Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Frugality

10 Aha Moments in 2010

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You know that feeling you get when someone says or writes something far better than you could have? I love that feeling. Here are 10 of the more memorable times it happened to me in 2010:

When anthropologists spend time with aboriginal peoples, one of the very first things they almost always comment on is that these are folks who spend so much time with their loved ones that they almost have no concept of privacy the way we do. I tend to think that is the default setting for the human brain and human psyche. I believe it’s time that we start living as Americans as if relationships are the things that matter to us the most, not  our achievement, not our possessions, not our money. – Dr. Stephen S. Ilardi

Frugality is not the same thing as cheapness … Frugality is the exact opposite. Frugality is an embracing of quality. It’s an embracing of experiences. It’s really trying to look at, what are we spending our money on? Why are we spending this money? – Chris Farrell

For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats—malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. – Rebecca Solnit

What’s really sad to me is not that people don’t send their kids out to play [anymore]. Let’s be clear what we’re talking about: get up in the morning, walk out the door, say, “Bye Mom,” and don’t come back ‘til dinnertime. And your mom has no idea where you are, or who you’re hanging out with, or what you’re doing. It’s just not an issue. That’s the kind of freedom we’re talking about. And what’s sad is not just that my kids don’t get that, that I don’t let them do that, that I don’t feel like it’s possible anymore somehow, but if I did … and when we do send our kids outside, there’s no one out there to play with. They’re just in this deserted moonscape, where something terrible happened to all the children, and they’ve been taken away. Where are they all? They’re all inside. It’s not right, and I think we know it’s not right, and I think it’s a persistent source of guilt for parents. – Michael Chabon

Whatever work I am doing –  editing a magazine or lecturing or whatever other work I am doing – I never hurry. … I say, there’s plenty of time. I don’t feel any kind of stress or strain when I do something. I do slowly, and I do with love and with care, and that way I can live a simple and slow life. I do only one thing at a time, and when I’m doing that thing, I do only that thing. – Satish Kumar

Somewhere along the line, I had stopped believing the evidence that was before me and started believing one of the central myths of modern American culture: that a family requires a pile of money just to survive in some sort of comfort and that “his and her” dual careers were an improvement over times past. – Shannon Hayes

I’m critical of these focuses on individual lifestyle changes, you know it’s our fault that there’s global warming because we didn’t ride our bike, or we didn’t recycle, or we didn’t carry our own bag to the store. Of course I think we should do all those things and we should definitely strive to live as low impact as possible. But we’re operating within a system where the current is moving us toward greater ecological devastation. So these individual actions that we can do, it’s kind of like getting better and better at swimming upstream. …. Rather than nagging our friends to take public transportation even if it takes five times as long and costs twice as much money, let’s work together to get better public transportation, so that the more ecological action is the new default. We need to make doing the right thing as easy as falling off a log… – Annie Leonard

We are so used to being in our metal-and-glass boxes that we forget how wonderful the rain is. And when the weather is good, cars isolate you from that. You don’t get to feel the sun on your shoulders, the wind in your face, the fresh smell of licorice when you pass a certain plant, see the squirrels dart past or the ducks mock you with their quack. – Leo Babauta

This is an increasingly noisy era — people shout at each other in print, at work, on TV. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they’ll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen. – Margaret J. Wheatley

Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief. … Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think and distance from normal demands. I got to stop. – Mark Bittman

* Don’t forget, tomorrow is the first day of winter and the shortest day of the year. The solstice this year coincides with a full moon – a rare event. (The next time it will happen is on December 21, 2094.) And this year there will also be a total lunar eclipse on the winter solstice starting at 1:33 A.M. eastern standard time. It’s a special day for so many reasons. You can find simple ways to celebrate here.

Who or what inspired you this year?

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Resourcefulness is Back in Style

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Resourcefulness – (n.) The ability to come up with clever ways to solve a problem.

The bad economy hasn’t been easy for my family, or for many of my friends and neighbors. But these lean times are forcing many of us to hone an incredibly useful skill: resourcefulness.

In the last few years, my husband and I have learned to build raised bed gardens, grow vegetables, raise chickens, make bread, put up a fence, prepare delicious meals from inexpensive ingredients, fix broken faucets, remedy a variety of plumbing problems, treat a handful of minor human and feline ailments, grow and harvest herbs, and on and on. We are, by the day, becoming more resourceful people.

We learned one thing early in our roles as homeowners, cat and chicken-tenders, and parents to a little person: things will go wrong. And when things go wrong, it’s tempting to (a) feel overwhelmed (and often sorry for ourselves) and (b) tote out the Yellow Pages to look for someone to call to make things better. The problem with this approach is that it’s very expensive.

So my husband and I are learning to step back when things go wrong and ask ourselves, “How can we fix this?” This simple tactic has saved us many hundreds of dollars – in the last month alone.

