WalletPop

This post is part of a series about real-life signs we're in a recession.

I was pregnant with my first son, Everett, when my family bought a membership to the Oregon Zoo. Here in Portland, obstetricians actually suggest eager moms-to-be walk up and down the hills at the zoo when they're trying to stimulate contractions.

It didn't work much, but it started a family connection to the zoo (and hilariously, a baby mountain goat was born the same day as Everett), and now that we have three children, we've upgraded to the most serious membership of all. My husband's favorite thing to do with the children is to get on the bus (we've given up our family car) and take the boys to see animals. With the $100 annual membership, all our visits are free but for snacks.

Ahem. But for snacks. Visits have been few and far between lately, because the snacks at the zoo now seem so expensive. Even though the baby doesn't ask for elephant ears, buying even one treat for every family member with a full set of teeth can set us back $20 -- more than our typical family grocery budget for a day (and we haven't had a zip of nutrition, in all likelihood). I don't mind packing snacks for the boys to go on an afternoon excursion (especially if that leaves me home alone in peace), but have you ever taken a five-year-old and three-year-old to the zoo and refused to buy them the treats offered at every turn? Umm-hmmm. Avoiding the "gimmes" when we truly can't afford to satisfy them is the reason we now spend a lot more of our entertainment time enjoying the wildlife in our own backyard.

While there are lots of opinions pro and against the Economic Stimulus Package checks (hitting your bank account beginning May 2!), the fact is: they're coming no matter what you think. We all have heard the prevailing skepticism as to whether $300 - $3,000 a family will do anything to help the failing dollar or to create jobs; in the end, who knows? But we have some ideas about how we could spend together to create the change we want to happen. And we'd be remiss as a personal finance site if we didn't come up with some ways you can truly stimulate your own personal economy.

Let's start with a couple of Don'ts. Don't use your rebate check for conspicuous consumption -- TVs, DVD players, large bottles of Champagne, imported Kobe beef, a trip to Cancun. Don't use it to create a greater need for fossil fuels; not as a down payment for a new car (if your very survival depends on a car, at least get a used one), or to trade up to a bigger gas guzzler, or for a power mower, or to put a new hot tub in. Do this and you'll help stimulate us into the worst possible direction.

Here's a better idea. Do try to spend it locally on something that will benefit your financial future! I've been reading a lot of smart people's musings about this (and coming up with some of my own), and have identified some areas of absolute crisis in our economy. Our country's farmland is being stripped by the wrong-headed over-production of corn and soy (in complete ignorance of sustainable farming practices). Our limited fossil fuel resources are being frittered away unnecessarily so we can continue to cling to our isolated, wasteful car culture. Our healthcare expenditures are reaching a panic point, while we are eating ever-more-expensive, ever-more-damaging food. Life as we know it is not sustainable, and no one seems to have the willpower to reverse the societal tide.

Doing something radical with your Economic Stimulus Package check can be both fun and good for your own financial bottom line. You'll end up with more money left after your pay your bills, you'll be healthier, and you may just spur a tiny bit of social change. At the very least, it can't hurt you. Here are some ideas:

I am one of the world's leading procrastinators. Last night I finished and hit "transmit" on my E-filed taxes at exactly 11:59 p.m. I had planned to do my taxes in February, of course, and then... all of the sudden it was April 15th, and it was nearly midnight. What some people do for an adrenaline rush, hmmm?

But in previous years I've done far worse. Last year I managed to get my Federal taxes to the post office by 11:56 p.m. on tax day... my Federal taxes for 2005. It wasn't until a few days later that I finished my Federal and state taxes for 2006, and my state taxes for 2005. So I know exactly what happens to a person who doesn't file her (or his) taxes on time.

Did you miss the deadline? Did you forget to file an extension, or just not get around to it? Are you, too, a tax delinquent? Firstly: take a deep breath. No one is going to throw you in prison for sending in your taxes a few days late. They won't even call or write, not for several months (and, if you haven't filed in previous years, they could never call or write, depending on whether or not you have had income reported to government agencies). If you manage to get them in a reasonable time frame (less than six months), you'll just be paying a small penalty and interest (if you owe taxes), as much as 4.5% and more if your taxes are more than 60 days late (at least $100, or a penalty equal to the whole amount you owe, whichever is smaller).

What if you're owed a refund?

How can you profit from Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's amazing eccentricity? Hint: the answer is not buying Oracle stock. Nope. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Ellison recently successfully gained a reassessment in the property taxes for his enormous Japanese-style home in Woodside, California. And you can too!

Ok, so you probably didn't spend so outrageously much on your home (for Larry, $12 million for the land and another $200 million to build his Japanese-style seven-bedroom palace complete with separate tea house, bath house, and waterfalls; Luxist had details on all Larry's real estate ventures). And you probably won't register a $3 million refund. But you might be able to get back a few hundred dollars, if you feel your home's worth has been set at the market's peak, while your income is slightly more down-market. And remember, as Tracy Coenen posted, you have rights as a taxpayer!

