During my daily phone call to my mom, I told her that I was very amused by the boys’ non-stop discussion of kickball rules. She launched into a rant about how kids don’t know how to play any more, because they have been over scheduled and too closely supervised by adults. I know better than to derail this rant once it has begun, so I let it run its course.
Today, David Brooks writes about how Americans are irresponsible spenders, whose habits have been enabled by corporations, banks, and government. He had an interesting fact about American’s lottery habit. "A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income." He has a series of recommended reforms, including a return to Ben Franklin thrifty values.
My recommendation, David? Lose the Style Section of the New York Times.
My efforts at thriftiness have been undone this morning. Fat Bastard, the resident groundhog, has eaten the tomato plants in my victory garden.
Apt. 11d 
Heh, I just posted about travel and frugality last night.
A few weeks ago, my sister in law, a social worker, called to ask my husband to agree to use my FIL’s retirement funds to “invest” in a $500K house in NC where she and her husband would live. There are so very many things wrong with the whole situation (my husband didn’t agree to it), but one of the things that really galled me was how it was conspicuous consumption. I wanted to say–You’re a SOCIAL WORKER and your husband is an mid-level professional. What the hell do you need a $500K house in NC for? I live in MA and *I* don’t need a $500K house! (Here that would buy me another bedroom and bathroom. 🙂
Re kids and play: your mom and I would get along. 🙂 It drives me crazy that kids don’t play in the neighborhood. Everyone is in their backyards on their decks and behind their privacy fences.
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But David, baby, they can afford it because it’s impossible to spend more than $20 at a Red Lobster. Plus there’s all that money they save by going to the salad bar at Applebee’s.
(Does anyone here want to bet that Brooksie doesn’t fritter away 10 percent of his income? Especially if we let a hostile observer define fritter?)
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I’m right there with you on the victory garden, Laura. Although I sacrificed my back porch to the tomatoes: I just couldn’t stand going toe to toe with the neighborhood vermin one more time (especially since the vermin invariably win). We’ll see how the unprotected summer squash do.
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I mostly agree with your mom, Laura, and with Wendy too, about kids and play, though I tend to blame material causes–poor neighborhood design, isolated suburbs, poorly funded and maintained parks and sidewalks, inefficient local policing, an economy that often necessitates frequent and distant moves (thus breaking up family and neighborhood networks) and two earners per family (thus removing daytime adult influence from the neighborhood), etc.–at least as much as I blame oversheduling, paranoia of strangers, and an obsession with privacy.
I figure that if Brooks can manage to make one column of his out of ten not just a bunch of lazy, goofball observations, he’s doing pretty well. (Hey David, in case you didn’t know: lotteries and other forms of state gambling purposefully prey upon the poor and lower-middle-class, through their advertising and placement of ticket sellers. There’s like, whole books and articles on this. Maybe you could do some reading on it, sometime.)
As for gardens, we don’t have to worry about groundhogs, but we do have to worry about rabbits. I need to buy some fencing to better protect our tomatoes and peppers this year.
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Caddyshack has great tips on getting rid of groundhogs.
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I’ve given up on the garden too. I’ve watched as my next-door neighbor worked for hours only to see the rabbits and groundhogs dig under her fence and feast on her tomatoes and zucchini. Whatever they leave behind ripens around the time that the farm down the street is harvesting their lovely veggies. So I avoid feeding the groundhog, save myself a lot of work, and support my local farmer (the only one left in this suburban area). Plus, I get to fill my yard with flowers. Not bad.
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MH, you just kill me. Over the winter I Netflixed that movie and made my family watch it so they’d understand what I meant when I said “License to kill gophers.”
We have rabbits and a groundhog, too, though my husband destroyed its burrow under our yard on the grounds of child safety. We also have a huge plot of strawberries because my husband is insane. He begged me to get rid of the bird feeders in one area of the yard so he could put his strawberries there. I pointed out that the birds would look upon the strawberries as a replacement for the birdseed, so he set up a complicated birdproofing system, with a cover and everything.
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At some point, we’ll rent that movie for my kids, and they will suddenly understand half of the crazy things that come out of their dad’s and Uncle Chris’s mouths.
Who’s the gopher’s friend? We still love Bill Murray, even if he’s a drunken wife beater.
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You know, I’ve realized I don’t believe in frugality as a value, in of itself. I believe in living within one’s means (and that includes living within one’s long term means, by saving for retirement and all that). But, I don’t believe in being frugal for the sake of being frugal. I think that’s a larger philosophy of thinking there is no value to denying yourself something you desire without there being a good reason, other than learning to live without it.
