I add 1/4 cup of borax powder to each laundry load. It acts as a water softener. I live in Colorado where we have a lot of minerals in our water. When I first moved out here 24 years ago, I stayed with my cousin and his wife temporarily until I got settled. They had a water softener hooked up to their water supply. I hated the feeling on my skin after a shower or bath--that feeling that the soap hadn't rinsed off. I've never had a water softener in my home where I've lived for over 20 years. I use white vinegar to dissolve the hard water deposits on fixtures and add it to appliances like coffee maker, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. It can't take any more effort than maintaining a water softener appliance with adding salt each month. Try the borax powder in your washing machine. You'll find that you won't need to use as much detergent.
I've lived in my home for 20 years. We have well water that contained limestone which left a lot of white powder residue on the water dispenser and ice dispenser on our refrigerator, scale in the hot water tank, etc. -- basically, all the things that Jon Anderson and others wrote about.
After 5 years I had enough and we purchased a water softener. Best thing! My dishwasher, side-by-side refrigerator, and hot water tank -- the originals when we built this home 20 years ago -- still continue. The only appliance I've had to replace is my washer -- which was 23 years old. And, it was replaced only because the knobs and mechanism that controlled the washing cycles broke.
I also have a separate line for drinking water on my sink...it eliminates the salt but does purify our drinking water. It's part of our water softening system.
I'm spoiled...I love my water softener....never thought I'd say that. I grew up on city water and loved it....no more.....I just can't get past the chlorine taste and its hardness for bathing and washing items.
hi paul, respectively of course. you look pretty young to be a senior anything.. i just wonder if you have spied on these farms personally. you seem to know an awful lot.. what we need to remember here is that the usda makes there comments based on what our fda tells them to say. who is basically run by ex-monsanto corp. executives. we are all getting to know them now. our elders from Vietnam remember them for creating agent orange. now growth hormone, which makes cows sick , thus we introduce antibiotics. they are trying to take over all food with there gmo seed. ex. sugar beet, soy, etc. those crops will only germinate if using roundup, produced by monsanto. yes poison in the soil.. organic farmers work very hard to maintain there certification. people are sick of the fda not marking products correctly, or deceitfully, or not at all. that is why they are turning in more profits. personally , i drink raw milk. but , i would much rather buy organic milk as opposed to non organic. when you see a label on milk boasting about no rbst's in there milk. call them up, ask them if they are fed GMO CORN OR OTHER GMO FEEDS. the answer will be yes. everything i see written here is describing the tactics company's like nestle,kellogs, etc use to hide the fact that they are GMO FOODS, PERIOD. Until our country does proper testing, like all the countries(and there are a lot) that ban gmo instead of paying off colleges to lie. we are going no where but backwards.
Spending is obviously critical as is having your house paid off, and these should be included in any retirement projection, but the key is simply to have a big enough nest egg. I've had friends retire and suddenly change their outlook to one of 'preserving' their wealth and frankly not have any fun -- they're too worried about running out of money! I"m not expecting extravagance by any means, but they become so chintzy that they are duds compared to their former selves. If you can't comfortably maintain a lifestyle that's close to your current one, in my opinion, you aren't ready to retire.
A friend who stopped by to check out my new digs recently recommended the cutting-board method as well, although she uses hers on her stove (when it's off, of course). Whether over the sink or oven, it sounds like a great way to add counter space, and I look forward to trying it out.
Awesome post. I hadn't really thought about the promised future from this angle before. Really made me think about how we all live and how affluenza has taken hold of most of us.
I am struggling with how to live at the moment and while myself and my girlfriend are planning to move to a smaller town, grow our own food (as much as we can) and slow down, I struggle with how far to go with the change.
Thanks for the article - it has really got me thinking.
I really appreciate your blog but I am more of glass half empty person.
My wife and I have been self-employed for 20 and years and try to live very frugally. Eventually you run up against non-negotiable expenses. We paid our house off but property taxes, heating fuel, and repairs/services that we can't do ourselves are going up all the time. We saved cash (quite a bit of it) but now interest rates are zero so it's not working for us. Health insurance goes up 17-20% a year like clockwork--even though we have a high deductible insurance, are healthy, and have never cost the insurance company a cent. We have disability insurance as well and that is costly. We also need to have plenty of cash set aside to cover the deductibles of these insurances because unlike what Sharon Angle suggested, I don't know of any doctors that barter their services for a chicken.
