When cheap is a way of life
Whether it's cutting coupons, making sack lunches or sharing a car, some people are driven to cut spending. Meet the folks for whom frugality has become a sport.
By Melinda Fulmer
For most people, cheapskate is a dirty word. For Mary Hunt, it's an honor.
"I wear that badge proudly," said the author of "Live Your Life for Half the Price" and "Everyday Cheapskate's Greatest Tips." A reformed compulsive spender, Hunt stockpiles food bought at pennies on the dollar, roasts her own green coffee beans in a popcorn popper and shares a pickup truck with her husband to cut costs.
Hunt, 57, shares these penny-pinching tips with her readers on her Web site, providing a forum for other savers to boast of their dollar-stretching tactics. For some, frugality has become a sport rather than a means to an end, like paying off debt or building a nest egg.
No cost is too small to cut. One of the readers on Hunt's Web site suggests picking up bent nails at construction sites to reuse. Another admits to buying two-ply toilet paper to separate into two rolls. One woman even decided to ditch a subscription to her favorite magazine, waiting a year until her local library discarded the copies.
Frugality is her new extravagance
Indeed, doing without has become as satisfying to some people as splurging. Case in point: Debbie Zervas. The 44-year-old Knoxville, Tenn., collections supervisor has thrown over her old pastime of needlepoint because, she said, it's too expensive. "You can find needlework at garage sales for 50 cents, yet people have put 30 hours of their time into it."
Instead, Zervas has found a new hobby in "personal finance," cutting her spending and making do with less. "I decided that I needed to find a hobby that, instead of consuming resources, saved them," she said.
To pay off about $9,000 in loans and make it through a couple of stretches of unemployment, Zervas adopted some bare-bones tactics. She decorated her house from garage sales, went without trips to restaurants and movies, and began stockpiling canned goods that could be bought for pennies on the dollar. Years later, with her debt paid off and a promotion under her belt, Zervas is still living a frugal lifestyle.
On one of her last trips to the grocery store, she bought 40 cans of tuna, because they were bargain-priced at 33 cents apiece. "I look at it as an ingredient in a lot of recipes, and a staple," she said. Zervas has plenty of coupons to use. In addition to her regular job, she has a paper route that she uses for extra cash and to get extra copies of its Sunday coupon supplements.
To this day, Zervas' entertainment and clothes purchases are mostly done on the cheap. She makes dickies out of old silk shirts, tailors blouses marked down to $5 and re-dyes the same pair of black jeans four times.
Rather than pay for movies at the local Cineplex, she spends weekends or evenings at her local bookstore, curled up in one of their overstuffed chairs reading, but not buying. "I wait for it to come out in paperback," she said. Likewise, she said, when she does go out to eat these days, she mostly hits an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet. She fills up, so she doesn't feel like eating dinner, and she doesn't buy a beverage. "I'm allergic to paying $2 for a soda," she said.
'It's like a drug'
Fellow cheapskate Deborah Chester, of Minden, La., feels the same way. The 47-year-old nurse has cut out most restaurant meals, except on special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries. And she and her husband pack their lunches.
Like Zervas, she has begun making her own household cleaners, and she even makes her own laundry soap, which costs two to three cents a load. To make it, she grates a bar of Fels-Naptha bar soap and melts it down on the stove with water, before adding laundry soda and borax. She keeps it in old plastic laundry jugs given to her by her relatives. "My clothes come out softer," she said. "And there's no strong smell, like you get with Gain."
After hunting deer and squirrels for meat each fall, harvesting her vegetable garden and using coupons, Chester manages to spend just $25 each week on groceries for her family of four. She shops her local bakery outlet and plans her meals and snacks around what's on sale. "Apples were $1.25 a pound this week, so that's what we're eating this week" for fruit, Chester said.
Her stockpile of food and toiletries bought for mere pennies is overflowing the cabinets in her laundry room. A second shelving unit in the dining room is overflowing with bottles of shampoo and other toiletries. "It's like a drug," she said. "I like to see how much I can get for how little, without sacrificing the quality of my life."
While her husband laughs and some people call her "the crazy coupon lady," Chester said she would "rather be addicted to saving money than to spending it." The frugal lifestyle has allowed her to pay off $12,000 in debt and shift her 30-year mortgage to a 15-year loan, which she hopes to pay off in seven years.
And, she said, she has built up a contingency fund that she could tap if she ever were to lose her job.
Plug the money leaks
These lifestyle choices might seem a little extreme to most people. Hunt admits that even she has her limits.
"I don't wash out plastic bags or reuse foil," she said. But, Hunt said, it doesn't require those kinds of sacrifices for most people to cut their budgets.
Consumers can cut their spending on groceries -- one of their largest expenses -- by matching coupons to sales and stockpiling when there's a good deal. Cutting down on small indulgences can help out too, like brewing your own coffee each morning and taking your lunch to work a couple of days a week. And, she said, you can avoid "throwing money away" by avoiding bank fees and credit card charges for late payments and annual fees. "So much money leaks out of our lives undetected," she said.
Hunt also suggests setting up a separate "freedom account" for vacations and gift-giving. When the money in the account is gone, it's time to start making gifts or stay home.
But most important, Hunt said, is figuring out what things in your life are most important to you and saving your money for these things. While she will go out of her way to use a coupon, she said she wouldn't cut out her trips to New England each year to see the fall foliage. She also insists on eating out with a group of friends each Friday night.
"That's the life I love. You've got to have something you're living for, things to enjoy." Chester also admits to enjoying cable and the occasional matinee. But, she said, she draws the line at the concessions stand: "That stuff is expensive."
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/SavingandDebt/SaveMoney/WhenCheapIsAWayOfLife.aspx?page=all
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