Says someone who indulged in some clothing purchases (most for my daughter, but not all) that are decidedly not frugal, but well within my means. I know for sure that I don’t *need* anything I bought. I don’t feel bad about it at all.
To take Wendy’s story, I also don’t see any reason why someone shouldn’t live in a 500K house (even though whether one needs it depends on the area you’re talking about). Whether it’s reasonable to ask for FIL’s retirement money to invest in it is an investment question. Whether its reasonable to ask for it as a gift depends on FIL’s financial situation. I wouldn’t be offended by having this conversation with a relative, and I’d decide whether I’d want to contribute based on the same criteria I apply for all purchases/investments.
bj
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PS: yes, we are not living on the edge of need, monetarily and I do worry about not teaching “frugality”/”denial” to my children. One needs to understand the difference between want and need, and to adjust one’s needs and wants to one’s means.
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bj, I think the key is moderation. Frugality as a usual thing, with occasional bursts of splurging, is, well, satisfying. There’s a whole lot more regarding my SIL’s request that is unnecessary to go into; I was just pulling out one of my reactions that it was conspicuous consumption. I also think there’s a difference between indulging in a $100 pair of socks (which is way excessive, but really, once in a while isn’t ridiculous) and a $500K house. Is the term “economies of scale” maybe? I don’t know–my brain has melted.
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I’m with Wendy on this one (except for the $100 socks as I would splurge in other areas). Even ignoring the whole housing bubble thing and the perils of “investing” in family members, a bigger house increases related expenses (insurance, taxes, utilities, upkeep, repairs, etc.). A $500k house costs well more than twice as much as a $250k house. And, unlike splurging in other areas, it is either extremely costly (real estate commission, transfer taxes, movers) or impossible to stop splurging when you buy a big house.
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Re-reading my previous post, I can say it more clearly:
As an investment, houses are not liquid and have carrying costs that are both high and highly variable. This means houses are an investment suitable for those with capital.
As a residence, houses should be treated like other consumption goods. That is, baring those who would otherwise be homeless, you should only spend what you can comfortably afford.
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I have a love-hate with frugality. On the one hand, everyone must learn to live within your means. And IMHO consumption for the sake of consumption is vacuous and bad for the Earth. Waste is, well, it’s just that: waste. A Bad Thing.
On the other hand, I come from a long line of skinflints, and their level of frugality is not pretty up close. For many of my relatives, it’s led to stinginess to the point of greed. Things like generosity, hospitality, charity: these things are difficult for many of my relatives, even things to be avoided. This type of frugality holds other non-monetary things hostage: those who are “frugal” in this way often have very little respect for others’ time, for example, unless it has an overt dollar figure associated with it. Finally, it just seems small-minded to me. Some things are worth more than their price tag at the mall.
That said, I would *never* spend $100 on socks!!!
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I don’t know much about NC, but a $500K house there is absolutely insane for a family of moderate means. (From what I hear, it seems like all the dumb Yankee money has pulled out of Florida and is heading to NC.)
It’s interesting the need people feel to give woodchucks names–the hero of the excellent “$64 Tomato” is a critter named Super Chuck. (Anybody who wants to garden needs to read that book.)
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Jen, frugality can become kind of pathological that way, but the way I keep myself centered is to think of the distinction between spending money on things vs. spending money on people. The other night I stressed over $2 difference between entrees on a restaurant menu, but I rounded up my babysitter’s earnings about $5 that same night. I buy my plants at the outlet garden store, but I pay the guy who cuts my grass biweekly a ridiculous amount of money. People and their time/labor/expertise are worth spending money on, especially people who live in your community.
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I agree wholeheartedly with MH’s analysis about houses. They are an investment for people with sufficient capital to weather fluctuations, certainly no less risky than the stock market, and perhaps more so (because of the associated costs of purchase, upkeep, taxes, and sale, and their lack of liquidity). And, otherwise, you should only buy what you can afford. But, they could be a reasonable investment for someone with capital + a reasonable consumption cost & still cost 500K. (Wendy, I’m not talking about your situation, but a hypothetical, and I guess, not completely a hypothetical, since we’ve gone through the same discussion in my family, where it might actually make sense).