So, how was Ellison able to justify the reassessment?

I'm trying to live a slower life, and years ago I cancelled all my family's credit cards and we've now gone for almost two years without a car. A big problem with this sort of lifestyle is that it's truly hard to take a vacation -- it turns out that all of our vacations had been financed through credit.

When I saw Zac Bissonnette's post on a bank offering "vacation loans," I shook my head right along with him. (And no, vacation loans are not a solution for a family living without credit cards!) My solution has been something far more practical and with both financial and psychological benefits: I vacation in my own backyard.

Last year, I took a week off in early April to slay blackberry vines that had taken over my yard and dig up the dirt, make raised beds, and build a big sandbox for my boys. This year, my week's spring break will feature the transplanting of several varieties of tomato and pepper, the aggressive creation of an herb garden, the planting of an experiment with four new types of beans, and the digging out of a garden on the other side of my yard, to be used as a several-years rotation.

I've recently become enamored with gardening, so my upfront cost for my vacation this year is about $400 in various gardening books, fencing, plants, and a splurge on some very expensive fertilizer (kelp meal, recommended by a favorite local author; I plan to share with my neighbors). Instead of researching attractions and finding the best price for a hotel, I'll be building a pergola and trying to figure out which are the best grapes for our soil. Instead of expensive dinners at roadside restaurants, I'll go all out and buy two new blueberry bushes.

Remember the 80s? Gold was about $300 an ounce and every little girl had some pretty little flimsy gold jewelry. The way I remember it, my aunts and uncles' default all-occasion gift was a little locket or pendant. I was not a fussy little girl, and I often ended up with tangles of fragile gold chains in a pretty box.

If I'm to believe the people behind My Gold Party, I should run, not walk, to my parents' house and unearth that pretty box and its handfuls of tangled Christmas and birthday gifts. The idea: you buy a kit from the web site, only $699.50 (!!!) will get you a digital scale, a gold tester (the "GXL-24 Pro evaluates the gold karatage in the common 6 to 24 karat range used in the jewelry industry. This will assist you in determining the gold purity"), the My Gold Party book. Oh, and a magnification loupe, so you can feel like a real pawn shop owner.

With gold at $1,000 per ounce, it seems like such an obvious concept: melt the once-cheap and broken stuff down, get cash. But it turns out you don't have to throw a party or use vastly expensive equipment to weigh your scrap jewelry down; a competing gold recycling service, Gold Kit, will send you an envelope for free -- according to the web site, they'll send you a check immediately.

There's no telling which of these services provides you the better value for your junky jewelry ounce. But I'm leery of any money-making concept with that much sparkle and upfront cost. Books should not cost $59.50, unless they're text books, and we all know why those are so expensive. If you think the concept of having a party where everyone makes money is great, by all means, gather your friends together and have 'em bring their gold, grab a kitchen scale and have someone take the result to a refinery. But this just makes way more sense as a simple act of recycling than a shindig. [Update: Tom Barlow has a great set of considerations before you sell your gold.]

Or you could get a pickup truck and go around the neighborhood picking up scrap metal, like my husband's friend, Jose. It's not nearly so glamorous, but I bet you'd make just as much money.

Back in the early nineties, "Food Stamp menus" were en vogue, and the newsgroups and early web sites were full of ideas (of course it wouldn't hurt to pay a few dollars for the knowledge!). Cynthia Hillson, then a mother of five living outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, was one of the first to happen upon this concept: that feeding a large family could be cheaper, if you'd only plan carefully and follow a list of rules. The Hillbilly Housewife is just one similar concept that has sprouted into web being since.

In the time since the late 1980s, when Cynthia's husband lost his job and took one making less than $30,000 a year, she's birthed one more child and the cost of groceries has risen immensely. Instead of attaching a weekly cost to feeding a family (in 1991, it was $45), now Cynthia is just focused on the process, and her self-published book is called "How to Feed Your Family." She sells it for $8.00 and encourages readers to make photocopies to share with their friends and church groups. She sent me a review copy and, after reading her perky, practical advice I've decided to send her a check; her advice is way undersold. Were she vastly more polished and a bit more savvy with sustainability, she'd be travelling the country with Michael Pollan.

In this slim stack of three-hole-punched pages, Hillson sets forth strategies right out of In Defense of Food (without any of the science, most of the background, nor the elegance). Sure, she skips some of the parts I find important in my family food plan (she dismisses organic food as too expensive and gives up on gardening as not worth the effort), but many of the vital strategies are there.

As a board member of my neighborhood association, I can attest to great horror at the cost (and bureaucracy) involved with public art. Even the most innocuous of pieces starts at several thousand dollars, and months and months of hoop-jumping and consensus-building.

