Harrelson and wife in Maui Woody Harrelson lives off-grid in Hawaii and his plug-in Toyota RAV4 is his pride and joy, reports the London Sunday Times.

Harrelson keeps the Toyota in Los Angeles, but his main home is in Hawaii, where he has a VW Beetle that runs on biodiesel, and a motorbike, which he presumably has no choice but to run on dirty old petrol.

His Hawaii home is off-grid and runs on solar power. “Everybody in the neighbourhood is on solar power,” he says.
>>Keep reading “Harrelson’s Hawaii haven”

Sorrell: bye bye the Ferrari…….. Advanced industrial countries like the US and UK are moving toward a post-consumer era - less materialist and more spiritual, reports Alex Benady.

The idea that people will stop buying stuff was once the preserve of gloomy anti-globalists. Now a top advertising boss is saying it, you can be sure the party’s over.

In a series of extraordinary and unreported speeches at seminars this year, Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and CEO of WPP, the world’ No 2 advertising group after Omnicom, representing trillions of dollars of consumer spending worldwide, has been announcing what sounds suspiciously like the imminent death of the consumer society in its current form. And other ad execs are joining the chorus.

Sorrell’s speeches

“All our instincts as clients, agencies and media owners are to encourage people to consume more – super consumption,” he told one conference.
>>Keep reading “End of Consumerism”

Jassen Bowman explains why he decided (like many others) to live full-time in his car:

As I sat across the breakfast bar from this lovely young couple in their beautiful, meticulously ordered home, they told me they were finally going to be able to build their dream home in the country. And I was going to be part of that process for them, in my small way, by helping them sell there current home in the suburbs. As I filled in blanks spaces on the listing agreement, I casually asked them about their new home.
>>Keep reading “I live in my car”

In the excellent Penny Pincher’s Book seasoned savers John and Irma Mustoe share their innovative (and sometimes eccentric) tips:

1 Steam iron (or freeze) woollen clothes during winter to kill moth eggs. It’s the larvae, not the flying moths, that do the damage. And conkers make very good ‘mothballs’.

2 Extend the useful life of empty scent bottles or talcum boxes by putting them into drawers to perfume the contents.

3 Refrigerate candles for a few hours before using and they will burn more slowly, drip less, and give you better value for money.

4 Plant lettuce seeds. A 15g packet of seeds produces about 2,000 lettuces and costs about the same as a single lettuce in shops.
>>Keep reading “50 ways to save money”