On and on it goes. Once you reach a certain level of frugality, you realize that you really can't live cheaply in the US and be middle class. To live cheaply, you must live on or close to the edge and have no assets. You may be the exception but don't assume that everyone can do it. I have an acquaintance that reminds me of you (lives more frugally than my wife and I). But I have to say, he is extremely talented in this respect and he managed to get some benefits such as healthcare and a small pension from previous jobs along the way, so I think it's a false picture (at least as far as he is concerned). Of all the other people I know, I am the most frugal by far and still, it can only accomplish so much. Now, if you have no assets to protect, you can go without insurance because at least they'll stabilize you at the hospital before flinging you out on the street. But if you have assets, you may lose all of your meager savings that you've worked for your whole life due to some accident or illness. So insurance is a must.
I realized long ago that most pensions were under-funded scams and that's one of the reasons my wife and I left the working world. There was no point in giving your life to a company to end up with nothing. My mother did piecework in textiles and her union notified her that there was no money in the kitty for the health benefits they promised her. And that was back in the 80s! I now have friends who are professors at a state university in IL and are worried that they may never receive their public pensions. What a situation for the greatest country in the world to be in! So now I realize something I did not understand in the 80s and early 90s. Namely that wealth accumulation (for the purpose of financial security) is also a scam for most Americans. What good is it to save money for retirement or for living well when it is so precariously hanging by a thread? What fool likes those odds? I certainly don't.
After seeing what Obama (who I voted for and donated to) came up with for healthcare...the way he tossed the ball over that crook Baucus...I knew the gig for this country's middle class was up 100%. Previously, I held a very slim glimmer of hope but now I know better. My advice to young Americans is, unless you are pretty sure you are going to make a lot of money, move out of the country. Forget voting because the system is rigged and all possible winners are vetted. They will serve their masters. Bank on it! Seek out opportunities elsewhere, where the society has some cohesiveness and there is some security. If you can't find a suitable match, at least find an interesting country to live in that appeals to you, where you can possibly make a future for yourself. I say this to my own detriment because without young workers, my SS and medicare prospects look grim. But still, save yourselves if you can. I am 52 and have very old and dependent parents and will make my grave here because I have no choice. First the corpotacracy will suck out all my blood, and I mean every drop, and then they will toss me into a shallow grave. Now those are sure-fire odds if ever I have seen any.
Sorry for the rant, BTW. I am actually more upbeat in person but these thoughts are still 100% me and I believe them with complete certainty. I just try not to bring everybody around me down, so we talk about the weather instead.
The photo is of a sculpture in Chicago, in the loop, north of the Art Institute. I just thought it looked futuristic. (I really wanted to go with a 1950s poster of a retro future, with flying cars or jet packs, but couldn't quickly find a public domain (or creative commons licensed) image that I liked.)
Great article! Living 1950's style is do-able if you keep looking and trying to find the right fit. My house is small, built in 1904, no air conditioning, but perfectly fine for 1-3 people. My car is from 1987 with over 250,000 miles (odometer stopped working) and my mechanic says it will last another 10 years or so. I chose to live in a place with great public transportation to cut down on driving costs. I do work full-time, but have the option of working at home if I want or need to, so there is a good work/family balance. More and more people are deciding that having the biggest, latest, greatest isn't worth it. It did take quite a while and a lot of work to get to this situation, but it is a wonderful life.
The photo: ?Is that a broken rollercoaster meant to be symbolic? Or something else??? Love your photos!
Sure. That's more or less what I did. It's not quite as good as was promised—you have to do all that planning and saving—but it's a way to get there, and it doesn't depend on reorganizing society around the way you want to live your life.
You can also work the full time job for awhile, save the surplus, and take a "sabbatical" i.e. quit and live off your savings or take a lesser paying part time job, ideally one more fun than your old job.