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Oh, and Jen & Wendy’s comments made me think about mine a bit more. Yes, the devaluation of time is one of my issues with frugality. As a busy person, who has lots of other things I want to do (i.e. more money than time) I’m almost always willing to pay for relieving my time so that I don’t have to do something I don’t want to do, and I am willing to pay others comfortably for it. I am also unwilling to spend my time doing something I don’t want to do for someone else (i.e. picking people up from the airport is a big one for me — I’d rather pay for the cab than have to do that, and yet your sometimes put in the awkward position where the money for a cab won’t be accepted, but the pick-up will be).
And, I believe in indulgences, as long as you can afford them. If a hundred dollars worth of socks makes you happy, and you can afford it, you get to decide whether it’s a frivolity, not me.
I think the one thing people haven’t brought up is — should I give up the 100 dollars worth of socks so that I can donate money to a something? i.e. charity instead of consumption? I do give freely to charity, but, of course, I could always give up the indulgence and give more money. I think I gave up on this logic many years ago, because I realized that my entire life is unjustifiable on such a premise. If I applied an honest “need” criterion I would live so differently from how I have always lived, that everything else seems a matter of degree. Who am I to say that what a handbag should cost? or how much one pays for socks? or shoes? My preference is to sustain a high tax rate and then allow people (even the rich) to spend whatever is left as they choose (assuming that they first pay for all the necessities, which includes some stuff like retirement).
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I was reading “The Complete Tightwad Gazette” a month or so ago, and it was very interesting how well frugality and environmental friendliness seem to go together. On the other hand, as bj would point out, you can only go whole hog with that sort of thing if you assign no value at all to your time. I think, though, that it’s very worthwhile to have the reflex of “What do I have already that I could use?” rather than immediately running out and getting some single-use $5 plastic item. (Amy Dacyczyn has about a dozen uses for the humble milk jug, which is odd, actually, since if you listen to her and use only powdered milk, you won’t have any at home.)
In our daily life, the items that don’t really carry their weight but which I would hate to part with are: juiceboxes, bottled water (kids’ and adult sizes), and Starbucks (a favorite target of media budget-cutters). The issue with Starbucks is that I get a 50 minute round trip walk out of taking the kids there, so it seems worth keeping. At least for the summer, I’m going to try to switch over to unsweetened iced tea (a $2 savings over iced mochas), and I’ve been threatening to make the kids split a treat.
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Over the weekend I was talking to a friend who mentioned that she got her kids special banks: they have three slots, one each for “save”, “give”, and “spend”. And I thought, wow, the adults in our house could use that kind of direct reminder.
My in-laws are Mormon, and as part of church they cover very basic things like, always save money. Keep emergency supplies in the house. Give away part of your bounty. I can’t help but think, why do these things have to go with the (IMHO) more oppressive parts of Mormonism? And why don’t the liberals I hang out with ever talk about these basic things? Why has this sort of common-sensical stuff been ceded to the conservatives?
Apologies in advance if I’ve offended anyone.
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I’d pay the price of Starbucks drinks to keep my son occupied for 50 minutes. When we go, we tell him that his foamed milk is “baby coffee” and now he asks for it at home.
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The liberals and charity is an interesting question. I do think the give/spend/save idea is a good one, and one that doesn’t have to be at all religious. We liberals can incorporate that into our philosophy (as well as tithing to our communities, rather than our churches). I think we once talked about this concept over at Half Changed World (i.e. “tithing” but not to a church). It’s one of my goals, a guideline to use for my giving. I think there, we actually talked about the mechanics of how that 10% is calculated (i.e. is the base on which 10% is calculated a number you can take out of your tax returns? I’m presuming (but don’t know) that there’s some official position on that, say, in the Mormon church.
But, I do think there’s another reason that liberals are sometimes less charitable — it’s because I don’t want some of what charity might pay for to be a voluntary contribution. I want schools, a social safety net (i.e. welfare), unemployment insurance, health care, parks, public swimming pools . . . to be part of our public services, which we pay for with taxes.
I actually worry about this when I make certain kinds of donations. For example, I like the donorschoose.org site, which allows folks to make donations answering specific requests by teachers. But, when I make a contribution, I frequently worry that what I’m doing is subsidizing a broken system that *should* be fixed by raising taxes. Whether kids have books in a poor school in my rather rich city should not depend on my randomly clicking over to donors choose and making a donation, and it just makes me mad if it does, though today, my anger didn’t prevent me from making the contribution. Sometimes it does.
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Reverend Lovejoy: And once again, tithing is ten percent off the top, that’s gross income, not net.
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A few weeks ago, my sister in law, a social worker, called to ask my husband to agree to use my FIL’s retirement funds to “invest” in a $500K house in NC where she and her husband would live.
