squeaky walker

SQUEAKY WALKER


About ten years ago, back when I was both young enough to think most of my life was ahead of me and also waste my time and money as if it were, one of my coworkers loved to tease me. She said that at first she thought it was my shoes but she soon realized it was my ass squeaking as I walked, I was such a cheap tight ass. She was an older gal, a real hoot to be around. In fact, her sense of humor allowed me to overlook the fact she both a Gott Damned Yankee AND a Yuppie Scum Princess. You see, I’m not so dogmatic that I can’t see past everyone’s glaring faults. What brought this to mind was a minions cheeky remark about me being cheap. I thought it was pretty funny. However, while I USED to be cheap, now I’m just frugal. Allow me to illuminate and educate. Being cheap is refusing to spend money. Being frugal is saving your money to put it to a better use. As I’ve admitted before, my head hung in shame, I was an aspiring Yuppie In Training. Oh, I’d lived the carefree fiscally uncaring lifestyle as a bachelor. I was comfortable in a modest money environment. Then, after I got married to wife #2 I was blinded by a large bosom and eagerly embraced Yuppie Scumdom. While I wasn’t totally unhappy, there was the inevitable friction as I was pushed into more stressful career directions ( but of course I showed her- I was totally truthful on my applications and admitted LSD use so that I wasn’t hired for any LEO positions ). I probably would have gone along if the marriage had ever been destined from the start to work. Then you never would have been reading this.

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My point is that my frugal skills were non-existent come the divorce. I had lived before on minimum wage, but never really lived in a severe money drought. While I had plenty of book knowledge on living without a salary, we all know that can’t be practiced without actual hands on. Suddenly, I was living on $200 a month. Lots of roommates so my rent and utilities were only $100 a month, $50 on food and fifty for a long commute ( gas was a buck a gallon ). The severe shock of that turned me totally cheap. I dared not spend a dime on anything. That habit stuck with me, and a good thing as it was one money problem after another. Try living on $500 a month when your trailer payment is $250 and your lot rent is $250. As long as you can go Karen Carpenter and live off oxygen it is pretty easy. I’m glad, after the fact of course, that I went through that, because that was the start, about 2003, of going from cheap to frugal. First lesson, don’t have a trailer payment. Second lesson, although much harder to implement, don’t have lot rent. Don’t get yourself to the point that you need other peoples help, such as roommates, or the compassion of an employer. Spend money, but only if it will save you money in the future.

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Spending money on a car? Consumption, not savings or investment. Even though I’m buying more land to cut back on commuting, and I need more land like a hole in the head, at least it is a material good you can keep rather than a worthless cost. I don’t buy into the “car as an investment to get to work”, because it is an unnecessary expense that can be avoided. If you live thirty miles from work, its past time to move or get another job. Take the travel trailer. I should have lived in a tent and just dug like crazy before the first winter and lived in a small plywood cabin and avoided all the complications and extra expense ( $300 inside extra insulation and $100 skirting-that money would have paid for half of a cabin. I can’t pretend I’ve done everything right from the start ). But since I live frugally I have the cash to piss away and the cash to redo things correctly. And, looked at another way, I already had the trailer living in a park before the move, so it was mostly free housing. It wasn’t necessarily a waste, although you’d have to push things to claim it was an investment.

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Okay, part of being frugal is needing to be cheap. I don’t eat tasty food, I don’t live in much comfort and my commute is not all “hug a tree and ride a bike and be healthy’ feel good crap but mostly just an irritating struggle ( a sure sign of being cheap is refusing to spend for comfort- but that is because you value a pile of Greenbacks over everything else. Being frugal is not caring as much about money, mostly because of your prior investments ). Not because I need to. I could be living in town. It would be a fiscal struggle, but I could live in a trailer park, on grid. But that’s the thing about being cheap. By picking the least costly way of doing things, you lock yourself into that expense forever. Being frugal and investing one by one eliminates expenses. In my case, my investing is more sacrificing comfort instead of money. It is cheaper to buy the land and keep up the bicycles than pay lot rent in town. But the comfort level is wayyyy down. I’m investing in a low maintenance future, where far less money will get me much more comfort. Being cheap, you buy the most inexpensive form of heat for your house. Being frugal, you build underground and eliminate any heating bill at all. Granted, all this isn’t just about money. A lot of it does fall under the survivalist need. But since I’m not a complete idiot, I plan for both just in case we never collapse ( I plan on a collapse and see nothing happening as a remote possibility that needs to have insurance. Most folks buy preps as the insurance of a remote possibility of collapse ). It might not be socially acceptable to act the Scrooge and never spend money, but everyone loves a good investment plan.

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