I actually have fallen into half time work situation after getting laid off from full time employment. A former employer contacted me and asked if I could work temporarily for them. Now I work for them whenever they are busy and stay home when they are slow. Because I have kept my living expenses low, I am able to get by just fine.
Phillip, thanks for the quick reply. I just skimmed through your referenced posts. You hit the talking points on health care reform, but my experience is that the devil is in the details, those details are being manipulated by "big-insurance", and the media isn't doing their traditional job of exposing the manipulation.
Take the PCIP (pre-existing condition insurance plan) that was implemented this past summer. Supposed to make insurance available to people that couldn't get full insurance due to a pre-existing condition. Nope - it was modified so that if you had partial insurance with exclusions (which is all you could get privately) you had to DROP that for six months before applying for the PCIP. Nice way to protect insurance companies profits, and it goes against all principles of getting everyone to have insurance.
If you had no partial insurance, chances are you couldn't afford the PCIP, but the insurance companies really didn't care as you weren't paying them. If you do play "medical roulette" for 6 months so you can apply, you don't know if the republicans will be successful in their vow to starve funding from these type of heath reform bills.
I read comments from the Health editor at Consumer Reports where she saw this loophole coming but didn't call it to mainstream attention. So much for whistle-blowing journalism that seemed to exist in the 50's.
That is such a true statement. I never thought about it that way. People often talk about how evil debt is and I bought into it but without student loans, a lot of people wouldn't have the start that they have, the car that they have or the house that they have. At the end of the day, it is about wise decisions but I still think cash, savings and discipline can bring you a lot more.
I also think that loans/credit/debt all feed in to make things cost more. If people had to pay $24,000 out of pocket for a car or college, the price would have to go down because not a lot of people would be buying. Between 1910 and 2010 Fords went from being $650 to $30,000 and I think inflation was a small part, technology was a slightly larger part and credit had the biggest effect on the jump in cost.
Yes, health insurance is a huge issue—at least for people in the US, because of the way we've structured health insurance as an employee benefit that usually only goes to full-time workers. I've written a couple of posts about that:
We have a small kitchen in our place as well. What I use for storage is part of my linen closet. 1/2 the closet goes towards towels and sheets, the other 1/2 of the linen closet is used for gadgets that I do use, just not very often (blender, hand mixer, waffle iron, etc.). It has freed up alot of kitchen cupboard space!
Wow, you've so captured my thoughts and situation.
I left the workforce (computer networking for big companies) 5 years ago at 48 to resolve a health issue. I had expected to be able to work part time as some point in the future. But you've listed many reasons why skilled part time work is so hard to find. At the time I left, my company would consider allowing "job-sharing" but I'm reading that even telecommuting is being restricted so I think flexibility is on the decline
I can only hope that part time work will open up in the future, if only because many Americans will need to do something in their old age due to lack of financial preparation.
I had hoped that health care reform would shift that cost away from companies and make it more like other societies where health care is more of a basic right. That shift would help part time work, but I doubt it will really happen.
I find frugal living pretty easy as many hobbies can replace costly habits (for example, roast your own coffee rather than funding starbucks), but a part-time job
would be 4 or so hours a day that you aren't spending money.
One thing that people can do is voice to their representatives that they want (and probably need) the ability to work part-time as they get older. A public health option would move that cost away from employers. Employers could also get tax breaks for part-time worker (that is, if we ever get past our current high unemployment).
If your friends are all the sort who don't know how to socialize without spending money—if it's all meals out, drinks at the bar, coffee at the coffee shop, movies at the theater—then it can really feel like you've got to choose between frugality and sociability. But there are alternatives.
You can gradually educate your friends on the attractions of frugal entertainments—meals, drinks, or coffee at one another's homes, for example. Instead of going to a theater, you could watch a DVD or play a board game or go to a free event at the library.
Another option is to start socializing among a broader group of people. There are plenty of other frugal folks out there. You don't have to drop your old friends; just make new ones who appreciate getting together for the company more than for spending money.
Have some capital. That slapped me in the face. This statement is so true and I think few financial bloggers focus on it. This is such an excellent point and is so freeing. Some times I feel like I'm a slave to whatever I'm saving for but just being a saver rather than a spender increases quality of life and reduces stress.