Enter knitting. While the solitary art of knitting has always had its community focus (think socks for soldiers), the concept of knitting together has had its resurgence in the past half-decade. This weekend, my friends Larissa and Martin Brown are celebrating the release of their book, Knitalong, which discusses knitting community through public art projects, knitting get-togethers, and (of course) online knitalongs; they write about fiber artists who have created "installations" ranging from the knitted wedding to a lovely project of a thousand knitted "peace cranes." Larissa is in the middle of creating a lovely installation of a hundred knitted cotton dishcloths.

If you can't build it, knit a cozy for it! An AP piece yesterday investigates the phenomenon of knitted trees, a public art trend which seems to range from artful tree sweaters to small-ish tree warmers to whole knitted trees (without the tree underneath). The tiny town of Yellow Springs, Ohio has a tree whose rather garish striped "sleeves" are compared by a local artist to graffiti street art -- but better, presumably, because of the overall lack of defacement (whether or not you think the tree cozies are artistic, they're quite simple to remove with a sharp pair of scissors if the public cries out).

Tree cozies are great projects for the community organization without major funding, or patience. Forget the RFP, the regional arts council board meetings, the high cost of bronze. Grab some spare yarn, some needles, and a couple of crafty friends and pick a tree.

See what Larissa has to say about this project:

This post is part of our series on people, places and things finding new life in 2008.

It was the year 1999, and I was looking at homes in Northern Virginia. I knew what I wanted, and it had an actual wood-burning fire. We must have walked through dozens of condos, townhomes, and very small houses, and never once did I find the object of my heart's desire, though it seemed that every one had some sort of fireplace fake. People don't burn wood, silly! It's so messy.

Two years later, I had a new love and an old city. My family and I now live in a 1912 house with a hole in the kitchen where the wood cook stove once connected to the chimney. Every late summer, my boys help grandpa pile chopped wood under cover near my parents' house. When I hear horror stories on the BBC about disappearing fuel reserves and coming shortages, I can't help but feel smug about my possibilities. I tell my husband that we should follow my parents' lead and get a wood stove now, before the crisis comes and all the wood stove stores are fresh out.

Mom and Dad aren't the only modern family with a decidedly 19th-century woodpile. While only 2.1 million people in the U.S. heated their homes with wood in 2001, the last census data available, the New York Times announces that Wood is Back! One Oregon stove retailer says sales are up 65% in just a year.

It may not be the cleanest-burning fuel, but it's cozy and comforting and renewable and way cheaper than oil or natural gas. 2008 may very well be the year I finally get my wood stove -- will you get yours, too?

This post is part of our series on people, places and things than have found new life in 2008.

When I'm bored, I come up with taglines for the clothesline movement. They have "right to dry," but I prefer the very British "Hang it all!" or the Bondsian "Live and let dry."

The clothesline movement? You might be asking. Umm, we need one of those? Yes, yes we do. You see, it comes down to this idea in the middle of the 20th century in America that the ownership of a machine to do -- well, anything -- was a banner of respectability. Washing dishes, blending your non-dairy whipped topping, mowing your lawn, drying your clothes: power 'em with fossil fuels or be one of the unwashed masses.

We don't want that in our neighborhoods, said the rather small-time powers-that-be, and many communities wrote a ban on outdoor clothes drying along with the removal of livestock and various more hateful bans. One such neighborhood was Awbrey Butte, Oregon, where a resident was threatened with legal action when she chose to flout the CC&Rs and hang her clothes out to dry in the plentiful warm summer sun. She might have done better with this fanciful (and spendy) clothes drying "tree."

Watch out, neighborhood boards, homeowner associations, town councils. Because the clothesline is coming back. Many of my friends now consider the last rains of spring to herald "drying weather," and extoll the fresh scent of line-hung laundry, along with the savings on their power bill and the nice feeling of appropriate use of one's precious resources. And if you want my opinion? I like the way clothes look, hung out to dry. The comeback of clotheslines is a win, win, win!

This is one in our series on people, places and things than have found new life in 2008.

My neighborhood association chair has a dream. His dream isn't about people of different races living together in harmony, no, it's more about an iconic mode of transportation whose tracks still run, buried, throughout my hometown of Portland -- and in cities across the U.S.

It's the streetcar.

We've already started bringing it back. In the tourist destinations of both San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, streetcars run cheerfully through college campuses and down retail thoroughfares. They're digging them up elsewhere, too, in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Edmonton, New Orleans. Ours goes past Powell's, City of Books. We'd like it to go further, to connect neighborhoods with electricity instead of the big isolated fossil-fuel-guzzling pods we call "cars." There was once a streetcar down Gladstone Street, a nice wide local avenue now featuring a bunch of lovely speed bumps.

