Thursday Money Blogs Roundup: $11 Billion Of Bottled Water Edition

I was reading an interesting article on Smartmoney.com titled “20 Small Ways to Save the Planet” and saw this reported in it’s 20th tip - Skip Bottled Water:

In 2006, Americans spent a record $11 billion on bottled water, according to the Earth Policy Institute.

I thought that was interesting because, immediately after the Smartmoney article, I read this (source):

It is estimated that about 25 percent of the bottled waters consumed in the U.S. come from municipal water supplies.

Read the label carefully. If it is packaged as “purified” or “drinking water,” chances are it came from a municipal water supply, and unless the water has been “substantially” altered, it must state on the label that the water comes from a municipal source.

Often images on the label show mountains, snow or other bodies of water. For example, the label design on Aquafina (from Pepsi) gives me the feeling of mountains and snow; implying that Aquafina may be from a mountain spring, rather than bottled at Pepsi plants using processed municipal water. Coke’s Dasani, also one of the leading bottled water brands is processed municipal water with added minerals.

Assuming a fair distribution of all brands and types in the $11 billion of bottled water sold, and taking into account that 25% of the bottled water came from municipal water supplies, it can be inferred that Americans wasted about $2.75 billion dollars just by choosing to drink their tap water from a plastic bottle instead of their directly drinking it from their taps. That’s insane.

Sometimes, I wonder if it would be more profitable to start bottling our regular tap water and set up a shop to sell it for cheap than to work like crazy in grad school towards that dream job - our *water-paid* apartment would only encourage the idea

OK, enough ranting. Let’s get to some interesting articles published by my fellow bloggers over the week.

• Free Credit Report and Fee-based Credit Monitoring Services by Sun @ The Sun’s Financial Diary. Sun points out to a lot of sources through which you can obtain your credit scores. Earlier, I wrote something on this topic in “The Confusing World Of Credit Scores And Some Pointers For Getting FICO Scores For Cheap “…read it if you want to know the difference between FICO scores and *FAKO* scores - remember, not all credit scores are made equal.

• 24 Signs That You Could be in Financial Trouble #24: Ignoring the Signs by Jeremy @ Generation X Finance. In other words - increased procrastination is a sure sign of financial trouble. When you start pushing things for later, it’s a sign that you are afraid of dealing with certain issues - delaying will only aggravate the matters.

• 10 Ways To Organize and Simplify Your Finances by SVB @ The Digerati Life. SVB suggests a few simple tips towards a simple and smooth financial life, and towards the end, she raises a very good point about simplification potentially conflicting with diversification.

• A really simple retirement formula by MBHunter @ Mighty Bargain Hunter. It can’t get any simpler than this:

Save X% of your income, with X being as close to 100 as possible.

• Pay Cash For Everything by Jim @ Blueprint for Financial Prosperity. A devil’s advocate post that encourages the use of cash. This is really not for me - I absolutely don’t use cash now a days (I will post something about this in time to come).

• Investing Insights from and about Suze Orman by FMF @ Free Money Finance.

I have a friend in the office who watches the market every day throughout the day. Often he’ll ask, “Did you see what the market is doing today?” and I’ll respond, “Nope.” Why? I’m not really interested in day-to-day fluctuations in the market — I’m in for the long-term and am a believer in stocks over the long haul.

• Shopping at Costco the frugal way @ Blunt Money. Some practical tips to make the most of your Costco shopping trip. The post specifically talks about Costco…but it’s applicable to any wholesale warehouse.

• How to Make Exercise a Daily Habit (with a May Challenge) by Leo @ Zen Habits. This isn’t about money, but an interesting read anyways. There are 117 comments on this post, with many people showing eagerness to join the challenge - I wonder how many are still following up with it.