I’m so tired of shuffling receipts. It’s both a big waste of paper and colossal waste of energy.


One of the reasons why I look forward to completing our bank account merger is because I’m dog tired of fumbling crumpled paper to update our budget. Our current system consists of me checking my accounts online to update my half of the budget and then going through a stack of Hubby’s receipts for the half (and assuming that everything else is on auto-pilot). It’s time consuming, and surely causes errors. Plus, Hubby is always teasing me about having a “George Costanza wallet” with receipts spilling out.


Once we finally have everything in one place, I’ll be able to  update everything from the computer without having to organize and subtotal each line item of receipts. Our new system will be to file away any long term household purchase receipts/info, tally up cash purchases by receipt, and then recycle the rest. Hopefully there will soon be more places that will ask you if you want a receipt. Each time I’m able to say “no thank you” it feels like a little victory.


If you’re tired of receipts, you can sign an online petition asking retailers to limit receipts. According to AllEtronic “600,000 tons of thermal receipt paper used by stores each year. It takes 15 trees, 19,000 gallons of water, and 390 gallons of oil to make a ton of paper.” If you use these numbers, it would mean that 9 million trees, 11,400,000,000 gallons of water and 234 million gallons of gasoline. Wow, I really never realized how much all those small pieces of paper add up!
 
Do you avoid receipts? Reuse them? Anything creative?


~*~*~*~*~*~
Sustainable Family Finances 
The story of a family creating an abundant and sustainable life.