But it’s done so much more than that. Tapping into our ingenuity, instead of calling someone to fix things, takes away fear. When we grow confident in our ability to solve problems – or to network with our friends and neighbors to solve problems –we stop being scared of the things that may go wrong. We start trusting that we’ll be creative and clever when we need to be, and that we can find solutions to even seemingly insurmountable problems.

Of course, we can learn much about honing our inner resourcefulness from our grandparents’ generation. They (and many generations of people before them) had to master the skill. Take these stories from Ohio’s Great Depression Story Project:

We grew all our own vegetables. We had our own orchard. We had our own cows, had milk, made our own butter, did a lot of canning. My mother at one time had over 800 jars in the basement of jams, jellies, meat, fruits, vegetables, all these different things…
– Dean Bailey, age 82

Grandma made her own bread and baked it in an open hearth oven that my Grandfather had built in their backyard. I have never tasted anything as good as that since. If there were any loaves left over by her next baking day, Grandma would make an Italian dish called ‘minestra’ – made with the cut up left over bread, beans, ham hocks and dandelion greens. This was a poor man’s meal, but very nourishing. Mom and Grandma would walk to lnterlake field to pick the dandelions used in this dish.
– Mary Rose DeMaria, age 83

For a refrigerator we used an empty gallon can with a rope tied to it, which we lowered down a dug well to sit on the top of the water. That would cool a pound of bologna… For a while before we had electricity, we heated the irons that we used to do the ironing on the cook stove. We bathed in a large wash tub that was also used to wash our laundry…
– Lester Baiman, age 82

We had no cellar to store our canned food in and my dad would make a place in the garden where he would pile up straw or hay. He would put vegetables in a pile then he would put more hay or straw on them. Then, he would put burlap sacks and old coats on top of that. He would cover it all with some soil and in the winter he could dig in it and get vegetables to eat and they kept very well.
– Charles Warrick, age 81

We raised chickens (lots of chicken and eggs were on the menu), canned our garden vegetables along with apples, pears, grapes, cherry and plums. Dandelions were our first spring greens and we welcomed them after the long winter. Mom made many casseroles, pancakes, cookies, fried donuts and fritters. Sometimes we had ice for the ice box, but we often cooled many foods in a special place in the basement.
– Marian Seilheimer, age 89

There were no disposable diapers, no paper towels and no paid babysitters. Everything was used and re-used and repaired. Nothing was thrown away. You saved buttons, nails and screws in a Prince Albert tobacco can, 1# size. It was a great day when the feed company started to put feed in pretty, printed sacks. We’d tell the men to get 4 sacks alike. That would make a dress, curtains, shirts, tablecloths, etc.”
– Margaret Smith, age 94

We lived in a couple rooms at a private residence and I remember the single light bulb hanging in the combination living room/bedroom. Mother cooked on a hot plate and washed dishes in the bathroom, which we shared. No refrigerator, only a window box to use in the winter. We never had a thought in our mind that maybe we weren’t rich. Mom and Dad always had a job and everybody laughed all the time.
– Vane S. Scott, Jr., age 85

(If you enjoyed these stories, you can read many more here.)

Are you becoming more resourceful because of the bad economy? I’d love to hear about it.

Frugal isn’t cheap

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My husband and I allocate $10 to $20 of free money to ourselves each week. We call it “walking around money”. But I rarely see anything I need, so most weeks, mine ends up tucked away to be saved for later. I want to spend my money on something I’ll really value.

But I’ve always been scared that maybe I’m actually just a little bit cheap.

Some years ago, I went out for dinner occasionally with a group of coworkers. One of them, I’ll call him Mike, never ordered anything even though he seemed to have as much money as the rest of us. He asked for a glass of water and watched us eat while he drummed his fingers on the table or played with his napkin. When someone set a fork down or paused to converse, Mike would lean in. “Are you going to eat that?” he’d ask. Usually someone would push a basket of fries or a salad across the table to him.

Mike had many fine qualities, but frankly, it could be less than fun to hang out with him.

I’ve always been vigilant about paying my share, but I’ve held onto a fear that somewhere deep down, I’m cheap. I’ve just never enjoyed spending money. Malls and box stores are some of my least favorite places. And, with the exception of books (which I never seem to have enough of), I don’t really want much more stuff. I feel like I have more than enough.

So the other night, when I heard economist Chris Farrell on the radio talking about his book The New Frugality: How to Consume Less, Save More, and Live Better, I felt an almost palpable sense of relief when he said:

Frugality is not the same thing as cheapness … Frugality is the exact opposite. Frugality is an embracing of quality. It’s an embracing of experiences. It’s really trying to look at, What are we spending our money on? Why are we spending this money?

He explains that many Americans have had to become more frugal because of the sour economy. But frugality can be more fun than the mindless consuming many of us got in the habit of doing in the previous decade, because we end up spending money on what we really want. And frugality is about looking at why we’re working and what kind of difference we want to make in the world.

He also says, “Being green and being frugal, it’s the same thing, and it’s self-reinforcing.”

Yes! That’s exactly how I look at money.

You can listen to the interview with Chris Farrell on American Radioworks here.

Has the bad economy made you more frugal?