environmentalism Archives • Bitches Get Riches

Kara Perez’s Debut Book “Green Money”: How To Use Your Money To Save the Planet

October 30, 2024November 1, 2024 Jess Fickett ("Piggy") 6 Comments

Today we have a very special interview for Bitch Nation. Recently I sat down with the inimitable (and individual!) Kara Perez, author of the upcoming book Green Money: How to Reduce Waste, Build Wealth, and Create a Better Future for All.

Now, I don’t say this lightly, but… this book is giving me hope.

Green Money “shares a vision of how you can break free from outdated financial advice and live a fulfilling life that values community, sustainability, and financial well-being. Filled with real-world anecdotes, cutting-edge research, and hands-on money exercises, this book equips you with the tools needed to take immediate action towards a brighter, greener future.” Essentially, this is your guide to putting your money where your climate is—making financial choices to support a greener, more environmentally sustainable future.

For those of you squinting skeptically right now, I know what you’re thinking. But this is not another well-meaning finance guru offering individual solutions to systemic problems. Rather, Kara approaches the topic with the spirit of a community organizer and activist. Green Money is about our collective influence as much as it is our individual hopes for the future. It’s as optimistic and creative as it is ready to win this fight.

And I don’t know about you, but I will be putting on my thrifted boots and following this movement (via public transit) all the way!

Let’s get to the interview.

Our 5 Best Secrets for Secondhand Shopping Like a Frugal Warrior

October 7, 2024October 8, 2024 Jess Fickett ("Piggy") 13 Comments

Gather ’round, ye children, and I will teach you of an essential moment in Millennial cultural history.

The year was 2012 and a white boy with an egregious undercut was topping the charts rapping about your granddad’s clothes. Not only was this chart-topping song a banger (in fact, it slapped). And not only was the music video a cultural zeitgeist that would define a generation’s visual aesthetic. But the whole moment of “Thrift Shop” was a lovingly earnest ode to what we, the post-Great Recession generation, valued.

It was tacky. It was fun. It was simultaneously both anti-consumerism and materialistic. It was juvenile and absurd and it loved a goddamn deal. Did I mention that it slapped?

Secondhand shopping never looked so incredible.

Anyway that’s how I remember it and I will not be accepting alternate historical interpretations at this time!

The point is that I am still living inside of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” And that makes me kind of an expert on secondhand shopping.

This expertise is more valuable now than ever! It’s been ages since we first wrote about how almost anything can be purchased secondhand. Since then we’ve covered how a lot of secondhand shopping is experiencing a nauseating price hike.

But there is cheap treasure yet to be found if you know where to look. It just requires a little extra time, wisdom, and elbow grease. Here are our five best secrets to secondhand shopping like you want to make an elder Millennial proud.

You Have the Frugal Right to Repair Your Shit. Or Do You?

November 9, 2022August 31, 2024 Jess Fickett ("Piggy") 40 Comments

Let me tell you about my favorite pair of boots.

They’re calf-high brown leather with a one-inch heel that makes this short Bitch feel just a little more powerful. They’re the kind of boots you can wear with a dress, with leggings, with jeans—they’re exactly as dressy or as casual as you want. I got them almost five years ago for about $200.

Recently, the heels broke. I’d worn them down to the point that chunks of the sole had snapped off and gotten trapped inside the heel so they rattled when I walked. So I took them to a cobbler. $50 later, I had new, beautiful heels attached to my favorite boots. Good as new!

Now let me tell you about my last phone. It was a magical pocket-size computer that did everything from calculating tips to playing music to oversharing on social media. (Note: it did not call home often enough, which was a major design flaw as far as my mom’s concerned.) After three years, I noticed the battery failing. Soon it could barely hold a charge for a few hours, let alone all day.

I brought it in for repairs. And they told me that replacing the battery was so financially and technically inefficient that they simply… wouldn’t. But, they assured me, I could upgrade to a newer, better model for only $24.99! Per month, that is. Which is way cheaper than replacing the battery, promise!

I couldn’t get anyone to replace my phone battery. There was no cobbler-equivalent phone artisan wearing a leather apron and bifocals in a musty shop lovingly repairing old phones.

Out of options, I bought a new phone. And just to spite the fuckers, I paid the total cost up-front.

Investing in Cryptocurrency is Bad and Stupid

February 15, 2022April 4, 2023 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 23 Comments

If you’ve been reading our blog for long, you probably could’ve guessed we think investing in cryptocurrency is bad and stupid.

And yeah, I considered using more expansive words like “unethical” and “speculative” instead of “bad and stupid.” Those words had precision, but lacked panache.

Our Patreon donors vote on potential article topics, and this month they wanted to read our thoughts on investing in cryptocurrency. So we get questions about it all the time! Which isn’t surprising. Relative to cash and traditional investment vehicles, crypto is new and confusing. To make matters worse, there’s so much hype surrounding it in the personal finance world that research feels like reading a data science textbook through a swarm of bees.

Mercifully, we’re not here to explain what crypto is, or how the mysterious blockchain technology works (others have done that intolerably boring work for us). Rather, we’re going to release you from caring about crypto in the first place!

So it’s our personal opinion that investing in cryptocurrency is bad and stupid, and you shouldn’t do it. Here’s why.

You Deserve Cheap Toilet Paper, You Beautiful Moon Goddess

September 15, 2021October 19, 2021 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 20 Comments

In my short lifetime, I have heard more than one perfectly sensible person tell me they “can’t do” cheap toilet paper.

