On (Middle-Class) Frugality
Does cutting costs mean robbing oneself of life’s small delights?
At the beginning of last year, I decided that if I could cut my family’s weekly expenses, not including mortgage payments, to $400, then our life would be better. Optimized. Simpler. Less cluttered. There had to be a trick to it, a hack, such that if I gave up the small stuff, I’d be able to afford what I wanted the most. After spending the pandemic with my family constrained to our little house in Ottawa, I wanted to swim in the ocean; eat ripe, flavorful fruit in January; or walk through a city where I didn’t know the language.
My husband and I had been carrying a credit card balance since we’d had to replace a broken washing machine. My sister had told me to get a line of credit, but I kept thinking I could pay off the credit card debt before accruing interest on it. Interest on credit card balances turns out to be quite high. Then there were the large, once-a-year expenses, including car insurance and summer camp registration for the kids. Groceries were more expensive than they had been the year before. Our car, which needed repairs every year, would eventually be unfixable.
In an Excel spreadsheet, I modeled what would happen to our bank account if we spent only $400 a week. Quickly, the credit card debt would be paid off. Then the money would start to accumulate. By summer, we would have a surplus, enough to pay for a vacation. Looking at the numbers made me feel hopeful and oddly accomplished—it was like watching a home renovation show; I felt I’d achieved something just by watching it be done.
In my early 20s, I’d lived on $800 a month, including rent. I lived with housemates, once on a few square feet of floor meant to be a landing at the top of a staircase. I felt enriched by the cobbled-together arrangements I’d made for thrift. I’d ended up in interesting places among fascinating people. A friend I’d made in the landing-as-bedroom house officiated my wedding ceremony.
Not having enough money could make a person miserable, I knew. Too much money, I’d heard, had its own psychological consequences. But what was the relationship between money and happiness among my demographic of middle-class people with kids, mortgages, Netflix accounts, gym memberships, farm shares, and registered retirement savings plans?
I once asked my husband how many pairs of pants it is normal to own. On reality TV shows, most people have walk-in closets filled with clothes. Only a small number of the homes I’ve visited have walk-in closets. Do most people have five pairs of pants? Or 50?
Do I spend money like other people do? When I was a university student, my friend’s apartment in Montreal was burglarized, and insurance gave him money to replace the lost items. He got about $5,000 for his clothes, and I was shocked to learn that they had originally cost that much. His CD collection was worth even more.
Among my friends, I can tell whether someone owns a high-priced house or has an expensive car, but those are the only clues I can decode. How much money do they spend on food, makeup, or pet care?
A government agency called Statistics Canada gathers information every two years about how much money Canadians make and what they spend their money on. (For the past few years, the Canadian dollar has usually been worth between 70 and 80 American cents.) In 2021, the average household spent $67,126 in total, including $10,305 on food ($2,189 of that at restaurants), $21,106 on housing, and $10,099 on transportation. An average of about $2,300 was spent on clothing and accessories, a portion of which must have gone to pants.
Of course, those averages collapse a lot of very different people into one set of numbers. In 2021, this hypothetical average household spent $1,803 on tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis products and $173 on games of chance. Someone out there must have all my lottery tickets, because I’ve never bought one.
To see how I compared with the average, I went through my credit card statements and bank account to categorize expenses. Mortgage. Insurance. Food from the grocery store. Food from restaurants. Lessons for kids. Liquor store. Gas. Clothes. Recurring expenses mattered most; they were the baseline costs of my life. I read once that when people earn more money, they buy more of almost everything except potatoes. Potato consumption goes down with increased wealth.
My family spends a fairly average amount on housing. We spend more than average on food from the grocery store. We spend less on transportation, but our car is a 14-year-old Volkswagen, and I climb into it through the passenger-side door because the driver’s side doesn’t open.
I took a few economics courses in university, so I’m familiar with the idea that consumers are—to some extent—rational actors, that we make reasonable decisions about what we buy and at what price. We consider our limited means and decide what we value most. Maximize advantages and minimize loss. Whole economic models rely on this idea.
