About finding balance in your life, connecting with who you are, and creating a lifestyle where you wake up each morning eagerly anticipating the day ahead.
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I found this old newspaper clipping tucked away inside one of the old 1889 diaries. The year "1889" is written in pencil in a margin on the back, but there is no identifying source on this clipping because of the way it is cut. I would guess that this clipping, like the many others that were saved in these diaries, probably came from the same newspaper that we have always assumed originated in Boston.
We have heat! It took nearly a month of telephone calls, research, lots and lots of perseverance, and a full day of exacting work, but our previously "dead" furnace is now running like new. We were hoping to repair... not replace... the furnace, and this turned out to be a problem because the part we needed didn't seem to exist. There used to be two dealers within a sixty-mile radius selling and servicing this kind of furnace. The dealer we bought the furnace from went out of business a few years ago. The other dealer is closing his business in a few months because of the recession and he had absolutely no interest in trying to help us find parts or information.
Eleven years ago my husband and I were still 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.
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.
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.
Life today for most people moves at a hectic pace. A surprising number of people are convinced that they always have to be "doing something" and are so afraid of boredom that they deliberately fill any free time with activities and planned events... multitask to take advantage of every single minute... and then wonder why their lives still feel empty. Feeling that you're just existing instead of really living each day is a horrible feeling... but life doesn't have to be like that.
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!
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.
Anyone can learn new skills. It's easier if you have someone to serve as an instructor, but "how to" books work great too. An elderly uncle showed my husband how to do electrical wiring, but he learned how to do plumbing completely from instruction manuals. Both skills were learned out of necessity when we had an empty shell of a house to finish and no money to spend on hiring professionals. The carpentry skills my husband learned grew out of the same necessity, with trial and error being his best teacher. My husband has shingled the roof, installed doors and windows, and learned how to make a perfectly smooth wall or ceiling. I have refinished furniture, painted, upholstered, made soap, cheese, slipcovers, curtains, and baskets. Together we have built porches and sheds, framed rooms, installed drywall, carpet, well pumps, bathtubs, toilets and sinks... first learning how, and working slowly and carefully until we could see we had it right. One of our proudest accomplishments is the way that we took a wild, wooded landscape and rock-filled soil and turned it into a lovely yard with a series of gardens and paths.
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.
Downshifting means working towards simple living by making conscious choices to leave materialism behind and move on to more sustainable living. It does not mean simply cutting back and trying to live the same life only with less money. Downshifting requires prioritizing, an adjustment in values, and a totally different mindset... not just a change to a more frugal way of living.
Some people think that voluntary simplicity means frugality, but voluntary simplicity and frugality are actually two different things. Although frugality is an important part of voluntary simplicity, frugality is a tool that makes the simpler lifestyle possible... not the goal. Voluntary simplicity does not mean you have to live in poverty or practice a lifestyle of self-denial. It means quite the opposite, in fact, because once you develop the habit of being frugal where it really counts, you will be able to enjoy a happier and more meaningful lifestyle, with more discretionary money and time, plus the freedom of being able to decide what to do with both.
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