I don’t know why people tell me these things.

It’s like they want me to cry out to Father Dagon and Mother Hydra and bid them raise an army of Deep Ones from the many-columned depths of Y’ha-nthlei to sweep over the land and drown the humans in a cosmic flood as recompense for their innumerable and unpardonable follies.

My Cure for Aimless Wardrobe Syndrome: Manage Your Clothes the Same Way You Manage Your Money

June 9, 2021January 30, 2022 Lauren Torres ("Kitty") 36 Comments

Until very recently, I suffered from a pretty bad case of Aimless Wardrobe Syndrome.

I felt lost when it came to clothing. I assembled outfits at random. If I ever looked good, it was at the cost of 35 minutes of standing in my closet, hemming and hawing like an asthmatic donkey.

It seemed like a pretty insignificant problem. But eventually, I realized it was quietly harming me every dang day. I was wasting way too much time, money, and spoons deciding what to wear. And it somehow left me feeling worse about myself, not better!

This led me to develop a cure for my Aimless Wardrobe Syndrome. And in retrospect, it was so obvious that I’m sorta kicking myself for not figuring it out sooner.

It requires a bit of time to set up. But it transformed my daily life for the better. Since I developed this system, I’ve been shopping less, buying less, and spending way less time considering my options. And y’all know how I value my money and my time! Yet I also love everything I wear, and wear everything I love. It kicks ass.

Here’s my system. Steal it!

{ MASTERPOST } Everything You Need to Know about Repairing Our Busted-Ass World

December 16, 2019April 12, 2024 Jess Fickett ("Piggy") 5 Comments

You know us, babies. We’re not just finance bloggers, we’re cool finance bloggers.

We try to approach the topic of money and economics with a tiny smidge of compassion for people who aren’t making six figures a year. You know: almost everyone.

This also involves interrogating the reasons why some people make a fuckton of money and others struggle to get by. Which naturally leads to speculation on how we can all make the world a better place for everyone.

As a result, we’ve famously published some opinions on the intersection of SJW-dom and money-dom. We’re financial feminists, and we want you to know all about it! Whether you like it or not!

So here’s a collection of our misandrist, socialist, SJW, race-betraying, gay-agenda-having opinions. If there’s a topic we haven’t covered below, or if we have more to learn on any of these topics (spoiler alert: we definitely do), leave us a comment to let us know!

Ethical Consumption: How to Pollute the Planet and Exploit Labor Slightly Less

December 9, 2019June 3, 2022 Jess Fickett ("Piggy") 35 Comments

There’s a short story by Ursula K. LeGuin called The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. With apologies to the late, great author, I want to summarize it here:

In the city of Omelas, everyone is deliriously happy. The people eat well, drink well, and party all the time. There’s no sickness, no pain, and the weather’s always perfect. It’s a utopia. Everyone has everything they could possibly want or need.

Well, almost everyone. For deep in the heart of Omelas is a dark, damp, cold room. And in this room is a child: unwashed, starved, uneducated, and treated cruelly. They don’t have a name, a family, clothes, or a clue as to why they’re kept in horrible conditions.

Everyone in Omelas is taken to see the child once in their lifetimes. They’re made to understand that, somehow, all the glorious happiness of Omelas relies on this one person’s suffering. As long as this child suffers, everyone else in Omelas will thrive.

And it’s then that the individuals of Omelas make a choice: to stay in Omelas, content in the knowledge that their comfort and happiness relies on the misery of another; or to leave, to opt out, to go somewhere that might not be as perfect as Omelas, but where they can live without exploiting another for their own gain.

The ethical choice is, of course, to walk away from Omelas. It’s a fable for modern times.

We live in a world where so much of our lifestyles, our wealth, relies on exploitation. Animals live short, brutish lives on factory farms so we can eat meat from the supermarket. Carbon emissions slowly damage the climate to devastating effect so we can drive cars and ride airplanes. Children work twelve-hour work days in sweatshops so we can browse a closet full of fashionable clothes and still say “I have nothing to wear.”

The way we consume—food, clothing, electronics, everything—is, all too often, pretty fucking unethical.

Now here’s a gif of a doggo hanging out with some baby chicks because that shit just got real fucking dark!

The Joys of Getting Around Without a Damn Car

February 19, 2018May 30, 2022 Jess Fickett ("Piggy") 38 Comments

Loyal citizens of Bitch Nation, I have a confession to make.

I fucking hate driving.

It’s tedious and boring. It takes up time I could spend in other ways. It raises my blood pressure because everyone else is a really fucking bad driver but definitely not me I’m perfect. Cars are noisy, dirty, and expensive. And I’m expected to follow the rules of the road when I just wanna be all

So yeah. Me and cars? We don’t get a long.

And I’m not alone. Haunt the halls of lifestyle blogs and personal finance advice long enough and you’ll run into people who have gone to great lengths to go without driving.

Living a carless lifestyle is entirely possible for a lot of us, and the joys and benefits are many. Getting around without a car saves you a trunkload of cash (see what I did there?), it’s better for your health, and it’s better for the environment. It can even save you time, in certain circumstances.

Below I examine the joys and practicalities of carless modes of transportation. It’s by no means a complete list, so I encourage class participation! Tell me all about your car-free mobility in a comment.