When I look at my credit card statement to see how I might meet my $400-a-week goal, I ask myself: Are these the purchases of a rational actor? Is buying $40 moisturizer at a $5 discount minimizing loss? In December, I spent $120 for my family to drive through a Christmas light show on a rainy night. (Plus the cost of gas. Plus hot chocolate.) Is kitsch viewed through a windshield somehow advantageous?
I buy things because they are near at hand, like orchids displayed near a checkout. I purchased throw pillows and a wicker laundry basket because a home goods store was close to where I’d parked on an unrelated errand. Other than food, shelter, and education, my purchases aren’t particularly rational.
Buying toothbrushes and fluoride toothpaste might save me money in dental treatments later. I suppose taking the vacuum cleaner to the repair guy and paying to have the duvets cleaned in an industrial-size washer saves money because it keeps me from having to replace these items. Prevention and repair might be to my advantage. But most of my purchases are motivated by a different, less rational drive.
Near my house is a store with a rack of discounted pet costumes for dogs, cats, and guinea pigs. For the past few years, Americans have budgeted $700 million annually for pet costumes. Which seems like a lot.
How much do I value delight? A guinea pig in a shark costume is delightful.
I took to writing down purchases on a notepad that I carried in my purse. Gift for my son to take to a birthday party: $28.99. New book of music for my daughter’s piano lessons: $25.60. Haircut for son: $25, including tip. Vitamin D tablets and Omega-3 fatty acid gummies: $36.19. New windshield wipers: $97.35 for two. It was all necessary. None of it was necessary.
After he cooks anything in boiling water, my stepfather leaves the pot on the stove so that the heat disperses into the air before he dumps the water into the sink. He plugs the drain when he takes a hot shower to retain the warmth inside the house. He bikes and has never owned a car. When he found running shoes he liked, he bought two pairs, explaining to me that shoes were only going to get more expensive. He wore the first pair for 15 years; when he took the second pair out of its box, the plastic had slightly degraded and discolored, but he wore the shoes anyway. He uses cereal boxes cut diagonally to store his files.
Recently, when I read a listicle on 50 ways to save money, I realized that my stepfather checked almost every box. He mends. He repairs. He buys used. He’s vegetarian. He keeps the thermostat low in winter. He saves on his cell phone bills by not having a cell phone. He tried to persuade an electrician to reuse the original copper wiring from the 1890s when his kitchen needed to be rewired. That isn’t to code, it turns out.
I attributed all of this to my stepfather’s desire to live in a more environmentally sustainable way. It seemed well intentioned, if occasionally embarrassing, as when a discarded pair of underwear reappeared as a rag to wipe down the baseboards. Or when he brazenly picked still-usable luggage or plastic clothes hangers from his neighbors’ garbage. Or the time he rescued an uneaten sandwich that one of his students had discarded into a wastebasket. He cannot stand to see anything go to waste, be it kilojoules of energy or, to my dismay, a mattress that he and my mother retrieved from my neighbor’s trash. They wrapped it in plastic and left it out in subzero temperatures for six weeks to kill any vermin.
“It just seems like everyone takes up so much,” he told me when I asked him about his frugality. “And I want to see if I can take up a little less.”
My mother is also thrifty. Before I was born, she lived on a commune, used a tepee as her primary residence for a year, and built a house of sorts from salvaged materials on land she’d bought for cheap in an arid part of Oregon. I cut her hair. She darns her socks and the mittens of everyone in our family. But unlike my stepfather, my mother has made a few expensive life decisions, notably: having children.
Despite my somewhat unconventional upbringing, I harbored rather mainstream hopes for a middle-class life. I expected to have a car to take my two-point-five children to their after-school activities. When I imagined the house I would someday own, it was a two-story, detached structure with a yard. Maybe a fireplace, if I was lucky. Mostly, what I hoped for was a feeling of safety when it came to money, that there would be enough, that I could afford the important things and drop $200 at a restaurant without thinking about it.
In the spring, winter coats were on sale at the local outfitters’. My winter coat is nearly 10 years old, and I wear it every day for half the year. The fake-fur trim that once adorned the hood melted when I washed it the first time. I wash this coat often. The fabric looks thinner than it once did; the seams are shiny and whitish. But it keeps me warm.
