Living Beautifully With the New Frugality

Morning by the Sea by Susan Rios from Allposters.com

There is a beautiful side to frugality going on all around us. Women who are coming home are discovering the beautiful life by what I call "creative resourcefulness."

Our basic needs are food and clothing, and even at that, we only really need enough to sustain us, not an abundance to indulge in or feel entertained by.

Here are some things that you do not need:

- You do not need to have your hair streaked and you don't need to pay for a tanning session. Even if you have your sister, friend or mother do it from a home-kit, that product is not a necessary expense. Instead, do as we did in the old days: if you are blond, rinse your hair in lemon juice and water, and if you are brunette, try vinegar, and go out in the sun and let the sun streak it naturally. Without all this trouble, it will streak in the sun and you will get your tan, especially if you are gardening and trying to grow some vegetables for your family table.

-You don't need posts in your skin. This costs money and is a health issue. Ask any dentist or doctor. The people who make money off naive young women who do this, ought to be locked up. Look at the photographs of the women of the 19Th century, shortly after the camera was invented. Without modern makeup, tattoos and skin-piercing posts, they had a fresh bloom in their faces and sweet smiles, highlighted by bright eyes. This kind of beauty is free. While cutting down on expenses, consider learning to cut your family's hair, and learning how to trim your own. You can now get videos and books that show you how. Doing your own hair at home will save you money, and the cost of driving to and from the hair clinics many times. I am not saying that everyone must do this, but if you are seriously trying to redeem your family finances so that you can stay home, this is one expense that is not necessary. Long-haired ladies do not have to have maintenance cuts as often, and can often get a friend to trim their locks.

-You don't need fizzy drinks, or coffee by the cup, which can add up to $45.00 a week. You do not need to eat out or buy prepared food. You can make the same things at home, and enjoy it with your own choice of company and music. Home made fries taste much better. The cost of food is considerably less when you only buy raw ingredients that have to be peeled, sliced, or cooked. It costs a lot more to get any kind of prepared food, because you are paying for the extra services of peeling and chopping, putting it into containers with a label, and shipping it somewhere.

-Women at home do not need to drink,smoke, gamble, or go to parties. The amount of money spent on these things could buy things of lasting value: a new couch, a new rug, or fresh paint for the house.

-You don't need to go to the movies or an expensive vacation. You can improvise and substitute things that are free. You do not need to buy seasons tickets or any tickets to ball games and concerts. They are pleasures but not necessarily needs. There may be nothing wrong with having any of the above-listed items, but if you are cutting down on expenses so that you can secure your position as full-time homemaker, they are not necessary. The Victorian women were entertained by reading, writing, doing puppet shows for their children with socks and handmade dolls, and they knew how to make up stories. In those days it was quite common for families, even those not rich, to have a piano in their house. The young people enjoyed exchanging sheet music and playing new tunes while others gathered around and sang. Even without instruments, families learned to sing in harmony and entertain themselves. The hub of life was the home, and to be invited to someones house for the evening would be a memorable event consisting of happiness and warmth. People used to make up their own jokes and invent their own games. Every family can do this today.

The Picket Fence, by Dwayne Warwick from Allposters.

You can plan day trips that are interesting vacation locations, and still be in your own bed at night. You can learn to relax at home, even while you are working. You can provide a place in your own back yard to have quiet moments. When your home is cared for and put in order the way you really like it, you won't want to leave it for long, anyway. With all the lovely corners you create in your house, being home will become a lot like a vacation, without the cost. Consider using the cost of a vacation for home improvement: a new stove (or even a new kitchen) new sheets and bedding, and new bath towels and things for your bathroom.

-Don't get in the car to go to the store for every little thing. Save up a list and make one trip, or ask your husband to get something on the way home from work.

-You, or your children, do not need 40 shirts and 20 pair of shoes. Try to wear out all your clothes and shoes before buying more, and when you buy more, think of ways to get them without spending a lot. If you sew, you do not have to buy expensive buttons or trims. Instead, clip them off the garments you are going to discard, and use them again. The 6-inch ruffle on Lillibeth's dress, was a cotton eyelet curtain valance we had kept in a drawer with laces because we had no use for it but thought it might be useful for some stitchery item some day. She did not have to do any cutting or unpicking or altering; she just sewed it around the hemline of her dress. Our grandmothers kept jars of buttons they clipped off old shirts before using the shirts to crochet into colorful rag-rugs. Sewers can use up their stashes of fabric, and scrapbookers can use up all their papers and embellishments.

