Frugal in the Fruitlands

Pun fully intended.

Last night, as my husband and I drove home together, I was feeling positive for the first time in months about our finances. Over the past year, we had built a small emergency fund, replaced one of our ugly, high-interest credit cards with a card with 7.99% APR, cut back on our expenses, and paid off thousands of dollars extra on our high-interest second mortgage. In addition, we expect a large tax refund this year (and yes, I know a tax refund is simply an interest-free loan to the federal government - but that’s a conversation for another day). I had changed my payroll allocations just that day so that I was putting $20 a month into savings, and we were about to schedule an appointment with our mortgage lender to see if we could refinance into a better interest rate. I held hands with Matt and thanked him for everything he had done to help our financial situation over the past year.

And then this morning…

… the brakes went out on the Tercel as Matt after he dropped me off at work today.

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Entertainment is a contentious issue in my household. This is in part due to differences between my husband and me.

He: finishes games and books consistently. I’m easily distracted (ooh shiny!) and I can count on one hand the number of games I’ve actually finished.

He: doesn’t have a lot of creative pursuits, long-term goals, etc. I suppose some people may see this as a failing, but he is actually a damn good example, I think, of the Zen idea of “goallessness.” He really does just live for the moment.

So it’s taking us a while to work out the monthly entertainment expenses issue.

He agreed with me that we should cancel Netflix until we get through our backlog. Netflix: cancelled. To celebrate, I’m going to put that $17.84 per month into savings.

The MMOs are the most contentious issue, because, again, his entertainment backlog is shorter than mine. Plus we both like games, but few games give us the opportunity for teamwork and togetherness that we both value - most multiplayer games are competitive, not cooperative. MMOs are good in this respect. Of course, there are other alternatives - but Matt makes a good point that a lot of these options, in the long term, would lead to us buying more and more $40-50 games. I guess we could rent them, too, but I just discovered that a membership to GameFly - the game equivalent of Netflix - starts at $15.99 a month for one game out. So… this is better than an MMO how?

For now, since our WoW subscription just auto-renewed, we will see how much we play it in the next month, and cancel if we don’t put any more time into it. It is less expensive than City of Heroes, it’s true, but if neither of us wants to play it, it’s not a bargain.

The cable subscription stays, for now. Neither of us really like the options we have if we cancel it. Most of our shows are available streaming on their respective websites, but huddling around my computer monitor is not my idea of quality “together” time.

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In my hand I hold the December 2007 issue of Real Simple. At roughly $5 a pop, it’s not a magazine I frequently buy. Or ever, really. But back in November, I was stuck in the Cleveland airport for an ungodly amount of time, returning from a business trip, and I decided to pick up a copy. I’d been meaning to take a deeper look at this magazine, which at first glance struck me as not particularly real or simple. I figured that, if nothing else, my $5 investment would net me a good Spendthrift Sunday article.

I was not disappointed.

First of all, like many magazines, it’s in large part ads. 215 of the magazine’s 396 pages contained ads - most of those 215 ads were whole-page or multiple page ads. That’s right - 55% of the magazine was advertising. This is not counting the inside back and front covers, which were also ads; or the fact that most of the articles, were, in fact, product recommendations. Let’s take a look at some of these articles:

“How sweet it is” gives details on holding a cookie decorating party. This party is incomplete, of course, without bakery boxes ($1.30 a pop), copper cookie cutters ($13 a pop), and for that very special holiday cheer, Wilton cookie icing ($4.50).

“Your days are numbered,” a feature on using your calendar effectively, featuring ‘Real Simple picks’ such as a $31 “6-inch personal pocket journal.” But wait! It can be embossed! And has city maps!

“Black magic,” a fashion spread of “little black dresses” - including one for $1,130, and several in the $400-700 range.

Let us not forget the ever-helpful “Real Simple To-Do” list at the back (2 1/2 pages), which offers a handy-dandy guide to all the advertisements found within the pages. This is followed by another four pages of “Simply shopping,” with even more items to lust after, such as a device to “scan, read, and organize” your receipts. Because I guess, if you’re reading this magazine and buying $1,000 dresses, you need to be clipping coupons, amirite?

In case you’re wondering who is behind this drivel, look no farther than Steve Sachs, the publisher of Real Simple. Apparently he’s been quite good for the company. Of course, some of the articles about him highlight what Real Simple is really about:

One of Sachs’s biggest successes has come in an area that most consumer marketers are finding difficult to tap into: Partnership marketing. As Real Simple’s consumer marketing director, Sachs oversaw the development of partnerships with companies such as Coca-Cola, Pottery Barn, and Whole Foods-partnerships that netted the magazine more than 200,000 new subs.

Partnership marketing. Who is profiting from my $5 “investment” in this rag? Not only Steve Sachs, apparently, but Coca-Cola, Pottery Barn, Whole Foods, and others. Unsurprisingly, you find advertisements for all three of these in the pages of December 2007’s issue.

