Category Archives: Roxie Rodgers Dinstel

A cleaner home may be high up on your list of priorities for the new year. You may be trying to keep your house clean, but are also concerned about how the cleaners and the bottles they come in affect our environment. The American Cleaning Institute, formerly the Soap and Detergent Association, offers hints on how to clean while being aware of sustainable practices.

One area where each of us can make a positive contribution is in the way we purchase, use and dispose of cleaning products. The following steps are designed to help you make the best decisions about cleaning products for your family, your community and the environment. • Before you buy, think about the cleaning job at hand, read product labels carefully and choose the product that is best for your job. Be sure to buy only what you can use. • Before you use, read the label and follow directions for proper use and follow all safety precautions. Use the recommended amount; more is not necessarily better. • After you use, read the label and follow directions for proper storage. Keep lid tightly closed and if there is a child-resistant closure, use it. Keep product in the original container with readable label. If you have more than you can use, share any product you can’t use with a friend or neighbor. • If you must dispose of a product, follow label directions. If there are no directions, think about how you use the product. If it mixes with water, it’s water soluble. Most liquid, gel and powder water-soluble household cleaning products can be disposed of down the drain, just like you use them. Most solid products can be placed in the trash. For other products, such as oven cleaners, drain openers and furniture polishes, call the manufacturer’s toll-free number for disposal instructions. • When you are disposing of cleaning products, flush the container with water and be sure not to mix products. Chlorine and ammonia make for a deadly gas when mixed. Dispose of powders in small quantities at a time. This will keep them from forming lumps in the drain pipe. • Disposing of household hazardous waste (HHW) is costly. In general, HHW costs 10–15 times more to dispose of than nonhazardous municipal waste. If you’re disposing of nonhazardous materials in this way, it may affect our tax dollars. • Water-soluble household cleaning products usually do not fall into the HHW category because they go safely down the drain and into the trash. So, think before you treat them as HHW — you’ll be saving all of us money. • Start out right by cutting down on trash at the source. We all want to conserve resources and keep waste to a minimum. It’s called waste reduction — cutting down on excess products and their packages at the source.

The soap and detergent industry has been working hard to conserve resources and reduce waste. In the last few years, we’ve seen innovations such as concentrated products in smaller packages, combination products (providing two functions in one product), refillable containers, and using recycled materials to make new containers. In fact, the industry has become one of the biggest purchasers of recycled plastics, giving new life to the plastics you recycle.

By buying concentrated products, refills or containers made from recycled materials, and by recycling your used containers, we’re keeping excess trash out of landfills.

“Thinking Green” is a daily journey! By making informed decisions before, during and after product use, you’re on your way to doing the right thing for yourself and your community. And remember, the key to smart use and disposal is reading the label. It’s the single most important thing you can do to make the right decisions.

Roxie Rodgers Dinstel is a professor of extension on the Tanana District Extension Faculty. Questions or column requests can be e-mailed to her at rrdinstel@alaska.edu or by calling 907-474-2426. The Cooperative Extension Service is part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, working in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Copperative Extension Service
www.uaf.edu/ces/

The year has just started and many of us are looking at ways to improve our finances as our new year’s resolution. We all know how important our credit score is to our financial life. It affects not only your credit cards, but also what you pay for insurance, rent and a host of other financial transactions.

How can I improve my credit score? This is one of the most frequent questions that I get from folks. Many of us have the wrong ideas about what will help or hurt our credit scores. Here are five of the most common beliefs that are plain false.

1. Checking my own credit history will affect my credit score. It is true that inquiries can affect your credit score — but only the inquiries that mean you applied for credit in the past two years. Those are known as “hard inquiries.” When you get a copy of your own credit history, you may see other types of inquiries. Companies that received your contact information for marketing purposes, such as sending you a preapproved credit card offer, will be listed. If you recently obtained a copy of your credit history, you’ll see that noted as well. But you are the only person who sees those two types of inquiries, and they have no impact on your credit score or on lending decisions.

2. Cancelling a credit card I don’t use is always a smart thing. Cancelling a credit card you no longer use may be a good money management decision, if having the card tempts you to spend more. But cancelling it could hurt your credit score. One of the factors that affects your credit score is your utilization ratio — the amount of your available credit limits that you are using. Let’s say you have two credit cards, each with a $5,000 limit. You have a $1,000 balance on each one. You’re using 20 percent of your available credit. Then you transfer the balance from card A to card B, and cancel card A. You’re still carrying a balance of $2,000, but your credit limit is $5,000. Your utilization ratio went up to 40 percent, and that’s not a good thing.

3. Carrying a balance on my credit card is better for my score than paying it off each month. Your credit history doesn’t tell lenders whether you pay off your credit card each month. They only know what your balance was on the date that the credit card submitted the information to the credit-reporting agency. Having regular activity on the card (making purchases and paying on time each month) has a positive effect on your credit history and score.

4. One of my loans was turned over to collections. If I pay it, that negative information will disappear from my credit record. If you were late on a bill or if it went to collections, that information will still be true even if you finally pay the debt in full. Those late payments and collections can remain on your credit history for seven years. Having the debt reported as paid is better than showing that you still owe the money, but it won’t remove the negative information from your credit record.

5. I use a debit card. If I choose “credit” when I use it, it becomes a credit card and helps me build a credit history.

Using a debit card won’t help you build a credit history. Choosing “credit” when you use a debit card does not change the type of card you have. You’re still using your own money, not borrowing money. Choosing debit or credit determines how the transaction is processed (directly with your bank or through the same processing system used by credit cards) and whether you enter your PIN (personal identification number).

The most important thing you can do to improve your credit score is to pay your bills on time each month starting today. As the negative information on your credit history gets older, it becomes less important. Even though those negative pieces of information can remain on your credit history for years, you could see a significant improvement in your score after paying your bills on time for a year or two.

Roxie Rodgers Dinstel is a professor of extension on the Tanana District Extension Faculty. Questions or column requests can be e-mailed to her at rrdinstel@alaska.edu or by calling 907-474-2426. The Cooperative Extension Service is part of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, working in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Copperative Extension Service
www.uaf.edu/ces/