After Nate and I bought our house in the summer of 2012, I felt compelled to fill it up with furniture. This was our first real home and empty rooms (plus a card table) just wouldn’t do. We bought a king-size knock-off memory foam mattress on Amazon for $279 and, studiously following the instructions to “open only in the room where it will reside,” unfurled it atop our similarly cheap bedframe. It sprung to life like one of those pill-shaped pellets that expands into an animal-shaped sponge when dropped into water, which I’d beg my mom to buy in the checkout line at the grocery store when I was a kid. I had no clue if a $279 knock-off king-size memory foam mattress from Amazon would be any good, or if it would last, or have any attributes resembling comfort, but for that price—as opposed to the brand-name price tag of over $2,000—it was worth the frugal gamble. And since I know how this story ends, I can tell you that nearly six years later our $279 knock-off memory foam mattress remains remarkably comfortable, has survived a move, and is still mattressing on. But that mattress took care of only one room in our otherwise empty house.
In one of our quests for house filler, we double-parked our seventeen-year-old Honda Odyssey minivan, which was badly dented along its entire left side and defaced with a stripe of green paint where I’d interacted with a pillar of the same hue in the American University parking garage a few years back. The van now questionably parked, Nate and I ran up the three stories of a Boston brownstone that we hoped contained our future couch. I refused to buy new furniture (with the exception of our knock-off mattress) for our mostly empty house, on the premise that it was ridiculous to pay full price when I could find used items on Craigslist (or at garage sales or on the side of the road) for at least 75 percent less. After learning the exact height of our minivan while trying to shove a too-tall couch in there one afternoon, and then learning the precise width of our front door in a similar operation, I now knew to ask sellers for exact dimensions. And this couch? Up these three flights of stairs? It was exactly the right size.
The sellers opened their front door and I was surprised they were my age, because I didn’t think people my age had any furniture to sell yet. I mean, how long could they have possibly owned this stuff? Five years, tops? Newlyweds, they explained they were “of course” buying all new furniture now that they were married. Nate and I declined to mention that we’d been married for four years and were just now buying our first couch, used, from them. I asked if they had any other stuff they were selling and sure enough, the bride wanted her husband’s leather armchair gone. We offered them $250 for both and they bit. I was thrilled they were getting rid of a couch that looked, felt, and smelled perfectly fine (it was trendy, even) and an all-leather chair that, I checked, originally retailed for $950. Nate and I inexpertly levered the couch over our heads in order to clear the antique banister in the elevatorless building. We hustled it down to our double-parked minivan and discovered we’d be paying another $50 in the form of a parking ticket. Since both couch and chair wouldn’t squeeze into the van together (I mean, there are limits, even in a minivan with all of its backseats removed), we drove the couch home to Cambridge, unloaded it into our living room, and bolted back for the chair.
My commitment to the secondhand market deepened as I witnessed firsthand the remarkable depreciation curve that new furniture undergoes in its spiral down to the nominal prices I paid for it on Craigslist with my envelope of cash. New stuff—cars, clothing, furniture—is usually not an investment, meaning that except in rare circumstances, it does not appreciate. It’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking we’ll buy something for life, or invest in a couch that’ll hold its value for decades, but that resale moment rarely comes to fruition.
Being a person who owns a $285 pair of leather boots, I keenly understand the desire to pay for quality and to subscribe to the idea that I’ll never buy another pair of boots in my entire life. But how often does this actually pan out? We (I include myself here) get bored with our stuff. Our style and tastes change. We move houses and need a bigger/smaller/more purple couch. This notion that we can future-proof our material possessions is, more often than not, a woeful excuse for overpaying. By instead embracing the used market, I was able to find higher-quality pieces of furniture for far less than their cheap, new, particleboard analogues. Same goes for clothes. The brand names I source from thrift stores are typically better made and more stylish than new and inexpensive fast-fashion outfits intended to be worn and thrown out in the course of a single season. After I slowly outfitted our entire home via the used market for a total sum of $1,000, I was a diehard convert to the world of secondhand.
I’d scour the Craigslist furniture section early every Saturday morning and email anything that seemed promising, requesting (exact) dimensions and directions. I learned to always ask people what else they were selling because people are always selling more than one thing and you can usually get a bundled deal a la my couch-n-chair combo. And I always offered less than asking price, which almost always worked. After each successful cheap purchase, in a fit of hypocrisy, to celebrate finding an end table for $5 and a dresser for $20, Nate and I would go out to dinner at Lord Hobo or Atwood’s or any number of other superb Cambridge eateries. The irony that we were spending upward of $50 on our celebratory meal was lost on us at the time. In our early days of home ownership, frugality appealed to me when it was a contest and when I could find deals and barter with sellers.
