This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine ran a letter to the editor by Economics Professor John Lunn and Accountancy Assistant Professor Martha LaBarge, both of Hope College, Michigan. The letter comments on Paul Krugman’s article in the September 6, 2009 edition, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?”
In their letter, they note that historically, some “bubbles” never led to recessions, and they add this interesting remark:
The market system works well most of the time. Perhaps a key factor affecting whether a shock to the system or even “irrational exuberance” leads to a serious recession is the level of buffer stocks held by households and firms. When savings exist and debt levels are not inordinately high, the economy adjusts to a shock.But when debt levels are high and savings low, the bursting of bubbles in houses and equities can turn into a severe recession. (My emphasis)
How much more dead on target can you get?
This is exactly what I’ve been trying to say for lo! these many months: living within your means, refraining from purchasing objects and services that you don’t really need, and staying out of debt not only do not harm the economy, as steady long-term habits they actually benefit the economy.
A major contributing factor to the late (we hope), great deprecession was that far too many Americans took on far more debt than they could repay. Innocent of the potential consequences of the many questionable loans that were offered, people were led to pay more than properties were worth through loans whose ballooning payments they couldn’t hope to cover even if they had not lost their jobs. Not only that, but they were up to their schnozzes in credit-card debt and car loans.
Had the average man and woman on the street taken a more realistic view of their lifestyles, had they been spending no more than they earned, had they restricted borrowing to instruments whose terms and balances they could reasonably handle and to lenders that do not charge usurious rates, had they been setting aside adequate funds in savings, even the run-up and collapse in housing prices might not have pushed the economy into a recession as profound as the one we’ve been experiencing.
This brings me back to my basic thesis: Frugal living is not just the responsible thing to do. Frugal living is patriotic.
Here’s something fun and useful: check out Miss Thrifty’s Six Thrifty Uses for a Lemon. The main post has six great ideas, and readers have been adding more—including one link to an experiment that shows how to use lemons as batteries! The physicist in me fails at that stage. But since I’m a woman, my name is vanity…and lemon juice is one of my favorite frugal cosmetics. Here are a few ways to use fresh or bottled lemon juice to spruce up your daily beauty routine:
♥ Facial toner. Don’t spend a ton of money on fancy astringents to apply after you’ve washed with expensive facial cleanser. After washing your face, squeeze a little lemon juice (or use about 1/2 to 1 tsp bottled juice) into the palm of your hand and gently rub it over your face and neck. Be careful not to get it in your eyes.
♥ Neutralizer. If you wash your face with soap, you may find that it leaves your skin feeling dry and puckery. Most hand soaps are somewhat basic—they’re made with lye, after all. Acid neutralizes bases. Applying a small amount of lemon juice or diluted vinegar immediately after washing with soap will bring a quick stop to that parched sensation. If your complexion is naturally oily, a little lemon juice may eliminate the need to apply moisturizer after washing with soap.
♥ Hair rinse. There’s nothing like lemon juice to get the last of the shampoo out of long hair. Pour a little lemon juice over your hair (1/8 to 1/4 cup bottled juice to about a cup of water works well) after shampooing and before conditioning. Again: take care not to get it in your eyes—it stings just like soap.
♥ Hair brightener. Many women apply some lemon juice to their hair and let it sit, without rinsing, for an hour or two. Especially if you go out in the sunlight with lemon juice in your hair, it enhances blond highlights and subtly brightens naturally brown hair. You will need to rinse the juice out before you’re seen in public, since dried-in lemon juice will leave your hair sticky.
♥ Sunspot fade. Used two or three times a day over a number of weeks, lemon juice will lighten age spots. To make this really work, though, you have to stay out of the sun! Apply the juice to lighten spots. After the juice dries, cover the area with a good sunblock. And if the spots are on your face, be sure to use sunblock under your make-up and wear a hat when you’re going outdoors for any length of time.
In the frugal cosmetics department, here are some related posts:
The other evening La Bethulia and La Maya invited me to join them for dinner and then to do the rounds of First Friday, a sprawling monthly open house for galleries and studios in the downtown arts district. Interestingly, they invited a particularly charming friend along—let’s call him Bob ;-)—and we headed off for an Asian bistro on the west side of the Valley.
