An extra special giveaway

What do you do when you have 80 pens? Help save someone's life.

Most times we give away an item we feel we're helping someone. Even selling an item does the buyer a favour by providing what they need at a bargain price. But this was a step above.

At a local church, lawyers and other volunteers help refugees seeking safety in Australia. They have a mountain of government paperwork to do to demonstrate who they are and the serious danger they face in their home country.

Recently they needed more stationery supplies for the paperwork and applications. It was a great chance for us to declutter our stationery and help people in real need.

I was surprised to find we had at least three staplers and 80 pens. Almost half the pens no longer worked - either broken or had dried up while waiting to be used.. We have much less now - but probably still more than we will ever use in our lifetime.

Comments

Ethical Investing for Australians

I write about investing, because it's a key part of life. Spending less and investing means an automatic income. An automatic income means we can work less (if we choose) and definitely stress less. But where to invest? What to invest in? Many people expect their money to be invested responsibly and ethically - rather than making money through things like cigarettes, weapons, casinos, adult entertainment, environmental destruction, and pollution from fossil fuels. Those are all things we could probably do with less of. So how do we invest to get good returns - and to have a positive effect on the world? Here are some sources I've seen: Ethical Investing in Australia At Frugality and Freedom , Michelle has done a fair bit of research into Ethical Investing in Australia . For herself, she's chosen Bank Australia for banking, Australian Ethical for superannuation, and two exchange-traded funds ( FAIR and ETHI ) for her share investing outside of super. She also gives detail...

How to waste a year's wages

A friend recently asked me why it is that so many people (on good incomes) are struggling to save. Often the big three money areas are housing, transport and food. In one sense these are necessary items. But what we spend on them is often way more than necessary. I crunched some numbers on how much extra my wife and I could spend on these things - if for some reason we wanted to burn our money. 1. Housing Our apartment is fairly nice, but also cost-effective. I've mentioned how choosing it saves us $1,800 per year , compared to a similar one we saw. The high end of 2-bedroom apartments in our suburb is $305 per week more than our apartment. Not $305 per week. $305 per week more than ours is. I cannot get over that. Sure it's new and modern-looking, but that's a lot of money. It's an extra $15,860 per year above what we pay. 2. Transport The Australian Automobile Association lists the costs of owning and running a car. It includes many often-overlooked c...

Don't dump on charities

Netflix causes mass dumping. Here's an alternative. January is usually a big month for physical donations to charity. In 2019 it's been over-the-top (literally) as charity donation bins have been overflowing with items. The Netflix series "Tidying Up" by famous declutterer Marie Kondo (see her book ) has inspired many to declutter their homes. But in the process they've cluttered the streets. What's so bad about donating? When the bins overflow the extra items are thrown away. Having been in the weather, the rain and on the ground, they are classified as contaminated and cannot be sold. To make it worse, much of what fills the bins is not good enough to sell, and is also dumped. Bad donations hurt charities 13 million dollars. That's how much it costs charities to deal with all the junk we dump on them - 60,000 tonnes a year. Lifeline says half its stores have stopped accepting donations. We might think we're helping, but that's a lot ...

But wait... there's less!

Search This Blog