Who Needs

Retirement savings?
Sometimes, you just gotta have it

The Story of My Stuff, Continued

Things have settled down around here a little. It's a good thing, too. For a while there, I felt like things were just never going to get back to normal. We have this giant empty dining room in our apartment, which is bare except for a chandelier and a big armchair, and that's where my Stuff took up residence for the better part of two weeks. It wasn't pleasant, and it sure wasn't pretty.

It was kind of strange, having all this stuff all over my space all of a sudden. It was like I was being punished for all those years of blasé consumerism and mindless shopaholism. Every "purchase" button I'd ever clicked, late at night, trolling the JCrew website, was apparently coming back to bite me on the ass. I already paid for my mistakes once, in a year spent winnowing down the mountain of debt that had quietly gathered on the old Visa card. But I wasn't free yet, apparently. Because even after I'd spent a year saying no to meals out and clipping coupons diligently on Sunday mornings, watching with delight as the balance owed dropped, I still had the reckoning in store.

The Reckoning of my Crap.

Oh, the things I've hoarded. Now that I'm waxing verbose about the garbage that I've bought and kept, I might as well rattle off a list of the things that we tripped over, shifted about, cursed and eventually got rid of (but not before we paid thousands to store it, then more thousands to move it. Le sigh.)

Here are a few: a fairly cheap set of kitchen pots, a set of dishes I never used (my mother criticized them. I replaced them, and kept the old ones.) A library full of social science books I'm delighted I'll never have to read again (so why, might I ask, do i have them? ) An awful lot of indie rock CDs my brother bought for me because he wanted, desperately, for me to like them (I didn't. I'm not really an indie rock type, sorry and everything.) Suits I bought right out of undergraduate in the hopes that I'd be successful at some kind of corporate job (size two, I don't think so, not anymore, anyway.) Silk party dresses forgotten for years, love letters from a long - ago relationship, intricately embroidered shawls from my native land, beach pants from forgotten holidays. Appliances I registered for and got better versions of for my wedding. A few cheap pieces of furniture, some ill-advised pairs of shoes. A wine rack I'm too lazy to attach to the wall, framed photographs of high school friends I haven't been in touch with for years. I could go on, and on and on, but I won't bore you with an even longer list of the garbage that I've stored.

I've learned my lesson, and I've learned it well. If you don't like it enough to put it in your trunk/suitcase/ van/ whatever and bring it with you, you don't like it enough, period. Most of your stuff is, unfortunately, junk, and it is utterly replaceable (yes, I mean yours. I'm sure your crap is as crappy as my crap. It was nice crap. When I write my garage sale post, I'll tell you all about the delight the neighborhood yard sailors felt at the prospect of taking my treasures home with them. They were thrilled. It was still crap.)

There were , of course some things that I was delighted to see again. A slew of letters from my father from the time that I lived in Eastern Europe as a teenager prompted me to sit down and write him a long note about how delighted I was to be reunited with our correspondence. Some truly beloved old books- maybe two or three of the nine hundred that had taken up residence in the middle of the living room. The journals i've been keeping since I could write.

But none of that stuff is labeled JCrew , or Pottery Barn or Crate and Barrel. Nope. And it all fit in my car or van or whatever it was. There was no need for the great storage fiasco.

Stay tuned for a post on the Most Thrilling Yard Sale Ever, and the virtual retail location my home has become. Hint: the move has almost paid for itself, and there's plenty more to sell.

Where I've Been & The Story of My Stuff

Well. It's been a while.

There are a lot of reasons that I've been AWOL on this blog. There is, of course, the dissertation that never ends. Then there was a period during which I was paying homage to parents in a far-off land, a holiday that came immediately before another big move in our lives:

I finally moved in with my husband.

I know, that sounds totally weird, and the fact is, we've been married for over a year and living together for three years. The story goes like this:

Husband and I met in graduate school in another city. Husband had just finished his degree and was taking a job in another city....at around the time we met. So I road tripped out to said city with him to help him get settled aftere we'd been dating for a few months. We're still on the road trip that never really ended; because i never went home again. Instead, I basically moved out of the apartment where I lived, sort of in the middle of the night, and put everything in storage. We were in love, but the relationship was new and we weren't engaged, so I wasn't about to move .