When you are finished using up available materials in the home, challenge yourself to find a substitute before buying more. When you have a new attitude toward spending, you begin to look at things a little differently: an empty jar, a box, an old piece of furniture--even if broken, can take on new life when you look at it as a valuable raw material. Originally, materials do not come in labelled packages: you can make almost anything you are interested in. Before you go out and buy something, think of how the item came to be made in the first place, and you might possibly be able to make it yourself. I'm not suggesting that you waste a lot of valuable home-keeping time trying to make something like your own leather for shoes, but there are some things you really do not need to buy that can be substituted quite easily.

Many women are really good at decorating rich. When they do not have money for lavish furnishings, they manage to take something and make it look like the expensive item they want. It is a matter of style and taste, not money, that makes a home look beautiful, as many people are finding out.

When trying to be careful of extra expenses, entertainment and social life can be more enjoyable than ever. Just because you cannot afford to give an expensive dinner, does not mean you have to live in isolation. You can still have company and share some little thing. I used to know someone who would clean her house, bake some muffins, and then call us over for a cup of tea. That is all she had, but oh, did we enjoy sitting at her table and looking at her wonderful setting. Her hand made centerpiece was nothing more than a candle with some cranberries around the edge of it on a plate, but the atmosphere was complete joy. If you do not have flowers, you can always pick something from outside, put it in a vase, and tie with a colorful ribbon. An inexpensive meal prepared carefully and arranged beautifully on the platter is very elegant and hardly distinguishable from something expensive.

To live beautifully while being frugal, you can still be a good housekeeper. I have noticed some people who claim to be poor will also have smelly, musty, dirty houses with soil everywhere and the stench of dirty laundry. Children run around in diapers that have not been changed for two days, drinking out of cups that haven't been washed in a week. There is simply no excuse for this, as most poor women are still able-bodied enough to wash a dish. I know of single mothers who have a very low income that still manage to have a very beautiful home and clean children!

Painting by Consuelo Gamboa, from Allposters. (Enjoy a vacation in your own area, using simple things like picnics and tea parties.)

It does not take money to clean a dish and put things away. It does not take money to have some pride in your existence in the home. If you have no washing machine, some things can be washed by hand, and if you have no water, you can catch rain water with a bucket. People of the past could be poor, for sure, but many of them had a pride about them that required them to be clean, to have a tidy appearance, and to keep their houses neat, and they were resourceful enough to know how to wash their clothes and bathe themselves and their children. Other people who have a sense of dignity, will so live that you can't even guess that they are enduring hard times. Cleanliness and neatness, home cooking, and upright living, will go a long way to making life at home beautiful even if you do not have money to spend.

Here are some ideas for using less, so that the products you buy last longer.

-You can probably use less detergent. Too much detergent makes it harder to rinse off the clothes, which then can make people have quite itchy skin.

-Eat fruit instead of drinking fruit juice. The fruit has a lot more properties in it that are good for you. Buying juice means you are paying someone to squeeze it and bottle it.

-Buy fresh vegetables and cut them yourself, and learn to cook them so that they taste good, instead of buying frozen. If your electricity, for any reason, gets knocked out, the frozen things will spoil anyway. Cooking with fresh ingredients is like gourmet cooking, which is what a lot of the popular television shows feature. You can do this at home and experience the satisfaction of eating something that is very good for you in an atmosphere that is better than a fine restaurant.

-Read the ingredients on packages of your favorite foods and figure out how to make them yourself. Often a flavoring is only garlic and salt. Italian season consists of oregano, basil and a few other ingredients, all which you can use yourself to make your favorite salad dressing or sauce. Just about everything you buy can be made by using basic ingredients at home.

-Get out your stack of magazines that you have saved from years gone by. Pick the current month and display them on one of the tables. Read them when you need to sit down and rest. They are very refreshing! Sometimes when I tell people that I do that with old issues of Country Woman or Romantic Homes, they "feel sorry" for me, but now, I do not do it because of poverty. I enjoy it! I see things in a different way when I have not seen them for a year. It is like taking out a box of old letters and reading them again. After all, many magazines cost as much as a book these days. Why not get them out and make use of them, even if it is for clip art for scrapbooks.

