Since we no longer have any local radio or television stations, we depend on the Internet for weather forecasts. We regularly check two sites that follow the weather in our small town and the immediate surrounding areas, and both sites are surprisingly accurate in their predictions. Since the weather forecasts are for the same area, you would expect them to give similar information, and they do... but the difference in the way this information is presented is striking.
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Peter Lawrence's lifestyle is very different from that of the average American. He doesn't own a bed... instead he sleeps on the floor in a sleeping bag. He doesn't own a television, a sofa, a dining room table, or most of the other pieces of furniture usually found in a home. His computer desk is an old adjustable ironing board that was left behind by its previous owner. He says that if he had to move house quickly, he could pack all of his belongings into his 1999 Honda Civic and be on the road in about an hour.
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Readers often tell me that they would like to be more frugal but that they don't want a lifestyle of "living poor" and "doing without." What they don't realize is that there IS another way. Actually, I have serious objections to much of the frugal advice out there because it offers only quick-fix extreme measures that... like a crash diet... can't be lived with for very long. Extreme frugality sets up feelings of deprivation that almost always lead to bouts of spending... the money that you gave up so much to save gets spent impulsively and you're back to square one. To me, that yo-yo cycle of deprivation/splurging, deprivation/splurging is playing at frugality, not living it. Oddly, finding a level of frugality you CAN live with for the rest of your life is much, much easier.
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I keep a well-stocked pantry and an accurate ongoing pantry inventory. A small notebook hanging out of sight on the inside door of a pantry cabinet allows me to quickly update the list as inventory is added or used. This inventory list allows me to see at a glance exactly what is in the pantry and how much there is of each item.
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When I woke up very suddenly this morning... with the distinct feeling that something had woken me up... the room was lighting up at intervals from lights that were moving around just outside our house. The lights were too low to be lightning and not in the right place to be coming from cars driving past in the road. When I got up and went to the window, I saw two large round lights slowly moving back and forth, covering first one section of our yard and then another. It was still early, only a few minutes before four a.m., and it was still completely dark outside... no street lights here!... and all I could see was the lights. It was very obvious that the lights were not flashlights because the light was so intense and yet so strangely muted at the same time... and that at least two people were near our house doing something they shouldn't be doing.
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Have you ever noticed how many of the same people who are trying to promote a simple lifestyle make frugality into a negative concept... or how they routinely equate frugality with being cheap or miserly? Somehow frugality has become almost synonymous with deprivation and denial, and understandably, this kind of negative frugality turns most people off. It turns me off too...
The good news is that true frugality isn't like that. When frugality is based on your own values and what YOU want out of life, it can only be a positive influence. It's also important to remember that true frugality isn't just about spending less money... how you choose to spend your time and how you choose to conserve other resources should all be a part of the total equation.
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Ten years ago my husband and I were spending most of our time at work running a business we had created. Financially everything was great... the store we owned and operated was in a wonderful location, it was a spacious, attractive and newly renovated space, and the extra large office meant that our children could always be there with us. To all of us our store was like a home away from home, and the only down side was that we were spending so much time there that we never had any time or energy left for our real home or the other things we felt were more important. As the years went by, we began to realize that we never were going to have that time as long as we had the store. Still, letting go of the store was almost unthinkable because we had worked so hard to get to where we were.
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On our wedding day, my husband and I were both just out of school. Neither of us had any savings or anything of any value to bring to our marriage, but I don't remember ever worrying about finances then. My husband had just started a new job and we had rented a small furnished cottage. We had student loans to pay off, and a car payment to make. We bought a bookcase and a sofa bed and signed up for monthly payments on them. We managed to save a small amount each month and we never accumulated a large amount of debt, but still almost every cent of every paycheck had a place to go even before the check was cashed.
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One of the first things most people discover when they try to live a frugal lifestyle is that extreme frugality is almost impossible to live with long term. It's a lot like dieting. You can cut back on what you eat in a sensible way that you can live with happily for the rest of your life, or you can go on an unhealthy starvation diet that will make you miserable and is impossible to maintain. Some people try to save money by cutting so much out of their life that they end up feeling very deprived... the reason, I think, why some people get so burned out... they try too hard and deny themselves too much... almost guaranteeing that they will end up feeling impoverished and very dissatisfied with their new lifestyle.
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We had been living a simple life for many years before I discovered there was a name... voluntary simplicity... for the way we have chosen to live. Obviously, our version of voluntary simplicity... living debt-free, living close to nature, working from home, living green and without chemicals, cooking from scratch... is based on OUR personal choices, so I wouldn't expect it to be exactly like anyone else's version of the lifestyle.
However... earlier this week I was disappointed to see the voluntary simplicity movement described by one author as "learning to live poor." Equally disappointing was another author's insistence that anyone wanting to live simply must completely stop spending on wants and limit spending only to needs. Combine this with the focus on extreme purging and eliminating everything except necessities, and simple living sounds pretty grim, doesn't it? I know I wouldn't want to live that restrictive a lifestyle!
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