Now, two years later and two days after launching our move-to-the-woods plan, I was coming face-to-face with the fiscal ramifications of all those celebratory meals. Nate and I sat staring at his laptop on our wide wooden plank dining room table, which we’d bought for $75, including the four woven cloth chairs, from a Scandinavian couple who’d moved it into their thirty-foot-ceiling Boston loft all the way from Scandinavia and then decided it didn’t work in their new concrete-floored home. Nate opened a spreadsheet he’d exported from our bank account detailing every dollar we’d spent the previous month, which we hadn’t known would be our last month ever pre-extreme frugality. The first element of our plan was that we needed to save more money. Full stop. I’d thought we were frugal and smart with our money, sitting as we were at this discounted table and chairs in a home we owned to which respectable-size paychecks were delivered. But I’d never tested this theory, and I’d never actually combed through every dollar we spent in a month. Kind of a painful process the first time you do it, let me tell you.
Once I started earning a decent income, and then most especially after Nate’s similarly decent salary was stacked on top of mine in the melting pot of our marital bank accounts, we stopped micromanaging our spending. By which I mean I had no clue what we spent in any given week, month, or year. Back in my Brooklyn AmeriCorps days, I counted every bar of soap I bought for fear I’d overdraw my account. All I’d wanted then was to have enough money to not have to deliberate for weeks over whether to spend $10 on a grocery cart to tote my clothes to and from the laundromat. Now that I’d experienced a life of spending $40 a week on artisanal cheeses and $120 on haircuts and $200 on dinners out, I realized it wasn’t what I wanted. What was the point of being able to buy whatever I wanted if I didn’t control my time? I’d thought money was the ultimate resource, but it was dawning on me that time is actually the greatest resource of all. More specifically, the ability to use my time as I wished. It wasn’t that I hated my job, I didn’t; it’s that I spent too many hours there, marooned in a cubicle, with my tasks dictated by other people, unable to work on things I felt inspired by.
Staring at what seemed like unfathomable dollar amounts on this blindingly white spreadsheet tallying our March 2014 expenses, I understood that Nate and I had fallen for the most hackneyed trope of the American dream: we were spending more and more money in increasingly desperate attempts to mitigate the frustration and discontent we felt over our jobs. We were working for the weekends and spending the money we’d worked so hard to earn in an effort to make ourselves feel better about how hard we worked. It was a vicious cycle. We were firmly entrenched at that point. After reaching the mammoth goal of buying our house, we entered what I now call a period of financial purgatory: we’d failed to map out a next step for our money. Buying our house had been it, the only thing we’d planned for. There was no next goal. Until now. Those two goalless years reared up on Nate’s spreadsheet graphs like volcanoes we’d stupidly thought were dormant and were now trying to summit, wondering why molten earth was coursing around our feet. We’d drifted through these two years as mindless consumers, convincing ourselves that we needed, nay deserved, new iPhones and wall art.
In the aftermath of closing on our house, we’d gone out to eat maybe once a week. But then we started to think, If it’s nice to eat out once a week, wouldn’t it be even nicer to get takeout another night, and nicer still to get lattes and scones every Saturday afternoon? What I didn’t know at the time is that Nate and I were victims of the hedonic adaptation that plagues our consumption-focused society. Hedonic adaptation is the concept that we calibrate ourselves to whatever we repeatedly do. If we constantly reward or treat ourselves (with restaurants and scones), we deaden our ability to derive true pleasure from those rewards. Then we require larger and more frequent rewards.
It’s also a question of habit. We can acclimate ourselves to just about any level of expenditure or pleasure. After all, the superrich can’t fathom how anyone survives without ten homes and five yachts. And sure, owning ten homes and five yachts sounds ridiculous, but is it really that much more ridiculous than wanting to eat at a restaurant every night of the week? In both situations, we’re relying upon external forces to bring us happiness. In both situations, we’re trading money for experiences, which we think will yield that ephemeral “good life.” The problem is that when we get into the routine of trading money in order to make ourselves happy, we lose sight of any other routes to happiness. Like an addict, we start turning to money to solve more and more of our problems and to farm out more and more of our dissatisfaction with the life we’ve created and which we now must pay for. We become desensitized to pleasure and lose our capacity to experience joy from things we’d previously considered luxurious, such as a single restaurant meal a month. Nate and I realized we needed to disrupt this cycle of hedonic adaptation and recalibrate what brought us joy.
