I opened this discussion about money, because at least in our corner of the blogosphere, it’s rarely discussed unless it’s in the context of having too little, spending too much or trying not to spend too much…on yarn, which, come to think about it, might make a good financial management strategy. How to Think About Money as Yarn Stash. Really, if we all treated money like stash, we’d have tubs-full of it hiding all over the house.

The hording part is probably a good first step. But if we’re concerned about having yarn in our old age and afraid we might run through our stashes, we have to find ways to make our yarn work for us.

Some of you have done this by becoming good spinners and dyers and then selling your wares on the Internet and at shows. Your yarn is working for you. Congratulations! But for the rest of us, we have to make our money work for us so as to afford space to house our stashes, which brings me back to the stock market and Mr. Smarty Pants.

Now that our money is back in our “stash” (after separating from our financial advisor Mr. Smarty Pants), we have to do something with it. I’ve been researching alternative energy funds and funds with socially responsible investment (SRI) policies. I won’t make any recommendations here, because A. I don’t know what I’m doing and B. It can’t be ethical to purchase a fund and then recommend all your knitter friends to “buy.” Trust me, when I say, there are plenty of folks on the Internet opining all over the place about where to stash the cash.

There’s a high likelihood that most of our stash will not end up in SRI funds and the like. But I wanted to come out about money as a way to get the conversation going and to spark some interest in putting our money where our mouths are. I’ve said this before, we’re not the greenest family on the block. (We have neighbors who recently relocated to New Zealand to better position themselves for the coming climatic apocalypse.) Rather we occupy that much-derided “light green” position—some of our bulbs are compact fluorescent, some not. Some of our money is green, some not.  But if every American driver used one less gallon of gas a week, or if every American investor made a small investment in an enterprise he or she believed in, be it medical research, clean energy, environmental clean up, whatever, that’s pretty powerful.

I’m stepping down off the soap box now.