot of Americans still have these now-relics around–18 million Americans according to The Daily Green website– and these machines are using up lot of energy. If everyone just switched over to voice mail, you would save in energy and emissions the equivalent of taking 250,000 cars off the road. That’s a lot of kilowatts!

* Eat and grocery shop locally
I remember reading about fruits and vegetables that have to travel thousands of miles to make it to my local grocery store–and how often times this produce was forced chemically to ripen so that it looked more palatable to shoppers like myself. In the end this was bad for the produce, bad for me (chemicals), and bad for the environment. These days the best way to save the world is to eat locally, as I discovered in a recent Portland Press Herald article that my mother in Maine sent to me. This article talked about the amount of energy consumed in transporting fruits and vegetables some 4,000 miles. (This mileage stat doesn’t surprise me, given that I recently saw New Zealand Gala apples in my Pennsylvania supermarket. In my mind apples should come from Washington, New York, or Maine, where my grandfather was an apple farmer.) This notion of eating locally to save resources, find fresher fare and support local businesses fits right in with the 100-mile diet challenge that some folks follow, whereby they try to have everything in their diet come from within a 100-mile radius of their home. I’m sure that isn’t easy but probably an eye-opener and well worth the effort.

* Check the baking aisle for creative cleaners
I can remember my mother teaching me to use vinegar as a way to clean out the gunk in my coffee machine without poisoning myself in the process. (It sure did speed up brewing time but it took many, many pots of hot water to clean out the awful smell.) I can also remember her showing me how baking soda and vinegar can clear a clogged pipe better than a chemical cleaner, and the same combination works great to clean a toilet and a bathtub. It seems that these days, cleaning is baking soda and vinegar chic. I’ve recently seen a number of articles touting baking soda’s benefits–from keeping HEPA filters in vacuum cleaners clean to degreasing your hair–and would you believe it? There are books out on baking soda and vinegar. They are Baking Soda: Over 500 Fabulous, Fun, and Frugal Uses You’ve Probably Never Thought Of and Vinegar: Over 400 Various, Versatile, and Very Good Uses You’ve Probably Never Thought Of, both by Vicky Lansky and both with pretty impressive Amazon rankings. I’m going to have to see if my local library has either or both books!

What other “out of the recycling bin” green, money-saving steps have you picked up on lately?

I’m glad to know that I’m not the only media junkie who is trying to survive in a frugal world. I recently clicked over to The Frugal Duchess blog (always a fun read), that Miami Herald writer Sharon Harvey Rosenberg pens. She was talking about breaking herself of her magazine addiction as a way of saving money. Sister, you are preaching to the choir.

If you were to look around my home, you would find more stacks of newspapers and magazines than food in our cabinets. All four of use are media junkies and read everything we can get our hands on–backs of cereal boxes included. But paying for and then having to dispose of hundreds of magazine issues and newspapers in a given year isn’t good for the budget and probably isn’t so great for the environment. (A recent Waste Age report says that only 34% of recovered newspaper gets turned into recycled newspaper print. At the same time Co-Op America reports that less than 1% of magazines are printed on recycled paper.)

Getting my news and information online is a great way to save money and the environment, especially now that The New York Times is planning to drop its fee-based Times Select program. So is using my local library to catch up on my reading. Bookstores with well-endowed magazine and newspaper racks are also an option, but they’re not my first choice. I don’t know about you but I’m always tempted to buy a delicious and expensive snack whenever I’m in one of these bookstores. That means that if I spend $3 on a cup of coffee and $2 on a baked good, I’m not really saving money in the long run.

I recently discovered that Freecycle can be a great way to get rid of magazines and pick up magazines I’m interested in but don’t want to spend money to buy.

If you must get magazines to read at home, do your bank account a favor and don’t succumb to check-out-line impulse purchases. I mean, why do you think they put magazine there in the first place? So that when you’re waiting in line and you pick up a copy to pass the time, you’ll find something in there you wanted to read about, and then the next thing you know, the magazine is on the conveyor belt and the cashier is ringing it up. In the long run, it’s cheaper to buy a subscription. I’ll admit that I finally broke down and got a subscription to People Magazine. That subscription, while not cheap, was only about 1/10 of the price of buying each issue of the magazine on the newsstand.

Another inexpensive way to get magazine subscription is to use up unused airline miles. I’m always getting offers in the mail, and last year we were able to subscribe to a ton of magazines without spending a dime.