Looking at every dollar we spent in a regular old month—not even a month when something noteworthy, like a friend’s wedding, happened—I felt like I do in the spring when I put on my bathing suit for the first time: exposed and larger than I had hoped. I was angry at myself. How had I let this lifestyle inflation happen? I’d considered myself a consummate frugalist. Yet here was irrefutable evidence of Nate and me flushing thousands of dollars down the drain on craft beer and throw pillows. I was tempted to tally up how much we could’ve saved if we’d been on a legit frugal path from the beginning, and if we’d known all along we were going to abandon the conventional life we’d originally forged.
But in the same breath, I knew that was impossible. I came around to this plan because of my firsthand experience with what it feels like to work forty hours a week and to spend all the money I wanted, not in spite of it. These past few years had been our spending Rumspringa; it was only through trying on the lifestyle of a typical American consumer that we were able to discern it wasn’t for us. There would be no woods plan without first having this city spending plan. The money we’d spent wasn’t wasted. Rather, it was sacrificed in service of figuring out what we wanted to do with our lives. Or at least, that’s what I like to tell myself. Instead of wallowing in regret over these lost funds, I moved forward. I termed it our era of “start now and don’t look back.” Nate had done all manner of fancy spreadsheet calculations on how much money we could save and invest each month, and thus how quickly we could reach financial independence, but now it was time to see if his predictions were right.
Our watershed coffee shop conversation was on March 29, 2014, and so the month of April 2014 was our test drive in true extreme frugality. Our month to find out how little we could spend and still survive. Up to this point, we’d been Christmas and Easter frugalists, dipping in and out of fiscal prudence where it suited us, saving enough to ensure ourselves a spot in retirement, but also buying things like a handcrafted turquoise-and-brown embroidered collar for Gracie with a matching leash. It was time to renew our commitment. We enacted what we called our $0 budget. I’ve always thought that spending is like a gas: it expands to fill whatever space you allot to it. If we’d given ourselves a $1,000 monthly spending cap, I can almost guarantee we’d spend exactly $1,000. If we were at $990.01 on the last day of the month, we’d go buy a dog toy for $9.99 to make it even. My rationale was that with a $0 budget, I’d approach the month from the mind-set that I wasn’t going to spend any money. At all. Obviously, I knew we’d have to buy stuff, but I’d consider every dollar spent as a debit against that paragon zero.
We decided that this most frugal month ever would have a twofold goal: 1) to see how much money we could save and 2) to test out how sustainable extreme frugality felt to us. Could we actually embrace living on less for the long term? Neither of us wanted to sell all of our possessions and go live in a yurt, but we also felt lied to by our “treat yourself” culture that parrots consumption as the cure for what ails. We needed to find a tenable middle ground between dumpster diving for our food and embracing the rampant, gratuitous spending that’s considered normal and even necessary in our culture. Since most budgeting programs are based around the premise of bumping their acolytes up from a 0 percent savings rate to a 5 or 10 percent rate, and Nate and I were angling to boost what was already a 45 to 50 percent savings rate, we decided to strike out and create our own system.
In making the decision to ignore everything our culture said about money (that it’s to be spent) and careers (that you must work them for over forty years), we had the somewhat alarming realization that there aren’t very many people who do this sort of thing. This was a wholesale reckoning of how we used our money, how we viewed our consumption, what constituted a need for us, and how we structured our lives. We needed to identify where every dollar was going and either eliminate the expense, reduce it, or find a cheaper substitute.
Looking at our previous month’s expenses was ideal because it gave us a baseline starting point. Trying to estimate what you spend in a month is a lot like the weight you tell yourself you are: much lower than reality. Better to step on the scale and face the real number. If we didn’t know how much we were spending and what we were spending it on, there’d be no way to calibrate our projections. Sitting at our kitchen table, we divided our expenses into two categories: fixed and discretionary. Fixed costs are things that aren’t easily changed. Our list included just one item: our mortgage. Most budget gurus will shovel gigantic piles of expenses into the fixed section, including the likes of utilities, transportation, and groceries. But those things aren’t actually fixed; they’re calibrated upon our actions. If we choose to drive to work every day as opposed to taking public transportation or riding a bike, that’s a decision we’re making with a very real financial consequence. If we choose to turn the heat in our home up to 75 degrees in the wintertime, that’s a choice with expensive repercussions. If we spend thousands of dollars every month on pricey prepackaged groceries, that again is a choice. I set aside our one fixed cost since we wouldn’t be changing that quite yet, but I didn’t forget about it. I now turned my attention to the yawning fissure of line item after line item of discretionary expenses. Lucky for me, there was a lot of low-hanging, overripe spending fruit for us to pick off that first month, a truism for just about everyone who performs this kind of audit.