Since, contrary to the weather prediction, it wasn’t raining, we drove back into town for the large, unruly art walk. So many people were packed into downtown, we couldn’t find a place to park, so we went up to a midtown historic area called the Melrose district, which also houses a few galleries and antique stores. This area, running down for years, is beginning to gentrify as Phoenix’s answer to Seattle’s Capitol Hill. We managed to park close to a gallery right in the heart of Melrose, where we found some amazing found-art sculptures, including a nifty abstract agave, and one really very nice painting that both Bob and I were taken by.
From there we drifted across the street to an aging strip mall where a large drum circle had gathered. By the time we got there, after 9:00 p.m., they were going strong. Athletic young (and some not-so-young) belly dancers were joined by onlookers who frolicked in the street. At least one was teaching belly-dance moves to a few girl children, very entertaining.
It was a fun time, and—except for the modest cost of dinner—it didn’t lighten our wallets. First Fridays are free, though of course one is tempted to buy art, jewelry, and kitsch at the galleries.
One thing that’s clear: in retirement (or unemployment) a crucial trick is to find inexpensive or free entertainment. There’s a lot of it out there. Most of us think we have to pony up cash to be entertained. But that’s not always so.
Saturday morning we came across a club of bicyclists riding in groups through the pleasant desert and upscale neighborhoods of far north Scottsdale: an altogether free activity once you have the bike.
And the community colleges here are alive with inexpensive or outright free events, from the athletic to the theatric. Check out these possibilities:
• Complementary admission days or evenings at city museums • High-school and community college athletic events
• Meetup.com • Art walks through gallery or studio districts • Bicycling and hiking groups • Church- or synagogue-related activities • City Parks & Recreation programs
We don’t have to be job-free to develop an interest in frugal entertainment. What do you do for low-cost (preferably free!) fun?
La Maya and a cousin of La Bethulia’s dropped by early this morning to pick me up on the way to an estate sale in the fancy part of a far-flung arm of the galaxy. The house was located in the elegant suburbs of far, far, far north Scottsdale.
Actually, it dwelt in a small patch of tract houses surrounded by large, expensive late-model houses on acre-plus lots. The tract itself consisted of modestly sized structures—maybe 1,600 to 2,000 square feet—on typical tiny tract lots, what we dinosaurs would call “patio homes” but today’s mammals think of as full-sized family houses. Its saving grace was that its tiny backyard looked out over a vast swath of undisturbed open space, giving it a view across only lightly raped Sonoran desert all the way to the mountains that ring the Valley. Very pretty. Maybe even pretty enough to justify the $600,000 asking price for three tiny bedrooms, a single living area dominated by a wall of ungainly niches built to house a hulking television and an array of large speakers, and not a single wall anywhere broad enough to hold a decent bookcase.
At any rate, the owner had a flair for decorating. We got there a little late to grab the nicest things, but we did see a nice array of lovely Asian pottery and ceramics, many beautiful clothes (once incredibly expensive but all, alas, in the smaller petite sizes), and some very nice artwork. But Gini, the sale proprietor, kept slipping new things onto the countertops as buyers cleared the merchandise, and so, stepping into the kitchen at just the right moment, I scored this nice old carving set:
The blades are carbon steel, a feature much coveted in the Aptosaurus family. M’hijito loves the carbon-steel knives I passed to him after SDXB nabbed them in a yard sale and gave them to me. Tho’ they’re softer than stainless and can’t be left to corrode in a puddle of water on the drainboard, they sharpen easily and take a beautiful edge.
See those little decorative collars at the top end of the handles? Those are marked “sterling.” There’s no maker’s mark on the blade or fork, but the sterling silver deco touch suggests they’re good pieces, like everything else the woman owned. I think the handles may be bone or possibly horn, not plastic. And the blade has been sharpened many times.* The pieces have a little corrosion, as if they were put away and forgotten at some point. I’ll bet the owner inherited it, or else acquired it early in her marriage and kept it all her adult life.