Well, we did eventually make it official, but having lived for a year without any of my worldly possessions had made me aware of just how unnecessary they actually are, and paying the folks at Uhaul Storage $100 per month for the use of a storage locker seemed like a small price to pay to not have to confront the piles and piles of useless and apparently unnecessary stuff I used to call my own.

Nearing the thirty-month (read: three-thousand-dollar) anniversary (or whatever you want to call it) of said storage locker, we bit the bullet and admitted to ourselves that I am not going to do the frugal thing, go out to our former city, load up a u-haul, and drive said U-haul 10 hours home to our current location. Nope. So we hired a mover to do it.

The cost of professionally moving that stuff was substantially less than the cost of thirty months' worth of storage.

And we paid thirty months of storage PLUS a professional mover. Which makes us idiots. Lazy ones. That's life.

But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that when the stuff finally got delivered, there were a couple of useful and favourite old things (lots of social theory books, hooray, a gorgeous 1950s Schwinn with original parts and a working headlight, a bed for the guest bedroom so we don't have to give up our bed and go sleep on an air mattress every time we have company, yay, photographs and journals from a lifetime ago.)

I would have to say that at least 70% of it was useless junk: clothes I no longer want or which are, frankly, too young for me (tube tops, anyone? What can I say, I was in my early 20s when I put everthing into storage) knicknacks and purses and shoes I'll never wear again, novels that are worth a penny used on amazon.com, computer paraphernalia that is so outdated it might be worth something as an antique, a first-generation IPod, a printer for which the ink is more expensive than an entire new printer, and furniture so shoddy it could only have been purchased by an impoverished graduate student.

Sigh. WHY, WHY, WHY did I hang onto this stuff ? Picking through it was like having been taken back in time, or perhaps like sifting through the posessions of a person I once knew very well but hadn't seen for a while. I saw the bits and bobs of a much less happy person. It's true, I was lonely in grad school, and I did a lot of "retail therapy." My Goodness, I can't even begin to describe how much useless stuff I accumulated.

Looking through all these silly objects, half of them acquired to help me feel better about being in a cold and lonely place, made me realize how much happier I am to have found a frugal lifestyle I enjoy and which is more sustainable than the way I was living before . It was kind of a rude awakening, seeing the whole pile of stuff in the middle of my living room like that, the detritus of a much more wasteful existence. It took me more than a week to gain something even resembling "control" over it.

It's mostly gone now. I mean, junked. Rid of. I'll write another post about what became of the enormous pile of stuff. Soon.

But , in closing, wow.

Home Economics

Recently Frugal Zeitgeist blogged about the mini-memoir by top NYT economics reporter Edmund Andrews. So many people are scandalized by the fact that this guy was, of all things, an economics reporter, but the bottom line is, economics and personal finance don't have much in common. No, the rules of market capitalism do not apply to home ec. I'm a philosopher and my husband is an economist. Who's in charge of the household finances? Yours truly. Enough said.

Here are some choice phrases my husband uttered while we were living the high life and accruing massive amounts of debt:

"Debt is a sign of growth."
"Debt reduction is the same as saving."

And my all-time personal favorite,

"It rounds to zero."

As in, "well, we could buy a year's membership to the fancy gym now, or pay month-to-month for the cheap gym. In the end, the two even out and the difference rounds to zero. "

Well, this is truer in some cases than in others. When we were busy having fun and going broke, there were a lot of things that supposedly rounded to zero that didn't really. But nowadays, what we claim rounds to zero generally does, and sometimes we spring for something pricey but high-quality in favor of something that is less expensive but will require replacement, because the difference really does round to zero.

OK, enough on that, that isn't really where I was going with this entry. But I do find it entertaining that I know a surprising number of economists that are clueless about personal finance because they apply the rules of market capitalism to their home economics. ("Well, our wages are only going to go up from here, so I don't really see a point in worrying.")

The real reason that I sat down to write this entry is that that article really struck a chord in me. Maybe partly because of the whole economics expert goes broke thing, which kind of happened to us, too, but also because I recall having engaged in many similar behaviors. If you read the brief history of our budget I wrote last year, you'll see that we were nowhere close to level of spending these people were at. We don't own a home. We don't have children . We don't have an alimony payment. But we were every bit as clueless. We overspent in the fog of love. We were borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. We juggled plastic in checkout lines. We vacationed extravagantly, and believed what the creditors told us. For a low monthly fee, it would all work out in the end .