Goaded on by my new infatuation with frugality, I busted out the delete key for every line item that wasn’t a strict necessity. My litmus was: “Do we require this for our survival as two human people and one dog-child?” This is how we said goodbye to the unnecessary tchotchkes of city life: dining out, coffee shops, dry cleaning, cabs, bars, cafés, and takeout (OK, yes, a lot of it was food-related . . . ). We already had a nearly nonexistent entertainment budget because things like paying double digits to sit in a dark room with a bunch of strangers to watch a program that you can’t change the channel on if it’s bad, and where you can’t bring your own food, or put your feet up, or cuddle, or go to the bathroom any time you’d like, sounds more like a form of torture than entertainment to me. Suffice it to say, we watched movies at home. Nate and I had cultivated a lot of free hobbies over the years, such as walking, hiking, and cooking, thanks to our initial poverty and then our house-buying goal. All of these pursuits yielded major frugality dividends. I’m also averse on principle to paying for entertainment as it seems like a cop-out to me. Half of the fun is the quest and the creativity inherent in finding free or cheap stuff to do: cruising through free festivals and outdoor markets, going to museums on free-to-the-public days, reading books and magazines from the library, hosting friends for themed dinner parties, trying out fancy recipes at home. This philosophy of creating our own entertainment was already an ingrained aspect of our lives.
Next on my ruthless expense-chopping block, I decided to abolish the modern-day construct of paying other people to do things for us. This wasn’t a super-huge category since we’re insourcers by nature, but there was still room for improvement. We like the self-reliance, the collaboration, and the auxiliary benefit of learning new skills that results from embracing a wholly DIY existence. We’d refinished our kitchen cabinets ourselves, refurbished our staircase, painted walls, and done a smattering of other renovations in our house. We washed our own dog and cleaned our own home. Our only outsourced activity at the time were our haircuts, which we decided we could handle in-house.
Next up were things crucial to our basic survival, but that weren’t fixed costs, a category that included groceries, household supplies like toilet paper, dog food, clothing, and our utility bills (water and electricity). The goal here was to reduce the amount we spent in each of these categories. I’d always glossed over grocery costs in the past with the glib assumption that since food is a necessity, I didn’t need to think about how much I was spending. But I was out $40 a week in the artisanal cheese section alone before I even got to the chocolate-covered sea-salt raspberries and the sparkling white wine. I needed to find less expensive alternatives and learn how to compare price per square foot of toilet paper (and price per ounce of almonds, and per pound of apples . . . ). It wasn’t about decreasing the quality of our food, but rather about being conscious of what things cost and how to achieve the same end result—a healthy diet—for less.
After making these eliminations, we were left with a small, but crucial, list. These were the things we didn’t want to give up. These were the items and the experiences that we felt added significant value to our lives. In order to retain this value in our lives, we decided to find frugal substitutions for each.
I didn’t view this new and intense level of frugality as a mechanism of deprivation, I instead saw it as an opportunity to identify my priorities. I wanted to isolate the variables that constituted my core happiness. My goal was to figure out when spending money made actionable, appreciable difference in my life, versus when spending money was superfluous, unimportant, and beyond the scope of what brought me lasting enjoyment.
A lot of my spending had become automatic, mindless swipes of the credit card that I repeatedly did out of sheer habit. Enter my Dunkin’ Donuts routine. I used to buy an iced tea from Dunkin’ Donuts almost every single weekday afternoon with my best work buddy, Jess, not because I liked the iced tea, as it’s actually horrendous-tasting, but because I wanted to spend time with my friend. It dawned on me that she and I could just as easily enjoy a walk together instead of a trek over to Dunkin’ Donuts. We could catch up on our work gossip, stretch our legs, and get out of our cubicles for a few minutes without the accompanying loss of $2.50 per day. Easy. Stripping away pointless purchases like this unneeded and unwanted iced tea helped me to identify priorities—in this case, quality time with my friend—and divorce them from spending money. All I had to do in order to save hundreds of dollars every month was bring consciousness to my daily transactions.