My daughters school is about to start a magazine drive as part of a school fundraiser. Luckily, I can use the regular order forms to renew my subscriptions, which I would have renewed anyway, but by doing it through this program, I can usually get a discounted renewal price. If that wasn’t possible but I wanted to support the fundraiser without adding to the recycling bin, I would see if I could buy a gift magazine subscription to my local library.

Well, the first week of school has come to an end, and my idea about using reusable water bottles in lunches has been a bust. In the past we’ve had problems with bottles that leak and that’s why we’ve stuck with store-bought bottles of water in lunches. But with our new frugal and green lifestyle, I thought it was time to give reusable bottles a try.

Over the summer I bought one kind of bottle that I thought for sure would be a winner. The kids used it in their camp lunches, and all seemed fine. However, this kind of bottle has a pop-up top–and my kids tend to pull up that pop-up top with their teeth. These days, the bottle’s top is pock-marked with teethmarks and becaue of these indentations, they’ve destroyed the “seal” of the pop-up top. Now, the top never quite closes and should the bottle end up on its side or, worse, upside down, the water just comes gushing out. Guess those bottles going in the trash, er, the recycling bin.

Our next water bottle purchase was one with a screw-off top, that works fine with adult hands. My kids, however, have had a tough time getting the bottle to close all the way, and the past two days, they’re arrived home with their lunchboxes and book bags full of water. (Never mind their textbooks, which I’ll be drying out over the weekend, because they ended up soaked, too.)

We’ve also tried the bottles with the embedded straw but those tend to leak, too. If the kids don’t push the straw part all the way flush with the top of the bottle, it begins to act like a leaky faucet.

I guess I’m going to go back to cases of bottled water for the time being. In the meantime maybe I can get one of my magazine clients to assign me a story on the best water bottles out there, and then I can road test a bunch and get paid for it.

Speaking of magazines I noticed today that Woman’s Day magazine’s website has a feature on how going green saves you green–the very concept I’m going for in this blog. I must be on to something popular if magazines are writing about it now.

My daughters and I ended their summer vacation with a clutter-busting kick that included cleaning out their toys, clothes and books. Then, in an effort to fund their allowances through Christmas–and not add to any landfills in getting rid of their unwanted items–we decided to put stuff up for sale on eBay.

Now, I consider myself to be a pretty savvy eBay veteran. I’ve been buying and selling items on eBay for years (actually ever since I wrote my book Buying and Selling Your Way to a Fabulous Wedding with eBay and became an eBay fanatic during my book research). One of the cardinal rules in making eBay work for you, financially, is making sure that you don’t stiff yourself on shipping. I learned this the hard way the first couple of times that I’d sold stuff on eBay and didn’t weigh the packages before I’d listed the shipping price. From then on I was super careful about shipping and making sure that I always turned a profit.

Then the U.S. Postal Service had to go and raise its rates, and create this odd rubric for figuring out postage for anything that isn’t a letter. It’s all so confusing and frustrating that I can’t ever determine shipping at home anymore and therefore have to schlep to the post office now whenever I’ve got something over 16 ounces I need to mail. I hate going to the post office.

Last week I noticed that on the back of my grocery shopping receipt, there was a $1 off coupon for my local shipping store that uses brown trucks exclusively. (You know which one I mean, right?) So having successfully sold three lots in the past two days, I figured I would avoid the post office and its inane postage rubic, and take my packages to the shipping store and, of course, use my coupon. Again, I figured, my packages weren’t big and they weren’t heavy, and so they shouldn’t cost too much to ship.

Wrong! I ended up spending $10 more on shipping than I’d made on the auction itself. I feel like such an idiot that I didn’t take the packages back once the guy had rung up the charges, but I think I was in shock. And so I silently walked out of the store and then began to beat myself up once I got to the car. I mean, I’m selling stuff on eBay to help our Sudddenly Frugal budget, and here I’ve just taken $10 out of the budget. That is not good budget math.

Turns out when you use private ground shipping services, the discounts come with size, weight and volume. So if I’d been shipping a big box that weighed a lot, it would have cost signficantly less than if I’d taken it to the post office. But my three itty-bitty padded envelopes of books and games? I really paid a premium for not shipping them via the USPS.

Five more eBay lots are ending tonight. Tomorrow, you can bet that I’ll be taking my packages to the post office, even if it means waiting it long lines and dealing with clerks who seem to be mumbling, “I wish you all would just go away” under their breath. Despite the hassle I am not going to make that same mistake, of losing money on shipping, yet again.