The idea is to cut the saplings as close to the ground as possible. Same goes for the brushy weeds and twiggy stems. I was wielding the clippers, Nate had the handsaw, and Stella was asleep in a hand-me-down Ergo attached to my chest. We were chopping our way through the trail next to our house; in fact, the very same trail we hiked up when deciding to buy our property. Nate later took the chainsaw and removed the logs bisecting the path, making this our first official cleared hiking trail. It extends in a loop circumnavigating our land at its perimeter, starting and ending at our house. In the summer months, we put Stella in the carrier and take our clippers on each hike, beating back the incessant undergrowth scheming to overtake our footpath. For winter hiking, we got a game sled, traditionally used by hunters to cart deer and other game from the woods, lined it with blankets, and nestled Stella inside. Sleds specially designed to tow kids are four times the price and not as durable for handling rough terrain. Nate and I strap on snowshoes and Stella snoozes while we pull her through our snow-covered woods. We can hike any day of the year, right outside our front door, and most days, we do. There’s no longer a barrier to entry and we don’t have to drive for hours or plan ahead or take the day off work. The woods are simply there for us.
It’s true that Nate and I don’t buy Christmas, birthday, or anniversary gifts for each other. But it’s equally true that we don’t need to. We’ve smoothed out the happiness curve of our lives. Rather than living for vacations or weekends, we’ve created a life that delivers ongoing happiness on a daily basis. Before embracing extreme frugality, our lives resembled a spiky graph with peaks denoting milestones—our wedding, dinners out on Saturday nights, weekend getaways—followed, inevitably, by the lowest valleys. Those ever-present valleys represented our daily routine, the Monday-through-Friday sludge of cubicles and office politics. We’d offset those valleys by spending money. By treating ourselves. And while sure, there were the euphoric highs of buying a new dress or having a sumptuous meal out, we spent most of our time at our baseline, down in the valleys. Through frugality, Nate and I elevated our baseline to a permanent state of contentment. We’re not deliriously gleeful every day, but our graph trends upward and is mostly smooth. We still have occasional spikes—a vacation, say—but on the whole, what we’ve done is create a daily routine that embodies the things we love. Nate and I used to work for the weekend, for our two days of escapism. Now, we’re orchestrating a life where every day is an honest deliverance of our passions. Rather than work jobs we don’t enjoy in order to afford hits of consumerism to soothe the discontent we feel over working those jobs, we stepped out of that loop entirely.
Our culture espouses a “treat yourself” mentality that goads us to surrender to all the short-term goodies we can possibly conceive of: lattes, Netflix, a new car. We deserve it, right? But I think the “treat yourself” culture masks a deep-seated fear that we’ll never realize our long-term dreams, so we’d better live it up in the present. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we buy now, the less money we have to make actionable progress toward our dreams later. The instantly gratifying thrills that our consumer culture peddles—everything from snack delivery services to biting-fish pedicures—are nothing more than road-bump opiates: short-term pleasures that only serve to derail our actual goals. And we don’t apply this mentality just to tiny purchases. If we think we’ll never save up enough for a down payment on a house, we might be more liable to rent a ritzy apartment and fritter away our would-be down payment savings. I’m astounded at how many ways there are to waste money, and at how many of them I’ve personally fallen victim to. Marketers diligently create needs we never knew we had and many products advertised to us fill false needs. This type of spending skirts the question of what we really want out of life. It’s the classic conundrum of forgoing delayed gratification played out day after day, purchase after purchase. The more we buy, and buy into this culture of more, the more we think we need. It’s a vicious, endless cycle.
While I’m pretty sure the phrase “extreme frugality” sounds like a penance, it’s actually the exact opposite. It’s a deliverance. Nate and I consider our lives to be luxurious: we live where we want, as we want, on our own terms, and we’re not beholden to anyone else. If that’s not luxury, I don’t know what is. Sure, we don’t have new cars, but the key is that we don’t want new cars or need new cars. We view money as a tool to be spent on things we need and that we value highly. Money doesn’t bring us happiness, but it has granted us the financial freedom to construct a life we love.
It’s also true that Nate and I are satisfied with less. We’ve discovered that the rarity of something’s occurrence serves to enhance its enjoyment. Just like eating to excess or drinking to excess, spending to excess delivers no lasting fulfillment. Judiciously meting out the resource of money, on the other hand, allows us to relish the things we do buy. When Nate and I go out to dinner, an infrequent event, we savor each bite. We thoroughly enjoy ourselves and we appreciate the uniqueness of the experience. Frugality turned us into people who feel profound gratitude for everything we have, as opposed to the people we used to be, constantly scraping and grasping for more.
