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May 6, 2009 Newsletter
"We Were Frugal, When Frugal Wasn't Cool"
I don't like country music unless it's old timey (think, "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") or bluegrass (ditto). But I have no problem borrowing the title of a 70s or 80s country music song to title this post. The fact is this: when I married my husband in 1982, I married frugal. Period.
Back then he derived most of his income from selling honey as a beekeeper with about 80 hives. We weren't "low income." We were below that! I am almost embarrassed to report what his income was when we got married, but I am also amazed that my parents let me marry a guy who made four figures a year, and at the low end of that, at that! But there was an upside. First, back then it was no shame to be poor when first married. Second, we grew about half of the food we ate, and at the time were vegatarian, almost vegan. Third, we paid almost no rent for the two room house/honey extracting house we lived in for the first year or so. Fourth, there was a university nearby (Sul Ross in Alpine, Texas), so I could go there on low income student loans for my post bacheloreate teacher certification (thank you, Reagan, for canceling the post bacheloreate student grant program I would have been eligible for!). Fifth, my husband started getting paid to help build his mother's house, not only getting paid to learn the skill of house building he would use to build our house, but also built the house in the same mountain subdivision we would eventually buy into and where we still live today. So that by the time I was ready to find my first teaching job, he was making five figures, at last. By then, we had already bought our land, and, by the second year of my teaching, we had bought our water well. By the fourth year of teaching, we had our first child, a son. Four yeard later, a daughter. By then I had quit teaching for a while, and had to go back to work only for one year in 1994. By then, living frugally was ingrained in me and I grew to love it.
But here was the reason I had to go back to work for a year. After spending ten years living frugally, after ten years of living on low income and now with two kids, we got greedy and fell into a scam pitch: commodities, in a sales pitch from a commodities trading company that was scamming ordinary futures/options buyers as part of their insider trading fraud. We know it was a fraud because the SEC sued them on behalf of investors like us when, during a one week period when it was impossible to contact this company, they bought call options on some commodity with the money they had made in commissions on selling their investors put options the investors were advised to buy from them earlier. In other words, they suckered us into buying a bet that the commodity would go down, and in the mean time they were bidding it up! Something similar to naked short selling. So, we lost it all, and only got a fraction back from the lawsuit settlement. Since we borrowed the money to invest in this scam, we had to immediately pay it back, and spent the last ten years or more paying back that debt which we had put on our credit card.
Needless to say, we have been living frugally again since that time. But in addition to paying off that credit card debt, we have been saving money and only buying what we could pay for immediately. Since we own our house and land outright, except for property taxes and covenant community maintenance fees, we do not have anywhere's close to the financial problems that many Americans have. In fact, since we have been so frugal and have spent so "wisely" (I would put it...some might say "miserly" is a better term), we can now "splurge" every now and then, debt free. For instance, if we go to the big city for my husband's business outtings, we can stay at the $80-100-a-night motels that have king sized beds, refrgierators, or even efficiencies, for more than one night and not have to worry about paying. We can eat out at restaurants and be billed for $70 or more. Go to a movie and pay almost $30 for three tickets. Go bowling. In the summer, go to a water park. And then spend about $400 stocking up on meat and groceries at Wal-Mart and Sam's. When we have auto repairs on our 15-year-old suburban (thanks mainly to the dirt roads out here), it doesn't take long to pay them off. We can even help pay for our son's college education at Texas A & M: he will have NO DEBT when he leaves college!
To make a long story short, I do not believe we will have the same level of financial difficulty that so many Americans will have or are having now in this time of bank bailouts, corporate bailouts, and federal/state/local budget cuts, and "crises" in general. We have lived at or below our means almost from day one, so it is no big deal. When we did get into financial trouble due to our desire for "something for nothing," we were able to suck it up, live in poverty like we used to a for a few years, and then come out of it stronger, as in the expression, "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." We learned our lesson and realized then and know for sure now that we had it right the first time! Live within your means!
It's the same lesson folks like my mom and dad learned from their parents and thus got through the Great Depression just fine. I suspect that the vast majority of Americans who have not learned that lesson are learning it now, or are about to.
These links here, here, and here show how frugality is becoming "trendy" again.
I didn't really want to "get political" here but let me say, regarding the passage in the House of the Kennedy-inspired new hate crimes bill, HR 249-175, that not only does this bill rip up the First Amendment to the Constitution, but it WILL spread hatred even further in this country. Even more divide and conquer by the elites used against the common people. What are the chances that this bill, if it becomes law, will even further set various racial, religious, gender, and ethnic groups against each other under the guise of preventing hate? Just as high, in my opinion, as the chances that Abe Foxman and ADL are smiling like the dickens at the passage of this bill in the House. Regardless, we must not hate, period.
And now, a video. This one is one guy's rant about the economy. He says what I think a lot of Americans feel, and at least has the forthrightness to admit he himself is part of the problem.
Don't forget, if you have a comment on this or other posts, e-mail me with your comment, and put the name of the article in the subject line.
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