There's much to love about streetcars. Not only are they cute, but they use fewer resources and they spur economic development. They connect people with the past, with their neighborhoods, with how beautiful transportation could be. It's time they went from tourist attraction to a real part of more cities' public transportation system. Ding ding!

I was FLORed. (I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.) Late last night I placed an order for a few dozen FLOR carpet tiles for my living room, the 'Morning Coffee' pattern in 'Decaf' (reddish orange) and 'Espresso' (dark dark brown). The shipping cost, via UPS Ground, from the Georgia warehouse to my home in Portland, Oregon was painful, though, $39 for my order; I would have ordered a few extra tiles in some other colors and textures, but that would have tacked another $13 on my order. I shivered, and pressed "buy."

This morning, bright and early before the sun was up here on the West Coast, I got my shipping confirmation. Speedy! I thought. Then around 9 a.m. I got another email, this a promotional offer. "Free Shipping for a Limited Time!" the subject read. Ohhh... ouch!

I spent several minutes feeling peeved, and then I thought: why not just call? I dialed the customer service line and was connected to a friendly representative who happily processed a refund for my shipping. Giving me plenty of time to enjoy my morning coffee.

If you, too, are in the market for some FLOR tiles, now's the time! The free shipping code is BP887W, and the email didn't say when the promotion would end.

Whether you prefer organic milk or orange juice for breakfast; whether coffee or cola gets you caffeinated; whether it's beef or chicken that's for dinner, you're paying more for it this month than ever before. Our friends at AOL Money & Finance took a look at a group of groceries on many people's shopping list and compared the average U.S. prices in December 2006 to the prices in December 2007. What we weren't surprised about: all these prices are higher this year than last. What we were surprised about: some of the increases are truly monumental.

You can browse through our gallery to see the ones we thought would impact us the most, and what were the highest increases -- over 30% in two cases! But I was amazed at how universal the increases were. While lemons don't make up a big portion of my grocery budget, it's shocking to see that the prices are up 23.2%. And sweet peppers, a staple in many Tex-Mex and Cajun dishes, are up 15.7%. The aforementioned orange juice, part of that complete breakfast the cereal makers are always advertising? Up 13.3%.

If my husband really loves me, this Valentine's Day, I won't find any little jewelry boxes or over-wrought bouquets on my desk; I won't be offered prime rib and lobster for dinner. No, I'll know how much he loves me (and understands me) if I get nothing for Valentine's Day.

It helps that I run a personal finance weblog: I'd be foolhardy to trumpet my sweetheart's wasteful spending (maybe I could have him put it on Visa, and then we could refinance our home to add the diamond pendant or dozen red roses to our roof-over-the-head debt load!). I'm a firm believer in putting all our spending cash toward useful objects; I wouldn't turn down a book from my Amazon wishlist, or a coffee mug from a thrift store, or two pounds of my favorite local butter (so I can make my own chocolate torte, yum).

When it comes right down to it, gifts to one's significant other should be based on his or her value system; not on the loudest noise from the marketing juggernaut. Here's a hint: whatever is being promoted via television commercial or newspaper insert or 160x800 tower ad (sorry WalletPop advertisers), probably isn't the ideal gift to express true love. I've never been a fan of diamonds, especially since watching documentaries showing little girls and boys whose arms were cut off with machetes, all because of diamonds. Not to mention my suspicion that the world diamond trade is less than transparent. Roses? I'm working on eating food that's more local and seasonal; if I were to accept roses transported from Argentina, or Chile, or California, I'd feel the weight of the hypocrisy.

I've finally come to know that the price of the present has no relation to the depth of the love. All I want for Valentine's Day is an unspoiled bank account!

It seems I find a bin, tucked in the back of every thrift store, filled with metal knives and forks and spoons. In my house (I don't know about yours), forks have this way of disappearing. Maybe they go the same place as the mates for my socks (forks and socks: star-crossed lovers?). In any case, I peer into the bins, thrilled by the hope that maybe I'll find something great to fill in the fork section of my cutlery drawer.

And then I remember my cutlery drawer. Ahh, those thrift store purchases from long ago; the odd forks and spoons brought home accidentally from my husband's former job as a caterer. None of them were stainless steel, and one day I had a particularly large sink of dirty dishes and got out one of the thrifty purchases. I could distinctly taste the metal along with my pie. That can't be good for you.

Unless you can see the stainless symbol on the cutlery at the thrift store, stay away! The last thing you need is to introduce more metal into your diet (the mercury in your tuna is already too much). If you can taste it, it's certain that some of it is wending its way into your digestive system. I'm no expert on metallurgy, but I'm sure that these metals are not healthful dietary supplements. When you're out looking for a bargain: pass up the spoons and forks.

This post was written as part of a series on how to thrift shop smarter. Read more on what to buy, and not to buy, at thrift stores.