Why I Became Frugal

Frugality is in my blood. My grandparents, mostly passed away now, all came of age during and in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression. My mother endured a tough childhood in a big family with uncertain sources of income. My father was a young divorcee when he married my mother and a late bloomer, starting his law career in his mid-30s after going back to school.

It’s not that my family wasn’t comfortable – we have some intergenerational wealth and there are members of my generation that do not work – but for the most part we’re proud and independent and usually do not ask for constant financial support from our elders.

Frugality is also in my wife’s blood. I know of no relative more frugal than my late father-in-law, Bruce, a man who carefully saved for his family’s financial security. Bruce was the kind of guy who kept note of every fast food joint with a senior citizen’s special. His daily treat to himself was getting the senior lunch discount at the same restaurant each specific day of the week – one day he’d eat at Wendys, ,the next at Dairy Queen, and so on. That was Bruce.

Setting Out

I was not always frugal. My parents did spoil me – a lot – and were permissive of me being a late bloomer myself. They let me move back home after an abortive attempt to move out turned bad. They let me stay in school for far too long while I tried to figure out what I was going to do with my life. They still  probably buy me too many meals on the rare occasions that we get to spend time together, and too many clothes during the year  and on holidays (though my mom’s a true believer in clearance rack and deep discount shopping). I was financially privileged, and it made me financially lazy.

I started working as soon as I was able, but my paychecks rarely lasted more than a few days. I had enough hobbies and addictions going simultaneously that I never really held onto my money. What I didn't spend keeping myself entertained or intoxicated often went to friends, or girls, or girlfriends. I've always liked spending money on other people and otherwise making them happy. Giving, for me, is a selfish act. So I spent the early years of my adult life with no net worth and on the verge of racking up debt.

My wife and I lived in my parents’ basement for the first few months we were together, eventually moving into a tiny one bedroom together to live an unmarried bare-bones existence where we easily spent as much as we earned – sometimes more. We began to rack up small amounts of consumer debt from time to time. I worked at a restaurant. She delivered pizzas. We were both still in school, in our 20s and terribly happy.

Then I lost my job.

Oh, we were in trouble as we weren’t even making ends meet yet. My restaurant job should have been easy to replace, but I didn’t want to go back to working in a kitchen. I became depressed. I was not actively seeking employment.

My depression became a spiral. I started selling marijuana to try to make ends meet. The problem, though, was that I was also a pot head at the time and I smoked most of my profits. I stopped going to class. My grades declined, I was on the verge of washing out of school. My friends seemed inclined to support my jobless, failing, directionless lifestyle, in part because I was providing them with drugs. I have no idea why my wife stayed with me through all of this and kept working a job that she absolutely hated, but she did.

Rock Bottom

Rock bottom came when I decided to leave her.

At some point in all of my depression she figured out that I’d stopped attending classes and was flunking out of school. A tearful confrontation took place. I quit a band I was playing bass in because now not only did I have no money and no job, but I was about to lose access to an education AND my relationship was beginning to fragment. I couldn’t focus energy on my side pursuits like being in a band, so I told my bandmates I was done.

Days later, I figured I wasn’t good enough for Cheryl anymore. Taking a page from the Homer Simpson school of relationship idiocy, while she was at work I wrote a note to her and left it on our dinner table, telling her that I still loved her but couldn’t stay with her until I proved myself “worthy” somehow, worthy in my mind being employment and academic success of some sort. Signing the note, I walked to a friend’s house, penniless, and asked for a drink.

I drank the afternoon away with my friend, watching television and shooting the bull, when there was a loud knock on the door.

It was Cheryl, and she was not happy. I believe the phrase “leave me again with a note and I’ll fucking kill you” was uttered. I was drunk and unable to argue coherently. She slapped me. I don’t remember much of the argument except that it ended in tears and in each others’ arms.

Things got better from there. I did get another job – not a career job, mind you, but a nice paying hospital gig. I eventually took responsibility for and control over my own finances. We were doing quite well, even compared to our peers who were not late bloomers. As our 20s became our 30s, we were wrapping up our educations.