Since I work in advertising, in my own way, I love taglines. Real Simple’s tagline is “life made easier.” This life appears, then, to be a life of unitaskers - a world where no product can stand in for another; where we need exactly the “best product for dry skin,” exactly the right cleaning products from Target, exactly the right cookie icing. However, it is telling that none of these articles say much about where to store your cookie icing when you’re done with it, unless it’s to sell you a cookie icing organizer. It doesn’t mention that you’ll need to dust that new tchotchke, except, perhaps, to recommend an environmentally-unfriendly, non-biodegradable product with which to dust it. The entire magazine is based on the premise that stuff will make your life easier; but doesn’t recognize the kind of escalation that results from this attitude, that ultimately, you will need more stuff to solve the problems the stuff caused in the first place.

Interestingly, the average American doesn’t need to turn to a $5 magazine to tell them how to simplify their lives. Voluntary Simplicity, the seminal work of the VS moment, tells the stories of many individuals who managed to simplify their life. In large part they did it by turning of the stuff machine and tuning out the advertising drivel.

But that isn’t as sexy, and doesn’t sell slick magazines, does it?

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The Simple Dollar’s post today, “Maximizing the Free (or Nearly Free) Things That Make You Feel Good,” got me thinking.

If I read through my library of unread books…
Played through my library of unplayed games…
Watched all my unwatched DVDs or downloads…
Knitted through my yarn stash….

… it’d keep me entertained for the rest of my life. Just off the top of my head, I could: read the first four books of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, finish playing Oblivion (hell, play through the two Morrowind expansions that I never got through), watch all of Irresponsible Captain Tylor, and learn to make socks.

And this is ignoring such things as board games, which can be played again and again, and of which we have a sizable collection.

So why are we paying for two MMO subscriptions, a 3-per Netflix account, and cable? By eliminating those services, it would save us $188 per month. ($31.98 for two WoW accounts, $39.98 for two CoH accounts, $98 for cable - though that includes cable Internet, and they can have my bandwidth when they pry it from my cold, dead hands - and $17.84 for Netflix), or $2,256 per year, or $15,453 in 5 years (if invested at a conservative 4% interest and compounded annually). That might even buy you a sandwich in 2013 dollars!

Question to readers, and to my husband (the most important reader): How can we realistically cut back on these services and not resign my husband to a life of Wii Tennis?

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This is a question that has bothered me since I started this blog: if money were no object, would I still want to live frugally and simply? I mean, it’s only voluntary simplicity if it’s voluntary, right?

Well, one could argue I don’t live all that frugally or simply now - this blog has always been about the journey, and currently the best I can do is to live out of sync with the consumerist culture I inhabit. When I think of the crushing weight of my mortgage, it’s handy to reflect on women who spend upwards of $1,000 a month on their beauty routine.

I think the conclusion I’ve come to is this: If I were independently wealthy, I would “invest” more heavily in sensual, temporary pleasures. I would do almost no cooking or eating at home, unless Matt was moved to make one of his extra-special dinners. I would buy a subscription to a tea-of-the-month club. I would buy more perfume oils. This stems from an observation that my joy results not from having stuff, but from fleeting experiences. Some of my happiest moments have been sitting in bed with a cup of tea, reading H.P. Lovecraft, and smelling the warm blend of smells coming from my bureau, where I keep my perfumes.

Most importantly, though, I would harness the extra money to break the chains of full-time employment. I don’t mean I would necessarily quit my job - but I wouldn’t live in fear of being fired, and I wouldn’t be afraid to pursue my passions. Work can be transformational when you’re not afraid.

But if I were wealthy, I would still use the public library, in part because I find it such a welcoming place. I would still go to garage sales. I would still not buy a gym membership. I can’t imagine investing more in my beauty regime - I’ve never worn makeup, never shown much of an interest in fashion, and my idea of “put-together” is clean and with clothes that match.

On some level I worry that every cent I spend above my basic needs is snatching food out of the mouths of poor children. But down-shifting is so much more difficult than improving the quality of life. We are constantly swayed to improve the quality of our life, and it takes a great deal of conscious effort to examine our crap and decide it doesn’t fit with the person we want to be.

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It’s happened to most of us before - we’re commuting to work, listening to the radio and the sound of our stomaches grumbling, when we hear a commercial. Maybe it’s for a candy bar, a breakfast sandwich, or the newest latte - but suddenly we start craving whatever it is being advertised.

Or maybe that doesn’t describe you at all. Maybe you’re savvy to the way advertising works, and you just say to yourself, “Meh, I can have a (free) cup of coffee when I get to the office and some oatmeal.” You drive on, smug in how you avoided the trap that millions of others fall prey to.

Most advertising, though, is more insidious than this; it preys on emotion more than base needs. I work selling colleges to high school students and their parents, and I know that what we aim for is not to sell facts - 13:1 student:faculty ratio, hands-on learning experience, study abroad opportunities - but the idea that a student will fit in there; that it will feel like home.

Advertising fills your mind and heart and displaces your values. That may sound extreme, but hear me out:
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