PHOTO COURTESY OF RUBBERMAID
Like any good frugalista, I love to talk about the ways in which I save!
Well, sometime last summer, my Mom mentioned they had recently gotten rid of curbside trash pick-up. They live in New England and were paying around $45/month for pick-up 2 times a month.
They had finally had enough of that and decided they would take their trash to the dump.
They bought a permit for $15 and were ready to go.
My Dad has informed me that they are averaging 2 large bags every other Saturday (and that includes taking my uncles trash, too!) to the tune of $2/bag.
Now, when we do the math it's about $1.25/month for the permit plus 4 bags/month x $2 for a Grand Total of $9.25. They do spend a little gas getting to the dump, which is about 2 miles across town, so we can add $1 for gas!
That means that every month they save just under $35 on trash!
Now multiply that by 12 months and it's a whopping $417 a year!
Now, that got me thinking!
So, I made a few phone calls. I called around to see what the best rates were on curbside trash. Our bill at that time was $29/month. As I made my calls, I knew the $2-$5 savings I might see per month was not what I was looking for. So, we stopped by the local dump, where we were informed the yearly cost for the permit is $20 and the cost per LARGE bag is $3. I did the math and am proud to say we have been gladly escorting our trash to the dump every ten days (or so) for the past 6 months.
So, here's the math for my trash!
The permit is $1.67/month plus 3 bags/month x $3 for a Grand Total of $10.67/month. (We don't really need to factor in the gas because our dump is on the way to just about everything in town and we don't make a special trip for our trash!).
This means that every month we save just over $18 on trash!
Now multiply that by 12 months and it's a whopping $220 a year!
Now, that's not as great as the savings my parent's are experiencing, but I can think of a lot of things to do with $220 besides throwing it away!
This may not work for everyone, but it definitely works for us!
4 comments:
Nice! For $220 dollars you can do a little something for yourself once in a while :)
great idea!
Doing the math almost always helps. Here, we pay by the garbage can, which is huge, so that helps. We generate about a bag a day of trash though. I wonder if I could somehow get that reduced. I need to think on it.
Wow I feel blessed concerning what our trash pickup costs. We pay around $14 a month for weekly pick-up. I still have been talking to my husband about quiting the service anyway as we can take stuff to the dump at no charge and we really don't generate that much trash. I have really been trying to cut back and we only have around 1 bag a week so hauling it to the dump every couple of weeks wouldn't be that big of a deal.
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