How many times do you find yourself staring into the fridge at an expired item and wishing you had never bought it in the first place? But you did buy it, and needlessly it seems, since you didn’t make use of it or never got around to it. As for those leftovers beside it that have a multi-colored wool coat – looks like you didn’t get around to those either. But that’s okay, isn’t it? Things go to waste sometimes; it can’t be helped.
Too many times than not people find themselves or those they know in the exact situation as above or another close variant. Very common with fresh food products, people will pick stuff up thinking that it looks good and they’ll enjoy it, only to never get around to eating it. But it isn’t okay to do that – it’s wasteful. This scenario is more or less like going to the store, picking out a large number of items, and then after paying for them, proceed to throw at least a third of the purchase into a nearby garbage can… because this is essentially what you’ve just done.
Although most of us can accept the first paragraph’s sequence of events as something annoying but life all the same, it’s fair to assume we’d also be upset if we saw a stranger tossing valuable goods into the trash. Either way it’s the same exact scenario, just that the only difference in the order it happens is the time involved. What would have been better yet is if they’d simply have bought the items they were going to use and forgot the rest. Unfortunately that’s hindsight, and we’d rarely see the person throwing away what they had bought.
Leaving groceries behind, there are other products and necessities that siphon valuable finances. Paper towels and toilet paper are often over-used when less will suffice, especially when you can substitute an old sock for use as a cloth rag rather than several fistfuls of wadded paper towel. Electricity is wasted on unneeded lights or leaving computers, adaptors, and other appliances plugged in when not in use. Gasoline is sometimes burned up faster when traveling at higher speeds, because at a certain point the wind resistance factors in strongly. And the waste doesn’t end with that.
Countless things that are acquired and sit around and deemed “wastes of space” are mostly unneeded items that do little more than add to household clutter. Plastic storage bags are used once and then thrown away, when a plastic container can be washed out for reuse. Plastic shopping bags are often thrown away when they can work just as well as garbage bags. Things bought on a whim and never used are wastes. Water and heat waste; there’s no end.
However, just as the food from before was never used and had it never been bought we’d be one third of the purchase richer, the same rule can apply to many items and necessities time and again. To use what you buy to use is the golden rule to saving money. After all, if you buy it and waste it, you lose both the money spent and the object itself.