I think the difficult thing is trying to live in this world like you are in the 1950's. I almost feel like you have to be a hermit in order to live frugally.
Sure you can. In fact, if you think the paper might be counterfeit, refusing to accept it is the only reasonable thing to do.
The legal tender statement on the paper dates back to the days when paper circulated together with gold and silver. It meant that you couldn't insist on payment in precious metal, but had to accept the lawful money of the United States. But not if it were counterfeit, of course.
And in any case, you're always free to specify reasonable time, place, and manner conditions on accepting payment. For example, if someone wants to pay a large debt in the form of cash, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to insist that payment be made at a nearby bank (where you could have the bank check that the paper wasn't counterfeit, and then deposit the money immediately).
Well, as I said, the cost savings are available. Move into a small house or a cheap apartment, arrange your life so you can get by without a car (or with one cheap car), and refrain from spending money on gadgets that the like, and you could bring your expenses down to about half of what the average person spends.
The employment options are more problematic. Most managers will not want you to go to half-time work. But that's only true of most of them. There are a lot of managers in the country; you only need to find one that's willing to let you work half-time at half the pay. That's an extra obstacle in your job search, but not an insurmountable one. Keep looking and I've no doubt you can find an appropriate job.
You can have your amazing 1950s utopian future if you want it. It's just a matter of arranging you life that way, and then looking for the right job.
Wait, what are we supposed to do? This post presents a huge structural problem, and then offers very little in terms of solution. "Our society screwed up! It's all stacked against you! There are almost no part-time jobs to be had. But don't worry, you can just go out and find one."
Questions: Give me an example of when you had to explain something difficult to someone who did not have your background/ knowledge.
I add 1/4 cup of borax powder to each laundry load. It acts as a water softener. I live in Colorado where we have a lot of minerals in our water. When I first moved out here 24 years ago, I stayed with my cousin and his wife temporarily until I got settled. They had a water softener hooked up to their water supply. I hated the feeling on my skin after a shower or bath--that feeling that the soap hadn't rinsed off. I've never had a water softener in my home where I've lived for over 20 years. I use white vinegar to dissolve the hard water deposits on fixtures and add it to appliances like coffee maker, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. It can't take any more effort than maintaining a water softener appliance with adding salt each month. Try the borax powder in your washing machine. You'll find that you won't need to use as much detergent.
I've lived in my home for 20 years. We have well water that contained limestone which left a lot of white powder residue on the water dispenser and ice dispenser on our refrigerator, scale in the hot water tank, etc. -- basically, all the things that Jon Anderson and others wrote about.
After 5 years I had enough and we purchased a water softener. Best thing! My dishwasher, side-by-side refrigerator, and hot water tank -- the originals when we built this home 20 years ago -- still continue. The only appliance I've had to replace is my washer -- which was 23 years old. And, it was replaced only because the knobs and mechanism that controlled the washing cycles broke.
I also have a separate line for drinking water on my sink...it eliminates the salt but does purify our drinking water. It's part of our water softening system.
I'm spoiled...I love my water softener....never thought I'd say that. I grew up on city water and loved it....no more.....I just can't get past the chlorine taste and its hardness for bathing and washing items.
,
hi paul, respectively of course. you look pretty young to be a senior anything.. i just wonder if you have spied on these farms personally. you seem to know an awful lot.. what we need to remember here is that the usda makes there comments based on what our fda tells them to say. who is basically run by ex-monsanto corp. executives. we are all getting to know them now. our elders from Vietnam remember them for creating agent orange. now growth hormone, which makes cows sick , thus we introduce antibiotics. they are trying to take over all food with there gmo seed. ex. sugar beet, soy, etc. those crops will only germinate if using roundup, produced by monsanto. yes poison in the soil.. organic farmers work very hard to maintain there certification. people are sick of the fda not marking products correctly, or deceitfully, or not at all. that is why they are turning in more profits. personally , i drink raw milk. but , i would much rather buy organic milk as opposed to non organic. when you see a label on milk boasting about no rbst's in there milk. call them up, ask them if they are fed GMO CORN OR OTHER GMO FEEDS. the answer will be yes. everything i see written here is describing the tactics company's like nestle,kellogs, etc use to hide the fact that they are GMO FOODS, PERIOD. Until our country does proper testing, like all the countries(and there are a lot) that ban gmo instead of paying off colleges to lie. we are going no where but backwards.
