Frugal Seasons

When I was hemming my new white jeans, I flubbed the job.  I not only sewed it wrong twice, but I also cut it wrong before I'd caught my mistake the second time around.  Sigh.  When I told John that I hoped the pants didn't shrink, he commented, "If they do, then you'll buy new."   I felt protests rise upon my lips.  "But these are new!"  "But I just bought these!"  "But...." I stopped each one before it was ever uttered.  The truth is that if I'd really made a huge mistake in hemming these pants, then I'd move them to my drawer to wear around the house and I'd buy another pair.  We're not going belly up over another $30.

This morning, I was thinking of that conversation and realized that I've lived through many frugal seasons.  I have always been frugal, but the degree of frugality is directly linked to the needs of my life at the time.

When I first married at age 19, I was laid off from my job in our first year of marriage.  We had a house payment, two car payments, insurances, and life necessities.    I quickly learned what to do to save as much money as I possibly could, especially since my first husband felt that food for basic nutrition was unnecessary.   This was my introduction to eating on a budget that I have ended up using for the whole of my life but this season of frugality was all about have to and needs must.   We went without.  We picked up glass soda bottles from roadside and turned them in for deposits just so we could buy a fast food breakfast out once a month.  

I learned many frugal lessons in the years of that financially and emotionally unstable marriage.   When I entered the work force, I didn't understand why we still struggled though it was a little easier than it had been.   I didn't know of the financial infidelity my husband was committing until he was called for duty to the Gulf War.  Suddenly not only was I parenting on my own and struggling to make ends meet (he never sent any of his pay home during that short season) but I was getting phone calls from multiple agencies to whom he owed money.  I learned that you can have quite a good income but if you owe more than you make you won't be free of the need to be frugal.

 These years of my life set me up to manage very well indeed when I was a single parent with no child support and later when  John and I combined households and I went through a spell of unemployment.  After a year of not finding any sort of work, I was able to get a temporary position that turned into a full time job.   We didn't have funds enough to save much but we attempted to save anyway.  Most everything we made was spent on basic necessities.  Thankfully our rent was very low and I knew how to stretch a meal!  If a child needed shoes or clothing, we saved a little each pay period until we could go buy the needed things.  

Eventually we were able to buy a home to put here on this land.  Those were tight years for us but our lives changed very gradually.  We set up our household here.  We were a smaller family as the two older children  moved out.   A job that paid well for a short season enabled us to pay off a few of the moving debts but I can't tell you life was noticeably better.  All those years of frugal living that had gone before, stood us in good stead.

Eventually John and I each had jobs that paid equally as well.  We were still plodding along but things had eased financially for us a little.  However, with our second child graduating  and planning to move on into her own life, I found myself in a position where I had no child care for Katie.  We were uneasy with Sam being at home alone, too, though he was 13.   

I was a latch key child from age 7 and I remembered too well the sick anxiety of caring for younger siblings and the fears and insecurities of being expected to carry adult responsibilities at such a young age.  We looked at many options and ran figures for each scenario.  In the end, as well paid as I was at the time, it came down to cold hard facts.  If we employed any of the options I was going to be working for $0 a month by the time we'd paid the added expenses that each option presented.  I was shocked when we realized that if I left my job, we'd really only lose $100 a month.  I changed our car insurance, saved that sum per month immediately and John and I agreed I'd leave my job and become a stay at home mom.

A new and different season of frugality began.    This one we went into willingly.  It wasn't a 'have to' season of frugality.  It was a "We choose to...." season.  And while it all looked the same on the outside, we both felt we had real purpose in this particular season and a common goal in doing all we could to make our budget work. 

The day came when John said to me, "I want to be debt free...these four things are what are holding us in debt."  I shivered as I'd looked at his list because frankly we'd just been through some mighty lean years of living and we had just come into a season that had eased our situation slightly.  The total of what we owed was daunting, too.  I represented a lot less than most peoples debt but for us, with only one working, it was several years worth of salary required to pay that off.  But I was intrigued as much as I was scared.   I wanted to be debt free, too.  How and where could we tighten our budget any further?  Truth told, I was getting a bit weary of living frugally.  

