One bottle or can at a time

First off, this is a true story. I don’t need to make up all of my stories, I had a very colorful life.

So my girlfriend and I decide to recycle, and recycle big. This was in 1975.

We decided to pick up beer bottles and aluminum cans of of the side of the streets. That was our dating life for quit awhile.

Every night we would go out in her Volkswagen and we would pop the hood, in the front remember, and we would toss the bottles and cans that we found into the car as we took turns slowly driving down the roads.

There were a couple of down sides to this. One was that the car always smelled of beer and we did also. Her parents must have thought that we were big drinkers, but they said nothing.

We took the cans and bottles for recycling and saved the money in a separate account with both of our names on it.

We saved $3000.00 in three years. We also recycled newspapers and she would go to all of her family members for their recycling materials.

At that time we received half a cent per can and $30.00 a ton for the paper. We also recycled copper wire from her father’s construction jobs. He would pick up all of the little pieces of wire cut off by the electricians during construction. I would take all of the rubber sheathing off of it. Bare wire was 85 cents a pound and that with the rubber still on was only 30 cents.

After three years, we had $3000.00 and we used that money for the total downpayment on a very nice condo in Tustin. We payed $30,000.00 for it, fixed it up and sold it for $46,000.00 a year later.

We took that money and bought a fixer upper in Orange for $52,000.00. We lived there for seven years, until I was asked by the misses to leave, and quickly, please. She sold that property several years later for $217,00.00.

Remember, when you sell a house, you get all of the money you paid in payments back and more sometimes. Rent is like burning your money.

I never rented a property that I ever lived in. Renting isn’t always bad, buying is just much better if the conditions are right. Most of the times, they are.