We’ve also simplified nearly every aspect of our lives. Instead of looking for expensive solutions, Nate and I ask ourselves what can we stop doing, stop needing, and stop buying. I’ve stopped painting my nails, stopped wearing makeup, stopped fixing my hair, and just generally stopped doing stuff that ate up my time without delivering a commensurately valuable return on my investment.
We try to identify the root of the issue and the problem we’re trying to solve, as opposed to what a consumer mind-set would tell us to buy. We live in a culture where people are lured into buying things they don’t need to fill houses that are too large and then feel compelled to move to ever-larger houses and work ever-longer hours in order to support a life that they’re barely living. A life that they perhaps did not consciously choose, and that they perhaps do not even extract pleasure from.
“But I don’t want to live in the woods and I like my job.” I hear this from readers all the time, to which I respond: it’s not about wanting to move to the woods or quit your job. It’s about liberating yourself from reliance on the salary that your job provides. Nate and I both choose to continue working to this day because we derive satisfaction from our work. The salient point is that we have the option to quit at any time. To walk away and pursue a different avenue in life. If we were instead wholly dependent on the money we’re paid for this work, our options would be much more limited or nonexistent. In addition to the freedom this provides, it’s also a hedge against calamity and a way of self-insuring. If something terrible were to befall us—from a catastrophic illness to a car that won’t start—money would not be an issue. There are a multitude of things in this life that we cannot predict, or prevent, or plan for, but financial stability is something that is largely within our control. I prefer to shore up my resources while I can in defense of the future unknowns. This doesn’t make me a fatalist, but a pragmatic realist. Life is easier to cope with when you have enough money. Control what you can and the rest of life becomes much less complicated to navigate.
You very well might work your job for the next forty years and love it every day, and I know plenty of people who have. However, no one has ever regretted having more money in retirement than they planned for: you can endow your grandchildren’s higher education, you can start a private foundation and donate to charity, and you can travel the world year-round. It’s also true that we live in mercurial times where jobs and pensions are not the bulwarks of security they once were. While none of us thinks we’ll ever be laid off, it’s no longer a certainty in most professions. Saving money now ensures you’ll be able to take advantage of the opportunities, and manage the hurdles, that life will inevitably throw in your path. As Nate and I discovered when we unexpectedly found our homestead ahead of schedule, there’s nothing more liberating than wanting to pursue an unusual dream and having the financial ability to do so.
After nearly four years of dedicated extreme frugality, I’ve come to realize there are stages of frugal adherence. I’ve now arrived at what I imagine to be the final stage: profound contentment. I’ve freed myself from stressing out about my appearance, about my furniture, about my success. I’ve let go of the nagging external prompts to buy more and to, in the process, change who I am. I quite like who I am, and nothing I buy would ever change that. It was only after I stopped buying that I actually appreciated my own unique character, me on my own, divorced from the trappings of consumerism. My frugality evolves and changes with each new iteration of my life—parenthood, homesteading, age—but it’s the constant, the thread that runs through everything I do. It guides my decision-making by encouraging me to simplify, to be grateful, to never deny the abundance that surrounds me, and to recognize that there is very little I need in order to live a meaningful, fulfilled existence.
Frugality has become about far more than saving money, although that’s certainly a nice fringe benefit. Alongside my spirituality and my yoga practice, frugality is how I find peace in an uncertain world and how I ensure I’m living a life I’ll be proud of. I’m quite certain that no one on their deathbed has wished they worked longer hours or owned a newer car or bought more clothing. I like to imagine myself as an old woman reflecting back on a life well spent. Then, I make sure I’m creating that life and populating those future memories. Frugality removed the myopia of my perfectionism, of my fears over what other people thought of me, and my drive to meet conventional metrics of success. Thanks to frugality, I have perspective.
If Nate and I won the lottery tomorrow, we likely wouldn’t change much about how we live. We’d have more money to give away to charity and we might redo our kitchen countertops (they are a weird green plastic at present . . . ), but on the whole, we are content with our lives. I know that I will never be the richest, or the smartest, or the most beautiful, or the kindest, or the funniest person who has ever lived, and I am now at peace with that. I am at peace with living as I see fit and as I see best and as I want. I am happy not to spend my money trying to achieve an ephemeral state of perfection, because it’ll never happen anyway. And that’s not depressing to me; that’s sheer liberation. Frugality mutes the noise of unnecessary desire and consumption and instead focuses us on our real priorities. Frugality opened my mind up to what I can do with my life, as opposed to what I can buy.