We stepped back from the brink before the recession really got started in around October of last year, and because our our line of work, we have a little more job security than most people. That said, who's to say that at the rate we were going, that wasn't us twenty years later? It was certainly the direction that we were headed in.

And now, when we talk about owning a home in the distant future, we don't talk about what we can afford and how many rooms. We're happy to wait until we can comfortably afford it. Starting my adult life at the time that this huge recession hit might mean that my view of what money is for, and what reasonable spending looks like, has been colored for life. In a way, I'm happy we learned the lesson early. No amount of granite countertops and shiny gizmos and fabulous neighborhoods is ever going to take precedence over financial stability and responsible living for us. It's clear, now, what is more important, although I don't think it really was for most of America for the last few years. It once looked like this kind of spending was worth the risk. And now an entire nation has learned otherwise.

Which brings me to my next question: have I really learned? Will I wake up, 48, tossing and turning over foreclosure? Right now, I say I won't, but there was a time when this extremely educated man's finances were probably perfectly in hand. I mean, how can it be that an individual so erudite could make such unwise decisions? Life is full of surprises, as this guy's story shows. Today, my preferences are more or less right where I Want them. I don't ever intend to go through life eating tuna noodle casserole, but we've struck a sustainable balance. Now it's a matter of keeping it.

Partway is Not The Same As Nothing.

I think that this is something that we often forget.
If you can't get the whole paper done right now, you might be glad later on that you wrote the one page that you had time for. If you don't have time to scrub the house top to bottom, you might feel better just from clearing the coats heaped on the sofa away. If you don't have the energy for a long, hard workout, maybe you will feel good by just taking a gentle walk in the sunshine.

I often put things off because I don't have a clear swath of time in which to complete a task perfectly. But when I just do a little of what I meant to - giving the bathroom a swipe, putting clothes back in the closet, clearing away the breakfast dishes, changing the water in a vase of flowers. Sometimes the tiniest task makes me feel so much more in - control. Sometimes it inspires me to do more when I feel low on energy. Sometimes, it makes me feel better even though I don't have the time to finish up.

A little something is not nothing.
And that is part of what simplicity is all about.

What Have You Given Up That You Don't Miss?

Fabulously Broke linked to this great post about what you've eliminated in your reductionist/downshifting/debt-free journey that you don't miss at all. My list is less impressive than some but we really have made a turnaround in our ways. Here's ours, sort of grafted on to No More Spending's.

What I've Given Up That I don't miss:

• Beauty Treatments.
  
• Shop-bought soap (I make my own!)
  
• Paper towels
• Ready meals
• Most Restaurant Eating. (we still do go out occasionally, I am not going to roll my own sushi.)
  
• Pre-made vegetarian meat/dairy products.
  
• Meat.
  
• Magazines
• Cd's/Music
• DVD's
• Buying lunch
• Personal trainer.
  
• Gym membership (I walk/run/do free weights & videos)
  
• Fizzy pop
• smoking
• breakfast cereal
• shop-bought bread
• credit card debt
  
• Newspapers
• Gift wrap (I was always one of those re-users, but I can't credit my frugal transformation. It was more of a matter of being to lazzy to muss about with all the different rolls of it.)
  
• grocery bags (bring my own)
  
• Bottled water
• Buying clothes just because I want them (never much of a handbags girl.)
• New books (use library or paperback swap)
• alcohol daily. (no, I don't have a drinking problem, but we used to have wine with dinner every night. we had no idea how much it cost until we cut back to wine on Saturdays only. A-mazing. )
  
• keeping up with technology.
• Parking space at work.
  
• Driving to work .
• Our second car.
• Our landline.
  

My ambition list:

• Give up cleaning items (I can't bring myself to detach from the lysol. I am convinced it is the only thing that cleans a bathroom.)
  
• The swiffer swiper (expensive refills, a good dry mop would probably not be much different.)
  
• The cinema.
• Netflix (we live in a cold climate. In January, back episodes of The Wire are our bred and butter.)
  
• Caffeine addiction .
• Student loans (we're about to take on more, I'm afraid. Yes, I'm going into my scared-rabbit mode: finish one degree, get another.)
  
• Afternoon coffees from the café downstairs. I bring my own in the morning, but I need a post lunch one. see above, caffeine addiction.
  

