personal finance

Can’t control your finances? Get yourself a coach.

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Not a counselor — a coach. That’s the subject of my latest “Living With Less” personal finance column, now up over at MSN Money. “Find a personal money coach, free” explains how you can work to make your finances match your dreams. Generally speaking, counseling is about an issue and coaching is about an individual. … Read more

Automatic frugality.

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The other day I stopped writing and left the room to go to the euphemism. (We didn’t say “potty” in our house.) As I walked out I turned off the office light even though I’d be gone only about a minute.

At lunchtime I rummaged in the fridge for some cheese, the sausage I brought with me to Alaska and the mustard. The nearly empty bottle was upside down, so the last few drops would be attainable – just enough left for my lunch.

It’s 50 degrees, breezy and raining but I didn’t turn up the heat. I just put on another layer, my fleece Mr. Rebates pullover. (Only recently did I figure out that the logo is a little bag of money wearing glasses. Or maybe it just has googly eyes.)

Welcome to automatic frugality – stuff that’s so ingrained you don’t even realize you’re doing it. Only when someone reacts do you learn that the whole world doesn’t write grocery lists on junk-mail envelopes or pick up pennies from sidewalks.

If you’re lucky, that person doesn’t think you’re a kook. If not, then the wedding is off or you don’t get that promotion after all.

 

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What’s your “a-ha!” moment?

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Discovering that your paycheck won’t cover even minimum debt payments. Buying a house, or being unable to buy a house. Feeling suffocated by the (costly) clutter in your life. Wanting to stay home with the kids but fearing you can’t afford it.

All these defining moments turned spendthrifts into thrift-thrifts.

A couple of years ago I wrote a Smart Spending blog piece about what a reader called “a-ha!” moments. The reader, posting as “Bigdreams,” solicited such stories in a Smart Spending message board thread.

Some “moments” are epiphanies. Some are slowly dawning realizations. Readers variously described the experience as a slap in the face, a kick in the butt, a good hard look at oneself, a God-given wakeup call, the sudden glimpse of a bleak future.

However they arrive, a-ha! moments carry the same basic message: Something has to change.

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Frugal materialism.

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One of my earliest articles for MSN Money was called “Living ‘poor’ and loving it.”* In the essay I noted that there’s real joy in knowing that you have everything you need and some of what you want.

But what if your goal is to have more than one of everything you need, and a whole bunch of what you want?

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Why I’m writing, and why you should read it.

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In my late 40s, with about $130 to my name, I returned to college to get the degree that eluded me as a teenager. Frankly, that terrified me. But my life was already turned upside down: I’d left a long-term marriage and run through most of my savings to support myself and my disabled adult daughter. If I didn’t go then, I knew I’d never go.

That first year I survived on a crazy-quilt of gigs: babysitter, apartment house manager/handyma’am, work-study grunt, freelance writer, paid medical research volunteer, mystery shopper, oldest living cub reporter on the college paper. And I sank slowly into debt because divorce lawyers get paid by the minute.

An old acquaintance, now an editor with MSN Money, invited me to write an essay. “Surviving (and Thriving) on $12,000 a Year” appeared on Jan. 10, 2007. I figured it would be like any other article I’d ever written for newspapers or magazines: Some people would read it and agree, some would read it and get irritated, and the next day they’d all be thinking about something else.

Wrong. Thousands of readers e-mailed their reactions to the piece. Many others, especially personal-finance bloggers, discussed the article online. The folks at MSN Money realized this was a demographic that wasn’t getting heard: Folks living paycheck to paycheck, who couldn’t even think about retirement because day-to-day survival took all their financial and emotional resources.

 

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