When I was quite young—still in grade school—my parents got divorced. My father landed quite comfortably in the home of his soon-to-be second wife. Meanwhile, my mother went from working one retail job to three. The only way we survived was with my Nanna’s free child care, groceries, housekeeping, and cooking—as well as the leftover food my mom brought home from one of her jobs.
In time, with my mother’s second marriage, money become slightly less tight. But I was still expected to have a job and pay for everything from my maxi pads to my school pictures out of my own pocket. When I went off to college, I—like my mother before me—began working three jobs in order to pay the tuition bills and rent. I brought home food from the restaurants that I worked at that was destined for the trash. I squeezed my classes between my shifts. On more than one occasion, I bounced a check.
All that money stress took its toll. Well into my thirties, I carried a fear of homelessness inside me. And not just homelessness—but a whole imaginary scenario that involved two babies, a cardboard box, and drinking turpentine straight from the can.
Part of what helped me to deal with that fear was living below my means. And I learned from the best. My Nanna, who grew up during the Great Depression and was orphaned at a young age, was the queen of living well on less. She shopped garage sales, used the same tea bag all day, and kept every container of every prepared food she’d ever bought to use as “free Tupperware.” She didn’t have a lot of knickknacks and she didn’t buy anything for full price. If you complimented her on her dress or sweater, she’d invariably respond by saying how much she’d saved on that dress or sweater (a habit that I also have).
The other thing that helped me tackle my turpentine fears was, quite frankly, making more money. From the ages of seventeen to twenty-five, I never earned more than $22,000 per year at my salaried day jobs—which is why I always waited tables and worked other jobs on the side. In my thirties, I started to earn more, but I continued to live as though my salary was still $22,000—putting a large percentage of my paychecks in retirement and savings accounts.
Now, I know we live in a world where living on less is considered the opposite of sexy. Shopping is one of our greatest pastimes. Owning stuff indicates success. McMansions, gadgets, and trendy fashions are supposedly central to our happiness. Choosing to live below our means really means saying no to a lot of the messages we’re fed from the time we’re babies. But more and more influential self-help authors are suggesting we do it.
The first book to really send this message to Jolenta and me was America’s Cheapest Family Gets You Right on the Money, by Steve and Annette Economides. Over the first twelve years of their marriage, the Economides family lived on an average income of $35,000. During that same time, they paid off their first home, bought a second home twice the size of the first, and bought several cars for cash. They did all this through dozens of tricks, which included purchasing only secondhand items, not owning credit cards, and grocery shopping only once per month in order to cut down on gas money and impulse buying.
I mostly loved living by the Economides method. It made saving money feel like a game and shopping feel like a frivolous waste of time and money.
And while Jolenta didn’t love the book quite as much as I did, it helped her to face her anxieties about money for the first time in her adult life, which led to tough but important conversations with her husband and even learning to log on to her bank account for the first time.
But for the most part, America’s Cheapest Family presents only the most basic financial reasons for living below our means—so that we can have a home, a car, and a retirement fund. Other books present more exciting and/or emotional reasons.
For example, in The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, Suze Orman suggests that living below our means can help us to feel emotionally in control of our money (rather than the other way around).
In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss suggests that we can all lead more interesting lives if we spend less money on material items and more on low-cost experiences (some of which may even earn us money). One way of doing this is by temporarily living in a less expensive country than our own and working remotely while renting out our home for profit. Although neither Jolenta nor I did this while living by Ferriss’s book, my husband and I have since rented out our home when we’ve traveled, which has helped pay for our trips.
In The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo presents another reason for living below our means—because owning lots of things also means the potential for lots of clutter. Clutter is a source of frustration for many of us—especially when it is made up of things that we don’t need or love. Why not just hold on to the things that spark joy, and bring fewer items into our homes after that?
And then, of course, there’s Bea Johnson’s environmental argument for living below our means. In Zero Waste Home, she tells the story of how she and her family once lived the suburban American dream with a big lawn, a three-car garage, a giant house, and lots of objects to fill that giant house. Her family consumed gallons of bottled water every week, thoughtlessly purchased single-use plastics, and reassured themselves that—because they recycled—they weren’t really damaging the planet.
In her early thirties, Johnson started to see her family’s wasteful habits for what they were: destructive to the planet. After that, she and her family made a decision: They would be better stewards of the earth, and they would begin at home. They started walking rather than driving whenever possible, moved to a much smaller home, and shopped only for what they needed (while avoiding anything packaged).
Among the main pieces of information that Jolenta and I took to heart while living by her book was that refusing to purchase or accept things (even free things) was the most powerful thing we could do on a daily basis for the planet. We could say no to straws with drinks. We could refuse bags at the grocery store. We could say no to turning up the heat or turning on the air conditioner. We could say no to taxis and fast fashion and new gadgets and long showers. And we could refuse to buy anything in a package—even if the package claimed to be recyclable—because the vast majority of recycling programs in the United States do very little recycling and use a tremendous amount of resources in the process.
We could live with less. We could live below our means. And in the process, regardless of a book’s primary motivation in telling us to do so, we found one common side effect: We were able to live more in the moment. When we focused less on things, we could focus more on people and experiences. When we learned to stop chasing more stuff, we could learn to be grateful for the stuff we already had. And when we pared down what we owned, we could better understand what we didn’t need, what we did, and what truly made our lives better.
Dear Kristen and Jolenta,
It’s great to live below your means, but what if you hardly have enough means to live on in the first place?
—SH
Dear SH,
You bring up such a valid point. The fact is, 12.3 percent of Americans live below the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and millions more people around the world barely scrape by. Living on less is absolutely not realistic for everyone. But my point in this chapter was not to suggest that everyone follow in my footsteps. Rather, it was to illustrate how budgeting (even during my poorest years) has kept my money anxieties from completely taking over my life, and in some cases, has even made me happier.
—Kristen