Welcome Back To Green Money🌳
Green Money is Ridge’s blog series bringing you the news, tips, and tricks you need to protect your money and protect nature. Saving up for a bike? 🚲 Not sure where to donate? 💰 Just trying to make rent and live your life? 🏘️ We got you.
Savings Tip
Emergency Fun(ds) 🚨 Stuff happens. Let’s prepare for it.
It’s hard enough to make time to get outside, but even harder when you’re out here battling unemployment, inflation, medical bills, flat tires… Let’s prepare for the worst so we can enjoy the best. Check out these tips on how to create an effective emergency fund for times like these. Then check out this article from Money Under 30 to learn more.
- How much goes in the fund? Six (six!?) months worth of expenses.
- Where to start? Six months of expenses is a lot of money, start by putting away a small portion of your paycheck if you can. If you can’t, dive into your monthly expenses and see where you can save a bit each month.
- Struggling to put anything away? Try round-up savings. Automate your savings in small increments and watch it grow 🪴 (Join Ridge’s waitlist to get this feature when we launch!)
Buy Used: Save Money. Save the Planet.
Bike it Back 🚵♀️ Give an old bike new life.
Whether you’re buying a bike for the road or the trail, it’s not a cheap purchase. That said, you don’t want to get stuck with the cheapest bike you can find for the next five years. This is where buying used comes in. Good stuff, at a good price, that’s also good for nature (that place you bike in…). How do you do it though? Check out some tips below and then reach some more in depth recs from Bicycling.com.
- Trust but verify. Go try the bike out (seems obvious right?).
- Know what to look at:
- Frame: Paint chips? OK. Dents and cracks? Not OK.
- Gears: Listen for any weird sounds when you shift. 👂
- Tires: Aim for new tires, but remember these can be replaced without breaking the bank.
Green Money News
Green Washing Comes For Tree Planting🌳
An oldie but a goodie. The Twitter verse brought back a great point made a few years ago by some brilliant researches over at Oxfam: there’s not enough room on Earth to cover all the tree planting and forest offsets being sold.
Oof. Marketplace has more.
What do we do then? Well, we stop buying out way out of the problem and take the small actions we can to do the best we can. Bank more sustainably. Vote more sustainably. Shop more sustainably.
