To me, one of the biggest pieces of the neofrugal idea is that there are some things that are worth spending significant money on… that getting the most of what you value sometimes means paying more than the minimum possible price: figuring out what is important to you and being unafraid to invest in it.
That’s not where we are, yet.
I’m working for a big company again, with the regular paycheck that entails, but we’ve still got some ground to make up from the past couple of months. Our personal austerity program is still in effect… although I am admittedly eyeing our competing shovel-ready spending programs. It’s time to look at the cutbacks and see what is to be added back in.
We made a lot of choices and changes to make it through, some better than others. I’ve made a few notes on why the methods may or may not be a part of neofrugal.
Home and vehicle maintenance
When it’s not clear whether you can afford gas, you’re probably not going to get the oil changed. It’s never really a conscious decision to put off maintenance, it’s a cumulative effect of looking at the money pile each week and maintenance funds simply not being there. You let things slide, make do, hope it’ll hang together until the pile grows. Obviously this is extreme frugal; frugal taken to a ridiculous conclusion. It was necessary, I’m glad the necessity is passing, and routine maintenance on vehicles, systems, and appliances is clearly a neofrugal value.
Vehicle expense
We were a two-car family, but have been operating with one vehicle for several months. Although we had little choice in the matter (if you neglect your vehicle maintenance long enough, this decision will eventually make itself), there are benefits to acting like a one-car family even if you don’t have to. Having only one car forced us to plan ahead better: instead of being able to run out to the store or a drive-thru if we ran out of something to home, we had lists and minimal regular shopping trips; reducing gas, time, and impulse spending opportunities. We’re definitely going to get a second vehicle running, but we’re keeping the attitude that less driving is best.
Landline phone, cable tv, trash pickup, internet
For a while, we simply cut every service we possibly could. The internet has already made its comeback, landline and cable, not so much. Cutting the landline was completely painless, and the library made cable surprisingly easy to do without, even before the return of the internet brought streaming tv back into our lives. The local waste management center (I guess they’re not “dumps” anymore) is not far away, just off the main loop we already use for grocery, department store, bank runs. We did find that it was a true hardship for us to do without an internet connection at home… even though we both had internet at work and at plenty of local free access points.
Restaurants, brand names, processed foods
Cutting out restaurants and drive-thrus was hard, but made a huge difference in our food budget. We will certainly be adding restaurants back to our routine, Suzy and I are both foodies, but it’s clear there will be some changes in the frequency of particular destinations. I’ve been in it too long to do it anymore: I just can’t bring myself to pay the premium at big chain restaurants. Most of the places we really like to go are the proverbial mom and pop operations.
With very few exceptions, we have found generic and store brand products to be equal quality as name brands. Sometimes a difference is not one of quality, but one of relatively small variations of flavors and textures; we actually prefer the non-name brand product, on occasion.
We’ve also been buying less processed items, more staples. This has made avoiding brand names easier, too, as well as being generally cheaper, healthier, and better.
We didn’t have any choice when we cut these expenses, even though we’d come to think of them as basic parts of our lives. The lean times have helped us look at expenses from the other direction, to examine what we really get from the purchase, and if it’s worth it compared to the other possibilities.
Consider the following the hyper-ultra Cliff’s Notes version of my NeoFrugal story. I turned fifteen and got my first part-time job about a month before Ronald Reagan took office: I became a part of the American economy about the same time as did Reaganomics. I started to learn real financial lessons in college… when I jokingly filled out one of the mass mailings I’d been sent while working as a waiter, and American Express sent me a Gold Card. I went to college just because I was supposed to, eventually got a “real” job in industry and materially enjoyed my success during a time of seemingly unbounded growth by considering the concepts of frugality to be antiquated reminders that my grandparents survived a financial dark age.
I was losing my taste my the corporate world at about the same time the industry where I worked was hard hit by the post-9/11 recession. My family had to make some significant life changes, but we persevered with part-timing and freelancing to the point we felt we could make the jump to running our own business full time. This was around September of last year… approximately three weeks before the economy collapsed. Again, my family made some significant lifestyle changes to try and persevere, but recently I have returned to working for a large employer.