-Consider growing a garden. It does not have to be an ordeal. Just put some seeds in some soil and water them. I knew of one woman who was not in good health one year, so she just pulled up some weeds and grass, and put seeds in the loose soil and covered them up. Her children watered them, and she had a harvest. She did not have a tiller or a shovel, but she still grew some tomatoes and cucumbers. If you only have a tomato plant, your yield will be good enough to save you some money at the grocery store. During the World Wars, Americans and British had "Victory Gardens." Each family was encouraged to plant seeds and make themselves independent. They would then share what they could, with others. I think whether there is a war or not, everyone can have a victory garden, even if it is a bean plant in a pot on the front porch. Declare it victory over financial burdens and poverty, victory over helplessness, or victory over going to the store for every bite you eat, and independence from having to spend your entire income on food.

Now here are some things you do need:

-You do need to pay your monthly house rent or payment. Therefore, it will be necessary to eliminate the above "do-not-needs" in order to protect the money for that payment.

- You do need your electricity. There are many ways of cutting back on it so that rooms are not left with lights or fans on, and things are not left running all day long.

- You do need your water. If you don't spend money on unnecessary things, you assure yourself of the availability of money to pay for your household water supply. Sometimes young women who have quit work to be homemakers, do not realize the cost of water and electricity. They have worked in places where it seemed to be all paid for, and did not realize how it could be conserved. If you can look at your electric meter and watch the numbers roll by, you can understand how the things you turn on or plug in can make your energy costs rise. The more you spend on things you "want," the more likely you are to lose the things you need: light, water, rent, fuel. Keep these at the top of your list as priorities, and you will be able to find many substitutes for other things.

-Learn the many uses of age-old, basic, natural ingredients like vinegar, olive oil, hydrogen peroxide, Epsom salts (I think I read somewhere that this was good for the garden)soda bicarbonate, corn starch and many other common kitchen items. You will not have to spend on expensive medicines and cleaners.

I can tell you from living both ways--both well off and poorer, that I enjoyed the creativity of the frugal times much better. I quite liked my fringed muslin curtains, and didn't miss the expensive drapery and the accompanying complicated hardware. I enjoyed stenciling the walls and didn't miss expensive wall paper that was hard to remove and couldn't be painted over. I liked doing without a car. It gave me hours and hours of freedom to complete jobs and to cook dinner early and have it ready by evening. I was not rushed.

Using a car in the daytime is nice, but it takes a huge chunk of time and can leave a nervous, anxious feeling similar to that of rushing to work and back home. When I didn't have fabric to sew, I enjoyed looking around for unused sheets, table cloths and other fabrics in the house that I could dye, cut and sew for other things. I liked framing scenic pictures from magazines and using them for pictures in the house. A smaller house was easier to take care of an cost less to paint and decorate. It was cheaper to heat. I could hear everything around me. There were many advantages to living a more frugal life.

Being frugal does not mean your house will be unlovely. With the same fabric you make your curtains, you can make a matching tablecloth and napkins and a few runners and doilies, edged in fringe, for other pieces of furniture. You can often coordinate everything much better than if if you were looking for something in a store. Being frugal means you won't have as much clutter and junk as you would if you went to the stores more often. Your house can actually look better. Being frugal means you can make gifts and give them from the heart. It means you will be less wasteful and more mindful of the hard earned money that could be saved.

Daughters at home need to learn how to make do without spending. Even if they are going to have money to spend, there is something sad about not having the inner resources to survive if needed. They need to be able to, if necessary, do without, make things do, or create something out of practically nothing. It uses the creative skills and gives them more interest in life.

I observed girls who had grown up in families where everything was provided for them. They never had a moment's concern about money or about making things do. When these girls got married, they were bored and unhappy. They seemed to have no challenges or goals. I believe frugality is something that the Proverbs 31 woman had in mind when she "looketh well to the ways of her household." She might have been watching for unnecessary waste. Frugality is actually quite fun, for you can start laughing at the world and its insistence that you need to buy everything. It isn't' true. We can get along with merely a shelter and food and adequate clothing to cover our bodies. If we get extremely poor, we can sell our out-grown, torn, faded, threadbare clothes at a high price to famous actresses and call them "Designer Threads."