Um, WOW.
My husband’s cousin is always trying to pull schemes like this on their grandparents. It’s usually billed as an “investment opportunity”, but of course the cousin has no example of, say, paying fair-market rent value, so a more accurate description would be “an opportunity to subsidize me”.
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And since we’re on the subject of great fictional characters, I’ll note that we call this cousin Bluth, after the Bluth siblings, talentless but for the ability to shamelessly squeeze every drop out of the family teat.
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“For many of my relatives, it’s led to stinginess to the point of greed. Things like generosity, hospitality, charity: these things are difficult for many of my relatives, even things to be avoided.”
One of my departed relatives was like that–years later, in the later stages of dementia, he lost a bundle to Y2K scammers while trying to buy gold coins. He went big into sweepstakes, too. He “won” piles of junky reconditioned electronics.
I think a good budget is better than practicing mindless cross-the-board stinginess, since it helps you figure out what is important to you and what isn’t. Over the past few months I finally tamed my mindless Amazon one-click habit, and I was able to go see an old Peace Corps friend before she had her first baby. I also bought tickets for my oldest and me to visit friends in DC later this summer (my oldest misses DC). Over the past half year, I’ve done less book-buying and restaurant going than I have in a decade, but we’ve managed lots of travel (sorry, dinosaurs!). Likewise, ever since we produced our first well-engineered budget in October, we’ve been able to spend X% of net income on charity, our parish, and private giving. And we’re on track to pay off our car (our last debt) by Christmas. Thanks to the budget and our debt-payment efforts, I have finally come to grips with the fact that there is no Downpayment Fairy, and that to create a house downpayment, we’re going to have to keep milking the budgetary cow one dollar at a time, using the same focus that killed the credit cards and my student loan this spring and is going to kill off the car loan in just a few months. Christmas 2008-spring 2010 is going to be a bummer, but we’ll put one foot ahead of the other, and eventually we’ll have a house that we can afford.
“Over the weekend I was talking to a friend who mentioned that she got her kids special banks: they have three slots, one each for “save”, “give”, and “spend”.”
It sounds like your friend is a Dave Ramsey listener.
“Whether kids have books in a poor school in my rather rich city should not depend on my randomly clicking over to donors choose and making a donation, and it just makes me mad if it does, though today, my anger didn’t prevent me from making the contribution. Sometimes it does.”
I think there is a big difference between different categories of public spending and how effective private giving can be when trying to fill the gaps. If I wanted to fund a highway project, my small contribution wouldn’t make any dent in it–you need the whole road for the project to be of any use. However, small classroom purchases are exactly the sort of thing that individual givers can handle very efficiently.
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About giving/charity being a conservative vs. liberal thing: I don’t know where this comes from, to be honest. The save/give/spend thing is pretty much commonly discussed in any discussion about children and allowances. My very liberal leaning parenting e-mail list (it leaned pro-Clinton, by the way) has a talk every December about where to donate.
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Wendy, the lib/con charity thing, in its most recent version, comes from a book called “Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism” by Arthur C. Brooks. I haven’t read the book, just some reviews. For an example, see:
http://philanthropy.com/free/articles/v19/i04/04001101.htm
Summed up, he says that the religious are much more generous than the non-religion and even slightly more generous than the non-religious if you exclude religious charities. Conservatives are more generous than liberals, but the difference isn’t as great as the religious/non-religious difference.
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I’d heard of but not read Brooks book as well. I think the review is fairly balanced to the issues involved (though Brooks himself sounds quite partisan, not necessarily for the Republicans, but for a certain type of free-market ideology). I do think there’s an ideological difference that drives the giving. In my example above, I was donating money for books. I really, really believe that those books should be part of our society’s basic support of the schools, and it was a difficult decision to make, to decide to subsidize the purchase through my charitable donation.
Amy is right that buying this benefit for one particular classroom might be something that can be done by personal giving (i.e. the amount is small enough that I could pay for it, unlike a road, or a school building). But, school books for everyone is not something that I can pay for personally, and if we’re relying on donations to pay for school books for all the children, there will be inequities in access, based on randomness (did a giver go click on the web site, was the teacher’s request emotionally moving enough, did the need and request match the desires of a giver with money . . .).
I do think there’s a role for donorschoose, but it should be for extras, not necessities (of course that’s where this debate started,, trying to define the difference).
