The New Frugality

"Clean your plate. People are starving in Bangladesh."

Story by Teresa Pelham | Illustration by Chris Kaeser

I’m not quite sure why my mother chose Bangladesh as the place to illustrate the guilt I should have felt in 1974 because I hated fish sticks and beets, but the image was shattered years later in college, when a math professor started the semester by telling the class he was from Bangladesh, yet he was downright pudgy.

Today my own kids often ask why I always talk about poor people during dinner. I might plunk down $9 on a cosmo or $150 to see Sting in concert, but throw away food? Not on my watch.

The hideous rise in fuel costs has led in the past year to an even more hideous rise in the cost of food and just about everything else we need to take care of our families, forcing all of us – even those who, on paper, should be living an affluent life – to watch our nickels.

According to the guilt-inducing Quicken accounting program, which The Husband uses to demonstrate how much I spend in various categories, we’re spending way more today than we were a year or two ago. To fill our two cars’ gas tanks in the first half of 2006 we spent $1,800, and shelled out $2,500 for the same months of 2008. No surprise there, but it’s the other stuff that is making it harder to keep the checking account balance above $2. For example, take a look at your “groceries” and “sundries” categories (sundries have always sounded like sunny and happy things to me, like bonnets and crepe paper, not paper towels and toilet paper). We’re on target to spend $2,000 more this year on Cheerios and Windex than we did in 2006. Whenever I hear people saying they want more for their kids than they had as children, I wonder if that idea should be applied only to the offspring of parents who actually suffered or went without. Most of my contemporaries had plenty growing up, so should we hope for even more for our kids? We only had Atari Pong, so should our kids have Xbox 360? Until my boys are old enough to join the Peace Corps, they will likely not grasp the idea of hunger or poverty living in a home with heat, clean water and an endless supply of Pop Tarts. So this cutting back may ultimately have a positive effect on those of us only moderately impacted by 2008’s economy. Perhaps this next generation of kids will learn to save money. Perhaps our kids will not take for granted fresh fruit or their favorite cereal since, for now, we don’t buy foods that are not on sale. While my children are presently enjoying a comfortable existence here in the Farmington Valley, my siblings and I had a different experience with money as adolescents. Because full-time employment eluded my parents for several years during my youth, I used free lunch tickets, only owned tag-sale bicycles, and ate leftover leftovers (from the days my mother worked handing out frozen pizza samples in the grocery store). That’s not to say we were poor, considering the poverty affecting people in all parts of the world, both then and now. But unlike my kids, I didn’t get on an airplane until I was almost out of high school. We couldn’t always order the class picture. We took handouts. The difference between $400 birthday parties and a Carvel ice cream cake at home is huge. Yes, we’re giving our kids more than we had, but should we? Just because we can afford to spoil our children doesn’t mean we have to.

It’s upsetting to think about what these rising costs are doing to families on the edge of poverty, or to small business owners operating without profits, like the landscaper who can barely afford to fill his crew’s gas tanks every other day. But if there is a bright side, maybe our culture of excess will become a bit leaner and we’ll become more aware of where our money is going. I am not feeling a bit Scrooge-like when I say “no” all the way down the cereal aisle; I feel smart.

During the past months, every individual and every family in America learned a trick or two to make the paycheck stretch a little further. Over the summer (in between yelling at my kids to finish the $4.19-a-gallon milk left at the bottom of the cereal bowl), I asked friends and professionals what they’ve been doing to make ends meet. Their penny-pinching tips are as varied as their income levels, yet all share the common thread of making do with less. My girlfriends, it turns out, are a bunch of tightwads. No, not really, but ask any of them how they’ve been cutting costs lately – from the at-home mom to the neurologist – and they all come off sounding like home economics teachers. Karen Cortes, a mother of three from Simsbury, washes her family’s clothes in cold water “but not for really stinky loads, like the stuff coming home from summer camp.” She heats her home using wood or pellets in three stoves and last year cut her use of home heating oil from 700 gallons a year to 400. The biggie for her this summer was to borrow a relative’s beach house for a few nights, rather than pay a few thousand dollars to rent a similar house for a week.

Sitting by the lake one day, three of my money-conscious mom friends tossed out these dollar-stretching gems: Drive the speed limit. Grow more vegetables than flowers. Unplug appliances when not in use. Split a big salad and an entrée with your dining partner (unless you’re on a first date when it would be totally lame). Don’t buy specialty coffee drinks on a daily basis. Water down juices and household cleaners. Convince your kids to share birthday parties with siblings. Barter time with talented friends rather than paying for private music lessons. Make the most of your credit card rewards. Use a clothesline. Avoid buying bottled water (that one’s mine). And then, still sunning ourselves by the lake, we handed our kids the boring brown-bag lunches we brought from home instead of sending them off for the $4.50 snack-shop hot dogs and slushies they really wanted.

Economist Nick Perna offers even larger-scale saving ideas. An economic advisor for Webster Bank, Perna is the go-to guy for reporters looking for meaty forecasting quotes (okay, he did mention that food prices are likely to go up another 5 percent, oil prices will flatten or continue to fall, and home sales will keep falling for the next six to 12 months). But this time it got personal. After realizing he recently spent $5 in gas to buy a $2.30 Starbucks espresso, Perna took stock. Not only does he now combine trips and shop around for cheap gas, he’s tackling big ticket items. The extra refrigerator in the Perna basement was sucking $500 in electricity every year. By purchasing a new fridge for $500, Perna now saves $400 each year in electricity costs. “Oh, and I’ve become a sealing monster,” he says.

Hmm?

“My wife bought me one of those vacuum sealers,” he says. “I love the thing. When meat is on sale, I go crazy.” But the Costco rotisserie chicken is his grand slam purchase. “You can easily get a few meals out of a $6 or $7 chicken,” he says. “There’s chicken salad, chicken burritos...”

He should have one of those Heloise columns.

Perna suggests that we look at the labor part of clipping coupons and shopping around as a part-time job, “Except nobody gets a piece of it,” he says. “Whatever you save is all yours. You don’t pay tax on it.”

Back in the 1970s, people (not only those living in Bangladesh) were forced to learn to live with less meat. That was when Linda Drake, nutritionist and program director of the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program at the University of Connecticut, learned some good vegetarian recipes. “I’ve been a frugal beagle for a long time,” she says. “Eating a few vegetarian meals a week is a good idea. So is having a garden.” It seems as if we’re at the mercy of the grocery stores for produce, since our growing season here in New England is short. After recently realizing that I bought $6 worth of grapes, I washed them and put them in the nicest bowl we own and displayed them before the children, pointing out that these grapes are the reason we don’t have a Nintendo Wii. The boys practically ate the stems, probably thinking Santa might be watching.

Drake has about a zillion tips for saving money at the grocery store. Knowing how to cook is the best tactic. It’s not that difficult to make your own salad dressing, she says, and you’ll not only save money by using stuff already in your cabinets, you’ll avoid the chemicals and other unpronounceable things that go into bottled varieties.

Just about everyone has developed their own money-saving tips or obsessions – just ask my niece and nephew who visited this summer and were chased through the house for their half-finished glasses of milk. Happily, we can all learn from each other. And if all else fails, I heard the Pernas are serving chicken quesadillas tonight.

Teresa Pelham is a freeelance writer based in Farmington.