I also reasoned that if I could get all of our furniture for a fraction of the price by substituting Craigslist for swanky furniture stores, there had to be frugal analogues for lots of other things too. We could’ve entirely eliminated every single line item not required for human survival from our budget, but Nate and I were angling for long-term sustainability in our frugality. We once did the South Beach Diet together, which was not the greatest of ideas we’ve ever had. We stuck to it like some hardcore mofos for about a month (full disclosure: it did work in helping us both lose weight), but we were miserable. Mis-er-a-ble. We bailed on it in favor of a more moderate but wholesale transformation of how we eat. We made our long-term diet sustainable by allowing for treats and the stuff we love eating (except for Cheetos, as I have a certified problem with Cheetos and had to quit those full stop). The same approach was effective with our frugality. By retaining the things we love, we were able to craft a lifestyle that isn’t focused solely on saving money, but rather, on optimizing for our priorities. Your priorities are surely different than mine, but by allowing this principle to guide your budgeting process, I imagine you’ll be amazed at how many insignificant line items are gobbling up your funds month after month. The key is to identify what matters most to you, what brings you the deepest enjoyment, and then abolish all of the subpar iced teas on which you’re frittering away your cash.
The biggest-ticket line item that I did not want to give up were my yoga classes. For several years, I’d been taking yoga two or three nights a week, and every Saturday morning, with Nate at a heated power-yoga studio a few blocks from our house. They were a priority; I loved both the classes and the community, and regular yoga had whipped me into the best physical shape of my life. But I was spending $18 on each and every class, which tallied up to a whopping $288 per month. Ouch. There was no way that $3,456 per year on yoga fit into a regime of extreme frugality. I was bummed. While sulking about this sacrifice, I remembered a poster hanging up in my studio that read “Do you want free yoga classes?” in purple letters across the top. And I thought, Why yes, in fact, that’s exactly what I want. There was no excuse (none whatsoever) for the fact that I’d never paid attention to this poster before, but it was a perfect illustration of how myopic I’d been in my presumed frugality. Two days later, I was sitting behind the front desk being trained as a yoga studio assistant. I felt like a world-class idiot for the thousands, thousands of dollars I’d spent on classes over the years when I could’ve been getting them for free. Never mind that, no time for regrets. I learned how to navigate the computer system (turns out, there’s a whole suite of software just for yoga studios), how to run the credit card machine, how to mop the studio, and how to take out the trash after class. I’d discovered the wonderful world of barter and trade, which my modern cultural training had informed me was dead. False, I learned as I asked, “How would you like to pay for class this evening?” and then rolled out my mat for free.
My newfound understanding of the role of barter and trade in our modern economy served me well as I frugalized every aspect of my life. I’d always considered it an antiquated concept with no presence in our market economy, but how wrong I was. In the years since uncovering this magical free yoga hack, I’ve heard from folks all around the world who have a similar barter and trade arrangement with their yoga/ballet/Pilates/CrossFit studio/gym/pool. The opportunities to trade your time are available; you just have to seek them out.
After combing through our entire rundown of expenses and striking off restaurants and new clothes and haircuts with barely a hesitation of the delete key, I landed on another luxury I didn’t want to sacrifice: seltzer water. Yes, I said seltzer water. Nate and I are bubbly-water fanatics because it’s how we both quit drinking soda. I crave carbonation more than the ersatz flavors of soda, so seltzer was my deliverance from both the expense and the health detriments of fizzy pop. We don’t add syrups or flavors to our seltzer, so it’s just plain old H2O; however, the inserts for our SodaStream seltzer machine still cost money. Quite a bit of money, as it turned out. Nate and I were drinking a whopping 180 liters of seltzer per month, which, in case you’re wondering, required that we purchase three SodaStream CO2 inserts a month at the rate of $15 a pop. Don’t worry, I’ll do the math for you: that’s $45 per month and a staggering $540 per year on bubbly water. This had to change. Since seltzer was one of our identified priorities (don’t laugh, everyone’s priorities are different . . . ) we realized we’d have to devise a frugal alternative.
Ever the industrious frugal DIY-er, Nate figured out a way to hack our SodaStream machine to hook it up to a gigantic (OK, just twenty-pound) CO2 tank, which meant our fizzy water now cost something like half a penny per serving as opposed to the $540 per year we were spending on SodaStream inserts. A twenty-pound tank of CO2 cost $35 and, since we used roughly two tanks annually, we were on track to save $470 per year. Sure, it would’ve been cheapest to simply do away with our bubbles entirely, but we wanted to embrace a lifestyle of luxurious frugality. A lifestyle where we were saving an inordinately high percentage of our incomes, but also enjoying life. Since this was a quest to create a life we truly loved, we saw no point in making ourselves miserable in the process.