What all this means (other than I have a pretty lousy sense of timing when it comes to making risky financial decisions) is that I never learned some important lessons about handling money back when it might still do me some good; that a family of four can live for a year, say, 2008, for instance, on less money than a single guy spent on travel, bars and restaurants, movies and concerts, media of types, and collectible toys comics and computers in, say, 1999. That he term frugal was associated with personal concessions that had to be endured when times were bad.
Now that it appears things are changing (I project the checking account about two months ahead, and we’ve enfrugaled ourselves to such a degree already that only a few weeks of steady employment will catch us up… leaving us in the position of making decisions on where and how to expand our budget for the first time in ages), I’m starting to look at frugality in different ways. Although there are plenty of better or worse suggestions of what items to add back to our lives, there’s a significant number of items that I just can’t imagine spending money on, anymore. And I’ve identified some items that are simply so much better than their alledged substitutes that I’d rather just go without them than go with the cheaper option. Thinking about the future, frugality is becoming a set of choices about what is genuinely important… and a new economy built on new business infrastructures has, at the very least, made fascinating new choices into possibly viable candidates for genuine importance.
NeoFrugal means getting more from your life by reducing waste, understanding your values, and recognizing opportunities. NeoFrugal isn’t about spending less, it’s about doing more with what you spend. NeoFrugal isn’t about limiting choices, it’s about making good choices. NeoFrugal is about looking at your kids and wanting to give them, when it might still do them some good, some of the knowledge you still wish you’d had… back when it might still do you some good.
So that’s the big picture what and why is NeoFrugal. This weblog will be partly a journal of my new choices, partly the financial instruction manual I always needed, partly a clearinghouse of frugal possibilities, and partly a database of my own experiences of value. Eventually, the hope is it will be partly a forum for other people considering new frugal possibilities and sharing results and opinions.
Thanks for reading.
Hello, welcome to my new weblog, NeoFrugal Notebook; a resource for changing financial lives. I’m Jeff, I’ll be discovering practical ways for imperfect people to change their financial situations for the better. I’ll be curator of information, oftentimes serve as a cautionary tale, and typically be the guinea pig “imperfect person” trying to change something.
I’m quite sure there are people using the term neofrugal to mean something specific: I admit I was shocked to see I could buy the neofrugal.com domain. But since I could, I feel free to establish my own definition. For me the new frugality has three aspects: eliminating waste, maximizing value, and enlarging your life. Eliminating waste is pretty obvious, the most similar to traditional thriftiness. We’ve all been made aware over the years that some bargains aren’t really bargains, but maximizing value is also beginning to incorporate the notion that some things are worth an extra expense. Enlarging your life is a concept that will become more clear as we go, but in a nutshell it’s the recognition that “some things are worth an extra expense” for reasons that extend beyond your own life and preferences.
Every week, I will be making three new posts in the NeoFrugal Notebook, each focusing on one aspect of eliminating waste, maximizing value, and enlarging life, in turn. I’ll also do reader mailbag posts every so often, increasing in frequency should any presupposed reader mail me anything. There will also be regular posts on various financial projects or processes I’m working through, and links of interesting reading.
Which begs the question of how this is going to be any different from any number of other personal finance blogs out there. I’ve written professionally in the past. I’ve confronted some uncomfortable realities of my own situation, have maintained a sense of humor about it, and am willing to dish on myself in the hopes that a bad example can serve as a lesson. I’m determined to make a set of changes in my own life, and am willing to document methods and techniques that succeed and fail for me. All of which, it seems, still fails to clearly differentiate me from the herd.
What it’s really going to come down to is whether or not I’m able to reach someone new with my efforts. I have to make a change in my own financial life, and if I can help someone also make a change in their financial life, so much the better. I hope my experiences can educate, my struggles can warn, and my successes can inspire. And I hope you enjoy it.
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