Meanwhile… The tail end of Hurricane Jimena has been drifting north across the Chihuahan and Sonoran deserts, and now it has ambled into the Valley. On the way home we passed through a sharp storm cell, the lightning copious and the rain ferocious. About the time we hit the freeway it really started to fire-hose. People were pulling off onto the shoulder, but La Maya managed to make it to an offramp several miles north of our neighborhood. This put us in the middle of an electrical storm. At one point a lightning bolt struck just a few yards from us. Its C-R-R-A-C-K and BOOM shook La Maya’s sturdy RAV-4 and all three of us yelped at once!
But we outran it a little south of Thunderbird, where the North Mountains blocked the blustery clouds’ passage long enough for us to run ahead of the rain and lightning until we reached our part of town. We were mighty glad to see the rain, and just as glad to get off the road and inside a building!
It caught up with us as I was running from the car to the front door. Just had time to power down and unplug the Mac (which I had stupidly left sleeping despite the encroaching storm) and heat some breakfast before the lightning threatened to fry the local power lines. Now the noise and heavy downpour have come and gone, and we have a lovely steady rain, temperatures in the balmiest of mid-seventies. Lovely!
Next week will be very busy. I’ve fallen behind in my plan to stockpile posts, and so today’s post is today’s post. But have many things to share and so will carve out as much time as I can find this weekend to write and schedule the next few days’ entries. If I miss a day or two, it’s not because I’ve forgotten you but because this fall’s expected flood of work is starting to rise.
Why do we tend to fill our lives with dust-catchers and useless junk? Every week when the notices for the current round of estate sales arrive, my mind is filled with wonder.
What does a person do with all that stuff? Where on earth do you store it? Many houses where these estate sales take place are not huge…how do the occupants find room for the piles and piles of stuff? And why would they keep it at all? For that matter, why did they acquire it in the first place?
There’s this, for example:
Everyone needs a glass chicken, right? To go with the fake flowers. These photos aren’t the greatest, being thumbnails. But you get the (heh) picture.
Collecting is one thing I’ve never been able to understand. Why accrete a large number of useless items just because they have one trait in common—images of pigs, say? The pleasurability of this, for example, escapes me:
Scores and scores of Matchbox Cars, all in their original, unopened packaging. Someone evidently viewed this as akin to an investment, since enough people have a fixation on accruing Matchbox Cars to make them “collector’s items” and therefore, one speculates (and we do mean speculates) that someday they’ll have some outrageous value. So, we might speculate, will our house. Our stock market holdings. Our plastic hydrangeas…
They’re toys. Kids are supposed to play with them! Grabbed off the market and left to collect dust in some closet, their purpose is perverted.
Over the past couple of decades, developers have been designing houses with “plant shelves” (read “dust-collection platforms”). It also has become the vogue to install cabinetry that doesn’t go to the ceiling, possibly because high ceilings are popular and cabinets are built so cheaply these days they won’t span that much space. The result is that every newer kitchen (and many older, renovated kitchens) comes with ready-made dust-collection platforms, all of which call out to the homeowner: ohhh please: fill me with STUFF!
This kitchen scene appears in a house occupied by an interior designer, who’s in the process of unloading the high-end furnishings of her present home so she can start over in new digs:
The chintzy cabinets are in a large, expensive house:
But the developer still couldn’t see fit to provide the well-heeled (or generously financed) homeowner with cabinetry to fill the available space. So what has she done? She’s stuffed it chuckablock full with plastic plants, plastic fruit, plastic vegetables, fake duck decoys, decorative pottery, collector plates, carved wooden boxes, and basketry, all of it collecting dust and (if she cooks) kitchen grime. Makes sense, eh?
Just look at this clutter!
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She couldn’t use any of it if she wanted to: how likely is it that in the middle of cooking dinner she’s going to traipse out to the garage, drag in a ladder, climb up to somewhere near the elevated ceilings, haul down that gravy boat, drag the ladder back to the garage, and wash the dust and grease off the thing before she does anything with it?
But so pretty, you say, and you ask, “What’s wrong with this harmless expression of one’s taste and love of…junk?” Let us count the ways!
• It’s not frugal.Au contraire. It’s wasteful. Buying and stashing junk we will never use is incredibly wasteful! Think of the trips to Paris this woman could have taken with the cash she put out for all that debris. Or…think of all the food she could have contributed to charity, if she just wanted to get rid of her money.
