A Frugal Life

Stepping into 2015 is also stepping into the new reality of living on a “fixed income” which translates to no impulse buying and no more “I want’s” but only “I need” type of purchases.  The habit of the last 5 years where I allowed myself to spend lavishly on clothes and oddments should not be very difficult to break as the previous 55+ years of my life were frugal in the extreme. 

As a person gets older it is amazing to discover what one has collected over the years and one begins to ask the question “why did I ever buy this”.  Many of the self-help disciplines use January as the De-clutter month and as luck would have it this was part of my plan for this month also.  It’s amazing how much money a person can save simply by being active in doing something inside the home.

I think back to the time of my childhood when most mothers were still at home.  They were busy keeping house; few women had a second car so going to a store was out of the question until Saturday when family grocery shopping was done, husband in tow.  Our neighbourhood actually had both a milkman and a bread-man who drove around making their deliveries.  Our milkman came every day and the bread-man was in the neighbourhood at least twice a week, maybe three times.  My mother still had an old fashioned wringer washing machine until 1973.  She was probably the busiest mother on the street even though we were not the biggest family of children. 

Malls weren’t invented; the closest thing we had was a strip mall which was a couple of miles walking distance.  There was a Woolworth, a Dominion grocery store, a Reitmans, a men’s clothing store and I think there might have been a hardware store but as my father was a stranger to tools of any kind I know that we never set foot in it.

My mother was a fanatic clean freak and woe to any child that came home with dirty clothes, wet socks or a stray animal.  She would be the biggest drama queen on the planet if we came into the house with “soakers” which of course we did on a regular basis.  She’d go into a rant “Now I can begin all over again” which doesn’t sound like much until you hear it in Danish.  She would wash the floors several times a week and once a week she would wax them, always down on hands and knees using good old elbow grease.

So reflecting on old fashioned housewifery I go gung-ho into January’s “de-clutter” mode.