Frugality is Back

My mother in law would be proud. Apparently, seventy percent of the elderly population in the United Kingdom are reverting back to the frugal methods for conserving funds that many of them learned during and immediately after World War II. My mother in law never forgot those lessons. She was a toddler when the London blitz began, and her formative years were spent in a country where what we would consider basic necessities, like soap for example, were considered luxuries.

Since then, she has always believed in cutting costs and finding bargains. As a single mother raising three children in South Africa, this was essential. Sure, she came from an upper middle class family, and her parents could have and would have helped her more than they did, but in so doing, they might have made her dependent on them rather than the independent entrepreneur that she later became. Now, we don't see eye to eye on every issue, but the lessons her own life teaches us about living a frugal life have begun to resonate among younger generations.

Risk takers have been vilified where once they were held up as heroes. We see this in an American culture that venerated those who made easy money and relegated those who worked hard and saved as fools. You would never find something like this article I just read online about an elderly woman who had put all her savings into the stock market. The author talks about her with disdain, and perhaps this is for good reason. It is because of the ever greater risks that people took most recently in the US housing market that the world economy began to fray at the edges.

But attitudes are changing , and the idea of cocooning, spending more time at home than out spending money, has come back into vogue. The home is becoming more of a haven for entertainment with the Internet and electronic gadgets. You don't even have to leave home to shop anymore. Retail clothing outlets in the US have been closing as people stop spending and consumers become tighter with their money. Even people who work in the financial sector are seeing their companies being frugal with their money, questioning small purchases and getting tighter with their funds. To quote an asset manager in London: "All our expenses are being looked at down to the last penny – someone was questioned the other day on a claim of 75p for a newspaper. It’s as bad as being an MP."

While other retailers are cutting back, discount stores like Wal-mart are seeing new customers come into their stores as they abandon other, higher priced retail outlets. These new shoppers spend some forty percent more than the typical Wal-mart shopper. As a California lawyer that has become a regular Wal-mart shopper said, “If I am able to get good stuff at Wal-Mart, and I am able to save money, why would I change?”

I am full of hope for the future. I believe this new/old way of thinking that is now making a comeback will take us towards where we want to be as human beings, building a sustainable lifestyle based not on plundering the world's resources but on finding ways to reduce, reuse, and recycle. There are new ways we can invest in the future, and technology holds the key.

An article by Shel Horowitz advises those who have never lived in poverty on how it can be ended, and in this article he lists a number of things that not only the poor, but all of us, should be encouraging. He pushes for the massive introduction of alternative energy sources such as solar and wind, decriminalization of offenses for illicit drug use that takes otherwise productive citizens out of society and puts into prisons, revitalizing mass transit on which the poor depend for transportation, organic gardening, and a number of other things that would make us wealthier as a society. The days of greed being good are gone, and there is a storm brewing on the horizon. People are angry that the very people they view as causing this economic crisis, the bank executives and speculators in the financial markets, are the same ones that are now getting bailed out. Again, Shel Horwitz quite fittingly lambasts those who took the bailouts and praises the Obama administration for freezing the salaries of executives of companies that have received bail out money.

It is time for us to get back to the basics, and to get back to a world view espoused by mother in law. One of her favorite sayings is "Cut your cloak according to your cloth." This essentially means that we should take what we have and make from it what we can rather than wishing we had more, or borrowing to attain it. Creating wealth does not entail taking on loads of debt. If you can save a buck by making your own food from scratch, rather than going out to eat or eating prepared meals, then that is what you should do. Leftovers should be eaten, clothes should be mended rather than buying new, and growing vegetables in a garden, something my father taught us to do as children, is something we should start doing again. We should all look at what we do and the way we spend our money, because it is through hard work and savings that real wealth is made.