Skip eating out
Cooking a meal at home that serves four to six people will cost as little as $7 to prepare, compared with the average restaurant meal, which is $40.78 per person in New York City. That’s if you’re a smart shopper and buy a month’s worth of groceries at a time, says Nanci Slagle, author of The Freezer Cooking Manual from 30 Day Gourmet. For meal-plan ideas, visit 30DayGourmet.com.

Waste not
Embarrassed by how much past-its-prime food you toss each week? That waste can add up to hundreds of dollars a year! Cut your losses by using the Reynolds Handi-Vac Vacuum Sealer ($9.99 for starter kit; retailers nationwide), which preps meats, fruits, and vegetables for long-term freezer storage. Simply defrost the frozen ingredients when you’re ready to use them. Or stock up on EvriFresh sachet disks ($3.99): They neutralize the food-spoiling ethylene gas that produce releases in the fridge as it ripens.

When to buy big
If you have a freezer buy good-for-you grass-fed meat straight from the farm; use a site like EatWild.com to find local farms.

“You can buy a quarter, half, or even a whole cow for an average of $5 to $6 per pound—far less than what you would pay for naturally-raised meat at the grocery store,” nutritionist Amanda Louden says.

5. Programmable Thermostat
Having a programmable thermostat is the easiest way to lower your heating and cooling costs. And having the house temperature right where you want it every hour of the day isn’t bad either. You can find programmable thermostats as cheap as $20 – at that price, it would probably pay for itself many times over in a year.

At the same time, some leading multinational corporations are taking action to slash their use of fossil fuels. Manufacturer Johnson and Johnson has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by seven per cent while growing its business by 300 per cent in the past eight years, according to Banks.

“They’re saving on average about $40 million a year. So, the rhetoric that this is going to hurt economies, that it’s going to bankrupt companies, is simply not the case,” said Banks.

Canadian entrepreneurs are hoping to take advantage of the growing appetite for clean technologies, which includes everything from efficient lighting to renewable energy. More than 70 Cleantech companies are now listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, including many solar technology firms.

Being born into wealth helps people advance in life, and for people who have indeed worked for their fortune, as opposed to be being born into it, realize that knowing other rich people helps just as much as being rich. This is why people like the Late Body Shop founder leave relatively very little material to their children.

Many of these rich do not come from riches. They are self-made, and generally the self-made have a different attitude to money – or specifically, the acquisition of money – compared with those who have always had it. They generally do not, for example, have the “legacy assets” of the old rich – the 4,000-acre pile in Scotland that has been in the family for generations and must be passed on in good nick; or the idea of noblesse oblige that used to go with such assets: the responsibility to the tenants of the land, to the local community. “With inherited wealth, the current generation may simply consider themselves custodians for the time being of the family wealth and will follow the path laid down over many generations,” says Stuart Chappell, director of Barclays Wealth. “With self-generated wealth, it is the responsibility of those who made the wealth to decide what is to happen after they are gone. It is more likely that the creators of new money will feel that those who follow them should not be ‘feather-bedded’.”

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek has some advice for people who are questioning a jump into something new because they question if they have the resources to do it. Granted, he’s talking about starting a business, but I think that his advice can be applied to everyday living as well. He argues that by concentrating on what you have, you can do better – basically think positive to turn a lack of resources into a strength.

Excuses not to jump into the unknown are a dime a dozen. In the case of entrepreneurship, the “I don’t have” list — I don’t have funding, I don’t connections, etc. — is a popular write-off for inaction.

Little do most people know how often lack of resources is the ingredient that creates great companies.

It forces you to be clever, to dissect problems instead of throwing cash at them, and to innovate instead of imitating better-funded competitors.

Slate has an article examining how Starbucks helps small coffee shops by giving them new customers.

The first time Herb Hyman spoke with the rep from Starbucks, in 1991, the life of his small business flashed before his eyes. For three decades, Hyman’s handful of Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf stores had been filling the caffeine needs of Los Angeles locals and the Hollywood elite: Johnny Carson had his own blend there; Jacques Cousteau arranged to have Hyman’s coffee care packages meet his ship at ports around the world; and Dirty Dozen leading man Lee Marvin often worked behind the counter with Hyman for fun. But when the word came down that the rising Seattle coffee juggernaut was plotting its raid on Los Angeles, Hyman feared his life’s work would be trampled underfoot. Starbucks even promised as much. “They just flat-out said, ‘If you don’t sell out to us, we’re going to surround your stores,’ ” Hyman recalled. “And lo and behold, that’s what happened—and it was the best thing that ever happened to us.”

David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, has some advice for musicians so they can succeed in this new age:

I would personally advise artists to hold on to their publishing rights (well, as much of them as they can). Publishing royalties are how you get paid if someone covers, samples, or licenses your song for a movie or commercial. This, for a songwriter, is your pension plan.

Increasingly, it’s possible for artists to hold on to the copyrights for their recordings as well. This guarantees them another lucrative piece of the licensing pie and also gives them the right to exploit their work in mediums to be invented in the future — musical brain implants and the like.

No single model will work for everyone. There’s room for all of us. Some artists are the Coke and Pepsi of music, while others are the fine wine — or the funky home-brewed moonshine. And that’s fine. I like Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and Christina Aguilera’s “Ain’t No Other Man.” Sometimes a corporate soft drink is what you want — just not at the expense of the other thing. In the recent past, it often seemed like all or nothing, but maybe now we won’t be forced to choose.

Ultimately, all these scenarios have to satisfy the same human urges: What do we need music to do? How do we visit the land in our head and the place in our heart that music takes us to? Can I get a round-trip ticket?

From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It’ll teach you something, it’ll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.

The best part – she provides information on how another way is possible!

Watch the movie The Story of Stuff.