cash for trash

I don’t know the name yet. I just reserved litterforcash.com and cashforlitter.com.

I made a list earlier this year, 2019 with goals for this year, 5 years, 10 years and lifetime. Some of this years goals were things like, pay off my wife’s car, take a vacation just the 2 of us. 5 year goals had travel overseas and others. 10 year goals were bigger, like pay off the house, not HAVE to work anymore and be healthy, keeping weight down through age 50. However for the purpose of this blog post I am more focused on lifetime goals. A couple of these were leave some money behind for my daughter (and future grandkids), not die broke, travel to every continent and make a difference to the world. The latter is what i want to talk about.

So a comment I’ve made a bunch in past year or so is ” when I get rich and have money to burn, I want to sit in my car at a walmart or a street in a neighborhood or a concert or wherever and find trash/litter just sitting. Then I want to wait and whenever someone picks it up I will walk up, thank them and give them $100 or $1000 (depending on my lever of richness)”. I would want it to be completely random. Sit in a different car each time, at a different place each time. The goal obviously would be that people would hear about it and even if just hoping for the cash, would start to pick up trash. The other goal would be that giving some money to trash picker-uppers would catch on in different parts of the city and then different cities of the US and maybe even spill over to cities around the world.

Picking up trash is easy. You’re walking through the parking lot to go in the grocery store, where you will walk past a trash can going in, so pick up that water bottle or candy wrapper or fast food cup. It won’t kill you. It might even get you paid.

I know there are good-hearted people around the city/country/world who would do this. What I didn’t know how to do was get people in different areas to do this. I really still don’t. My hope would be that by doing it in one place it would catch on through social media or media coverage and someone would do it in the next city and then it would become a country with people doing this in cities and towns all over the US.

My issue with this was that I needed (in my own head) to be wealthy or on my way to be able to give money away that would make this worth it. But today my opinion of this changed. I am on my yearly vacation with my wife’s family this week. Where we are is paradise. Fripp Island SC is paradise. I’m sure I will write a blog about it at some point. Knowing that this is paradise and a nature preserve but yet some people are still ass-hats and think that dumping their beer cans or plastic bottles should be someone else’s problem. So today we, my brother and sister-in-law and my wife and I, were driving around on the golf cart and my brother-in-law Joe stopped to pick up a water bottle. He said “we’re picking up trash today”. I loved it. When he said that I thought to myself, “man if I had started my idea he would have just gotten some cash”. And then it hit me. I don’t have to wait till I have the money to give out $100 or $1000. I could do this with way less, what I could afford to give out now. And so could everyone else. I could go to a Walmart with 40 bucks. I could give 2 people who pick up trash a twenty each. Or 4 people $10 each. Even a little is something. I think the reason I wanted to do $100 or more was so that it was money that would really help someone. But $10 or $20 might make the difference to some people between buying the absolute basics and being able to pick up some ice cream or fresh veggies or school supplies for the kids. Or maybe that $20 goes to someone who doesn’t really need it, and they can pay it forward. Maybe they go through a drive-thru and buy the meal for the car behind. Or they buy some extra food and toiletries to give to a homeless person. Or maybe they put it in their IRA. Maybe they buy a lottery ticket, win millions and keep the idea going. Who cares. I don’t care if they go buy a case of beer with it. But the next time they are walking through a parking lot I bet they bend down and pick up a piece of trash. If just a small percentage of people pick up a piece a day the whole country with be cleaner.

I think this might be my “make the world a better place” idea. It seems so easy to me. There are tons of people with some extra cash. And there are literally tons of trash that need picked up.