Spending is obviously critical as is having your house paid off, and these should be included in any retirement projection, but the key is simply to have a big enough nest egg. I've had friends retire and suddenly change their outlook to one of 'preserving' their wealth and frankly not have any fun -- they're too worried about running out of money! I"m not expecting extravagance by any means, but they become so chintzy that they are duds compared to their former selves. If you can't comfortably maintain a lifestyle that's close to your current one, in my opinion, you aren't ready to retire.
A friend who stopped by to check out my new digs recently recommended the cutting-board method as well, although she uses hers on her stove (when it's off, of course). Whether over the sink or oven, it sounds like a great way to add counter space, and I look forward to trying it out.
Awesome post. I hadn't really thought about the promised future from this angle before. Really made me think about how we all live and how affluenza has taken hold of most of us.
I am struggling with how to live at the moment and while myself and my girlfriend are planning to move to a smaller town, grow our own food (as much as we can) and slow down, I struggle with how far to go with the change.
Thanks for the article - it has really got me thinking.
I really appreciate your blog but I am more of glass half empty person.
My wife and I have been self-employed for 20 and years and try to live very frugally. Eventually you run up against non-negotiable expenses. We paid our house off but property taxes, heating fuel, and repairs/services that we can't do ourselves are going up all the time. We saved cash (quite a bit of it) but now interest rates are zero so it's not working for us. Health insurance goes up 17-20% a year like clockwork--even though we have a high deductible insurance, are healthy, and have never cost the insurance company a cent. We have disability insurance as well and that is costly. We also need to have plenty of cash set aside to cover the deductibles of these insurances because unlike what Sharon Angle suggested, I don't know of any doctors that barter their services for a chicken.
On and on it goes. Once you reach a certain level of frugality, you realize that you really can't live cheaply in the US and be middle class. To live cheaply, you must live on or close to the edge and have no assets. You may be the exception but don't assume that everyone can do it. I have an acquaintance that reminds me of you (lives more frugally than my wife and I). But I have to say, he is extremely talented in this respect and he managed to get some benefits such as healthcare and a small pension from previous jobs along the way, so I think it's a false picture (at least as far as he is concerned). Of all the other people I know, I am the most frugal by far and still, it can only accomplish so much. Now, if you have no assets to protect, you can go without insurance because at least they'll stabilize you at the hospital before flinging you out on the street. But if you have assets, you may lose all of your meager savings that you've worked for your whole life due to some accident or illness. So insurance is a must.
I realized long ago that most pensions were under-funded scams and that's one of the reasons my wife and I left the working world. There was no point in giving your life to a company to end up with nothing. My mother did piecework in textiles and her union notified her that there was no money in the kitty for the health benefits they promised her. And that was back in the 80s! I now have friends who are professors at a state university in IL and are worried that they may never receive their public pensions. What a situation for the greatest country in the world to be in! So now I realize something I did not understand in the 80s and early 90s. Namely that wealth accumulation (for the purpose of financial security) is also a scam for most Americans. What good is it to save money for retirement or for living well when it is so precariously hanging by a thread? What fool likes those odds? I certainly don't.
After seeing what Obama (who I voted for and donated to) came up with for healthcare...the way he tossed the ball over that crook Baucus...I knew the gig for this country's middle class was up 100%. Previously, I held a very slim glimmer of hope but now I know better. My advice to young Americans is, unless you are pretty sure you are going to make a lot of money, move out of the country. Forget voting because the system is rigged and all possible winners are vetted. They will serve their masters. Bank on it! Seek out opportunities elsewhere, where the society has some cohesiveness and there is some security. If you can't find a suitable match, at least find an interesting country to live in that appeals to you, where you can possibly make a future for yourself. I say this to my own detriment because without young workers, my SS and medicare prospects look grim. But still, save yourselves if you can. I am 52 and have very old and dependent parents and will make my grave here because I have no choice. First the corpotacracy will suck out all my blood, and I mean every drop, and then they will toss me into a shallow grave. Now those are sure-fire odds if ever I have seen any.
