NeoFrugal, what and why
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.
