Queen of Bargains
And Her Court®
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"Living Richly Without Being Rich" doesn’t mean buying every
bargain you can find so your home is crammed full and you’ve got more
than anyone else you know.
To back me up check out the book, The Millionaire
Next Door by two Ph.D’s, Thomas J. Stanley and William D.
Danko. Their facts and figures all point to the rich of America as
people who live beneath their means, with low personal overhead and
great self-control when it comes to spending.
I recently found out that emigrés from Romania, on entering the US, receive literature trying to explain why Americans consume so much. That’s because our passion to buy is a foreign concept to them. There is even a Romanian proverb that goes something like this. “I can’t afford to buy cheap, inexpensive things because I’m too poor.” This eastern European folklore emphasizes that if high quality stuff costs a lot, it’s okay because it will last.
What do other cultures know about us that we don’t know or that we are reluctant to acknowledge? I call it “Shopping Shibboleths” or “Aggravating Agora Assumptions” or simply “Marketplace Myths.” These are ideas we take for granted as truth when in fact they are lies.
I love capitalism because it honors creativity and individuality. Yet for every good thing about the free marketplace we strive for in the US, there is also a dark side. Perhaps if I help bring these lies into the light, we can see them and learn to avoid them.
Let me enumerate some.
- A woman’s haircut is no good unless it costs at least $ 90.
- Easy credit and debt help you buy more, which is good, and helps you lower your taxes, which is better.
- Two parents have to work to afford the best for their children.
- Daycare doesn’t harm kids and is an excellent substitute for family care.
- Every kid in America needs his own room in order to grow up “normal.”
- Kids need cell phones, I Pods, PDA’s, cars, money, and vacations to grow up nicely.
- Every family driver needs a car.
- Fast food has to be a staple of American cuisine.
- We have luxuries because we “deserve” them despite the cost.
I’ve heard that the extended family (in the “olden days” prior to World War I) was less stressed and able to live more within its means than we do today. Having grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in your household or close by meant you had free help with the business of running a family. House cleaning, laundry, ironing, shopping, errands, vehicle or equine maintenance, home maintenance, cooking, bill paying, filing, banking, information gathering, vacation planning, routine correspondence, decision making, sewing, entertaining, homework, childcare, special event planning and correspondence, gardening and all other family business was shared among the able family members somehow.
Today we have to outsource almost all of the chores I’ve listed. That is a big drain on family finances. No wonder so many are broke or just a paycheck away from bankruptcy. We have to pay others to do what was once part of family life.
If you look at the family as a business, overhead has dramatically increased while income has not kept pace.
What can we do to keep the money in the family as much as possible? One way could be the answer to long, boring summers for your children who think you should be a broken slot machine spewing out money without pause. Instead of giving them unlimited sums to pay for camps, clothes, movies, water and other amusement parks, cars, shopping sprees, CD’s, computers and software galore, teach them the family business. Train and encourage your children to do some of these tasks for your family and then, ultimately, they can provide experienced labor for the business world. The year I decided that all of the kids should be self-supporting in the summer, was a golden one.
I never fully understood the stress I felt when being “nickeled and dimed” to death by bored children.
“No money, no purchase” is our motto because we mostly agree that debt is to be avoided.
The summer jobs my four have mastered include selling the vegetables we grow, lawn care, digging garden plots, life guarding, working in a gas station, scooping out ice cream at the corner store, filing, working as a receptionist, researcher, writer, general office assistant, legal assistant, newspaper carrier, waiting tables, car washer, tutor, mother’s helper and baby sitter.
Our quality of life improved. Our children began to develop more of their potential. Their desire to buy was been sobered by the reality of knowing it was their hard-earned money that had to be used. More important we have stared in the dark at the marketplace myths that others believe and have seen the light.