Sorry for the rant, BTW. I am actually more upbeat in person but these thoughts are still 100% me and I believe them with complete certainty. I just try not to bring everybody around me down, so we talk about the weather instead.
Peace and good tidings for the new year!
Thanks!
The photo is of a sculpture in Chicago, in the loop, north of the Art Institute. I just thought it looked futuristic. (I really wanted to go with a 1950s poster of a retro future, with flying cars or jet packs, but couldn't quickly find a public domain (or creative commons licensed) image that I liked.)
Great article! Living 1950's style is do-able if you keep looking and trying to find the right fit. My house is small, built in 1904, no air conditioning, but perfectly fine for 1-3 people. My car is from 1987 with over 250,000 miles (odometer stopped working) and my mechanic says it will last another 10 years or so. I chose to live in a place with great public transportation to cut down on driving costs. I do work full-time, but have the option of working at home if I want or need to, so there is a good work/family balance. More and more people are deciding that having the biggest, latest, greatest isn't worth it. It did take quite a while and a lot of work to get to this situation, but it is a wonderful life.
The photo: ?Is that a broken rollercoaster meant to be symbolic? Or something else??? Love your photos!
Sure. That's more or less what I did. It's not quite as good as was promised—you have to do all that planning and saving—but it's a way to get there, and it doesn't depend on reorganizing society around the way you want to live your life.
I've written a couple of posts that are on-topic:
http://www.wisebread.com/retirement-on-the-installment-plan
http://www.wisebread.com/fund-your-own-sabbatical
You can also work the full time job for awhile, save the surplus, and take a "sabbatical" i.e. quit and live off your savings or take a lesser paying part time job, ideally one more fun than your old job.
I actually have fallen into half time work situation after getting laid off from full time employment. A former employer contacted me and asked if I could work temporarily for them. Now I work for them whenever they are busy and stay home when they are slow. Because I have kept my living expenses low, I am able to get by just fine.
Phillip, thanks for the quick reply. I just skimmed through your referenced posts. You hit the talking points on health care reform, but my experience is that the devil is in the details, those details are being manipulated by "big-insurance", and the media isn't doing their traditional job of exposing the manipulation.
Take the PCIP (pre-existing condition insurance plan) that was implemented this past summer. Supposed to make insurance available to people that couldn't get full insurance due to a pre-existing condition. Nope - it was modified so that if you had partial insurance with exclusions (which is all you could get privately) you had to DROP that for six months before applying for the PCIP. Nice way to protect insurance companies profits, and it goes against all principles of getting everyone to have insurance.
If you had no partial insurance, chances are you couldn't afford the PCIP, but the insurance companies really didn't care as you weren't paying them. If you do play "medical roulette" for 6 months so you can apply, you don't know if the republicans will be successful in their vow to starve funding from these type of heath reform bills.
I read comments from the Health editor at Consumer Reports where she saw this loophole coming but didn't call it to mainstream attention. So much for whistle-blowing journalism that seemed to exist in the 50's.
That is such a true statement. I never thought about it that way. People often talk about how evil debt is and I bought into it but without student loans, a lot of people wouldn't have the start that they have, the car that they have or the house that they have. At the end of the day, it is about wise decisions but I still think cash, savings and discipline can bring you a lot more.
I also think that loans/credit/debt all feed in to make things cost more. If people had to pay $24,000 out of pocket for a car or college, the price would have to go down because not a lot of people would be buying. Between 1910 and 2010 Fords went from being $650 to $30,000 and I think inflation was a small part, technology was a slightly larger part and credit had the biggest effect on the jump in cost.
Great post! I use the library a lot to try out dvd's before I buy them. I then try to find them cheap on ebay or amazon.
Yes, health insurance is a huge issue—at least for people in the US, because of the way we've structured health insurance as an employee benefit that usually only goes to full-time workers. I've written a couple of posts about that:
http://www.wisebread.com/not-free-to-be-poor
http://www.wisebread.com/health-care-reform-good-for-people-like-me
We have a small kitchen in our place as well. What I use for storage is part of my linen closet. 1/2 the closet goes towards towels and sheets, the other 1/2 of the linen closet is used for gadgets that I do use, just not very often (blender, hand mixer, waffle iron, etc.). It has freed up alot of kitchen cupboard space!
