values

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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Trashing plastic bags.

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It’s so easy to denounce plastic shopping bags. They start to tear before you’ve finished filling them. They’re a waste of the oil used in their manufacture. They wind up in landfills by the millions, or floating along roadsides, or in the stomachs of marine mammals.

Some cities have proposed or enacted grocery-bag fees to discourage use. Other municipalities (and countries) have banned them outright.

Eventually plastic bags will no longer be a fixture in our lives. And I’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Wait! Don’t send the green squad over to tie a shopping sack over my head! I’m as dismayed by the waste of petroleum and the ubiquitous litter as anyone else. That scene from “American Beauty” of the plastic bag dancing in the wind was cute – but the moviemakers didn’t address the fact that the bag had to come down sometime.

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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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Can’t anybody here play this game?

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Here’s a recipe for frugal fun: Go watch some “coach-pitch” Little League. Go even if you don’t have any kids. And go to the bathroom before you leave for the game, or you will almost certainly wet yourself laughing.

Coach-pitch is like an extended bloopers reel on YouTube, minus the annoying music and captions. Think “The Keystone Kops,” only shorter, and with bats instead of billy clubs:

  • Runners piling up two or three deep on third base as coaches scream, “Go back! Go back!” and the third baseman tries to figure out which one to tag.
  • A shortstop singing a little song to herself, complete with hip-twitches, as a series of line drives sails past.
  • The right fielder and center fielder who played catch during the game.
  • A runner dashing almost off the field to avoid being tagged. A few steps more and he’d have been in the bleachers.
  • A catcher, all but blinded by an oversized protective mask, turning around and around in a futile search for a loose pitch that was practically under his instep.
  • Another catcher adjusting his protective cup. From inside his pants.
  • Outfielders waiting patiently for hits to roll all the way to them. Then again, it’s hard to show much hustle when the baseball glove is bigger than your head.

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Got an honest face? You have a bright future in sneak-thievery.

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Recently I bought my first laptop. However, I could have gotten one or more for free at the University of Washington. During the month before I left for Alaska, I was twice asked by library patrons if I’d watch their stuff while they went to the bathroom.

Of course I said “yes,” because it was a simple favor. But I could also have strolled out of Odegaard Undergraduate Library with a couple of nice computers plus whatever was in their backpacks.

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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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My first laptop, finally.

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Two years ago I wanted a laptop. I thought my life would easier if I could write during my 50-minute bus rides to the University of Washington.

But then I examined the potential purchase the way I examined all others:

  • Can I really justify the expense vs. the payoff?
  • If I got it, would my life be significantly improved?
  • If I didn’t, would my life by substantially diminished?

No, no and no. Buying the laptop would have meant dipping into my nascent emergency fund. It also would have meant one more thing to carry – and a backpack jammed with textbooks and my daily brown-bag lunch already had me feeling that I was toting my house on my back.

In other words, it would have amounted to a very expensive shoulder ache.

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Jam jars and laminate flooring: Why Freecycle rocks.

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You can get rid of anything on Freecycle, and I can prove it: A woman came to my house the other day to pick up five empty 42-ounce oatmeal boxes.

Bonus: The lady is a Yup’ik Eskimo so while we chatted on the phone I had a chance to use one of the approximately three Yup’ik words I know: “Akleng,” or “I’m sorry,” when her toddler daughter woke up crying from a nap.

I wasn’t sorry to be giving her the boxes, though, because it gave them one more use before they hit the recycle bin.

I also wasn’t sorry about having five empty oatmeal boxes. I kept them because I figured someone would want them. And someone did.

 

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Turning invisibility into stealth.

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In the summer of 2007 I won a fellowship to attend the University of Washington’s two-month Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities. One day we were given 20 minutes to write something about a specific aspect of our identities.

Here’s an excerpt from mine:

“All terrorists should be middle-aged women,” I once said – only partly in jest. 

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