"...a family of four lives in a white, colonial-style house in a manner that once would have been considered All-American but more recently has been seen as just plain weird: They're frugal."Well, we've definitely got the "weird" part down. And I think we'd count as "frugal", as well.
"They walk most everywhere, they rarely eat out, they sometimes buy clothing at consignment shops, and they turn the lights off when they leave a room."The horror!
These are all excerpted from a story about a family living what seems to me to be a thoroughly ordinary middle-class suburban American life. In fact, what strikes me most about their story isn't their cutting-edge revolutionary frugality, but rather their prior behavior, which, I suppose, may be average enough, but still caused alarm bells to go off in my head (alarm bells indicated by '!'):
"During the days of soaring home prices and easy credit, they took out a $101,000 home-equity loan(!) on a previous house and spent lavishly on a lifestyle upgrade—going on three cruises(!!) in two years and taking the kids on annual pilgrimages to Disney World(!). "After 9/11 it became patriotic to shop, and we became as patriotic as anybody," laments Behre, sitting in the dining room after a meal of chicken stir-fry—washed down with tap water(!)."Tap water? What is this ... tap water? Oh, that's right, the stuff I've drunk at home for the last 45 years.
Things nearly spun out of control after they upgraded to a better house. Despite raiding their retirement funds(!) to help with the down payment, they ended up with higher monthly payments.So, anyway, people such as those highlighted in the story, and, I guess, us, are now "harbingers of a dawning Age of Frugality", which apparently means living like normal prudent people.
"... baby-boomer children grew up without psychological scars from the Depression. And the boomers' children have come of age in an era of abundance, easy credit, and a taste for luxury. So it's no wonder that the sudden need for thrift comes as an upsetting shock for many. Some are calling for a massive public education effort on the level of the anti-drunk-driving and anti-smoking campaigns that have been so successful. "We want to build a culture that's more hospitable to thrift, so it's not seen as odd but fostered and nudged along," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-author of For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture, a new report from The Institute for American Values, a think tank."What I'd really like to see is a culture where people don't give a ...hoot about being seen as odd, or living within their means... but barring that, I suppose that re-learning the lessons of the Depression will do. It's odd, though; both M. and I have parents that grew up during the Depression, and while they never obsessed about it, they clearly knew the value of money and how not to waste it, and for the most part I see M. and I as having learned that lesson from them, however imperfectly. I'm not sure why we were able to absorb that cautionary tale and so many others apparently were not.
To be sure, there are odd moments on the journey to a thriftier lifestyle. To demonstrate, Bill Behre pulls out a mobile phone and twists it back and forth so the light glints off of rhinestones glued on by daughter Annie before she got a new phone. Behre's own phone was ruined in a rainstorm, so he's using this gaudy hand-me-down until he can get a free replacement in March. "This is the ultimate in frugal," he says.Ditch the cell phone, and then get back to me about "frugal", ok? Jeez.
Sticking to the program requires vigilance. When Ingram does drive, she calculates the relative costs of traveling a few more miles to get gas for a few cents cheaper (I thought everybody did this– DF). ...In the old days, the family overspent their checking account by an average of $300 a month—dipping into the home-equity funds to make up the difference(!!!). Now they're in the black by about $800 a month. Since making their big changes, they accelerated payments on a car loan and managed to pay it off. ...That's why we aren't worldly successes, Moira: we haven't yet learned to hector others about the bleedin' obvious. We should write a book!
Ingram has started a blog, The Lean Green Family, where she encourages others to be more frugal.