I also believe a version of the Nader quote that’s derided by Brooks, that a just society requires less charity (I don’t think it eliminates the need, but it diminishes it)
Oh, the one thing I do like, is a discussion of how one becomes a giver — to think of charitable giving as a part of your consumption budget (as Amy describes), a part of your spending that you budget, and plan for, as you do for your taxes and your other spending. I haven’t reached 10% of our gross income yet, in our planned giving, but I’m aiming for it.
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I agree with bj — I dislike the idea that people receive ‘charity’ for things that I believe should be theirs by rights. Like a good education, for example.
I’m not so sure how I feel about donations to my own childrens’ parochial school. Does this really count as charity? I define charity as giving something to someone in need. But my kids’ school, almost without exception, is filled with middle-class families. And I see the same thing all around me: people using their non-profit donations to support things that provide them direct services but happen to be not-for-profit. The local zoo, NPR, my husband’s beloved Swedish American Museum Center in Chicago. Is this really charity?
To bj’s question about how one becomes a giver, this to me underscores part of why the religious may have the upper hand. At church, even if you avoid the sermons on the widow’s mite or what have you, on a weekly basis you are surrounded by others who are putting their earnings into the plate. Even children are asked to put their offerings directly in. It’s openly discussed. As opposed to a non-churchgoers one-time end-of-year conversation with a friend or two, or maybe just the spouse, about how much to give, and where. (This is what I did, at least, during the pre-kid years I did not go to church.)
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The bulk of government spending is “we” spending money on “us,” rather than “we” spending on “them.” Money moves mostly sideways, rather than downwards to the needy. Indeed, a certain percentage of government money moves up (Social Security, farm subsidies, stadium subsidies, etc.).
The promise of charity is that you can ensure that your money is helping those less fortunate than yourself, rather than those more fortunate. This is most dramatically true with regard to giving aimed abroad. Wikipedia says the US spent at least $30 billion dollars from 1979 to 2003 on economic aid to Egypt (with another $30 billion on military aid). The aims of US foreign aid are so complex and contradictory (help foreigners AND help US farmers) that it’s no wonder that the whole thing is a mess. It’s better to privately fund some small, well-thought out project.
Also, with school giving, the hope is that you would be able to shortcircuit a big, slow stupid bureaucracy and provide the materials and books that a teacher actually wants. (The big city school systems are infamous for not having schoolbooks available to kids until well into the school year.)
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Jen,
I had no idea there was such a thing as a Swedish American Center in Chicago, but now we’ve got to go.
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Yeah, Jen, I am enamored of churches as a community building tool, too. Unfortunately, not useful for my personal benefit, because I can’t get around the whole god module thing.
The latest donor request I’m scanning is for printer cartridges. Printer cartridges. Yup, that’s we should do with our tax dollars. Give printers to the schools, but no cartridges, so teachers have to request funds from anonymous donors for cartridges.
(and yes, I find the donor’s choose site addictive, for the same reason I find online shopping that way. I think it has the real potential to encourage giving — the online sites, especially ones where you can contribute cooperatively).
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From what I’ve heard from my husband, the whole cost of printing is in the cartridges. The printers themselves don’t have much value.
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“god module?” That’s a new one for me.
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If you do go to the Swedish American Museum Center, make sure you hit the children’s floor. It’s spectacular — especially the little log cabin. Bring a New York times; you’ll actually have time to read it while the kids play.
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Well, it’s apparently a band: http://www.godmodule.com
but, it’s also a theory about the brain function and its relation to religious experience:
“[Ramachandran] researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have reported that the human brain may be hard-wired to hear the voice of heaven, in what researchers said was the first effort to address the neural basis of religious expression. In a provocative experiment with patients suffering from an unusual form of epilepsy, researchers at the UC San Diego brain and perception laboratory determined that the parts of the brain’s temporal lobe — which the scientists quickly dubbed the “God module” — may affect how intensely a person responds to religious beliefs.”
The result was described at a scientific meeting, and never published, but is a common anecdote in the neurology community — that lesions/strokes/tumors/epilepsy in the temporal lobe (i.e. the “god module”) can cause an increase in religiosity, and alternatively that a sudden increase in religiousity in a patient can be a soft sign to look for temporal lobe dysfunction in the brain.
http://archanaraghuram.wordpress.com/2008/05/10/phantoms-in-the-brain-by-vs-ramachandran/
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Mrs. Micah at mrsmicah.com has a post up entitled “How My Mom Gives to Charity.” (Mrs. Micah is a very young personal finance blogger in DC.)
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I love it that you have a groundhog called Fat Bastard.
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