Two Steps Back

I chose journalism because I’ve always loved writing, and I’ve always loved learning – and I saw a way to get paid for doing both. The problem, though, is that you typically don’t get paid much as a journalist, especially at entry level.

The first job I took was in far northern New York, which necessitated a move from Lexington, Ky. to the Canadian border. My pay was cut almost in half, while my cost of living nearly doubled. My wife would have to give up her job to move with me. Financially, we were pointed towards a situation close to rock bottom.

That was in 2011. I was 30, she was 31. We lived on one income of approximately $25,000 in one of the most expensive states in the country – mind you, it was one of the least expensive areas of a very expensive state, but we still had to pay New York prices for food and fuel and household products. Life became very difficult, very quickly.

My first task was to figure out exactly where our money was going. I’ve been through several computers since then and do not have the scratch work I did to arrange our budget, but I literally tracked every expense and cut back where possible.

Bachelor Chow

Gas at the time was over $4 a gallon in northern New York. I didn’t waste a mile in my car – and living in an area as sparsely populated as St. Lawrence County meant that seeing a friend or going to a store often involved miles of driving.

I invented a terrible dish, inspired by frugal eaters, that consisted of boxed macaroni and cheese, canned tuna, onion and green pepper. I called it “bachelor chow” after a throw-away joke from one of our favorite cartoons, Futurama.

We cut back on our vices – Cheryl and I were both smokers at the time and we started to smoke less. I was still a drinker, but I cut back to cheaper beer brands, and then cut most of my drinking altogether. My company eventually hired Cheryl to use a very small portion of her graphic design talents as a paginator. I received a promotion after a year with the company and took a modest raise – hand-in-hand with the promotion came a 45-mile daily commute, pretty much eliminating a good chunk of the additional money.

Then the hospital bills happened. I injured my arm mowing the lawn – I’m not sure  if Cheryl had a hospital visit during our northern New York experience – and incurred medical bills totaling several thousand dollars. I did not qualify for indigent care or support from the local hospital, and I was unable to afford the monthly payments they proposed as part of a payment plan. The bills eventually went to collection agencies.

Then, in 2013, a life preserver came from a colleague that took me to the Jersey Shore. The move entailed another step up in cost of living, but also higher wages and better job prospects for Cheryl. For the first few months, we were back to living on a single income and we were not doing much better than we were in New York.

Out of New York

Thankfully, we were able to apply the lessons in budgeting and frugality we had learned in New York to our life in New Jersey. Leisure usually involved walks to the beach. We figured out the places in New Jersey where we could get onto the beach for free.  We grew a circle of close friends whose idea of fun didn’t involve spending hours and scores of dollars in bars or clubs. We ate simply, but well and in a healthy manner.

Eventually, Cheryl did find a good job which she has held for several years. I, on the other hand, have had the chance to enjoy the volatility of the journalism business, enduring two different rounds of layoffs before settling in my current position in 2015. In 2017, we enjoyed our first vacation in more than a decade. We bought a home a month after returning from our trip. Life is on the up-swing. The challenge now is not learning how to cut corners and be frugal, but how and where to spend more, and to spend the additional money effectively while increasing our savings rates.

If you're wondering why I don't address the "retire early" part of FIRE, there you have it - I'm a late bloomer, for my household a retirement by the age of 67 would be the rough equivalent of a mid-50s retirement for a household with earners who got out of school at 22 and were well into their careers at 30, rather than out of school at 30 and well into their careers today. As it so happens, with the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis, many young generation xers/older millennials are in similar situations to Cheryl and I. While I plan on taking a holistic view of finance, when I write personal posts, they should resonate most with these 'X-ennials.' 

I don’t want frugality to be the over-arching topic of this blog, however, I think it will be important to revisit my lessons on frugality from time to time – I’ll even post some frugal recipes at some  point (no bachelor chow, unless it’s a request – it’s mindnumbingly easy to make, but hard to eat). The experience of cutting myself off to some extent from family help and learning to be independent shouldn’t be unique, but I believe that it is unusual and atypical. In the end, I needed the hardships I encountered to grow up and not be the 35-year-old child couchsurfing their way through life.

Yet I put my self – and my wife – through some hard times with some of my poor and mediocre choices. I’d like to hope that we’ve emerged better for it.