New winter coats at this store run from $800 to $1,000. But last spring, the leftovers were discounted to between $200 and $300. I walked among the racks and touched the all-weather fabrics. I called my sister and told her that I was looking at discounted winter coats. “But I don’t think I’ll get one, because eventually it will look like my current winter coat,” I said.
“That is what happens to all things,” she said. “They are new, and then they wear out. By this logic, you’ll wear that winter coat forever.”
She was not wrong. But I didn’t buy a new coat. In my head, the cost of my winter coat per use is falling every day. It’s an amazing deal.
On a treadmill at the gym that charges me $46 twice a month, where I always watch home-renovation shows on HGTV, it occurred to me that being better with money is just another way to modify myself. Writing down all my expenses is like counting calories. Checking my bank balance is like stepping on a scale. It’s about aspiration and numbers. It’s diet culture for finances.
When I put money into an education savings account for one of the kids, I feel a smug kind of high. It’s the broccoli of bank transactions. So virtuous. When I blow $100 at a bar with friends, I feel a flash of shame.
On the TV attached to the treadmill, homeowners gut their ugly, poorly designed interiors and rebuild them as airy white rooms devoid of clutter. In the gym around me, people in spandex climb imaginary stairs and perform weight-assisted chin-ups. We are all working toward self-optimization.
Not spending money is a version of self-control. I want to be disciplined and deny myself short-term pleasure in the service of—what, exactly? The ocean, yes. A trip to another country. But also an idea of myself as someone who doesn’t give in to her baser urges. There is allure in self-restraint.
By July, I had yet to meet my financial goals. We spent several thousand dollars going to my sister-in-law’s wedding in New Orleans. (Once-in-a-lifetime expense, thus okay.) I borrowed money from my mother to pay an unexpected tax bill.
But I had not bought anything off the internet. Indeed, I’d blocked the marketing emails from the companies I used to buy things from. No more organic cotton children’s clothes designed in Sweden. When my daughter cut her own hair, I didn’t take her to a salon to get it fixed; instead, I evened it out myself with kitchen scissors. I took an extra gig copyediting a dissertation for $500. These small changes made no significant difference to my bank balance.
When I looked up online how to be frugal, I found blogs by people who had saved enough money to retire young. A Canadian couple invested everything to build a seven-figure portfolio and retired at 31. Another blogger reported that if you can invest enough money so that you need only four percent of it each year to live, then you can stop working. There are a lot of these blogs. The bloggers all share the numbers behind their personal successes. “If you saved X percent of your paycheck every month and invested it well, after Y years you’d have Z wealth, and you could travel the world.”
Most of these bloggers also sell books or investment seminars. One blogger has created an index of food, for which he has tabulated the number of calories per dollar for each item. He suggests that vegetable oil is a very frugal food.
There was something appealing about the single-mindedness of these bloggers. Don’t spend money on anything that isn’t a need. Save it all. It was like intermittent fasting. So simple that it could work! It is already too late for me to retire at 31.
When I was younger, I would often run out of money toward the end of the month. I didn’t have a credit card, which is what kept me from going into debt. A friend told me recently that debt is part of adulthood. Student loans. Mortgages. The economy is set up so that most of us must take on debt to be able to do anything expensive.
After I told him about my quest, my friend Peter from high school sent me a copy of The Wealthy Barber: The Common Sense Guide to Successful Financial Planning, by David Chilton. Peter owns a house in downtown Toronto and drives an electric car that he bought new. He told me he wanted everyone he knew to learn about financial planning so that we wouldn’t “get screwed.”
The book tells you to invest 10 percent of what you make starting from your first job. It tells you to get ample life insurance and have a will to protect your family. “I have so much life insurance that it is almost fun to think about how if I died, they would be set,” Peter said to me on the phone. “Weird, I know, but they’d be rich.”
After I finished that book, Peter told me to read Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki. The ideas in this book are harder to pull off. Kiyosaki suggests using venture capital to buy real estate that you can then sell for a profit. He says you should set yourself up as a corporation and buy things, like cars, under the umbrella of the corporation, so you don’t have to pay as much tax. When I called Peter, he told me that he was, indeed, the proprietor of a limited liability corporation.
Kiyosaki’s book makes only one suggestion that could be relevant to me. He says that one should not think of one’s house as an investment. It is a liability. So don’t buy the most expensive house you can afford to live in. Buy the least expensive one.