• It’s selfish. It keeps products out of the hands of those who might use them. Case in point: the Matchbox Car fetish. When collectors grab these things off the market, it drives up the cost of nifty toys. Little boys (and yup, little girls!) who should be able to buy them with their allowances now can’t touch them. In this case, it’s akin to stealing candy from children.
• It’s not green. Consider the resources that went in to making and transporting all that pottery, basketware, and plastic foliage, just so it could sit on top of some woman’s kitchen cabinetry and collect dust!
• It creates a stupefying amount of extra work. We (or someone) will have to dust and clean all the tschochkies we’ve littered the “plant shelves,” cabinet roofs, and countertops with.
• It’s inconsiderate to the point of rudeness. After we croak over, someone is going to have to dispose of all the debris we gathered and stuffed into every closet, cabinet, nook, and cranny of the dwelling, garage, and storage shed. Why should our heirs or landlord have to spend hours (some have the privilege of spending days) gathering all the junk and finding some place to get rid of it? Why should they have to hire a company to sell Mom’s or Dad’s junk and then pack up the stuff that some other sucker wouldn’t buy and cart it to the dump?
What to do, what to do?
Well, first, let’s all refrain from collecting stuff that serves no practical purpose. If it doesn’t do something (collecting dust does not qualify as “something”), don’t get it.
Second, let’s invest our money in something better than speculative “collector’s items,” and leave the toys for the kiddies to play with. We could stash our money in a high-yield online savings account until such time as it’s accrued enough to buy into a low-load mutual fund. As investments go, savings accounts and securities are lot more likely to show some profit, a lot sooner, than will a collector’s item whose main function is to gather dust.
Third, resist! Resist buying houses that are designed with dust-collection shelves and corner-cutting cabinetry that shorts you on storage space. If you already live in one of those houses, get yourself some drywall, tape, and plaster and fill in the stupid shelves. If you know the brand and make of your cabinets, find the cabinetry maker and try to buy some matching cabinets that will fill in the space between the existing boxes and the ceiling. Don’t buy houses that give you useless space, but if you’re stuck with one, eliminate the useless space.
Fourth, at the very least, if we must have houses adorned with dust shelves, let’s refrain from filling them with dust-collectors. You could, for example, install up-lighting in them (puck lights are easy to install and very cheap at your nearby box home improvement store). Or…there’s no law against leaving them empty.
And finally, when something we don’t want anymore still has some use left on it, let’s pass it to someone else, whether by selling it or donating it, instead of saving it for a posterity that doesn’t want it.
Every now and again, a blogger agonizes over whether frugal habits lead to cheapness—or worse, will be perceived by friends and relatives as miserliness. Beyond Paycheck to Paycheck ruminates, to entertaining effect, on the wacky ideas people have about personal finance and frugality. True frugality, IMHO, does not mean asceticism, tightness, or pathological self-deprivation. So, what really is a healthy, productive frugality?
Frugality is. . .
• Independence
The frugalist knows better than to jump off a cliff just because all the other sheep do it.
• Freedom
Not until you’ve paid off your last penny of debt are you truly free to work where you please, to choose an occupation that remunerates you in something more meaningful than cash, or not to work at all.
• Common sense
True frugality recognizes the difference between penny-wise and pound-foolish.
• Charity
What goes around comes around. Over at Gather Little by Little, GLBL has been trying to explain the importance of giving for a while.
• Living light on the land
Frugality by its nature is “green.” Frugalists neither waste nor want…nor do they accumulate junk. So frugal habits tend to preserve resources of all kinds.
• Goal-setting
Pinching pennies for no other purpose than to pile up pennies is a miser’s habit. Frugal people save money for specific reasons: to get out of debt and stay out of it; to send the kids to college; to take a dream vacation; to buy a house; to accrue an emergency fund; to finance a secure retirement.
• Self-discipline
The frugal person stays on track toward the goal.
• Organization
Frugal people keep track of their finances and other aspects of their lives.
• Ambition
Frugality is self-motivation to do better in life as well as in personal finances.
• Minimalism
Frugal people furnish their lives with only what they need or truly appreciate.
• Love
Frugalists work to build a better life for those they care about: born or unborn, found or yet to be found.
• Faith
. . . in a better future.
Jamaica Sunrise, Adam L. Clevenger, Wikipedia Commons