These types of frugal substitutions and alternatives were all around us. We marveled at everything we’d been unwittingly overpaying for. By bringing creativity and ingenuity to our consumption, we were able to drastically reduce our overall spending. I’ll grant you that $470 might not sound like a whole lot of money to save, but what you have to remember is that once you eliminate an expense, you’ve eliminated it forever. It’s not that we were saving a mere $470 in one year, we were saving $470 every year for the rest of our lives (or at least, until we stop drinking seltzer, which I imagine will be after we’re dead). Plus, all of our savings were stacked one on top of the other, which is how you create an extremely frugal lifestyle. We weren’t saving just $470 on seltzer per year, we were saving $470 plus the $3,456 on yoga plus $1,008 on haircuts . . . and on and on and on until we were saving thousands upon thousands of dollars every single year. Forever.
There’s a theory in behavioral economics related to loss aversion positing that once we acclimate to a certain level of luxury or ownership in our lives—be it seltzer or expensive yoga classes—we find it nearly impossible to then live without this luxury. Giving these things up feels like deprivation because we’ve acclimated ourselves to their presence in our lives. Knowing this, and knowing that we wanted to sustain a lower cost of living forever, Nate and I put a lot of time and effort into devising our frugal workarounds. I don’t think the route to successful frugality entails brutally slashing everything from your budget, because you’re bound to end up in that deprived state that behavioral economists have documented. Rather, the key is to identify less expensive options that’ll yield the same or a similar end result. Thus, you end up not feeling deprived, you save a boatload of money, and you are motivated to find even more opportunities for dramatic changes and the resulting savings. Once you begin down the road of frugalizing, it’s nearly impossible to stop. It becomes a game, a competition, and an invigorating challenge. You get to win at your own life.
In the unfurling of this personal frugality boot camp, Nate and I made the discovery that we were both second-marshmallow kids. Not literally, as we weren’t lucky enough to be actual subjects in this research experiment, but we fall into a category of people wired from an early age for delayed gratification. You’ve probably heard of what’s often referred to as the Stanford marshmallow study of the ’60s and ’70s, in which preschoolers underwent a now-classic test in delayed gratification. In this experiment, researchers sat a preschooler at a desk alone in a room, with two marshmallows atop the desk and the following instructions: the researcher needed to leave the room for a moment and the child could either eat one marshmallow while the researcher was absent or, if the child could wait until the researcher returned, the child could eat both marshmallows. Some of the kids are like, “hey, bird in the hand!” and gobble one ’mallow. But other, weirder kids, like me and Nate, agonizingly wait for the researcher to return in order to savor the promised, greater prize of two marshmallows.
When I was in second grade, my teacher gave us coupons for good behavior that we could redeem for prizes. There were pencils and erasers you could get for five coupons, a rubber ball for ten coupons, and other nominal kid trinkets for each increment of coupons saved. At the very top of the prize bookshelf, there was a row of stuffed animals that were redeemable for one hundred coupons each. One hundred coupons is a lot of good behavior. One hundred coupons is months’ worth of listening, walking in line, raising your hand, being a good friend, not cutting people with scissors, and turning your work in on time. I had my eye on a Care Bear on that top shelf, Tenderheart Bear to be precise, and I watched Tenderheart Bear all year long. I studied her (his? gender was never clear . . . ) beaming bear smile and the big red heart stitched on her chest. Every time I collected a coupon, for not eating glue and for remembering my permission slip, I stole a glance at Tenderheart Bear, planning, plotting, waiting. In May 1992, which was the final month of my second-grade career, I had one hundred coupons at last. I got to take Tenderheart Bear home with me. She was covered in dust because, as my teacher explained to my mom, those big stuffed animals had been sitting up on that top shelf for years.
I don’t know why Nate and I are both so attuned to the merits of delayed gratification, but it’s an attribute we’ve brought out and enhanced in each other. Sacrificing short-term desires like lattes and scones on Saturday afternoons for the long-term gains of living life on our own terms makes rational sense to both of us. It also appeals to our ingrained desire for efficiency. We both recognized that the pleasure we’d derive from those weekly dopamine (not to mention sugar) hits of our latte treats couldn’t compete with the promise of not having to slump in grayscale cubicles every Monday through every Friday for nearly every year of our adult lives. Since we were working toward an ever-crystallizing goal of decamping to the woods, frugality wasn’t about what we were giving up; it was entirely about what we were going to gain.