I recently received an angry email from an ex-boyfriend. In it, he recounted that when we lived together, I was in university while he was working, and he paid for a greater portion of our expenses. After I graduated, we worked together for about a year at a small business that he had started. When we broke up, I asked for half the money we had saved from that year, which he gave me. He felt I had cheated him. More than 15 years ago.
I imagined writing back to him with the most cutting insults I could come up with. Or trying to explain why I had thought my request was fair. I did neither. How much money had I received? Should I pay it back? I deleted the email, then called several friends and asked them whether they thought I had been selfish with money. A friend from university remembered that we’d always carefully split the bill when we ate at restaurants. Peter said that I’d bought beer for our friend crew when I had extra cash, but then I’d eaten food from his parents’ cupboards when I ran out.
I had lunch with my friend Ann, who has a degree in economics. She talked about how love and money get all mixed up. I wondered whether my ex-boyfriend had struggled with money in the years since I’d known him.
I read an article in The New York Times—about how some people want to ban babies from first class on airplanes—that refers to the “customer service generation.” The dream of working hard, saving money, and giving one’s children a better life has evaporated in a society with an increasingly large gap between rich and poor, the writer argued. Now our sense of identity and control is derived from our personal consumer choices. People who save up to go on an expensive vacation don’t want their consumer experience marred by other people’s crying babies.
I read the article aloud to my husband as we sat at the kitchen table drinking coffee, our laptops open in front of us. What I liked about it was the articulation of an emotional expectation related to spending. The calculus was: enough spending equals no one gets to annoy me.
“Other people are going be irritating, no matter what,” I said. My husband nodded in agreement.
“I can’t believe people think spending money will give them control like that,” I said. My husband cocked an eyebrow at me.
“What?” I asked.
“If you feel like you can’t get the big things, you try to get the small things,” he said. “A tiny measure of control. Remind you of anyone?”
“But I’m giving up the small things to get the big things,” I said. “I’m doing the opposite.” He smiled at me and shrugged.
When we first moved in together, my husband and I realized that neither of us owned silverware because our respective housemates had always had cutlery that we could use. He bought a whole drawerful of silverware from the Salvation Army; the spoons were mismatched, old-fashioned, and beautiful. He was thrifty in a way that I admired.
Was I thinking about money too much? Was my financial asceticism improving my life? Or was it just feeding a false sense that I could control the impossible?
In November, it became clear that we needed to buy another car. Ours had broken down on a long road trip, stranding us in a motel in a small town outside Syracuse. This time, we decided, we would not buy an old car for $5,000 from a stranger we found on Craigslist. No, this time, we’d buy something just a few years old, something highly rated for safety by Consumer Reports.
My daughter cried when we told her that we would need to get rid of the old car. She begged us to just let it sit in our driveway. She grows attached to things as if they are alive.
The average used car sold in Canada that year cost $27,000 before taxes and financing. Sitting in the dealership, I kept my coat on—did the salesman notice the seams were shiny?—to show that I could leave at any time. The salesman walked us through every-other-week payments over eight years. He printed out the terms of our debt. We’d pay more than $7,000 in interest. My cheeks and neck flushed and prickled. After we signed the papers, the salesman said, “It wasn’t that bad, was it?”
The dealership took our old car in exchange for a set of winter tires.
As the days grew shorter, I was tempted to buy paper star-shaped lights to hang in the darker corners of the house. Not a necessity, of course. A small delight.
Unlike the austerity bloggers, I want some of my middle-class trappings, like piano lessons and fresh berries. There is a thin line between frugality and self-flagellation; I want my life to include small daily pleasures. I continue to think about how to balance short- and long-term desires related to money. Delight versus security.
My stepfather’s financial planner asked him recently whether he wanted to start spending some of his savings. He did. He then offered to pay for my brother to attend a stand-up comedy class. He volunteered to send my husband on a songwriting retreat. He bought my daughter an electric piano. He still doesn’t have a cell phone.
Peter suggested that I read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey. He told me his 10-year plan is to buy a house next to High Park in Toronto, a big, expensive one. “I like setting goals, hard things to work toward. It feels good,” he said. “What do you want?”
“Star-shaped lights,” I said.
