Last week, I rinsed off and hastily dried the detachable head of my toothbrush, and as I went to click it back on its stand, it fumbled around and fell. Like for everything else so far that morning, the pull of Earth’s gravity seemed to outweigh any intentions I had to hang on to an inanimate object - I’d already knocked my hairbrush, a water bottle, and a cat’s bowl to the floor. Mysteriously, I had managed to stay upright.
I peered over the side of the sink. There, on top of a paper towel I’d used to pick up the cat’s dirty mess the day before, was the brush head. Perched near the top of the trash can, it beckoned, mocking … reminding me I’d only taken it out of the package a few weeks ago and the bristles hadn’t been broken and made shaggy yet.
“Nope,” I told it, reaching instead for a replacement from the remaining package of three I’d bought discount by mail order off of Groupon. I mean, I’m cheap, but I’m not THAT bad. Not even if I did think for a split second of plucking the sullied brush head out of the trash and giving it a good Listerine-ing.
If you’re making a face reading this and thinking *How could she* - you have clearly never been poor. And if you’re reading this and thinking *How did she NOT* - you’ve clearly known me too long.
Some people judiciously call my habits “frugal.” People who know me have called me “cheap” or “tight” or, sometimes - rather cruelly, I might add - “Ann.” My sister makes jokes about the dust motes escaping my wallet when I buy anything besides necessities for the house or food. My friend Nat has expressed sad sympathy for Lincoln because of my nickel-squeezing. My own mother used to sigh profoundly while wondering if there had been a mixup at the hospital (well, probably not only because of my frugality).
Many of us tightwads haven’t always been this way. I can fondly recall throwing around cash and credit for various scented lotions at Bath & Body Works and TJ Maxx in my twenties. I still have a sizable cache of colorful stationery and blank journal books bearing unusual sigils or prints from when I collected clearance papers and notes at around the same time in life. I used to go out for drinks with friends, to dinners for no special reason, and bought books like harvesting trees was about to be outlawed.
Too many of us have a story about jobs, or marriages, or life not going quite as planned, and as a result being in financial straits for a while. Learning to stretch a dollar further becomes necessary, and it can even lead to some useful insights. For instance, I learned I really DO have a difficult time losing weight no matter the effort exerted - it’s something I had suspected from earlier efforts in life, but there’s nothing like not being able to afford more than two small meals a day while working several jobs and walking roughly three miles each day for several months straight, to find out what a stubbornly uncrackable walnut your body can really be.
Other insights are more whimsical, such as conducting field tests with your car to see how many miles it can go after the fuel light comes on before you need to stop for at least a few dollars’ worth of gas. My peak research period on this was pre-2009, during the height of mounting oil prices, when basic unleaded went as high as nearly $4.50 a gallon. While I did get an answer to these impromptu experiments (answer: approximately 23 miles), I also learned about other affecting factors - namely, that you shouldn’t attempt steep hills when you’re on mile 18 past the “E” light, unless you also want to find out how to stop a car from rolling backwards when your power brakes go out (answer: cut the steering wheel frantically until your rear tires are in a stranger’s muddy yard - and I do mean frantically, since the power steering is also gone).
Probably my favorite lesson from this time was learning how to window-shop. There’s just a lot of things you really don’t need to pay for and take home in order to enjoy them - clothes, decoratives, art, a wall display of lovely handbags are all things you can soak up visually and move on to the next shop. A subgenre of this is what I call “proxy shopping” - when you have a friend who loves to shop and doesn’t mind you tagging along to watch. There’s no shame in living vicariously in watching someone else’s spree; the sheer volume of popular luxury cooking shows proves that.
So don’t feel ashamed or bad for whatever you have to do to survive bad financial times, so long as you’re not hurting others … or yourself, with poopy brush bristles.
- October 23, 2019