However, we came into agreement and we began looking for ways to save further.  I found items to sell on eBay.  I started cleaning my mother's house twice a month.  We counted all sorts of savings.   If we chose to skip buying a soda, we put that change aside in a jar and when we came home to eat instead of grabbing fast food, we put the savings aside.  If I found an item cheaper at one store than another, we bought the cheaper item and saved the pennies we netted.   If John worked an extra shift we saved that money. Within the first year we'd completely paid off a small loan.   I learned in this season of frugality that truly small amounts of money that seemed too small to fret over, once saved and combined, could make a greater than imagined impact if you were serious about getting out of debt.  Some months that extra was $25...Others it might be $250.  The key was to keep doing all we could and to save, save, save.  We paid off a small loan that we'd been paying on for years and rolled that amount over to the next debt, along with any additional sums we could manage each month.

We tackled the credit card debt next.  That added amount was a start but not quite enough.   We changed how we used credit cards, too.  If we used any of our cards, we wrote down the amount as a debit from our account right away.  We pretended we'd paid cash and that money no longer existed.   And then that debt was paid off and we started trying to pay the car loan off.    The day we paid off the car, my eBay sales dropped to $0.  I couldn't make a sale for anything.  We had no clue how we'd keep the momentum going to pay off our home. 

I've shared before that during this season of time my Grandmother, Uncle (my father's brother) and finally my father died.  My family didn't leave much behind.  My uncle had no personal property and my father, too, was without personal property and had only a small bank account.  My father told me when Grandmother died that he intended to hold on to his share of my grandmother's home and when he died it would be left to my brother and myself.  As it happened my uncle died and then my father, so my brother and I inherited my Grandmother's property.   

Grandmother's home was old,  needed work and was in a very  rural area much like our own with low real estate values.   I wouldn't have taken bets my brother and I would realize much  but eventually the legalities were all sorted out and the house was sold.  The amount the house sold for was not high.  John and I were determined however that we'd pay as much as we could of our house debt with whatever I received.   We had $250 left after we'd paid tithe on the money and wrote the check to pay off our home.  We'd lived here for ten years and not one penny of all the payments we'd made ever applied towards the principal of our loan.  It had taken five years of saving and earning extra where we could and going without all sorts of things, big and small but we'd paid off all our debts.

Did that end our frugal years?  No.  You see, at that point,  we knew we needed to look towards retirement years.   We knew we'd need to replace furnishings and do some major maintenance work on our home.  We'd need to eventually replace our cars.   We knew all too well that life happens and you can be flush with cash one day and broke as broke the same day if life took a turn.

We entered a new frugal season, one geared towards our retirement years.   We took our former house payment and turned it into savings each month.  When we needed to replace our cars or we had to do work on the house (AC, new roof, new flooring, etc.) we paid cash.  Cash.  We'd borrow the money from ourselves and we'd pay it back just as if it were a loan with interest.  If, as in the year when I was hospitalized with pulmonary embolisms and we found ourselves with medical bills coming in faster than we could pay them, we did take out a real loan we paid it off in double time.  We kept using the same means: an extra shift here, a week without grocery shopping, a gift of money...it all went to paying off that loan.  And we saved, saved, saved every month.  We never stopped saving just because we had a loan payment. We tightened our belts still more.

This past year we entered still another frugal season, one called "Retirement".   When John retired, we knew we had a limited retirement income at best and we were counting on that 'entitlement' social security we'd been paying for all our working years to close the gap.   The day we signed paperwork to cash out our retirement account, the stock market crashed.  Suddenly we found ourselves with a social security check and nothing more.  I'm not saying we lost everything.  We did not.  Thanks to a very savvy investment counselor who coached us we delayed withdrawal and recouped very well.   We also learned  through his counsel that if we waited a few years more we'd save thousands in taxes.    Hearing that made the choice to choose another season of frugality easy.  It meant we'd live on about half what John had made monthly while working but we didn't fret.  We knew we could manage just fine.  Savings might be decreased for a short season but we'd get through and so we did.  

This year, I qualify for social security.   We won't be changing a whole lot about our lives.  I want  to slip away from home a little more often but our travel won't be costly.  I'm discovering as we grow older our needs are decreasing.  Things last longer when there are two adults and the children are grown.  Confidence has grown, too.  Frugal seasons will always come and go.   I am so grateful for the experiences these years brought us so that we could live peacefully and sure of our ability to manage just fine.