Is a Green Lifestyle Always More Expensive?

With climate change being a societal issue that people try to address in their own way, one of the difficulties that you might face is the costs that can come with it. It doesn’t take much shopping around sustainable stores to see the higher prices that can hover around these options compared to the cheaper, more environmentally damaging candidate.

Is this always the case? If you want to make an ecological difference, are you forced to suffer through more expensive prices in order to get there? Not necessarily, but a change in perspective might be required in order to see how that’s ultimately possible.

Long Term Savings

It’s easy to judge the initial costs side by side, as the long-term money that you spend is always in flux – hypothetical. The way that you power your home and provide yourself with energy is one way in which this might apply. For example, while you might have been put off from the idea of contacting a solar powered attic fan installer due to that initial cost, you might be pleasantly surprised at what your energy bills might look like going forward – something that could even change your mind.

The same is true of alternative means of transport, like leaning more into public transport or getting a bike to decrease how much you depend on your car. Over time, you might find that you spend less money than you have been on fuel, which can act as a further incentive.

The Food Shop

If you’re looking to cut down on some of the more environmentally harmful foods, the initial impact that this has on your regular meal plan can be catastrophic. However, once you’ve scoped out the landscape and made a note of some alternative recipes, you might realize just how much you have to work with. If this now means that you’re relying more heavily on vegetarian meals, you might even notice a decrease in how much your weekly shop is costing you.

At first, these savings might not seem like much, but the food shop is something that you’re going to rely on every week, meaning that over time, what you save could accumulate into something greater. This can even be put back into that same shop for added luxuries, or put aside for something like a holiday.

Air Travel

Speaking of holidays, it might be that what you’ve decided to cut out is air travel due to the harmful emissions that planes can cause. Won’t this mean that you’re cutting holidays entirely out of your life? It doesn’t have to, and it might encourage you to look closer to home for some destinations that are both easier to reach and easier on the wallet. There are any number of forms that these trips can take, and you can even make saving money part of the objective if you’re looking to do something like a road trip while sticking to a budget or going camping. You have plenty of flexibility, as much as removing air travel might initially feel like a restriction.