Wow, you've so captured my thoughts and situation.
I left the workforce (computer networking for big companies) 5 years ago at 48 to resolve a health issue. I had expected to be able to work part time as some point in the future. But you've listed many reasons why skilled part time work is so hard to find. At the time I left, my company would consider allowing "job-sharing" but I'm reading that even telecommuting is being restricted so I think flexibility is on the decline
I can only hope that part time work will open up in the future, if only because many Americans will need to do something in their old age due to lack of financial preparation.
I had hoped that health care reform would shift that cost away from companies and make it more like other societies where health care is more of a basic right. That shift would help part time work, but I doubt it will really happen.
I find frugal living pretty easy as many hobbies can replace costly habits (for example, roast your own coffee rather than funding starbucks), but a part-time job
would be 4 or so hours a day that you aren't spending money.
One thing that people can do is voice to their representatives that they want (and probably need) the ability to work part-time as they get older. A public health option would move that cost away from employers. Employers could also get tax breaks for part-time worker (that is, if we ever get past our current high unemployment).
If your friends are all the sort who don't know how to socialize without spending money—if it's all meals out, drinks at the bar, coffee at the coffee shop, movies at the theater—then it can really feel like you've got to choose between frugality and sociability. But there are alternatives.
You can gradually educate your friends on the attractions of frugal entertainments—meals, drinks, or coffee at one another's homes, for example. Instead of going to a theater, you could watch a DVD or play a board game or go to a free event at the library.
Another option is to start socializing among a broader group of people. There are plenty of other frugal folks out there. You don't have to drop your old friends; just make new ones who appreciate getting together for the company more than for spending money.
Have some capital. That slapped me in the face. This statement is so true and I think few financial bloggers focus on it. This is such an excellent point and is so freeing. Some times I feel like I'm a slave to whatever I'm saving for but just being a saver rather than a spender increases quality of life and reduces stress.
I also love spend money to save money. :-)
I think the difficult thing is trying to live in this world like you are in the 1950's. I almost feel like you have to be a hermit in order to live frugally.
Sure you can. In fact, if you think the paper might be counterfeit, refusing to accept it is the only reasonable thing to do.
The legal tender statement on the paper dates back to the days when paper circulated together with gold and silver. It meant that you couldn't insist on payment in precious metal, but had to accept the lawful money of the United States. But not if it were counterfeit, of course.
And in any case, you're always free to specify reasonable time, place, and manner conditions on accepting payment. For example, if someone wants to pay a large debt in the form of cash, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to insist that payment be made at a nearby bank (where you could have the bank check that the paper wasn't counterfeit, and then deposit the money immediately).
All good points.
I've written a couple of times about Dan Pink, including this book review:
http://www.wisebread.com/book-review-the-adventures-of-johnny-bunko
And this video about the ideas he presents in his book Drive:
http://www.wisebread.com/motivating-yourself-and-others
He's done a lot of interesting work.
Well, as I said, the cost savings are available. Move into a small house or a cheap apartment, arrange your life so you can get by without a car (or with one cheap car), and refrain from spending money on gadgets that the like, and you could bring your expenses down to about half of what the average person spends.
The employment options are more problematic. Most managers will not want you to go to half-time work. But that's only true of most of them. There are a lot of managers in the country; you only need to find one that's willing to let you work half-time at half the pay. That's an extra obstacle in your job search, but not an insurmountable one. Keep looking and I've no doubt you can find an appropriate job.
You can have your amazing 1950s utopian future if you want it. It's just a matter of arranging you life that way, and then looking for the right job.
Wait, what are we supposed to do? This post presents a huge structural problem, and then offers very little in terms of solution. "Our society screwed up! It's all stacked against you! There are almost no part-time jobs to be had. But don't worry, you can just go out and find one."
I'm guessing you read 'The Overworked American' (http://www.amazon.com/Overworked-American-Unexpected-Decline-Leisure/dp/... ). But you don't have any helpful suggestions for those of us who would actually like to do this?