Are you on the fence about making the switch? Maybe you really want to switch but just can't afford it right now.  Well friend, I've been there done that! Everyone knows that natural living is more healthy, but my goodness it typically costs you a small fortune during the initial switch.  Good news is that I have found an EASY SOLUTION to fix that problem.

It typically costs at least double for the all natural products.  Why is that?  Depending on where you live the prices may be higher or lower, but where we live a bottle of the cheapest window cleaner at the big stores costs about $1.00 but the organic cleaners cost around $5.00.  A 64 oz bottle of liquid hand soap costs around $5.00 but a 12 oz bottle of castile soap costs about $10.  Why such a huge jump? Well, take this for an expample:

Castile soap is the most basic soap there is, with a total ingredient list of only olive oil, water, and lye.  With even the smallest ingredients list, it still costs me about $4.50/bar just to make it (not including the cost of curing it, labeling it, storing it, packaging it, plus shipping it out.) Pretty high right?  You may think that the artisans selling soap for $8-12 / bar are price hiking because its "natural" and that is what is "in" right now.  Well friends, that is typically not the case.  It is because it costs way more to make a pure product than a partial product loaded with chemicals to make it appear as though it works as a pure product.  Have you ever heard of sodium laurel sulfate?  Check every single product in your house that bubbles- soap, shampoo, laundry detergent, stain removers, dish soap, car cleaners, flea shampoo, baby shampoo, etc. Chances are you will find Sodium laurel sulfate in the ingredients list.  It is a really cheap chemical additive that causes bubbling.  Why would you need to add in a chemical additive to make soap bubble you ask? Shouldn't soap bubble just fine on it's own without chemical aid?  Well, it is because you are not using real soap.  Most of the products really wouldn't bubble without the additive because it was too costly for the large companies to produce batches by the thousands of pure product, so they found a cheaper chemical alternative.  The cheaper costs for your soap products are great for them and great for you right?  They are pretty affordable, but now studies are finding the long term side effects of the over exposure of sodium laurel sulfate are devastating families all over the world.

Now that we know why it costs so much more to purchase the "green" products, we are now going to learn about how the huge companies trick you daily and how to get around it.  Oh yes, you are being tricked every single day.  TV commercials and the big stores have pounded into our heads that you need twenty different cleaners to get the job done.  We have been fooled into thinking you can only use window cleaner for windows, tile cleaner for tile, hardwood floor cleaner for wood, dish soap for dishes, laundry detergent for clothes, furniture polish for furniture, tub cleaner for tube, and so on so forth.  WRONG.  During my personal switch to all-natural when our twins were born six weeks premature I discovered the world we live in is a huge illusion brought on by marketing strategies to make the larger companies more money.  Castile soap for example, can be used for everything that bubbles- soap, shampoo, face wash, baby shampoo, pet shampoo, and dish soap.  We even grate the bars and mix it with borax (a natural product mined from the earth and once carried out by mules in Death Valley in the 1880s- search 20 mule team borax on the internet, its a really neat story) to make laundry detergent.  So one natural product literally just cut out the need for six store bought chemical filled products.

Most of the other cleaners are easily substituted with vinegar.  Vinegar diluted with water make great window cleaner, floor (tile, wood, lanolium) cleaner, carpet cleaner (if you infuse your vingegar with dark fruit such as strawberries be sure not to use the colored vinegar on light carpets), counter cleaner, bathroom cleaner, and when mixed with baking soda makes a really great heavy duty grout cleaner, tub cleaner, or any other surface cleaner that you may use products such as softscrub on.  The only downfall to using vinegar is the smell. To fix that issue I infuse my vinegar by putting the leaf ends I cut off of my organic strawberries, or peels of lemons or oranges, and even cinnamon sticks or rosemary sprigs into the vinegar to help with the scent.  The longer you leave it the stronger the infusion.  I typically let it to soak in for about two or so weeks and the smell is way better.  Now, the very last cleaning product is olive oil.  Olive oil makes a great wood polish, goo remover, and a great oil-based paint remover (from skin at least).  Vinegar and olive oil just cut out the need for about ten store bought products.  Feeling like this all natural thing may actually be affordable yet?  And it really isn't that much work to mix vinegar and water in a bottle and buying castile soap in bulk so that it is way cheaper per ounce.  We just washed out the old shampoo, body wash, and dish soap bottles really good and filled them with the castile soap.  It took a whole ten minutes to make the cleaners we could, bottle the castile soap we bought, and store our own cleaners.  It took more time getting rid of the chemical cleaners! 

Now we know why store bought products are so cheap compared to natural products and how three natural products can easily replace about sixteen chemically loaded store bought products.  Going natural is possible!  It does not have to be a long, drawn out expensive process.  I mean, you can go to the store and load up on twenty different costly all natural products, but you really don't have to.