And the things I don't intend to give up:

• holidays
  
• champagne/dinners out on occasion with my husband.
  
• keeping my house warm in the winter. Yes, I spend $100 more on heat than your average mortal, per month, in the winter time. As a result, my house is pleasant. The cold makes me miserable, I cut back on enough things, and I want to be warm. Heat-included buildings are not an option really in this part of the country, and I love our place.)
• a grocery budget that allows me to cook gourmet meals at home.
  
• whey protein.
  
• dairy.
  
• new sport shoes whenever the old ones begin to look tatty/hurt my shins. This is important for health.
  
• wine.
  
• Sending my husband's shirts to the cleaners. I hate ironing. Hate it.
  
• Giving gifts to charities & friends. I love to buy a couple the best thing I can afford on their registry, and I like to save money each month, which we put into a charity account in our ING savings and give away at the end of the year.
  
• Beautiful stationery. It makes life better. One of my fantasies when I was single was my first stationery after I was married - I've always had personal stationery, and I couldn't wait to have the kind that had my name and my husband's at the top, with our address. First anniversary gift, by the way, is supposed to be paper!!!!
  

Where'd you get your purse?

This post  at On Simplicity got me to thinking - and finally to blogging - about something that I've been meaning to post about for some time.  

I long to be one of those women that has one-and-a-half dozen items in their closet.  I know what mine would be:  well-cut slacks, black and gray, a couple of dresses that are just conservative enough to pair with a jacket and wear to work, but might also be paired with pearls for a dinner out (Vintage?)  A pencil skirt, three impeccable blouses, some beautifully fitting jeans, two blazers, perhaps three versatile sweaters and an outfit or two to get all sweaty in (and I mean gym clothes, get your mind out of the gutter.) A little black dress, and something a little more fabulous.  One pair of heels, one pair of boots, one pair of "sensible" shoes. A purse, a briefcase, and a clutch.   Is that more than one and a half dozen?  Maybe, but not much more.  Each piece would be impeccably crafted, nicely kept, match with everything else,  and speak loudly of a crisp, elegant, distinctive personal style. 

An adolescence of retail therapy , graduate school, and about four dress sizes in as many years have made my wardrobe a little less concise, controlled, and classy (and yes, that is a real-time glimpse into my closet, my friends.  I'm rather wide of the one-and-a-half-dozen mark. )  As of this weekend, it no longer qualifies as an unholy wreck, but it's only just below par.  With the exception of a few choice items, most of it is pretty cheap, a lot of it, I don't like.  My wardrobe speaks of moods and whims, of phases and personae that I attempted to cultivate at one point or another.   Oh, that was when I was going through my houndstooth phase, I'll say as I chuck another garment on the goodwill pile. 

Why do I own so many clothes?  Well, I used to shop and dress to hide my insecurities; being well-dressed was the symbolic armor that I wore to shield myself from others' judgments.  Or I'd shop to make myself feel better, if I felt fat or ugly or unwanted I would go out and get something that would make it all go away.  Sometimes, I would see shopping as seizing an opportunity:  oh, if I don't buy this dress/bag/ boots now , it will be sold out, and  there will never be another.  I saw garments as one of a kind,  as unique, as distinctive and exquisite and filled with personality or fun.  

Do those adjectives tell you anything?  Do they seem like they should be describing something else?  Like, maybe, a really charming person?  Having a million different ways to dress yourself nicely doesn't make you a better person.  It's nice to have a sense of style, but you can achieve that with two dozen pieces as well as with two hundred, especially if you are thoughtful, if you bide your time and think each purchase through carefully.  

I can't let go of all those clothes, either , although I know I should try.  Part of the reason why is that I'm afraid of limiting my options.  What if I gain weight, and need these pants? What if I lose weight, and fit into these again?  I say to myself as I stand, garment in hand, between the muddled closet and the goodwill pile. 

As with stuff more generally- wanting it, keeping it, buying it- being able to rely on a few well-chosen pieces requires confidence, thought, and discipline.  It's so easy to go out there and by that bouclé mistake in every color JCrew is offering it in, it almost feels like a relief, for a brief and shining moment. Looking nice, well-put-together, and stylish on far less is much more of a challenge.  

But after all, it's not going to be your purse that makes you fabulous . Ever.