Thrifty Thursday: Ethics and Money

I want you to think about your personal ethics for a minute. What's important to you? How do they inform the way that you live? How do they affect the choices that you make every day and do you realize the impact they have on even the smallest of decisions?
This Thrifty Thursday I want to talk about ethics and money. When I began thinking about doing this I had themes in mind like cooking, cleaning, budgeting ideas and now here I am with Deep Thoughts by Amanda. Yeesh. However it seemed to me this was such a cornerstone of being thrifty that it needed to be brought out and aired.
So often being thrifty isn't only about spending as little money as possible. It's about making choices about how you live your life and what got you to this place. Perhaps you are a stay at home parent who chooses this path in order to homeschool your kids or be present for them before and after school. Maybe you look after an aging parent or work from home doing something that makes you happy every single day of your life but doesn't leave a whole lot left over after all the bills are paid.
Being ethical is about choosing not to fill your houses full of STUFF, making environmentally-friendly choices, avoiding all those crazy chemicals manufacturers seem to love to put into our food and everything else and being healthy. It's about buying used things instead of new and making things from scratch rather than spending money.
The funny thing I've noticed is my ethics cause me to spend less money rather than more in so many cases. It surprised me a bit because it's important to me to be environmentally-conscious and to buy foods without weird chemicals and that means buying organic produce and meat from animals who haven't been pumped full of antibiotics, hormones and food they wouldn't normally eat. And that costs more. But my combination of ethics mean that I may be spending $7.99 on a pound of grass fed ground beef but it gets offset by the fact that I only make the trip out to the butcher once a month when I can make it worthwhile for the gas and wear and tear on our car. I also don't spend money on treats for the kids, prefering instead to make them from scratch at home which is cheaper and healthier. I knit like a fiend and haven't bought mittens or a hat for myself in 9 years and when I wanted a new skirt last summer I made one rather than heading to the mall.
When I'm getting discouraged about how hard it is sometimes to make ends meet especially when the washing machine begins to make THAT NOISE again I find it helpful to think about why I'm still doing this. Maybe it helps you too.