I last wrote about Vietnam Veterans of America in 2011. At that time, they still were picking up clothing donations in NYC. They no longer do that, but they have offered a wonderful alternative. Go to their Happy Donations website to print out a free shipping label. Fill a box with clothing, shoes, jewelry, and/or accessories. Add the label and take the box to a UPS store. You can also give the box to a UPS driver or leave it any…
Read more →The laundry room of my apartment building is not a place that usually fills me with glee. However, I recently went down there for my weekly laundry routine and was delighted to find a clothing donation bin! It is part of a program called refashionNYC that is a joint venture between the NYC Department of Sanitation and the charity HousingWorks. In addition to clothing, shoes, accessories, and linens, we can deposit fabrics for recycling, even though they might only be reusable…
Read more →If you do a lot of mail order, as I do, you are frequently recycling cardboard boxes. Would you like to know a better use for those boxes? Give Back Box is a charity that was established to reuse those cardboard boxes to donate clothing and small household items. Simply pack up your unwanted items in the empty box, go to GiveBackBox.com to print a label, and mail it to Goodwill for free. You can drop off your package at a local UPS store…
Read more →Remember back to last spring when you were preparing your taxes. Pretty annoying, right? Didn’t you hate digging through all your papers to find relevant information, some of which was already more than a year old? I bet you made a vow back then that you were going to be more proactive in the future. January is a great time to get things set up for a smooth tax process. As I described in Reducing the Pain of Tax Time, setting up some…
Read more →Today, my sister and I finished clearing out our family home of nearly 40 years. It wasn’t the home we grew up in — we moved out of that apartment three weeks before I graduated high school. But it was where we introduced our parents to the men who would become their sons-in law; where we brought our children to play with their cousins; where we mourned our mother three years ago and helped my father reestablish his new life, which ended two…
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